The Weight of Dew
by Jacqueline WestIt was lilac season when I arrived in Rivertown. The air drifting through the windows was so damp and sweet that it drenched the car with its purple velvet, glazing the windshield with mist. Inhaling it, I felt my eyes begin to close. My foot slid off of the gas pedal, and I knew this was a sign: it was finally time to stop.
Along Rivertown's quiet streets, sprawling houses from the turn of the century were settling deeper into the soil. Strands of ivy crawled up over dormer windows; crab grass and hostas buried brick foundations. I turned the car down a street lined with mildewed houses and overgrown gardens, lilac hedges a story tall, and old trees that nudged the sidewalk slabs into uneven juts and slopes. On one pale green three-story house, I spotted a stenciled "Rooms for Rent" sign tacked to a sagging porch banister.
Even before I found a payphone and dialed the number, before Leslie, the landlady, came fluttering out of her station wagon clanking with beaded necklaces and corded clumps of house keys, I knew that I would stay at 317 Lincoln Avenue. I was Dorothy in the poppy field; I wanted to sleep in those grandmotherly lilacs, to lie in the uncut, dewy grass until I could never get dry or warm again.
Leslie unlocked the door of room five, above the porch on the second floor.
"Here we are," she announced, stepping over the threshold. The walls of the room were white and bare, and through the leaves that curtained each French-paned window, I could see fragments of a white, bare sky. "This is one of the larger rooms. The carpet is just two years old - we redid the whole second floor that summer, repainted, patched the walls and everything. Not that it was in bad shape then, but the whole place is just getting old. All of the furniture is antique, too. I insist on that. I can't stand that bare, hotel-room look." Leslie patted the banged-up desk with the palm of one knobby brown hand.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt its mattress sag beneath me with the creaky acquiescence of old springs. I could barely keep my eyes open.
"It's perfect," I said. "Can I move in right now?"
Leslie smiled, her magnified blue eyes beaming at me through her thick glasses.
"You sure can. I had a good feeling about this one. I'm pretty good at matching the right people to the right rooms. Just let me zip down to my car, and I'll get the paperwork."
She clattered away down the wooden stairs while I unzipped my purse and flipped open my wallet. Jane Miller. Jane Miller. I'm Jane Miller, I said to myself, staring at my new driver's license. They had done a good job. Worth the two hundred dollars.
In another minute, Leslie was back and spreading the forms on the desk's scarred top. She kept talking as I scanned the fine print, my eyes blurring the words into long inky streaks.
"Did you just move to town?" Leslie asked.
I nodded.
"From Ohio? I saw the license plates."
"I lived in Ohio for a little while."
"Well, I'm sure you'll love Rivertown. It's one of the oldest towns in this part of the state. Fur traders came here, and then the lumber barons. This is one of the oldest houses in town, you know. It was built by Morris Foster, one of the biggest lumber barons."
"Really?" I said, my voice foggy. The air of this town was weighting my body, even my tongue, with its thick syrup. "When was it built?"
"1872. Back then, half of this floor was a huge ballroom. The Fosters were known for their parties. There are still lots of stories about this place. I don't believe most of them, personally - a lot of exaggeration built up over the years." Jane Miller, I wrote on the first blank. My cursive J was awkward. I would have to practice.
"During one of the big Foster parties - they were always throwing fancy dinners and dances - the oldest Foster girl, Alice, was waltzing in the ballroom when she spontaneously combusted. Just burst into flame in the middle of the dance floor. It happened so fast, there was nothing anyone could do. All she left was a smudge on the floor. Of course, that's faded away now. The floors have been sanded and redone lots of times."
My hand froze mid-letter. Jane Miller. Jane Miller. My name is Jane Miller.
"Like I said, most of the stories are a lot of hooey, but the one about Alice is true. There were dozens of witnesses who saw it happen. That doesn't bother you, does it?"
"No, it doesn't bother me." I handed Leslie the sheaf of papers, stacked into a neat white fan. Then I paid the first month's rent in cash.
If Leslie was surprised, she didn't show it; she just smiled warmly and shook my hand. The bangles on her wrist knocked against my knuckles. "If you have any questions or problems, give me a call." She pulled two keys from the metal bouquet around her neck and set them with a click on the desk corner. "Welcome home."
I locked the door behind Leslie and pulled the security chain down its paint-speckled trough.
Then I shuffled to the bed and fell down face forward on the bare mattress. Jane Miller had been awake for twenty-two hours. Before her, Catherine Larson had driven from Montana to Illinois. Beth Schmitt had ditched a car somewhere in Ohio. There had been no time for resting, hardly time to breathe.
Birds were twitting softly in the branches outside the windows. Sleep washed up and over me, and it was rich with the scent of old lilacs, of moss and dust and dew.
"So - he's been here, too," I thought to myself as my eyes sealed shut.
I woke up many hours later at the pale edge of dawn, and stretched my arms out over the bed that I had all to myself. I felt small, insubstantial; I could have floated on the wind like a scrap of paper.
