Chapter 19

It’s disorienting to arrive at 88 Benefit Street so quickly after leaving the restaurant parking lot. Saoirse feels as if they spent the night on a space station or an island—or at least in some distant part of the state—not fifteen minutes from her house. She unlocks the front door and leads Emmit through the foyer to the kitchen. There’s a note on the table, and for a second, Saoirse feels a sharp, irrational burst of fear— Aidan broke in! Aidan found me! —before she remembers Lucretia spent the night:

I slept in the guest room ... threw the sheets in the wash but didn’t run it. I’ll be home today ... call me when you’re back. I hope everything’s okay!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pluto was an angel. I gave him his insulin this morning ... glad I stuck around for the demonstration at the shelter! -Lu

Guilt shoots through Saoirse as she bends to pet Pluto, who is weaving around her ankles, though he seems none the worse for having spent the first night in his new home without her. She straightens—vowing to do better by her new housemate—slips the note into a drawer, and turns to find Emmit examining the woodwork around the kitchen doorframe.

“I can’t believe it,” he says.

“Can’t believe what?”

“That Edgar Allan Poe spent time in this house. That Sarah Whitman lived here. You can feel it, can’t you?” He closes his eyes. “Like, an aura. Something of historical significance happened here.”

Saoirse continues staring at him another moment, then closes her eyes as well. Does she feel something? It’s hard to tell; she’s still getting used to feeling anything at all. She hears Emmit walk out of the kitchen and cross the hallway, and she opens her eyes to follow him. He has one hand on the rail above the three short steps to the walkout and is preparing to start down.

“No!” Saoirse says, and he pulls his hand back, surprised. “Sorry,” Saoirse says. “It’s just, it’s a mess down there. Mostly stuff that belongs to the landlord.”

She feels guilty for lying, but she can’t remember if she pulled the rug over the trapdoor, and she doesn’t want Emmit to find the basement. She’s not ready to explain the black-clothed table and pillar candles, the belief—Mia, Roberto, and Lucretia’s, but isn’t her own now too?—that they commune with Sarah Whitman via a weekly séance. She’d like to have spent more than a single night with him before she admits she may owe her newfound poetic abilities, in part, to Emmit’s own face, along with the faces of Poe and Saoirse’s dead husband, projected onto her basement ceiling, during some sort of magic tea–induced hallucination.

“Sorry,” she says again. “Let me show you the rest of the house.”

Emmit fawns over the antique furniture and gothic atmosphere, and spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the living room fireplace brickwork. She ends the tour at the door of her bedroom. “I’m going to put on fresh clothes,” she says. Then adds, “You can come in if you’d like.” She changes in the walk-in closet, and when she emerges, Emmit is on the balcony, looking down onto Saint John’s Cathedral. She slides open the door and joins him on the small platform.

“I never knew how well you could see the cemetery from the third floor of the house,” he says, more to himself than to her.

“At first, I thought it might be creepy, living so close to a graveyard,” Saoirse says. “I mean, this house is practically on top of it. But the more time I spend out here, the more peaceful I find it. It’s like—” She stops, embarrassed. Emmit turns to her.

“Like what?”

“It’s stupid, but sometimes when I sit here, I feel like it’s the mid-1800s. Like by viewing the world from this balcony, I’ve opened some portal to the past. The feeling has gone so far as to prompt me to go inside, walk downstairs, and cut across the yard to the cemetery. I’m always surprised—and a little disappointed—when I see the lichen covering the tombstones and cracks in the granite, the carvings all but worn away.”

“How exquisite would that be,” Emmit says, “to time travel with so little fanfare? It feels greedy, thinking that way, since we have the luxury of so many wonderful words from that period. We can time travel with all the ease of picking up a collection of Poe’s stories or Whitman’s poems. If anything, it’s the way their words bring us back so effortlessly that makes me feel we deserve more.” He takes her hand, brings it to his lips, and kisses each of her fingers, then turns and stares down at the cemetery again.

“When was the last time you tried it?” he asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“When was the last time you walked down to the graveyard, hoping to end up in 1848?”

“Oh,” she laughs. “I don’t know. A couple of days ago, maybe.”

“Should we try it now? Regardless of what century we arrive in, I’d love to see some of the markers up close. I know this isn’t the graveyard that featured so heavily in Poe and Whitman’s romance. But I also know Poe first saw Whitman here, tending her rose garden, and the fact that I’m staring at that very rose garden right now makes the Goth English major still residing inside me a little giddy.”

Saoirse shrugs. “Okay. Let’s go.” Then, unable to ignore her curiosity, she adds, “A graveyard featured heavily in Poe and Whitman’s romance?” She must have missed this in her research.

“Swan Point. They strolled among the graves together during their courtship. Many believe it was in that cemetery where Poe proposed to Whitman. She talks about the proposal in one of her sonnets, and it’s obvious she’s describing Swan Point.”

They descend through the house, Saoirse deliberately exiting from the front door and walking around to avoid the walkout. Saint John’s Cathedral looms over them on their left. With regard to her comment about traveling to the past, Saoirse feels less foolish with every step. It does feel like leaving the normal world behind when she ducks under the low-hanging branches of a massive elm or steps onto the cracked marker of a weaving stone path. The air feels different in the forgotten graveyard. Still, but expectant. Surrounded by dwellings, buildings, churches, yet an island unto itself.

