The House That Leans

The house leaned toward the water, and it had always leaned toward the water, and Tovah Marsh had spent her childhood being told this was a thing the house did on purpose. "It's listening," her grandmother used to say, the two of them on the crooked porch with the screen door clapping behind them. "Marsh houses lean toward whatever they love. This one loves the sea. You'll lean too, child, give it time. It's in the blood." Tovah had left at eighteen specifically so it would not be in the blood. She had gone inland, where the ground was flat and the houses stood up straight and nobody told you that you were going to be slowly bent toward an ocean. She had stayed inland for twelve years. And now her grandmother was dead, and the will was very short, and the will gave the leaning house and the shop beneath it to Tovah and to no one else, and so here she was again at thirty, standing in the salt wind on the crooked porch, watching the screen door clap. The key still worked. That bothered her more than it should have. Twelve years and the same key, the same swollen lock, the same particular shove of the shoulder her grandmother had taught her at nine years old. Her body remembered the shove before her mind did. She was inside before she had decided to go in. The shop took up the whole ground floor. It had no name that Tovah had ever known — the sign outside said only MARSH, painted and repainted by four generations of Marsh women, and that had always been enough. People did not come to the Marsh shop because of a clever name. People came because they had a trouble they could not say out loud anywhere else, and they had heard, the way you always heard in a coastal town, that the woman in the leaning house could help with the kind of trouble that did not have a doctor. The shelves were exactly as her grandmother had left them. Jars. Bundles. Things in seawater and things kept dry and a long low cabinet of small drawers, each labelled in handwriting Tovah's chest hurt to look at. The air smelled of salt and dried rosemary and the particular green smell of the marsh at low tide, and underneath all of it, faint and unmistakable, the smell that Tovah had spent twelve inland years successfully forgetting. The smell of the work. Of witching. Of the thing the Marsh women did that was not medicine and was not prayer and had no honest name, the thing that had skipped Tovah entirely — everyone agreed it had skipped her, her grandmother most regretfully of all — and that she had been almost grateful to be skipped by, because the women it did not skip did not seem, to Tovah's eye, to lead lives anyone should want. She had come to sell the house. She wanted to be clear with herself about that, standing in the dim shop with the tide-smell rising. She would sort it, and price it, and sell it, and go back inland to the flat ground and the upright houses, and the Marsh line and its leaning and its troubles would end politely with her grandmother, where Tovah privately believed it should have ended two generations ago. She found the letter on the counter. It was addressed to her, in her grandmother's hand, and it had been sitting there — she would work this out later, and the working-out would frighten her — it had been sitting there waiting in a closed and empty house for the eleven days since the death. Tovah picked it up. The envelope was not dusty. Eleven days in a shut house and the envelope was not dusty, as though the shop had been keeping it, the way you keep a thing that matters off the floor and out of the damp. She opened it. There was one line inside, and the line was not a goodbye, and Tovah read it standing at the counter with the screen door clapping and the house leaning under her feet toward the sea. *The curse comes due this generation,* her grandmother had written. *I had hoped to spare you. I could not. Go and see the lighthouse keeper before the first spring tide — and Tovah, my heart, whatever else you do: do not, under any circumstances, let yourself love the water.*