I brought my one recklessly stuffed suitcase up to my room and used the shower in the second floor bathroom. Then I walked the three blocks to Main Street and had breakfast at a small café called Ernie's, pretending to read the local newspaper while coffee-swilling regulars stared at me.
After breakfast I walked to the east end of Main Street, where the public library stood wedged between a law office and the squat brick sheriff's headquarters. The woman behind the service desk didn't look up until I asked for a library card. She had frizzy brown hair and tired eyes, and put a form down on the counter as though the sheet weighed several pounds.
"Are you new in town?"
She said it so suddenly that I wasn't sure she was speaking to me.
"Yes, I just got here yesterday."
"Thought so," she said. She gave me a smile so small it was almost not a smile. I suppose the librarian knew everyone else in tiny Rivertown, and kept them all logged in her memory like a human card catalog. I was new, irritatingly without a place.
I had written an S in the "First Name" blank. I scribbled over it quickly, and squeezed a J into the corner above it. Jane Miller. I looped the r with a flourish.
"Your card will be ready in about fifteen minutes," said the librarian, glancing over my form.
I waited, shuffling from foot to foot awkwardly, until at last she raised her eyes again.
"This is going to sound strange," I began, "but do you know if you have any books about spontaneous combustion?"
"I think we have something in the paranormal section," she said. "A local author just wrote a book, Paranormal Stories of the Midwest, I think. It has a chapter about spontaneous combustion. Have you heard about the Foster house?"
"I'm living there, actually."
"Oh." The librarian's eyes widened, as though she were one of those sleep-and-wake dolls and was finally standing up straight. "Then you've heard about Alice Foster."
I nodded and put on a smile, the kind that said I was a little embarrassed to be figured out so easily.
I followed the hem of the librarian's floral-print skirt down the paranormal/occult aisle. "Paranormal Stories," she intoned, holding out the book for me to take. "Questions without Answers, Unexplained Deaths."
She left me in the reading corner. I sat there in a stiff green leather armchair until the twinges in my stomach grew painful. I already knew the story of Marla James, who burst into flame in a crowded Chicago nightclub in 1930. I knew about Marguerite Henck, who could only be identified by a few teeth extracted from the ash on a Lake Michigan bench in 1956, and I knew about Viola Peterson, who was believed to be the source of the fire that burned down Cincinnati's Grand Hotel in 1911. Now I knew about Alice Foster, daughter of the Rivertown lumber baron. The books never offered any explanation for what had happened to these women, and how ñ only doctors' theories of metabolic abnormalities, electrochemical malfunctions.
But I knew something they didn't know.
I knew who had been sitting beside Marguerite on that park bench. I knew who swung to Chicago jazz with Marla James in that candlelit nightclub. I knew who had shared the hotel bed with Viola, maybe with his arms wrapped around her like vines even as the rumpled silk sheets slid to the floor and the mattress, curtains, and papered walls collapsed in the rising flame.
And that night, he found me. I had changed my name four times, driven across six states. But whatever he wants, he finds. I knew that the arm cradling my head was not real, the hand that traced gently up the skin of my forearm, making every tiny hair stand on end like the nap of velvet was only a trick, a precursor to reality, but knowing this didn't change a thing.
"Sadie," his whisper slipped out of dream-darkness, the sibilant S coiling deep in my ear. "Sadie."
In the divot of my chest, where the ribs latch like a pair of doors, the heat was beginning. It always started there, small as an acorn; a silver root sending out its bright spokes.
"Sadie. Why did you run away?"
I had to. I didn't want to. Get your hands off of me.
"Sadie."
My name is only a breath. It smells like smoke, a dead fuse in the air.
This is not real. I'm dreaming. You can't reach me here.
I could feel his lips on mine, but I was still asleep. It could not really be happening, his voice, his weight, his skin against mine. The heat branched out through my chest like oak roots.
"Sadie."
I opened my eyes and looked up into his face. So familiar, so beautiful - those strangely-colored eyes, like the edge of singed paper. Heat shot through my ribcage like the bones were made of gunpowder.
And then I was sitting up in bed alone in Rivertown, Wisconsin, where the mattress still creaked with my sudden movement and lilac branches made a thick net of shadows on the wall.
Down the hall, in the moonlit kitchen, I groped for the faucet's metal lever. It grew hot under my hand. I splashed my face with freezing tap water, listening to the droplets that did not turn immediately to steam thud like pebbles on the bottom of the sink. I patted my face with a nearby dishtowel. The smell of smoldering cotton filled the air. I dropped the cloth into the metal basin, letting water run over the gaping scorch holes. Shifting my weight from one tired leg to the other, I rinsed the burnt towel, my wrists, my hands, until at last the heat inside my chest had died back to something unobtrusive.
Back in bed, I fell asleep holding a flashlight and an outdated magazine, and dreamt of grass blades coated with dew, bending toward the ground like tired men with broken spines.
