The Rascal (7 page)

Mother’s face was blank now. Her pain was gone or, God forbid, hiding beneath a pale shroud. But it was best for him not to think of such morbid things. If he did, if he allowed himself to focus on what waited in the dark, he might never recover. To Ethan, a blank stare was more terrifying than the most horrific grimace of pain. Ethan had stopped being afraid of the dark soon after the accident. He stopped seeing imaginary nightmares, because there was a real one just down the street at a care facility, and it had his mother’s face.

Ethan clicked on Chloe’s icon, but as he did so, her name disappeared from the screen. She had signed off or—and this he found more likely—was simply refusing to talk with him.

He soon signed off as well. He needed to check on Bug anyway. He’d give Jeff a call tomorrow if he could find the new cell phone number. Wading through discomfort in the daylight was always preferable to doing it in the stillness of night.

The Bridge

Standing on the small stone stoop outside the kitchen door, Chloe watched the barn. Her arms were folded yet again, as much from a pensive attitude as from a chill. Her brow was pinched in deliberation. The move hadn’t helped at all, and she now accepted that it was ridiculous to have thought it ever would have. They could live on this hill above the rest of the world for ages and not see another soul (but for crazy old Lana Pruitt), and still Jeff would never see Chloe the same way he once had. And, in truth, she would never see him the same either. Gone was the gorgeous man with the warm smile who gave her inappropriate hugs at company meetings as her mother looked on. She’d never feel those arms again in that way. She’d never again feel the warm crush of his body on hers while making love. Past mistakes, she found, anchored their pain to the present. It never lessened, and never had the chance to slip away to the horizon where it might possibly disappear forever.

But there was nothing for it. She had to live with him now that they had bought the cottage. And he had to live with her. She would make an effort. Maybe something could be salvaged, even if it was just a shadow or an act. Chloe decided that, like Lana, she could learn to act.

She entered the open doorway of the old barn with some trepidation. This was Jeff’s space and she felt like an invader. Her arms were still crossed and she massaged her elbows. She stood in the door space for a moment. The light from the gray sky came through the wood walls and ceiling of the barn like some divine light. It had the feel of something spiritual. Of a cathedral. But it was not at all comforting, just overbearing and ready to crush her with accusations.

She found Jeff on the muddy floor of the barn behind a reassembled stack of rotten firewood. He was tightening a bright yellow rope. It trailed out the barn door to the well. Beside him, more rope snaked and coiled. He seemed to be constructing some kind of pulley system using the barn as tethering. The firewood served as uneven shelves for Jeff’s mountain climbing gear. Jeff had the skill for climbing mountains. He had done it many times with the company, leading tours. Chloe had done fewer of those type of tours. The altitude did not appeal to her. She could lead tours through the lower hills of a range, but nothing that involved crampons or ice picks.

She looked out toward the well as she leaned against the barn. “So, that’s the well,” she said, her voice weak and wary. “Are you going to descend? To see what’s down there?”

Jeff looked up at her. His face was smeared with black mud, one especially thick wipe across the left cheek. He studied her momentarily. His fingers stopped working the rope. Chloe realized he wasn’t
studying
her, he was
judging
her. She suddenly felt very bare—naked, but in such a way she had never been before. Vulnerable and stripped of even her skin.

“What do you want?” Jeff said. His voice was deep and angry. The whites of his eyes glowed in the relative darkness of the barn. If he were frothing at the mouth, he could not have seemed more vicious.

“I just came out to—” But she was stopped short, her attention grabbed by a new, disturbing air. At first, she thought it was her own stammering, but there was an unmatched quality to this sound. It was a giggle—menacing, but a giggle still, and it came from nowhere that she could see.

She looked at her husband, suddenly on alert. “Did you hear that?”

“What do you want?” he repeated. His stare had not changed. He dug his fingers into his forearm, scratching ferociously. Chloe noticed his skin was now raw in that spot, as if he had a rash or bug bite there and had been scratching for a while.

