Saving Annabelle

Prologue

Three stories of flame rise, lighting the starless winter sky. In a bedroom window, fire catches lace curtains. They billow before dissolving into flames. It is late in November. The sun is not due for over two hours, and even the farmers, who rise in the dark to tend their cows, claim an extra hour for rest in the winter. There is but one person, who suffers from insomnia, who rises while the world sleeps to study his Bible. A sense of unease draws Reverend Langli to the upstairs window that overlooks the river. Turning his gaze to the south, he sees an unusual red glow low in the sky, crowning the treetops at the horizon. The sight rouses in him a certain longing he harbors with guilt—to see the end of days—and then, as the red glow takes a new shape, he realizes what it is.

The Reverend rushes forth in his slippers and nearly chokes on a great inhalation of frosted air. He slips on the compacted snow as he runs from the back door of his home to the back door of the church. Inside the vestibule behind the altar, he jumps to extend his reach and grabs onto the bell pull, uses the weight of his body to start the bell swinging. The church bell is heavy cast bronze—a gift to the people of Aaberg from their founder. It rings forcefully, a resounding clang sure to travel and rouse men from their sleep. The alarm: three solid strikes of the clapper, a pause, three strikes…again…again. Sweat trickles under the Reverend’s dressing gown.

Winter has come with an early hard freeze and the well water is locked under an inch of ice. The townspeople know there is nothing they can do. Most of the men ride bareback, hurrying despite their helplessness, suspenders twisted in haste, trousers bunched up the top of their boots. Their hands freeze around the reins—if they bother with a bridle at all—while their breath is panted in frosted clouds that trail both rider and horse, like steam from a locomotive. Their horses are sweating from the run.

Women and children, wrapped in layers of wool blankets, come behind the men, driving wagons and buggies. Only a few mothers with very young children and the very old fail to turn out. They find Maude Jacobsen wandering the yard in her chemise and bare feet, a wrapper haphazardly slung round her shoulders. There is no sign of her husband or her daughter.

The house disappears in a mountain of flame. The heat it gives off is not unpleasant. The colors too: pumpkin-orange and brick-red shifting and dancing against the navy-black of the northern sky. The air fills with the sharp crack of wood giving way, of beams stacked with struts and shingles falling in pieces. The house rumbles and the roof crashes down. Women jump. Men clap hands on their sons’ shoulders. Children cry. Horses skitter. It is a collective response fitting of such an ordeal. The ground vibrates as the ruin settles. It does not matter that Halldórr Jacobsen, the town founder, built it himself on a grand scale, and now it is gone. What does matter is that the unspeakable occurred within those walls.

The wind shifts and soon everyone is crying, if not from the spectacle of loss, then from the dense, choking smoke that fills the air. Doctor Bjornson remembers the bonfires of his youth and notes that this smoke is different, heavy, bitter, and somehow impure. He decides it is from the various contents of the household burning together, all of the larder, furniture, books, clothing…and for some reason he thinks of Maude’s seldom-used parlor piano, its strings snapping from the heat, resounding one final strange note.

Women huddle around Maude. She is draped in a brown blanket, and covered thus she sits like a mound of dirt, unmoving. “Maude… Maude…” the women moan. They wring their hands and clutch at each other. “She is in shock,” says one. “Maybe she does not know,” suggests another. Mrs. Bjornson whispers to Mrs. Hansen, “The poor dear is not in her right mind. She is surely lost to us.” And the news that Maude is hopelessly lost spreads through the circle of women, their skirts brushing the snow-covered ground as they shift with the discomfort of it all. “Poor Maude!” they cry, knowing that Maude Jacobsen’s fate has cruelly turned and turned again.

At the edge of the yard, far enough away to capture the entire spectacle with his accordion box, Clovis Mendelsohn sets up his tripod. He disappears under the black cloth. His spindly legs and those of the tripod prop up the dark spider shape. It is the chance he has awaited. He is sure to include Maude prominently in the frame. The more pathetic and sorrowful the sight, the more certain his success. This is the photograph every newspaper in Minnesota will buy, and he will become a famous man for it.

From the trees on the hill, one figure watches all as a single star appears over the pyre, high and faint. One star, to guide home one soul.

Chapter One

We can no more choose the family we are born into than a match can choose who strikes it or what it sets alight.

This truism brings me no comfort, only a conundrum. It seems my nearly nineteen years of life have been shaped by chance. I could just as easily have been born to different parents and had an altogether different life. Another view, however, considers nothing random. According to this view, while I certainly did not choose my family, I was intended for them and they for me. Whether my life’s course was thus set by chance or by divine intention, I cannot say. I find it is impossible to believe it matters one way or the other. I was born Greta Vanja Jacobsen, and that has shaped my existence in this world. Every choice I have made, every action I have taken, has begun with that solitary fact.

