Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Aunt Libby’s Grave MELANIE TEM

Libby glided from the sitting-room to the bedroom. She sat in both, slept in both and on the dusty floor of the roughly pentagonal central hall off which they and three other rooms opened like petals. No matter how unclear the functions of things were, it was important to have names for them.

She crept from the bedroom to the study. Papa brought her books and she did indeed study them, her mind’s alchemy transforming the information into her mind’s own thing.

She sped from the study to the nursery, which was empty, which had in it pale lovely light and motes of dust like old lace. It was not really a nursery; she only called it that to gather in one place her desolation and resolve. Another room might gather tedium, or joy.

Pulling her pink sweater more tightly around her, she sang so they would hear her — in the rest of the house, moving behind walls; in the wide world, drifting from window to window; in days gone by and days to come.

Aunt Maureen was poised to tell a story — the story which Cecelia guessed now, too late, was the reason they’d come to the cemetery. Cecelia didn’t want to hear it. She had a strong sense of danger, a physical feeling of dread.

But she liked her Aunt Maureen. She’d always liked her, and now that her mother had died, taking with her any hope that they could be close or that Cecelia would ever be brave enough to ask her why they weren’t, her desire for Aunt Maureen to like her had intensified into a childish yearning.

That was why she’d taken the long train ride from Denver to Detroit to visit — hoping for guidance, maybe; hoping for approval, or just for contact. That was why she’d not had to feign interest in the news of Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett’s grown children, her cousins whom she knew little and liked less, although it had been necessary to conceal her jealousy as their mother talked fondly, worriedly, proudly, knowingly about them. It was why she’d found herself worrying at odd moments about whether she was carrying on a conversation sufficiently polite, about how the things she told of her life were sounding to Aunt Maureen, about whether there was cat hair on her clothes since assuredly no fur-bearing animal had ever set foot in Aunt Maureen’s house.

Wanting to please Aunt Maureen was also the main, though perhaps not the only, reason she’d acquiesced in coming here and standing on this hill in this bright cold autumn afternoon and looking at grave markers neatly embedded in the family plot. Dark grey metal rectangles with raised inscriptions she assumed to be bronze, they were all partially obscured now by leaves skittering in a breeze she couldn’t yet feel but would soon enough. Aunt Maureen pointed out those for Cecelia’s grandparents, Harry Harkness, whom she remembered without much emotion one way or another, and Martha Harkness, who had died young in childbirth. Those for Elizabeth and Frances Harkness were next in line, separated from the rows for the next family by a blank space which Cecelia found a trifle unsettling.

She couldn’t refuse to listen to the story Aunt Maureen had to tell her, nor even let her attention wander for fear her aunt would notice and disapprove. But apprehension made her pulse skitter like the leaves.

‘When your Aunt Libby died,’ Aunt Maureen declared, ‘I was the only one at her funeral. I stood right here, where we’re standing now, and I watched the funeral procession come up that hill, and there was just the hearse and the undertaker, and I was the only mourner at the graveside.’

‘Why didn’t my mother come? Aunt Libby was her sister, too.’

‘Dad said Helen and Libby were close when they were girls, but once they were grown they didn’t get along.’ Aunt Maureen shook her head briskly, as though dismissing the squabbles of her two much-older sisters. But something about the set of her shoulders or the cast of her glance piqued Cecelia’s attention.

Maureen was a tiny woman, even shorter than Cecelia’s mother had been, considerably thinner, and equally formidable. Cecelia thought she remembered Aunt Libby, the eldest of the Harkness girls, being taller and lean, gaunt to Maureen’s wiriness and the stocky sturdiness of her mother Helen. But Aunt Libby had died when Cecelia was no more than three years old, so she hardly remembered her, and she’d discovered that her images of her mother shifted from time to time. She thought about her a good deal and, of course, remembered her vividly, but what she remembered changed. It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten what her mother had looked like, but as if she’d never exactly known.

