Page 13

Chapter 11

T hat night, I made carnitas bowls from a pork shoulder that I’d put in the slow cooker before leaving for work. Peter and Mere cooked rice with black beans, chopped tomatoes, and onions and jalapenos, and grated mounds of Monterey Jack. I whipped up a pitcher of margaritas for Peter and me then went to work shredding the fragrant, tender meat.

At one point, Ramsey stalked into the kitchen, and Mere flinched, eyeing him fearfully and leaning away. Peter lifted an eyebrow at me, but I shook my head and shooed the cat out of the room without comment. For once, Peter wasn’t physically or mentally MIA. He was here with the two of us, wide-awake, joking with Mere and touching me at every opportunity. I wasn’t about to make a big deal over the cat and jinx this situation.

We sat around the long kitchen table, and I started to dig in when Mere insisted on saying the official Juliana grace. After she’d finished, she touched a spot on her wrist and then pressed her fingers against her lips.

I looked at Peter. His brow was furrowed, but I shook my head again. If our daughter wanted to say grace, what could it hurt? It wasn’t a battle worth fighting. Thankfully, Peter let it go, and after dinner, Mere asked if she could paint. I rolled out butcher paper on the kitchen table and set out pots of poster paint. She went to work while Peter and I sat on the back porch and finished the pitcher of margaritas. I told him about the school meet-and-greet, omitting Alice’s admission of being Peter’s client.

“Mere’s really excited about school,” I said. “And Alice Tilton’s got a whole bag of tricks for keeping her engaged.” I hesitated. “I was feeling kind of down about not being able to talk to Mom about it, but it was really nice to have Lilah there, you know? Like, next best thing.”

There was no answer.

I leaned forward. “Peter?” I put down my drink and peered at him. His chin had dropped to his chest, and I realized with disbelief that he’d actually fallen asleep. I stared at him for a few seconds, resisting the urge to panic. He looked agitated, his eyes moving beneath their lids, his breath coming out in labored, staccato puffs, like he was running. Beads of sweat dotted his temple and ran along his hairline. He let out a soft whimper.

I reached out to shake him, but before I could, he stiffened and let out a bloodcurdling scream. I sprang back, clapping a hand over my mouth. He was struggling now, twisting in the rocking chair, legs kicking out, arms thrashing. He looked like he was fighting for his life.

“ You fucker ,” he spat out. “You demon fucker! Don’t touch me with those wings. Those fucking wings . . . I hate ’em. The feathers . . . the feathers . . . I said get the fuck back! ”

I eyed him with a horrified, transfixed fascination, my heart thudding against my chest.

“You fucker !” With a great jolt, he flung himself up and out of the rocking chair, launching himself in my direction. I screamed and jumped to the side as he charged past me and crashed into the railing. He woke up then, sprawled on the ground, sweating and breathless. I ran to him.

“Peter!”

He rolled to a sitting position, head in his hands. “Oh God. Oh my God . . .”

“You were dreaming. What was it?”

He blinked. Then let out a disbelieving laugh that sounded almost like a moan.

I put my hand on his chest. “Peter. Talk to me. You have to talk to me. I’ve never seen you like that. I’ve never seen anyone like that.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He kept shaking his head, like he was trying to shake off the vestiges of the dream. Then he covered his face with both hands.

“Peter. Please. This is me. I’m here.”

He breathed deeply. Reoriented himself. “There was this horse. It was white with spots, but just a lighter white, like a spray of sunspots or star . . .” He trailed off, at a loss. His eyes were huge, full of a pain I couldn’t identify, and he couldn’t seem to describe.

“You said something about wings,” I prodded.

“The thing . . . it had feathers. Wings. And it was coming after me. It wanted to hurt me. To hurt us. It was a demon, Billie. Some kind of demon-horse.”

I tilted my head. “A demon-horse.”

“Yeah, you know . . .” He gazed off across the back fields to the west, to the orange setting sun. “It belonged here, to this place. Over there. Over by the bluff. But it was angry. It . . .” He turned to me.

“What?”

His eyes were pleading. “You’ve had them too, right? The dreams?”

“Yeah. No demon-horses. Just that song. Kids singing that hymn we play at the restaurant. An old woman sometimes.”

“It’s got to mean something, don’t you think? Like we’re all having bizarre dreams. We’re all having trouble sleeping.”

I wanted to say that I was having trouble sleeping mainly because he kept waking me up, but I didn’t. “Want to take a walk?” I asked instead. “Just a short one? Mere will be okay.”

