Claudia was shaking her head back and forth, blinking the doubloons out of her eyes. “Did he go to jail?”
“It was just that after everyone, after everything, I wanted to be the one who got to send someone away for once.”
“Jamie,” Claudia said in a firmer voice, “did he go to jail?”
I shook my head. “I ran away before he was arrested, and since I’d only told a counselor at school there was no way to make the story stick. But he had to move away from the town where he’d lived his whole life. He lost his job, his friends, everything.”
Claudia stared into the shop’s dark shelves for a long time. “Jesus Christ. How old were you?”
“Old enough to know better.”
Like I said before: no one tells a story without intention. But that doesn’t mean the intention’s always known. This wasn’t like the stories I’d told in the basement when I was trying to distract Claudia from her morning sickness, trying to make her feel better. Who knows, maybe I’d told this story for myself. To make me feel better. But I had told it to Claudia, and it was up to Claudia to do something with it. But all she did was look around the shop one more time, as if wondering how in the hell she’d ended up there, how quickly she’d be able to leave.
She put a hand on Chez Divine. “Why don’t you see if you can find us some rope,” she said, her voice not so much cold as helpless. She cleared her throat, spoke more loudly. “I think I remember some downstairs. Room three or four.”
By the time I got back she’d regained her composure, and she took the rope from me and secured it to the pillar. “Hemp. God, I’d like some of that right now.”
I snaked the free end of the rope down the shaft, swung one leg over the lip of the dumbwaiter, took a deep breath.
“Here goes nothing.”
The wood that lined the shaft was old and coarse, and my bare feet—smooth-soled sandals didn’t seem wise for such a vertical descent—gripped it easily. I let myself down foot under foot, hand under hand, slowly, less concerned about the distance I’d fall than landing on the lantern and splashing flaming oil all over my body. Still, it wasn’t a hard climb, and in less than a minute I was standing on the floor of the shaft. I stamped once; a solid thud vibrated up my ankle.
“Throw me my socks. It’s freezing down here.”
They fell on me in a little cotton and wool hailstorm, all six of them, and when one hit the lantern the flame flickered a little.
“Be careful, Claudia. You almost knocked over—”
“Can you get the door open?” Claudia called over me.
I looked up at her.
“Not me, Mr. Ramsay, the
door
.”
“Hold on.” I put my socks on, all of them, then held the lantern up to the doorway. With a little jerk, the lantern lifted from my fingers and swayed a few inches above my head, and I looked up to see Claudia holding it by its string; with her free hand she motioned me toward the door. I looked back down and saw that it had been sealed with three vertical planks. I looked for a hole to take my mother’s key, but there wasn’t one. I pushed at the planks, then pulled; they didn’t budge.
“It’s boarded over.”
“Well, kick it down. C’mon, Jamie, show some spunk.”
I forgot I wasn’t wearing shoes—forgot that if I had been wearing shoes I’d’ve been wearing sandals—and I kicked. Luckily the thrice-socked ball of my foot struck the wood or I probably would have broken a toe. As it was my foot twanged off the wood painfully and I muttered a string of curses.
“What are you saying, Jamie, I can’t hear you.”
“I said the wood’s pretty solid, dear. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to get a hammer or a crow bar.”
“Who the hell knows where Endean would keep something practical like a hammer,” said the woman who’d just spent five months using one to bang on the walls of the basement. “Hold on, I think I know what to do.” The shaft was plunged into darkness as the lantern ascended rapidly, and I looked up to see Claudia’s face disappear; it was gone only a moment before she returned. “Here. Catch.”
In the darkness I couldn’t see what she threw down on top of me, could only feel it writhing around my limbs with the heavy weight of a boa constrictor. I panicked: she’d trapped me in the pitch black confines of the dumbwaiter and the heavy weight of her snake coiled around my neck and arms and legs, tripping me, choking me. It was so dark I didn’t realize I was falling until my head smacked against the wall. I heard crashing noises, splintering, the snake’s scales scratched and scraped the skin of my neck like a noose and then there was a splash of water on my cheek and left shoulder, the top of my thigh, and I heard Claudia’s voice.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie, are you okay? Jamie? Answer me, goddammit!”
