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They brought the bodies out on a Tuesday—Tom and Jane and Sam and Billy and the monster Fairbairn, and Jack too, the only living one, who they carted off to St. Thomas for treatment and “evaluation”—and on Wednesday, I moved into the Marrowbone home and began to clean, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the putrid floors of the attic, which I inspected on my hands and knees, scrubbing away the smells and stains, trying not to think too hard about what I was scrubbing, about which parts might have been old friends, looking over my shoulder every few minutes to make sure no one was behind me, jumping at ever scurry or rustle, only realizing I had been crying once the task was complete, after which I went to the window from which Jack used to send messages to me and yelled as loudly as I could, praying he would hear me and come back.
When Jack was released from the hospital a month later, we set about repairing the house together, plastering walls and repainting surfaces, listening to Pet Sounds, the only record he owned. For a while, I felt like a newlywed, freshly moved into a fixer-upper home with my husband, remaking it into something we’d created together. Jack and I never talked about what had happened, about Fairbairn killing Jane and Sam and Billy, or Jack bricking them all up in the attic or Jack carrying on life downstairs, talking to—and for—his siblings as they rotted upstairs, sharing space with their murderous father, Fairbairn. The doctors said we should—talk about it, I mean—but I couldn’t bring myself to mention it, let alone think of it. I should have, I know. But Fairbairn had tried to kill me too. That was my excuse.
We did still talk about Sam and Jane and Billy, just not how they died, or what happened after. We laughed about the day I met them and sometimes Jack cried, and I cried too but only when his back was turned.
Those first few months were good, though. I brought my own record collection to the house, and, when our third attempt at electrifying the house failed, we consoled ourselves with Dusty Springfield, celebrating with the Kinks when our fifth attempt finally achieved success. Sometimes, while working side by side, I would look over at Jack and he would smile his goofy smile, one that always made him seem like he was surprised to be looked at, though pleasantly so. In these moments, I would hear “Sugar, Sugar” in my head, a song “performed” by the Archies, a fictional band created by executives to sell comic books and lunchboxes, the kind of song a serious girl such as myself was not supposed to enjoy, let alone hear playing in her head. One day I told Jack about the song and he asked me to sing it and when I did his smile grew wider and more surprised.
It wasn’t until the house was finally electrified that it occurred to me that I had never actually been invited to move in, that I had just done it. Jack needed me, I’d thought and acted accordingly.
“Jack,” I said soon after this uncomfortable realization, “Do you want me here?”
“Of course I do.”
“I know I just sort of showed up.”
“Yeah, you did,” Jack said, smiling his surprised smile. “I like it. It means I’m not alone.”
I cringed at the thought of all the months Jack had spent alone, at the dead siblings he had imagined into being to save him from that loneliness.
Noting my discomfort, Jack quickly added, “It’s not just not being alone. It’s having you here, specifically. I like being with you.”
“Oh, yeah?” I forced a smile and pressed myself into him, gentling poking him, making sure to avoid the wound in his side his father had given him, even though it had long since healed. “You better.”
The next day, Jack biked into town for the first time since his release from the hospital and returned with an Archies record, which we listened to in the kitchen, dancing to “Sugar, Sugar” in our socks, until he said, “Most of these songs are terrible actually,” and I agreed, and we shut it off.
I had always thought of women who said, “He needs me,” and then rushed off to fill that need as women who did not have lives of their own. But, even after I moved into the Marrowbone home, my life continued much the same as it had before. I still worked at the library and led special reading classes at our town’s tiny school. I still spent plenty of time by myself, reading or writing in my notebook. I had lived with my parents before and now saw less of them, but I still had lunch with them once a week. Lunches where my mother would ask me how I could bring myself to live with a man who hadn’t even asked me to marry him yet and where I’d come up with a different answer each time—I’d been possessed by demons, I enjoyed living in sin, I thought perhaps I was not the marrying kind.
Jack and I had been living together for two months before he asked about the attic, standing below the dark spot on the living room ceiling, the one we could never seem to paint entirely over.
“I suppose we’ll have to go up there eventually,” he said, holding his body so still afterward I worried he may have forgotten to breathe.
“No,” I said. “I took care of that. You don’t ever have to go up there. Not unless you want to.”
“Really?” Jack exhaled. Then his tone changed, as if we were discussing an item on a to-do list. “That’s very good. Thank you. I’m glad it’s taken care of.”
