CHAPTER 14
WREN — Then
Eleven years ago, and the years after.
I lived inside a dead girl for six years, and I want to tell you about her, because everyone in this story gets to be a person except Iris, and she’s the one it all started with, and somebody should say her name like it belonged to someone real instead of a hole the rest of us fell into.
I started finding her in pieces, the way you find everything true in that house.
A girl doesn’t vanish clean, no matter how hard a house tries to erase her, she leaves herself in the margins, in the places a grown man’s hands don’t think to look, because grown men forget how small the world is when you’re twelve and you need somewhere to keep the parts of you nobody’s allowed to take.
I had the same needs. I knew where to look because I needed the same hiding places.
That’s the terrible intimacy of being someone’s replacement: you fit into all their secret spaces because you were measured to.
Behind the loose baseboard by the window, the one I found because I went looking for one, because every kept child knows there has to be one, Iris had left a tin.
A toffee tin, rusted at the seams, the kind of thing a child thinks of as a treasure chest. Inside: a blue hair ribbon.
Three foreign coins. A pencil stub. A child’s drawings, folded small, of horses and a dog she must have wanted and a woman I think was her mother, drawn from the back of beautiful and from the front as a blank oval, because she couldn’t remember the face. And a notebook.
The notebook is the thing I’ve never told anyone about. The notebook is the thing I should have understood years before I did.
It was just a child’s notebook, at first, lessons, doodles, the diary of a lonely girl in a cold house, Father is in a mood, stayed in the nursery, L.
brought me toast. (L. Lazarus. He was bringing his little sister toast and standing in her doorway years before I ever climbed that hill; he’d been a wall for someone before he was ever a wall for me.
That undid me, when I understood it. He didn’t learn to protect me.
He learned to protect her, and failed, and spent the rest of his life trying to not-fail again.) But the further back the entries went, no, the further forward, toward the end, toward the date that stopped on the doorframe, the stranger it got. Iris had started keeping lists.
Names. Girls’ names, in her careful pencil, a column of them down the back pages.
Some crossed out. Beside each, a season and a year, and a single word, always the same word, the word the whole house was built to make people believe: left.
Annie, spring, left. Marguerite, winter, left. Sophie, left. Dorothea, left.
I was twelve when I found it and I thought it was a game, a lonely girl’s imaginary friends, names for the dolls she didn’t have.
I put the tin back. I was a stray in a new den and I had my own survival to learn and I did not have room, at twelve, to understand that I was holding a murdered child’s evidence in my two hands.
It took me years. It took me lying in her bed and tracing her lullaby under the headboard and passing her photograph on the landing, my own face, my own wren-brown hair, the same too-wide eyes, and slowly, the way the truth about a place arrives, not as a thought but as a cold weight finally settling, I understood what Iris had been counting. Not dolls. Not imaginary friends.
The other girls. The ones before me. The strays who’d come up the hill before either of us, given a dead girl’s room and a soft church voice and a buyer’s eyes turned up to the light, and who had, every one of them, in their season, left.
Iris had watched them come and go from inside the house her whole short life, and being a clever, lonely, doomed child, she had done the one thing she could do about it: she had written them down.
She had refused to let them be erased completely.
She had made herself the witness, in pencil, in a tin, because no one else in that house would ever say their names again.
And then her own getting-taller had stopped, one spring, at four feet eleven, with a date and then nothing, and I understood, finally, holding her tin in a dead girl’s room, that Iris hadn’t been the first loss in that house.
She’d been the one who counted the losses.
Until she became one.
I never put another girl’s name in that notebook.
But I kept it. Through everything, the fire, the grey dress, six years of a life with nothing of Marrowfield in it.
I kept Iris’s toffee tin, because she’d kept all of them, and somebody had to keep her.
It’s in a drawer in my little house at the bottom of Cradle Hill right now.
I think about it every time I take in a stray that everyone else gave up on.
I think she’s the reason I do it. A dead twelve-year-old taught me that the least you can do for a thing the world decided to erase is refuse, with your whole stubborn life, to let it be erased.
That’s the part of me Augustus could never measure.
He bought a girl who looked like his daughter.
He never understood that the resemblance went all the way down, that he’d brought home, on purpose, another child exactly stubborn enough to keep a record of his sins. He thought he was getting Iris back.
He was. He just thought he was getting the part of her he could keep.
He got the part of her that counts the dead.
And in the end, in a burning house, with a tape spooling, with all the names finally coming up out of the dark at once, it was the counting that buried him.
Iris started that. A lonely girl with a pencil, refusing to let four girls named Annie and Marguerite and Sophie and Dorothea disappear quietly.
Say their names. That’s all she wanted. That’s all any of us ever wanted, every stray that house ever swallowed.
So I’m saying them. Annie. Marguerite. Sophie. Dorothea. Iris.
And me. Wren. The one who got to keep counting because a boy stood in a doorway and a dead girl left a tin.