Light returned as the lantern descended like a shooting star out for a Sunday stroll, and I looked up to see the slick contours of Claudia’s face.
I took a breath. “I’m fine.”
“Fine? You were fucking berserk.”
“You sound surprised,” I said as I untangled myself from the rope she’d dropped on top of me.
There was a long silence from the top of the shaft. Then Claudia just said, “It is.”
“It is what?”
I looked up, but even before Claudia spoke I knew what she was going to say.
“A compulsion.”
I thought—but I resisted the urge to say it—who was I saving this time?
“Hey, Jamie?”
“What
now
, Claudia?”
“Shut up and turn around, okay?”
I shut up; I turned. And there it was. The door of the dumbwaiter. The three planks that had covered it were broken in half and hung loosely off their nails.
“Not quite open sesame, but it got the job—”
“Claudia! I see something.”
“Oh my God! What do you see?”
“I see a light.”
“
Step into the light, Carol Anne.
”
I giggled, but at the same time I was pulling the broken boards off their moors with trembling fingers. The rusted iron nails were so old they broke rather then bent. The lantern’s glow pushed into the room and stale air pushed back, stale musty frigid air, and something else too, something less light than glow, less glow than gray, a softening in the pitch blackness of the chamber, a single vertical fissure in a black field, faint, flickering, and when I leaned through the door of the dumbwaiter with the lantern thrust out ahead of me I could just make out the outline of the peg-legged box from which the glow emanated.
It was a television.
An old fashioned console TV, its tube nearly—but not quite—extinguished.
The two faint lights, the lantern’s and the television’s, illuminated shag carpet, a Barcalounger, a row of chintzy Dresdenesque figurines on a sagging particle-board whatnot.
If this was my mother’s treasure, she’d bought it at Sears.
four
IT WAS ALL IN THE TAG on the back of the television. “Serviced and/or repaired” on 10/12/82, 2/12/89, 8/8/97. Five years ago—not even—my mother had stood where I stood, my mother had flipped through channels with this clunky plastic knob and then she’d gone away. She’d left and she’d forgotten to shut the TV off, but she hadn’t been gone so long the tube had burned out. Almost, but not quite: it still emitted a sliver of light, a glow as portentous as a fissure between two dimensions. I felt I could stick my hand into that tunnel of light and somewhere on the other end my mother’s hand would grab mine and pull me to where she was—and it was there the fantasy broke down, because I didn’t know where my mother was, or when. I didn’t know if she belonged to my past or my future. Until I found that television I’d operated in a haze, lost in the idea that my mother had come to No. 1 in the middle of the last century. Had come to the building when it was new and grown up and grown old with it, had passed into history along with the dead gaslights still poking from the walls in the stairwell. It was such an old place, filled with such old things, its history should reach back just as far. And I suppose it did, but not the part I knew. What I mean is, the nails that had fastened the boards over the dumbwaiter’s door were square instead of round, rusted iron instead of galvanized steel.
They
were old, but they couldn’t’ve been hammered into place more than ten or twenty years before, and as I looked at them I realized the confusing haze wasn’t entirely in my head: my mother had had her own fuzzy relationship to time.
What did I do first? I turned on the lights. I didn’t plan to. I just walked from one darkened room into the next, and, out of habit I suppose, or conditioning, I performed one of those gestures that marks me as a member of the First World: I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. Light exploded into the room, from the ceiling, from the matching end tables on either side of the mold-spotted couch. And although I didn’t question the existence of electricity in the subbasement (after all, the TV had been on), I didn’t entirely trust it either: I kept my lantern with me.
I walked through the house, room by room. Because that’s what it was: a house. It wasn’t a finished basement, I mean. It was a suburban tract house with a living room and a kitchen and three bedrooms and two and a half baths, and it had been broken apart somehow, put back together like a ship in a bottle. Except whoever had rebuilt it had done a terrible job. None of the rooms was square, they overlapped each other, cut each other off at corners. Escherlike, one faded into another. A study, its empty bookshelves angling into an otherwise rectangular dining room. A skewed parlor, its sofas and chairs covered in thick brittle plastic, a crooked kitchen filled with fifties appliances. The faucet coughed dry breaths for a second, then spewed a thin stream of rusty water, but the gas had either never been connected or had been turned off. There were coffee cups in the dishrack, a chess set on the card table, gaily printed curtains on every darkened window. A front door even, but when I pulled it open the only thing that greeted me was a wall of solid earth. There was a keyhole on the outside of the doorknob, but it refused my mother’s key.
