TRACES OF HIM

They swarmed her in Gran’s lime green kitchen, slipping over her ribs and the childish nubs of her breasts. It was worse between her eyes: panic and vertigo as they pushed to get inside her. Adine screamed, but her mouth made no sound. Then Gran was there, suddenly, with a basket from the garden. Leaving Adine reeling, they fled to ring the old lady like ribbons. Adine was almost able to make them out--moist silver whisps, possessive, encircling her grandmother. And yet Gran seemed oblivious.

Adine woke gasping in the four-poster bed that had belonged to her grandmother for seventy years. She threw back the embroidered spread, giving the alarm button a pre-emptive whack.

This place was still so full of Gran. Memories and dreams ran together here; sometimes it got hard to distinguish one from the other. She wasn’t sure the old wood-sided frame was accepting. Gran had willed it to her, and she’d come back to Blackmeath to teach French at the tiny public school. But the house lacked the stored promise of her childhood summers--it stood hollow in her grandmother’s absence, as though brooding on its loss.

Gran’s house harboured expectations.

The least shadow in the light-filled kitchen pricked her with dread. And one upstairs room at the end of the hall where the lath showed--Adine kept that door locked. Her first week she’d gone in for a blanket or a textbook: the air was different in there. It pressed itself against her eyelids, hard, and weighed on her chest. She’d emptied the room out and left it.

Once she went in and threw the old lead-weighted window up to admit a breeze. When she reached to finger a small tear in the screen, the frame came crashing down. She jerked back, saving her fingers by millimetres. Her temples pounded with blood.

A diagonal crack now split the lower pane; Adine didn’t bother to have it fixed.

These were the beginnings of memory: bits and snatches of half-known sensations. Gran had never let her play in there.

If Adine got up in the night she wouldn’t look down the hall--the recess of that dark door always churned sparks in her gut.

"Did himself in, your great Uncle James," said the Grade Two teacher one noon hour, swallowing a mouthful of corned beef. "That’s when he and your granny were both young, Adine. You never saw her then, of course—a real dark-eyed beauty, like you. It broke her up for years, her brother going like that. Such a shame, and he in his last year of law school down in Toronto. Quite a history, my dear."

"Edsel Hillier, that’s morbid." Mrs. Kenny, the music teacher, reached across the table and smacked him with her teaspoon. "The girl has to sleep at night."

"It’s all right," said Adine.

After the bell she caught him outside his room. Kids streamed about them on their way in from recess. "About my uncle, Mr. Hillier…"

"Eh?"

"My great uncle James Ethier?"

"Ah yes," said the old fellow, shaking his head. "Nasty business."

"Did he do it in the house, Edsel?"

The Grade Two teacher stood blinking at her. "Oh yes, dear," he answered after a minute. "Hung himself."

A small hand tugged at the teacher’s pant leg. "Mr. Hillier--Logan just threw up on his desk." A milky print showed on the brown polyester of the old man’s slacks. Huffing, Edsel grasped the child gingerly by the wrist and propelled him back into the classroom.

Adine stood a moment in the quiet hall before heading off for her prep period. Her family had never spoken of James, not even in passing.

Late that afternoon she found herself in the upstairs hallway, staring at the locked door. The wood gleamed in the dying light. Adine breathed deep, fitting the key and pushing inside. Sun slanted through the cracked window. Its brightness warmed a patch low on the wall, where the plaster crumbled. The day’s heat had made the room oppressive. Adine edged toward the window; this time she’d come armed with a brick. She threw up the pane, propping it open, and air sweet with spring poplar washed in. Slowly the door swung to, resting not quite closed in its frame.

Adine glanced at it a moment and turned back to the window, her gaze descending with the greening fields to the stands of birch and pine that fringed the river. Yes, much better in here with a breeze, but still very close. She sat down cross-legged on the floor. The last rays of sun cut across her knees, making her lethargic. She lay back, stretching; her skin felt good against the constraints of her jeans.

Her top rode up and she laid a hand on her stomach. She looked up at the ceiling. There was a hole there, several inches in diameter, that she hadn’t noticed before. Adine studied its contours. It was broken, naked and deep--as though someone had been sounding for the house’s bones. Cracks ran through the surrounding plaster.

The fingers of Adine’s right hand slipped lower, beneath her denim waistband. They worked languidly at first, and then with more insistence as her left hand trailed down the wall, meeting the roughness of exposed lath. The smell of sandalwood--the heat of a man’s skin--rose from the room’s damage. Adine inhaled of it and successive gasps escaped her, until finally she lay quiet on the floor.

The night was descending, turning the light of the room gray. In the silence the door clicked shut. Adine’s eyes snapped open. How long had she been on her back in a stupor? She heard it then: an exhalation not of her own breath. Adine shot to her feet, and the old familiar pressure came to assault her temples. It slunk about her torso, laying claim to her flesh--trying to get in.

Adine lurched toward the door, falling against it. She struggled to focus on turning the knob. It took her some moments to realize she held the door closed with her own weight. Finally she tore it open, stumbling into the hallway and slamming it behind her. The key rattled in the lock as she turned it. The narrow length of metal fell from her fingers and bounced along the hall runner as she scrambled downstairs.