‘It was a chilly fall day like this,’ Aunt Maureen continued, and as though to illustrate pulled her navy blue sweater tight around her and crossed her arms over it.

Cecelia caught her breath. Her mother used to make a habitual gesture like that. It had been a bright pink sweater with embroidery on the collar, and she’d pull it snug around her just like that and cross her arms, tucking her hands in. The memory, which had been buried until this moment and had the feel of very early childhood, pierced and hummed like an arrow that had hit its mark, as though it meant something.

The air wasn’t moving, but in it was the anticipation of chill golden wind and sleet. The grey-gold sun through layers of hardwood leaves, compressed this late in a Michigan October, had a metallic sheen, a wet-metal taste. Cecelia fumbled for a comment so Aunt Maureen wouldn’t think she wasn’t interested. In truth, she wasn’t particularly interested in Aunt Libby’s death and funeral, but she didn’t want Aunt Maureen to stop talking to her.

‘I stood up here on this very hill and I watched Libby’s funeral come towards me—’ Cecelia looked where she was pointing, at the winding dirt road below them and beyond. There, in fact, she caught sight of an oncoming funeral procession, a boxy black hearse, one other dark car nearly as tall at the hump as it was long, and — oddly, she thought, though she couldn’t quite have said why it was odd — several pedestrians.

The road was apparently much further below them than she’d realized, for the figures stayed tiny, movements blurred by distance and perspective. She blinked, glanced at her aunt beside her, looked back. The sad little parade of miniatures was no closer, although it was still in forward motion.

Uncle Clyde’s flesh was mostly pale pink, darker pink in some places Libby could not think about, and smooth, hairless. If he’d been hirsute, darker-skinned, or covered with warts, she’d have found his body no more nor less revolting.

When she was little and Uncle Clyde would come to get her, she’d sometimes open his shirt and feel around for his nipples, like little stones in the ocean of his soft smooth flesh. Then he’d whisper to her, or say out loud if he was sure they were alone, ‘You like this, too, don’t you, sweetie? You like your Uncle Clyde.’

Libby did like how his nipples felt under her fingertips. They gave her something to fasten her thoughts on to. Sometimes, too, she’d imagine that she could slit him open by tracing a line from one of those hard pinkish-brown dots to the other and his pink heart would tumble out into her hand. That never happened.

All the women in the family knew about Uncle Clyde. As girls grew up, they learned what to say about him. ‘Oh, that’s just Clyde,’ Grandma said nervously the single time Libby — thirteen years old, scrubbing clothes on the washboard in the big black tub — told her about the kisses he stole from her in the pantry, which was not the worst she had to tell. Her little sister Helen was peeling potatoes on the back porch, out of sight but not out of earshot, and Maureen, crawling, was under everybody’s feet, with Mama eight months dead.

‘Clyde is a good man,’ she was instructed sternly. ‘Clyde is a man of God,’ and Libby, observing, could see that this was true. Uncle Clyde performed many acts of charity. He was a good husband, a good father, a good neighbour. Everybody loved Uncle Clyde. For a little while, she tried it on, like somebody else’s frock, feeling chosen.

‘He does it to me, too,’ Helen informed her from the other edge of the billowing sheet as they changed his bed the next Monday morning. ‘Maureen’s next, you know,’ and that was when, for the first time in her life but by no means the last, Libby was aware of making up her mind to do something hard, something she was afraid to do. She would tell her father, Helen’s father, too, and Maureen’s, a man newly bereft of his wife and Uncle Clyde’s brother. She would tell. Frightened as she was, full of dread as she was, her resolution buoyed her, made her feel grown-up and strong, gave her something better to fasten her thoughts on to.

Walking home from school the next day, worrying about telling, worrying about the English exam on Friday and about the ink stain on her skirt, she smelled something funny. Ever since she was little she didn’t like going past that big old tree in front of the grocery store, because it had a knob on it that looked for all the world like somebody hiding, waiting to jump out and grab her. This time when she hurried past it, there was an odour, vaguely bitter, wrongly sweet, and then a man was walking beside her.

