The Boathouse

I have asked myself, since, whether it would have been different if I had mailed that letter. I will never know. I know only that the week that followed was the week the children stopped pretending, and that it ended at the boathouse, on a Sunday, in the rain.

I had taken them out for the afternoon, because I had begun to be afraid of the house and I thought the open air would help. We walked the long way, through the trees, down to the boathouse, and the rain held off until we got there, and then it came down hard and we took shelter inside. The boathouse is one big room over the water, with the boat in the middle and windows on three sides, and the rain on the roof was loud enough that we had to raise our voices.

Fern found a corner and sat down with her stones. Eliot walked to the far window and stood there, looking out at the lake, and I watched him the way I had begun to watch everything he did, for the wrongness in it.

“Eliot,” I said. “Come away from the window.”

He did not move. He said, without turning around, “Do you think they can see us from the water?”

“Who?”

“The people who watch.” He turned, and his face was open and friendly and wrong. “You know who I mean, Nora. You've seen them too. You've seen him at the window and her on the dock. You told Ada, and Ada told you their names.” He smiled. “It's all right. You don't have to pretend with me. I've known them all my life.”

The rain came down. I heard it, and I heard my own heart, and I heard something else, behind me, at the window that faced the drive: a sound like a hand laid flat on glass.

I turned. There was a face at the window, pressed against the glass, looking in at me — the narrow face, the long hair, the dark coat, the dead caretaker, Colin Vance, with the rain running down the glass over his eyes. He was not there. He could not have been there. He had been dead for two winters, and I knew it, and he was there.

I did not scream. I do not know why I did not scream. I picked up Fern without a word — she had not looked up from her stones — and I took Eliot by the hand, and I walked us out of the boathouse into the rain, and I did not look back, and behind me, the whole way up the path, I heard the sound of a hand, laid flat, moving along the glass as we went, keeping pace with us, the way you keep pace with something you are herding.

When we reached the house I shut the door and leaned against it, and the children stood in the hall, dripping, looking at me, and Fern said, in her small voice, “You see, Nora. It's not so bad. They only want to be with us.”

That night I took the letter out of the drawer. I read it again, and I added a line at the bottom: “I am not imagining this. If anything happens to me, please look after them.” And I sealed it, and I put it in my bag, and I promised myself I would mail it in the morning.

I did not mail it in the morning. Because in the morning, Ada Crane knocked on my door and told me that the children had been heard, in the night, talking to someone in the empty wing, and that the someone had a voice she recognized.