Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Eventually, Dick emerged from the kitchen carrying a brown plastic tray with a tin coffeepot, three cups and some oblong cookies smeared with white frosting arranged on a plate. His boots never left the floor. He pushed his feet forward like a child on skates for the first time, his eyes fixed on the cups, his hands trembling. The room had no table on which to lower the tray, but Dick clearly had his next move planned. He came to a full stop and began to bend his knees a little at a time. Once he had lowered himself about six inches, he held the position for a couple of seconds as if to confirm that he had gone that far, bent over and abruptly set the tray on the floor. Cups clinked, cookies slid, but the tray was stabilized in a spot beside one of the toasters. Without standing up, Dick started the business of pouring coffee. He handed her a cup, and Lily looked into the black liquid. Grease bubbles floated on its surface, but she brought the dirty cup to her lips and drank. It didn’t taste bad — a little oily, but strong and good.

Dick watched her intently. “Egg,” he said.

“Pardon me?” Lily shouted.

Frank shouted back at her. “There’s an egg in the coffee!”

Dick nodded. He righted himself and poked the cookie plate under her nose. Lily took a cookie.

Once they had settled themselves with the coffee and cookies, Lily roared at Dick, “I don’t understand. You couldn’t have seen me here last night. I wasn’t here.”

Dick nodded, but Lily wasn’t sure what the nod meant, whether he was signaling that he had heard her or that he agreed with her. He spoke in that odd voice of his. “I seen Marty carryin’ you across the field and over the road.”

“What?” Lily said, but not loudly enough. Then she corrected herself and yelled, “Marty?”

“Marty Petersen from down the road,” Frank said.

“Yesterday?” Lily said.

Dick continued, his eyes on the window. Slowly he extended his arms in front of him, his elbows bent. Lily watched the coffee cup in his right hand tip dangerously. “I seen Marty carryin’ you like you was fainted or…” He didn’t finish but lowered his arms without spilling and then rubbed the cup with both hands. “It was you,” he said to the window. “I seen your eyes and face and hair. I called to him.” Dick changed his voice. “‘Mar-ty!’ I says. ‘Who you got there? Come back, Marty,’ but he din’t answer me. He walks on ’cross the road and down by the creek and into the woods. I ain’t got the legs to run no more, so I goes into Frank and tells him what I seen.” Dick glanced at Lily for an instant, then fixed his eyes on the window again. He nodded, squinted, turned back to her and said, “But here you are in the peak of health.”

Lily leaned forward and stared at Dick. “What time was it?”

Dick looked at Frank, his face a question.

Frank said, “I’d say early evenin’. Wasn’t dark yet.”

Both men were silent. Lily looked from one to the other. It was crazy. The whole thing was nuts. She waited for them to speak.

Neither one said a word for at least half a minute. Then Frank took a breath and said, “Well, that’s that.”

Lily stared at Frank and swallowed. He gave a little push and raised himself from the chair, then started for the kitchen. This was her cue to leave, and she didn’t feel she could ignore it. She set her cup carefully on the floor, nodded at Dick, who didn’t respond, and then followed Frank to the door.

She tried again. “It must have been someone else,” she said. “And if it was someone else, it could be, well…” She didn’t finish that sentence but added another. “I don’t think we can just let it drop like this.” Lily hugged the bag with the shoes in it and looked down at the floor. Frank’s boots had left prints on the linoleum, which was already thick with mud.

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he opened the screen door and held it ajar for her.

Lily walked outside, turned on the stone step and looked at him. “Mr. Bodler,” she said. “If you see anything else, will you promise to call me? I can leave you my number.”

He let the screen door slam shut and eyed her through it. “Ain’t got no phone.”

Everybody has a phone, Lily thought. It doesn’t matter how poor you are. Everybody’s got a telephone.

Frank put his nose close to the screen. “It’s Dick,” he said in a confidential tone that surprised her. “Don’t like ’em, don’t like hearin’ those faraway voices without no bodies. Even before he lost his hearin’, he din’t like it.” Frank shook his head at Lily. “Said it was like talkin’ to a spirit, and what’s the sense of aggravatin’ him with that? We had one. Sold it to Pete Lund. He collects them old phones, and we got a good price for it. Don’t miss it neither. Folks come here or we go there, don’t matter.”

Lily nodded at him. “I see,” she said. “Good-bye, then.”

The man did not say good-bye. Neither brother seemed able to punctuate comings and goings in the usual way, and Lily found the absence of these words unnerving. She watched Frank turn, move across the kitchen floor and disappear. Then, instead of walking to her bicycle, she took a right and headed for the woods behind the house.

Lily chose a spot at the foot of a small cliff that followed the creek. The place was deeply familiar to her. As a child, she had roamed up and down Heath Creek, and the landscape had lived inside her ever since. Still, as she stood at the edge of the steep bank overlooking the water, she felt a change. It had been years since she had visited this spot, and it appeared to have shrunk. It took her several seconds before she realized it was she who had grown and that her new height had changed the proportions of everything else. The current of the swollen creek pushed at countless stalks of snake grass that bent over the water. The light through the trees glinted unevenly on the gray water. After she scrambled down the earth wall, she kneeled near the place she had picked out and dug with her hands. The soggy ground loosened easily, and when the hole was finished, she lifted the shoes from her bag, still wrapped in the cloth, and laid them gently inside it. After pressing them firmly into the hole, she pushed the wet dirt over them and fussed for a few minutes with the look of the surface, patting and smoothing until the spot was round and even. She examined her work, then leaned back on the wet ground and closed her eyes. She heard a woodpecker — a distant dull hammering, then a rustle of foliage from above. Lily looked sharply toward the noise, her ears straining to hear more. Leaves moved, a branch snapped. Would Frank have followed me? she thought. She stared at the cliff. It was one thing to get down, another to get up. If someone was there, by the time she crawled to the top, he would be long gone. She stood up, brushed her filthy hands on her shorts, stamped the mud off her sneakers and stared at the spot. Before she left, she found a smooth, oblong stone and put it there to mark the place.

Grabbing roots to steady herself as she dug her toes into the cliff, Lily scrambled to the top. She imagined Dick chasing Martin across the field on his short, stiff legs, and then Martin carrying a young woman in his arms, a woman with long dark hair like her own. There had to be a resemblance for Dick to make that mistake. Once she had scaled the cliff and was standing at the top, she looked beyond the house into the field and asked herself how it was possible that Dick, slow as he was, hadn’t managed to catch up with Martin. Martin had been carrying somebody, hadn’t he, so how fast could he run? Or maybe Dick had hallucinated the whole thing. Lily walked to her bike and pushed it up to the road. “She’s not alive,” Lily remembered Martin’s words and looked up at the sky. The cool wind blew against her face and then she heard a sound in the grass to her right. A brown rabbit darted past her and she watched him until he disappeared behind a hillock.