Fragrance of a Rose, Part 1

Rebecca can’t believe in anything anymore. Maybe that’s because she sees too well how there is some sort of truth in everything. She sees how one truth makes another truth a lie, and how some unknowable core truth strings all the lies together, like a necklace of cowrie shells. 

Or a necklace of skulls. Without their faces of muscle, tendon, and flesh, they all look pretty much the same.

***

One day, the ghosts tore Rebecca’s life apart. I could sell my story with that one line, she thinks. 

Nah, she thinks again. Nobody would really care. It’s not the kind of ghost story people want to hear. 

What would she tell them? That they showed her too much? That they heard her crying out to them, “I want to know things!”, and cruel creatures that they are, cursed her by giving her what she asked? 

There are walls that are not meant to be knocked down, as though they were the crumbling skeleton of some old tenement building. There are some walls — inner walls — that are there to keep things out, and to keep things in. That is the way it should be. 

It was Brad and Rebecca’s running joke, that the house they’d moved into was haunted. Except that to her, it wasn’t a joke at all. Not from the very first day, the day Rebecca saw the woman in the garden. The Sobbing Woman. For Brad, it was a joke. For Rebecca, it was a mystery. A promise. 

She ought to have known better.

***

Theresa Ann Cavalluso is the real estate agent Brad and Rebecca have settled on. She is a chatty divorcee who drives an Aerostar minivan scented with cinnamon; jaunty air fresheners dangle from the rear view mirror and the heating vents.

“Please, call me Terry Ann,” she tells them the day they first meet. “I don’t even respond to ‘Theresa’ anymore. It just sounds better on the business card, according to my boss.” She adds with a chirpy smile, “And, she’s the boss.” 

Terry Ann has a motherly quality about her — but a hip mother. She holds her thin brown cigarettes with an elegant and slightly jaded flair. She wears designer jeans and exotic jewelry, and her long fingernails are done up with microscopic, psychedelic patterns of eye-numbing hues.  

And she’s sharp. She picks up right away on Brad and Rebecca’s preference for the older houses, the ones strung along the winding back roads or even the roads-off-of-back roads down in the Catskill cloves and hollows.

These weekend outings are a balm for Rebecca, an escape from the city, the cramped apartment, and the crowded Manhattan streets. They let Terry Ann do the driving as they sit in the Aerostar and watch the road slip by. They hadn’t expected to stray so far from the city. They’d been thinking Westchester County, maybe as far as Putnam or Rockland. 

But here, deep in these ancient hills — that hadn’t been part of the plan. 

And yet, whenever Rebecca is here, she feels it: Somewhere amongst the abandoned farms gone back to wooded acres, the burbling streams, and the meandering stone walls, is Home. 

She knows this, because a quiet yearning in her heart grows louder whenever they come here; because she is seeing the world anew, seeing everything for the first time, all over again; because she can hear a music that is only meant for her.

They work the back roads, the three of them: Boxy modulars, raised ranches, aging Eyebrow Colonials, cute Cape Cods with tiny twin dormers. Carved pumpkins and cut-out skeletons decorate doorsteps in October, and the hills glow like fire with the riotous scream of autumn death. 

The tang of wood smoke perfumes November living rooms. Soon, they’re shielding their eyes from the pale December skies, holding their coats closed in a windy swirl of dry, brown leaves. A heavy snow a week before Christmas rests like whipped cream on the branches of hemlock and spruce. 

Holiday lights come on early in the dark afternoons, painting the snow with color. In one rustic log cabin, warmed by a wood stove and scented with the sharp-sweetness of spiced hot cider, Rebecca notices an ornate Menorah set in a bay window, candles waiting to be lit, and quite suddenly and inexplicably bursts into tears.

Still, they keep searching.

***

Even after years have passed by, Rebecca is still not quite sure whether the haunting is one entity, or several. 

There is the Sobbing Woman, whom she had seen that first day. There’s the Wandering Woman, walking the hallways and the woods beyond the house. And there’s the Mad Thing in the little alcove at the top of the back stairway. Each one seems different, but Rebecca sometimes has a feeling that they are all the same soul. 

She tells Brad about them, whenever she encounters them. He is vaguely indulgent, playing along with a game that has grown old, and for him, a bit tired. A joke told too many times. Only for Rebecca, it was never funny at all.

“The Mad Thing was there again today,” she says, as they settle down to watch a movie on demand. “I was on my way to the studio, and remembered I’d left all the new ad copy on the bed. So I had to rush back and rush upstairs and then rush down again because I was really running late. So I didn’t have time to stop. But she was there.”

“You saw her?” asks Brad, eyes on the television screen.

“I felt her.” Just remembering the sensation of it causes Rebecca’s throat to close up, and tears to threaten. 

“She say anything to you?” Brad asks, putting an arm around her while adjusting the volume with the remote.

“She never says anything,” Rebecca answers, although she’s told him that many times before. “She just sits there, in the alcove, all hunched up. She’s almost like an empty space, like you can feel the air being sucked in.” 

Rebecca sighs at the futility of trying to explain. She leans into Brad’s body, his solid warmth. “I wish there was something I could do for her. She must be in so much pain.”

Brad begins to sing the theme from Ghostbusters.

***

Sometimes Rebecca feels as though she were standing in an invisible doorway; sometimes she feels as though she were the doorway itself. Time moves through her, instead of her through it, which is why she sometimes finds herself walking the hallways of a house newly theirs, instead of one seasoned with years of their presence.

