She took one step away from him, then another. As she did, the longing that had rocked her a moment ago felt more like a dream; it wasn’t real. The sound of the blood in her ears, the rushing brook, stopped.
She took a deep breath. She knew she had to be brave—face what had happened here twenty-three years ago, here and now, if she wanted to move on with her life. She walked to the basement door, pulled by the force of the past. She turned the knob and walked down the stairs.
In the late 1800s, the basement had had a dirt floor, but Mathilda had redone it with concrete. Despite that improvement, this was New England, and basements were often damp, so chill and a musty smell hit her when she opened the door.
“Kate, why are you going down there?” Conor asked. “You don’t need those memories.”
“I do,” she said quietly.
She heard his footsteps on the stairs behind her. Beth had trained Popcorn well, and he didn’t follow them down. Kate felt daring, entering the place of so many nightmares. The odor and the clammy feeling of her skin brought everything back to her. She had actuallydesiredConor. She wanted that feeling back, right now, but first she had to break the spell of the past. Maybe her body could be her own again.
Conor had been here that day. He had found Kate and Beth and their dead mother. Had he heard Beth whimpering, speaking gibberish, a language that she’d invented during that long night?
At the foot of the chestnut plank stairs, she turned in a circle. The basement held all the systems—furnace, hot water heater, electrical panel. One wall was covered with shelves filled with bronze and stone sculptures. There were three six-by-six-inch load-bearing support posts set into cement piers, original to the 1890 house. The edges of the cement were crumbling slightly, eaten away by time and moisture.
Kate, Beth, and their mother had been tied next to one post, the rope looped around and around, anchoring them to the building. They had tried changing positions, this way and that. They tried to saw the ropes against the rough edges. Each of them stretched as far as possible, trying to wriggle free. Kate’s left side had been scraped raw. To this day, she had fine, threadlike, horizontal scars on her hip from scraping against the ragged concrete.
She walked over to the pole now, leaned against it, and stared at the floor. She pictured her mother, blood streaming from her nose, vomit from choking on the gag. Kate and Beth had struggled to get free so they could save her. The harder they’d thrashed, the deeper the ropes had cut into their wrists.
“Do you remember what it was like that day?” she asked Conor.
“Yes, everything,” he said. “Do you?”
“I think so. It’s hard to tell whether the memories are real or dreams. Sometimes I think I turned into a ghost that night. That I left the earth.”
“You didn’t,” he said, reaching for her hand. “You’re not a ghost. You’re right here.”
“I don’t always feel alive,” she said, staring at the way his fingers were clasped with hers. “But I want to.”
After a moment she pulled her hand away and turned around. A framing workshop occupied the basement’s east wall. A pegboard with hooks for tools hung above a long rustic workbench. Vises, a mortar board, and saws covered the wooden bench. The family had scoured estate sales for antique frames, often with inferior paintings still intact. The canvases, if they weren’t interesting, would be cut out and discarded. Several large, ornate gilded frames leaned against the wall.
“He made himself useful at one thing,” Kate said.
“Who?” Conor asked.
“Pete. Building frames.”
Standing by the bench, Kate noticed a print by Thomas Nason. Beside it were four lengths of black-painted wood, corners mitered, ready to become a frame. Conor leaned over to examine a wood engraving of a Colonial house on a low hill, surrounded by pine, maple, and birch trees. Kate found it haunting; she wondered if Conor did too.
Kate remembered how Mathilda had told her Nason had etched thousands of fine lines in the block of wood to create depth and shadows. He’d then rolled the block with a thin layer of ink and printed the work. The print was painstakingly detailed, right down to the textures in pine needles and maple bark, the house’s shingles, a glint of dying light in the window glass.
“Looks as if Pete was in the middle of building a frame for this one,” Conor said. “It’s Mathilda’s house, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Kate said. “The artist used houses and barns and land along the Connecticut River as his subjects.” Just as Ben Morrison had used the island and the brook.
“Did Nason know your grandmother?”
“Yes. She said he was the most poetic artist in America. She meant it literally. Some of his prints illustrated books by Robert Frost.”
“I can’t picture Pete feeling the poetry, working on this,” Conor said.
“Trust me; he didn’t. But Beth ... ,” Kate said.
“Beth, yes. She would,” Conor said.
Kate nodded. “Frost was her favorite poet. His poems evoke New England, the places we grew up and loved.”
And then it hit her: Frost’s “West-Running Brook.” Beth had always been haunted by it, the poem about contraries in love. Most brooks ran east toward the ocean; one streaming west was rare. Kate knew Beth had related the poem—with its dialogue between a couple questioning what they were to each other, whether to follow expected routes in life—to their parents’ difficult love. She pictured Morrison’s painting of the brook, so close to Beth’s desk she could touch it. The stream that ran past Jed’s tent. Beth’s contrary love for him. Everything was connected.