Emmit walks through the rows of markers with quiet reverence. Saoirse kneels beside an ogee headstone she hadn’t noticed on any of her previous excursions. After brushing away a bit of dirt, she can read the inscription:

I N M EMORY OF H ENRIETTA

D AUGHTER OF S AMUEL she’s not sure she can get behind the idea that they’re standing on anything other than one of countless small, private graveyards scattered across America. Still, he’s so earnest, she can’t help but nod. They walk toward her yard, Emmit lost in thought, half smiling as his eyes linger on each moss-covered marker.

Back in the small patch of grass behind the house, Emmit inspects the winterberry and echinacea stalks before moving to the storied rosebushes.

“How green of a thumb do you have?” he asks.

Saoirse winces. “My gardening skills start and end with houseplants.”

“These rosebushes don’t need much. Just a little pruning before winter so they’re in the best possible shape come spring.” He smiles. “I could help you if you’d like. My mother was an avid gardener.”

Saoirse starts to open her mouth, but Emmit blushes. “Not that she ever got to teach me, of course. But my uncle always said she loved her gardens. As a teen, when I was going through a bit of a ‘phase,’ as my uncle called it, I grew plants to feel closer to her.” He smirks. “Sometimes they were even the ones you gazed upon instead of the ones you rolled up and smoked.”

He drops to his knees and brushes at the soil along the base of one of the thorny bushes. “It’s a little late in the fall to fertilize. They’d use that energy to struggle against the first frost of the year, which could be any day now.”

“Don’t worry,” Saoirse says. “I didn’t move here from Jersey with bags of fertilizer in tow.” Hadn’t Emmit hinted at wanting to come here for a very specific purpose? Not that she isn’t enjoying their time out of the bedroom, but she’s not sure how—or why—the focus has turned to gardening. Emmit must realize, too, that he’s lost her a little. He drops his gaze and shakes his head, hands still in the dirt.

“Sorry. I guess I’m more like those Whitman groupies you told me about than I care to admit. It’s just—” He stops, frowns, and looks down. He moves his fingers back and forth as if he’s lost something, then digs his hand deeper and scoops up a handful of loamy soil. He sifts it, purses his lips, and digs deeper.

“What are you—” Saoirse starts, but something falls to the ground with the next handful of soil Emmit sifts. He grabs it, brushes the object off, and brings it up to his face for closer inspection.

“I can’t believe it.” His voice is breathless, incredulous. He climbs to his feet. “I felt something in the dirt, and this was it! I can’t believe ...” He trails off, digs in his pocket for his phone, and jabs away at the screen for several seconds. Whatever he’s found is pressed into the palm of his right hand. “Holy shit,” he says a moment later. “Come here. I can’t believe it. You have to see this.”

She walks to him, but he holds out his phone rather than the mystery object. “Read this,” he says. “And tell me if I’m completely out there.” He points to a paragraph halfway down the page. It’s a Wikipedia entry. Sarah Helen Whitman’s Wikipedia entry.

Saoirse gives him a curious look but takes the phone.

Whitman was friends with Margaret Fuller and other intellectuals in New England. She became interested in transcendentalism through this social group and after hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture in Boston, Massachusetts and in Providence. She also became interested in science, mesmerism, and the occult. She had a penchant for wearing black and a coffin-shaped charm around her neck and may have practiced séances in her home on Sundays, attempting to communicate with the dead.

“I’ve read this before,” she says when she’s finished. “A few days after I discovered where I was living.”

“You read the part about the charm she wore?” Emmit asks.

“Yes.”

Emmit opens his right hand. In it lies a charm the size of a grasshopper. It is dirt-caked but intact, its shape unmistakable. It is a tiny coffin, carved from some sort of dark metal. Tin, maybe, or iron.

“You found that?” Saoirse asks, now sounding as incredulous as Emmit. “Under the rosebushes? In my backyard?”

“Yes,” Emmit breathes out, then laughs. “Under the rosebushes. In your backyard!”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I know! It’s absolutely amazing.”

Saoirse makes a face. “No, I mean, I really don’t believe it. It couldn’t be hers. Not after a hundred and seventy-five years. That Wikipedia article is public knowledge. Someone probably came here wearing that necklace as part of some ridiculous cosplay, and it fell off their neck. Somewhere online exists a collection of photographs in which two weirdos reenact the night Poe first saw Whitman. I bet there’s a lot of dramatic swooning involved, and no small amount of cleavage.”

Saoirse thinks she’s speaking reason and so is surprised by how crestfallen Emmit appears. “No way,” he says. “Though, I won’t deny that many a cosplay of that nature has probably taken place. Can I bring this to someone, my contact in the historical society, for their appraisal?”

Saoirse shrugs. “Sure. Of course. Let me know if you find out anything.”

Emmit pulls his wallet from his pocket and places the charm in a zippered compartment. Then, without warning, he takes her head in his hands and kisses her deeply. When he pulls away, Saoirse’s heart is pounding so wildly, she can feel it in her throat.

Emmit smiles at her, the nervous half smile that allows her to glimpse the mischievous boy he might have been. “Now, should we go inside and get to what we came here for?” he asks.