The “Police Report” had cited “an outrage to public decency,” but I was just embarrassed. At thirty-eight, I’d not known Emmanuelle was a high school kid. She’d been reading Moby-Dick to my grandmother. Emmanuelle was the one who found Nana—dead in bed, with that big book. I still wondered if Emmanuelle had noticed Nana’s thumb between the pages—if Emmanuelle knew where in Moby-Dick my grandmother was reading when she died.
In 1980, when Nana died, Emmanuelle might have been as young as sixteen—she couldn’t have been older than eighteen, I was thinking, when Em interrupted her reading in the car. “You’re thinking about Emmanuelle, aren’t you?” Em asked me.
“You could probably go to jail for sleeping with Emmanuelle—Moby-Dick is not an excuse, sweetie,” my mom had told me.
“I don’t think Emmanuelle is that young, Ray—I don’t think it’s illegal to sleep with her,” Molly had said.
I told Em I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle “in that way.” I just wanted to ask Emmanuelle which part of the Pequod’s voyage had been the last part for my grandmother; I wanted to know what Nana was rereading to herself when she died. I knew Em would have said it was okay, if I’d been thinking about Emmanuelle in that way.
We’d talked about this. “We’re too old to sleep with young women anymore, but it’s okay to think about them—in that way—and it’s okay to look at them,” Em had told me.
“Okay,” I’d said.
Once, when Em saw me looking at a young woman—in that way—she said, “I saw her first.” This had since become what we said when we caught each other just looking. In truth, we didn’t look at other women a lot.
It was a long winter, with a late spring, in 1997. There were uncounted hours of reading Moby-Dick in the car. Em had just finished Chapter 111, “The Pacific,” when she woke me one night—crying out in her sleep, as Captain Ahab cries out in his, “ ‘The White Whale spouts thick blood!’ ” When I woke her up, and she’d calmed down, there was another matter on her mind. “You know, kiddo—she would be in her thirties now,” Em said.
“Who would be?” I asked her.
“Emmanuelle—she’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-five,” Em told me.
“I know,” I said.
“I’m just thinking out loud, kiddo. If Emmanuelle finished reading Moby-Dick to herself, she’s a real reader. Emmanuelle will show up at one of your readings,” Em said. I repeated that I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle in that way, but Em said it didn’t matter what I thought about her. “If Emmanuelle kept reading Moby-Dick, she has staying power—she’ll show up one day,” Em said.
I was learning that Em as Ishmael made herself clear. But Em was still learning about six-year-olds. Matthew took what you said literally. Em had told us she was playing house in Toronto. Matthew pressed her for more details. To a six-year-old, playing house sounds like fun. But where was Toronto, and how did you play house? Matthew wanted to know. Em’s explanation of playing house to Matthew was a revelation to me. She sounded like Em as Ishmael, or maybe she was Em as a fiction writer—or both.
“Toronto is in Canada, a foreign country with a different kind of government. For some reason, the Queen of England is also the Queen of Canada,” Em began. Not a word about social democracy, so far.
“But where is it?” Matthew asked; he didn’t care about the kind of government, or the queen.
“If you drive to an airport and go in an airplane, it only takes as long to get to Toronto as it takes to drive to Vermont from New York. My mystery house isn’t far away,” Em said.
“Why is it a mystery house—what’s the mystery?” Matthew asked. Now maybe we would get somewhere, I thought.
It would take a while for Matthew to imagine the house Em had in mind. It would take me a while, too, whereas Em was the kind of fiction writer who was good at foreshadowing—she always knew where she was going; she saw the path ahead of herself. Em’s house in Toronto was no mystery to her.
“Imagine an empty house, no furniture. The rooms don’t know what they are—no one has told the rooms what they’re for,” Em said. “Imagine you’re a room, but you don’t know if you’re supposed to be a bedroom or a living room or a dining room,” Em went on, creating sympathy for the rooms.
“The poor rooms!” Matthew cried, a compassionate child.
“Well, the bathrooms know they’re bathrooms—what toilets are for is no mystery—and a kitchen knows what it’s for,” Em said. “But this house has two kitchens—one is upstairs—so the kitchens are kind of confused, too,” Em told us.
“Why is there a kitchen upstairs?” Matthew asked her.
“There used to be two families living in the house,” Em explained, “but the family living downstairs never saw the family who lived upstairs. The family living downstairs only heard the upstairs family—when someone was walking around, or when someone went up or down the back stairs,” Em told us.
This wasn’t the best story to tell a six-year-old, Grace said. Matthew had nightmares about an unseen family living above him. Matthew swore he could hear them, although there was no one walking around above the five upstairs bedrooms in the East Dorset house—and there was no upstairs in Molly’s Manchester house, where Matthew occasionally had the same nightmare.
One night, when Matthew and Em and I were at Molly’s, Matthew slept with me on the futon in the TV room. I knew he liked sleeping with Molly, in her bed, better. I thought Matthew might be worrying about the upstairs family, but it turned out he just wanted to tell me what was up with my mom and the snowshoer. “Those two don’t hang out at the house anymore—I only see them at Molly’s,” Matthew told me. “They must know the house is for sale, and that you’re not there anymore,” Matthew said.
“I see,” I said, wishing I could see them.
“They’re not getting any older—all those two do is goof around,” Matthew assured me.
Matthew must have talked to Molly and Em about seeing them, because both Em and the old patroller spoke to me. “Where they are isn’t a place, Kid,” Molly had already told me, touching her heart. Now Molly made it more clear; those two must be hanging out at her house because they could see all of us there. It was Matthew and Molly and Em and me that mattered to those two—not where we were, the old patroller said.
I just wished I could see my mom and the snowshoer, I admitted to Em. “You know those two—they’ll figure something out,” Em told me. “Those two know how to make a plan and stick to it.”
There was more evidence of stick-to-itiveness in the snowshoer’s notebooks, not that we needed more evidence; Em and I stopped reading for the night when we came across Elliot’s entry about the Rock Garden. “I can carry Ray out of the Rock Garden, if she can’t make it,” the snowshoer had written.
Near the top of Upper Twister was what Molly also called the Rock Garden, where the old patroller and I had noticed how the climbers’ tracks changed. My mother must have had some trouble on the second steep part of Twister. Molly and I had seen only the snowshoer’s tracks the rest of the way. Elliot Barlow had carried Little Ray piggyback to the top.
“Those two are always piggybacking each other everywhere,” Matthew had said of their younger ghosts.
“That’s just what those two do—they love each other,” was all I could say to Matthew about their piggybacking.
I had almost everything I wanted, I was thinking. I had Matthew’s love, and Em was seriously trying to live with me. I just wished I could see those two—I missed them, and their fooling around.