Echoes in the Walls Read online

  Would anything ever be well again in this house? When had it ever been? I wondered, but what really was on my mind was how I should look, how I should dress for his homecoming. If I dressed too fancy, my father would surely think I was trying to stir up Ryder’s memories of our aborted romance. And yet if I dressed too casually, I thought I might look like I wasn’t excited about his homecoming. And then there was my hair. I had let it grow out since Ryder had last seen me. It was down to my shoulders now. Would that further confuse him?

  In the end, I simply brushed it and pinned it back, put on a plain white blouse and a pair of jeans, and didn’t even put on any lipstick. My father looked pleased.

  Mrs. Marlene, Mr. Stark, Samantha, my mother, and I stood off to the side, watching and waiting for some sign to emerge in Ryder’s terribly blank expression. Thankfully, there was no fear, but the emptiness in his eyes drove ice water down my neck and over my heart. When he looked at me, he was looking through me. Not my smile, not my love, and not my urgent and sincere need for him to know me made any difference.

  “Okay, Ryder,” Dr. Davenport said. I detected some disappointment in the tone of his voice. “We’re going up to your room. Mrs. Marlene has made you a Dutch apple pie, your favorite. She’ll bring it up with something to drink.”

  I could see Ryder struggling to remember that it was his favorite or even what it was or who Mrs. Marlene was.

  My father nodded at us, and Mrs. Marlene hurried to the kitchen. I didn’t know whether I should step forward to say anything, something as simple as “Welcome home.”

  Samantha didn’t hesitate. As if nothing had happened and he had just returned from school, she said, “Hi, Ryder. Want me to bring my checkers set to your room?”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked at his father.

  “Let him rest a while first, Samantha,” Dr. Davenport said curtly.

  My mother stepped forward, and she and Dr. Davenport started Ryder up the stairway. He glanced back at me. I thought his eyes were swimming in question marks. It filled me with sadness and anger that I could not provide the answers.

  “Checkers,” I said disdainfully under my breath. “How stupid. He hasn’t even settled in his own room again.”

  “It wasn’t stupid. You were never good at checkers, so you didn’t think of it,” Samantha told me.

  “I always let you win, Samantha, or you would cry.”

  “Like, that’s not true,” she said in her favorite whiny voice.

  “Let’s go play, and we’ll see,” I said. I was smarting from the fact that she had spoken to Ryder before I had. The truth was I was afraid to speak to him. I couldn’t stand his not recognizing me. Despite it all, I was ashamed to admit that I was still feeling sorrier for myself.

  Afraid to discover I was telling the truth, Samantha fled to her room and to her phone to tell her girlfriends her brother was back. Who knew what stories she would concoct about him and how he had reacted to her as opposed to how he had reacted to me? Whatever her stories were, she would surely be at the center, hoping they would feel sorrier for her than for Ryder and pity her more than any of the rest of us.

  Those early days throughout most of the fall were difficult for everyone. Most of the time, Ryder was kept in his room, or he went for walks with Dr. Seymour and occasionally with our father. Sometimes, when I was home at the time, I would watch them walk and talk, following far behind them. Usually, either Dr. Seymour or our father did most of the talking. Ryder walked with his head down, listening. After they took a number of these walks, I saw them head toward the lake more often. Maybe Dr. Seymour was testing to see how the sight of the lake would affect him. Of course, I was never asked to join them, nor did I dare ask permission to suggest to Ryder that we take a walk. Samantha would surely be tailing along anyway. So, with him mainly in his room most of the day and the evenings, our opportunities to talk to each other were quite limited.

  Whenever we were together, there was always someone else present, and even then, I was hesitant about talking directly to him, frightened I might say the wrong thing. Samantha leaped to plunge into any silent moments, mostly babbling nonsense. He would look at her as if she was some strange creature. It was his lack of reaction to almost everything that had to do with us that saddened, even sickened me, whether it was times together when we were growing up here or the prom and its dreadful aftermath.

  In the beginning, he was given things to do that didn’t really require someone else to assist anyway. Just as during his formal therapy, he was told to do crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles and provided with many new things to read. Dr. Seymour told us that the purpose was to stimulate his mind as much as possible doing different mentally challenging things or at least things that would seem new to him now. He had to force his brain to work and to form “fresh wires.”

  When he thought Ryder was ready for it, Dr. Seymour prescribed his having more and more contact with us. Actually bringing him down for meals so he could interact with my mother, Mrs. Marlene, Samantha, and me was preferable to having his meals brought to his room, where he would eat alone or with my mother standing by to be sure he did eat. Samantha usually dominated the conversation at the dinner table, rattling on about something she had done at school or some gossip she had heard about another family. Occasionally, I caught Ryder looking at me curiously. I imagined a search engine on a computer seeking out some subject. He was struggling to understand why I was so familiar to him, I was sure. Or at least, I hoped.

