Echoes in the Walls Read online

  He had barely acknowledged my mother when she returned from bringing Ryder his breakfast, happy to say that he appeared to have a good appetite this morning. On the other hand, I shouldn’t have been surprised at Dr. Davenport’s lack of a joyful reaction to such good news. Smiles, much less laughter, had become as rare as moon rocks for everyone in Wyndemere, and, I suppose, for good reason.

  It had been months since my half brother Ryder’s near drowning in Lake Wyndemere. He and I had been caught in a vicious spring storm when we were in one of the Davenports’ rowboats. We were battling to return to the dock when Ryder fell out. Dr. Davenport’s driver, Parker Thomson, swam to us and brought Ryder up. The storm was still raging. It took a while for Parker to get to him and get him back to the dock to be resuscitated.

  Paramedics arrived at the estate as quickly as they could and then took Ryder off in an ambulance to the hospital, where he was given the best follow-up treatment by one of Dr. Davenport’s good friends, Dr. Malisorf, a neurologist. He and his wife had been to dinner at Wyndemere often, and their son was friends with Ryder. I was sure it was like caring for his own child. Ryder received the best possible treatment. No one could blame the aftermath on that.

  We all learned that Ryder’s subsequent health problem came about because he had suffered brain hypoxia. Not counting Samantha, I was the last to be told the devastating news. His brain had been denied oxygen a little too long, and some damage had been done. It had affected his memory most of all.

  Consequently, although he was physically fine now, he was still very much a stranger in his own home, and I remained quite a stranger to him, even after all this time and continual therapy. I had heard the psychotherapist, Dr. Seymour, who attended him twice a week, compare his condition to Alzheimer’s, but he’d thankfully added that he believed Ryder would enjoy considerable recovery. I wanted so to believe him, but how much recovery Ryder really would enjoy remained, as Shakespeare had written and my mother would often quote, “in the womb of time.”

  I had rushed through breakfast this morning and was almost finished before my father, who was mentally already in his operating room. That didn’t matter. When he was like that, it was useless asking him questions. You’d have to repeat them, and his answers were usually incomplete, his thoughts hanging in the air. If I was too insistent, my mother would flash one of her not so subtle looks, warning me not to annoy him. But maybe my father wasn’t thinking about his upcoming cardiac procedure or occupied with thoughts of his patient; maybe he was swimming through his muddled and troubling family history instead, because it was about to be Christmas, and holidays meant you thought most about your family.

  Why shouldn’t I believe that was troubling him? No one was haunted in this house as much as my father was. Every corner welcomed the shadow of some sad memory, like the loss of his little sister, Holly, because of a heart problem. My mother said that was probably what most drove him to become the specialist he was.

  Ironically, unlike Ryder, who had good reasons to be the exact opposite because of his continuous physical improvements, I didn’t have a good appetite this morning. I ate as little as I could, which was something my mother was constantly criticizing. We were on our holiday break. Joyful tunes were supposed to be floating around us instead of the imagined deep echoes of ghostlike footsteps and doors opening and closing in unoccupied rooms. Surprises in decorative boxes awaited us on Christmas morning beneath the twelve-foot-high Christmas tree Mr. Stark had brought into the living room, with its neoclassical sofas, chairs, and tables.

  My mother, Mrs. Marlene, Samantha, and I had decorated it. Ryder had been brought down to watch, but he had fallen asleep in his chair despite Samantha’s incessant chattering, or maybe because of it. We were still hoping to have a holiday dinner; however, as always, anything we did together was totally dependent on Dr. Davenport’s schedule. His patients seemed always to have emergencies. When I voiced my skepticism, my mother quickly reminded me that he was the doctor for life-and-death moments.

