The Madwoman Upstairs (18 page)

After a few minutes, I felt well enough to stand. The real danger must have been gone because I was already beginning to imagine how I would tell the story to someone else. I brought myself to my feet and picked up the book from the doormat.
Wuthering Heights.
Of all the horrors! I flashed a pathetic light on the words
Tristan Whipple, his book
, which were etched on the cover in permanent red ink. The only other proof I needed of its origin was on the first blank page, where the outline of a human hand appeared. We had traced that hand, a long time ago, he and I. It was my eleven-year-old palm, my scraggly middle-school fingers.

I walked into my room and immediately tossed the book into the corner of the room, where I had discarded
Agnes Grey
and
Jane Eyre.
In the darkness, I imagined the three of them were tiny, grinning grinches. Emily Brontë’s voice came unannounced into my head:
What else could it be that made me pass such a terrible night? I don’t remember another that I can at all compare with it since I was capable of suffering.

I stared into that blackened corner like I would stare at my own epitaph. Wasn’t this the way it had always been? Just me and the Brontës, trying to see each other across an eternal void.

A half hour later, I was standing outside the Faculty Wing. The rain had abated, but the wind was something vicious, and it slapped against my face like a fish out of water. It was stupid of me to come here. I was not well. I should have been in bed. But the idea of being alone with
Wuthering Heights
was dreadful. My tower was not big enough for the two of us.

Really, I just wanted to see Orville. I recognized that it was Christmas Eve, and that he was likely home with his secret girlfriend and all of his illegitimate children, whom I imagined would be swarming around his ankles like bastard puppies. Yet despite the hour, it wasn’t long before the front door of the Faculty Wing swung open. Two professors were on their way home. They were laughing. The man was holding a paper package in one hand and what appeared to be a centerpiece of a table in the other. Of course, I had forgotten. The faculty and staff who remained in Oxford for the holidays were always invited to their own Christmas banquet.

I recognized one of the professors as Flannery, the woman I had met at the hospital. She was wearing purple tonight, an unflattering shade the color of a bruise. Her companion was a withered old gentleman with a hooked nose and three moles arranged in a Bermuda Triangle on his lower left cheek. Both of them looked startled to find me there, but Flannery in particular seemed shocked—shocked, and then pleased. She was looking at me as though she had finally found proof supporting an old and elaborate theory.

“I’d like to see Professor Orville,” I said.

Flannery was standing in the doorway. “What do you need, dear? It’s a holiday.”

I glanced at the door behind them, which was slowly beginning to creak shut. I hurried: “Something’s happened, and I’ve come for help.”

“Goodness, what is it?” said the man. He had a kind smile; I liked him. He looked like the sort of person who had gone by “lad” as a child. “You can talk to one of us, I’m sure.”

“Thank you,” I said, glancing between them. He and Flannery must have been a couple—he took her hand and she let him hold it. I looked away.

I said, “I’d prefer to talk to Orville.”

“
Dr.
Orville,” corrected Flannery. I looked back at her and then at the door, which had gently closed. She had a strange look on her face. “There is a resident dean in each college throughout the holidays,” she said, repositioning her purse on her shoulder. “Surely you can talk to Dean Sidney?”

“I tried,” I lied. “He’s not there at the moment.”

Flannery wasn’t smiling. “Dean Sidney,” she said slowly, “is a she.”

I didn’t respond. I had never met Dean Sidney.

“Why don’t you go back home,” she said, ending the conversation in a way that suggested she had many more things she could have said on the subject, were it not Christmas. The man tipped his hat and told me to mind the weather. Flannery smiled and followed him along the path. I wrapped my arms around my chest and said, “Yes, yes, very well.” They took a right, and I took a left, but only briefly. As soon as they were out of sight, I doubled back. The door had not closed all the way, I noticed, and quietly I crept inside.

The electricity was out here, too, and the candelabras were lit. I hated the look of raw flame. It was unstable and manic. I walked quickly up the staircase. The light grew dimmer. I credited instinct with taking me toward Orville’s room like a moth to a spiderweb. I let one hand graze the wall. I ran my fingers over the nameplates like I would read Braille. Milton, Norris, Northington. The last door, Orville’s, was locked. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was gone.

Silently, I pressed my head against the cool wood, easing the heat around my temples. I felt ill—truly ill. I heard the thumping of my own heart as it beat through my ears. There was a terrible ache in my head, and for the first time in my life, I had so little strength that I could hardly stand. I pressed my back against the door and let myself sink to the ground. I decided to wait—just a moment—for the ache to go away.

