“No,” she snaps, rising to leave. “I’m staying here. Tom needs me . . .”
Maren nods. She can tell Aurelia is agitated, but isn’t sure why. She proceeds with caution. “Tell me, is there any particular place in the house that you can hear these voices?”
Aurelia sighs and flicks her long blonde hair over one shoulder. “The basement.”
“I see. The reason I ask is because this house . . . it has an extremely old ventilation system, as you’ll know. I, too, have heard voices.”
Aurelia turns her head, stares Maren straight in the eye. “You have?”
Maren nods, gives a reassuring smile. “Yes. Also in the basement. And sometimes in the kitchen. The vents make a noise. Do you think it could have been that?” She pauses, determined to keep her tone light, inoffensive. “Or something else?”
Aurelia draws a deep breath. Could it be that she’s just been hearing the moans of old vents? No, she thinks. No. She has heard the voice of a woman, not the moan of a vent. Certainly the house is noisy. But she has seen things, too. Ghosts, she thinks. A woman in the kitchen, standing with her face to the window. A woman without eyes.
But she doesn’t want to admit this. Not now. She feels like she’s losing her mind. Ghosts. Ha! She is losing her mind.
“Yes,” she says finally, not making eye contact. “It must have been the vents.”
“You know, my sister had hair like yours,” Maren says, reaching out to stroke it. “I used to plait it for her at night. It was to keep it from getting tangled, but the brushstrokes soothed her, helped her sleep.” She looks at Aurelia with tenderness. “Would you like me to plait yours?”
Aurelia nods. She realizes how much she has missed her mother in the aftermath of giving birth. Not her mother, exactly, with her compulsion to turn every conversation into a tirade of complaints against Aurelia’s father, but a mother. In the moment of becoming a mother she craved to be mothered, to be handled with tenderness. Her body feels so bruised and battered. As does her mind.
She sits in the chair, her hands folded in her lap and her shoulders rounded, as Maren picks up a flat brush and draws it down Aurelia’s crown to the tips of her hair, which lie just beneath the strap of her maternity bra. Maren spends a long time brushing like this, smoothing out the kinks and the knots before beginning to divide the hair in three at the crown and braiding it carefully. Aurelia closes her eyes and enjoys the sensation of touch without anything being wanted in return. It’s such an unusual feeling, these days, to be touched without expectation of milk, food, or love. Just to be held, to be cradled and soothed, is a temporary light in all her dark places.
* * *
—
Outside, a storm is breaking, rattling all the doors of Granhus. Rain overwhelms the drainpipes, gushing down the windows in torrents. Tom rushes outside to secure the tarp across Basecamp’s incomplete roof, and even as he trudges through muddy flash floods funneling down the hill, he knows water damage is the least of his worries. The ground has turned to a swamp, right where Basecamp is built. A dramatic zigzag of lightning crackles across the sky, lighting up the trees and sending creatures scurrying for shelter. Tom is drenched to the skin, wind pummeling his ribs. His hands shake as his tries to turn on the flashlight on his phone to survey Basecamp’s foundations. It is pitch-black, but what he sees makes his jaw drop—the river is rising directly beneath the house, bubbling up around the pilings.
He tries to tell himself that it will be fine, the house is on pilings, the river will pour down over the cliff. The storm will pass and they’ll fix the damage. But by morning, Basecamp will be destroyed.
* * *
—
When Aurelia finally falls asleep she plunges into harrowing, vivid scenes that seem more than dreams.
She is standing at the foot of the fjord.
The tidewaters are a silver mirror; the sky is overcast. Mists marble and drift over the fjord. She turns and surveys the black cliffs that stretch all the way to the sky. Pretty white flowers are growing out of the cracks, but it’s the stones that interest her enough to bend and collect them in her hands. Velvety blue stones, the color of jewels. An amalgam of stone and