I thought knowing the attic had been scrubbed clean, that he never had to see it again, would set him at ease, but, a week after our conversation, Jack woke screaming, yelling, “What have you done?”
I knew immediately who he was talking to and even outside of the dream, supposedly free of it, I could tell Jack continued to see his father before him. For a moment, I saw him too and jumped, adopting Jack’s nightmare as my own.
“You can’t have her,” Jack yelled, throwing his arms out to shield me.
“No,” I said, pushing his arms down. “It’s okay, Jack. He’s gone.”
“He’s come back for us.”
“No. Jack, look at me.” I pulled his face toward mine. “It’s just you and me now. He can’t hurt you anymore. He’s gone.” Then I nodded until Jack was nodding along with me, pulling him into a hug when he finally seemed convinced, willing to turn his attention away from the shadowy figure his mind had created.
“He’ll never be gone,” Jack whispered into my shoulder.
After that, his father visited him every night. Some nights Jack would immediately place himself between me and his imagined father. On these nights, I was in need of protection. Other nights, I was the protector, Jack trembling behind me. Still on other nights, I was the enemy. These were the worst nights. The nights when Jack would shrink from me, often fleeing our bed, huddling in a corner. The nights he might stay in bed but flail wildly when I touched him. On these nights, I’d need to calm him with just my voice, waiting until his breathing slowed to ask, “Jack, can I touch you?” Then I’d hold him until he fell asleep, too frightened to close my own eyes, trying to convince myself that the shadows in the hallway were just shadows and the wind blowing through the house was just wind, that we were as safe as I told Jack we were.
The second time I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation, Jack suggested we try sleeping in different rooms for a while.
“No!” I said, the word escaping my mouth more loudly than I had intended. “I won’t leave you alone like that. Not unless you want me to.”
“I want to know I’m not ruining your life.”
“You could never ruin my life.”
“Just your sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep somewhere else,” I said. “I want to be with you.”
“I’m scared too,” I wanted to say but didn’t. “He tried to kill me too.”
Eventually, the nightmares grew less frequent, only visiting a few times a week, giving us a respite. In many ways, life returned to normal. Still, something had changed in Jack, or perhaps resurfaced. Sometimes it felt like we were adults living adult lives, making budgets and fixing faulty plumbing, but other times it felt like we were kids, acting out elaborate fantasies for the benefit of a child who was no longer there. At these times, we would build forts and play games with the seriousness of children, as if our lives depended on it. It was fun, mostly. Still, I often found myself following Jack’s eyes, wondering which corner of the room he was imagining his little brother into. I had thought that, with me there, Jack would no longer need his siblings, but this of course did not stop him wanting them. This I understood. I had only been friends with the Marrowbone children for a few months before they died, and I missed them desperately. I could only imagine Jack’s desperation.
In lieu of giving voice to his siblings himself, as he had done before, Jack often seemed to be casting me in their roles. On the childlike days, I eventually stopped looking for Sam in the corners, realizing that Sam was me, that the games and forts were for my benefit. Jack seemed to understand I was not Sam—he always called me by the correct name—but he enjoyed relating to me the way he had to Sam, offering me help if I ever seemed stuck on a task, eager to teach me things. The days I became Jane, Jack would talk to me like a co-conspirator, like we had a secret we were hiding from someone else, like I was smart but also a bit fragile, someone to be careful of. My least favorite days were the Billy ones when everything I said was interpreted as angry or volatile, when I was constantly being calmed down, managed. This treatment seemed to turn me angry, or angrier at least, and I’d occasionally find myself being short with Jack, something I never wanted to be to him. One day, after I told him about a difficult patron who had visited me at the library and he counseled me to be patient and “not lose my temper,” I snapped, “I’m not Billy, you know.”
A look of surprise appeared on Jack’s face, unaccompanied by the standard smile. For a minute, we stared at one another. “I know that,” he finally said.
He went to bed without dinner that night and when I joined him, he slid away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Do you want me to sleep somewhere else tonight?”
“No.”
“I’m so sorry, Jack. I never should have said what I did.”
No answer.
The next day, he refused to get out of bed, leaving the food I brought him uneaten on the floor. When I returned from work and found him still there, I crawled in beside him, wrapping my body around his.
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “I know you miss them.”