Libby did her best to edge away. The man said in a pleasant voice, ‘I won’t hurt you, Libby,’ which made her even more afraid.

‘How do you know my name?’

He was nicely dressed. His hands were in his pockets. That bittersweet smell seemed to be coming from him, although it was so faint she couldn’t be sure. ‘You know,’ he said in a tone so friendly it was threatening, ‘if you tell your father what you’ve been doing with Uncle Clyde you’ll cause a great deal of trouble in the family. Your father is suffering already because of your mother’s death.’

Tears hurt Libby’s throat at the mention of her mother. Confused, she found herself puzzling over how this stranger knew about that, rather than, she realized later, the greater mystery of how he could know about Uncle Clyde and that she’d decided to tell. Maybe he was a family friend. Maybe he’d been at the funeral. She thought his voice did sound familiar.

‘Your father cries at night.’ From the angle of his voice he might have been looking gently down at her, although she could hardly see him beside her. ‘Did you know that, Libby?’ The thought of Papa’s sorrow was worse than her own. ‘If you tell him, you will only give him more to cry about.’

Libby didn’t know what to think. She stayed silent.

‘You don’t have to say anything. You’re almost grown up now. Uncle Clyde won’t bother you any more. He doesn’t like grown-up women.’

‘My sisters—’

‘Helen can take care of herself. She’s growing up, too. And you don’t know he’ll start with Maureen. You don’t know that.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘You’re a good girl, Libby. I trust you to do the right thing.’

He was gone, the after-image of too-bright light fading away, and Libby was left to ponder, fist to her throat, whether what he’d said was wholly or partially true or not true at all.

Aunt Maureen didn’t seem especially aware of the procession below them. ‘Can you imagine?’ Her voice was crisp and controlled; Cecelia had never heard it otherwise. But she was hugging herself. ‘You’d think Libby had lived on this earth an entire lifetime and never made a difference to anybody.’

‘She made a difference to Frances,’ Cecelia protested. A cousin fully a generation older, Aunt Libby’s only child, Frances had died a long time ago, Cecelia thought from complications of morbid obesity. Cecelia had hardly known her; it was difficult to comprehend what connection there’d ever been between them, other than the blood-arch, mostly abstract, of their mothers’ sisterhood. ‘Anyway, do you think that’s possible? Not to make a difference to anybody?’

Aunt Maureen shot her a look. Cecelia didn’t want to seem rude, but she did want to understand what Aunt Maureen was saying. Such questions — whether or not people made a difference as they passed through this world; how to tell whether that was so — had lately come to be of considerable importance to her.

Twenty-five years old that autumn, she was feeling less and less substantial. She and Ray, whom she supposed she would marry when he came home from the war, had seemed scarcely to touch even when they were seeing each other every Saturday night, and her weekly letters to him now might have been written to anyone; if he did not come home, perish the thought, she would mourn what might have been between them more than what was, and she feared she might live to mourn that anyway. Her job with the insurance company, though she was skilled at it, sustained her in no way other than financial. No one with whom she came into contact in the course of a day was likely to remember her once their specific business with each other was done, nor would she remember them. Certainly, if she were to die today, none of them would come to her funeral.

Aunt Maureen, gazing off over the gilt vista through which Cecelia was still watching the funeral procession move like a model train through a toy landscape, proceeded deliberately. At this point, Cecelia dimly understood that the story was in some way hers, too, if only because she was here, in this place and time, with this purposeful woman who had something to tell her.

The story became more and more hers, too, because it wasn’t given to her all of a piece. She had to work for it, put forth something of herself in order to receive it; she could not simply listen passively. As parts of the tale emerged, tales unto themselves, Cecelia was required to interpret, to fill in spaces, to arrange and rearrange incidents and the interstices among incidents so they made sense and then, given more, made sense again.

