Giselle [POV]
I served the Herringtons their warm milk almost an hour ago, I thought as I stood in the hallway staring at the thin line of light between the master bedroom doors. That meant that the light should go out r-r-r-r-right… about…
The light between the doors snapped out.
I backed away and crept down the hall to the staircase that led up into the attic, leaned in and listened…
Silence.
Though I hadn’t been up there since my shift began early this morning, by the sound of it, Rosa had arrived straight back from the pond hours ago just as I demanded yesterday and is already in bed. And I will no doubt make certain he was beneath the sheets this when I go up to check on her, but first… I reached into the apron, pulled out the small brown book—
The ‘Book with No Name’, so Rosa calls it… and rightfully so perhaps as neither its cover nor its binding revealed either the title or the author… be then again, it wasn’t supposed to.
I stuffed the book into my apron, slinked down the master staircase, slipped past the living room, skulked down a cold dark corridor, and once I reached a pair of old sliding wood doors, I slipped inside, sliding them closed behind me, careful not to allow them to creak too much. Though the darkness I crept, following a thin trampled rug the length of the room, interrupting blue shafts of moonlight slanting from the high windows, and at the end, I climbed behind the bulky oak desk and tugged the beaded string of the small lamp sitting nearby.
At once, two walls of books appeared and faded into the darkness of the far end of the room. On the desk, a globe tilted beside a thick pair of reading glasses and a book on the great outdoors. I rolled the leather chair closer to the desk and sat staring out at the shadowy tables of books. No matter how much I dusted, the stale odor of Mr. Herrington’s faded volumes never went away…but I wasn’t here to borrow one of those…
I lifted the book out of my apron and turned it about, sliding my finger along the smooth spine, brushing a bit of lent from the cover. The book felt heavier now then when I first found it just before Rosa came two years ago, and knowing that, I soon realized why I had never opened it. But now that I would peel the away weighty cover didn’t altogether mean that I had strength enough to read a single passage, even I wasn’t in the attic. Yet, I opened the cover, flipping the pages one by one. Some of the passages were written in blue ink, others in pink colored pencil with red and violet hearts drawn down the side and other had telling titles penned across the top such as Chronicle of a Rainy Weekend, The Old Folks Downstairs, Toothache: Day Three and Counting, and Countdown to Cellar Clean up Day with Mom which made me smile. But after a turned another page or two my smile fell away once I saw that the rest of the pages were blank. The sight of the blank pages was perhaps worst than the reading of one of the passages with words. I leaned on the desk, sighing in the dark, asking myself all the questions someone would ask when there was something they missed a great deal: How could this happen? Why did this happen? Who cause it to happen???
I stared into the darkness of the library awhile listening for footsteps as if the answer would come walking out of the shadows any moment. The library itself was hushed, but I as began to shut the empty pages, I noticed that the page I was on was not empty. I thought the Countdown to Cellar Clean up Day with Mom was the final chapter, but somehow I had overlooked a passage entitled Nor’easter Park. I glanced at the globe leaning on the stand. I had never known of such a place in Hunting Hollow or anywhere else by that name. I snapped my eyes toward the darkness thinking I’d heard a sound, but when nothing came forth, I pulled the book close and started reading the passage written two years ago to this day:
I watched mother as she walked toward the end of the drive. She was headed to the Ashley estate just down the lane, but I hated that she worked at night. On her hands and knees, she’d be polishing floors, washing walls, and scrubbing dishes for families that weren’t even home. Around this time of year they were all away visiting their children and children’s children – everyone huddled around a great fire, telling stories, just like the older couple we lived with.
I was in the living room, but wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to be in bed. I turned away from the window, not to locate the light switch, but only to pan everything sitting in shadow around the room: the flowery clean sofas, the unlit Christmas tree, and the portraits of frowning faces I don’t know. Suddenly, people began to appear, as I pretended the room was filled with party goers – some in the corners sipping cider, some sitting in the sofa holding smiling babies, a few children racing to the tree and back snatching the dangling candling canes. I pretended I was there too, discussing with some of the people where I wanted to attend college after graduate this spring. I seemed to be drawing a small crowd. They wanted to hear about my ambitions to be a dancer. Some asked me the types of dances I’d study, some asked me about what I had done on the stage, and others told me how I would make my mother proud. But in that instant, I saw a woman alone in the corner starting at me plain-faced. She wasn’t wearing party clothes, she wasn’t listening to the conversations on either side of her, and she wasn’t paying in mind to the children with candy canes racing past her… the woman was my mother. But the Me on the sofa didn’t see her… but then, she didn’t seem as if she wanted to be found.