“I just wanted to see what you were up to,” she said. She began edging away. She had never feared Jeff before, but this… This hardly seemed like Jeff. She felt like a cornered animal. As she moved off, Jeff returned his attention to the rope.

Chloe walked, chilled and frightened, back to the cottage. She kept her eyes on the ground. She would wait until she got inside the cottage before she’d allow a single tear to fall. But there would be tears. It was over. It was all over. Their marriage. Their friendship. Everything. There was nothing left to pick over.

***

Jeff was immersed. He did not have time for Chloe’s cloying attempts to regain her footing in his life. He had a project to work on, and it had begun to swallow large swaths of his time. He could not resist the well. He had to know what lay far below in the darkness.

He tightened and untightened the same length of rope again and again, not realizing what he was doing. The feel of the rope, the sense of purpose, put him at ease and took him out of his unsatisfactory life. The barn and the well had become his sanctuary.

He had been dreaming so vividly of late. Even while working on the well, he would find himself lost in the dreams. There was a boy, around twelve or thirteen judging by his height, but Jeff never saw his face. He was always seen from behind. The first Jeff had seen of him, the boy sat near naked on the ground in the woods wearing a pair of dirty underwear and a large-brimmed brown hat. Perhaps too large for his pointed head. The boy had something in his lap and was working furiously on it. Feverishly and unnaturally fast. Around him lay the bloody carcasses of small animals: birds, rabbits, and moles.

The boy turned quickly, as if being called, and then got up and ran. He ran to the big house on the hill. The sky was mute and heavy over the structure. The boy stopped suddenly in the yard and tensed. He backed off slowly, and the big house began to transform. From wood and stone, it became flesh and bone. The widow’s walk became a woman’s head and it looked disapprovingly down at the boy. Its roof had become her messy dark hair and the railing was a line of her sharp teeth. The boy screamed and he began to run back to the cottage. He ran as fast as he could, but she caught him with her arms made of the splintered porch.

At once, the boy was in the barn, being whipped by the woman, who now stood all too human before him. Jeff tried to intervene, but the woman would not allow it. She continued to thrash at the boy without mercy with a finely whittled tree branch, leaving deep red marks on the boy’s bare legs and arms. He howled in pain and rage, his face still a blur to Jeff.

“He gets what he gets because he sins,” the woman said as she continued whipping the boy. “You must stop it before it begins.”

Then she let go of the branch and it became a rope. It wrapped itself around the boy, tying him to one of the beams in the barn. Again, Jeff made a move to interfere.

The woman flung him back. “It gets what it gets because it sins!” she screamed.

From the woman’s push, Jeff fell back to the mouth of the well and peered down into it.

The woman stood at the barn door. “Well, you fell and found the well. It will tell, oh it will tell! A gateway, an opening, out of some hell.”

The darkness of the well enveloped him, and he woke. And when Jeff awoke from such dreams and visions, they did not fill him with dread. No. It was excitement that filled him, for he knew then that there was adventure yet to be had.

***

The actress saw everything from her widow’s walk. She saw the ocean mock the sky. She saw the sky rage at the water. At night, she saw the lights from across the bay, tiny and twinkling. She saw the change in weather before it arrived. And through the telescope, she now saw Chloe, the new cottage owner, trudging up the hill.

Lana didn’t think Chloe was headed for the big house. Truthfully, Chloe didn’t look to be headed anywhere. She was just walking, climbing up the hill and tiring herself out. Her arms were wrapped around her body, and Lana sensed the loss the girl was feeling. Loss was like a bridge and tackle. Anyone who has known it—true loss, not just the displacement of a favorite trinket—anyone who has honestly known it connects automatically, almost angrily and with a starving need, to those souls who are similar. The actress felt Chloe was throwing her tackle. The question was, could Lana accept it? Would she want to? She’d been alone so long, everything else was foreign now. To seek comfort in another human being would be… immoral.

