Harmony House Page 5

  The images flash and stutter like film running through an old-fashioned movie projector—jumping from frame to frame, skipping and tearing in places.

  But I recognize the room.

  It’s where I found the book—here, in Harmony House. Only it is different. Crosses are nailed to the bare white walls. The boy plays absently with a string of rosary beads. A fire burns, flickering in the hearth.

  The woman—a nun, I realize—retrieves a brush from the antique bureau and begins to sweep it through her long, shining hair. She sings softly to herself—and to the boy.

  “You’re beautiful,” the boy tells her.

  She turns and smiles.

  “What a nice thing to say.”

  The boy reaches out his hand to her.

  “Are you my mother?” he asks.

  The woman presses her lips together.

  “You don’t remember?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  She takes his hand in hers.

  “Your mother is with the angels in Heaven,” she says. “But I love you just as much as if you were my own child. And I will always love you. And I will always care for you. And I will never let you go.”

  “I love you, too,” says the boy.

  The woman ties her hair back now and secures the habit over her head.

  “The babies will need to be fed and changed,” she says. “Will you come with me to heat the bottles?”

  The boy nods.

  “Is that girl still here?” he asks.

  The woman stops adjusting the buttons on her habit and stares at him.

  “Which girl?”

  “The one who was screaming last night?”

  The woman gets down low next to the boy and whispers, “Hush, now. Hush. Don’t let the monsignor or the other sisters hear you talk about that.”

  “But . . . she was screaming and . . .”

  The woman shakes her head.

  “She’s gone up to Heaven, baby.”

  “With my mommy?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy gets to his feet and then bends to tie his shoe. The woman takes the laces from him and ties them herself.

  From down the hall, heavy footsteps sound, creaking the floorboards, growing rapidly closer.

  “Quick,” says the woman. “Under the bed. Go. Hide!”

  The boy’s eyes go wide with something like terror. He stumbles quickly beneath the wooden bed frame and threadbare mattress, peering out from underneath. He watches as the woman, now fully dressed in her habit, goes to tend the fire. The door swings open. Another nun, older, with rimless glasses and deep furrows around her mouth, steps into the room.

  “What are you still doing here?” the older nun demands. “The babies need tending.”

  “Yes, Sister,” the woman says. “I was worried about sparks from the fire. But I’ve fixed it now. I’ll start making up the bottles.”

  “See that you do,” the older nun says.

  She slams the door.

  The woman turns toward the bed.

  “Okay,” she says. “You can come out now.”

  But the boy remains hidden, soaked with sweat and trembling cold.

  CHAPTER 4

  I wake up on the cold tile floor with a feeling like a drill boring into the center of my forehead. My teeth grit together and I press the palm of my hand against my temple. I pull myself up to standing and drink water from the faucet. A wave of nausea sweeps through me. I clutch at my stomach and gag.

  The vision—if that’s what it was—replays itself over and over in my mind. The pretty nun, the little boy, the way he hid trembling under the bed. It was like it was all happening there in front of me. Like it had all happened in this house a long time ago.

  But that doesn’t make any sense.

  It must’ve just been a nightmare.

  Or maybe some kind of fever dream. Because I’m sick as hell.

  I cough and retch and gag over the sink.

  I splash water on my face and try to breathe.

  When I close my eyes I can still see that older nun with her face all lined and full of hatred. In the image I have of her now her eyes are black, scribbled out, and dead-looking.

  I face myself in the mirror. What the hell am I thinking?

  You’re crazy, I tell myself.

  “You’re crazy,” I say out loud.

  Then I open my mouth and look down my throat and gnash my teeth. “Get it together,” I say.

  I open the bathroom door and see that the house is dark. It feels very late—or maybe very early. I make my way back to the pink Pepto-Bismol room, crawling under the thick down comforter. I lie there until the nausea passes. I drift off to sleep. And in sleep, I dream.

  I dream of my mom.

  When she picked me up from school in our old green Volvo station wagon—surprising me, since I usually had to stay in the after-school program. She was so pretty then. Her eyes were blue and she smiled big—her two front teeth pushed in a little so it made her canines stand out sharp and feline-looking. She had a small, angular nose and high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. Her neck was long and elegant and she wore a silver cross necklace. She took my backpack from me, and I had to reach up to take her hand.

  Driving through the bright spring afternoon, she played David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane on the six-CD changer and we both sang along. The surrounding country was coming back to life green and vibrant after the long winter. In the parks families were out walking their dogs and kids were playing pickup baseball games and people were out boating on the lake.

  My mom had the windows rolled down and we sang together as we passed through downtown and drove out the old highway to the thrift store owned by my mom’s friend Mrs. Douglas—who would call my mom and tell her when she got in special fabrics, clothes, or records. My mom was a seamstress and would sew dresses for me.

  She never got to use her talents as much as she liked, working the way she did at the makeup counter at Peebles. But she was very talented. That day she bought a length of bright, floral-patterned fabric she would make into a blouse and a pair of matching shorts for me. And she let me buy a Jackson 5 record they had on sale for a dollar.

