*Fiction — April 1, 2021
The House by the River
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T he house was Lynn’s idea, and she would not be dissuaded. They could be closer to their daughter this way, she believed. Mitch, typically Mitch, did not know how to handle this new Lynn, and so relented. He would remain in the city, in any case. He would drive out for the weekends, his obligations to the company permitting, which, as it happened, did not result in any weekends at all.
The woman selling the house had lived on the property her entire life and was pathetically attached. But this woman was now old and required a walker to shuffle about and could therefore no longer attend to the upkeep; her own children had refused to take on that duty. She could not make the short journey down to the river, ten yards behind the house, through vigorous trees.
“My daughter loved the river,” Lynn told the old woman. She felt it was important for the woman to understand how much she needed the house; how the house deserved her. That she’d had a daughter.
“This is exactly the house I want,” Lynn said. “There isn’t a house more perfect. I’m sure you can see I’ll take only the best care of it. I’ll open the windows to let it breathe the air; I’ll bring in pinecones, if there are pinecones.”
“I suppose it would be good for the house,” the woman said. “It hasn’t seen much happen over the past few years.”
The woman harbored an anxiety that the house would be lonely without her, and so she had vetted all prospective buyers herself. There were not many, and she had thus far been unimpressed. But Lynn managed to win her over. The woman instructed Lynn as to the particulars: a toilet with a delicate constitution, faucets that must be left trickling in wintertime to prevent the pipes from freezing.
“You must leave out a dish for the kittens every night,” the woman said. “A bit of meat. You can pour milk on it.”
Lynn promised she would do this.
They were feral, the woman explained, abandoned by their owners to drown or starve or become truly wild. They prowled the woods like spirits. In her earlier days, the woman had gone into the little town that served as a nucleus of civilization for the area, had put up posters urging the practice of spaying and neutering—but the townspeople persisted in their ways, utilizing the river not only to dispose of the orphaned and unwanted but also as a dumping grounds for miscellaneous rubbish and broken household items. They did this without apparent guilt, as if delivering their junk unto eternal baptism.
Lynn, like most tourists, had not noticed any such degradation and thought the area was beautiful.
•••
On the first day, Lynn ventured out back to the river. She sat on the low, treed bank and dangled her toes into the airspace above the water. She felt very close to the river from four inches above it. She felt that she and it could coexist. She had no desire to get closer yet.
As for the river, it concealed itself in layers of fish-skin green, murky with sediment. A tear-shaped sandbar divided it into two portions, one slow and smooth, the other bumping clumsily over the jagged teeth of rapids. Farther down, a patch of brilliance lay atop the water in such a way that it seemed as if the light emanated from below. Long fingers of light reached up to stroke the surface from the slick, algal bedrock where somnolent fish dreamed. And tangled in these weeds of light, singing softly, that’s where Mandy lay.
Really, actually, Mandy’s body had surfaced at a point much farther downriver, the horrible catch of a group of trout anglers. She’d been missing for a week before the waters released her, and Lynn was told that her face was bloated near beyond recognition. Lynn had refused to view the corpse.
“Do you want that to be the way you’ll always remember her?” was what she had said to Mitch.
“It’s about closure,” Mitch had said. “If I don’t make good and sure it’s her, that this is a fact, there will always be the hope it wasn’t.”
The night of the accident, Mandy had been with a boy. The boy had lost his nerve and gone hours before reporting it. And his account had been confusing, Lynn thought; the way Mandy was said to have “vanished” in the water, how the boy kept repeating himself, as if floundering for a line to hold onto. At first, Lynn had wanted to stay in touch with the boy. But Mitch had suggested that would be drastically inappropriate.
It was a year later that Lynn had conceived of the idea to move here.
•••
Lynn stood in the kitchen, the only place her phone received service. The trees overcast the windows, and shade pooled in the corners of the room.
“Mitch, you won’t believe this place,” she said.
“Lynn.”
“Mandy would have loved it.”
She heard his concentrated intake of breath.
“I’m still not quite sure what there is to be gained from this . . .” It was a point of pride for Mitch to be selective with words. “You’re taking us in a precarious direction.”
“Life has taken us,” she said. “Here I am, bailing out the boat. I’m bailing out the boat.” The phrase made less sense the more she repeated it. Did she really mean to say they were in a boat together? How quickly was the boat filling up? With what was she bailing?