And sometimes — sometimes — she is there on that very first day again.

But mostly she’s in that timeless place that she fell into on that day she got lost in the woods. 

She’d been following the Wandering Woman, convinced that the spectre had something to show her. And she did have something to show Rebecca, only it was like having too much light force-fed into her eyes all at once. None of it had made sense, and all it had done was drive her a little crazy.

She has a recurring dream now. She is sitting on the back porch, which looks out not onto a yard but trees. The day is hushed, the summer haze thick and blue in the air. There is a red bird in the Lilac bush, a bright crimson thing, flitting with a whirring sound from branch to branch. 

Rebecca holds out her arm, fingers extended, and silently calls to the bird, which leaves the tangled shrub and alights on her hand.

Then later, when she remembers it, she realizes that it was not a dream at all. 

***

It’s a Sunday in January. Brad’s theory is that any house still on the market this deep into winter would be more likely to go for a good price. 

They’re headed for an old center-hall farmhouse, the last one on the list for the day. Terry Ann wants them to see it, even if it’s a little farther afield than their normal range. 

“It’s an estate sale,” she tells them. “Owned by a widow who suffered a stroke and died soon after in a nursing home. The house has been empty for six months now.”

Rebecca and Brad glance at each other, eyebrows rising.

“It’s the same old story,” says Terry Ann. “The kids squabbling over the will, wanting to sell everything off and take their slice of the pie. The place probably needs some work, and it’ll sit empty if it’s not sold. You know what that means.”

“Lowball,” says Brad. 

“Lowball.” Terry Ann nods.

They climb up into the hills. Old snow and ice, crusty with soot and salt, border the edges of the road. Terry Ann chatters on as usual. Brad reads the specs on the house from the listing sheet.

“‘110 amp electric’ — it’s gonna need an upgrade,” he says, peering at the paper. “New boiler three years ago, very good. And not baseboard. It’s got actual old cast iron radiators. Wow.”

“Does it have a fireplace?” Rebecca asks.

Brad runs his finger down the sheet. “Stone fireplace in living room with wood stove insert.” He reads. “Full, unfinished attic. Basement. Oh, and you’ll like this Beck — it’s got one of those back staircases. Like that farmhouse in Stone Ridge that we looked at.”

“Oh, this is the real deal, kids,” Terry Ann announces from the driver’s seat. “It’s 120 years old. You’ll see the original hand-hewn beams in the basement. Front and back porch, wide board floors. Probably needs a new roof, but you’ll find that out from the inspection…”

Rebecca tunes them out and turns her face to the window. The day had started out full of pale, January sun — brilliant and thin as watery milk. Now clouds have moved in. They hang low in the sky as though weighted with buckshot. 

There is no shadow anymore. The shadows have spread out until their borders have meshed with each other, until the day has become saturated with drab, grey light. 

Most of the Christmas decorations have been taken down and packed away for another year. Those that remain on the houses they pass seem forlorn: Drooping holdouts from whose grip the cheer of the holiday season has slipped away. Forgotten objects lie in frozen yards, half buried by snow and ice. Winter feels old and sad.

Fat flakes of snow have begun drifting down by the time they get to the house. 

“There it is.” Terry Ann points through the bones of high bushes that will be thick with green come summer. The driveway is unplowed, and tires crunch on cracked snow and ice as she pulls off the road.

They trudge through the old snow, boots breaking the brittle surface. Terry Ann and Brad stomp up onto the front porch, banging their feet to get the snow off, grinding icy granules underfoot. Rebecca holds back, taking in a wider view.

The small front yard is dominated by a large, leafless tree. She thinks it may be an oak. The huge bulk of its trunk seems squat, made dense and thick by its own massive weight. Twisted ropes of some kind of vine crawl up the bark like varicose veins. 

Looking up, she sees the spreading black branches. They are jagged and sharp against the gunmetal blue and lead-gray of the sky. Scattered across the branches are large black birds — crows — who are uncharacteristically silent, only occasionally ruffling out their wings or hopping from one branch to another. 

Through it all, the dark snow falls. The shadowed flakes come thick and fast now, settling on her lashes as she gazes up at the cold, dispassionate sky.

“Beck?” says Brad from the sheltering porch.

“I want to look at the property,” Rebecca says, “before the light fades too much.”

Terry Ann is at the front door, working her key in the old, cranky deadbolt. Brad watches for a moment, then looks back at Rebecca. He gives her a half wave, half-shrug. He’s tired; they’ve seen three other houses today, and he wants to get it over with, not go tramping through ankle deep snow. 

“Go ahead,” he says. “I’m just going to take a look inside.”

A snow-covered field on the side of the house stretches off to a treeline in the distance. The row of leafless shrubs, shielding the property from the road, tower ten, maybe twelve feet high. They probably haven’t been trimmed in years. 

Nearer to the house, a latticework structure laced with some wild-growing plant leans against a low stone wall. Its strange, angular lines look like etchings, a message written on the air — unreadable symbols signifying unknowable things.

Lifting her knees to get through the deep snow, Rebecca tromps around toward the back. 

The falling snow blurs the lines of the house, making it seem tentative, as though it might at any moment flicker out completely. The dark windows gaze blankly out at her, and it occurs to Rebecca that in these months of looking at houses, she has developed an eye for the difference between those that are lived in, and those that are empty. 

It’s nothing she can define. She only knows that there is an invisible light that she has nonetheless learned how to see, and that vacancy has a color that is unmistakably all its own.

…To be continued…

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