IT HAS TO GO OFF

Father had a 1902 model rifle Cartwright .22; the type of antiquated rifle that some proto-boy scout might have used as the beginning of the century gradually gained inertia. The handle was smoothed and red as cherry wood, and the trigger curved gracefully like a swan’s neck in the moments before it is broken. When I was a little girl, I would pretend the thing was a queer kind of bird, if birds could be wrought from metal and polished, rose-colored boughs. My father had inherited it from his father, and so it encompassed a certain nostalgic value, I assume.

Anyways, guns are rather intimate objects. They create strange bond between the one who fires the offending bullet, and the recipient. The sound of the shot is enough to startle even the most unflappable creature out of their apathetic stupor, as though to say—this is what you have done. Even if you cannot feel it, you can hear it. When I was nineteen, my older brother Anton took the rifle from its mahogany case, and walked it up the stairs to his room in the east wing. He closed the door to his room gently—so gently I did not hear it across the hall. And then he locked it.

And then the thing went off. Even though I couldn’t feel it, I heard it. And that was the end of that.

* * *

After the suicide, mother said it might be beneficial for me to go and stay with some other more suitable relation. This was not meant to be particularly motherly or compassionate in any way; it was more so a jab at my father, whom she had detested for however long they had been divorced. For context, he was her first husband, and she was his third wife (and so she had not yet learned the valuable lesson that replacement of a mourned object is often more satisfactory than the affliction of pure melancholia, just as he had not learned anything past the age of five, having become a malignant narcissist by that time).

In any case, the suggestion did not sound particularly helpful to me, regardless of its motives given that no matter whom I lived with, Anton would still be dead.

“I could come stay with you I guess? We could go back to Connecticut together after the funeral,” I proffered in the most clueless sounding voice I could muster.

“Oh heavens no. That won’t be possible. Not with everything going on with the remodel” she paused, sounding perturbed before adding excitedly, as though finally grasping upon an excuse that made her seem a little more humane, “seeing you will just remind me of him, obviously. I can’t deal with that right now”.

“God, how silly of me. You’re completely right. I’ve been so mixed up lately”, I murmured comfortingly into the receiver. That would shut her up. Pretending to be stupid is often the most intelligent thing to do in any given situation.

“Oh yes” she responded vaguely, “This must be rather hard for you. The bond between siblings is such a special, special thing. As a mother—“ she began, working herself up into what was sure to be a crescendo of affect and emotion, before a voice in the background interrupted and cut her off.

“Darling, Douglas just came back from the meeting with the contractor—I have to go. You’ll be okay until I fly down?” she muttered before the line went dead. Douglas was her ex-pool boy. They had been casually dating, but apparently he was reluctant to put a label on things. I could not imagine why.

* * *

The fact of the matter was that Anton had decided to end his own life, very deliberately from what we could ascertain from the police reports. I had not been the one to find him—that honor had been reserved for the maid, who had swiftly collected the only spare set of master-keys from the groundskeeper when I found I could not open the door to Anton’s rooms—and made me promise to wait in my room until she could be sure everyone was alright. Obviously, everyone was not all right.

Later on, I had stared vaguely the French windows of his chambers. He was twenty-one, and to everyone’s knowledge, in fine health and control of his mental faculties. The house was confused by the fact that he had neglected to leave a note explaining why he had acted in such an impulsive and bizarre manner.

In actuality, there had been a note. A single note with a single recipient. I had found it under my pillow, scrawled carefully in the familiar handwriting, upon my own stationary, which had been specially ordered from Italy. What a rush of blood to the head.

It contained two words, written with annoying clarity and precision.

Your turn.

I replaced the note under my pillow and fell asleep almost immediately, knowing as I did so that there would be no dreams that night.

* * *

The funeral was scheduled for a Saturday. Mother had been meant to fly into Los Angeles the evening before, but had decided to take a later plane and so ended up missing the first fifteen minutes of the service. Father was drunk in the front pew, squinting blearily at the coffin in the center of the room. My stepmother, Lydia, was trying to wrangle the smaller children, her blonde hair in an elegant chignon, but her face pink with annoyance. She should never have been a mother. We all knew that the children, my half-siblings, existed only because she required an airtight insurance for when father inevitably left her for a younger model. About half way through the memorial montage, I deserted the dreary chapel in favor of the fresh air.

Besides, graveyards had never frightened me, as long as they were interesting. The more elaborate and bizarre the headstones, the better I felt. For how could death be real among the lofty sepulchers, the weeping marble angels? Everything covered in lichen, everything so dreadfully physical and green and far away.

A thought appeared in my mind unbidden. Three words, circulating in a terrible repetition.

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

A small hand suddenly gripped mine and pulled hard. I turned to see Arabella, grasping my fingers with all the tightness her five-year-old self could muster. Closely behind her trailed Atticus. They had apparently escaped Lydia’s clutches.

“Sissy”, Arabella muttered in her singsong voice, looking more like a doll than a human child in her stiff black dress and glossy miniature shoes.

“What?”

“Anton is gone forever. Tell Atty. He doesn’t believe it, because he’s a stupid baby. He thinks he's coming back. Tell him he’s wrong”. She smiled garishly at me, and for a moment I was caught in the small, whiteness of her teeth, the barbarity of her electric blue eyes.

“We all grieve in different ways, I suppose”, I murmured, extending a hand to Atticus as he waddled towards us.

“Avey”, Atticus smiled, his gums pink like a clam. He was dressed in a toddler’s suit, the picture of absurdity. Although he could not actually pronounce my name, I appreciated the attempt. His sister had at various phases of development called me “girl”, “woman”, or “sissy”. Despite this faux pas I attempted to keep an eye on her whenever Lydia had had enough, which was most of the time.

