The Turn

What I have written so far is true, and I have written it carefully, because I know what is coming and I want you to understand that I was not looking for it. I did not believe in the dead coming back. I still do not know what I believe. I know only what I saw, and I saw it with the same eyes I am using to write this letter, and the seeing did not stop.

The turn came in the third week, and it came the way water turns, slowly, and then all at once.

The children changed. It was not anything you could put your finger on at first. They were still good, still beautiful, still ahead of their age. But they had begun to move through the house as if they were walking a path they had walked before, with other people. They would stop in doorways and listen. They would look at the upstairs windows at the wrong hour, the hour I had seen the man, and they would not answer when I asked what they were looking at. And they had begun to smile at each other, in the way of two people who share a secret that is not for me.

I tried everything I knew. I read to them, I took them to the lake, I played their games, I sat in their rooms until they slept. Nothing reached them. They were polite to me the way you are polite to a guest, and the politeness was the worst thing, because it meant I was no longer part of the household. I was the new one. The others were the ones they knew.

The nights were the worst. I began to keep a lamp lit on the landing, because the dark had changed texture, and I had begun to hear things in it: a step on the stair that stopped when I stopped, a voice in the empty wing that was too low to be words, the creak of a door that I would find, in the morning, exactly as I had left it. I told myself I was overtired. I told myself the house was old. I told myself a dozen reasons, and none of them held.

The night it became unbearable, I heard the sound of the piano. It was past midnight, and the piano was in the library, at the far end of the ground floor, and it was playing — softly, haltingly, the way a child plays when he thinks he is alone. I went down the stairs without a candle, in my nightgown, and I stood in the doorway of the library, and the piano was silent, and the room was empty, and the bench was warm.

I stood there for a long time. Then I went back upstairs, and I walked into Eliot's room without knocking, and he was sitting up in bed with his dark eyes open, and he said, before I could speak, “I knew you'd come. You always come when the music stops.”

I sat on the edge of his bed. My heart was beating in my throat.

“Eliot,” I said. “Who was playing the piano?”

He looked at me with his beautiful, patient face, and he said, “Nobody was playing it, Nora. You were dreaming. Go back to bed.”

I went back to bed. I did not sleep. And in the morning I made the decision that I have gone over in my mind ten thousand times since: I decided that the dead were in the house, that they had come for the children, and that I was the only person standing between them and the children. I decided that I would save them, and that I would do it alone, and that I would not ask for help, because asking for help meant admitting what I had heard, and admitting it meant it was real.

That evening I wrote you the first letter I had written you since I arrived. I wrote it in my room, by the lamp, and I told you that the children were not well, that I needed advice, that something was wrong at Stillwater that I could not put into words. I wrote it, and I read it, and I put it in the drawer of the nightstand, because I had promised, and because I did not know yet that a promise made to a man who is never there is a promise made to no one.