The Letter

This letter will reach you because I am writing it, and because the agency finally agreed to forward it after your lawyer asked them twice whether they had heard from me. They had not, and they had not expected to. You told them, when you hired me, that I was never to contact you about anything, and I kept that condition for four months, through every hour of it, and I would have kept it forever if the children had been spared to me. They were not spared. So I am writing to you now, and I will not pretend that I expect a reply.

My name is Nora Hale. You may remember me as the woman who interviewed badly at your club, in the little room off the bar, while your phone rang twice and you did not look at it. You hired me anyway, because my references were clean and because I had no family of my own to call me home. I remember what you said: that the children had lost their parents, that you were their guardian in the legal sense only, that you paid the bills and saw them twice a year, and that what they needed was someone young and steady who would not leave. I said I would not leave. I meant it.

What you did not tell me, and what the agency did not tell me, and what nobody told me until it was far too late to matter, was that two people had died at the property before I arrived: a woman the previous summer, in the lake, and a man the winter before that, on the drive. I learned about them the way you learn most things that matter — late, and from someone who thought I already knew.

The property is called Stillwater. It sits at the head of a lake in the Hudson Valley, an hour and a half north of the city, on a road that ends at the gatehouse and then continues, gravel, through two miles of trees before the house appears. The house is old by American standards, with a porch that runs the length of the front and windows that face the water. From the upstairs landing you can see the whole lake, and on still evenings the water holds the sky so exactly that you cannot tell which side is the real one.

I arrived on a Thursday in June, in the rain. The housekeeper, Ada Crane, met me at the door with an umbrella she did not need, because the porch kept us dry. She was a small woman in her sixties, with the flat, kind face of someone who has outlasted the weather. She told me the girl was asleep and that the boy was still at school, and then she showed me the house as if she were showing me a debt. We went through the rooms on the ground floor, the library, the kitchen, the long dining room with the doors to the porch, and at the end of every room there were windows, and at the end of every window there was water.

“You’ll be happy here,” Ada said. She said it the way people say things they have decided to believe.

The girl woke before dinner. Her name is Fern, and she is eight, and when she came down the stairs in her nightgown she looked at me for a long time before she decided, and then she took my hand and led me to the kitchen to show me where the cereal was kept. That was the whole of our first conversation, and it was the best one. Her brother, Eliot, came two days later, driven up from the school in a hired car, and he shook my hand on the gravel and said, “You’re prettier than the last one,” and I laughed, because it seemed the thing to do.

I told myself, that first week, that I had never been so fortunate. The house was quiet, the children were good, the pay was more than I had asked for. The only strangeness was the silence around the two deaths, and I did not know yet that it was a silence with a shape. I found out the shape of it the way you find out everything at Stillwater: through a window, at the wrong hour, when you were not looking for anything.