Page 11 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth

Eleven

Alex

I make it back to the farmhouse without crashing the truck into a tree or passing out behind the wheel.

No small feat, I assure you. My heart is palpitating, my palms are sweating and I can barely breathe.

If I wasn’t sure this is a stress response, I’d be convinced I’m having a heart attack.

But I’m not. My past has finally caught up with me.

I kill the engine and slump in the driver’s seat.

How could I have been so stupid? I should have listened to the whispered warning my brain gave me when my search revealed the Roses as social media ciphers.

Who are they, really? It can’t be a coincidence that someone from Windy Rock rented my cabin, out of all of the cabins in the world.

I scrub my hands over my face and drop my forehead into the heels of my palms, trying to think of a way out of this.

Nothing comes to mind, and it’s getting cold in the cab with the heat turned off.

So I drop the key into my pocket and hop out of the truck.

I land on the hard ground with a thud that jars my teeth.

The sensation knocks me out of my rumination and back into the real, present world.

It’s a welcome intrusion, and, as I jog to the porch, I promise myself I’ll figure something out. Don’t I always?

Safely inside, I lock the door and secure the deadbolt.

Then, I do a full circuit of every floor of the house, including the basement and the attic.

I check the locks on every window, the kitchen door, and the bulkhead door that leads from the back porch to the cellar.

Once I’m satisfied that nobody’s getting in, I put the kettle on.

But before the water can even get hot, I switch off the burner.

I need coffee, not tea. Strong coffee that will help me stay awake to ward off the nightmares that the topic of Windy Rock always brings.

While the coffee percolates, I turn on the radio.

Maybe music will drive the dark thoughts out of my mind.

Then I head into the spare bedroom behind the living room.

It’s drafty and sparsely furnished. I don’t often have overnight guests in the main house.

The last time someone slept in here was three Easters ago, when Robert’s sister and her husband came East for a visit. The room smells like camphor and dust.

I flick on the lamp that sits on the dresser and cross the room to the closet.

There’s a light in here, too. A bare bulb screwed into the ceiling.

I pull the chain and blink at the brightness.

Once my eyes adjust, I stretch up onto my tiptoes and feel around beneath the neat pile of quilts stacked on the shelf above the hanging rack until my hand connects with the cold metal of the crowbar.

I heft it down then drag the old footlocker out of the closet so I can pry up the loose floorboard underneath—the one Robert doesn’t know about.

I ease the plank aside and remove the metal lockbox that’s been nestled under the floor undisturbed since the weekend we moved in.

I leave the closet in a state of disarray and carry the box out to the kitchen. After I deposit it on the kitchen table, I pour a cup of coffee and roll my neck from side to side, staring at the damned thing like I’m waiting for it to jump off the table.

“Pull it together,” I say aloud, cringing at the harshness of my own voice against the forgettable pop music playing in the background.

I take a big gulp of coffee, scalding my tongue in the process, and square my shoulders. Then I dig my keys out of my jeans pocket and flip through the ring until I find the small silver key that unlocks the box. I pretend my hands aren’t shaking as I insert the key and unlock my memories.

First out of the box is the 1998 Windy Rock School yearbook.

In a town the size of Windy Rock, back then, there was one school for kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Two hundred and twenty kids ranging in age from five to eighteen in one building.

Average class size of eighteen students, one class per grade.

It was as suffocating as it sounds. But it also means the yearbook contains the photograph of every school-aged kid on the peninsula.

If Tristan Rose lived there the year I graduated, he’ll be in the yearbook.

If he’s old enough. I frown. I’m not sure of his age, but he looks to be around thirty. He might be just a hair too young.

I shrug and open the book, turning to a page in the front where a gaggle of gap-toothed kindergarteners smile at me.

A quick scan of the three rows of six names confirms there’s no Tristan.

I close the book with a loud snap and take another, more cautious sip of coffee.

I set the yearbook aside and lift a yellow-orange Kraft envelope out of the box.

I pry open the metal clasp with my fingernail and remove the bundle of yellowing newspaper clippings.

They’re held together with a rotting rubber band that snaps apart when I unwind it.

I toss it in the trash and stare down at the reports of my attempted murder.

The local press coverage was surprisingly circumspect.

The first three articles referred to me only as the “unnamed victim who fought off her attacker.” Later, someone in the police department leaked my name, but the truth is they didn’t need to: everyone already knew who’d been attacked.

The whisper network spread my name all over town before I even regained consciousness.

I was life-flighted to the medical center in Bangor, one county over, and Bangor’s newspaper took a more sensational angle.

Headlines like “Terror in a Small Town,” “Stabbing Victim Fights for Her Life,” and “Killer at Large in Coastal Community” flash by as I flip through the reports and force back the bile rising in my throat.

The scar that runs on a jagged diagonal from my sternum to my belly button throbs.

I know my mind has created the sensation: the scar tissue is over twenty years old.

It’s not throbbing. But the phantom feeling tells me this was a bad idea.

I shove the articles back into the box and grab the yearbook.

I’m about to toss it on top when I think to check the alphabetical index of student names in the back of the book, just in case Tristan is older than he looks.

Roberts, Roman, Russell. No Rose. I close the book, return it to the box, and lock it up.