“I couldn’t protect them,” Jack said, his voice muffled by the hands he had thrown up in front of his face. “I said I would, but I couldn’t.”
“You did.”
“That’s not true. If it was, they wouldn’t be…” Then Jack fell silent.
I made him drink a glass of water and held him for the rest of the night, trying to absorb his sadness, to take it away from him instead of merely letting it expand outward.
“Maybe we could go somewhere,” I said the next day when Jack still wouldn’t leave his bed. “Nothing big. Camping might be fun.”
“Jack, you need to get up,” I said the day after that.
The day after the day after that, I said, “I love you.”
“I don’t think we should go anywhere,” Jack responded. “I don’t want to be away from the house for too long.”
I was so shocked to hear him speak, it took me a moment to make sense of it, to realize he was responding to what I had said days ago. “All right,” I finally said.
“I think I should take a shower now.”
“I think that’d be a good idea.”
Then Jack got out of bed and while he showered, I imagined living in the Marrowbone home forever.
When I came downstairs the next morning, Jack was already busy in the kitchen. I stood in the entryway for a few moments, trying to make enough noise to alert him to my presence, to avoid startling him. When I cleared my throat, I saw his body tense, but when he turned and saw me, he relaxed. The surprised smile returned.
“Sit,” he said. “I have things for you.”
Minutes later, Jack set before me a plate with two fried eggs, bacon—thick-cut—and a tomato.
“I don’t know if I can eat all this.”
“There’s tea as well,” Jack said from behind me, reaching over my shoulder to place it on the table, kissing the top of my head as he stood up. It struck me that, despite the fact that we’d been together for over a year, were now living together, this was the first time Jack had initiated a kiss, even one as chaste as that. I reached up to the neck of his shirt and gently tugged it, signaling for him to come back down to my level. When he did and his face was mere inches from mine, I waited, seeing if he’d kiss me again, which he did, pulling back just a few seconds before I was ready.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, sitting across from me, “maybe you could go back to your parents’ house every once in a while.”
“Do you not want me here anymore?”
“No, no. I do. Very much. It’s just, since you’ve been here, they’ve gone away.”
“They?” I knew who he was talking about but wanted it confirmed nonetheless.
“Sam, Jane, and Billy.”
“Sam, Jane, and Billy have to stay gone, Jack. They are gone.”
“I miss them.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need them here all the time. Just to visit once in a while.”
“They can’t visit, Jack. They’re dead. Is that something… do you understand that?”
Jack waited a long time before speaking. “I do.”
“It’s not healthy to—”
“I need them, Allie.”
“You have me.”
“It’s not enough.”
My first thought was for him. “What if something happens while I’m gone? What if you need me?”
“I’ll know you’re coming back soon.”
My second thought was for myself. “I’m worried if I leave, you’ll never want me back.”
“I’ll always want you back.”
So I packed a suitcase and went to stay with my parents. “Just for a few days,” Jack said. “How many?” I asked. “I’ll send you a message,” he said, pointing to the window where he still had his light set up.
The first time, “a few days” meant two days, the second time it meant four, and the third time I was gone a whole week. Each time, it became harder and harder to leave, and harder and harder to go back. I never wanted to return to that house and I never wanted to leave Jack. My parents were appalled by it. My mother, who had made my father breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for twenty-five years, asked me how I could bring myself to be at the beck and call of a man, one who, she reminded me, “hasn’t even asked you to marry him yet.”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“Then what is it like, Allison?”
“Either I live here or I don’t,” I told Jack after my third trip away. He was distracted, sitting at the kitchen table staring straight ahead, perhaps wishing I’d go away and his siblings would come back, and I had to repeat myself, the declaration holding more frustration the second time.
“I never asked you to live here,” Jack said, still not looking at me.
“Right.” I picked up my still-packed suitcase and moved toward the door. “Then I guess I don’t.”
“No,” Jack said, standing up. “Don’t go. Please.” He looked so terrified I handed him my bag, thinking it might make him feel better, let him know that I didn’t really want to leave, that I likely never could even if I did want to. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling me into a desperate hug, the suitcase, now in his right hand, pressed against my back. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
That night in bed, after I thought he was already asleep, Jack began to speak. “Billy once told me that I needed them more than they needed me,” he said. “This was after… it wasn’t really Billy saying it, I guess. They were already dead. But I think it was true. I did need them. I needed to feel like I was protecting them, taking care of them. I don’t take care of anyone anymore.”
