by Sarah Hogle
“Are those supposed to be trees?” he asks benignly with a motion toward my green-black blobs, to which I can’t help but laugh.
“If you have to ask, I guess they’re pretty bad.”
“No! Not bad. Not at all.” Lies. “Here, try this.” He plucks two brushes with flat, fanned bristles from the plastic tub, one for him, one for me, and dips them in water. Wipes the excess carefully against a paint-stained rag. “These are perfect for coniferous trees.” He dabs his into hunter-green paint and then creates a realistic fir tree in seconds, like it’s nothing.
“You don’t always need to have your brush loaded with paint,” he says. “If you let it fade out, you end up with softer branches. Then you come back, like this, with a little bit of yellow. These brushes are handy for grass, too.” He demonstrates, barely tapping the bristles against the wall but managing to leave behind feathery strokes of yellow-green grass.
I copy him. “Ahh! Look at my tree! I made a tree!”
“Very good,” he replies, even though his tree is much better.
“Would you mind helping me?”
Wesley doesn’t take any convincing. He asks what I’d like him to do, and I put him on tree duty. I try to mirror whatever he does on my side of the mural but keep stopping to watch him work. He makes all sorts of trees, using different brushes for the trunks, for different textures. He knows exactly which brush is the right one for the result he wants. Which colors to use. “You’re really good at this,” I say.
He grumbles noncommittally, arm stilling its movements. It takes him a while to get back into the groove, and as I watch his progress, I also watch his cheeks and neck redden.
I can’t believe it. He’s self-conscious.
“No, seriously, you’re an actual artist,” I force myself to tell him, like I’m trying to pet a dog who might bite me. “You’re legit.”
“Not really.” He squirms.
“You must paint all the time, then? To be this talented?” There are a few landscape paintings hanging up in the cabin, but I assumed he or Violet bought them.
“I’m not . . . I’m not that good.” Wesley rubs the nape of his neck. I think complimenting him is making it worse. It’s so humanizing, to see this giant starchy potato get all pink and flustered simply because I’m bearing witness to his fluffy trees. It makes me want to compliment him more, which is a disturbing development.
“Anyway.” He rolls his shoulder and tries to twist himself so that I can’t see his face. “Light. And shadows. Um. So, look, there’s the sun, so . . .” He darts me a sidelong look. “Pay attention to the art.”
“I am.”
(Awful, is what I am, but in my defense he walked right into that one.)
His blush is furious. You could fry an egg with it. “Look at my brush, please. You’re missing important techniques here.”
He adds whitecaps to the waves, and reflections of overhanging trees. I imitate him. He isn’t as precise anymore, fumbling with the paint bottles, knocking over our cup of water. He mutters and grumbles and, honestly, looks completely miserable. I have never seen him like this. I’m so startled that I don’t know what to say.
“Thanks for teaching me,” I say, nodding at the wall, where a waterfall lagoon mural is slowly emerging from the mess I made. “I appreciate it. You must have taken quite a lot of pity on me and my painting abilities to help out somebody you hate.”
It’s a joke. It’s mostly a joke.
Wesley swivels his head, eyebrows knitting. “I don’t hate you,” he says slowly, like it’s obvious.
“Kind of thought you hated everybody,” I say. It’s another sort-of joke that falls flat.
“No.” He looks hurt. “I liked Violet. I like my family.”
This piques my curiosity. “What’s your family like? Are they all giants?”
“My mom’s four eleven.”
“Holy cow, your dad must be Paul Bunyan.”
His grunt tells me this conversation is closed. Then, a few minutes later, after I’ve forgotten and moved on: “I’m not that tall. The national average for men in the Netherlands is six feet. If I lived there, no one would even notice me.”
I stare.
He swings away.
“Could you teach me how to draw a pirate sh—” I begin to ask, but Wesley drops his brush in a fit of frustration, rising from his chair.
“I’m not any good at this.” He sounds so resigned. And sad.