Later, she would not be sure what Aunt Maureen had actually told her or in what order, what context. Now and then throughout her long life, images and information from that day would present themselves to her — the light’s particular glint; the yearning (and it was to be the last of it, really) for Aunt Maureen to tell her what she knew, give her what she had, love her; the chill of unease as imagination played over what might be underground in this place, what the embedded grave markers might be taken to signify. Each time these things would seem to mean something slightly different, something cumulative or stripped down or newly nuanced.

On the train ride home, for instance, she would puzzle over the relative position of the embroidered pink sweater in her own life, the movement of it and the truncation of movement as its wearer repeatedly pulled it snug. The realization would descend on her, stopping her breath for a moment, that it must not have been Helen she remembered doing that but Libby.

William Bradley was earnest, decent, rather dull-witted. He loved her, he insisted gamely; he could love her. Libby did not believe that, though it was kind of him to say so, and it would not have persuaded her if she had. ‘I can’t marry you,’ she said to him. ‘I’m crazy. Everybody knows that. Don’t you know that?’

‘I have a duty to our child.’ The words were resolute, but clearly he was appalled to be saying ‘our’ to her about anything, let alone a child, and already grateful that he would not be bound to say it much longer.

‘I’ll do what’s right,’ Libby promised. ‘Send money.’

‘Kill the child.’

It was not, of course, William Bradley who suggested such a thing. There was an actual voice but no visible source for it, and, more than hearing it, Libby felt the voice in her hollow bones. There was a bittersweet fragrance, too, that clung to the skin between the bones of her fingers as they stretched around the baby’s tiny neck. She clenched her fists in refusal. ‘No.’

‘What sort of life will this child have?’ She had to admit it was a reasonable question. ‘You sent young Mr Bradley away. You’re crazy. You said so yourself. You barely managed to raise Frances, and look at her.’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘It would be easier on everybody. On you, too.’

‘No.’ Libby took a deep, steadying, bittersweet breath, and freed her hands from her baby’s throat to push his voice and his insinuating odour away.

On that melancholy golden October afternoon in 1942 — soon to be grey and doleful November, another season altogether — Aunt Maureen asserted, as though satisfied that she’d worked it all out in her head, that Frances had died soon after Libby because she hadn’t known how to live without her mother. ‘A grown woman, you’d have thought she was an orphan,’ which prompted Cecelia to ask about Frances’s father. Who was he? What had happened to him? It amazed her that she’d apparently never wondered about him before; she thought that could not be true, but she had no memory either of her own curiosity in this regard or of any answers forthcoming or withheld.

It also caused her to think about her own father, but her thoughts, having nothing much to snag on to, didn’t stay long with him. Cecelia believed her relationship with her father to be uncomplicated. Easily, they loved each other. She supposed they could be considered neither close nor distant. He mourned her mother now, as did she, but simply, cleanly.

‘I don’t know,’ Aunt Maureen said evenly. ‘As far as I could ever tell, almost nobody in the family knew who Frances’s father was. Including Frances. Papa didn’t know.’

The funeral procession below them gave the strong overall impression of coming closer, while its component parts — dark figures except for one swatch of pink; dark motion — appeared no bigger or clearer than ever. Distracted by this contradictory perspective, Cecelia at first merely nodded in response to the last statement. Then, suddenly disoriented among the tangles of the family tree, she chanced a quick look at her aunt. Aunt Maureen was watching her, and, when Cecelia’s glance swung her way, she nodded emphatically.

‘But I believe it was Uncle Clyde. Our father’s brother. I believe he was Frances’s father. Libby and Helen always behaved strangely when his name came up, and he never came to our house, although I heard he used to live there. Libby was fourteen when Frances was born.’

Cecelia pulled her gaze away, not wanting to stare. For a while when she was the age Aunt Maureen was now, she would find herself flashing back to this moment, this secret told first and smallest among many, as a point at which her life had veered off one course and on to another. Eventually, though, she would cease thinking of life in terms of courses and veerings at all.

‘Our mother had died giving birth to me.’ Self-consciously, Cecelia waited for some sort of signal as to what her reaction ought to be. This she’d known already, presumably from her mother, although she remembered no time or place she’d been told, no specific conversation, no gift or complaint or instructive intent personally to her.