“I don’t think so. I’m tired.”

I folded my arms, my mind clicking away. I was not going to let this night end with Peter turning in early, and me sitting by myself catching up on whatever reality show was trending on Netflix. I was going to make my husband talk to me, even if it killed the both of us.

I sat beside him on the wood planks of the porch. “Have you heard back from Doc Belmont yet?”

“No. He said he’d call when he got the lab results.”

I touched his arm. “Come walk with me. You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t want to walk, Billie. I don’t feel like it.”

I felt chastened, like a toddler who’d just gotten her hand smacked for some naughty deed. “Tell me about your day then.”

He sighed. “It was just a day like any other day. I listened to clients talk about their shit. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

I went hot all over. It felt like he’d slapped me in the face.

He sighed. “Sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m just so tired of being tired.” He stood. “I should go to bed before more dumb-assery comes out of my mouth.”

He helped me up and pressed a kiss to my hand, but it felt perfunctory. “I’m sorry, Billie. I really am.”

I lifted my chin to meet his eyes, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring out across the damn field, that faraway look in his eye that was fast becoming his default expression.

I jerked my hand out of his. “What? What is it that you see out there, Peter? Is it a well without a cover? Is it a demon-horse covered in feathers? Whatever it is, I want to go out there with you and find it.”

For a split second, there was a desperate look on his face. Then he composed himself. “It’s not the well. It’s something else. It’s—”

I lifted my chin, glared at him. “Let’s just go out there and find the fucking thing once and for all and be done with the whole damn issue. I’m tired of you pushing me away. That’s not how we do things. It’s not us.”

His jaw worked. His eyes looked watery and unsure in the porch light.

I stepped closer to him. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with the well, but you are, and I have to accept that. I accept it—my husband is more interested in some well on our property than anything, anyone else in his life.”

“Like the way my wife feels about a restaurant.”

“Okay. Great. Finally. That’s what you’re upset about. So let’s talk about it.”

He was quiet for a moment, then spoke. “I know you don’t get that same charge here at home as you do at Billie’s. Over there everybody’s dying for the owner to come talk to them. Everybody’s looking at you. You’re the star. Here, you’re just Mom. Nobody’s writing stories about you. No one’s kissing your ass.”

The nastiness of the comment took the wind out of me. Also, the small vein of truth that was buried within it.

“I’d suggest we start back on the date nights, but I can barely get you to leave the house,” I said bitterly.

“I’m tired, Billie.”

“You’re absent—”

“You’re not here either! You’re always there! Always at the restaurant!”

The glass whizzed through the air so fast, smashing against the side of the house behind me, that I barely had time to register what was happening. But then I did. He’d just thrown it. My husband, my calm, reasonable, therapist husband had just thrown a glass, and it was now shattered in a million pieces on the porch. I stared down at the glistening shards around me, then looked up at him. Had he meant it to hit me?

“Don’t you think I’m scared, Billie?” he yelled. “Don’t you think I know something’s wrong, that I shouldn’t be falling asleep every goddamn second of the day? Don’t you think I’m terrified that they’re going to tell me I’ve got some kind of rare, autoimmune thing or a brain tumor or some kind of degenerative—”

“Maybe it’s not physical, Peter!” I shouted. “Maybe you just hate being here, hate seeing me happy, hate it that you feel like you followed me—”

“Go ahead, Billie! Cut me open! Get up in here”—he jabbed a finger at his head—“and tell me everything that’s wrong with me! It’s not like I’m not beating myself up enough about all this.”

“Who’s got a brain tumor?” Mere’s trembly voice floated across the porch. We both whirled to face our daughter, paintbrush dripping watery green poster paint on the worn boards, watching us. She glanced at the mess of broken glass on the porch floor.

“Daddy had an accident,” I said. “He dropped his glass. And nobody’s got a brain tumor. We were just talking.” I glanced at Peter. His face was grim and gray, and he was running his fingers through his hair. His hands were trembling. “Peter?” Say something.

He sniffed and planted his hands on his hips. “Hey, Mere. How’s the painting?”

Her eyes were still wide, taking in the whole scene. I was pretty sure we weren’t fooling her. “Good.”

“Ready for bed?” I asked.

“I’ll take you.” Peter hustled Mere inside before she could protest. I watched them go, wondering if she was going to ask more questions. Would he tell her we’d been fighting? That he wasn’t feeling well? That he was scared?

