The boy took a step closer. He seemed pleased when Franklin neither retreated nor told him to stay away.
“Where would you go?”
“Not far.”
“You wish to leave.”
“No!” The boy giggled. “I’ll never leave!”
The more Franklin kept his eyes on the boy the louder the second voice grew in his thinking.
Did the child have to be devilry? The dead rose from time to time in the Bible, did they not? Lazarus. Jesus. Couldn’t this be such a case? He was aware of the facts against it. He’d watched his boy die, tried to lift him up and felt him come undone, his sweet head damaged beyond all fixing.
Yet here he was. Proof that questions lingered.
Was God real? Was he kind? Did he know how broken Franklin’s heart was, how heavy the strain of keeping his country together when so much conspired to tear it apart? Who other than God had the power to bring his boy back?
“Why do you need my permission?” Franklin said.
“I only do as I’m told. I’m a good boy, Papa.”
He saw it then. A part of this boy who truly was Bennie. How could that be? Perhaps it was that his son’s spirit had been commandeered. Perhaps this wasn’t a trick. It was an opportunity. A miracle in waiting.
It made him remember himself as a child, as a man, a father: Franklin had always tried to figure out ways to be loved. Yet his son Bennie simply loved.
Where did the boy come to it, this ease of feeling? Not from Franklin, certainly. And not Jane, who felt deeply but translated its excess into pains and aversions.
Now here was a way to go back. To love as openly as he ought to have done from the start. Not many men were lucky enough to stare at it as he was doing now. A second chance.
“Papa? Please?”
It was exhaustion that made him do it. He was tired of having people stolen from him. He was tired of being lost, sounding lost even in his most strident speeches to Congress and letters to foreign leaders. More than anything, Franklin was tired of not being a father anymore.
He went to the door. The general stepped aside. Fif-fif-fif-fif. Franklin opened it and looked back at his son. On his face a creeping smile yellowed by the lamplight from the hall.
A single word. Quick as a snapped finger.
Despite its brevity, Franklin wasn’t finished speaking it when he heard the error he’d made.
“Yes.”
28
Her father unclasped the hands at her back. Raised his lips all the way to the gums.
“Let me go,” Jane said, but he was already stepping away from her.
As he went the particulars that made him appear as her father blurred. The gray brows became a line over his eyes, the veined hands a pair of white mittens.
She spun around. Opened the door.
Her dead son was running down the hall.
When Bennie saw her he paused. His face betrayed no feeling of any kind, the eyes not even assessing her, merely looking. It made her think of feral dogs encountered on the street: people had no way of guessing whether the dogs would walk on, or whine for food, or bite.
“Benjamin,” she said.
The boy looked back down the hallway. Jane looked too.
Franklin stood outside the Grief Room. Even from this distance she could see how ruined he was. She recognized it from the image of herself she saw in every mirror now: a place beyond failure, beyond sorrow. He had been pulled so far out of himself there was no self to return to.
Franklin raised his arm. Pointed at the boy.
Jane saw what he was asking. She started toward the child. Not to hold him or speak with him but to capture him. Drag him back down the hall to his room. Lock him inside and never open the door again.
Bennie was too fast for her. He moved to the top of the stairs—not running, but skipping. He did it without turning from her, so that his body was faced forward and his head behind. The unnatural twisting of a boneless doll. As he descended she expected him to show her something of his nature, a grimace or snarl. But his face didn’t change, revealed nothing, which was worse than if he had.
Franklin appeared next to her.
“We have to find him,” he said.
Jane heard the way he bypassed all the questions he might need answered. How is he here? Did you know? Was it you who brought him back? Perhaps he already guessed the replies she would give.
“What will we do with him?”
He coughed in her face. It smelled of sourdough and bourbon.
“Let’s find him first,” he said, and started down the stairs.
* * *
The two of them searched every room on the first floor. The Blue Room, the Crimson Parlor, the State Dining Room, the pantry. The president and First Lady entered them all and peered wordlessly behind every settee and cupboard, murmuring vague explanations to the staff—Just looking; Dropped something—if they asked if they could be of assistance.
They encountered Webster on their way out of the Green Room.
“Have you seen a boy?” Jane asked him.
“A boy, ma’am?”
“He was running about.”
“No. I’ve neither seen nor heard the running of a boy.”
“Keep your eye out,” Franklin said, and Webster turned to him.
They saw it then. The image of themselves in the face of the president’s secretary. And in it, they saw too the only conclusion he or anyone could come to. The Pierces were more than grief-stricken. They had slid away from their sanity, and for those who worked around them in the residence, the question was now how best they be handled, contained, avoided.
“I will, sir,” Webster said.
* * *
They talked through the dinner hour in Jane’s room. When the candles guttered out she lit more and returned to sit on the edge of the bed across from the chair where Franklin was slumped. A dozen confused years had been added to his features. Yet Jane found he remained handsome, possibly more so, in the way that older men can tell heartbroken stories with the lines in their faces.
“Will you stay with me tonight?”
He went still at her question.
“In your room?”
“In my bed. Our bed.”
“You must be very afraid to want that.”
“I am afraid. But that’s not the reason I’m asking.”
“What is it?”
“We haven’t had something together, something to share, for a long time.”
She offered her hand. He took it. Let himself be guided to the mattress next to her.
“I just wish—” she began.
“That none of this was real.”
“That it was real. That the boy was real—our Bennie.”
Given all that she’d told him over the preceding hours—her invitation to the Fox sisters, the summoning of Bennie’s spirit, the infant that had leapfrogged in its growth in the room across the hall—she would have granted Franklin the right to be angry for her making a remark like this. It was her “just wishing,” after all, that had led to a sweet-faced ghoul moving about the mansion. Not to mention the other presences. Their fathers. The enslaved dead in the furnace room. And then there was the way she’d kept from him the presence that had followed her out of the Bowdoin president’s house of her girlhood and walked alongside her all her life. It was like an adultery, shaming and selfish. In this case something worse than that, as it was born of an offense against God.