The Descent

ELEVEN

Once I stepped through the door of the Moroccan hotel, I was back in the fortress, presumably in the hall on the second story. The dusty smell of the hotel in Fez lingered, however, clinging to my sweaty skin and damp cotton dress, proof that it hadn’t been completely fabricated in my mind—unless the subtle mix of ginger, mint, sandalwood, and jasmine were also figments of my imagination.

The hall was still a dim and empty expanse of red carpet and dark wooden doors. No sound echoed down the long corridor, the house as quiet as a mausoleum. In the unbroken stillness, I suddenly noticed that the flames standing atop the candles in the iron wall scones had begun to quiver, tickled by a draft coming from an unknown direction. Someone had opened a door.

I strained so hard listening for a sound that my ears started to ache. Then I heard what I’d been waiting for: a muffled thump, like a ball being dropped onto a carpet. And a second thump. Whatever it was, it sounded very solid, ominously so. The cloven hoof of a demon? I wasn’t going to stay and find out. My hand closed around the nearest brass doorknob. I gave it a turn, held my breath, and slipped inside another room.

I stepped into a forest, just on the other side of the door. The forest was vast—I could tell by the vacuous silence—and a light snow was falling; only a few flakes made it through the canopy of bare branches to the ground. A fuller stand of trees stood ahead of me, mostly pine and all frosted with new snow, and behind it another stand and another. My breath misted on the cold air and my skin tingled—not from the cold but because I was home.

I knew without needing to be told that I was in St. Andrew. How did I know this? After all, I could be in a forest anywhere, but I knew. The land was as well known to me as a painting I’d looked at a thousand times. The air tasted familiar; it even felt familiar against my skin, though of course all of this could have been a trick of the mind. Still . . . the birdsong, the slant of light. Everything told me I was in St. Andrew.

Again, it made no sense that I should be here. Perhaps it had to do with the way the afterlife was configured, hardwired to the time we spent on earth. The dour, judgmental Puritan in me would like to believe that it was designed to throw me back to the place or events that were most important to me, to revisit the lesson I missed in life. That is, if there was an order to things at all, which the realist in me doubted.

I walked toward the trees, wondering where I was in the Great North Woods, a forest famous for swallowing up people and not letting them go. The great woods went on for miles in sameness, and it was easy for even experienced wilderness guides or, in my day, axmen and surveyors on horseback, to lose their way. As I came to a thinning of trees, I heard the faint sound of running water and followed the noise until I came to the river.

Within minutes the Allagash unfurled before me. There was no mistaking it, broad and flat and calm. It might’ve been snowing, but it was not cold enough to cause the river to freeze over. The only strange thing I noticed about the river this day was that it was unusually dark. Black, as though a river of ink rushed over the rock bed. It must be a trick of the light, I told myself, a reflection of the overcast sky and not an ominous sign portending ill fortune.

My sense was that the village lay on the other side of the rolling water. I wondered if the river was shallow enough at that point to walk across. It looked to be, though the water was sure to be painfully cold. However, when I scanned the river’s edge for its narrowest point, I suddenly saw an empty rowboat nestled in a tangle of dead vines. The boat was weathered to a silvery gray, an old and forgotten thing, crudely made. A paddle lay across the plank seat.

I climbed in, pointed its nose toward the opposite shore, and began paddling. There were stretches of the Allagash that were very gentle, and I assumed from the current that this was one of them, but was surprised nonetheless by the ease with which I reached the other side, not quite as though the boat knew what was expected of it but nearly so. It nosed onto a sloping part of the riverbank as neatly as though strong hands had pulled it ashore for me, so it was nothing to step out and onto dry land.

A path showed itself through the trees and I followed, having no better idea of which way to go, and I didn’t have to walk very far before I saw someone in the distance. As I got closer, I saw that it was a woman in a long, dark coat sitting on a tree stump with what appeared to be a baby in her arms. Her straight dark hair had fallen across her face like a curtain, obscuring my view of her. I knew without question that she was waiting for me.

