The Wednesday Sisters(46)

“I'M SORRY” were Danny's first words when he came through the door early that evening, a big bouquet of flowers in hand. I said I was the one who should be sorry, feeling selfish and self-centered and unredeemable. I'd called him arrogant and self-absorbed, so wrapped up in his work that he was forgetting his kids—his kids, I'd said, not me—when all he'd been doing was working his butt off to keep us all in new Keds.

His company had introduced its first product that May, a sixty-four-bit random access memory, but it wasn't making them much money, and their second technology, the multichip memories, kept popping off their ceramic bases. That left a lot of pressure on Danny's silicon-gate MOS device. The whole company had gathered in the cafeteria for champagne in honor of the first one that actually worked. The yields were dreadful, though; very few of the things actually did work, even with Danny's team slaving away past midnight, tinkering with the kind of water they used, changing the acid dips, and hanging a rubber chicken over an evaporator for luck—although how a rubber chicken was supposed to bring them luck I couldn't imagine. Being completely logical and not the least superstitious myself, I prayed a lot and kept my fingers crossed and, when I found a penny lying heads up in the park one morning, I practically had it framed.

Danny was beat to hell when he got home that night—he'd been at the office until two the night before, and left that morning without breakfast, with only my accusation that he hadn't seen his children in a week. But we put the flowers in water and kissed and made up, and yes, we still felt a bit awkward with each other that way you do after your feelings have been hurt and you know his have been, too, but we put the children to bed and he poured us each a nightcap and we sat out on the front porch and began to let go of even that.

It had stopped raining but it was chilly as we sat talking about the new friends Maggie was making in kindergarten and how she could already write her name. Then Danny stopped midsentence and just sat there for a moment, staring out across the street.

“Someone's in the mansion,” he said quietly. “Someone is wandering around with a flashlight or a candle or something, like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Dickens. An engineer who reads Dickens. How could I have gotten so mad at him?

“The night watchman, I think,” I said.

“A watchman would turn on the lights, Frankie.”

I shrugged. “Whoever he is, he's a regular. I've seen the light several times.”

“Let's go look,” he said with that boyish grin I saw so little of lately. And when I hesitated he said, “Come on, Frankie. It's not like it's going to be a drug drop.”

Though it might have been. Teenagers had been arrested for possession of drugs right near this park, I'd heard. But teenagers had drugs everywhere by then.

“Wait! Maybe it's a burglar,” he whispered dramatically, “a serial burglar carting off the silver, teaspoon by teaspoon.” We'd just be gone for a minute, he insisted. The kids would be fine.

As we crossed the street and headed toward the mansion, Danny carrying the Cubs baseball bat I'd gotten at bat day when I was nine just to appease me, our shoes getting wet in the rain-soaked grass, it did seem almost as though a ghost was wandering the old place. The dim light in one window faded, another window lit a moment later, redder here where the room must be red, bluer there.

“The little girl's room,” I whispered. “The daughter's room.”

That's the way I'd come to think of the room that was lit now, albeit dimly. I'd finally found the place open one Sunday on our way home from Mass, and I'd quickly changed clothes and returned to look, expecting something grand inside: a butler to greet me at the door and a woman in a silly white cap serving cucumber sandwiches and tea, though how I could have thought that from the dilapidated outside, I can't now imagine. There had been a silver tea service and a dramatic candelabra with it, but the silver was tarnished nearly to black and was probably only silver plate anyway, because who would leave real silver in that falling-down house? The place had smelled musty, and there were cobwebs on the wooden balusters of the curving staircase, in the corners of the “little French room,” on the portrait that dominated the living room, the stern-faced old woman who'd built the house, her hair coiled in a severe bun. The fabrics on the furniture were rotting, too, and dust lay thick on the marble bust of the daughter, on the framed paintings—the daughter's childhood art—and on the oversized family Bible, which was jammed with old photos and opened to a passage from Job.

But the room lit now, the daughter's room, had been . . . not exactly clean, but better cared for. The bedding was fresher, as if someone occasionally smoothed the spread and fluffed the pillows, ran a dust rag or a sleeve over the dresser, opened the window to let out the stale air. That's why I thought of it as the little girl's room, though there were other bedrooms with wild-rose wallpaper and four-poster beds and looking glasses, and no girl had ever lived there in any event, the old widow had built the house only after her daughter died.