  Despite that, I was often convinced that he had invented emergencies to justify his frequent absences. Holiday happiness especially was locked up along with most of his happier memories in trunks, cartons, and armoires stored in the attic. Something that had once brought such pride and joy, like a picture of Ryder in his baseball uniform or receiving an academic award, was painful for us all to behold now but far more so for Dr. Davenport. Surely, every time he returned from the hospital, the dark-gray stone-faced house with its louvered vinyl black shutters, towering brick chimneys, and gargoyles replicating those on Notre Dame in Paris reminded him of the tragedy that awaited him within.

  I knew that was how I often felt returning from school. Parker drove Samantha and me to and fro when he didn’t have to drive Dr. Davenport anywhere; otherwise, we’d go on the school bus, which we boarded just outside our driveway. Samantha hated that. She’d have to mingle with the less fortunate.

  The moment Parker stopped in the driveway, Samantha would burst out of the Davenport limousine and rush to the front door, eager to get up to Ryder’s room first and fill his ears with her school stories, even though it was obvious that they were of little interest to him. I would get out of the car slowly, even reluctantly. Parker would nod, understanding why I was not anxious to face the disturbing reality inside. I hated how Ryder often looked at me with dead eyes.

  “What’s happened now, Samantha?” I asked, frowning at the way she had burst in on me this morning, not that my doing so would change her behavior. I looked down at the magazine in my lap to show her I wasn’t really that interested in what she had come to tell me. She could easily exhaust anyone, and sometimes, before her mother had moved out, I didn’t blame Bea for avoiding her every chance she had.

  Samantha was much more dramatic at thirteen than I ever was. Everything was a crisis. Her coffee-bean-brown eyes were almost always wide and flooded with some emotion stretched to its breaking point. If she was sad, she was wretched; if she was happy, she was ecstatic. And if she was disappointed, she was sick with frustration. There was no middle ground for my half sister. A boy who smiled at her was either dreamy or disgustingly ugly. Her teachers were usually unfair, resented her for being rich, or thought, as my mother might say, that she was the cat’s meow. I often thought that would have to be an alley cat.

  Over time, I had developed immunity to her reactions, taking everything she said with “a grain of salt.” My mother, who could have been a college professor, told me that expression came from the idea that a grain of salt was an antidote for poison. Of course, that wasn’t true, but too often something Samantha said was poison to me.

  “Don’t think that if you took a grain of salt, you could swallow arsenic,” my mother jokingly warned, back in the days when everyone would make jokes.

  This morning, after breakfast, even though she couldn’t go anywhere because of the snowstorm, Samantha had changed into her new cobalt-blue jumper and leggings with a pair of fur-lined shoe boots so she could parade through the mansion like some tween model in an upscale department store. Yesterday she had gone to her hairstylist and had her dark brown hair trimmed into short sides and a long top pompadour. Two of her girlfriends had the same hairstyle, so she wanted it, and especially these days, whatever Samantha wanted, Samantha got.

  She did look older in her new hairdo. Her body was maturing faster than mine had at her age. She had real cleavage and was already a year past her first period. Her legs and her curvy rear end made her look even more mature. She was always talking to me about virginity, curling her lips as if it was a disease when she pronounced the word.

  Apparently, there was a group of girls in her class who were titillated with the idea of losing theirs simultaneously, maybe at a special house party. In their way of thinking, it was like an initiation ceremony for adulthood. Something magical would happen, and the mantle of childhood would be lifted away. All their senses would heighten. They especially would see and hear boys differently,
and everyone who saw them would immediately stop treating them as adolescents or, worse, as children.

  I had done my best to convince her otherwise, explaining that some of the most promiscuous girls I knew in my tenth-grade class, and even juniors and seniors, were quite immature, but she refused to believe it and especially refused to believe that I was still a virgin.

  “You’re like most adults,” she accused in a huff. “You lie to keep us from doing what we want to do, what you already have done.”

  Sometimes she infuriated me so much that I felt like going into her bathroom when she was taking one of her bubble baths, which her mother had convinced her were important for keeping yourself young and attractive, and pushing her head down under the water until there were no more bubbles. Maybe because of the divorce, Dr. Davenport was reluctant about chastising her or punishing her for almost anything she had done, whether it was being nasty to the servants, especially Mrs. Marlene, or getting into trouble in school.

