I pictured a family living here for decades, maybe a hundred years or more. Burying their dead in the family plot instead of at one of the city’s cemeteries. Your father would be here, and then your babies, and eventually yourself. None of you would have to leave, to be buried near strangers.
I had no idea where my father was buried, and my mother was scattered in Long Island Sound.
“This one’s at the edge,” Terri called to me. “It’s the only one over here. I don’t know why.”
I followed to where she’d cleared a space.Anne Whitten, 1886–1907. RIP.Anne Whitten wasn’t beloved, by God or by anyone else. She had died at twenty-one.
The wind picked up, sending veins of cold over my skin. I glanced around into the trees, looking for a shadow.
“Dodie?” Terri said beside me. “It’s getting cloudy. I think it might rain.”
The wordsAnne Whittenscraped the back of my brain, pulling at something old and barely remembered. Something I thought I knew.
“We should go,” Terri said, but I ignored her. I moved to another grave, away from Anne’s, toward the center of the plot. I gently pushed the long grass aside.
Edward Whitten. Beloved Child. August 3, 1900–September 22, 1906.
“Ben,” I said, the word surprising me and coming out in a whisper. It was almost a sob.
I heard Terri ask,What?But it was an echo far away. I heard the wind in the trees and the cries of the birds overhead, the rustle of the tall weeds. A car’s motor, somewhere far off. The pounding of my own blood in my ears, the blood I reluctantly carried from my forebears, the blood I shared with my siblings.
Beloved Child.
He had died at six years old.
I felt a rush of love so hard it made me choke. It was followed by a rush of fear. The water flowing over me, icy and dark, pulling at me, dragging me down. Over and over again, night after night, the water coming, always coming. Always hungry to pull me under and never let me go.
Me as a child, sobbing in the bathroom in fear, running the bathwater to get warm, hoping that no one—thatit—wouldn’t hear me.
“Dodie?”
I turned to Terri. She was pale with alarm, her eyes wide as she watched me. It struck me that she was so small, so alone. Defenseless against the shadows in these trees. Alice McMurtry had died by the train tracks years ago, and now she haunted Violet in the ladies’ room of Fell Hospital, forever a girl.
“Terri,” I said, making my voice as gentle as I could manage, “do you ever have nightmares?”
“No,” she replied, but she was lying.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I have them, too. Mine is about water rushing over me in bed. Cold, dirty water, trying to drown me under it. Horrible, isn’t it? I’ve had the same dream many times. My siblings have different nightmares, but they dream, too.”
The girl next door pinched her lips together, as if biting back the words. I knew the feeling.
“Hanging,” she said, the word barely a whisper over the rising wind. “Someone hanging in my room. A shadow.”
I nodded, as if this was something I had expected to hear. “That’s a nasty dream. Did you ever have it before you moved here?”
Again, she bit her lip, as if afraid to speak. If you were too loud, it—she—might hear you. Terri shook her head.
“All right, then.” I didn’t have it in me to give her a fake smile or a line of bullshit, not here and now, but I could try to reassure her a little. “I’m going to see what I can do about that. Let’s get you home.”
“You can fix it?” She stood rooted to the spot as the first drops of cold rain began to spit down. “You can make it stop?”
I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t believe I ever would, or could. But standing here over these graves, I understood so much more than I ever had before. What I now knew made me panic just looking at her, thinking of her alone in her bed at night, just like I had been. Just like Vail and Violet had been.
No child should be alone and frightened in bed while something watched them. It wasn’t normal. No one had stopped it for me, but I wasn’t a child anymore. I could stop it for Terri.
If I had Violet’s and Vail’s help, we could stop it together. I’d show them these graves, tell them about the shadow I’d seen in the trees. We’d come up with something to do about it. We’d find a way.
I had believed it was just our house. But the Whittens had owned more than that, hadn’t they? They had owned this land, at the least.