  Gradually, our visits with him in his room were increased, but they were always with Samantha present. I avoided all extracurricular activities at school that would keep me there when the regular day ended. Instead, I went directly home with Samantha and most of the time followed her to Ryder’s room. Rarely did we find him in the living room or anywhere else in the house, for that matter. Dr. Seymour had encouraged me to mention students in my class and the classes above mine whom he knew.

  “A familiar name, an image, could help his memory return. It’s like building blocks. Think of it that way,” he said.

  Ryder’s bedroom was the second largest of the seventeen in Wyndemere. Samantha was always upset that her bedroom wasn’t larger than his. When Ryder was in the hospital and in therapy, she asked Dr. Davenport to switch her room with Ryder’s, claiming girls needed more space than boys. Look at how much room her mother had needed for her vanity and closets of clothes and shoes. Of course, our father adamantly refused.

  In fact, Dr. Davenport had moved some new furniture into Ryder’s bedroom when he was anticipating his return from the clinic. Besides his computer table, bed, and bureau, he had a settee and two matching heavy-cushioned chairs in dark blue installed. The room was big enough for a sitting area. Whenever the three of us were there, Ryder would sit in one of the chairs or sit up in bed, and Samantha would sprawl out on the settee and talk and talk as if she was the real patient in therapy. I sat in the other chair, waiting for a chance to say something and watching him closely for some sign of recollection.

  Sometimes it seemed like he was waiting for us, but most of the time, he looked surprised when we entered. The questions were clearly in his eyes: Who were we? Why were we there?

  Competing for his attention now, Samantha always tried to beat me to him. Many times, he was dozing before either of us had arrived, but when she got there first, Samantha deliberately woke him so he would lay eyes on her before he did on me. Those first months of darkness, as I liked to think of them, Ryder really did seem devoid of even the slightest memories of either of us. Even though Dr. Seymour was so optimistic, I thought Ryder would never return and certainly would never remember who I really was and what we once were to each other. Samantha never hesitated to remind him who she was. In fact, she relished doing it.

  “I’m Samantha, remember? I’m your sister, Sam the bird.”

  He didn’t speak or nod. He looked at me, and she would quickly say, “This is Fern, Ms. Corey’s daughter.”

 
I suppose it was dishonest of me not to describe myself as more and to let Samantha project that she was closer family to him than I was. From the start, I had been unwilling to accept that I was his sister, too. Apparently, neither Dr. Davenport nor Ryder’s therapist, Dr. Seymour, had delved into the Revelations yet. I thought they were both hoping for it all to happen naturally, smoothly. Repeatedly, we were told that too many shocks too quickly were dangerous.

  But there were some shocks you couldn’t prevent.

  And they were coming. As Mr. Stark might say, that was as true as spring follows winter.

  3

  WHENEVER THE THREE of us were together and Samantha rattled on and on about things she and Ryder had done together, he looked at me as if he expected me to translate what she was saying into comprehensible English. Of course, I had no idea what she was making up and what was true, so most of the time, I would simply smile or remain quiet. We were continually warned that we shouldn’t do anything to upset Ryder by making him feel sorry that he couldn’t recall something. For the moment, at least, I had to pretend whatever she told him was true. Having an argument in front of Ryder was out of the question. Samantha took advantage of that, often saying things to me and about me in his presence that were denigrating, anything to make her more important in his eyes than I was.

  “Fern and her mother used to live in the help’s quarters. Her mother is still our maid. Fern still helps out in the kitchen and sometimes with the cleaning, right, Fern? She was brought up poor. She hasn’t been to the places we’ve been. I have lots of pictures of our vacations to show you. Fern doesn’t have any pictures of vacations, do you, Fern? I don’t think you and your mother went on a vacation. It was probably too expensive.”

  “You lived in the rear of the house,” Ryder said, digesting the idea. Whenever he said anything about me, I waited with bated breath. What would the next sentence be?

  “Yes.”

  “Where the help was supposed to live,” Samantha added. “Her mother is still really just the head maid.”

  “But . . . you live here, not in the rear of the house,” Ryder said. He looked at Samantha.

  Go on, I thought. Go on, remember, and figure it out.

  “That’s because Daddy felt sorry for them,” Samantha blurted.

  Ryder looked at her and then at me. I knew he was looking either for confirmation or for me to tell him something else. The truth was buzzing around inside me. If I began, could I stop? Would I reveal it all with every added question, each question being born out of another factual statement?

  “It’s smelly back there,” Samantha said. “And too damp now.”

  “You didn’t always live in the back of the mansion, did you?” Ryder asked.

  I shook my head, holding my breath. It was coming back to him, right before our eyes. What if he blurted out what went on between us? Nothing could be worse than Samantha knowing all that.

  “That was when she was just a little baby. Her mother had to take care of us. She was a nanny, too. A maid and a nanny,” she added with a smile. “You played with me. You taught me stuff, like checkers. She had to stay in the back. She couldn’t even come through the front door, could you, Fern?”

  Ryder looked at me for my response, but I bit down on my lip and waited until we were away from Ryder’s room to scold Samantha for making my mother and me sound like we were inches from poverty. Her reaction was almost always to break down and cry, claiming she had no idea I’d be upset. She was developing her two faces. Could such a thing really be inherited?