“You take care of me,” I said.
“No I don’t.” Jack had been lying with his back to me but now he sat up and turned to face me.
“You do. We take care of each other.”
“I don’t take care of you the way a husband should take care of a wife.”
Unsure of how to respond, I took hold of Jack’s hand, interlacing my fingers with his. “We’re not married,” I finally said.
“But wouldn’t you like to be?”
“I—” For a few moments, I wasn’t sure. If Jack and I married I’d truly be trapped in that house, the place where Jane and Billy and Sam had been killed, the place where I had been attacked. But I already felt trapped there, knew I wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave. And if we married, I’d never have to leave Jack. Doctors, relatives, little more than acquaintances would stop warning me of just how much I’d be missing if I married Jack. The deed would already be done. They’d have to stop trying to tear us apart. And Jack, too, would have to stop. If we were married, he couldn’t send me away to be with siblings. I’d have just as much a claim on him as them, more so perhaps. “Yes,” I said, because of all of this, and because I loved him.
Over the following weeks, reasoning that a husband should not banish his wife for days at a time, Jack experimented with the comings and goings of his siblings, finding that they’d still appear to him if I was in the house, just not if I was in the room. Sometimes, I would be in the bedroom and hear him talking to them in the kitchen. Other times, they’d go fishing together. I knew none of it was real but began to view the situation almost as Jack did, telling myself that Jack and Sam and Jane and Billy were off having fantastic adventures together. Usually, I was happy for them. Sometimes I was jealous.
With this new system in place, it seemed we could finally marry, and we did so in August, taking the train down to Portland to be married by a justice of the peace, an arrangement my mother did not approve of, then taking it back the same evening, retrieving the bike we had rode to the station, and steering it home, first Jack pedaling while I hung onto the back, then the other way around, cutting through the cool night air, hollering like school children playing hooky.
The hollering stopped as soon as we arrived back at the Marrowbone home. I had wondered if the house would feel any different. Safer, perhaps, now that we were married, or at least more imbued with joy. Now, the house looming above me, I felt neither safer nor more joyous, but rather defeated, as if the house had got the better of me somehow, pulled me closer into its gruesome web. When Jack, who had continued on without me, reached back for my hand, I jumped.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, searching for some excuse for my hesitation. “Just don’t carry me through the door, all right.”
Jack had a wonderful way of looking confused. The feeling would dance across his face from brow to mouth, and I found his inability to hide it endearing. It never made him seem thick, just honest. “Why would I do that?” he asked.
“Is that not a tradition in England? The groom carrying the bride across the threshold?”
“I don’t really know. We grew up sheltered, I think.” The look of confusion turned to something darker. “Or not sheltered really at all. Cloistered, maybe.” Jack forced a smile. “Never mind all that. I promise I won’t suddenly start carrying you around.” As he squeezed my hand, his smile became more genuine. “Shall we go in?”
I nodded and followed him through the door, up the stairs, and to our bedroom, staring at our rather narrow bed, one in which we had shared many sleepless nights and also many nights of comfort but never, despite what my mother seemed to believe, anything more.
Turning to me with a laugh, Jack said, “I know I just promised, but may I?”
“May you what?”
“Carry you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s just, I’m thinking of something. May I?”
I nodded, both incredulous and excited, and Jack bent down and literally swept me off my feet, a less graceful gesture than I had been expecting but one I enjoyed all the same. I giggled as Jack carried me the few steps to the bed and set me down gently.
“May I?” he asked, reaching for the zipper of my dress, a loose white shift I had chosen to serve as my wedding garment.
“You may.”
“May I?” he asked again, pulling me up from the bed and placing his hands on the shoulders of my dress, waiting. Nodding, I let him tug the dress down, so I could step out of it.
I hadn’t been wearing a bra so all that was left was my underwear, which Jack reached for with shaky, tentative hands.
“You may,” I said before he could ask.
When that was finished, I stood before him completely naked, enjoying the feeling of being looked at more than I ever had before. There was something so innocent about Jack’s awe, so unassuming. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached for his tie and quickly threw it off. Then he began frantically unbuttoning his shirt.
“Wait,” I said, pressing my hand against his chest, against the third button. “May I?”