Suddenly, the couples sitting on either side of me, laughing, sipping their cider, faded until they were gone, and as I felt the space where they once were, one by one, I watch mothers and their babies fade away, teens shaking gifts, as well as children racing to and fro from the tree, leaving their laugher behind. I watched myself sitting on the sofa, looking around wondering where everyone had gone when I noticed that one person had not disappeared. She had her back to me but I arose from the sofa, appearing to know who she was. I walked behind her and stood there but the woman didn’t turn around. The scene enfolding before me, I wanted to call out something, anything… just to put words into the room. And just as I was about to speak, I watched me try to touch my mother’s shoulder, but when my hand went through her, I knew it was too late. I stared at the front and back of my hand as I faded away and my mother soon after.
My mother had never been interested in my dreams. She doesn’t believe that dancing is practical. She much rather me study something she figures would make me a lot of money. She says I need a real dream. My high school has dance classes, but she would never let me buy my own practice dress. I prayed and prayed, and then asked her again, telling her that I would practice every day, telling her that it would not interfere with my studies. But last week, around the fourteenth or fifteenth of December, my prayers were answered. It happened when mother and I were cleaning the cellar. We were busy sifting through old boxes and crates, throwing away broken candlesticks, shredded shawls and busted shoes – all belonging to the old woman we lived with – when in one of the boxes meant for rubbish I found an old dress. Again, I belonged to the lady of the of the house no doubt, but most likely when she was about my age, back before even my mother was born. The red and green designs were faded, and the length of it littered with moth-ridden holes, but I hugged it, and loved it, and carefully packed it away before mother could see.
And since then, during the night, I collected every patch I could find, even tearing up some of my old Christmas stockings to get them, and sewed them over the holes in the dress. I used to kept the dress in my bedroom closet until two nights ago when mother almost fund it… and if she had, she would have clipped it up and then thrown it away for certain. Therefore, I had a mind to store it in the cellar, but as I sought a hiding place it realized the moths may return and eat threw the new patches. So just when I was about to place the dress in the rubbish, I found amongst the debris a wall piece lined with brass hooks sturdy enough to have had stood against years of heavy wool coats slipped on them when the lord of the house passed through the foyer in from the blistery cold wea—
And remember looking wide-eyed at the hooks, for in that instant, I received the notion to loosen one of the hooks and hang the dress a stone’s throw into the trees in the backyard, a place where mother would not find it. So that’s what I did. I stared out of the living room window again. Mother was long gone, and since the old couple wasn’t home, the estate was empty. Across Buttermilk Lane, at the end of long dark drive, I saw another empty estate hid behind lengthy lawn cluttered with trees in the night and began to think how mother may be right about my dream of becoming a dancer… how I may not be able to afford a house like that even if I got straight A’s in dance. I thought that I would not be able to help mother once I graduated just being a dancer. Maybe if I were a doctor or a lawyer life would be best for mother and I and mother would smile a lot at me. Everyone would be happy for me, well, everyone accept my friend Sebastian. He’s the great nephew of the Somerville Winds composer Gem Westbrook. I met him in the ninth-grade at Somerville high. He’s the one who discovered my talent for dance even before I did, and has pushed me toward a career in it. But I would never tell mother about him, and for the moment, it seemed like I would not have to because in the morning, I was going to do with the dress what mother would have… I was going to cut up the dress and dump it with the rest of the rubbish. I cleared my throat – just the notion of throwing away the dress made my throat dry, so I wondered down the dark halls toward the kitchen at the rear of the estate. As I walked I thought about how all the after school practices Sebastian and I had where he’d play the piano out on the stage and I’d dance to it and how I’d tell mother I was on a yearbook committee and how it met three time a week after the final bell. I couldn’t tell her that I Sebastian helped me get a spot in the winter recital next week. She’d say that the snow was too bad or that there was too much ice on the roads. I entered the kitchen, passed the good dishes and entered the pantry were I looked for a paper cup. I found one in a paper bag on the floor beneath a window that looked out into the backyard. I could probably see the dress just into the trees, but I didn’t look right away… the dress would be trash in the morning anyway, and I was busy trying to figure out a career that made a lot of money so mother would proud and how to break the news to Sebastian that I would not dance again. But when I stood, to return to the kitchen, my eye caught of glimpse of something out in the backyard just inside the trees. I leaned into the glass.
The dress… the silhouette of it was flapping and fluttering so wildly beneath the branch that I could hear it through the glass. And when the clouds moved and the moonlight found the ground, could see something spinning around it… it was a cyclone made up of cloud of millions of snow flurries. Living in Hunting Hollow, I’d seen small ones appear and rush across some of the big snowy lawns or driveways before and disappear just has fast, but this one was as tall as the trees it spun between and was not about to disappear… it spun with a consistent strength as if it new if was spinning round the dress.
The dress!!
