The Things They Carried Out

By midnight, Bellwether House had divided itself into territories. The west rooms belonged to sleep, or to the performance of sleep; the east rooms held the restless. Pipes knocked in the walls. Somewhere above the kitchen, a shutter struck its frame at regular intervals, like a hand impatiently asking to be admitted.

Nell sat at the dining-room table with the tape recorder before her. She had removed the reel and placed it beside a glass of water. The brown ribbon looked harmless, almost delicate. She had spent most of her life believing that facts became less dangerous when arranged correctly. Now the smallest facts had begun to breed.

“You’re still trying to cross-examine it,” Tom said from the doorway.

He had changed into a blue shirt and no tie. Without the tie, he looked younger and more exposed, though Nell suspected this was another of his costumes.

“I’m trying to determine what it says.”

“You know what it says.”

“I know what we heard.”

Tom came into the room and poured himself a drink from the bottle Lydia had left on the sideboard. “There’s a distinction?”

“For lawyers, there usually is.”

He smiled, but the smile did not settle. “I spoke to a man in Boston. He knows someone at the historical commission.”

“Already?”

“Already.”

“About preserving the house.”

“About delaying the demolition. Preservation sounds noble. Delay is practical.”

“And what does practical mean?”

“That the property can be repositioned. A foundation could acquire it. Tax advantages, grants, public interest. There are ways to make everyone feel virtuous while they get paid.”

Nell looked at him. “Who gets paid?”

“Eventually? Everyone.”

“Except Lydia, if she wants the house gone.”

“Lydia is old.”

The sentence remained between them, uglier than he had intended. Tom’s hand tightened around the glass.

“Don’t,” Nell said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“You meant precisely what you said. You always do. You simply prefer to decide afterward what it meant.”

He left without answering. Through the window, she watched him cross the dark lawn toward the boathouse. He moved quickly, as if the house had begun to watch him too.

In the library, Suzie had opened three of the cardboard boxes she had brought from Connecticut. Their contents were arranged in rows: envelopes, school programs, dried corsages, a cracked Kodak case, a stack of blue airmail letters tied with green ribbon. Suzie sat on the floor in her nightgown, reading by the green-shaded lamp.

Mara stood over her. “You kept all of it.”

“Not all of it.”

“What did you throw away?”

Suzie’s fingers paused on an envelope. “Things that would have hurt people unnecessarily.”

“And the things that hurt them usefully?”

Suzie looked up. At fifty-two, she still had the mild, pleasant face that had once made everyone tell her secrets. But the mildness had hardened around the eyes.

“You think keeping something is the same as using it.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. Using it is what you did with your painting.”

Mara flinched. “I didn’t show anyone the figure.”

“You showed yourself. You painted him there and then spent thirty years pretending you hadn’t.”

Mara crouched beside the boxes. “Who is it?”

Suzie drew out a letter. The envelope was yellowed, its flap sealed with a dark crescent of old glue. On the front, in a boy’s impatient handwriting, was written: SUZIE—BURN THIS.

Mara stared at it.

“He gave it to me the week before he died,” Suzie said.

“Daniel?”

“I never opened it.”

“That’s a lie.”

Suzie’s mouth trembled, though her voice remained even. “I opened it the day after the funeral. I read it once. Then I put it away.”

“Why?”

“Because he asked me to burn it.”

“And you didn’t.”

“No.” Suzie folded the letter back into its envelope. “I wanted there to be one thing in the world he had asked me to do that I could refuse.”

Mara reached for it, but Suzie pulled it against her chest.

From the hall came Art’s voice. “That is an excellent line. May I steal it?”

He stood beside the library door with a notebook under one arm. His hair was disordered, his face bright with the fever that sometimes passed for inspiration.

“You’ve been listening,” Mara said.

“I’ve been alive. It’s an unfortunate habit.”

Suzie pushed herself to her feet. “Go to bed, Art.”

“I tried. The ceiling fan made a sound like someone whispering my name.”

“It was probably the fan.”

“Perhaps. But the fan doesn’t know what happened at the dock.”

Suzie went still.

Art looked at the envelope. “What did Daniel write?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

“Everything concerns me. That’s the burden of being a writer.”

“No,” Suzie said. “That is the burden of being a thief.”

For once, Art had no reply. His eyes dropped to the floorboards.

At three in the morning, the house lost power. The lights went out in a single breath, and the darkness seemed to rise from the basement rather than descend from the ceiling. Nell found a candle in the kitchen and saw Lydia standing at the far end of the corridor.

“Your aunt knew the power would fail?” she asked.

“Lydia knows everything that fails in this house.”

Lydia held a second reel in her hand.

“Morning,” she said.

“It is morning.”

“Not yet.”

Nell lifted the candle. “What’s on that?”

Lydia’s face gave nothing away. “The part where Daniel stopped asking to be believed.”

Behind them, from the dark library, came the unmistakable sound of paper being torn.

Lydia turned toward it. “Someone has finally decided what to destroy.”