It was the first time, though, that Aunt Maureen, the infant in question, had spoken of it to her, and she fretted that she should offer reassurance or condolence. There was no hint of a request for such a thing; she’d not have guessed at any particular emotional underlay at all if Aunt Maureen hadn’t added, in the same flat declarative tone, ‘It wasn’t uncommon in those days, you know, for women to die in childbirth.’

‘I know,’ Cecelia breathed.

Aunt Maureen nodded, allowed her sweater to fall loose, then pulled it around her again. ‘Libby raised us both. Frances and me. We grew up more like sisters than aunt and niece. Dad worked a lot to support us and most of the rest of his time he spent looking for a suitable stepmother, which he never found. Helen went off and had adventures. And misadventures.’ Aunt Maureen gave a quick smile, then repeated, ‘Libby raised us.’

‘My mother never talked much about her past,’ Cecelia ventured. It was a sad thing to admit. ‘She almost never told me stories.’

‘I’ll tell you.’

There was something ominous about the pledge. Hastily, Cecelia asked, ‘Was Aunt Libby a good mother?’ It was, truly, something she wanted to know, but the fact that it was also a diversionary tactic made her feel dishonest. Perhaps, then, self-justification was the source of her upsurge of interest in Aunt Maureen’s childhood. ‘What was it like,’ she asked, too eagerly, ‘growing up with your sister for a mother and your cousin for a sister and your father never home? Was it confusing? Was it awful?’

‘Libby,’ said Aunt Maureen grimly, ‘did the best she could. She could have said no.’

In the silence that followed, the funeral ascended the hill, though the perspective was still skewed. The hearse in the lead had its headlights on. Two figures, the one in pink and one of the handful of dark-dressed ones, had broken away from the formal procession leaving it paltry indeed, and, as Aunt Maureen resumed talking, Cecelia watched them against the mown gold and brown cemetery grass. Shadows fell everywhere, and in the thin low light theirs were indistinguishable. They seemed, she saw with something like shock, to be cavorting, and they were holding hands.

Libby said, ‘Papa,’ and couldn’t believe what she was about to do. How could she tell him? How could she speak of such things to her father?

Maybe she would not. Maybe she didn’t have to. Almost, she looked away and pretended she hadn’t spoken. Most likely, her father wouldn’t have pressed, wouldn’t have even noticed or would have been glad for one less thing to worry about.

But she thought of Helen, and her fists clenched in her lap. She thought of Maureen, who wouldn’t even remember their mother; Maureen, whom Mama had said to take care of. She made herself say again, ‘Papa. I have to talk to you.’

He was on his way out, not an unusual circumstance. He had on his big grey coat and was fitting his grey hat over his bald spot, rolling the rim just so, the tiny maroon feather slightly off to the right. He glanced down at her. ‘Not now, Libby. I’m late.’

‘When? I have to talk to you.’

‘Later.’

Later, then, very late, she was waiting for him when he came home. She’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table. She woke up, abruptly and fully, at the click of the door and his quiet despairing sigh before he came in and saw her there. ‘Papa. Please. I have to tell you something.’

When he took off his hat, his head was so bare she had to look away. When he took off his coat, she saw that his shoulders were shaking. ‘I’m exhausted, Libby. Not tonight.’

He was already out of the room, and she was hearing his dogged, hasty footsteps rounding the corner of the living room towards the stairs, when she said, just loud enough for him to hear if he would, ‘Uncle Clyde touches me.’ The footsteps didn’t stop immediately, but they did stop. ‘He touches Helen, too. Next he’ll start on Maureen, because we’ll be too old.’

Her father came back, a large sad man, and Libby was so sorry and ashamed, but her little sister Maureen hadn’t done anything wrong, had she? If Uncle Clyde started on her, would it be her fault? It would be Libby’s fault if she didn’t tell.

