Why didn’t he just write? she thinks, digging her thumbs into the soft space above her eyes. Perhaps he was like Matthew. And yet, he could discern her mother’s hand well enough to answer. She imagines Grace Prior poring over the illustrations. She was clearly able to decipher them.
Olivia will, too.
She brushes her hand over her father’s work, the ink as thin and wild as watercolor.
It is like watching clouds, trying to spot the shapes as they drift past, each one something and nothing at the same time, a promise of a picture more than the picture itself, but the longer she looks, the more her vision blurs, and the more her vision blurs, the more she seems to notice. Soon she stops trying to read the lines as shapes, and they become gestures. The images unfurl into sentiments. It is the difference between a language spoken and one signed, the mouth shaping words while the hands shape more, words and thoughts and feelings.
In her father’s gestures, she reads relief and sadness, hope and longing.
There are pieces she doesn’t understand, fragments that seem to dip out of reach, but it is a start. It is the first glimpse of a father she has never known, the ghost of him impressed on paper.
Olivia stops and stretches, feeling stiff. How long has she been at this? The rain is little more than mist now, and her eyes have begun to ache, so she closes the journal, running her hand almost absently over the twin grooves scraped into the front. And then, to her surprise, a ghostly hand falls over hers, and through. The ghoul’s touch is nothing, a cool shadow—still, she jumps, jerking back on instinct, only to realize it wasn’t reaching for her. Instead, its too-thin fingers drag through the air, tracing the same grooves in the cover of the book before drifting away. Olivia follows the ghoul’s hand to the window, where it rests against the glass.
Olivia cannot help herself. She looks straight at her mother’s ghoul, then, and for a moment—only a moment—she sees Grace Prior, interrupted here and there by the watery gray light, her face where it shows a mask of sadness, eyes focused on the world beyond the window. At the garden. At the wall.
For a moment—only a moment—before the weight of Olivia’s gaze grows too heavy, and the ghoul wavers and disappears.
Olivia leans forward, following the path those fingers made, from the journal to the window, where they hovered on the glass. As if reaching or pointing toward the garden and the wall.
Her gaze drops again to the dented green cover, those twin lines tugging something in her skull. She reaches for her sketchpad, turning through until she finds a drawing she made of the door in the wall, of the dark iron and its vine-shaped handle, of the gap where metal door met the surrounding stone. At the two bolts that stuck out, roughly the same distance apart as the marks on the front of the journal.
And then she’s up and on her feet, moving through the house.
Past the sitting room where Hannah snores before a dying fire, and up the stairs. Down the hall—Matthew’s door still shut—and into her mother’s room. She finds a pair of yellow galoshes in the back of the wardrobe, stuffing socks into the toes until they fit, leaves the sketchpad on the bed, and tucks the red journal under her pillow, taking only the green one with her.
It’s still light out, though for how long she can’t be sure, so she moves briskly through the house and out the garden door.
The rain has stopped, but the wind is up and the air is wet, and the clouds still hang heavy and low, their undersides dark with the promise of another storm. She presses the journal against her front as she trudges past the roses and down the slope to the wall, slowing only when the door comes into sight.
Last night I went beyond the wall. And I met Death.
But her mother met her father, too.
Somehow, despite the weather, the door isn’t even wet. The stone wall leans forward, just enough that the metal has stayed dry, and if Olivia weren’t so consumed with her quest, she might think it strange, might add it to the way the shadows bent, even when the sun was out, to the cold air that gathers against the stone like mist.
A ghoul shudders at the orchard’s edge. Not the old man, but her uncle, or at least, the pieces of him. She draws the rest in her mind, imagines him not as a specter, but a man, leaning, arms crossed against the nearest tree. The ghoul stares at her, and she stares back, but it doesn’t dissolve under her gaze. It takes a step toward her, and Olivia finds herself thinking, Stop, thinking, Stay there, and to her surprise, it does.
The ghoul’s face twitches, and it shifts back into the shadow of the trees, leaving her alone before the wall.