I threw myself against the glass. I couldn’t tell from inside, but the wind was probably tearing it to shreds! I darted to the rear door, stomped into my shoes, and bolt out outside feeling the bite of the freezing air on my face as soon as my feet hit the icy path. I took refuse behind the first of the stone statues standing in the yard and then slipped behind one next closer one and then the next where I was beginning to feel the air gnaw through my clothes. And when I peeked into the trees, the garment was flailing as must as any would if placed in the center of a windstorm, but even from here, I could see that despite the wind, the patches and stitches in the fragile piece was not being shredded or harmed at all… it was as if the wind knew what it was doing… almost like the wind itself was trying the dress on. No one would believe what I was seeing and I wouldn’t even try to explain it. Maybe this was only meant for me to see… some sort of secrete gift, or dance even, that winter itself was giving me.
Maybe…but right now, winter started to dance away from me. I stepped from behind the statue as the cyclone whirled away from the dress and into the trees. I darted to the dress… a few flurries frosted along the hem but as I suspected, no damage was done. I lifted the dress from the hook, and then, did the unthinkable— I threw the dress over my head, slipped my arms into the sleeves, straightened it about my waist, and raced into the trees after the funnel of air.
Where was it going? Where had it come from? Was what I saw truly real?
I darted around tree trunks, peering the darkness ahead, just now realizing that I had never been in this forest during the day much less at night. I knew I had to worry about how I would find my way back at some point, but at the moment, it didn’t matter…I had to see for myself what this was all about.
And in that moment, I saw it in the trees ahead, spinning, prancing, dancing through the trees. A slanted log lay ahead of the spinning funnel, but the way it leaped clean over it reminded me of a dancer, a ballerina even, and how it leaps through the air… and I wanted to be just as graceful and effortless in my own dancing as it was. So I waited for the whirlwind to spin a little ways ahead and then I spun and twirled toward the log myself and leaped over landing in the deep pool of snow on the other side. I was lucky I was wearing my pajama pants or the draft through the dress would be a lot worse. I guess that was one thing it didn’t consider… with all the patches in the dress, I could not see how anyone could wear it without any pants! That would be way too cold.
I completed a triple twirl through the trees and realized that now, I was far from the house… so far in fact, nothing but clusters of trees and shadows occupied the space behind me.
But winter doesn’t share its wonders and mysteries with just anyone, only those who are quiet and patient enough to have them revealed. I was about to turn around, through the trees ahead, I saw the cyclone whirl down a steep hill and had to notice where it would end up. So I tip toed as best I could to a big maple tree perched on the crest of the hill pressed myself against it. The wind… it could hear it. Something was happening on the other side. So staying as close as I could to the tree, I scooted around just enough to peek and I saw it dancing atop a frozen pond at the bottom of the hill as if the ice itself was a stage was the whirlwind. For some reason, it looked like it was mimicking the very twirl and twists a human would display. Maybe it was the moon in the sky that seemed more like a spotlight. Or maybe it was the hill of swaying trees on either side of the pond and how they seemed like they actually were watching the performance below same as a balcony of people would. Suddenly, a saw the cyclone slid off into a smaller one twister for a while that scurried and trotted around the feet of the main one awhile just before they rejoined… it was like a ballet for the heavens.
Watching the wind dance was magic, and so was this place. A nor’easter is a wind storm that not only occurs in the northeast, but sometimes moved northeast. So, whenever the wind moved over this place, that’s what this place would be called: Nor’easter Park.
Though Sebastian would wonder where I had learned my new moves, I could not tell him of this place. He would just have to be in awe like the rest of the audience when I perform at the recital this month despite mother, the weather or anything. After seeing this place, I know realize why Sebastian always encouraged and pushed to do what I love and be my own person. And so I would be at the recital because if him, no matter what.
And just like that, the trees on both sides of the pond grew still, the moon hid her face behind the clouds, and the icy stage stopped gleaming leaving the cyclone alone in the dark. It twirled, but must slower now. I could feel the way it was feeling and had I mind to run down there and keep it company but knowing that one should never walked on pond ice, I thought better of it. I wished there was something I could do. But the whirlwind seemed to need the sort of companionship I could not provide. Buy yet I stood there, watching the snowflakes dawdle and separate in the darkness… and once it vanished, I remained with the emptiness below awhile— my dress swaying in a sofa breeze, and me wishing winter could love.
I clapped the book shut, pressed it against my head but opened it again, and when I did, his name leaped higher from the pages than the writer herself. And every time I saw his name, I bit my lip harder and header.
Suddenly, I stared over the desk out into the darkness of the library as if the character himself would walk out of the darkness, but when no one came, I stood and jerked the lamp chain. The library fell into darkness, and as I walked through the slanted shafts of moonlight, I wiped my thumb across a pain on my lip and then rubbed my thumb and forefinger together, feeling its stickiness.