Her sad father with his sad footsteps and his uncovered head came back into the kitchen, and Libby could hardly breathe in the face of his sadness, to which she was adding. He pulled out the chair opposite her, scraping its two back legs across the old wooden floor, and heavily lowered himself into it. She locked her gaze on him and said what she had to say, every dirty word.

Cecelia took a breath and said, although she knew Aunt Maureen had no need of permission or encouragement, ‘I know only a handful of things about our family’s history. I’d like to know more.’

Later, at various times in her life when secrets from the past seemed especially vital or especially irrelevant to her, she would consider with a certain wonderment what she had thus invited in. Sometimes almost idly, occasionally with an urgency that was utterly impractical, she would wonder what difference it might have made in the lives of her children — particularly of Virginia, who would seem to have the most to gain and to lose — if she hadn’t invited Aunt Maureen to tell her this story, or if she’d pressed for more.

Aunt Maureen began by fixing things in place: ‘The year was 1916.’ For the same reason, Cecelia’s attention was momentarily occupied by the fact that she herself would be born the next year. Contemplating time before her birth or after her death always evoked in her a disquieting sense of continuity and insignificance, of being one small bead on an infinitely long and infinitely splitting string. She felt much the same way when she looked up at stars on a clear night, or lay flat in a mountain meadow, or on the one occasion when, on vacation with her parents in Maine, she’d walked along an ocean beach. It was somehow the same feeling, too, that made her back away from cliff rims — for fear not of falling but of jumping.

Aunt Maureen had gone on, oblivious to or, more likely, contemptuous of Cecelia’s momentary inattention. ‘Libby had another child. I was at the Normal, away from home for the first time, and no one had told me of her condition for fear of disturbing my studies, I suppose, or out of shame, or for some other reason. She and the baby came on the bus. I didn’t know she was coming. I understood right away what she wanted.’

For a moment or two, Cecelia puzzled as if over a riddle. Then she shook her head and asked, as she knew she was intended to do, ‘What did she want?’

‘Why,’ said Aunt Maureen, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, ‘she thought I should just give up everything and raise her child. I was young. Your Uncle Everett and I were already engaged. Here she was, a middle-aged woman alone with a grown child, and not well. She never came right out and asked, and I never came right out and refused, but we both understood what was going on between us. For ever after, it was between us.’

The wind had picked up. The navy blue sweater was obviously providing as much warmtb as it was going to, and Aunt Maureen’s hands were hidden under her upper arms. Cecelia’s cheeks, stiff from the cold, were wet already from the wet wind, although rain wasn’t actually falling yet. The mass of clouds descending overhead like a lid didn’t yet cover the entire sky, and the gold light skimming in under their edges and through their gradually closing fissures glinted like ore in granite.

‘So then what happened to the baby?’ All sorts of possibilities flashed through her mind, among them that in this world was a cousin utterly unknown to her and that there was an infant’s grave among the others in this hillside plot somewhere.

But Aunt Maureen wasn’t ready yet to recount that part of the tale. ‘The father,’ she said deliberately, ‘was a business associate of our father’s, a man named William Bradley, a decent man I’d always thought, a good deal younger than Libby. As a matter of fact, at one time I’d considered setting my cap for him myself.’

Restraining herself from glancing sharply in her aunt’s direction to assess regret, Cecelia listened for it instead and heard none. ‘And he wouldn’t marry her,’ she supplied.

Aunt Maureen tsked. ‘My sister refused to marry him. William Bradley tried to do the honourable thing by her, and Libby sent him packing. But then, she wasn’t well.’

The funeral now appeared to have reached what, presumably, was the edge of the Harkness family plot, although boundaries were blurred and Cecelia was still confused about the position of the procession relative to herself and Aunt Maureen. The figures were not only undersized and shadowless but also translucent; the gold light glimmered through them, and the grey light, and the suggestion of objects which, when the figures moved, were revealed as not there.