  Whoever had come up with the expression spoiled rotten anticipated Samantha Davenport. The little girl who once daintily followed me about, taking great care not to upset me or my mother so we’d let her tag along, had undergone a makeover since what we called the Revelations had occurred and since her parents’ resulting divorce and Ryder’s troubles.

  Occasionally, Dr. Seymour would whisper some excuse for her behavior to me, but I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why she had changed. When your mother treats you with indifference and your father seems to be more interested in your siblings, you can’t help but rage at everyone and everything and act out for attention. I simply wasn’t in the mood to be sympathetic and understanding, especially today, a day before Christmas, which should have meant as much to Ryder as the rest of us but would be just another empty day to him, another day filled with blank pages on which he surely thought nothing wonderful was promised to be written.

  Yes, I understood that under it all, Samantha was angrier than she was hurt, maybe even angrier at the world than I was. I was just far better at hiding it or better at not taking it out on others. I transferred my frustrations into something like a punishing fast walk around a quarter of the lake and back, my heels digging into the earth and gravel, my arms pumping up and down like an oil-rig drill. My whole body would ache when I was done. I didn’t know if it made any sense to rage at nature, but I often ranted at the lake as if it were a living thing and it had betrayed us, betrayed Ryder.

  “Ryder just said my name when he saw me,” Samantha said, gloating. “I didn’t have to remind him who I was. He even called me ‘Sam the bird,’ just like he used to. Remember?”

  I looked up from the magazine in my lap quickly. Surely, she was just saying that to rile me. Ryder had yet to pronounce my name on his own; he had yet to have that look in his eyes that told me he remembered who I was and what we had once meant to each other. “It’s Fern,” I would tell him whenever he looked at me with that lost expression. He would nod, but there was nothing to indicate my name had opened a closed door or pulled back a dark curtain, and this after countless hours of conversation carefully guided by my father’s and Dr. Seymour’s instructions.

  Especially during the first few weeks, we were told exactly what to say and what not to say to Ryder and how to behave with him so as never to cause him to feel frustrated and depressed, but it was frustrating for me and at times depressed me so much that I didn’t want to talk to anyone, even him. I avoided the opportunities.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  Ryder had never looked at her with any special recognition and always had to be reminded who she was, something she was more than happy to do.

  She smiled and gleefully performed a pirouette as she came farther into my room. She had been given ballet lessons but had quit; she had also been given piano lessons and had quit. She quit her private art lessons as well. She had the attention span of a fruit fly. My mother once told me Samantha would go through the British Museum in London in less than five minutes and claim she had seen everything worth seeing.

  Samantha paused and began roughly handling my dolls on my bottom bookshelf. I had never lost or thrown away one of them since I was two. I had only five dolls, but Samantha had thirty or forty scattered about her walk-in closet and some buried in one of her toy chests. She tried to twist the head of one of mine, and I screamed at her to put it down.

  “It doesn’t move. You’ll break it!”

  “Sorry,” she said, tossing it back onto the shelf indifferently. “I don’t know why you care so much about these silly dolls now. You’re too old for them.”

  “Everything I have has some meaning for me. That doesn’t disappear because you get older. They’re special maybe because I didn’t have as much growing up as some people had around here.”

  Of course, Samantha had been old enough to know the little I did have, not only compared with her but compared with other girls my age. Before the Revelations, my mother and I lived in what was known as the help’s quarters at the rear of the mansion, where there were two small bedrooms and a small kitchen, all the furniture and appliances looking like they were hastily thrown together from some secondhand thrift shop.

  We didn’t start our life at Wyndemere there, but we were eventually relegated to it. After I reached the age when I could be left alone, Samantha’s mother, Bea, discouraged me from being in the main house and specifically forbade me to use the front entrance. The rule about the front entrance was set in stone for my mother as well. When returning to Wyndemere from anywhere, my mother and I had to use the side entrance where deliveries were made. In those days, Dr. Davenport did not put up much resistance to whatever Bea wanted and rarely came to my defense or even my mother’s.

