Chapter 11. Upstairs
Catch the last chapter of the year!
Greetings, dear Comrades, Colleagues, Relatives, Neighbors and Friends!
This is the final installment of Rainwood House Sings for this year. I will begin publishing it again in the New Year.
Rainwood House Sings is an example of Fiction Featuring Activists. (Follow this link to my articles and reviews on this category of fiction). I will be writing more next year about the representation of activists and social movements in fiction, and sharing my growing Fiction Featuring Activists List.
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In the Comments section of this (or any other) post, please share your suggestions of novels, movies, plays, TV shows, narrative games, or other fiction where activists are portrayed in key roles. If they meet the criteria I will add them to the (upcoming) FFA List. To Comment (and to Like and Share) click on the icons at the top or bottom of this email, or on the title. This will take you to Substack. Forgive the stuff you often have to wade through to log in to your Subscriber account—I didn’t put it there! I believe access is easier on the app, if you care to download it.
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We live in the belly of the beast of injustice, yet we can still have joy, community, beauty, and solidarity, which is what I wish you for the holidays and always.
And now, back to our story…
Cole Benson seems unusually tired, Marlie thinks, seeing her visitor grasp the knob of the brass bedstead like the head of a cane. She recalls his remark about coming off the bus, presumably after visiting his grandmother on the Eastern Shore. Her family occasionally had outings to nearby Chesapeake Bay beaches when she was a child. She and her brother waded and played in the sand while her father and other men from Mexico fished. When they returned home in the evening, her mother cooked up tasty pescado frito con ensalada y papas. A pleasant trip, and not that far away, she thinks, eyeing him thoughtfully. Maybe he just doesn’t travel well.
A tiny bare fluorescent bulb hangs from the low peak of the dormer. Its reflection floats in the blackness of the window like a curled white worm. Marley gazes at it and sighs. Why not accept this gift from the universe and just let him stay?
Demetrius watches Marlie’s mobile face, willing himself to appear safe, friendly, nonchalant.
She appears on the verge of offering him the room. Then a thought seems to cross her mind like a wisp of cloud passing over the moon. She says, “I should ask you for a reference.”
“A reference?” His voice squeaks. In a more neutral tone, he repeats, “A reference.”
“Well, yes, a reference. Isn’t that customary?”
He nods vigorously. “Of course! Those friends I had the collective with would be good references, but they’re, um, out of the country right now.” The twins would be quick on their feet with answers, but it wasn’t safe to contact them.
“Count on me to fish you out of the pond like an old boot,” Granny Gus’s voice sounds in his head. They couldn’t have already bugged her landline way out in the country, could they? He’d have to take the risk. “You can call my grandmother on the Eastern Shore. I lived with her from age nine through nineteen, so she’s an expert on me as a housemate. But it will have to be tomorrow. She goes to bed early.” That’s true, though what he really wants is time to alert her.
Marlie nods, though Demetrius notes a slight crease in her brow.
“Good,” he says briskly. After a pause, he adds, “I guess I’ll go sleep in a hotel for tonight.” The cement bag in the basement, he thinks miserably.
Marlie continues staring out into the dark to hide her indecision. A hotel? She can’t recall any in the neighborhood. It’s late, and he has no car. She coughs to drown out her daughter’s cautionary voice in her ear. He seems harmless; no, actively good-willed. Why not let him stay, even if it turns out just to be for this one night?
A flock of scary images flies across her mind: Charles Manson. The hitchhiker who killed that family. That guy pretending to be hurt who convinced a DC couple to let him in and then murdered them. She scowls at her reflection in the window. It is so easy to become paralyzed with fear.
“Mami, not wanting a complete stranger to sleep in your home doesn’t mean you’re paralyzed with fear!” Marlie hears Vivi’s voice say this so clearly she replies aloud, “I know, hija, but I think it will be okay if he stays tonight.”
