A crinkle of worry creased his brow, but he nodded.
“Yes. It would be lovely to catch up.”
“I think somewhere private is best,” she went on.
“Come to my house.” He pulled a small notebook and pen from the pocket of his white coat. He wrote an address and directions from the asylum. “I leave here at six o’clock. Come by around seven?”
“Yes. Thank you,” she told him stiffly.
She took the paper and walked away.
The familiarity of their youthful friendship had died. Had she expected anything else? And yet, she could not deny the shred of hope that had carried her to the train and kept her feet moving as she stepped off in Traverse City, Michigan.
‘Once fractured, a bone will never be the same,’ George had told her one morning while setting the wing of a crow they had found injured in the woods. ‘He may fly again, but the crack will remain. All of life is that way, Volva. We are broken, torn down, sometimes ruined in this long walk to the grave, and every wound, every bruise and heartbreak changes us. Remember that. What once was will never be again.’
Liv watched Stephen walk away. His gait had changed, his hair showed bits of gray at his temples, but something more had shifted in Stephen Kaiser. A blankness surrounded him. He stole light from the sky and gave off only darkness.
“Thank you. This is fine,” Liv told the man who’d offered her a ride from town.
She stepped from his car and walked down the long driveway to Stephen’s home. A black wrought-iron fence protected the sprawling property.
As the house slid into view, Liv stopped abruptly.
It was a large Victorian house, eerily similar to the house Stephen had grown up in. The rounded second floor room made her breath catch as she remembered the dark figure from her dream.
Stephen opened the door before she knocked.
“Liv.” He beamed. “Come in,” he told her, backing into the dim hallway and opening his arms in a wide, welcoming gesture that only added to Liv’s unease.
Antique sconces held dim yellow bulbs. Oil paintings much like his childhood home covered the walls, but these were not drab family photos. Instead, Stephen decorated his walls with death and depravity. Images of humans chasing animals with spears hung in gilded frames. She saw a picture of a man, his neck broken, dangling from a hangman’s noose. Another painting depicted a pile of bodies heaped in a barren field.
Liv blinked and almost commented on the paintings, but dread blanketed her in a kind of speech paralysis. Numbly, she followed him to a sitting room.
“I’m surprised you don’t live at the asylum,” she commented after he’d handed her a glass of sherry.
He shook his head and sat in a black velvet chair, stretching his long legs in front of him.
He’d changed from his doctor’s coat and wore blue slacks with a black sweater. His pale face looked bloodless against the dark fabric.
“I lived at the hospital in the beginning, in a modest little apartment that I rather liked. But after a few years, I realized I longed for the creaks of an old house. Funny, isn’t it? I hated that house on Spellway Road, and now here I am.” He waved at the room. “Of course, this one is mine and mine alone.”
“It certainly is large,” Liv told him, unable to fake a compliment. The house was ugly, and it was… unpleasant. She felt on edge just sitting within its walls.
“Tell me about you, Liv. You just disappeared. I wondered if you followed George’s wishes and went to Norway.”
Liv offered a sad smile and shook her head.
“I haven’t seen George since I left. I fled, Stephen. I was terrified.”
Stephen studied her.
“And you chose Boston?”
She shifted uncomfortably on the satin sofa.
“California, and then Boston, yes.”
She recalled her final night in Gaylord, walking dazed into her bedroom. She had packed a bag and slipped into the night. She knew how to hop a train, but that night she couldn’t. She had no courage left. She remembered wishing she’d eaten the boar’s heart. Such a foolish thought, and yet she wondered if it might have changed everything. Instead, she bought a bus ticket, with money she stole from her mother’s can behind the potatoes, to California.
The memories of her first days in California were like peering through a fogged window. She had walked catatonic for three days around San Francisco. She slept in sips during the day, in a woman’s powder room or at the picture show.
When she had met an old man tilling a garden outside his little house, he invited her in for lemonade. She lived with him for two years. When he died, she bought another train ticket and travelled back across the country.
Again, she wandered the streets, but this time she had a bit of money. She stayed at the YMCA. There she met a young pregnant mother soon to give up her child. Liv accompanied the woman, Meredith, to the hospital, where she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
When Frannie, the head mother from the orphanage, arrived to take the child, Liv promised Meredith she would see the baby settled. After a day of sitting vigil with the baby girl, Liv never left Helping Hands.
The children loved her. They flocked to her in droves. They ran to her with their colored pictures, their stubbed toes, their favorite toys.
In Liv, they found the parent they’d never had. Here was a person who saw them, who not only looked but truly saw them. And in the children, Liv found purpose in an existence that for several years had been empty and unbearable.
Liv occupied the moment before her and no other. She had learned the practice of presence from George many years before, but after her final night with Stephen, it had saved her life.
In the moment, she never had to visit the past. She could almost believe it never happened at all.
“I work at an orphanage in Boston. The children are my home now. Or they were.”
Stephen’s face fell, as if disappointed.
“You work in an orphanage? Caring for children?”
Liv nodded.
He frowned and shrugged.
“To each their own, as they say. I had rather imagined you as a sorceress on the islands of Scandinavia, directing the wind, but here you are…” He trailed off.
Twenty years earlier, the comment would have bruised her, but she no longer cared for Stephen’s approval.
“Liv, I’m delighted to see you. But why are you here?” he continued, swirling the dark liquid in his crystal glass.
Liv crushed her hands in her lap. The courage of the previous days had been battered by the travel, and more so, by the memories. Memories that beat against the doors of her mind as she rode on the train to northern Michigan.
“It’s time to make amends,” she told Stephen, looking into his eyes. “George always said the past circles around. We’ve no idea how long it will take, but eventually it returns.”
“Have you seen George?” Stephen asked, sipping his drink.
Something in his tone put Liv on edge.
“No.” Though she had seen him in her dreams.
He nodded, finished his drink and stood.
“Stephen.” He stopped and turned back to her. “We have to go to the police. We have to tell-” Liv insisted.
“You’re right,” he interrupted her.
She watched him. His jaw was set, as if he held his cheek clamped between his teeth.
“I hate to do it. It’s the end of our lives, after all. But of course, you’re right,” he conceded.
He slipped from the room, and she loosened her twined fingers, though her heart continued to thump against her breastbone.
She tried to relax, invite a sigh into her constricted diaphragm, but her body remained tense.