He nodded and I set about undressing him with the same slow caution he had used with me. First his button-down shirt, then his slacks, then his underwear, and then, slightly less gently than the others, his undershirt, which I pulled up and over his head as we both fell into bed, our hands moving over the contours of each other’s bodies.
What came next was a bit clumsy, even funny, but very enjoyable.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said as we laid wrapped up in each other afterward.
“For what?”
“I’m not sure I did very well.”
“I thought you were great.”
“I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“You could have fooled me,” Jack said. Then, added quickly, “Not because I think you’ve been with a lot of men, or any men, just…”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I understand what you mean. I’m glad you felt that way. I was quite nervous.” It was occurring to me that I may have grown up somewhat cloistered as well, though for far less hideous reasons than Jack and his siblings. There was no horrible father in my past, just a small town I had never had the courage to leave. While other girls from home went off to Portland in search of education or husbands or both, I had stayed, learning as much as I could from the books I surrounded myself with, books that included very little instruction on relations between men and women.
“I thought you acquitted yourself very well,” Jack said.
“Acquitted myself?”
“Yes. Is that offensive?”
“No.” I laughed. “Not at all. It’s just the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about sex in my life.”
Jack looked at me with a wry smile.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m sure there are more bizarre things people say about sex.” Jack raised his eyebrows suggestively.
“Well now you’ve offended my delicate sensibilities.”
Jack laughed, then stopped, growing worried. “I haven’t, have I?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good.”
“Did you want to do this before?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But you thought we shouldn’t before we got married?”
“Not that we shouldn’t. I was just too nervous to ask before. Marriage seemed like a good inroad.”
I rolled my eyes at Jack’s characterization. “So is that why you married me? As a way to bring up the possibility of sex?”
“No.” Jack laughed. “What about you? Did you want…?” He trailed off. It seemed there were still some things he was too nervous to ask.
“I did want,” I said. “I, for one, got married exclusively as an inroad to sexual intercourse.”
Jack smiled his surprised smile. “You’re very wonderful, you know that?”
“I’d suspected. You too.”
We fell asleep facing each other, but I must have moved in the night and when I woke to noises in the attic, Jack was nowhere to be found.
“Jack!” I yelled, frantically searching for him in the darkness.
“I’m here,” he said, reaching from behind me to wrap an arm around my waist.
I turned toward him slowly. “Did you hear that?”
He nodded.
“It must be animals,” I said, not believing myself.
“We’ll check in the morning.”
We didn’t check in the morning.
We spent the next few days in bed, only leaving for food, which we brought back upstairs with us and fed each other, laughing and kissing and laying atop one another. It was very sweet, perhaps a bit embarrassing in its sweetness, but there was no one there to see us. It was only us in the house, in many ways, it felt, for the first time. During those days, I never noticed Jack staring into corners or the middle space, looking for his siblings. I began to think that maybe if I just loved him hard enough, the rest of it would go away. He could never forget Jane and Sam and Billy, nor would I want him to, but he could, perhaps, stop needing them. I could, through sheer force of will, become enough.
Eventually, I had to return to work and the honeymoon ended.
“I should probably get a job as well,” Jack said when I returned one evening. “It seems only right.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“In the way of husbands.”
I didn’t particularly care about the way of husbands, at least not in a traditional sense, but I did think a job would do Jack good. Keep him occupied when I could not.
Most people in town had heard about the “crazy Marrowbone boy,” the one who kept his father and dead siblings locked in the attic for six months, but some were more compassionate than others, including Mrs. Henshaw, who owned the grocer’s.
“Do you think you’d need any help around here?” I asked.
“You know someone who’s looking?”
“Jack is actually.”
I expected her to react in some way, to flinch, betray the discomfort I’d seen so many people show around Jack, but she didn’t.
Instead she said, “Ah, Jack. You’re married now, aren’t you?”
“We are.” I grinned despite my nerves. Any use of the word “married” still made me feel a little giddy.
“I think I’d have some work for him.”
Jack and I started biking to town together, still just on the one bike, usually with me standing behind him or sitting in front.
“With me working now, we’ll be able to save up for another bike soon,” Jack called over his shoulder during one of our trips.
“Easy there, big spender,” I said, but I don’t think my words made it to Jack’s ears, swept backward by the wind instead.