Despite the crunch of my shoes in the snow, she did not look up until I was practically standing next to her, confirming it was who I’d begun to suspect: Sophia Jacobs, the woman who had once been Jonathan’s lover but had taken her own life—and that of her unborn baby.

I was startled—almost frightened—to see her again. When we were young women together in St. Andrew we hadn’t been friends and she even had reason to hate me. I had tried to make her give up Jonathan, to hide the paternity of the baby he’d put inside her, but instead, she drowned herself in the Allagash, near this very spot. I’d thought little of her since Jonathan had absolved me of any guilt in her suicide, taking the blame on himself. And though I’d dreamed of her many years ago, when my trespass against her was still fresh, in none of those dreams had she ever been this vivid. She looked exactly as I’d last seen her in life, but seeing her this closely revealed a hundred tiny details I’d perhaps forgotten with time. Had she always been so worried and nervous? Were her eyes always this sunken, her skin ashy, her mouth hard set in a half frown? And in her arms was a bundle of swaddling that she held like a baby.

“Sophia,” I said by way of greeting, puzzled as to why I’d been brought to her.

She shifted the bundle in her arms, regarding me coolly. “Well, you took long enough getting here. Come along now, you’ve much to see.”

“What do you mean? I don’t understand—why’d you bring me here?”

She was rising to her feet but froze at my words. “Bring you here? No, it’s the other way around. I’m here because of you. Don’t dawdle now. We’ve got to be going.” She didn’t wait for my reply but set off at a strong pace through the snow, the baby held tight to her chest.

Within minutes we were at the edge of town. St. Andrew looked the same as it did in my childhood memories: the long clapboards of the congregation hall; the common green in front, now covered with snow, where we spent many an afternoon in the company of our neighbors after services; the fieldstone fence that surrounded the cemetery; Parson Gilbert’s house; Tinky Talbot’s smith shop; the path next to the blacksmith’s leading to Magda’s one-room whorehouse; and farther down the muddy, choppy road, Daughtery’s poor man’s public house, shuttered up against the snowfall.

Faces of the people I’d known when I’d lived here as a child—my family, friends, the townspeople who ran the businesses and occupied the farms that had flanked ours—spun past my eyes, people I’d missed more dearly than I would’ve thought possible. “Wait, Sophia,” I called to the thin figure bustling ahead of me. The top of her head and her sloping shoulders were white, as though she’d been dusted with sugar, and the hem of her long coat swept a wide path behind her. “Can you tell me what happened to everyone? You don’t know how often I’ve wondered . . .”

She walked on purposefully, keeping her gaze trained on the ground before her. “If you really wish to know about St. Andrew, the horrors that befell us, I’ll tell you.” Her tone was grimly smug, thick with schadenfreude. “The entire town was torn apart when you and Jonathan ran away.” It was then I realized that for all her ghostly qualities, Sophia was not omnipotent and was unaware of the circumstances of my abrupt departure. It may have looked to outsiders that I’d returned to the village intent on stealing Jonathan’s heart, but I’d come armed with Adair’s elixir of life, under orders to bring Jonathan back to Boston with me. But when I returned to St. Andrew, I found the town dependent on Jonathan: he ran the logging operation, the most profitable business in town by far, and held the mortgage to nearly every farm. I had no heart to take him away from a town that needed him. Fate interceded, however, and when Jonathan was shot by a cuckolded husband, I was left with no choice but to give him the elixir and whisk him out of town to keep our secret from being discovered.

“There was a terrible row when it was discovered that you’d gone,” Sophia continued with relish. “Jonathan’s family was exceedingly angry with yours, taking your mother to task for raising such a wicked girl. The town divided on the matter, for and against, and you’ll not be surprised to learn that very few stood with your family. You were called all sorts of vile names—whore, harlot, Jezebel”—she seemed particularly delighted to recall this bit of history for me—“and there was some talk of forcing your family to compensate the St. Andrews for their loss.”