  Then, on the way home, we stopped to get ice cream and she told me not to tell my dad, because it would ruin my dinner. Then she stopped at the packaged goods store and bought something in a brown paper bag for herself. Dad didn’t know about that either.

  We had a lot of secrets like that. We had to hide so many things from him.

  Though, eventually, she started hiding things from me, too.

  And soon she disappeared from both of us completely.

  But in my dream, I remember her as she was before.

  Sitting on the bench outside the ice-cream parlor, my legs dangling, swinging back and forth.

  She laughed and told me stories about when she’d been my age and how she used to chase the boys in school and try to kiss them. She told me that when she caught one boy and kissed him on the cheek, he burst into tears and went and told the teacher and she got in trouble.

  “I want you to promise me something,” she said, the flash of her smile gone—her eyes unblinking, staring straight into me. “Promise me you’ll make better decisions than I did.”

  Wanting to say the right thing, I nodded and told her yes. I promised that of course—of course I would.

  “You know I love you more than anything in the world,” she continued. “But I want you to have choices, okay? Don’t ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t have choices. You always do.”

  And then she stopped looking at me and turned to stare at something far-off. She added, dully, with a half smile, “Until you don’t.”

  And I didn’t know what she meant, but I shivered—maybe just from the ice-cream cold in my chest. And I reached out my hand and touched hers. And she laughed and hugged me tight against her and I could smell that smell of her again and feel the warmth in her embrace.

  I was happy.

 
Maybe we both were.

  Until we weren’t.

  In the morning I feel sick as hell again and I want to stay in bed, but my dad is pounding on the door, telling me to get up.

  I try to do what he says, but the pain in my head is really unbearable.

  I turn and lie back down again.

  The door opens and my dad comes in—like he does every goddamn morning—so we can pray together.

  “Dad,” I say. “Please, I’m not feeling good.”

  He tells me prayer will heal whatever is wrong with me.

  I want to tell him to fuck off, but, of course, I don’t, because that would just make everything worse. So I follow him downstairs to his dank room. The musty smell of it is overwhelming—like some kind of mold rotting beneath the floorboards.

  “Can I at least go to the bathroom first?” I ask him.

  He says for me to wait.

  Against one wall of his bedroom he’s erected a kind of altar with a giant cross showing, in exact detail, the nails driven in and the crown of thorns and the blood dripping down.

  My dad gets on his knees and gestures for me to do the same.

  It’s a ritual I’m used to at this point.

  He prays out loud, asking for God’s forgiveness and saying we’re not worthy and blah, blah, blah. Pretty boring stuff. But my dad is all emotional about it and I think he might even cry—I can hear a tremor in his voice.

  “And please, Lord,” he says. “Save my daughter. Show her the path to salvation that she may not spend eternity burning in the fires of hell.”

  I keep my head down.

  My dad drones on and on.

  Then another voice whispers in my ear.

  “Sinner,” it hisses.

  I close my eyes and shake my head to clear it.

  Finally, though, my dad finishes talking. He says, “Amen,” and I say it, too.

  I go back upstairs to the bathroom and try to wash my face, but the pain in my head is so bad now I can barely open my eyes. It’s not the easiest thing in the goddamn world, but I manage to get back to my room and I sort of stumble over to the closet. There’s a bag of pills that Steph and I stole from her dad’s medicine cabinet in the lining of my navy blue peacoat.

  Staring at the pills now, they’re all kinds of pastel multicolors—Vicodin, Percocet, Xanax, some opiate—I can’t remember what it’s called.

  I reach into the plastic bag and take one of the thick, round Percocet and dry-swallow it before going back to the bathroom to drink water from the faucet.

  Looking up into the mirror, I see my reflection in the mirror is kind of a train wreck. I’m strangely thin—my face pale and sunken around the eyes and jawline. Plus there’s a purplish-yellow bruise forming above my collarbone.

  I’m not sure where the hell that coulda come from.

  I walk down the stairs and go into the kitchen, where my dad is drinking coffee. Sunlight streams in through the open window.

  “Hey, what happened there?” my dad asks, noticing the bruise on my neck.

  My hand goes to it reflexively. I pull my collar together to cover it. “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s weird. I just—I woke up like this.”

  I pour myself coffee.

  “You need to eat more iron,” my dad says, handing me, somewhat incongruously, a box with some chocolate donuts in it.

  I take one and do my best to smile.

  “Not a lot of iron in these things.”

  “I’ll get some steaks for dinner and . . . uh . . . maybe some broccoli?”

  “That’d be nice,” I say. “Thank you.”

  I eat the donut and drink coffee and my dad starts talking to me about the daily chores. Really, it’s not so bad. Just a lot of dusting and straightening and organizing. No milking the cows or tilling the soil or whatever.

  Worse than the chores are the hours of religious study my dad’s planning to do with me. Homeschooling, he calls it. But my dad’s not a big fan of Darwin. And his concept of history is a little . . . skewed. I’m not sure I’m gonna get through it without him killing me, or maybe the other way around.

  But, for the moment anyway, I don’t really care. The Percocet is doing its thing. The pain in my head is gone, replaced by a feeling of weightlessness, like cotton candy wrapped around my brain—in a good way.