The call had not gone as she had intended. This often happened to Lynn; she meant for one thing and another occurred. The words changed in her mouth. The actions she took were not, in their performance, the ones they had appeared to be when she had decided upon them.
It was still early, although the trees squeezed out much of the daylight. A woodpecker drilled into a trunk. Lynn poured herself a drink and tried to read one of the books Mandy had been assigned for summer reading last year. The book was a play and the play was Macbeth. Lynn had read it before; in fact, she believed she had seen it performed, but all she remembered was Lady Macbeth, austere and spectrally pale, washing and washing her hands; her hands never got any cleaner. What were a bunch of fifteen-year-olds expected to learn from this?
She was two drinks down when there was a knock on the door. A woman with a basket of hand-picked apples.
“Oh,” said the woman, looking into Lynn’s face and not the face she had expected. “She sold. She finally sold.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Lynn said, and she felt that she was truly sorry.
“Well, she could have said a last goodbye, couldn’t she?” the woman said. Then her manner became kind. “I suppose I’m your neighbor. Agatha.”
She was easily as old as the woman who had sold Lynn the house and had the appearance of someone who has been repeatedly stretched out of shape. Her lean, long limbs were like frayed rope, but with a residual toughness. Lynn fixated on the single white hair poking out from her chin.
“Come in,” Lynn said. “Come in. I’ll make us some . . . tea.” As she said this, she patted the woman’s veined arm. She kept patting, she seemed unable to stop.
“Would you accept this as a housewarming gift?” Agatha said, proffering the basket.
“Absolutely––but you don’t have to do that.”
“Yours,” Agatha said.
Lynn hoped it had not seemed she was trying to take it.
A watery tumbler of vodka remained on kitchen table. Lynn removed it. She searched the cabinets for tea. She was certain there was tea.
“I know that kettle,” Agatha said.
It was a peculiar, square-shaped copper kettle on the electric stove. The former owner had left Lynn most of the furniture.
“I know these chairs,” Agatha said. They were ordinary chairs.
Agatha sighed and gazed out the windows as if already remembering this moment, recalling it from some future in which the trees no longer took comfort in their silence.
“Well, it’s a shame to see one of the old guard go,” Agatha said, “but we could use some fresh new blood. The only youths we get are vacationers.”
Lynn was not actually young. She was in her early fifties, although it was easy to dispose of a year or two in memory. She and Mitch had waited to have children. It had cost them two miscarriages before Mandy.
“I hope it’s not just you by yourself,” Agatha said.
“Oh, no,” Lynn said, and hesitated. “My husband has to be in the city for work, but he’s hoping to make it part-time, traveling. We moved for our daughter.” She halted again. There was a hard, dry piece of skin on her upper lip. She attempted to bite it off, but it simply tore and hung in front of her teeth. “Mandy loves it here,” she said. “She loves the woods and the river. We used to come hiking in the summer and fall, but then we decided let’s make it a year-round thing. Let’s live in the woods. We didn’t want Mandy to grow up without . . . nature. The things she deserves.”
She was speaking eagerly, in a young, high voice. She felt the world was opening up; it was growing larger in a way that made it all seem somehow accessible. Why couldn’t she, if she wanted, bring Mandy back? Why should anyone have to know?
“I think that’s admirable,” Agatha said. “It requires a sacrifice, though, doesn’t it?”
Lynn shook her head. “As a family, it’s what we’ve decided is important. For Mandy’s sake. . . . Irish Breakfast or Chamomile?”
“Nothing with caffeine,” Agatha said.
Lynn poured boiling water into two china teacups that were painted with identical scenes of children chasing after butterflies with long nets.
“How old is she?” Agatha said. “Your daughter.”
“Fifteen and a half.”
A concerned light pulsed in Agatha’s eyes. She frowned at the window, as if expecting to see something there that troubled her. “That’s a tricky age,” she said. “Certainly one I don’t look back on fondly. Won’t she miss her friends?”
“I just think it’s a myth that children need to grow up with a sense of normalcy,” Lynn said. “What they should really be having is the adventure of their lives.”
Agatha was silent for a moment. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” When she smiled, deep hook marks framed the corners of her mouth. It was not a lovely smile.
