5
PHIL LAY IN bed thinking, although his thoughts were disconnected. He felt the lonesomeness of the old house, which was somehow made more lonesome by Marianne’s death. Light from the stairwell lamp faintly illuminated the hall outside the open bedroom door, and the muslin window curtains caught a suffused light. In the slight draft they shifted like airy ghosts. He closed his eyes, but in his mind he could still see the shadowy lumber of furniture in the room and the pale moving curtains. He got out of bed finally, dressed, and started toward the stairs to the attic bedroom, which would be Betsy’s bedroom in a couple of days. It had only begun to settle into his mind that his solitary life was a thing of the past, and that he would suddenly have a child around the house. The idea of it was exotic. Softball and piano lessons? School—he’d have to get her into school. He remembered the asphalt playgrounds and tetherball poles and weedy baseball diamonds of his own childhood, suddenly part of his life again.
An idea came to him, and he returned to his bedroom and took a shallow cardboard carton off the closet shelf. He went out into the hallway again, climbed the stairs, and set the carton on the bed in the attic, switching on the bedside lamp. Next to the lamp sat a mason jar that had belonged to his mother, and he stood for a moment regarding it. Inside the jar lay several trinkets, like old-fashioned carnival prizes. The lid of the jar had been dipped in wax, although there was no liquid in it and nothing in the jar that would spoil. There was an old pocketknife inside with a handle that might have been carved out of antler, although it might as easily have been chipped out of petrified wood. There was a thimble, too, misshapen and decorated with a tiny smudged picture, and a hatpin with a lump of red glass knob on top like a piece of slag. There was a thumb-sized iron animal, perhaps a horse, and a cut crystal shot glass so small that it couldn’t have held more than half an ounce of liquid. He wondered for a moment if he should put the jar away, but it was the sort of thing that Betsy would like, so he set it now on a shelf near the window before switching off the light again in order to get a view of the moonlit night. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were ragged and windblown.
From the window there was a view of the grove of avocado trees behind the house and of the creek and arroyo beyond that. A path skirted the lower edge of Santiago Creek, along the back edge of the grove. …
He was startled to see someone—two people?—moving along the path in the light of the moon. And then, almost as soon as he noted the two shadows, they disappeared, which meant that they had either slipped into the grove itself or—not as likely—had descended the wall of the muddy creekbed. He waited, barely breathing, but they didn’t reappear. The arroyo beyond the creek was overgrown with wild bamboo and willow scrub, thousands of acres of marshy bottomland that stretched away toward the foothills in the north and the park in the east. Now, in the moonlight, the scattered rocks of the sandy arroyo shone chalky pale, and the skeletons of late-winter castor bean and mesquite stood out starkly against the white ground.
In the hundred years since the house had been built, the property had never been fenced, and although it was common for people walking along the trail to pick avocados at the edge of the grove, there was something unsettling about the idea of strangers lurking among the shadowy trees at night. And for the last few weeks, since the groundwater had risen with the constant rains, nighttime visitors had been strangely frequent lurking in the darkness of the trees.
Nothing was moving now, either on the path or in the arroyo. Clouds scudded across the moon again, casting the landscape into darkness. It occurred to him that it might easily be homeless people, perhaps, with shelters in the woods, and he turned away from the window and switched on the light again, trying to see the room as Betsy would see it. The place could use curtains, maybe shutters on the windows. A new rug would help, too—something bright. But it was a comfortable place with its old bed and rocker and dresser and with its wooden ceiling angling away overhead and two tall gables looking out over the grove. A narrow balcony stood outside the windows, and it was possible to climb out over the sill of one of the windows and walk along the balcony to the other—something he and Marianne had done more than once when they were children.
A backyard pepper tree grew at the edge of the balcony, and when he was small the branches had just reached to the balcony railing. Now the balcony was nearly swallowed by the enormous tree, and if it grew any larger he would have to think about pruning it back in order to save the last of the view. He was only now getting comfortable with the idea of making any changes in the house and grounds. When his mother had died, he had driven down from where he lived in Sonoma, to find the house empty, closed up, and locked. In the attic he had found an old daguerreotype print, sitting on the sill and tilted against the edge of the window as if to catch the light. It was easily a century old, of four people, possibly in their early twenties, although the stiff poses and washed-out quality of the print made it difficult to tell. Beside the photo had sat the mason jar with the trinkets inside.
Marianne had already had a house full of her own things by that time, and although she had talked about sorting through the stuff in the house and having her share of them shipped to Texas, she had never gotten around to it. Phil had done nothing to encourage her. He had simply left everything as it had been, although he had moved the old photo to a safe place.
He opened the box that he had brought with him—odds and ends of things that had belonged to his sister when she was a child, and he sorted through them, reminded of the past. There was a framed photo of her in a girl scout uniform when she must have been about Betsy’s age, and another photo of their mother standing beside the stone well in the backyard. He set both the photos on the nightstand now, took them down again, then set them up once more. Betsey looked a lot like her mother and like her grandmother, too. He had no idea how she would react to the photos, but he decided to leave them there. He closed the half-full box, slipped it into the dresser drawer, and sat down tiredly in the rocker, gazing at the photos, his eyes closing with sleep. And right then, as he tilted back in the rocker, the front doorbell rang.