I downed the rest of my margarita and stared morosely at the constellation of broken glass on the porch. I could try all I wanted, but it was clear Peter wasn’t going to talk to me. I put the glass down and listened. Cicadas buzzing their unearthly, electric song. An owl hooting so loudly it seemed like it had been amplified by a megaphone. I clattered down the steps, walking out into the grassy area behind the house. It was full dark now, with only a sliver of moon lighting up the clouds. I still couldn’t get over how dark it got out here at night, unlike the city that was constantly glowing, no matter what time it was. But I liked it. I felt safe. The darkness out here felt like protection.

I clicked on my phone’s flashlight and walked over the uneven ground, taking care not to step in any holes that the burrowing animals might’ve left. I was headed in the direction of the woods, Peter’s domain up until now. Whatever secrets this land held—whether it was a well or a demon-horse or just some nefarious corporate-sourced pollution—I was going to find it.

Entering the woods, I realized instantly the safe feeling I’d had was misplaced. I was not only not wearing the right shoes for hiking, but the denim cutoffs I’d thrown on after work left my legs vulnerable to scrapes, bug bites, possibly even a startled snake. Major Minette had said the well was near the western property line, right before the bluff. I concentrated on keeping my phone’s light trained on the trees. There was a path, a faint one, that wound through them. It was covered with a thick blanket of leaves and crisscrossed with fallen, rotting branches, but I could follow it.

I forged on, periodically checking the compass on my phone, telling myself this was going to be like one of those situations where Peter stood for fifteen minutes in front of the open doors of the fridge, insisting we were out of mayo, only for me to march in and locate the jar on the shelf where it had been sitting in front of him the entire time. When I found this stupid, uncapped motherfucker of a well, I was going to rub his nose in it for as long as I deemed necessary.

After a few more minutes, I stopped, feeling slightly turned around. The forest closed in around me. I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread and oppression as the trees loomed over me. It was muggy and warm, but I shivered in my shorts and thin T-shirt. I had started to feel dizzy as well, the woods spinning around me, gaining speed as I stood still at their center. I drew in a deep breath, but it only made the sensation worse. I’d lost sight of the moon; I only saw trees crowding around me. They were so close. Too close. I threw my arms out and closed my eyes tight, a tightrope walker trying to find her balance.

I suddenly felt that I was no longer in the woods, but as if I was someplace else, someplace cold and wet with the dank smell of some hidden, ancient place. A forbidden, dark place, but also sacred somehow. I was scared to open my eyes, scared of what I’d see if I did. Would Peter’s winged demon-horse be standing before me, snorting, pawing the ground, preparing to trample me with vile, filthy hooves? Or maybe it would be Mere’s Catawampus—Ramsey, transformed into a fanged panther, sulfur-eyed and thirsting to sink its claws into my flesh. Or maybe the rabid, rotting Juliana Minette.

My skin rose in gooseflesh. I heard a sound. Not owls or cicadas, more like music. I strained my ears. A soft wail, like keening, was rising up from somewhere ahead of me, somewhere beyond the edge of the bluff. What was it? It did sound a little like music. There was the twangy echo of a banjo’s strings, the plaintive cry of the fiddle as a bow slides across it.

But no, it wasn’t music. It couldn’t be. It was some kind of animal, down there, howling. A baby searching for its mother. The sound reminded me of Mere’s thin cries when we brought her home from the hospital. That first week, before her lungs really found their stride, her cries sounded like they were coming from a doll. I wished I could cry that way now, just let out my grief for Mom in that unfettered, animal way. But for some reason, no tears came.

I didn’t cry now, like I hadn’t cried then.

The memory flooded me. When Mom had told me she was selling the house I’d bought her and was moving to Maine, I’d calmly listened to her explain her decision— it’s not a cult, it’s a co-op, Bills —feeling more disoriented and hurt with every word that came out of her mouth. All these years I’d spent working my ass off, creating Billie’s, I realized then, it had been for her. But I’d never come right out and told her, had I? I’d never said, Mom, this is a place for us or, more to the point, Mom, I want to know you; I’d just blindly assumed I could keep her close to me with the restaurant . . . and now she was proving me wrong. She was heading off into the sunset to spend the rest of her life with a bunch of strangers. She wanted them, not me.

After I had hung up the phone, I left the apartment without my purse or phone and walked around the city for hours. I wound up in some posh corner of the Upper East Side at dark with blisters on my heels and no cash or card for a cab home. I actually had to ask a stranger to borrow their phone so I could call Peter.

Fuck her , I said to Peter when he’d come for me. I wasn’t going to chase her down. I wasn’t going to beg her to love me anymore.