My earliest memory is of watching a chick hatch. The first fracture appeared as a jagged little line that spread across that perfect smooth shell. I squatted in the straw and stared, afraid to blink for fear of missing the first miraculous appearance of new life. The tiny beak broke through at last, then the head, skinny and wet with shining black eyes. When the chick had tumbled from its shell, it looked at me and peeped, stretching its scrawny neck. It stepped toward me in a fumbling, unsteady way and toppled over, its tiny wings beating. It looked raw and exposed, like one of the dead things our cats left on the porch. Only the chick was not dead; it was insistent. I was considering touching it when my mother came into the henhouse and stood over me. “Well, Greta,” she said, “it thinks you are its mama now.”

It was not entirely different when my sister was born, the year I was five.

Mother had a dream, no mere flight of fancy, but a tangible thing of beauty and hope. This dream filled her with a courage and light she had never known before. She told me the dream so often while working about the house that it became my favorite tale and I learnt it by heart: Mother rose from bed in the middle of night and left Father sleeping soundly. She went out and sat on the bench under our biggest apple tree and gazed at the full moon, thinking how warm and peaceful the night. After some time, a light as bright as the sun flashed and a shape came toward her, but she feared not. When her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw that one of God’s own messengers stood before her in flowing white robes with curls of golden hair cascading about his shoulders. From his back sprouted wings of snowy feathers, each plume as big as her hand. Mother slid to her knees so that she might receive God’s Word. The angel did not speak, and she opened her palms in supplication. In each of her hands, he placed a large, ripe apple—one red and one yellow. And so it was that God sent a message to my mother and how she knew she carried twin girls. Mother immediately set to preparing both herself and the house for two babies. She instructed me each day how to care for a newborn so that I might assist her, although I was not even six at the time. She went about singing lullabies and talking to the unborn babes, whom she named Anna Beatrice and Belle Abigail. Then, with no way of confirming her intuitive dream, she ordered a new crib.

The day after we placed the order at Mendelsohn’s Mercantile, she slaughtered a chicken. Together we picked the finest apples from our trees. She dug potatoes and baked a fresh loaf of bread. The feast that evening rivaled Christmas supper. While the chicken was in the oven, Mother put me in my Sunday dress with a proper threat of what would happen if I spilt on myself. I stood stiffly while she jerked a comb through my hair and formed my locks into two smooth braids that looped to my shoulders, and wide grosgrain ribbons were tied around them.

Father enjoyed his supper with the suspicious air of a hog being led to the slaughter. Mother fidgeted while he scowled at her from across the table. Finally, with half the chicken remaining, Mother spoke up. “Halldórr, I have ordered a new crib.” Father’s mouth opened, then shut as Mother continued to speak. “I am carrying your twins, so we will need a second crib.”

“How do you know this, Maude?” Father had immigrated from Norway to the Minnesota Territory as a young man, and he retained his accent, filling his speech with aws and oohs, and pronouncing th as dh. But Norwegian was commonly heard around Aaberg, and his accent was not the thing that differentiated him from other men.

“I had a dream.”

“A dream? A dream?” Father’s face reddened as he curled his hands over the tabletop. “Hell and thunder!” If there was one thing Father could never stand, it was putting stock in silly, notions.

I watched my mother to see how she would respond to Father’s outburst, not daring to move even a finger. Mother stood up at the table, her protruding belly pressed against it, nearly in the remains on her plate. It seemed she was not to be put off by Father’s vulgarity. “Halldórr Jacobsen, I am carrying twins, and I need that crib. It will not go back.”

“It most certainly shall go back, unless you have some kind of scientific proof to support that dream.”

“I was visited by one of God’s own angels. Here in this belly, I carry a creation of His will and design. If that is not evidence enough, then shame on you.”

“Maude, it was only a dream, a pretty dream you want to believe in, but that is all.”

“No, Halldórr. It was a message from the Lord to prepare for a blessing.”

“Why? Why would you receive this so called message? What makes you special enough that God would communicate with you directly?”

Even at that age, I knew the tone Father’s voice took when he was deriding Mother. I dared to look at Mother. She retained her composure, and in fact looked as lovely as I had ever seen her. “I know what I know, Halldórr, and who are you to doubt it?”

