The Housekeeper

Ada told me in the kitchen, standing at the stove, with her back to me, the way she told me everything that mattered.

“It was past two,” she said. “I couldn't sleep. I heard them up there, in the east wing, the two of them, talking. Not to each other. To somebody. So I went up the back stairs and I stood in the hall and I listened.” She turned around, and her face was gray, and I saw that the fear I had been carrying alone had been carrying her too, all along. “There was a man's voice, miss. Low. And the children were answering him, polite, the way they answer you when they want something. I heard Fern say, ‘Can we go with you now?’ And the voice said, ‘Not yet. Not yet. Soon.’ ”

I sat down. I did not feel the chair under me.

“Ada,” I said. “You heard this.”

“I heard it,” she said. “I've heard it before. I've heard it for two years, and I've told myself it was the water, or the wind, or my age. But you've seen them, and Fern has seen them, and I can't tell myself anymore.” She sat down across from me, and she was old, suddenly, in a way she had not been old before. “Miss, they are not playing. They are not pretending. Whatever is in this house, the children are in it up to their necks, and they don't want to come out.”

“Then we take them out,” I said.

“Take them where?”

“Anywhere. Away from here. Today.”

She looked at me, and there was something in her face that I did not understand then and understand now: she was not afraid of the plan. She was afraid of me. “Miss,” she said, slowly, “before you do that, you should think about what you're saying. You should think about whether it's the house that's got them, or whether it's you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the doctor.” She said it gently, as if she were letting a child down easy. “The one in town, Dr. Maren, he's been out here twice this year already, for me, for the furnace. He's a good man. If I called him and told him the nanny thought the house was haunted, he'd come. He'd sit with you. He'd give you something to sleep. And he'd be the first person to tell you that what you've been seeing has a name, and the name is not ghosts.”

I stood up. I was shaking, and I was ashamed of it, and I said, “I have seen a dead man at the window. I have seen a dead woman at the dock. I have heard a voice in the east wing, and so have you. You cannot tell me it has a name.”

“No,” Ada said. “I can't tell you anything. I'm an old woman and I've been lying to myself for two years. But I can tell you this: if you take those children out of this house today, you will be taking them somewhere, and when you get there, whatever is in them will come with you, because it is not in the house. It is in them.”

She said it and stopped. She turned back to the stove, and she did not look at me, and the sentence stayed in the air between us, unfinished.

I have thought about that speech a thousand times. I have thought about the word she did not say, and whether she was warning me or accusing me, and I have never been able to decide. What I know is that I did not call the doctor, and I did not leave that day. I waited for the children to be asleep, and then I packed two small bags, mine and theirs, and I put them in the closet under the stairs, and I told myself that in the morning we would go.

We did not go in the morning. The morning brought the thing I had been waiting for, and it was not what I expected, and it was worse.