“I would really appreciate it.” The man gives her a hopeful smile. “Why don’t I pay you the rent now, and then you can return the balance if I don’t end up moving in?”
An offering of trust, she decides, and nods.
Marlie watches Cole extract a roll of bills from a little bag and count out five hundreds. She pockets the money with an austere nod she wishes Vivi could see, then smiles. “Hold on.” She picks up a notebook, scrawls a few words, rips out the sheet and hands it to him. “Your receipt.” She smiles proudly, then hurries back into the enormous closet, emerging with a pile of folded sheets and blankets. “For tonight you can sleep downstairs on the kitchen couch. It’s not very long, but then, neither are you. I mean,” she stammers, “I’m not, either. Shortness has its advantages, no?”
Demetrius nods groggily and hugs the soft bundle, barely refraining from plopping his head down on it.
“I gave you three blankets. I don’t know how warm a sleeper you are.” Her face reddens. “Sorry, I don’t have an extra pillow.”
“No worries,” he mumbles.
“How about using a rolled-up towel? You do have a towel?”
“Forgot to consult my Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” he nearly says, recalling the wacky sci-fi novel’s recommendations to travelers: “always carry a towel” and “don’t panic”—both of which he has failed to follow. He merely shakes his head, however, fearing to set off another round of talk about science fiction, or travel, or panic. “No worries, I’ll buy a towel and pillow and all that tomorrow. I mean,” he adds, “I need to buy them no matter where I end up staying.” He feels his skin sagging off his face like an old sheet.
Chirps and croaks serenade them as they descend the stairs, like cicadas and frogs singing out on the Eastern Shore.
Back upstairs, after leaving Cole in the kitchen to settle his bedding on the couch, Marlie steps through her bedroom door and halts as if she’s hit a solid wall. She stands frozen for a moment, then rushes in, grabs her pillow and the old sweat-suit she sleeps in, and hurries next door to Samantha’s room and begins yanking off her clothes.
Sleeping with Samantha will give her peace of mind, she tells herself. Vivi would expect her to be extra protective with a stranger staying in the house. Anyway, that bedroom is not really hers anymore, not if the grandmother gives Cole a good reference. But of course she will—the guy is her grandson. Marlie bites her lip. Is it stupid to accept a close family member as a reference?
She mulls this over as she pulls on her sweatpants in the darkness of Samantha’s room. Cole Benson seems like a good person. Samantha likes him. He works with plants, has progressive politics, a sense of humor. He has experience with cooking, ideas about the pipes, and even tolerates bats. Could he have faked those things for some nefarious reason? Why would anyone bother to do that?
Marlie doesn’t believe a grand scheme or power runs the universe, much less that anyone special is looking out for her, but she does harbor a sneaky hope that the more benign natural forces out there might sometimes swirl by on a quick visit.
She tiptoes to the bed and gently pulls back the covers. The cloudy night sky glimmers through a gap in the curtain, revealing that Samantha has put on her flannel hippopotamus pajamas. Marlie pictures thoughts of hippos unfurling in her granddaughter’s mind, mixing with the other interesting offerings of the day.
Smiling in the dark, she shoves the crowd of stuffed animals aside to make room for her pillow, and clambers into the bed.
Samantha speaks in the darkness. “Abue?”
“Sí, chulita, it’s me,” Marlie whispers. “Sorry to wake you.”
“Are you sleeping with me?”
“Sí, mi amor.”
“Yay!” Samantha’s hands and feet churn up and down under the blankets. “So Duke Cole is staying?”
“For tonight, anyway.”
“Yay!” More flailing of feet.
“Nena, you’re messing up the bed!” Marlie sinks to the pillow, pulls the covers over both of them, and snuggles close to the girl. “You’re a gusanito wiggle worm, but, yes, I’m glad too.”