“That’s ridiculous. Jonathan left with me of his own free will,” I said even though this was not strictly true. He’d been unconscious, going through the transformation, when we’d fled from town.

“That’s what your family’s supporters said, and the nonsense died down. The damage was done, however. The St. Andrews were left with no one to run the business, the sisters like ninnies and Benjamin as simple as a child. If it had all gone to ruin it would be Jonathan’s mother’s fault for putting all her faith in her eldest son to the detriment of the others. Some said, secretly, that Ruth was getting what she deserved, for she had worshipped Jonathan and turned a blind eye to all his womanizing. To think all this trouble could’ve been averted if they’d just let Jonathan wed you!” I knew Jonathan wouldn’t have married me, but Sophia didn’t know this. As far as she knew, he’d run off with me, leaving the impression that he’d been madly in love with me.

“But God provides for his flock, doesn’t he, even those as undeserving as Ruth St. Andrew and the pitiless magpies of this town,” Sophia said with some spite, lifting her skirts as she stepped primly over a fallen log. “For Benjamin managed to come along a bit, enough to work with the logging foreman, and with time earned the respect of most of the town for being an honest man and not nearly as manipulative as the rest of his family.” It was plain by her tone that she included Jonathan among the manipulative ones.

“Do you remember Evangeline? The wife you wronged?” Sophia asked, again delighted for being able to taunt me. “Poor thing—as though anyone needed further proof of the misfortune of being Jonathan’s bride! What a miserable time she had of it when Jonathan abandoned her. She lived in a state of perpetual shame. She left the St. Andrew house and moved in with her parents to raise her daughter, much to Ruth’s chagrin. She wanted that babe under her roof, she did. Benjamin made a campaign of wooing her, and at length she consented to wed him—perhaps the wisest decision she ever made. Though she waited until Ruth passed to give Benjamin her answer, for who would be eager to live under the same roof as that old witch again? But it seems your shameful deed brought about one blessing. You can thank the Lord for that kindness.”

I devoured Sophia’s news. Over the years, I’d speculated many times about what had happened after Jonathan and I left town. It wasn’t surprising to hear that I’d been vilified, but I was saddened to learn that my family had suffered unjustly for what I’d done. It reminded me how judgmental the people of my town could be, these descendants of Puritans, hardened all the more by privation. How stifling it had been, growing up in their midst.

“So, my family was ruined?” I asked, my voice faltering.

This time, she looked over her shoulder at me, and there was a vulpine smile on her lips. “Ruined, as they deserved, for raising the likes of you. But you shall see for yourself.”

After a few turns through the dark woods, we came to a cabin sitting in a clearing. I recognized the house at once as the one I had grown up in, though the land around it was not the same, and the whole vision had the distorted feeling one gets in a dream. Sophia opened the door and went inside with quiet authority, and so I followed her. The first thing I noticed was that the house had gone to ruin since my last visit. The logs in the walls had shrunk, loosening the wadding that plugged the joints and cracks, and let the wind and cold seep through. The rooms were austere, thinned of furniture. The overall impression was of a life suffered, made pinched and meager. I thought at first that the cabin was empty, but then I noticed one of my sisters crouched by a crude wooden chest. It took a minute to tell that it was Fiona, as she appeared much older than the last time I’d seen her. She continued to pack items into the chest, humming softly as she worked.

“She’s leaving,” I said aloud as I watched her.

Sophia nodded, shifting the baby in her arms. “Yes, she’s going to Fort Kent to be married.”

“For a bride, she doesn’t look happy.”

A vexed look crossed Sophia’s face, but rather than reprimand me, she said, “She’ll be joining your other sister.”

“Glynnis? She lives in Fort Kent?”

“She married a farmer out that way a year ago, and she’s arranged for Fiona to wed a widowed neighbor.”