  I mean, very good.

  Even my dad looks a little more . . . pleasant than he normally does.

  Back in Johnstown I went to parties and stuff and would drink a little. But I’ve always been kind of scared of drinking too much. I never wanted to end up like my mom.

  But one Percocet’s not gonna kill me. And it turns out it’s making this day a whole lot more tolerable. So I finish the donut and coffee and decide I might as well just keep my pajamas on while I’m dusting and straightening around the house. I go upstairs and get my Discman so I can listen to music while I work. Marc Bolan singing “Cosmic Dancer.”

  “I danced myself into the tomb.”

  I dust along the railings and bookshelves and every picture frame and light fixture and curtain rod and spare piece of furniture. The dust is like half an inch thick in places—gray and greasy, filling my lungs so I cough and sneeze and my eyes burn. Eventually I have to tie a bandana over my nose and mouth.

  I make my way through the front room and the dining room and the living room and the sitting room and the back study. The sun is warm coming in through the windows. I dust around the fireplace and around the doorframe and along the complicated floral-patterned wallpaper.

  At the back of the house there is another locked room like the one upstairs, but my dad gave me the skeleton key to use, so I fit it in the lock and turn the handle. A cloud of dust envelops me and I cough and sneeze until it clears.

  The room is dark and I smell that smell like mold and decay. I stumble through the clutter and push open the back windows and take big, gasping breaths of the cool morning air. A wind blows through the branches of the dense forest. The stiff brown leaves are falling—carpeting the ground in a thick blanket.

  Inside the room, white sheets are draped over more stored lamps and spare furniture and books and wooden frames and candlesticks.

  I pull back one of the cloths and notice a small wooden box, inlaid with silver crosses, sitting atop a very old-looking table.

  I open the box carefully and take out a man’s gold ring that stands out against the black velvet lining. I hold it up to the light. A golden snake is coiled around a glittering ruby apple. I take the cold metal in my hand and turn it over. With Marc Bolan now singing, “Girl, I’m just a vampire for your love.”

  I drop the ring in my pocket.

  I pull off another of the draped cloths and reveal a dark wood chest of drawers. There’s a black-and-white photograph on top of it, a man and woman dressed in tailored suits and hats—like from the thirties or forties. The woman holds a swaddled infant in her arms and the man holds the hand of what I think is a young boy in a wool sweater. I open the top drawer and find a stack of similar photographs.

  Alex’s stories echo through my head. A home for wayward girls. Are these the couples who adopted the children born at Harmony House?

  I don’t know what other explanation there could be.

  I keep on looking through the photographs, but then a sudden movement catches my attention. I turn to the window and see a figure crossing through the grass and then disappearing behind the line of trees. I go and lean out. A scrub jay screams loud from the treetops. Crows circle aimlessly overhead.

  And then I see him.

  That boy Colin.

  He’s crossing through the forest, I guess taking that path to the beach.

  I drop down onto the grass and run fast to the covering of forest so my dad doesn’t see me from the house. It must be the Percocet that gives me the courage, because I do it without even thinking.

  Colin’s back is to me. He’s dressed in a big army jacket with the hood pulled up over his head. He’s carrying a white bucket—li
ke a painter’s—by the handle, so it swings back and forth as he walks.

  I want to catch up to him.

  I stumble over the roots and low-hanging branches and the piles of wet, rotting leaves. It’s cold in the forest—colder than it should be—and I shiver and wrap my arms tight around my body.

  “Hey,” I call out. “Hey, wait up.”

  Colin turns like I startled him.

  “Jesus,” he says. “You scared me.”

  I laugh. “I’m the least scary thing in a five-mile radius. Didn’t you hear me flailing around back here?”

  He laughs then, too.

  “No, too deep in my own head, I guess.” He glances down. “Are you wearing . . . slippers?”

  I stare at my feet and realize he is, of course, right.

  “Yeah, uh, I just saw you going past and I . . . wanted to talk to you. Are you heading to the beach?”

  He nods.

  “Uh-huh. It’s low tide. I was gonna go see if I could get some oysters off the rocks.”

  “Oh, cool. You can do that here?”

  “I do—almost every day.”

  “Can you eat them?”

  “Yeah, of course. I’d ask you to come with me, only I’d say you need some better shoes. And maybe a jacket. It gets crazy cold down by the surf.”

  “Yeah,” I say, smiling. “Thanks, but I can’t anyway. I’m supposed to be cleaning the house right now. Then my dad is, uh, homeschooling me later.”

  “Homeschooling?”

  “Yeah, I’m one of those freaks now,” I say. “It sucks. Or, uh, it’s going to. We haven’t actually started yet.”

  “Why don’t you just go to high school in town?”

  I shake my head. “It’s a long story.”

  He grins. “I have time.”

  “I’ve gotta get back. I was gonna try to go into town later, though, if you wanted to maybe go to that diner with me and get some . . . coffee? Or something?”

  He smiles more.

  “I can’t tonight,” he says. “But maybe tomorrow? What about in the afternoon? We could go down to the beach?”

  I smile, too.

  “All right, yeah. That’d be great.”

  “Around two?” he asks.