When Marianne died, spring was in full growth, mature and ripe. Without warning, her heart stopped and they found her in the garden, a small green shovel still clutched in her left hand. The way she lied like that on a bed of yellow sweet-smelling daffodils, serene, with a slight smile frozen at the corners of her lips, made them think that her death had been a quick one, it had come and gone, like a gust of wind over the edge of a wave.
They cried a bit at first, then slowly their tears dried. She had lived her life fully after all, and when the time had come for her to die, no one had been too surprised. It took them exactly two months to stop mourning. The daffodils bloomed and disintegrated only to start all over again, until the last drop of their yellow beauty was spent.
Spring climaxed into a blinding summer, undisturbed, and soon enough no one remembered it anymore, nobody was left too heartbroken. No one except for Bianca, that is.
The girl sat on the windowsill bench in the big hallway and watched her parents pack Marianne’s belongings. One after the other, the big cardboard boxes took their way to the dusty attic, next to all the other unused things. They even stored there the antique sewing machine.
«Oh, who finds the time for sewing anyway? » her mother had answered with a dismissive wave of the hand when the girl had asked about it. Bianca would have loved to learn how to sew, just for the pleasure of touching the wood and metal where her beloved grandmother’s fingers had been. She had bit her bottom lip instead and had kept silent about it, afraid that her mother’s hand would flutter dismissively again. So she watched her parents’ faces turn red from the effort of pushing the heavy old thing up the stairs, grunting and puffing, their front glistening wet. With every step the machine climbed, with every protesting squeak of the wood, Bianca’s heart dropped.
Slowly, the house emptied itself of Marianne. They even started moving the furniture around, replacing it where a change was needed. They went from room to room, adjusted, shifted, swiped and scrubbed until everything sparkled. Slowly, the new took place of the old and the house took a different air. An air of transformation. Bianca watched it all from her corner, silent and careful.
When the last bit of Marianne’s memory disappeared, they stopped for a second and looked around at the result of their struggle. Their eyes swept piece after piece, detail after detail, colour and shape after colour and shape. When they decided that everything had reached their expectations, they smiled a sated little smile. With a glass of chilled white wine in their hands, they went out on the balcony to celebrate a job well done.
Bianca let out the breath she was holding. Around her, dust particles flew in the summer afternoon light. She watched them fluttering about, stray and misplaced, as in search of a refuge among the cleanliness and the new. She followed the dance of the dust and thought how ironic its presence there was. No matter how hard they have tried to clean the house, to chase the dust away, it had found a way back, relentless, stubborn.
From somewhere in the cottage, a small mechanical voice rang out, faded, muffled, like a dream. Bianca listened to it repeat the sound and frowned. She stood up from the windowsill, climbed the stairs to the attic and looked for the source of the noise. A smile bloomed on her lips.
They had carelessly dumped it on Marianne’s heavy sewing machine. It was so old that grey wood peeked from under the forest green paint in more than one place. Only five of the twelve Roman numerals on the rusted disk were still gold. It was delicately carved with beautiful leaves, acorns and tiny twigs. Bianca caressed the wood and strange enough, it seemed as though it was alive.
She remembered when Marianne had bought the antique clock at a flea market, so many years before. She could still recall the sparkle in her grandmother’s eyes when she had heard the cuckoo’s call for the first time. It had stopped striking the hours sometime after, but Marianne had kept it anyway, hung in her room. Bianca didn’t know what surprised her more. The fact that she had heard it chime from downstairs, when she knew it shouldn’t have chimed at all, or that it hadn’t stricken a full hour, nor a half one for that matter. She suddenly realised what time it really was. The hour hand was stuck at two. The minute one at five. Twenty-five minutes past two. The core of a spring afternoon, full of sun and daffodil perfume. The time when Marianne had been found on her yellow-green death bed.
Bianca took the clock downstairs and hid it in her room, under the stuffed animals in her closet, covered in her old pink fluffy blanket. For the following days, she would smile for no reason, making her mother frown at the unusual good mood of her usually gloomy child. When asked about it, the girl would just shrug her shoulders and turn away.
And then, one rainy day at the end of September, it happened for the first time. Nothing too drastic really, nothing too striking. A mere draft of air passing through the house, like one the wings of a dove would leave behind. No one noticed it, except for Bianca. And just like that, she knew.
Slowly an invisible but strong-willed hand insinuated itself in their lives. She sat on her cushioned bench on the windowsill, munched on salty pretzels and watched it turn the house upside down. Her mother’s magazines would change place out of the blue, or fall to the floor. Her father’s ties would grow knots overnight, or simply vanish into thin air. Framed artwork would switch places on the walls. Windows would be found shut when they should have been open, forks and knives would be found on the floor instead of in their drawer, towels would miraculously turn out wet on their shelves when they should have stayed dry. They would blame it all on Bianca, of course, and on an alleged early teenage rebellion against the loss of a loved one. They would punish her, lock her up in her room, take away her books and simply refuse to take "I didn’t do it" for an answer. It didn’t really matter, because you see, there was this unmistakable scent of daffodils enveloping every room that no one seemed to perceive, but the girl.
They refused to talk about haunted houses until there wasn’t a doubt in their mind that no child could willingly make objects fly and crash into walls, shadows and footsteps skitter on hallways, or unplugged blenders start spinning in the middle of the night with rattling, wailing sounds.
On the fourth month anniversary of Marianne’s death, the door to the basement slammed shut in the face of Bianca’s mother. Then, one after the other, all doors started banging against their frames, flapping like giant wooden wings, sending a wave of shock and dread through the entire cottage, until there wasn’t a single framed picture still left on the walls, or glass or porcelain figure still standing. On the floor, curled up into a ball, covering her ears with shaking hands, Bianca’s mother screamed.
They decided to sell the house and moved out of it before it went on the market. They refused to pass another month in it, let alone another winter. The moving truck was rented and filled in a blink of an eye and Bianca found herself silently saying goodbye to the old deserted house through the rear windshield of the car. When it got too small, too far away for her to see it, she swiped a furtive tear and turned around.
Behind her, in the trunk, objects thumped at every bump on the road, small grunts of contempt. She thought about the cuckoo clock hidden in her suitcase. Snuggled in her old comfort blanket, it laid between the faded jeans and the comic books she had received for Christmas the year before. All the other belongings of Marianne had been left in the attic, dusted, abandoned, and tucked in shadows.
The girl rested her forehead against the cold glass and watched the scenery unfold. She could finally feel her toes warming in her red rubber boots. The autumn was in full swing, soggy and chilly. As the day drew to an end, they rolled through the wideness of the fields towards the confinements of the city. Above the meadow, further away over the route to the coast, a sallow sun attempted to pierce the grimed sky and lost yet another battle. In the fields, long and thin strips of pale grass fluttered and bent under the raged breath of the wind.
The car bathed in an uncomfortable silence. Her mother had been sleeping for a while when Bianca felt herself drift off too. Suddenly, right before her eyelids shut, the air in the car seemed to change and an undeniable perfume of daffodils filled it, like the whisper of the wind over the edge of a wave. She took a deep breath, impregnating her every cell with the sweet aroma and let her lips lift in a sated little smile before drifting into a dreamless sleep.
