What the Dead Want (2 page)

“Do you think Mom's dead?” Gretchen asked her once.

“I don't,” Janine had said.

“Because you have evidence?” Gretchen asked. “Because there's some evidence she's alive?”

At that Janine looked right into her eyes. “There's no evidence one way or the other, but what I feel, what I know about your mom, I think she's out there somewhere. We just don't have enough information. And until there is proof otherwise, I choose to believe she's alive.”

Gretchen had wanted to hear that Mona was alive, but once Janine said it, it made her feel worse. The idea that someone had taken her mother and was holding her somewhere was terrifying. But the idea that her mother had simply left them, had walked away and never come back,
no good-byes, no explanations—that hurt like a dull throb in her heart.

Janine had seen the pain in her eyes and put her arms around Gretchen.

“The truth is,” Janine said, “we just don't know. But you asked me how I feel. And I feel the force of your mother's life around us. Sometimes you have to follow your gut to get to the proof you're looking for.” At the apartment, after Aunt Esther's call, Janine looked right into her eyes again. “You sure you want to spend the whole summer upstate in Mayville?”

“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “It sounds like it'll be a good vacation.”

Janine looked a little skeptical. “It'll be interesting, anyway,” she said.

“Can I inherit a house if I'm only sixteen?” Gretchen asked.

“Sure you can,” Janine said, laying down some Scrabble tiles that spelled the word “pickle.” “You just can't do anything with it yet.”

The next day Gretchen barely had a proper good-bye with Simon before the car arrived. He came downstairs and lay on her bed with his big feet propped against the wall, telling her how he had a crazy conversation about poetry with
the guy who owns that vintage clothing store with the neon pink sign down on St. Marks Place.

“The guy has a big tattoo across his chest that says
I Need More
,” Simon said. “I'm like, more
what
? Did he just get bored and not go back to the tattoo shop for the final word?”

“More
shirts
?” Gretchen said. “How'd you see his
chest
?”

“'Cause he was showing me the tattoo.”

“More
modesty
?” Gretchen suggested, making Simon laugh.

“Maybe just more wrinkle cream,” Simon said. “I think he's like a million years old. He talked about going to see Iggy Pop play in the 1960s!”

“That's cool, though,” Gretchen said.

Simon sighed. “I know. I wish we could have seen him back then.” He watched her pack up her makeup. “I can't believe you're leaving me here by myself all summer.”

She lay down next to him on the bed, looked into his dark eyes, rested her forehead against his. “I will text you every day.”

“You better,” he said.

Then he got up and helped pick out her “going to the mansion” outfit: gray vintage cotton slip, her Doc Martens, an old rhinestone necklace that had belonged to her
mother. She wore bright-red lipstick and put her long hair up into a topknot on her head. He stood back and sighed again. “So, so beautiful,” he said.

Janine went down in the elevator with her to see her off, handed Gretchen a wad of cash as she was getting into the car, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Upstate is pretty weird,” she said. “Take some good pictures.”

“Wait, what do you mean, weird?”

Janine shrugged. “Depressing. Provincial. Creepy. Insular. Ignorant. . . .”

“Okay,” Gretchen said, looking nervous. “I think I got it.”

“There's a reason eight million people live in New York City and not in the surrounding countryside,” Janine said. Then, “If you feel like coming home—do it.” Then she patted the top of the car and the driver headed out through a jam of rush-hour traffic. Gretchen gazed into the orange light of morning that reflected off the tall buildings surrounding Central Park. How very strange, Gretchen thought. She hadn't thought about Axton mansion for years, and now she was heading there—about to inherit the place her mother's family had once called home.

She'd had eight hours sitting in the back of the car to dream of what the mansion might be like, and now here it was: a ghostly relic at the end of a dark forest road. No houses nearby, not a soul in sight. On the porch the scrawny cat stared, an empty chair rocked back and forth from the breeze, and a stiff piece of smudged and ancient newsprint scuttled across the porch and lodged itself in the thorns at the base of the rosebush.

Dear James,

Thank you for sending the
N
ORTH
S
TAR
along with your letter. It means everything to me! I have hidden it beneath my mattress for fear Father discovers it. There is such anxiety over these topics. My parents have always found it best to keep their heads down—I'm sure you know why. But as for myself I hope you will tell me of any opportunity that might arise for me to help. I only wish that I had been able to be there and see Mr. Douglass speak myself. Maybe one day people will understand that no matter the plight, it's the very same people holding everybody down.