With a shock it came to Cecelia that somehow she’d been regarding this as a re-enactment of Aunt Libby’s funeral, and that, because of the motorized vehicles, it could not be. Apparently some aspect of her mind especially suggestible to this ethereal time and place, had readily accepted that a funeral from twenty-three years ago should reappear to her, and only a detail which in fact was irrelevant had made her decide otherwise. That she’d so readily made so ghostly an association gave her gooseflesh, and she found herself pulling her jacket snugly around her in the manner of the Harkness women and tucking her icy hands under her arms.

The hearse and the other black car stopped. Hearing no cessation of engine noise, Cecelia realized she had not been hearing engines in the first place, nor any other sound from the funeral. Silently, small figures disembarked from the two vehicles, and, together with the straggling pedestrians, formed a little graveside crowd. Six in particularly black coats and black hats lifted a casket from the back of the hearse. The wood of it caught thin sunlight and briefly glowed; fleetingly, metal glinted like the edges of the sky.

The two individuals who had split off from the rest, one pink-and one black-clad, were some distance away now, though it was hard to tell just where they were in relation to anything else. They danced, floated. Cecelia didn’t know whether to watch them or the group at the grave, where the casket — dull and self-contained, catching no light now — was being lowered. She didn’t know whether she could watch either without losing track of what Aunt Maureen was telling her. Recurring throughout the rest of her life, then, would be the conviction that on that late-autumn afternoon, in a part of the country which otherwise would prove to have no special significance for her, she might have missed something important.

Doubtless because Cecelia had not asked, Aunt Maureen informed her rather testily, ‘Libby had always been moody and high-strung. Within a few months after the birth of her second daughter, she had a fully-fledged breakdown.’

At the time, Cecelia thought she had no memory of this, which would have made sense considering her young age when it happened. But later, telling some of the story to Ray who didn’t seem especially interested, two clear images came to her that she suspected might be attached to that time and place: Laughter, song, wails echoing, travelling from room to room she couldn’t see; and a sign she gradually grew able to read after it had been read to her numerous times: black letters painted unevenly on a cut board, nailed to a door jamb well above her head, then not so high: STOP. DO NOT GO PAST HERE.

Again she asked Aunt Maureen, a bit breathlessly by this time, ‘What happened to the baby?’

‘Libby gave her to Helen,’ Aunt Maureen replied without hesitation. ‘Helen raised her as her own.’

For a split second, Cecelia thought she was being told she had a cousin/sister about whom she hadn’t known, and she felt as much eagerness as trepidation. But then the events of the story abruptly lined themselves up for her, and she stared at her aunt. ‘Aunt Libby was my mother?’

‘Libby gave you birth,’ Aunt Maureen said firmly. ‘Helen was your mother.’

Chills sped through her, and she pulled her jacket snug. ‘My father was William Bradley?’

‘Your father is Emil Parmalee.’ Aunt Maureen reached out from under her taut dark sweater, and her hand came startlingly around Cecelia’s exposed wrist. ‘This doesn’t change anything, Cecelia. I just thought you had a right to know.’

There would be times — moments; decades — when this insistent, imposed interpretation would ring true: her understanding of who she was had not, in fact, been changed by what she’d heard and seen that day in the cemetery on the cusp of the seasons. What she knew about herself remained known, and she’d found out nothing new that mattered in any sustained way.

There would also, though, be reeling moments and decades of cumulative vertigo — such as when Ray and the children were all, for their various reasons, busy leaving her — when it would seem to her that some fundamental thing had been shaken that day, some profound and still-hidden depth plumbed. Not until Ray had left for good would she think of searching for William Bradley, and then all the trails would turn out to be cold. Not until she was old herself would she come back to Michigan — this time in hot and humid July — to stand again at Libby’s grave. Finding no markers for Aunt Maureen, Uncle Everett, or their two sons also gone by then, Cecelia would conclude that they, like the rest of her own family, must be buried somewhere else, and would muse with acute but indeterminate emotion on the complexities of human connection.