“Shall we go look at the trees next to the chapel? Maybe we will find some dryads to talk to?” I offered, giving them both a faint smile.

“Dryads?” Arabella asked, her brows drawn together skeptically.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of dryads Ms. Arabella Cartwright? They inhabit the trees and occasionally will become visible to the very perceptive. Surely you and Atty must have seen them loads of times."

* * *

It was not as though the two of us had made any sort of pact—not really. Although to be fair, from my earliest memories, I had taken after Anton with a kind of fervor unmatched in any of my other pursuits. When he stopped eating meat in kindergarten, but father refused to let the chef cook him anything but steak on Friday evenings (an odd family tradition I cannot explain with any conviction), I went on a hunger strike in solidarity—a largely ineffectual one given that my will was still that of a toddler’s—fickle in the best of times. When mother and father divorced, and Anton decided to live with father in spite of everything, I assumed he had his reasons and followed suit. Besides, mother did not seem to have room for children in her wild, new life. When Arabella and Atticus were born, and my initial instinct was to let them fend for themselves, as Anton and I had from our babyhoods, he would make me spend hours with them in the nursery, reading them stupid baby books and doing crafts. I suppose it grew on me.

He had gone to college at Yale instead of Harvard, and so I had determined I would as well. It was the summer before junior year, while I was home, that Anton decided to pull his latest stunt.

We had never talked much about the family business, beyond that which was expressly necessary. There was an older half-brother who would presumably take over father’s role amongst the shareholders whenever he grew tired of the prestige and opulence, and so Anton and I were essentially off the hook. But it was always there in the background. Our money came from guns—everyone knew that. And then there were the guns themselves, littered all over the house like macabre decorations. I had been afraid of them as a child—worried one might accidentally go off in the night and shoot me. But father assured me most of them were unloaded.

In truth, the only gun he cared about was the 1902 model. That was the only one he kept up with any degree of scrutiny, because as I’ve mentioned it was his father’s. After we were very sure of what had happened with Anton, father insisted that the rifle be professionally cleaned and repaired in the event that firing after such a long period of disuse had damaged it in any way.

About a week after the suicide, I decided that I would be willing to see Anton’s ghost. I meditated on it one evening before bed, staring out the French windows in my room onto the manicured lawns below. That night, I lingered in a space between waking and sleep to no avail. In the morning I awoke with no remembrance of any dreams whatsoever—those containing Anton or otherwise. This failure came as somewhat of a disappointment to me, given the nature of our family history. A number of people are familiar with the “Cartwright Mystery House”, and the various home renovations, which my distant ancestor Lizzy Cartwright oversaw on the property until her eventual death in the 1920s. Anton and I had visited on a few occasions with mother when we were very small, under the premise of learning about “family history”. Mother would complain about how our grandfather should have done a better job of keeping the money and property in the family, as though we hadn’t enough of it. Father eventually put a stop to that, as he put a stop to all silly and frivolous things that might have amused children in his vicinity.

Mother told us that the house was allegedly haunted by the spirits of those who had been murdered by our families’ ruthless pursuit of what became a Repeating Arms Fortune. By the guns sold under our name. That the haphazard layout of the house was evidence of Lizzy’s madness, torment, and guilt—and was built specifically to house those not at peace with their own violent ends.

“She wasn’t a damn architect was she?” Father drawled one night after Anton and I returned from San Jose as children, “Of course there are staircases leading nowhere and doors opening out off the second story. What do you expect when you let a woman design anything? Ghosts aren’t the issue, the issue is eccentricity and feminism.”

Although I had swallowed this readily enough, Anton had always insisted he had seen apparitions as a child, some even before I was born. I thought perhaps, somewhere in the darkest parts of my mind, that I might see them too, if I ever desired it. But of course I had never had reason to. Not until Anton had decided to fly off the handle.

The question, eventually, became whether or not I was going to follow Anton off into the last great frontier. The answer seemed easy enough. He had always been the feeling one out of the two of us. I had nothing much to live for, besides him, and the little tasks he came up with to get me through the day.

And yet I remained alive, weeks after finding the note. At first, I told myself it was because I needed to wait until the gun was back from the cleaners. And then, the excuse became that Father had hidden the bullets somewhere separately, and it would take time to discover this hiding place, or to acquire my own ammunition.

Perhaps I was afraid of death, I considered, one night over dinner with the littler children. I interrogated that thought quite thoroughly, and found it to be baseless. I feared nothing, for I had never really existed.

Arabella reclined in my lap, glowering at the ceiling of the dining room. Atticus was stuffing his face with mashed potatoes, and Lydia was nowhere to be found. I ran my fingers through the girl’s hair as she continued to scowl vaguely at nothing in particular.

“I saw Anton, today,” Atticus shouted, spewing potato all over the table, apparently jealous of the attention I was affording his sister.

“Oh?” I asked, eyes caught on a chunk of potato and saliva that had narrowly missed my own empty plate.

“He walked into my room and I showed him all my army men!” he elaborated returning his attention to his unfinished dinner.

“Did he say anything to you?” I inquired as Arabella jerked up, face contorted with childish menace.

“Don’t listen to him. He’s a liar and a baby. Why would Anton care about his stupid baby toys?” she howled, her face radiating pink. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged at her.

“I really saw him, I swear” Atty slurred, beginning to tear up from his seat across the table, “He didn’t say any-fing, just played with me”.

“Ah, I see. Well that does sound like him”, I acquiesced at last.

That night, I took the note again from under my pillow case, and tore it into little pieces.