Soon Jack started working even more than I was, often biking into town to help on Saturdays as well, leaving me alone in the house for the first time since I’d moved in so many months back. Somehow I found myself more scared now than I had been back then. Maybe because Jack seemed so much better. I no longer needed to be strong for him and now seemed unable to be strong for myself.
“Maybe I could go to work with you,” I said one Saturday, feeling a bit childish.
“I’m not sure Mrs. Henshaw would like that. It might make me seem unserious.”
“I wouldn’t distract you.”
“Then what’s the point in coming?”
“Just to be with you.”
Apparently this was not enough reason for Jack.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, giving me a perfunctory kiss before walking out the door.
I began spending more and more time out of the house, wandering the beach and the surrounding hills. This time outside was not a bad way to spend a day but felt ominous knowing it was a diversion, that soon it would be over and I’d need to go back. The noises in the attic persisted, growing louder and louder.
One Friday night, the night before my day spent alone, Jack and I were awoken by a loud thud, followed by a shrieking sound and several smaller bangs.
“I’m sure it’s just animals,” I said, my standard refrain.
“We have to check.” Jack sighed. “This time we have to check. We can’t just assume. We have to know.”
“Okay,” I said, mustering up my courage. “I’ll go.”
“No.” Jack put his hand on my arm and squeezed. “I should go.”
“Why should you go?”
“That’s just the way it should be.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I’m your husband.”
“And I’m your wife. We’ll go together.”
And so we did, Jack in front carrying a flashlight in one hand and rifle in the other, me in back carrying a baseball bat. As we climbed the stairs, Jack walked more and more slowly. When I put my hand on his arm, I felt him tremble.
“Jack, let me go in front.”
“No.”
After a few more steps, Jack stopped, breathing heavily.
“It’s okay,” I said, pushing past him and taking the flashlight. This time he did not protest, and we carried on.
At the attic door, we both stopped. I thought I could hear Jack’s heart beating but it was likely just the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I placed a hand on the door, then immediately pulled it back, images of Fairbairn flashing before me.
“It’s okay,” I said again, this time for my own benefit.
Placing my right hand back on the door latch, I held my left arm outstretched behind me, my palm on Jack’s chest, holding him back, no longer sure whether I was protecting him from the pain of having to see the attic or the actual dangers within, whatever those dangers might be.
As I opened the door and stepped through, I saw the mangy hair and beady eyes of Fairbairn, only to have the vision dissolve into that of two fighting raccoons, equally mangy creatures who scurried away as soon as they noticed me. Once they were gone, I dropped to my knees and sobbed. Behind me, I heard Jack pacing back and forth outside the door, whispering to himself, engaged in an internally focused battle. Finally, he walked through the door and knelt down beside me, wrapping his arms around me.
“We have to move out of this house,” I said.
“We can’t do that.”
“It frightens me.”
“You never seem frightened.”
“I am. All the time.”
“There’s no need to be.” Jack took my chin in his hand and gently raised my head so I was looking at him, speaking with the confidence of a man who had not just battled against himself for a good ten minutes before entering a room. “We have each other now.”
“It scares you too,” I said. “I can see that.”
The confident veneer fell somewhat, now mixed with sadness, resignation. “I’d be scared anywhere. It makes no difference.”
“How can you say that when you’re afraid to even walk inside the attic? When this is the place…” I stopped. Jack knew what I was going to say. When this is the place your siblings died, the place they were killed, the place their bodies decomposed. It was not necessary to speak the words to him.
Unspoken, they had already made a clear impact. Immediately, Jack drew his arms away, hugging himself now, rocking back and forth a few times before standing abruptly, saying, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“Oh god,” I said as he left. Then I lowered myself until my forehead and elbows were touching the floor and stayed like that for an hour.
When I was finally able to leave, to return to our room, I found Jack in bed, wrapped up in the sheets like a caterpillar in a cocoon and wondered for a moment if this was really my new husband or his little brother come back to occupy his mind.
“Can I come in?” I asked and the voice that told me yes was that of an adult.
Jack stretched his arm out, lifting up the sheet just enough to let me slide under.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.” I searched for further words but there weren’t any so I made due with drawing him closer to me, staring into his eyes, waiting for him to drift off.
“You can sleep if you want,” I said. “I’m all right now.”
“I won’t close my eyes until you do.”
“Okay.”
We stared at each other all night, neither one of us willing to leave the other alone.