Samantha sighs happily and stares out into the night sky beyond the window, feeling her grandmother’s warmth beside her. The tie-dye sheet curtain doesn’t fully cover the window, and at the corner she can see the sky full of big billowy clouds. She turns to face her Abue and sees the brightness of the clouds glowing deep in her grandmother’s black eyes. “Abue,” Samantha asks. “Why did you make me sleep by myself?” In California, Samantha always sleeps with her Mami Vivi and the rest of the Whose Streets? Our Streets! troupe. While she and her mother were at Rainwood House recovering from their bad sickness, Samantha remembers, they slept together in this bed.
After her mother went back to California but Samantha stayed at Rainwood House because of health and school, she kept on sleeping in this same room, but only with Georgina, Luellen, Mushy, Snake, and Pig. And of course Detective Drunella and Rainwood House herself, each real but invisible in their own ways. Her Abue slept alone in the next room.
Marlie feels a pang. “I thought you’d like staying in this room, so you could have, um, privacy. And space for your animals.” She pats the long-legged rabbit, draped over Samantha’s shoulders. Privacy and space are overrated, in Marlie’s opinion, but that’s the American way. She sighs. “I suppose I wanted you to feel normal.”
“I am normal!”
“Of course you are, amor. Maybe I was wrong.” Marlie wraps both arms around the girl and gives her a squeeze.
Samantha snuggles up close and is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I think it was a little lonely.”
“Oh, chulita, I’m sorry. I should have asked you about it.”
“That’s okay, Abue.”
“Well, I don’t know if it was okay, mi amor, but now we’ll do it differently.”
“Okay.”
Samantha turns onto her back, her head resting on Marlie’s arm. Marlie hears the child’s slow breathing, but a faint gleam reveals her eyes are still open. After a long silence, Samantha speaks again.
“Abue?”
“Mmm?”
“Sometimes Rainwood House air feels a little, um, thick.”
“Thick?” Marlie raises herself on an elbow to look at her granddaughter.
“Yeah, like...” Samantha pauses. “Like with opinions about things.”
“You mean the House has opinions?”
Samantha nods, her hair rubbing against Marlie’s arm.
“But not bad ones?”
“’Course not!” Samantha shakes her head vigorously. “My Rainwood House is sweet as chocolate!”
Marlie gives Samantha a squeeze. “I think so, too, amor.” In the darkness, she tries to catch Samantha’s eye. “Chulita, let’s promise to tell each other right away if something doesn’t seem right, about the House or anything else, even if we’re not sure what it is, or not sure that it’s right or not.” Her words are getting tangled as sleep tugs on her, but she hopes Samantha gets the gist.
“Okay, Abue,” Samantha says, her voice fading.
Marlie pulls her close. It feels beautifully cozy to curl up together like mice in their little corner of the big house.
Then she opens her eyes. ‘Mice’ sounds so vulnerable. Is it reckless to let a stranger sleep in the house? Her groggy mind drags her back to Mexico. In the late seventies and early eighties, when she went back to her country to study at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología and got involved in the Movimiento Estudiantil, the government cracked down harshly on leftist political and student groups, including ones she and her friends participated in. Things didn’t get as bad as some other places in Latin America, but plenty bad enough. Helicopters prowled the skies. Police barged into people’s houses, made them pay bribes, hauled off family members.
She feels a touch of the dread that flooded through her when the helicopter woke her early that very morning, the same dread that had sat like a stone in her stomach during that time in Mexico, when she never knew for certain what was safe to do or say or whom to trust—particularly her own judgment.
Creaking stairs will warn her if anyone comes up here in the night, she tells herself. Which won’t happen, of course.
Still, her eyes won’t close.
She unweaves her arms from Samantha’s sleeping form and crawls out of bed, fumbling across the room to the low table piled with books and drawing materials. Picking up six or seven hardback picture books, she stacks them against the door, with the top two balanced at the edge of the pile. If anyone tries to open the door—not that anyone will—they will topple immediately and the crash will wake her up.
Feeling pleased with her booby trap, Marlie lays down again and cuddles close to Samantha. Despite the extra coffee and excitement, she goes right to sleep.