It is past midnight and Anne Brontë is holding a candle. She is wandering around the upper corridor of Thorp Green, the one that leads nowhere and smells like cabbage. It is storming outside, and the wind is shrieking through the walls. Anne cautiously rounds the corner. She has heard Bessie tell the other servants there are rumors of a woman who roams these halls—a woman who is as large as an ox and taller than the master. Anne can hear this strange woman laughing at night, and she is determined to catch her. She holds the candle firmly in her hand and creeps down the corridor. Every night, she hopes to find something shocking, and every night, she finds nothing but her own reflection in the windows.

Suddenly, the upstairs hallway fades in front of her.
How strange,
Anne thinks. It doesn’t seem to be Thorp Green anymore, but a different house entirely, one with new, hardwood floors and ugly bright red curtains that have clearly been chosen out of a catalogue by a man. A girl steps into the hall. Why is she wearing pajamas? Her hair is dark and wild, and she has the bemused look of someone who has just awakened. The unease on the girl’s face grows. Her eyes are wide and she is coughing. There is, Anne realizes, smoke everywhere. Then, in a moment, the girl is bellowing. She runs down the hall, but she can only move in slow motion. That’s when all the men in uniform start pouring in—where have they come from, anyway? Whose nightmare is this? Someone tugs the girl around the waist and yanks her down the stairs, across the hall, out of the house—there is a great rushing sound by her ears. Anne is no longer on the outside, she
is
the girl, she is the one screaming—and why is she screaming? And more important, why are there so many people on such a narrow old street? The noise softens, settles, and dies. Anne is sitting on the sidewalk, and there is a uniformed man with big feet talking to her, and the sun is rising over the rooftops.

“Samantha.”

“Harrumph.”

“Samantha.”

I opened my eyes. At first, I saw only a reddish glow.

“Is this hell?” I murmured.

“To you, perhaps.”

My eyes adjusted. I was inside Orville’s office, lying on his leather sofa. He was sitting in the opposite chair, legs crossed, reading the paper. He was wearing a maroon sweater and glasses that reflected the dying flames from the fireplace. I wondered how many years had passed since I had sat down against his door, or whether we had always been like this, he and I, and my life before I knew him had all been an elaborate fiction.

I said, “What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same question,” he said, shaking the paper once. “I returned from the banquet to find you sprawled on my doorstep like a Greek tragedy.”

I squinted. “Was I asleep?”

“You were thrashing.”

I let out a wheeze. “I’m a little ill.”

I tried to stand, but was seized by dizziness. The horror of my nightmare came over me. I collapsed back down on the sofa. I was trembling. I hadn’t dreamt like that in years. My limbs tingled, defeated.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Ten minutes to two.”

“In the
morning
?”

Orville didn’t answer.

I said, “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Long enough.”

I squinted at him, then at the fire. It was emitting soft orange sparks into cold air. I pulled the blanket over me—why did I have a blanket?—and tried to map out what had transpired. If I had, in fact, passed out on the floor of the hallway, then Orville must have moved me. My coat was hanging on a nearby chair; my boots were drying by the fireplace. Had Orville taken them off? God, what a thought.

The electricity must have come back on; one of the lamps in the corner of the room was bleeding a muted yellow. I pointed to the middle of the table, where a defrosting brick was wrapped in cellophane.

“What’s that?”

He glanced at it. “Cake. Interested?”

I wasn’t exactly hungry, but Orville stood and walked across the room. His legs seemed exceptionally long from my vantage point—he reminded me of one of those circus men who walk on stilts, with billowing balloon pants. I rested my head against the plump, swollen back of the sofa. The next time I looked up, Orville was standing over me, two glasses in his hand. When I didn’t take one from him, he put mine down on the table.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Cognac.”

I stared at it.

He waited. “Don’t you drink?”

“Of course,” I lied.

It was a strange sight, watching a faculty member take a drink. It reminded me that professors must have real lives—lives in which they wore boxers and occasionally cooked, lives in which they sometimes played tennis, sometimes slept with women, and sometimes just sat watching television, like the average peasant.

It was a minute before I could bring myself to take the cognac in my hands. I put my nose deep down inside the glass, then retracted it immediately. The stench was something awful. Perhaps I was more exhausted than I realized, but for a moment I thought I could make out my father’s face on the surface, warped and vague. I put the glass back down. I didn’t need it. People evaporated in alcohol, the way people evaporated in dreams.

I looked up and gave a small start. Orville, I realized, was watching me closely.

“Do you think about him often?” he said. The fire was dying and in the dim light, his eyes looked like two dots drawn by Sharpie.

I didn’t answer.

“How old were you when it happened?” he asked.

“When what happened?”

A pause.

I cleared my throat. “I had just turned fifteen.”

“How very terrible it must have been for you, Samantha.”

His voice was low and gentle. I frowned and wondered, not for the first time in my life, if I talked in my sleep. We stared at each other for only a moment longer before he reached forward and unwrapped the frozen cake. He set his knife against it and gave it a good thwack. A piece fell to the table like a sledgehammer. He slapped a cold slice onto my open hand.