I think about his life and journey and, like you, am inspired. Were that I not forced to stay in my father's home and care for my nieces, I would be at school, like you, or maybe even helping in the cause. Just to be surrounded by those who can speak so bravely about freedom, and fight for it.

I share all your sentiments, James, even the ones we shouldn't be so careless to speak about in letters. Would that you were here and we could talk more plainly face-to-face. I think about the day you left for school, and the things we said. It's all true, James. I have never had a better friend. And my feelings grow ever stronger in your absence.

Life at home in Mayville is as you would imagine. Pretty and airy and oh-so dull. I ran into your brother George while picking berries with my nieces. He was out hunting with some
friends and seemed well and red cheeked and jovial. George is charming and well liked, isn't he? Splendidly suited to take over the Axton family business, and always dressed in the finest cotton.

Sincerely yours,

Fidelia

G
RETCHEN SNAPPED HER FIRST PICTURE
STANDING IN
front of the house. She was not a person to take dozens of photographs a day of frivolous things. Of all her friends, she was proud of never having taken a selfie. She used a real camera, not her phone, and she chose her subjects carefully.

Never in her life had she seen anything as remote or abandoned as this place. And yet it was somehow vibrant. The sun shone through the pine trees onto the gray boards of the porch and spilled over the roof and the cupola, glinted off the weather vane; the air was wild with dust motes and pollen and speck-size insects. There were billions of
shining particles in the stillness, circulating madly. Birds were chirping. The whole place was teeming with nearly invisible life.

She stepped back away from the porch and took a shot of the house surrounded by light and insects—then a picture of the black car pulled up in the looping drive, to capture the strange juxtaposition of country dilapidation and city wealth.

“Oh, Simon,” she said under her breath, “you would love it here.” Simon had always said of writing poetry that he didn't know how people who didn't write could stand it—and, by “it,” he didn't mean “not writing,” he meant
being alive.

“I mean, if you're not a writer, you could be walking down the street one day, and a brick could fall on your head,” he said. “And then you're just, you know, some guy who had a brick fall on his head, and it totally sucks. But if you're a
poet
and one day you're walking down the street and a brick falls on your head, if it doesn't kill you, you've got
material
. Whatever bad shit happens to you, you can use it in your writing.”

“Exactly,” she said aloud to the memory of his voice, and snapped another picture. She felt the same about photography. That with her camera she could at least bear witness to the hard and strange things that happened. Being
in this place where her mother lived, after her mother was gone—it was like photographing her absence. Documenting what loss looks like.

The Axton mansion was simultaneously one of the most amazing pieces of architecture and one of the most amazing examples of neglect she'd ever seen.

The quiet of the country was profound and unnerving. She scanned the horizon—nothing but rolling hills and farmland for miles. Farther down the dirt road on which they'd traveled she could make out a barn and a small white house, but nothing else. She snapped another picture of the road, the distant buildings. The smell of woodsmoke drifted on the wind, and there was something unsettling about it; no smoke was visible, just summer haze.

She looked again at the door; though they'd seen her aunt's face in the window, she had yet to come outside. When the driver came up behind Gretchen and touched her shoulder, she jumped.

M
ONA
A
XTON JOURNAL

A
UGUST
18, 1977

I fell outside near the woods near a raccoon trap and now mother and father say that we are leaving the Axton mansion. Forever. We are going to Buffallo. And No the Children cannot come with us. And not the little white man with hooves or those people who ask for help either. Bcause they are not reel. espelcialy those people. And not Rebecca, and not Celia Either. And I am to throw away the camera. It's no good. Its broken. Those aren't Children in those pickchurs. Those are smudges. I said I don't want to go, my friends are here and they say thos are not friends, they are your imginashun. you will be happy in Bufalo where there's not all this old moldy stuff but a clean new house you will like. Celia and I said No. But no one cares what I say. And no one even knows she is there.

G
RETCHEN WAS CONVINCED THAT HER
MOTHER HAD
planned to leave them.

After it happened she went back through her memory and tried to pinpoint things her mother had said that might reveal a plan to abandon her.

Her father assured her there was no way this was true—that Mona loved her, loved them both, and that if she could be there with them she would. But there were things Mona said that made her suspicious—things about souls being everywhere in the universe at once, and about how Mona would always be with her—even if she wasn't physically there.

“Just because I'm not there doesn't mean I'm not thinking about you—that I don't have a connection to you or know how you're doing,” Mona had said. “I'm always with you, sweets.”