  Neither I nor Ryder ever liked Bea. He never missed an opportunity to disrespect her, and our father often chastised him for that whenever Bea complained to him about Ryder’s behavior. How ironic and sad it was now that Ryder couldn’t appreciate Bea’s fury at learning that Dr. Davenport was my real father and then see and appreciate their subsequent divorce months afterward. Ryder was finally rid of her, as was I, but for him, it had come too late. If he couldn’t remember her, he surely wasn’t even aware she was gone. My references to her in his presence were few and far between, as my father had ordered. Actually, I wasn’t even supposed to mention her name. When I looked like that bothered me, my father told Dr. Seymour.

  Taking me aside one day after one of his sessions with Ryder, Dr. Seymour told me that when people were battling to regain their memory, they especially avoided unpleasant recollections.

  “It’s the mind protecting itself,” he said. “It blocks unpleasant memories. He’ll recall her when he’s ready to recall her, when he can best handle it.”

  I wanted to say that might be true for Ryder’s remembrances of his stepmother, but surely that wasn’t true for his memories regarding me. Why wasn’t he remembering me—and fondly, too? He was seeing me daily in the mansion, and he was hearing my voice repeatedly when he was present and I was talking to my mother or Mrs. Marlene. Of course, I didn’t ask that, despite how much I wanted to. What he was saying about Bea made great sense, though. It helped me understand why he had no recollection of his near drowning, either.

  When the Revelations occurred almost immediately after Ryder’s near drowning, Dr. Davenport had insisted that my mother and I be moved back into the main house, where she and I had once shared a bedroom. Now, because I was older, I had my own. Dr. Davenport’s willingness finally to accept his full responsibility was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as Mrs. Marlene would say. Because of what had been developing between Ryder and myself, both my mother and Dr. Davenport had decided the truth could no longer be kept hidden under the shadows in Wyndemere. It was time to disclose another Wyndemere secret.

  Nevertheless, Bea thought she had been played for a fool. How could he have kept my mother right under her feet all this time? How could he have still employed the woman he h
ad slept with and impregnated, “breathing down my neck and surely hiding her smiles”?

  She knew that Dr. Davenport and his first wife, Samantha, had brought my mother here to serve as an in vitro surrogate mother for Ryder. My mother was desperate for the money after failing to earn enough singing. She was tired of being a waitress and accepted the offer rather than head back to England, where her father would gloat. Bea tolerated that fact by putting most of the blame and embarrassment on Dr. Davenport’s first wife, ironically accusing her of being the self-centered one, afraid to get pregnant and spoil “her dainty little figure.” From Bea, I learned that you could be jealous of a dead person.

  Bea’s one concession was to agree to name their daughter after Dr. Davenport’s first wife. Perhaps she had realized that was a demand that Dr. Davenport would not give up, along with other memories and pictures of his first, more beautiful wife that he kept in his home office.

  However, whenever she could, Bea ridiculed Dr. Davenport’s first wife’s memory in front of Ryder and Dr. Davenport, as well as my mother. She pronounced her own daughter’s name as if it was a profanity, clenching her teeth. I was too young to remember how it had all begun, of course, but my mother explained that before I was born, she had continued to live in the main house after Samantha’s tragic car accident one winter day. When Ryder was just four years old, Dr. Davenport remarried, having chosen Bea, who my mother said was selected more for social and professional reasons than romantic ones. So my mother remained as his nanny.

  And then, when Bea gave birth to Samantha, my mother was kept on as a nanny for both Davenport children, but as soon as Bea decided that Samantha no longer needed my mother day and night, we were ordered to move into the help’s quarters, and my mother became officially the house manager more than anything else. That way, Bea could blame her for anything that went wrong.