“And where’s my mother? Is she living with Glynnis?” I asked, but I knew the answer even before the words were out of my mouth. My nose stung as I fought back tears that I didn’t think would still come after all these years.

“No, Lanore. Your mother is gone. She passed last winter from pleurisy.” Sophia said this flatly, taking no pleasure in delivering the bad news to me. Of course, intellectually I knew my mother had been dead and gone a long time, but standing there in the house I grew up in, where I’d always seen my mother at the hearth or bustling about, Sophia’s news hit like a blow to my chest.

I shook my head, trying to shake off the sadness, and turned my attention back to my sister. “Poor Fiona, marrying a stranger.”

Sophia’s face twisted again with displeasure. “We all marry strangers, Lanore. Even if it is someone you know, he won’t be the same person once you are wed. Besides, none of us married for love. Everyone you knew married out of duty and in order to survive: your parents, your neighbors . . . even Jonathan. Love does not equal happiness,” she said sharply.

She was right, of course, yet I couldn’t help muttering, “And still, love is the greatest happiness I have known.”

Sophia was surely about to say something cutting in response to my last remark when the door swung back and my brother, Nevin, stepped in. By now, I knew to expect he would look older, but I wasn’t prepared for this drastic change. He was grizzled and hunched and seemed to have aged twice as fast as Fiona, his appearance ravaged by his work outdoors, regardless of the weather, looking after the cattle. His face was heavily lined and his cheeks pitted as though he’d suffered a recent bout of smallpox. He stomped his feet to knock the mud off his shoes and hung his hat on a peg, but kept his coat on.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked Fiona.

“Almost, but I need to pack a few more things. I’m afraid we’ll be leaving so late that you’ll need to spend the night with Glynnis and John . . .”

Nevin had begun shaking his head before she’d finished speaking. “No, you know I can’t do that. Who would take care of the animals? I cannot leave the farm untended overnight. I must get back this evening.”

“Nevin, I hope you’ll end this stubbornness and take on a field hand. You can’t do this on your own. You’ll need someone to help you.”

She had the tone of someone who already knew their words would fall on deaf ears, however. Nevin shook his head vehemently as he stared at the tips of his shoes. “We’ve been over this already, Fin”—his nickname for her—“I’ve no reason to take on a boy. It’ll only be another mouth to feed. The farm is small enough that I can manage by myself.”

“That’s not true and you know it,” she protested but softly. “What if you get sick?”

“I won’t get sick.”

“Everyone gets sick. Or lonely.”

“I won’t be lonely, either.”

Nevin was like a drowning man flailing too fiercely to be saved, Fiona forced to row away in a lifeboat, abandoning him to save herself. No one else in the family would blame her, but that would be little solace when things went to ruin later. “I’ll be fine,” Nevin said gruffly.

“Will you be able to return for the wedding?” Fiona asked, lowering the chest’s lid.

“You know I can’t. I have the animals to see to. You don’t need me, anyway. You’ll have Glynnis to attend to you.”

Fiona said nothing, for it wasn’t worth arguing with him anymore.

“They’ll not see each other again,” Sophia leaned and whispered to me as though we were watching actors in a play. Still, she spoke with the confidence of a prophet.

“Why—does something happen to Nevin? To either of them?” I asked, anxious. “What happened to my family? I’ve always wanted to know . . .”

She let her hollow gaze settle on the floor and not on me, mercifully, and dandled the baby high and close to her chest. “Nevin will live for another ten years. He does not take on any help for the farm and ends up dying alone one winter, his lungs filled with fluid, too weak to build a fire for himself.”

I bit my lip and felt a flash of bitter pain. Stubborn Nevin.

“Your sister Fiona will die in childbirth with her first child,” she said, nodding at my sister on the floor in front of us. “As for Glynnis—”

“Tell me at least one of them finds happiness,” I burst out.

“She is happy enough. Her husband is a good man and they have four children together, three boys and a girl.”

