Skylar Dorset - The Girl Who Never Was

I'm in a tiny room with tiny windows and a short ceiling, typical for a house this age. The house is at least three centuries old, and I feel at home in it immediately. The light is murky, but that's because there really is no light today, more of a non-light. There's an open shoebox on an old wooden table right next to me, and there's an index card taped to it with 'Donations Appreciated'written on it in the kind of proper Bostonian cursive that my aunts use. Except that the final flourish is a smiley face, and I think my aunts would die before using a smiley face. There is a single dollar bill in the shoebox and several dusty coins. The coins don't even look American. Next to the table is a softly ticking grandfather clock. As I walk in, it's just finishing up chiming nine o'clock. Not the right time. Grandfather clocks never tell the right time in my experience. My aunts'is the same way.

'Oh!'exclaims a voice to my right. The floor creaks in that way old wooden floors do, and I look up, startled. A man is bustling into the room from a doorway on the other side. He's dressed in gray corduroys and a bright red cable- knit sweater, and he's possibly in his early fifties, between my

father and aunts in age, I'd estimate. He has glasses and graying brown hair that's sticking up a little, and he makes me think of professors and naps and my father, all at once. I have that feeling I get sometimes, of odd familiarity, instinctive comfort, being in this museum with this man. It's almost like d'j'vu, although surely I've never been here before, never met this man before. 'I'm Will,'he says. 'Welcome to the Salem Which Museum?'

He says it like it's a question, like he's not sure whether or not I am, in fact, welcome there. 'Thanks,'I say awkwardly, and then, because he looks so thrilled to have a visitor and because I feel bad, I dig my collected coins from the day out of the pocket of my jeans and drop them in the shoebox.

Will absolutely beams. Then he says, 'What would you like to hear about?'

'Sorry?'I say because I have no idea what I want to hear about. I thought I'd just be able to wander around the museum, looking at displays.

'Well, here at the Salem Which Museum? The guest decides. Which type of museum are you looking for? That is the type of museum we are.'

'Oh.'I realize slowly. 'The Salem Which Museum.'

'That's us,'he affirms, still beaming and now rocking back and forth, heel to toe.

The kind of museum I was looking for was a museum in which I could disappear. I wonder what Will would say to that. I look around the little room, trying to find the most

obvious thing to ask about. I could ask about the Salem Witch

Trials, of course, but I've heard that story a million times.

'Might I suggest,'says Will, 'family history?'

I blink, sure I must have misunderstood. I look down. I am wearing the Boston sweatshirt Ben gave me on my birthday. There is no sign around my neck proclaiming my motherlessness. What would make this man say that?

'The history of Boston,'Will continues, 'for all Bostonians are family. And you are a Bostonian, are you not?'

Yes, I am wearing the Boston sweatshirt, although how many Bostonians wear Boston sweatshirts? But I just nod.

'Oh, the words I could tell you about the history of Boston,'says Will. 'But better you read them for yourself. Written words'that's where the real power is. And, of course, the history of Boston depends on who has done the writing of it. Come along.'

He scurries out of the room, through the doorway he came in.

I hesitate, then follow.

The room connects to a kitchen that looks as if it was last redone in the 1950s, and there is a huge iguana on the counter. I stare at it. It stares at me, reptilian eyes blinking without interest. Will's head pops through another door at the other end of the room and he notices my showdown with the creature.

'Oh,'he says. 'That's just Iggy.'

'Iggy,'I repeat dubiously.

'Yes. He's an iguana,'Will points out, like I'm an idiot. 'Come here,'he says and disappears into the other room.

The other room turns out to be much bigger than the rooms I've been in so far, with a much higher ceiling. Maybe it was the carriage house or something. Whatever it used to be, it is now a storage space for books. They are piled sky high, toward the rafters above. I'm not sure how they're not toppling over. There are narrow windows way up there, and that's where all the light is, barely making it to the floor where I'm standing. Something about the room makes me shiver, makes me stand on its threshold, unwilling to step forward, unsure what might happen if I do. The air seems dusty and different somehow'difficult to breathe.

Will, in the meantime, is busy impossibly climbing an impossible pile of books. He plucks one off the top of an adjacent pile, shimmies back down, and tosses me the book. 'About Boston,'he says helpfully and then runs off to scale another pile of books.

'That doesn't look safe,'I say.

'What?'he shouts down to me and then throws me another book, which I catch instinctively. 'Also about Boston.'

'Oh,'I say, not sure what to make of this, but Will is already down that pile and up the next, and I'm holding two books so dusty that I can't even see their titles. I try to blow the dust off their covers, but the dust is so thick my breath doesn't even dislodge it.

'You should go read them,'instructs Will, handing me

another book. He has apparently reached the ground safely once again.

I figure I've got time to kill. I look at the dusty floor. 'Is there somewhere I can sit?'

'Oh!'exclaims Will, as if that never occurred to him. 'You want to sit! Oh! Yes! Of course! In the front room!'

I edge back past Iggy and into the front room. There's a couch in there that doesn't look like anyone's sat on it since 1672, but it doesn't collapse when I sit on it, so that's something, I suppose. The fragile fabric probably crushes into dust underneath me, but it's better than the floor in the other room. I keep one ear open for the sound of books tumbling onto Will (What will I do? I wonder. Call 911 and say a mountain of books toppled onto him?) and flip open my books. The first one is some kind of epic poem about the first winter of the Plymouth Plantation, the second is a more traditional history, and the third, practically crumbling in my grasp, seems like some odd combination of the two, serious stories and anecdotes about kraken all mixed up into one. This is the one I decide to look through, and there, in the middle of it, is a list of Boston's first settlers. I look for Blaxtons, but there are none there. And then I decide to look for Stewarts. After all, I think, smiling to myself, my aunts have lived in the townhouse on Beacon Street since the beginning of time.

And then their names are there.

True Stewart

Virtue Stewart

Etherington Stewart

My aunts. And my father. Their names. Right there.

I stare at them for a long time. Coincidence, I think. The Stewarts are an old family, one of Boston's oldest. And the names True, Virtue, Etherington'not exactly modern ones. Maybe old family ones. Maybe recurring, from generation to generation.

I pick up the history and let it fall open where it wants, to a well-worn page in the middle, and it is a portrait of old, dour-looking people. The date of the portrait is 1753. I study it, wondering how many of these people were still alive when the Revolution broke out twenty years later.

I turn the page, and there are my aunts'faces, staring out at me. I blink, startled, but there is no mistaking it. It is them'as much them as a portrait can be. Their wide, deep, dark eyes, sorrowful and ageless under perfectly sculpted dark eyebrows. Their dark hair pulled back from their high foreheads. Their pursed, unsmiling lips. Their sharp cheekbones under unlined, olive skin.