“When Mandy was little, she spent all of her time in bed. I’m not telling you she was sick. She just wanted to be in bed. I would come in after doing the laundry and she was burrowed beneath the sheets. Of course I worried about her. But she wasn’t spending her time sleeping. She was inventing worlds, playing with her imagination. ‘Mommy, she said, I imagine such wonderful things.’ Then she wanted to know, was it OK? ‘Is what OK?’ I asked. ‘To want to dream,’ she said.”
Lynn realized she was telling a story and she wasn’t sure where the story was going. It didn’t matter. Agatha said something harmless. They each said many harmless things, and Lynn could see how easy it was, or would be, to continue to go on this way.
At last, Lynn managed to bite the piece of skin off her lip, and her lip began to bleed.
•••
“Your daughter, Mandy,” Agatha said, later, as she was preparing to leave, “tell her to be careful around the river. Kids her age.” Her fingers fussed with a paper napkin. “The most awful story. A year ago, I think it was, some poor girl drowned.”
Lynn’s brain chilled. Agatha looked at her and then quickly looked away, as though she were anxious about Lynn’s reaction.
“I don’t mean to frighten you,” Agatha said. “But I thought you should know.” She tore the napkin accidentally.
Lynn lifted her empty teacup, marveled at its structure and solidity, and then set it back down. “Mandy is an excellent swimmer,” she said.
“Yes . . .” Agatha made slow work of pushing back her chair.
She was going to confess, Lynn thought. She would destroy everything that Lynn had established in the past hour. Perhaps she would reveal that she, too, had once had a daughter to whom something awful had happened. She would seek a mutual understanding.
Instead, Agatha took Lynn’s hand in her own. “I hope we can do this again sometime.”
•••
In the night, the kittens––which Lynn had not yet seen—howled. They certainly sounded feral. Vicious, hissing. Their high-pitched cries were at once childish and strangled.
She had not put out the dish of meat. She pressed her ear to the pillow and pulled the quilt over her head, pretending not to hear. The sounds became very loud and it seemed that two of the kittens had gotten into a fight. Some intense struggle.
Mandy swam across Lynn’s closed eyelids. Mandy jumped off a tall rock into the river. Mandy floated, treading water. Then, Mandy stood outside with the cats; she knelt among them. The cats climbed Mandy’s arms and legs, and she lifted them to her lips and kissed them. Apparitions, all of them. So needy.
Lynn got out of bed and went into the kitchen where she could phone Mitch.
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
“Well . . . ” he said.
“Do you remember the time Mandy turned red because of all the tomatoes we fed her?”
“Honey.”
“The doctor laughed because I had brought her in thinking something was wrong with her.”
“Honey,” he repeated. “You know we’re handling this differently. We have to respect that we’re each going to have our own process.”
Mitch’s process was to not talk about it.
Mitch’s process was to not talk about it.
“If you want to talk to someone,” he began.
“––I want to talk to my husband. Mandy’s father.”
“Honey.”
“Are you coming this weekend? You haven’t even seen the place.”
“I don’t know yet. I have to see what things here look like. A couple of projects need to get finished.”
“Those damn cats!”
“What?”
“Oh, never mind. Goodnight, Mitch.”
“Goodnight. . . . Try to sleep, alright?”
In the refrigerator there was no meat. No milk. From the freezer, Lynn uncovered a block of frost-bitten hamburger left behind by the old woman. She zapped it in the microwave and lopped off a bloody hunk which she placed in a small mixing bowl. She set the bowl out by the back door. She stood on the step and waited. The kittens were silent now. She stared into the darkness and dared them to come out. They didn’t. They would come when she was gone, she thought. Because they did not associate with the living. Or something like that.
•••
In most places, the riverbank was not high; the earth descended into the water like sand into the ocean. Stems of grass gave way to currents. Fossils of dead trees protruded from the water where they had been drowned. The air was dense with moisture, with the shade of trees grown accustomed to their habitual postures.
Lynn passed several fishermen in vests, boots, and khaki-colored safari hats. A light rain began. The sun continued to shine, unconcealed. Slivers of rain like needles of glass. The river reflected sky. Everything was made of mirrors. Everything was a reflection of something else.
She continued along the bank, marveling. Why did the world make itself so beautiful only to enforce its own destruction?
On the rocks, something moved. Something unwell. Lynn stifled a sudden revulsion. It was an old rag woman lying facedown on the rocks and moaning. Her hair was clumped in filthy strands and she wore a stained sheet for clothing. She was having a fit, apparently, writhing in a way suggestive of intoxication or pure senselessness.