“Thank God,” I said, and meant it. My eyes filled with tears as I watched Fiona finish her packing. Time had worn away a little of my sister’s prettiness; she and Glynnis had been far prettier than I when we were girls. They had been the bright and winsome ones, quiet daughters who—unlike me—didn’t break their parents’ hearts and ruin their lives. It seemed cruel of fate to keep Fiona shackled to our family for so long (she was probably in her mid-twenties as she stood before me) only to have her die before she could have a family of her own. I hoped that this farmer she was to wed was a good man who appreciated her, and that he thought fondly of her for as long as he lived.

Even Nevin’s future seemed especially cruel. That he would live his entire life alone wasn’t so unexpected given his prickly nature, but in ten years he would only be in his forties. If we had lived farther south where the winters were not so long and brutal and life was not as demanding, he might’ve survived longer even though he lived on his own. There was good reason why the Puritan edict against solitary living was usually enforced in St. Andrew, for this practical consideration as well as the religious (which was so no soul would fall into ungodly behavior as there would always be a witness to steer him back on the path of goodness or turn him in, as the case may be).

It seemed absurd and cruel of fate to give me an endless expanse of time to reflect on my sins when an innocent like Fiona was made to die early. I had to guess that my family was cursed . . . and then it occurred to me that if this were the case it might be my fault, for hadn’t I been singled out, too? Perhaps I was to blame, my unnaturally long life offset by their brief, unhappy ones. But that couldn’t be, could it? . . . I was aghast at the thoughts that danced in my head. What strange perversion of our natures made us want to torture ourselves in this way?

For the first time, I was struck by the uniqueness of my immortality. I—and a few select others—experienced life differently from everyone else on earth. We experienced it as anyone who has taken a history class in school would expect to experience it: as a timeline, always moving forward. But as I listened to Sophia and heard the news of my family’s fate, I came to see that all anyone knew of life was the brief bubble in which he or she was alive: the rest was hearsay, however well documented. Only we few immortals were able to experience more than one bubble, to witness more than one piece of it, and thus, only we immortals were really in a position to judge what was true and what was false.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this trip to the underworld: Was I back in the early nineteenth century, or was this exchange with Sophia an approximation influenced by memory? It could be any number of things, really. After all, in reality I was lying on a bed on Adair’s magical island. Ever since setting foot there, I’d been made acutely aware that nothing was as it appeared.

But I never questioned that I might not be moving forward in time, though maybe I wasn’t. I remembered hearing of a theory among physicists that all of time went on simultaneously. As I stood in Sophia’s company, the tug of this crazy rabbit hole distorting the periphery of my vision, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was experiencing it at that very moment. It didn’t seem like something you could experience consciously or rationally—and maybe that was why my brain was fighting me for all it was worth.

In any case, I wanted to be released from this unhappy scene that I was helpless to change. “Can you tell me, Sophia—do you know what you are? Are you a ghost?” It was the question I’d wanted to ask but had been afraid I would offend her.

She looked at me warily. No response, just a narrowing of her eyes.

I pressed on. “You remember dying, don’t you? Going into the Allagash? Drowning?”

She turned her face away from me, but I caught a flash of red rise to her cheeks. “I remember the water . . . so cold . . . but that’s all. It goes black after that. And I don’t care to recall anything more, thank you.”

I didn’t blame her. Sophia’s suicide had haunted me for years. She had killed herself because she was pregnant with Jonathan’s child, proof that she was an adulteress, a serious crime at the time. The night before she took her life, I had spoken to her, pretending to be Jonathan’s messenger and telling her that Jonathan wanted nothing to do with her anymore. I had been harsh with her, and the next day she disappeared. No one knew what happened to her until the search party found her half-frozen body floating in the frigid Allagash River. Although Jonathan had since absolved me of my part in her demise, I couldn’t help but feel responsible.

