And we all agreed: it was the writing that mattered. It was through the writing that we were coming to know who we were.
WHEN DANNY AND I opened the front door to sit on the porch after the children were sleeping that Monday evening, the girl's room in the mansion across the street—“Estella's room,” we'd both taken to calling it—was dimly lit. We smiled at each other and, without a moment of discussion about it, set our drinks on the porch where we would accidentally kick them over when we returned. We didn't even stop to grab the baseball bat.
It was quiet, just the patter of rain starting up as we crossed the street. Then we heard the piano, haunting notes. As we drew nearer, it was unmistakable: the music came from inside the old place.
In the darkness around back, with the streetlights blocked by trees and the moon well sequestered behind rain clouds, the tinkle of piano notes wafted in the stillness, with only the occasional shhhhew of wheels on wet asphalt as a car passed on the street, beyond the trees. I started shivering. I was wearing only a light sweater, no protection against the rain and the chill and the tension of waiting. Danny gave me his suit coat, but still I was cold.
It seemed a long time before the piano music ceased and the wandering light appeared at the back of the house, in one of the upstairs rooms. The room grew brighter in the darkness, and then we could see her, a girl with long flowing hair standing at the window, the daughter returning to her piano.
Not a girl, though. A woman. We could see the silhouette of her, though we couldn't see the details of her face.
Danny whispered that he'd never imagined a woman prowling around there at night, but I had. Despite my disbelief in ghosts, I'd come to imagine this person was somehow connected with the widow who'd lived in the house.
The woman disappeared after a moment, and we waited for a long time, beginning to wonder if she'd gone down the main stairs and out the front this time, eluding us again. But a faint light appeared at the top of the servants' stairs, finally, and paused there. Danny tapped my shoulder, silently pointing to what I could see now in the little bit of light was an open window, just by a back door. We moved closer, crouched behind some bushes. It wasn't until the woman began slowly to descend the stairs, the light fading in the upstairs window, growing stronger in the downstairs one, that I imagined my own feet on the worn wooden stairs, my own fingers on the candlestick, my own private sadness being observed.
“Danny,” I whispered, and he turned to me just as the candlestick appeared in the window, casting its weak light on a table against the wall. I put my cold hands on Danny's cold cheeks and kissed him, turning us both away from the window.
The candlelight blinked out then, leaving the darkness total, and as our eyes adjusted, we could just make out the lonely shadow of a woman climbing through the window, quietly shutting it and setting off around the corner of the broken-down old place, to the park that had once been its lawn and, beyond it, to Ally's house.
THAT WAS THE FALL we switched from Wednesday mornings at ten to Sundays at sunrise. “Here's the thing,” Ally said the third Wednesday after Kath had started working for the accountant. “No offense to the rest of you, but Kath, she's just so . . .”
“She knows when a manuscript is ‘just a li'l bit catawampus,’” I said.
“Out of kilter,” Linda said.
“She'd like to tell you how you might could fix it,” Brett said.
“And she sure can make you laugh when you're just about to tune up,” Ally said.
“Or have conniptions!”
“Tell the news!”
“Throw a hissy!”
“Pitch a hissy. Not throw. Pitch.”
We'd just have to find a new time to meet, we agreed. Weekends, because Kath would be “all tuckered out” after work.
But Arselia couldn't sit for us on weekends, there was that problem. And with catechism and Sunday school and church—I'd just signed up to be a lector at Saint Thomas Aquinas—and everything else?
“That leaves Sundays at sunrise,” Linda said with a sigh, not really meaning it.
But Brett said, “Sundays at sunrise, then.”
“Our Lady of the Park Bench,” I said.
I STILL REMEMBER that first Wednesday Sister Sunday: getting up before dawn, moving quietly through the darkened house, trying so hard not to wake Danny or the children. Danny waking anyway, and coming up behind me as I stood watching the coffee bubble up into the clear top knob of the percolator. Him putting his arms around my waist and kissing my neck, whispering in my ear, “Come back to bed.”
I felt his warm hands and smelled the coffee and the toast browning in the toaster, and I half wanted to climb back into bed with him, but I said I couldn't. “I'm meeting the girls in the park, remember?”