Free We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler Page B

imposed on by vampires back in 1979
     feels today. And then, right back to my story.)
    More callers. Most people liked
Dracula
though some didn’t, but nobody liked professors who thought they could tell you what
     to read.
    The car began to bounce and I heard gravel under the tires. We came to a stop. I recognized
     the bright crown of the tulip tree by our old farmhouse drive, its golden leaves floating
     in a white-blue sky. Lowell got out to open the gate, got back in.
    I hadn’t known this was where we were coming. My good mood turned anxious. Though
     no one had said so, as no one was saying much of anything, I’d assumed Fern had been
     left behind in the old farmhouse to live with the graduate students. I’d pictured
     her life going on much as before, maybe even with less disruption than I’d had—missing
     Mom, for sure (and weren’t we all?), but with Dad still stopping by to oversee the
     drills, the games with colored poker chips and raisins. When, in a couple of months,
     she’d turn six, I’d assumed like every other year she’d have a birthday cake with
     the icing roses she and I so loved. (I don’t know for a fact that she didn’t.)
    So my thinking was that it was sad that she never got to see our mother, and I wouldn’t
     have wanted to be her, but it wasn’t
that
sad. The graduate students were nice and they never shouted, because they weren’t
     allowed to and they loved Fern. They loved Fern more than they loved me. Sometimes
     I had to wrap myself around their legs and refuse to let loose, just to get their
     attention.
    Now we were bumping up the driveway. Fern was always quick to hear a car approach;
     she’d already be at the window. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her, but I knew for
     certain that she wouldn’t want to see me. “Mary doesn’t want to see Fern,” I told
     Lowell.
    Lowell twisted around, pinned me with a narrow-eyed look. “Oh my God! You didn’t think
     Fern was still here, did you? Fuck, Rosie.”
    I’d never heard Lowell say
fuck
before; in retrospect, I’m sure he was trying to impress Russell.
Fuck
was another word that felt good in my mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Quack, quack, quack.
     “Don’t be such a baby,” Lowell said. “There’s nobody here at all. The house is empty.”
    “I’m not a baby.” This was reflexive; I was too relieved to be insulted. No angry
     reunion, then. The familiar treetops were overhead like golden clouds; beneath us,
     the familiar crunching of the gravel under the tires. I remembered how I used to find
     pieces of quartz in the driveway here, clear and crystalline. Like four-leaf clovers,
     this happened just often enough to keep me looking. There was no gravel at the new
     house and, so, no point.
    The car stopped. We got out and walked around the side to the kitchen door, but it
     was locked, all the doors were locked, Lowell told Russell, and the windows, even
     the upstairs windows, had been, in our last year there, fitted with bars, the route
     from the apple tree to the bedrooms cut off before I’d ever mastered it.
    The only remaining hope was the dog door into the kitchen. I don’t remember ever having
     a dog, but apparently, we did once, a large terrier—Tamara Press was her name—and
     apparently, Fern and I had loved her to distraction and slept on top of her until
     she died of cancer just before I turned two. Unlike most dog doors, the latches for
     this one were on the outside.
    Lowell undid them. I was told to go through.
    I didn’t want to. I was frightened. I felt that the house must be hurt not to be my
     house anymore, that it must feel abandoned. “It’s just an empty house,” Lowell told
     me encouragingly. “And Mary will go with you,” as if even I could think Mary would
     be good in a fight.
    Mary was useless. I wanted Fern. When would Fern get to come home?
    “Hey,” said Russell. Talking to me! “We’re counting on you, runt.”
    So I did it for love.
    •   •   •
    I