Sophia stared at me now as though my guilt were painted on my face. “You think I drowned myself because you lied to me, don’t you? You are a silly woman. It’s only natural to put ourselves in the center of everything, I suppose, but still—why would I care what you said or thought? The only one whose opinion mattered one whit to me was Jonathan, and his position was clear enough. He would never, ever acknowledge the baby.” She gazed down at the bundle in her arm. “But it wasn’t my pregnancy, not really. I cannot blame this child. It was my marriage that broke my will. It was a death knell. I couldn’t bear the thought of raising a child in that household, of the two us being crushed under the weight of Jeremiah’s thoughtlessness and inconsideration. He wasn’t an exceptionally bad man”—her eyes met mine, as though this was something every woman could understand—“but it would’ve been the slow death of me, to spend my entire life under his yoke. I did not end my life because I couldn’t have Jonathan but because I could not escape from the choices that had been made for me.”

“Have you seen Jonathan since you’ve been here?” I asked, hopeful that she might have information that could be of help.

At this, her stern expression crumpled a little at the edges, but after only a moment’s falter, she gathered up her steely reserve again. “What’s past is past—we cannot change the outcome. No matter how many times I may revisit that part of my life, the outcome will always be the same.” Even in the underworld, Sophia’s afterlife seemed anchored to this place as a point in time like a ball on a tether. She could travel all the way to the end of the tether or come back to the point of her origin, but she could never get away.

I looked through the window of my family’s cabin into the woods. How well I remember feeling the same as Sophia: Was I really meant to live my entire existence in these few square miles, among these same forty families? I could not accept that these two hundred people would be the only souls I would ever know. It seemed the most unbearable sentence. The next town, Fort Kent, was only thirty miles away but it might as well have been on another planet. In that small town, in St. Andrew, life’s few precious milestones—birth, marriage, the birth of your children, death—were all you were given. Sophia, like me, had longed for something more.

“You could’ve left, Sophia. I left. What I found out there was beyond my wildest dreams.” I opened my mouth to speak and tell her about the incredible existence I’d had, the places I’d traveled, the people I’d met, and of course Adair’s fantastical realm, which had swallowed me whole. But then I remembered that I was speaking to someone who was chained to this time and place seemingly for eternity, who would never get to see a fraction of what I had, and I couldn’t do it.

Sophia shifted the bundle she was carrying one more time, bracing it against her hip. Ah, the baby. This was something in her favor: at least she’d had her baby with her for eternity—mine had been taken away from me. I felt a pang of envy as I watched her . . . but then it occurred to me that something was wrong. I’d not heard the baby once this whole time. Not a burble, not a cry, not a sneeze. The child was very still.

“Sophia, is that your baby?” I asked carefully, my stomach tightening.

“Yes, a girl,” she said but offered no name.

“May I hold her?”

She shot me a contemptuous look but, tentatively, she held the child out to me. She was still in my arms and too heavy for her size, like a sodden bundle of wash. With trepidation, I lifted the corner of blanket covering the baby’s face, steeled for something horrific. There was a neatly swaddled infant inside, but whether she was alive or dead was impossible to tell. The baby didn’t seem to breathe and yet there was a whisper of animation to her, a pulse behind the eyelids, a slight tremor at the corner of her mouth. Her skin was the strangest color, a pale gray-blue as though she had stopped breathing—or because she had never breathed.

Poor Sophia. This had been her punishment for taking her life while her unborn child was still inside her: to carry the baby with her for eternity and never to see it wake up. She could not put her down, she couldn’t bury her and be done with it. She was doomed to be forever hopeful that the baby might open her eyes and look at her, but to know in her heart that she never would. I thought my punishment had been horrible but it paled compared to this. This was the real lesson here, I thought as I handed the baby back to Sophia, who cooed and fussed over the lifeless child all the while in a melancholy air; this was the reason I’d been sent through that particular door out of the dozen in the hall, to be reunited with Sophia: not only to better understand my punishment, but to witness hers.