I stared at the gang of children. “What kind of things?”
Ada blinked in the sun.
“Light. Animals. If Konrad sat still, he would be surrounded by birds. They fluttered out of the trees and landed all over him — on his shoulders, in his hair, on top of his feet. And he called rabbits. Not”—she looked pointedly at me—“by shouting or whistling. Not anything like that. I mean they came to him. First the smallest creatures, but then larger ones too. Once Greta walked into the woods at the edge of our land, looking for Konrad. She wanted to bring him in to dinner. And she didn’t see him in the first clearing, so she went a little farther, and then ahead of her there came a sound. A rumble. A growl. On the path stood a bear the size of a house, and right next to it stood Konrad. His fingers were wound up in the bear’s fur, and the bear’s eyes were closed. It was, well, purring.
“Greta ran towards her son, and the bear’s eyes snapped open. The three of them looked at each other for a long moment. Then Konrad whispered something to the bear and scampered into his mother’s arms. Greta watched the creature lumber away, but it never turned around.”
We ourselves turned to walk back the way we’d come. I stole a last glimpse at the children over my shoulder, as they played on the beach, sunburned across their noses. Loud and ordinary, not one of them looked up at me, content as they already were with one another.
The one thing Greta didn’t have in her family of strong sons was a creature of songs. That is to say, a creature like herself. She had never minded living apart in her small town, hearing the whispers of those who said she was a witch, a water spirit. That the songs she hummed everywhere she went would draw men to her so she could drain them of life.
But after the dance at the piano factory, she couldn’t shake the memory of the girl she’d held there — a child who had blinked into existence to the tune of a piano. And then blinked back out again, disappearing with the gray man to who knew where. Greta loved her sons, but when she held them she could feel the girl’s absence.
She hated being alone in her own home. Saul was a gently giant man, hunched over at the table as he ate his soup, back bent in the woods to avoid hitting his forehead against low-hanging branches. But with his softness came his silence. He regarded his wife with an always-quiet admiration and never got caught up in her humming. In fact, he seemed not to hear it at alclass="underline" the rhythms, the buzzing, the vibrations in her throat were as nothing to him. They were too insubstantial. He loved her for her weight and heft and hands.
The boys ran relays around their home. They pitched war games and threw mud balls and called up storm clouds and held congress with foxes and elk. Saul dragged trees down and planed off their rigid bark, and the boys queried wood larks, teased the nanny goats in the yard. Inside, Greta baked bread, and to herself she hummed. She took pride in her household and family, but she knew deep down that there was something missing from it, without which she would never be satisfied. Behind the cottage was a small plot of land fenced off near the trees to protect it from wildlife. The grass was so green it was practically purple, and dabbed here and there were spots of white, which, from a distance, could easily have been flower bushes. Saul carved each slim cross himself, after the wood was consecrated by the church.
Greta vibrated with music, so much that it was hard for her to believe that neither her husband nor her sons noticed it. Sometimes Konrad paused in his games when she walked by as though he had been struck by an idea. But he never sang a note, never hummed along with her; for all his affinity with animals, he never caught a small bird and brought it to his mother trapped in his hands, singing. To even want this, Greta knew, was selfish. He was his own child. He had his own path to follow.
The cottage that the family shared was built of redolent pine, the walls always dripping slowly with sap. It seemed to be a sturdy and impenetrable structure, but when Greta was alone and looked around herself she always felt the forest encroaching, the trees returning to reclaim their material selves. Greenling stalks coiled around into the backs of chairs, and trunks like spines erupted from the floorboards: a thicket of men turning their attention to the distance. From the ceiling sagged branches so robust that Greta knew they came from trees almost too large to fathom, and despite the careful chinking Saul had done, wind seemed to slither through the timber limbs.
When they grew out of their cribs, each boy went with his father into the woods on what Saul called a hunting expedition, the purpose of which was to find the boy’s bed. They would spend a full day, sometimes two, searching through gnarled branches, assessing the benefits of each possible contender. Andrzej chose a mighty pine because the tree had impressed him in the backbone of his house, and because upon leaning his ear to its trunk he heard something inside that he chose not to describe. Fil settled on ash after telling his father to close his eyes and then sneaking a taste on the tip of his tongue.
And Konrad, who was often inscrutable, spent two days of fruitless hunting. When his father was nearing exhaustion and despair, a sudden wind picked up and began blowing leaves around the forest floor. Konrad held out his hand and snatched something off the breeze. By the river’s edge, he and Saul found the willow that the leaf belonged to, and Konrad hid his eyes behind the roughing knuckle of one hand until the tree had been felled.
During these expeditions Greta stayed near the house or barn, usually wrestling with a new presence in her belly. What tree will you choose? she hummed and asked the air. When Andrzej was on his quest, it was a cheerful question; with Fil, uncertain. And by the time Konrad stepped into the woods, Greta’s mind sat balanced on a careful scale of fear and joy as she contemplated the red mess of a child coagulating within her. For between each boy there had come a girl, at least one, for whom there had also been a careful selection of wood grain. But instead of a bed, Saul cut the somber boards of a box, inside which each girl would nestle like a jewel while she rested silent beneath the trees.
It wasn’t until I was eleven that I realized what these sleeping girls meant. Who they were. They’d shown up in various Greta tales over the course of my life as anything from vital talismans to mere window dressing, their grave markers landmarks on the grassy ground my great-grandmother walked. But from the way that Ada spoke about them, it hadn’t occurred to me that they were my flesh and blood — Ada’s sisters.
Once the thought came to me, it took up residence. For weeks the dead girls hovered around my head like summer flies; I had to blink them out of my eyes and bat them away from my hair. Anytime I managed to distract myself — slipping bread into the toaster for a sandwich or leafing through the libretto Ada had given me for my birthday — one would pluck at my sleeve until a thread came loose. And as soon as I acknowledged one, the lot would be upon me, whispering their insubstantial opinions in my ear.
The haunting took its toll. I began to toss and turn in my sleep, and the food on my plate lost its savor. Whatever the meal was — pierogi, pizza — it appeared sallow to me, lacking in essential nutrients. My cheeks hollowed out. I looked like a ghost myself.
One day Ada was sitting across from me in the living room of our apartment, correcting my posture as I warmed up with a series of minor scales. She held a yardstick like a conductor’s baton, waving it back and forth to keep time. Occasionally she would press it to my shoulders or stomach to make sure I held an erect carriage. This was how I spent my time after school, on weekends. Other girls came over sometimes, but few returned. They made vague noises about being too busy, and most of the time I didn’t mind — we didn’t have much to say to each other. But it would have been nice to have someone to whisper to about the ghosts.