After I return it to its spot under the loose floor board and put the closet back together, I head back to the kitchen to refill my mug.

I should eat something. The acid from the coffee and the acid already swirling in my gut are guaranteed to give me a stomachache if I don’t.

I grab a box of crackers and the tomato jelly I canned last fall and boot up the computer.

While the ancient desktop wheezes to life, I wander over to the window to peer out into the rapidly falling darkness.

I can’t see the cabin from here, so I can only imagine what Emily Rose is doing.

Did my poorly concealed freakout rattle her?

Or is she one of those artsy types who live in their own heads? Maybe she didn’t even notice.

Her husband did, though. Tristan Rose looked as sick as I felt when she announced we both came from the same Godforsaken town. And that makes me curious. I know why I want to forget Windy Rock exists. Why does he ?

I scroll back through the snippets of the conversation that managed to permeate my panic. Tristan said he moved away when he was young. Something about his mother remarrying a man from Arizona. Of course. His last name probably wasn’t Rose when he lived in Maine.

I poke around on the internet for a while, smearing the tart jam on crackers, one by one, and shoving them into my mouth while I search for any reference to the name “Tristan” in connection to “Windy Rock.” Nothing. Bupkis. Zilch.

I try all my tricks—real estate deeds, tax rolls, church directories, and alumni listings.

But he was just a kid when they moved away.

By the time I reach the end of my very long dead end, I’ve polished off an entire sleeve of crackers, my lap is covered in a fine dusting of crumbs, and my coffee is cold.

I open my email client and send off a quick note to Robert.

I’m not sure when he’ll see it—or when he’ll have a chance to respond.

But the message is a touchstone or a talisman.

A reminder of my new life. My safe life.

My normal existence. And the act of sending it calms me, and I’m able to think more clearly.

My frenetic, swirling mind quiets just enough for me to realize that the kids and grandkids of the deceased almost always merit a mention in obituaries.

Two minutes and twelve seconds later, I’ve found him in the online obituary archive for the largest of Hancock County, Maine’s three funeral homes.

Most of Windy Rock’s residents seemed to prefer Zemansky Brothers, but Tristan’s father was laid out at Timothy Lewis Funeral Home over in Fort Bradford.

The obituaries stay up in the funeral home’s guest book forever, but the individual archive results aren’t indexed for internet searches.

I guess funeral homes aren’t overly worried about the SEO results seeing as how they have a captive audience.

The death notice was short, not particularly sweet, and dated three days after I was attacked. While I was fighting for my life in the ICU, Tristan’s dad took a header off the cliffs outside town:

Thomas “Tom” Weakes, age 41, of Windy Rock, passed away on Tuesday, March 4, 2003, as the result of a fall from the cliffs into Penobscot Bay. Tom is survived by his wife, Tara (Fulton) Weakes, and his two sons, Tate and Tristan. Visitation will be private.

Tristan Rose’s name didn’t trigger any alarms because he was Tristan Weakes when he lived in Windy Rock, and I was right—he is considerably younger than me.

He couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine when Tara packed up and left town with him.

She wasted no time after Tom’s death. She and her young son had already moved away by the time I was released from the hospital three weeks after the attack.

Tristan barely registered in my consciousness back then.

But I knew Tate. He’d been just a few years behind me in school.

He was finishing up his senior year at Windy Rock and didn’t move out with his mother and brother.

He stayed behind, ostensibly to graduate, but as far as I knew, all he did was get drunk and pick fights in the parking lot of Nate’s Burgers and Brews.

Not that I paid much attention. I was preoccupied with surgeries, physical therapy, trying to regain my footing in the world of the living.

And I didn’t waste any time getting the hell out of Windy Rock, either.

By the beginning of May, I’d moved down to Connecticut, where I met Robert.

When he was stationed in San Diego, I tagged along without a second thought.

The more distance I could put between me and Maine, the better.

I never regretted the decision to leave.

But I did wonder sometimes, on rainy nights when I couldn’t sleep, if my departure had led the police to give up on finding my attacker more quickly than if I’d stayed in town as a reminder of what happened.

If I hadn’t moved three thousand miles across the country, would they have bothered to run down the rumors that Tom Weakes had attacked me and, then, racked with guilt or fear of being caught, thrown himself to his death in the bay?

I tell myself it might not have mattered if I’d stuck around.

Probably wouldn’t have. Because if the police had asked me, I couldn’t have said one way or the other whether he’d done it.

I don’t know my attacker’s age, ethnicity, or build.

I am sure he was male, but I don’t know why I’m so certain.

I lost the hours immediately before, during, and after the attack, and my memory from that period never returned.

Not that I’m overly broken up about that.

I’m sure I don’t want to remember the details.

My mind is probably protecting me, according to the psychiatrists. And I’m happy to let it.

But, sometimes, those blank hours terrify me. My attacker could walk right up to me in the grocery store or rent my cabin, and I’d have no clue. And now Tom Weakes’ son knows where I live.

My hands shake as I drop the crackers and run for the bathroom. As I crouch over the toilet, hurling crackers and blood-red jelly into the bowl, I’m gripped by a cold fear worse than any I’ve ever known.