Mona's life's work could more accurately be called “afterlife work.” And she was prone to saying things about spirits. This meant, of course, that Gretchen had many memories of Mona saying things that didn't quite add up in what Janine would have called “an empirical sense.”

Mona Axton Gallery was the first ever to display the strange, elegant, pale-blue prints of Doug Caws, and the gruesome masked faces of the French photographer Philippe Saint-Denis. Gretchen's mother had introduced the world to unknown or underappreciated photographers, and written scathing reviews of those she felt were false in their intentions, banal in their aesthetics—commercial, pandering.

She believed that photography was a medium of transcendence and had written convincingly that the human/technological equation would be the one to illuminate the riddle of the universe; that art existed so we could understand what the soul is. She was also known for being a collector of images—particularly Victorian spiritualist images. In other words, photographs of ghosts.

During the nineteenth century, there'd been a craze
for ghost photography. Many people mistakenly believed that William H. Mumler (who was a fraud: his “ghosts” were double exposures) had been the first to bring spiritualist photography to the world. But he was far from the first. Thousands of images existed from the first decades of the invention of photography, images that contained strange anomalies. Images that many believed were captured souls.

Mona Axton also knew better than anyone how easily a photograph could be doctored, even before Photoshop, but she'd devoted her life to the study of these photographs, and believed that there were mysteries that could not be explained away as hoaxes or fakes. She'd written extensively about this, collected thousands of images for study, only a fraction of which she was able to analyze before her death.

Some critics thought she was crazy, but just as many believed she was a genius. And Mona had believed in photography with the passion of a religious convert. She believed that photography was magical. It was sacred. Supernatural.

And she also believed it could be dangerous.

When Mona gave Gretchen her first camera, she told her to be careful with it. Because Gretchen was only six, one might think that her mother was simply warning her
not to drop the camera on the sidewalk, or not to take it to the park in the rain.

What she had meant instead was that there were cultures in which it was still considered a punishable crime to take a person's photograph without permission. That there were places where it was believed that a photograph of a human being could be used to conjure the phantom of that person after death. That a photograph can steal your soul. “It's a big responsibility, being a photographer,” she'd said. “You have to know history. You have to understand your subject, know what it is you're bringing into the world by taking a picture.”

She'd given Gretchen two things that day. A leather-bound journal she'd found, written by a woman named Fidelia Moore, in script Gretchen could barely read, and a faded Kodak snapshot of herself as a child, pig-tailed in overalls in 1977 standing in front of a porch, holding the hand of a grim-looking man in a blue T-shirt and a green John Deere cap.

It would be years before Gretchen was interested in the journal, and then only as something she and Simon would read out loud from in funny dramatic voices, dressed up in vintage clothing. Some of it was about the Civil War, sewing, cooking, taking care of little kids. People back then took such a roundabout way of saying things, most of it
was boring, illegible, or incomprehensible. But the picture Mona showed her that day was immediately fascinating.

“Look, Gretchen,” her mother said, pointing to the right of the front porch: “Can you see?”

Gretchen could see that there was the older man, and the little girl who must have been Mona. There was an enormous house behind them with a porch and cupolas and a weather vane. There were trees in the distance as far as the eye could see, and lace curtains in the window of an upstairs bedroom.

But then Gretchen saw something more:

In the place to which her mother had pointed—yes, there
was
something. A third subject to this photograph.

A little boy with a baseball hat wearing a plaid shirt, running too fast for the photograph to fully snatch him, but not so fast that a hazy impression hadn't managed to be taken.

Gretchen put her finger to the place. “Is that a little boy?” she asked.

“Is that what it looks like to you?” Gretchen's mother asked. “A little boy?”

“Who is it?” Gretchen asked.

“My brother.”

“What?” Gretchen was startled. “I didn't know you had a brother.”

“Until then, I didn't know either. He died before I was born. He was six years old. My mother was pregnant with me when he accidentally hanged himself with a rope he was using to swing from a tree.”

Gretchen felt sick to her stomach and gave her mother a hug. She looked at the picture again and shivered, the hair on her arms rising.

“It's okay. It's nothing to be afraid of,” Mona told her. “It's a mystery, the world is complex. He came back to have his picture taken that day, just before we moved out of the house.”

She put the photo aside and picked up another, of a woman dressed in white walking through a wall. “Now
this
,” she said, “is a beautiful fake. Pay attention, sweets. It's important for every girl to know the difference between interesting mysteries and beautiful fakes.”