The next morning, Jack build a fort over our bed. A structure somewhere between a makeshift canopy and a tent, it was composed of a myriad of sheets with a peak at the top that he attached to the ceiling with blue yarn and outstretched wings tied to chairs he brought up from downstairs.
“This will be our new fortress,” he said. “It will protect you while I’m gone.”
Then he went into town for work and, despite the oddity of this construction and the fact that it made me worry for Jack more than I had since I first found him holed up in the old fortress, arguing with himself as if he were arguing with Billy and Jane, I stayed inside it all day, only leaving when Jack came to retrieve me hours later.
That night, the sounds continued. Now sure that they were animal-produced, I advocated for staying in bed, but Jack insisted on going back up there, alone this time.
“Listen to this,” he said, bringing his childish light blue record player into the room and queuing up Pet Sounds.
“Jack, don’t,” I said, but my words were drowned out by the opening beats of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Guitars, drums, and accordions. The perfect accompaniment to terror.
Jack stayed up there for hours, filling the space above my head with shouting and crashing, clearly doing battle with something more than the raccoons. I kept the record playing the whole time, trying to drown out the noise. By the time he got back, I was on my third listen of “God Only Knows.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Of course,” Jack said, still catching his breath.
“What was up there?”
“Just raccoons.”
“What were you doing with them?”
“Just trying to make them leave.”
“You weren’t hurting them, were you?”
“Of course not.”
“You were making a lot of noise.”
“That’s why I set up the record player.”
“Yes. That was nice of you.”
Jack smiled, then kissed me on the forehead, and lay down, pulling me down with him as the Beach Boys sang, “God only knows what I’d be without you.”
“Are you worried that if we leave here, we’ll be leaving Sam, Jane, and Billy as well?” I asked the next morning at breakfast.
“We’re not leaving, Allie.” Jack sounded exasperated, as if the suggestion was ridiculous.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Does it matter that I do?”
For a moment, it seemed Jack hadn’t heard me. He continued eating his toast and drinking his tea as if nothing had been said. Then, finally, he answered, “Yes.”
“Then why can’t we move?”
“I made a promise to my mother that nothing would ever separate us. That we would live in this house together. Always.”
“But surely you couldn’t have thought you would live here forever.”
“Why couldn’t I?”
“Well, when you live in a place with your parents, don’t you expect to leave someday? To set off on your own?”
“I am on my own,” Jack said.
“Then what’s the point of staying?” I wanted to ask but didn’t. And also, “You’re not on your own. I’m here.”
The nightly battles continued. Louder each time. “I killed you once already, you son of a bitch,” I’d hear Jack shout, over and over and over.
When I stopped in at the grocer’s and Mrs. Henshaw asked me how I was doing, I burst into tears, and she hugged me while Jack looked on impotently.
“I’m making you unhappy,” he said later that night.
“I don’t want you going into the attic anymore.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m just telling you it’s not what I want.”
“What do you want then?
“To leave this place.”
“I can’t do that.”
Jack’s answer was so fast, so cold, so resolute, I couldn’t help but cry for the second time that day. “Please take me out of this house,” I pleaded. “You said you wanted to take care of me. So take care of me. Please. Just get me out of here.” The begging made me feel pitiful, weak, and purposeless. If I had come to the Marrowbone home with the intention of helping Jack, what was I doing now?
“I’m sorry,” Jack said, pulling me into a tight embrace, speaking into the top of my head. “I don’t think I can leave. I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”
“You could leave me,” Jack said the next day. His voice was husky, tearful, and he was blinking rapidly.
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
“No.” The word came out in a barely audibly whisper as Jack shook his head slowly.
“Then I couldn’t leave,” I said, taking his face in my hands, my fingers brushing against the edges of lips, lips that hadn’t turned themselves upward in a while. I missed the surprised smile. I wondered what we were doing to each other.
A month later, in the early morning hours, Jack shook me violently awake.
“We have to go,” he said, pulling me up from the bed before I could fully understand what was happening. “There’s a fire. Right above us.”
But Jack did not leave right away, instead digging frantically through a drawer in his bedside table, retrieving a framed photo of himself and his siblings, one I had taken the day we met, and a cloth-bound book entitled “Our Story,” one he had written. Securing these, he ran to the closet and pulled out the dress I had worn on our wedding day. All I could do was stare.