Ignore it, was Lynn’s thought. You were not here.
The woman was pushing her face into the wet pebbles. She was hurting herself.
Lynn said sharply, “Get up.”
She moved toward the woman. She grasped the woman’s arm and pulled.
The woman shrieked at her. The dirty head swung around to face Lynn.
It was Mandy’s face. Mandy’s young, thin lips, her freckled nose and small, wide-set green eyes. Mandy’s face on this wretch.
Lynn slapped her hard across the cheek.
“Ouch,” cried the girl. She was just a girl. A very dirty girl.
“Who are you?” Lynn asked. “Get out of here.”
The girl scampered off. Her bare feet slipped twice on the wet rocks, but she kept running and soon was gone.
•••
Lynn asked Agatha later about this girl she had seen. Medium-to-tall height, fairly slim, with long brown hair and green eyes. A teenager. She did not describe the girl well. She was afraid of being more specific. Agatha had now visited multiple times, and Lynn had already described Mandy: her intelligent eyes, her lean swimmer’s physique.
She told Agatha that she had seen the girl in passing, and thought perhaps the girl and Mandy might make friends.
Agatha didn’t know of anyone fitting the description. Most of the children she remembered from the area were grown now. The young ones did not stick around. There was nothing here for them.
“Well, school will start soon,” Lynn said.
“Didn’t you say she’s in summer school?”
“Yes, but she hasn’t hit it off with the other children.”
Agatha tilted her teacup and gazed into the dregs. “The young are so picky, aren’t they? Give them time and they’ll realize there’s not anybody much different from any other.”
“I’m not sure I can agree with you,” Lynn said.
Lynn desperately wanted to touch something. She rose and poured more hot water into their cups. Sometimes she snuck in a touch of gin or other lubricant and that made the conversation smoother. Agatha was looking. Lynn sat back down.
“When your Mandy is home, I have a job for her,” Agatha said. “I’d compensate her. Just, I need young bones to help me with a few things. Boxes need to move to the basement. That sort of thing.”
“ . . . Certainly. I’ll ask her.”
Lynn sipped her tea. Mandy could say no.
It had always been easy enough to come up with excuses for Mandy. The acre of woods that separated their properties seemed enough to hide the obvious fact—and besides that, Mandy was so busy. The girl was a teenager, wasn’t she.
But Lynn knew she probably wasn’t keeping up a very convincing facade. Besides, Mitch had not once driven out; he seemed to have no intention ever of doing so, and yet he would never say this. He refused to say it. It was as if he believed that he could prevent Lynn from moving forward if he simply held her forever in suspense.
And here was Agatha: she accepted, easily, whatever Lynn told her. Perhaps she wanted to believe Lynn.
Lynn had a thought. What if Agatha wanted Mandy too? What was it the woman had said? Young bones, fresh blood . . . Was it possible? Lynn felt a little wild, but perhaps she was onto something.
Did everyone want Mandy, after all?
•••
Lynn dialed Mitch at home, knowing he was at the office. It was no use to talk to him. She preferred, instead, to leave him long, detailed voicemails. In the spacious and unresisting compartment of voice messaging, she could think herself out, provide comprehensive reasoning without his negative interruptions.
She spoke slowly into the phone: “I believe, Mitch, that you are refusing to allow us to move on. Mandy was an enormous part of our lives. She can still be a part of our lives, going forward . . . Personally, I feel closer to Mandy every day.”
She did not, this time, attempt to encourage him to come to the house. She was moving forward, and fast––whether or not Mitch acknowledged it. She felt this: her own velocity, swift and irresistible. Where Lynn was headed, most people don’t ever make it there. Mitch would only get in her way.
•••
A few days later, Agatha came over to deliver a tray of cookies—to thank Lynn for Mandy’s help. Mandy had helped Agatha get her Volkswagen out of a ditch.
Agatha had backed out of her driveway into the rain-filled swale on the side of the road, she told Lynn, and the car had stuck. She’d tried to drive out by rocking between forward and reverse; had only succeeded in wrenching a spurt of mud from the tires. She’d been ready to give up when a tall, freckled girl appeared at the window, offering help. The girl was skinny, but she was leanly muscular; dressed in athletic clothes, with a small duffel over her shoulder—Agatha described the girl just as Lynn had described Mandy.
