Page 6 of Beneath the Poet's House

Roberto cheers and pumps a fist into the air.

“Maybe just tea,” Saoirse says quickly. She stands and walks her mug over to the sink. “But for now, you’ve got to leave. I need to sleep for about twelve solid hours.”

“Of course.” Mia stands, and Lucretia and Roberto follow suit. Saoirse leads them to the foyer.

“I’ll give you my number,” Saoirse says. “That way you can call before you come over, rather than sneaking into my basement.” She pauses. “Howdidyou get in?”

“The white paneling on the outside of the house,” Roberto says. “Right where the sidewalk starts to incline. Three of the panels are connected and swing outward—if you know where to hold them—into another, albeit hidden, entrance to the walkout basement.” He smiles sheepishly. “If we’re going to be back, can I leave the candles downstairs?”

“Fine,” Saoirse says, shaking her head at his matter-of-fact admission and ushering them toward the door.

“But we can’t take your number,” Lucretia says.

“Why not?”

“We commune with the earth, remember?”

“Huh?”

“We’re one with nature.”

Saoirse gives her a blank stare.

“We don’t carry cell phones,” Lucretia says finally.

Saoirse looks from one face to the next. “None of you have phones? How do you get in touch with each other?”

“Well, wehavephones,” Lucretia says, placing emphasis on the final two words like a disgruntled teenager. “We’re transcendentalists, not monsters. We just don’t carry them around. Mia has a house phone, and Roberto uses an old-school flip one. I have an iPhone, but I put a bunch of content blockers on it so I can’t waste time scrolling on social media.” She shrugs and smiles. “You’ll have to takeournumbers if you want us to come back.”

Saoirse sighs and hands Lucretia her cell phone. Lucretia enters her number and passes it to Roberto, who enters his and passes it to Mia. Mia holds Saoirse’s gaze for a beat before keying in her own number. She thumbs the side button to darken the screen, but when she holds the phone out to Saoirse, the home screen reappears. Mia stares at the photo of Saoirse with Jonathan, the snowcapped mountains behind them, the healthy flush to their cheeks and giddy smiles.

Saoirse waits for Mia to ask who the man is, why he isn’t here with her now, unpacking his things along with her in this house on Benefit Street. But Mia says nothing, thumbs the screen off again, and holds the phone out for Saoirse to take.

“I hope we hear from you,” Mia says.

Saoirse opens the door onto the crisp October night. “Uh-huh” is all she can manage. It’s not even midnight but feels as if it’s three in the morning.

Lucretia squeezes Saoirse’s arm as she walks past. Roberto pulls his sweatshirt hood up when he gets onto the street. “Good night,” he and Lucretia say in unison.

“Night,” Saoirse says. When the door clicks shut, the silence comes to life, rolling toward her from every corner of the house like water unleashed from a dam.

The silence unnerves her far more than the chanting voices of strangers in her basement.

Chapter 3

When Saoirse wakes the next morning, she is half-convinced the events of the previous night were a dream. But when she descends to the kitchen and sees the four unwashed teacups in the sink, smells the lingering traces of bergamot and honey, she knows it was real. “What a bunch of weirdos,” she whispers. Dead poets. Transcendentalism. Nature as God, and God as healer of climate. But then she thinks of the way Lucretia and Roberto made her laugh, and how Mia’s softspoken demeanor calmed her inner turmoil. Would it be all that bad to spend time with people from the city? And writers, no less, around her age?

She pushes the question from her mind, relieved that—with their numbers in her phone and not vice versa—the decision to see them again is up to her. She washes the teacups, places them in the drainer beside the sink, and inspects the cupboards. Aside from a few boxes of tea, the honey, and a dented box of shortbread cookies, the shelves are empty. She’ll need to find the nearest grocery store if she wants any breakfast.

She grabs her phone and sees there’s a Trader Joe’s a mile away. She dresses, fishes her keys from her purse, and is out the door in under ten minutes. The morning is bright, but she senses a note of autumn, like a taste of earth, of fallen leaves, on the back of her tongue. Maybe she’ll pass a farmers market on her way and buy a pumpkin for the front stoop.

She’s halfway to the grocery store, enjoying the sunshine and the historical homes, the beech trees awash with brilliant swirls of color, when she’s struck with something like déjà vu. The Athenæum is up ahead. She knows it, though it’s been fifteen years since she last lived in Providence. Fifteen years since she would leave the halls at Brown where her undergraduate classes were held to visit Jonathan at his job in the two-hundred-year-old library. She doesn’t want to see it. Doesn’t want to recall the quiet evenings they spent there, the whispered conversations over lattes she’d fetch from a nearby café. But her feet keep moving— past the corner market, past the Shunned House of H. P. Lovecraft’s famous horror story, past one of the steepest streets in the city—following an agenda at odds with her earlier desire for breakfast, toward the rusticated stone-and-pillared Greek Revival building she already sees in her mind. Toward the ornate granite fountain below the Athenæum’s main entrance. Toward enshrined memories and book-bound secrets. Toward the past.

Saoirse climbs the steps between twin cast-iron lanterns, ignoring the hypnotic thud of her footsteps. Why has everything lately been reminding her of the night she found Jonathan? She passes through the entrance and stares up at the skylighted ceiling, marble busts peering at her like curious owls. It’s only after she spins in two complete circles, marveling at the stacks of books eighteen shelves high, and a voice comes from her left—“May I help you?”—that she remembers she’d been able to visit Jonathan hereafterhe’d secured her a membership.

“I ...,” she begins, already knowing she will hand over whatever amount this librarian states is the cost, despite there being no allowance for pricey library memberships in her budget. She simply knows that, now here, she has to stay. Has to inhale whatever lingering essence of Jonathan remains. Because even after fifteen years, his essencedoesremain. And in a weird way, that essence helps her understand that he is gone.

Ten minutes later, newly laminated card warming her thigh through the pocket of her jeans, Saoirse wanders through the upstairs stacks,lost in a memory that gives way to another and another and another, memories like dreams that collapse in on themselves and make her dizzy with nostalgia and want and regret. She’d forgotten—until this moment—that she and Jonathan were here when he asked her to “go steady,” a phrase so old-fashioned she’d almost laughed until she saw how terrified he was of her answer. He’d been so unsure of his own charm, possessed of the nonsensical belief that, because everyone at Brown was intelligent, he was unable to claim intelligence as a defining trait, at least for the duration of his time at the university. And he’d beenbackat Brown then, for a master’s degree in history, having gotten his BA five years earlier. Saoirse found his lack of vanity—lack of confidence, really—strangely attractive. Until twelve years later, of course, when it was anything but. When it manifested as a need for control. For the last word. For power.

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