“Come,” Jack said, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me out of the room, into the hallway, and onto the stairwell, where the fire was already threatening to climb its way down to us. The fire seemed to have started in the attic, something I couldn’t understand as there were no electric wires within the room and we had not had any lightning that night. My foot on the last step, I turned back to watch the attic floor fall into our bedroom, the fire spreading out in flaming tendrils.
“We need to go,” Jack said, tugging me forward and out the door, continuing to drag me until we were at least two hundred yards from the house.
“We need to call someone,” I said once Jack let go of my wrist. It was a stupid thing to say. We didn’t have a phone. “Should we run into town?” I asked. “We can’t let it spread.”
But the fire was already spreading. Through the windows, we watched the fire travel downward and then outward, enveloping the kitchen where we had danced to our Archie record, the living room where Jack had built his first fortress, the house that had contained so much pain but so much joy as well.
Turning my attention from the house to Jack, I saw that he had fallen to the ground, watching his disintegrating home with a look of horror.
“It’ll kill them,” he said, clutching the only photograph of his siblings he’d ever see again.
“No,” I said, kneeling beside him. “You got them out. We’ll take them with us wherever we go next.”
“I couldn’t save them.”
“No,” I said, pulling Jack’s quivering frame toward me, laying his head in my lap. “You did so much. You did so well.” I stroked Jack’s hair as he sobbed. “You saved me,” I said. “You saved me tonight.”
In more ways than one, I’ve come to believe.
After the fire, we stayed with my parents for months. Jack withdrew into himself, a reasonable reaction I thought, given my parents’ disapproval of him. Most days, he only left the room we shared to eat meals, silent, awkward affairs where my father pretended he wasn’t there and my mother stared at him. Other days, he wouldn’t leave our room at all. He stopped going to work at the grocer’s, stopped biking, stopped speaking to me.
“You can’t carry on like this,” my mother said. “A man like that will never be able to provide for you.”
“I don’t need for him to provide for me,” I said.
“Allison, don’t be ridiculous.”
Through it all, I was hopeful, sure that things would soon get better. The fire had been a good thing, I thought with some guilt. Now that we were out of that house, I could become myself again, could be strong for Jack, could be the person he needed. Could hold him through the night, and the day as well, without worrying for my own safety, without any distractions.
One evening, as we lay together in bed, Jack said the longest sentence he had uttered in weeks. “I hope I did the right thing.”
“The right thing?” I asked.
“With the house.”
“What did you do with the house?”
But Jack was done talking, had already said too much it seemed.
“Jack, you can tell me.”
He shook his head.
“You can tell me anything.”
He shook his head again, his whole body shaking with it.
“But not right now,” I said, running my fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him. “You don’t have to say anything right now.”
“I heard in town the fire was an arson,” my mother told me.
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Mrs. Evers.”
“And what would Mrs. Evers know about it?” I asked. It was more confrontational than I should have been. I had heard the same reports.
“She’s friends with the fire marshal’s wife.”
“Well, people gossip.”
“Be serious, Allison. Do you think Jack burned down your house?”
“No,” I said, even though I knew he had.
In fourth grade, I had a classmate, Gracie Monk, known for still having imaginary friends, embarrassing markers of childhood the rest of us had given up long ago. When the teasing from the other children and concern from her parents became too much, Gracie killed her imaginary friends off, one by one. Tammy was hit by a car on a vacation to New York City. Luther drowned. Edmund and Sally committed suicide when their parents said they could no longer be together. This of course assuaged no one’s concerns, only heightened them. But I always understood it. To merely abandon these friends, to suddenly stop talking to them, would be the same as admitting they had been fake all along, that she had made them up. It would be invalidating, erasing all that had come before, the ultimate betrayal. In the end, killing her friends was the most humane choice she could make.
Eventually Jack got better, still fairly brittle, but better. He left his room and valiantly tried to make conversation with my father. He ate meals with us. He laughed. And one night, after we’d retreated to our room, he sang “Sugar, Sugar” to me, softly and off-key. Sometimes he woke with a yell and a shudder, but he calmed quickly. After four months staying with my parents, Jack and I booked train passage to Oregon, the other side of the country.
“You ready?” I asked Jack as the train pulled into the station, extending my hand for him to grab hold.
“Ready,” he said, wrapping his warm fingers around mine.