It only took a moment to find the stairs. The door at the top was deadbolted, and I opened it and opened the door, tried my mother’s key on the outer lock; it didn’t work there either. There was a second door, wooden, thin. I ran my fingers around the edge till I tripped a latch and the door swung open and I found myself in Room 12 of the basement—and found Claudia waiting for me, breathless. I looked at her and she looked at me but what was there to say? Except: I closed the door to the subbasement and saw how its seams had been concealed by the paneling on this side of the room.
“I assume you tapped this wall yourself?”
Claudia stared into my face. “Oh my God. It was you. I thought it was Reggie, but it was you!”
I was confused. “Reggie?”
“When I first moved in. I thought Reggie’d been through my things but it was you. You found that map and you never said anything?”
I turned back to the door. “You really didn’t have a key? All this time? Even though you have a key to every other door in the building?”
“Oh, Jamie, forest for the trees: there’s only one key to No. 1. All the doors have the same lock.”
“Except for this one.” And, as if to prove I was as obtuse as Claudia had implied: “So why
did
you hide that map from Reggie?”
Claudia laughed, or snorted really, let out one bitter grunt. “The map I was hiding from you. It was the other stuff I was hiding from him. I used to do that sometimes, when I still gave a shit. But he always found it, or he’d just go out and cop some more.”
Claudia’s words sat between us as my confession about Cousin Benny had just a few minutes earlier, and then I shook my head and took her hand and led her downstairs, and instead of telling me about the drugs or Reggie, she told me what she knew about the house my mother had decided to hide in the basement.
“We all knew about it of course, but she never let anyone down here. Not even Endean. I guess she saw it Upstate. She used to go to all the flea markets and auctions and estate sales up there before she started going abroad. I guess she’d had her eye on it for a while because she left one morning and came back the same evening with the house on a flatbed truck, disassembled, every board numbered, every piece of trim, every fucking screw. It was amazing how small it was, how much of a house is empty space.
“I don’t think it took them a week to put it back together. And then the furniture. She had to have every piece of junk that had been in it originally. I think she read about it somewhere, or maybe she saw it at an estate sale. Some sob story about an old couple who built it as their retirement palace? Then the husband died right after they moved in? A hunting accident? The only thing she ever told me was that there’d been a second story on top of the original house and an attic on top of that, but all Ginny wanted was the first floor. It was all she needed, she said, but who can say why your mother did anything, or how for that matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: when she came back that day she was riding in the cab of that flatbed truck and she did everything but blow the driver a kiss when he left.”
We were in the house’s study by then, and Claudia’s voice broke in a gasp. I turned to her, then turned again, following her pointing finger. At first I thought it was some kind of trophy because it sat next to a bright red hunting cap, but then I realized: it was an urn.
“Parker?” she said, as though the urn might answer her. “Oh my God. Your mother—stole—
Parker?
”
She leaned on the desk with both hands, her mouth tearing breaths out of the thick air, and the only thing I could think to do was to go to the shelf behind the desk. It sagged under the weight of the bottled death it held, sagged even after I’d lifted the urn down. It was amazingly heavy, seemed made of inch-thick lead. It came down heavily—hollowly—on the desk, and at the thump Claudia looked up, her dusty face streaked with tears. When she spoke the words came in a rush but they still didn’t come easily. They felt pulled from her, in the same way she’d pulled the lantern up the shaft, from me.
“When Ellis and Parker died my father was so crazy he couldn’t pick their ashes up from the funeral home. So Endean went. But she brought them back here because Ginny—because your mother said she had these urns. She wanted to give them to my father.” She touched the urn now, experimentally, and when it didn’t shock her she left her hand there, let it cup curved lead as once it might have cupped Parker’s cheek. “That night there was something. We thought it was a break-in. A smashed window, the lock jimmied. They took the cash in the till and a bunch of little things. Costume jewelry and silverware and other things that looked like they might be valuable. And….”