The girl had pushed from the tail while Agatha accelerated. “And just like that, the car pulled out,” Agatha told Lynn. “I offered to her a ride, but she wouldn’t let me. Seemed like she was in a hurry, too.”
Lynn felt stunned. Had Agatha called the girl by the name “Mandy?” She guarded herself from saying anything. She complained of a headache. Agatha stood at the threshold of the door and pressed the tray into her hands. Mandy would enjoy the cookies, Lynn said.
Was it so bad to simply accept? Mandy would have done such a thing! Surely, Agatha and the girl hadn’t exchanged names—it wasn’t possible. Was it? No, they hadn’t said much more than a few words directed at getting the car out.
Agatha would probably never see the girl again.
Later, it occurred to Lynn that there might not have been a girl. That perhaps Agatha had been testing her. Was Agatha capable of such a thing? Lynn rather doubted it. But if so, then it was a game she simply had to keep playing.
•••
Lynn fed the kittens nightly before going to bed, and they no longer troubled her. For a time, she considered getting a dog, but decided it would be too much. Regular school had started. Lynn explained to Agatha that the house was so out of the way it had not yet been added to the bus route. So, Mandy got up at five every morning for swim team practice. At the appropriate time, Lynn would take the car out and drive toward town, where the school was located. Sometimes she would not drive all the way into town, but only toward it, so that it seemed as if she was going there. Sometimes she would drive and drive. Lynn adored road trips: the sense of going somewhere, the hope for arrival. She had that feeling now, as she drove along the river and into the mountains. All those little geographical secrets—discoverable by anyone, but hidden to eyes not open for that purpose.
Yes, she would drive and drive—and, especially at night, when the car filled with a palpable darkness, she would imagine that Mandy was with her, sitting quietly, bundled in shadow. Why so quiet? One had to be careful driving at night. Deer, in particular, were known to hurtle themselves directly at moving vehicles as a form of challenge. Lynn had seen it. Once, she came upon a full-grown doe. As the car passed, the doe began running alongside it. She slowed nearly to a stop, and just then, the doe bolted in front of her. She slammed on the brakes and the doe cantered away, but it had been close.
Home, afterward, she felt she could still smell the animal, its nearness; a breath of its essence on her body, her dress.
•••
The roads were slick. The car surged gently over empty two-lane highways sunken in trees. Night; darkness all around, and the car’s encompassing murmur, soft, like blood pulsed through a heart. As long as she didn’t look, Lynn could feel a presence in the back seat. She allowed the mist to gather on the windshield, gazed out through its beaded screen. She didn’t need to see any better than she could.
Momentarily, Lynn’s car was flooded with light. The other car passed quickly; it was soon gone, but the feeling of the light stayed with Lynn, even as darkness resumed. She felt deeply uneasy. She turned off, headed back home.
Halfway up the hill, she came upon a car askew with its emergency lights flashing. She prepared to swerve around it, but then saw the woman flagging her down. The rest became clear to her suddenly: the form that lay sprawled on the road before car—there was a form—a body. “God . . .”
The woman was Agatha. Arms flailing, white hair lit like a foolish cloud.
Lynn pulled over. When the engine silenced, her heart also silenced. She heard only her mind. Find something, her mind said. Stop the bleeding. See if the body’s breathing. She fumbled for her raincoat, got out of the car.
Agatha’s voice: “I didn’t see her!”
A sickly cord of fear tightened around Lynn’s esophagus. She could see now that it was a girl. Yes, a teenager, bloodied and splayed on the pavement like a dog. Sharp, panicked cries came from the girl’s mouth. She was alive.
“Have you called an ambulance?” Lynn demanded.
“They’re coming. Oh!” Agatha was babbling. “A fox in the road. You’re not supposed to swerve, but I did! I did.”
Lynn knelt to the girl. She could feel heat coming off the body, the metallic tang of blood in the air. She lifted the girl’s head and held her carefully. The girl coughed, tried to say something. “Shhh,” Lynn said. A terrible hope leapt inside her. A strange calm. Help would be here soon, she told the girl, though she could see nothing ahead but darkness. But Lynn was here, here was Lynn; she was going to take care of this girl—a daughter.
“It’s OK,” Lynn said.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.