And I refused to cry.

In the dark, I suddenly tripped over a root or fallen branch and, letting out a cry, pitched forward, stumbling over a sort of ledge. At first my feet sped up like someone on a runaway treadmill, then finally unable to keep up, I fell headlong, crashing through branches, inhaling rotted leaves, desperately clawing for some hold on something, anything to slow me down.

I finally landed—at the bottom of the bluff, I assumed—and lay there for a moment, waiting for some shooting pain in my ankle or knee or wrist. But there was nothing. Nothing other than a couple of scrapes and a spot on my hip that was probably going to be a nasty bruise tomorrow. I groaned and sat up, brushing twigs and leaves out of my hair.

My eyes, adjusted to the dark now, were finally able to make out my surroundings. I was on level land, in a sort of clearing. The steep wall of the bluff I’d just fallen down rose up behind me, covered by a curtain of thick vines and ivy and spindly trees, their roots half exposed. Ahead of me was the supposedly polluted creek Peter had found, making the most normal, cheery burbling sound. Sitting here, it all seemed so normal. So mundane and harmless.

But my head was pounding, and my leg burned where I’d slid over the rough ground. I’d also lost my phone. I looked around, still feeling disoriented. The forest around me was quiet. There were no sounds, just the excruciating sensation of my aching body and this pounding headache.

We shall meet but we shall miss him . . .

The words came unbidden to my mind. That earworm hymn from Billie’s playlist.

We shall meet but we shall miss him . . .

I heard the music in my head, banjo and fiddle again, and now a young girl’s thin but steady voice.

There will be one vacant chair . . .

The singing girl sounded like Mere, but not at the same time. And now it felt like the music was not just in my head but coming from the woods around me. I gripped my head in my hands, as the music seemed to grow louder. I had definitely hit my head when I fell. Jesus. I closed my eyes. What a fucking dirge. I was going to delete it from the playlist when I went in tomorrow.

We shall meet but we shall—

“Shut up!” I yelled, and the music stopped. The music in my head, I reminded myself. In my head. Not actually playing out here in the woods. Because that would be crazy.

Now there was only silence. And that sound the stars made. That high-pitched keening. Cries from light-years away. Cries that crossed time and space . . .

Stop it, Billie. Stop. Stars don’t make sounds.

I stood, brushing the rest of the leaves and dirt off me, attempting to reorient myself. A breeze kicked up, tickling my skin, and I twisted my hair into a ponytail holder I found in my pocket. I heard the branches of trees clacking against each other. Some kind of animal chittered a few feet from me. I should be getting back to the house. To Mere and Peter. It had been a bad idea to come out here. A terrible idea. I swayed, the pain at the front of my head intensifying. It had a beat now, pulsating in time with my heart.

The cold, damp enveloped me, sharpening the pain in my head. Goose bumps rose on my arms and legs. A shudder rippled through me. What was it Mom used to say when she had that sensation—that someone was walking across her grave?

I turned to look behind me, then in every other direction. Panic filled me, a buzzing even louder than the cicadas. The trees were holding hands above me, the canopy, and beneath me, their roots joined in a way I couldn’t see. Was that the way the dead held us? Above and below? Death was so strong here; it was all around me, in the rotting leaves and fallen trees and all the decaying corpses of squirrels and rabbits and God knows what else, hidden from sight. Death held me firmly in its grip, so I couldn’t run. So it could warn me of something. But what?

The trees bent lower, whispering death’s message through their branches.

What have they taken from you, Billie?

What will they take . . .

The same message of the old woman in my dreams.

I let out a desperate, gasping sob. I was drunk. Drunk off my ass with tequila, likely concussed after that fall, and now I was thinking that the trees were talking to me. I was a fool, coming out here. I should start back. Go home and get in bed and press my body close to my husband. I needed sleep. We both just needed sleep.

I started walking. It stood to reason that I was probably closer to the road, Route 140, the mill road, than I was to my house. I headed toward the creek, which didn’t look red in the moonlight, just black and oily. I splashed clumsily through the water and continued tromping through the woods, hoping I was heading in the right direction.

“Hey there!” came a man’s voice through the dark.

The voice was accompanied by a dark figure and the bright, reassuring twin beams of a car’s headlights. I sped up, tripping over a rock as I reached a slight incline. It was Jamie Cleburne, standing by his truck, which was parked by the side of the road. The mill road, which it appeared I’d accidentally found.

“Oh, thank God,” I breathed, stumbling toward him. “I’m so glad to see you.”