He blustered and threw his napkin down beside his plate. “If this is some foolery, Maude…if you do not give birth to twins, by God.” He spread his broad hands on the tabletop and stood, pushing his chair back, then left the house all abluster. When it came to conflicting the two things by which Halldórr Jacobsen measured this world, science and religion, he could no more choose between them than he could deny God’s existence above. And perhaps because he could not deny God, he denied so much else.

When Mother went into labor five weeks later, on November 1, 1864, I spent the long hours that she struggled crouching in the hall, listening aghast to her moans and cries. I thought for certain Mother was being torn apart. I imagined the Doctor with a saw, cutting her belly in half to extract my sisters.

The door opened at last, yanked quickly, and I heard Doctor Bjornson say sharply, “I thought I told you to bring it in.” He stuck his head into the hallway. “Greta,” he barked my name at me as though it were a command in itself, and I got to my feet as quickly as I could on cramped legs. “Run and fetch the case on the seat of my buggy.”

I flew down the stairs and leapt from them, never touching the bottom two steps, certain that if I were not quick enough my mother and sisters would be lost. The Doctor’s phaeton was parked just in front of the house. Father had unhitched the horse and taken it to the barn to feed it, not out of consideration for the Doctor, but for the beast, and because it brought a reduction in fees. The leather seat in the buggy felt cold against my hands as I slid the large wooden box toward me. I turned to go back and, in my haste, stumbled on the porch steps. The case fell from my grasp and I heard the clinking of glass bottles. Blood ran down my shin as I made my way to Mother’s bedside. Presenting the box as carefully as I could in outstretched arms, I prayed that nothing inside had broken.

“Ah, here it is,” Dr. Bjornson said with a note of relief as he opened the lid and took out a small green bottle. Deftly, he uncorked it with one hand and poured some into a dish on the crowded bedside table. His large black bag sat with its mouth wide open on the floor. He had laid out tubes, scissors, and other frightening implements of curving metal. A small green bottle like the one he had just retrieved from the case laid uncorked on its side.

The Doctor muttered to himself while he worked. A bachelor with dark and oily hair, too old to be called young and too young to be called old, he was an esteemed member of the community and had been reported, on more than one occasion, to bring folks back from the brink of death. For that reason, his brusque nature and self-aggrandizement were easily tolerated in Aaberg. With his ill manners came the tendency to immediately forget anyone he did not deem of use. And so I fell quiet, stayed out of his way, and remained in Mother’s bedroom.

Mother’s hair had come undone and clung to her face and neck like pale ribbons. She appeared to have swollen and her eyes were blackened as though she had been struck. Terrified, I wanted to cry out, to fling myself across the bed and stop this torture. Fascinated, I kept still, remained invisible.

Doctor Bjornson wet his fingers with the medicine I had fetched and then reached his hands between Mother’s legs. “This will dull the pain and help the tissue to stretch,” he said, not to Mother, but to his assistant, a young doctor learning the practice from our Doctor Bjornson. I had not noticed him before, standing on the other side of the bed with a flannel draped over his hands. The medicine must have worked, for Mother grunted and strained and held her breath two or three more times before the Doctor exclaimed he saw a head, and a minute later dragged a tiny body out of her, lifting it from between her legs. He swept the baby’s mouth with his little finger, then tied the cord, a purplish twist of an organ that draped between the infant and my mother, with a braided thread and cut it. He finally handed the baby, covered in a white film, to his assistant.

“You have a daughter, Mrs. Jacobsen,” the young doctor said. Mother smiled weakly and stretched out a hand, but the assistant did not bring her the baby. He instead busied himself with suctioning her nose and covering her in sweet oil before washing away her unctuous covering. At that time, I did not know babies were supposed to cry when born. I did not, therefore, think it unusual that my sister never made a sound following her first trial of life. Doctor Bjornson pressed his hand to Mother’s abdomen and said something about placenta, which I took as Latin for baby. I was used to hearing my father, the Doctor, and the Reverend coloring their conversations with these strange words. When I asked what they meant, I was told simply that they are Latin, all Latin, mysterious Latin. The Doctor continued to palpate Mother’s stomach, making her squirm and groan.

“Maude, another one has crowned. You are having twins. Keep pushing.”

Mother mastered enough strength to smile faintly. I crept to her side. This baby slid out easily in the wake of the first, followed by a rush of blood. She appeared so different, completely bald with almost translucent skin. Blue veins flowed over her scalp. The closed eyes bulged, and I thought she slept. Dr. Bjornson scowled and made a clucking noise with his tongue. When he handed her to the assistant, I saw how small she was compared to the other. The first baby, oiled and washed, had turned pink. No amount of scrubbing could remove the bluish tint from this one.

Mother saw her child and cried out, a hand cupped over her mouth.