The next morning, the house was so quiet that I began to wonder if all the other rooms were untenanted. I dressed and went out into the hallway, which was wide, wood-floored, and bare as a church aisle. The walls were built of cheap modern plaster, the kind that lets even small sounds leak through. I tried to imagine what had been there before, what these flimsy walls had divided. Getting down onto my hands and knees, I crawled the length of the empty hall, running my palms over the shellac, feeling lint dust and rock particles gather between my fingers. I tried the doorknob of each room as I passed. All of them were locked.
Leslie had said that the mark was gone, but I was sure that I would find something, something everyone else had missed, buried under the layers of gloss and the chalky edges of dividing walls. I was certain that I would recognize it, even hidden deep in the grain of the wood.
Near the third door on the right side of the hall, I did find a darker spot in the planks. It was faint and unobtrusive, and for a moment, I was not so sure. I laid my palm over the spot, and brought my face close to the floor. And then I heard the music.
It was a piano and a violin, a poorly played waltz vibrating in the floor beneath my palm. A trailing lace skirt brushed the tops of my knuckles. Her face was tilted up toward his, transfixed, letting him almost carry her over the floor. He always was a wonderful dancer.
He was smiling at her, their faces nearly touching, her eyelashes brushing the skin of his cheek while they spun faster and faster, his white gloves an orbit, and then she was glowing, blazing, collapsing, without even a scream, just a gasp that sounded like joy.
Jealousy clumped like a stone in my stomach. I dragged my fingernails over the scar that Alice Foster had left on the ballroom floor.
A drop of water smacked the back of my hand. I looked up to see a girl standing just behind me, rivulets trailing from her wet hair down to the white nap of her bathrobe. She gave me a hard, distrustful look as she unlocked her door and went inside. I heard the click of the lock turn again.
All that day I walked along the river that ran through town into a large county park and then flowed into the countryside. I bought a gas station sandwich and ate it on the shore, and went twice into the filthy park restroom, never leaving the rustling voice of the water more than two dozen yards behind me.
When the sun began to sink under the bristling edge of the tree line, I went to the distant end of the park, where the river turned rocky and inhospitable, and no other visitors fished or swam. I found a rock ledge jutting over the water where the moss had grown thick, and settled down. I told myself that I would not sleep. It was easy to keep my promise at first; cold twilight and fear of falling kept me tense. But sometime much later, I heard the crackling of the wood around me fade, the water slowing, the chirping of night insects dimming, dwindling. His breath touched the back of my neck. Warm breath; welcoming, embracing me.
I climbed down from my ledge into the river. The water was shallow, rushing over jagged stones, and my bare feet touched invisible things, slimy things, fish, or reeds, or rot.
The heat was swiftly growing between my ribs. I lowered myself into the stream until the water surged up around my neck, its green smell thick in my nostrils. Some sudden ripples touched my lip, and I tasted the cold mud of the river, the tiny growing things swept along in its current.
Drenched, I pulled myself back onto the rock and lay on my stomach. Water ran from my body and down toward the river. It sizzled, turning to steam, as he leaned toward me.
"Sadie," he whispered. His voice warmed my ear. "Why are you running from me?"
The flame bloomed from a tiny knot, swelling so that my skin hissed as I slid into the waves. The river boiled around me. When the simmering stopped, I crawled back toward the ledge. I couldn't see him through the darkness, but I could feel him there; I could feel the heat of him radiating all the way through the water to the middle of the river.
Morning came at last, without any grandeur. There was a faint bluing of the sky, and gradually a strip of light fell through the river valley, like a dull knife sinking through a cake. My hands had turned purple at the tips. I felt as though I was pulling half of the river with me when I climbed onto the bank for the last time.
Through the bleary frost that covered my eyes, I could see his face floating in front of me. He was still watching me patiently, a half-smile on his lips. He had probably perfected this look through the centuries, gazing down at women, promising them the warmth, the weightlessness that was love. I wanted to let him sweep me up, as light as a leaf again on my feet, let him nearly lift me from the bed as he had on the night when he had first come to me. In his arms I was nothing.
How long was I going to keep running from him? Weeks? Years? How many times would I climb back into the cold, murky river? Alice, Marguerite, Viola, the others - how many hundreds of others - had been wiser. They didn't run.
I had known it during the night, with heat running like silver in my veins, I had known it each time I fell into my bed wrapped in the pale light of morning, and I know it now, sitting on the chilly slab of rock, where the river sucks slowly on the roots of elm trees. The thought runs like a fingertip up my spine.
Soon it will be my turn to feel his body against mine. His burnt brown eyes.His skin like heated iron.
And when it comes to that last moment, I won't back away. I'll wait here until night, when he will find me. I'll let him brace me while the fire shoots through, spearing each finger, flaring each strand of hair. It will be my turn to scorch my name onto his long list, my turn to be glorious, a breathing firework, a smoking footprint; my turn to unfold like a giant, dancing flower wrapped in petals of flame.
©Jacqueline West
Jacqueline West currently lives, writes, and teaches in Madison, WI. Her work has recently appeared in journals including Chizine, Aoife's Kiss, Kenoma, The Pedestal Magazine, and Mytholog, as well as in the anthology Thou Shalt Not... from Dark Cloud Press.