  “I’m just telling the truth. We’re supposed to tell the truth,” she said, with that face of innocence.

  “How can you tell what’s the truth? It’s a foreign language to you,” I said, and walked away from her.

  I really shouldn’t have been at all surprised. Even as a very young girl, Samantha would fabricate things she had done, seen, or heard. Whenever I complained about it back then, my mother rightly pointed out what a lonely childhood Samantha was enduring. She wanted me to be understanding. Samantha needed to imagine more because she had so much less when it came to a loving family. Dr. Davenport was a workaholic (probably to escape an unhappy home life), and Bea was so into herself, her friends, and social activities that I thought she had to be reminded daily that she was a mother. Ryder was a good brother, but he was much older, and girls needed girlfriends their own age. Bea really never encouraged Samantha to have friends visit and rarely tolerated anyone staying overnight. Actually, she was more discouraging. In her eyes, few families qualified to breathe the same air. She was always threatened by the possibility that something about her life, about Wyndemere, would become the subject of nasty gossip, especially after the Revelations.

  In fact, one day before she had begun to sue for her divorce, Bea surprised us all, including Dr. Davenport, by hiring a personal secretary, Darcy Samson, a forty-five-year-old spinster not more than five foot five and at least twenty pounds overweight. She had beady eyes full of suspicions and fears. When it came to serving Bea Davenport, she couldn’t kowtow more if Bea truly was a goddess or some royalty. Whenever I witnessed them together, Darcy looked like she was grateful for every word Bea said and every glance she gave her. She nodded so much that I thought her neck was a thick, wide spring.

  Bea made it clear to Samantha and later to me that everything about the family or Wyndemere had to go through Darcy first before it could be voiced outside the house, even on a telephone call. According to Bea, the Revelations had done irreparable damage to her family, the Howell family, as well as the Davenport name. All the servants were told the same thing. Gossip about the Davenports was a capital crime. Nothing was too small or too insignificant to be scrutinized by Bea’s personal assistant first and then approved by her.

  Dr. Davenport ignored the whole thing. My mother, Mrs. Marlene, and Mr. Stark laughed about it, and then Mr. Stark and Mrs. Marlene had some fun telling Darcy the most mundane things, like Mrs. Marlene saying she was changing the brand of scrub pads or Mr. Stark describing in great detail the shrubs he was replacing at the east end of the mansion. Darcy would take notes in detail.

  Sometimes, when I felt like being mischievous, I would encourage Samantha to make up something someone had asked about her mother or Wyndemere, something ridiculous that no one in her class would ask, like if there were any bidets in the bathrooms. When Darcy reported it, Bea cornered Samantha in her room and conducted a questioning that resembled the Spanish Inquisition. I listened in the hallway and for a little while felt sorry for Samantha.

  “Who asked this? Why? What were your friends discussing? What did you say? Where were you? Who else could have heard it?”

  She fired off one question and then another before Samantha could answer. I heard Samantha start to cry, and then she brought me to laughter when she protested, “I don’t even know what a bidet is!”

  When they heard about how I was egging Samantha on, both my mother and Mrs. Marlene chastised me, but with smiles bursting out like bubbles that simply couldn’t be kept beneath their thin masks of reprimand.

  I really didn’t have to encourage Samantha to invent stories, however. It seemed to be her second nature. For me, it was only a small annoyance until Ryder was brought home from the hospital. When we were able to see more of him, she practically attacked him with one fantasy after another, always making herself the center of attention and building up her importance to him. No matter when I went and saw him during the day, whether in the living room, the game room, or the kitchen, she was there or arrived moments later, as though she had been waiting and watching for me.

  Another month had passed, and I had yet to spend any significant time alone with Ryder, just a few minutes here and there in the entryway, the hallway outside one of the downstairs rooms, or the stairway. I didn’t take advantage of any opportunities to do so. I was really afraid, afraid of what I might say or do. He would surely see something in my eyes, something to make him remember what we were to ea
ch other and why we went on that boat ride. I wouldn’t even dare touch him, not even brush against him.

  It wasn’t easy. I had to battle hard to contain myself. One night, when I was going up the stairs, I heard music coming from his room. His door was wide open, so I stopped to look in. He was at his computer and was listening to a song I quickly realized was a song we had danced to at the prom last year. He turned to me as if he expected me to be standing there. I saw no surprise on his face.

  “I like this,” he said. “Do you like this?”

  “Yes.”

  What would he ask next?

  “I remember it,” he said.

  I hadn’t heard Samantha come running to my side, but there she was, as if appearing out of thin air.

  “I showed you that song,” she said. “That’s why you remember it.”

  “Is that why?” he asked me.

  “Yes, is that why, Fern?” Samantha asked. She was smiling smugly.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I wasn’t here when she showed it to you on your computer.”

  He looked at the computer. “Why was it on my computer?”

  What else could I say without getting into trouble? Samantha would practically fly down the stairs to get my father. She stood there smiling at me, daring me to get myself in trouble and clear the playing field for her with Ryder.