As Chloe walked closer, Lana found that she wished Chloe might look up to the widow’s walk. To connect, if just a little.

“Here I am,” she whispered. But they were words not meant to be heard. They were at once taken by the same mad breeze that chafed her face raw. Words dead from their first utterance.

Opening up to Chloe would be selfish, Lana chided herself. The actress had laid her bed with self-accusations, and she had to sleep in it. The wind agreed. A friend would not help matters anyway. Lana felt she was already hurtling toward the end of the scene, her lines flubbed or the script rewritten.

Her husband, Michael, had asked her not to take the role in the film. Her last role. A diabolical mother with dialogue that stretched into the absurd and the campy. He had begged her to spend more time with their daughter, Rebecca.

“You have one chance to be a good mother,” he had pleaded with her. “You’ll have other film sets to go to. Please stay!”

He was so desperate that she not go that she almost relented. But Lana assured him there would be plenty of time once she returned from the shoot. Just this last shoot and then she’d take some time off. That seemed to satisfy him. The last Lana saw of her daughter was the girl’s teary-eyed good-bye. She and her father waved from the widow’s walk as Lana was whisked away in the long black car down the hill.

The film would flop, though she received decent marks for it. Lana’s last desperate effort to revive her career failed. She was a glittering has-been. Not even the tragedy that followed could raise the public’s interest in the actress.

Michael had called her on the set continuously on the last few days of shooting. He was even more bothersome than usual with the frequency of his calls. She began to avoid them.

“Tell him I have a scene,” she told her assistant. “Tell him I’m busy.”

Finally, on the last day of shooting, he was calling every couple of minutes. It exasperated her.

“What is it, Michael? I’ll be home in a day! Can’t it wait?”

She came home to find Michael standing over a fresh patch of dirt in the garden. His eyes were red from crying and fatigue. They would have a private memorial service for Rebecca there. He never looked at Lana again. At least not in the eye. She was grateful for that mercy. She could not look into his either. She was fearful of the things she would see.

Chloe waved from below. She had caught the actress in the midst of her own sorrow.

A bridge.

Lana reluctantly waved back but did not smile. That would be the toll for the bridge. Leave your smile before you cross.

And somewhere inside her, that voice that laid her bed with guilt said:
Invite her in. This is it, Lana. It begins. This all leads up to your glorious final scene. There will be a brilliant score. There will be weeping in the audience. And then you will die, because you have to die. You’ve seen enough films. You’ve been in enough of them too. It’s the scene any actress would give their right arm to perform.

What’s Past

At the kitchen window, Chloe mixed the sugar in the tea and watched Jeff swing the axe into the half-rotted block of wood. She wasn’t trying any longer. She didn’t expect the iced tea to make her husband suddenly swim out of his angry tide. She was making him tea so she would have something to do. That was all.

The day before she had been invited into the big house by Lana. It was a strange visit, as expected. The actress was on her widow’s walk and waved down to her, then motioned Chloe inside. Lana seemed a specter or a spirit dressed in her dark clothes at the top of the house. It was not a welcoming look, but Chloe went in just the same.

They drank tea in the library, a room so packed with thick books there was barely space for furniture. In fact, what books weren’t being used for literary purposes were piled upon one another as footrests or tables. The smell of slowly decaying pages—a strangely comforting thing—permeated the air. Almost a smoke, so heavy was its odor.

Not much was said between the two women, and what words that were spoken did not have any earth-shattering importance. They were simply directions and strained pleasantries: “Have a seat,” “Would you like some sugar,” etc. Every sentence and its response was bookended by an awkward silence. Awkward for Chloe, that was. The actress didn’t seem to mind the stoic moments. Chloe looked over old tattered volumes of literature and photo albums during those pauses. The pictures in the albums told Chloe more than any words ever could about the faded star.