Libby would wake up in the night or, worse, in the middle of the day, alone, and she would bring with her out of fitful sleep that faint bittersweet odour. Sometimes there would be a voice and sometimes not.

‘Libby, Libby, you don’t have to stay here.’

‘I’m not well. Papa says if I won’t stay here he’ll have to put me in the state hospital.’

‘You can get out. There are windows in every room.’

‘They don’t open. Papa nailed them shut from the outside.’ She’d gone with him from window to window, she on the inside and he on the outside, glass between them. He was too old to be climbing so high and working so hard. But she’d stayed with him, and in their companionship had been solace and strength.

‘Glass breaks.’

‘This is the third floor.’

‘I will catch you.’

Libby was distressed that she even considered it, but there was no question that her resolve was greater than her suggestibility. ‘No,’ she said, and kept saying so.

Then she was freed and the signs were taken down. She had not known there were signs, and the discovery of them gave her a peculiar little thrill as rapid-fire fantasies rocked her of who might have read the warnings, whom they might have been posted for, who might or might not have heeded them. Otherwise, though, her life didn’t change much.

Over the years, she took care of her father and he took care of her; when he died she found him, and wept, and made the arrangements. Always she kept a place in her house for Frances to come home to, and Frances required a larger and larger place. She welcomed her sisters and their families on their annual visits, and was only a little sorry to see them off. Once in a while, taking a tiny stitch in another intricate quilt design, she would flinch as the needle, suddenly, pierced her heart with longing for her younger daughter and worry for her elder.

‘Take your daughter back. She’s yours. Helen isn’t her real mother.’

Having held her breath against him as long as she could, Libby took a heady gasp of him. ‘Could I?’

‘Sure. I’ll help you. She’s your child.’ But it wasn’t right, and Libby refused. ‘At least tell her,’ he urged, exasperated. ‘Tell her who you are.’ But Libby, tempted, refused.

‘What do you want with me?’

He leaned over her as if to kiss her, but still it was only his insinuating voice that touched her, and the odour of him, and his intense body heat. ‘You know what I want, Libby. You want it, too.’

She did. ‘Surely there are other girls. Younger. Prettier.’ To her horror, she was envisioning Frances for him, offering her daughter to him in her mind.

He said, ‘Frances is fine enough,’ and Libby caught her breath, although she ought not to have been surprised. ‘A fine girl. But I want you.’

‘Who’s that?’ she demanded with a laugh, then waited anxiously for him to tell her. Was she Uncle Clyde’s girl? Frances’s crazy mother? The woman who had given away her child?

‘Yes, darling. I’m afraid you are all those things.’

Or was she — perilous thought — the woman who, more than once in her life, had made a hard, right choice?

Hastily, he murmured, ‘Be mine, Libby, and I’ll show you who you are.’

‘No,’ she said.

They talked about other things until Uncle Everett came for them. Cecelia said a little about Ray. Aunt Maureen told about how close Libby and Frances had been — unhealthily close, she declared, which was the impression Cecelia had already had; during the months Libby was locked for her own safety in her suite at the back and top of the house, Aunt Maureen said with a shake of the head, Frances had even stayed in there with her for days at a time. Cecelia said it was getting really cold; Aunt Maureen predicted the first snow out of those heavy clouds.

Disappointingly, the two of them seemed to Cecelia no closer than ever. Wistfully she wondered whether Aunt Maureen would come to her wedding. As it turned out, Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett would agree to take care of their grandchildren that weekend, but they would send a quilt that had been in the family for a long time; a note pinned to it said Aunt Maureen wasn’t certain which of her sisters had made it, but she thought Cecelia should have it.

As they wended their way to the road where Uncle Everett waited with the car, Cecelia caught sight once more of the two figures spun loose from the miniature funeral procession, which otherwise was lost now in the thickening mist and twilight gloom. The one in pink stood still. The one in black moved away until she couldn’t see it at all any more. A peculiar fragrance, not quite autumnal — vaguely bitter; wrongly sweet — lingered in her nose and on the cold skin of her hands as they drove away.