Shivering in the kitchen, Adine forced herself to make dinner. She never—she hadn’t done anything like that before. It wasn’t her, but them, traces of whatever had swum around Gran. They wanted to infect her, like always when she’d been alone in this place. But God, the desire. Adine wiped at her forehead with the back of her wrist. She was breading chicken breast: the meat was flaccid and pliant in her fingers. The feel of it disgusted her. Even as she pushed the tray into the oven she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat.

The kettle was whistling when she heard a thud upstairs, and glass shattering. Adine clenched her teeth. A pounding and scuffling followed, like something climbing the wall, then stillness. Every muscle in her body drawn taut, she went to the foot of the stairs. A thin light cast its beam on the landing above. She’d left nothing on. Knuckles showing white where she grasped the banister, Adine began to ascend. Before she reached the top, she knew the light came from the room at the end of the hall. A shadow swung intermittently across its expanse.

Adine set a foot on the landing and raised her eyes to the doorway at the end of the hall. The light expired, and she found herself in complete blackness. In a panic she flailed for the nearest switch. Wall sconces flared, blinding her a second time.

The door of the empty room stood ajar. She crept toward it, battling her legs at every step. Reaching the threshold, she nudged the portal inward with the toe of her shoe. Cold night air struck her face. The windowpane now lay in shards on the floor, scattered about the brick she’d used to prop it open. Adine flipped the room’s light switch. She swallowed. With one hand on the doorknob, she spent long minutes looking from the hole in the ceiling to the broken plaster and lath on the wall.

She patched up the window with a garbage bag and some duct tape, felt around for the key on the hallway rug, and locked the room up tight again. Sweat ran cold down her back. Adine shut herself in Gran’s bedroom with all the lights burning.

She was so stupid. What had she invited this afternoon, she asked herself as she undressed, slipping a nightgown over her head. She checked the door again, and her window. In childish perversity she even knelt, flipping up the bedskirt and looking underneath. A sick thrill took her stomach, but there was nothing, of course, except the gleaming oak of Gran’s immaculate floor. Adine stroked the wood, its vague warmth smooth beneath her touch. She sighed, retracting her hand. Her fingers stopped short at the feeling of cold metal.

Scrunching low, Adine scrabbled beneath the bed until she found it again: a doubled-over nail. She tugged at it and a floorboard gave way. In the recess below, her fingers brushed soft fabric, and she came up with a velvet drawstring bag. She dumped the contents on the spread. A sheaf of yellowed letters lay before her, and a single dog-eared photo, so worried about the edges that it was little more than tatters. It showed a young man in white trousers and an open shirt—he looked tall, with a thick head of dark hair that fell in his eyes. In his arms he held a girl in a sequined dress and a short bob. Long jet beads dangled from her neck. She kicked up her feet, and they were laughing. Scrawled on the back in Gran’s hand was "Ada and Jim, 1924". Adine’s hand hovered near her own face. So that was Great Uncle James. And Gran. Edsel had downplayed the family resemblance.

She turned to the letters, releasing the ribbon that bound them. They were all addressed to Miss Ada Ethier, General Delivery, Blackmeath, Ontario. In the upper left corner of each was scrawled Osgoode Hall. Adine thumbed through them, unfolding some, tracing the time-browned ink with an index finger.

November 7, 1923: Miss you horribly. Two hours of classes a day and the rest of the time glorified filing for a group of crusty old jackasses. How do they expect us to learn anything?

March 17, 1924: Longing for Gilchrist’s fiddle and you dancing. These big city girls are such clompers. But nobody’s got gams like my little sister…

April 3, 1924: God I’m lonely for you, Ada. Smith is such an idiot of a roommate. Hangs garters from his headboard. Trophies, he says. I’d love to take him moose hunting and lose him in the bush.

January 29, 1925: Ada, listen--please forgive me for Christmas. Sometimes I go too far. I’m only looking out for you… is Jurek’s nose knitting up okay?

April 15, 1925: This place is so phony it makes me sick. Hope to see you before month’s end. I’m thrilling at the thought of you, Ada, a vision on the back porch.

There was a final note, addressed merely A, so water-spotted it was nearly unreadable. Adine frowned over it, squinting: … most natural thing to adore you, and yet … monstrous in me. I remove … abomination--henceforth let me live in you. Your loving brother, James. Tucked inside was a faded lock of chestnut hair.

Adine put out the lamps. She lay down beneath the covers, clutching the soft curl against her cheek.

The ceiling beams creaked. Boots danced on plaster; the house shuddered and froze. Adine drifted on the silence, holding her breath. A momentary rattle, and the door down the hall swung on its hinges. Soft and uneven along the hallway, footsteps fell.

Outside Gran’s door they paused, and a ragged sigh rent the dark: it was a voice of grinding gears, corroded with disuse.

"Come," murmured Adine, trembling. "Come."

Letters spilled from the bed as he clove to her. He was cold--she pulled the rope from his neck as he lay between her breasts. "Ada," came his breath like a fog. At her every pore she suffered him entrance; the smell of him was rich sandalwood. Against her cervix she felt a different pressure, and her hips rose to receive it.

Adine sat on the back porch in a muslin dress, gazing over the treetops to a point of convergence. The falling sun set the river on fire. From the night that crouched between the pines, a figure in white emerged, moving steadily toward her. Adine smiled. In her house she was Ada, and her lover was coming home.