“What?” Not any good at this? What in the hell is he talking about? “Are you kidding? You’re amazing at this!”
“No, I’m not,” he mutters under his breath, cleaning up after himself jerkily. I can tell now that staring bothers him, but it’s impossible not to.
“Wesley.” I stand up.
“I should be cleaning. I’m too busy for this, I shouldn’t be messing around.” He holds out a hand like a stop sign, as if to say, Don’t you dare move. Stay where you are. “You’ve got this,” he assures me, gravely serious. “You’re doing great.” He keeps his hand up—Don’t come any closer—all the way out of the room.
I gape at the doorway. Then the mural.
“Okaaaaaay.”
I keep going for about two minutes longer, but concentration’s a pipe dream. I’ve got to go see what’s up with Wesley.
I find him in the kitchen, standing at the sink rinsing out his paintbrushes. I can’t tell if he’s hanging his head because he’s upset or just tired, but he isn’t his usual rigid self tonight.
In this silent house, my footsteps are an uproar. Wesley glances my way, eyes shuttering. We’re hungry and exhausted, a dangerous mix. We’re sick of requesting constant approval over every renovation detail when it comes to our own home, which we are each being forced to share with a stranger. Or not a stranger, anymore, not really—but certainly not a friend. He makes his distaste for my company crystal clear by finding any excuse to exit a room right after I’ve entered it and responding to my attempts at conversation with apathetic monosyllables.
“You all right?” I ask. I can’t help it. I’m an incorrigible peacemaker.
“Fine.” He shuts the water off, even though his hands still have paint on them, and begins to leave. He’s an incorrigible room-leaver.
“Have you seen the new box of garbage bags?” I ask before he can perform one of his vanishing acts. “I need to bag up about a billion paper towels. Cleaning out vents is disgusting.”
Without turning fully around, I know he’s gone stone-faced. I can tell by the shape of his profile, the minuscule jut to his chin. I hate that I pay close enough attention to be able to tell. “New bags are at the cabin. On top of the fridge.”
“Why’d you put them all the way up there?”
I’m trying to lift the mood with a little light ribbing, but Wesley’s too distressed to realize it.
“The top of the fridge isn’t all the way up there to me,” he replies tartly.
I don’t think I like his tone. “Not everyone’s as tall as you are.” He’s the ungrateful kind of tall. If I had that sort of height, I’d be a blessing upon the earth. I’d hang tire swings and save cats. Ask my neighbors if they needed their curtains taken down to be washed.
“Not my problem. You should have eaten more vegetables when you were a child.”
I glare at him, which he doesn’t see, because he’s refusing to look at me. After a short miracle of getting along, showing me kindness, he’s reverted back into the grouch he’s been from the start. When I get my hotel up and running, I’m putting families with small, loud children in the bedroom directly beneath his. There will be complimentary trumpets and kickballs.
“For someone as beautiful as you are, it’s a shame you’re such an insufferable ass,” I blurt out angrily.
Stillness rings. “I’m not that bad, you know,” I continue. “You are constantly tu
rning your back on me, ignoring me when I’m around like I’m a punishment to talk to, and it makes me feel like shit. You make me feel even lonelier than I already was.”
I can’t believe I said that. I can’t believe I said that out loud. But if I’m shocked, he is floored.
His eyes are saucers. I’d give up the left wing of the hotel to know what’s running through his mind.
“Whatever!” I shout, embarrassment joining my anger. “I won’t bother you anymore, then. Go ahead and be alone.”
I spin on my heel, leaving him behind. From another room, I hear him yell out: “I was just kidding about the vegetables thing! Maybell! That was a joke!”
I slam the front door. A section of door frame splinters apart.
“Damn it.”
God, I have had it with today. With this week. Month. Year. Maybe Falling Stars is cursed. My phone starts to vibrate in my pocket and I decide that if it’s that telemarketer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who’s been calling me for two years nonstop, I am going to give them hell.
“Hello?” I bark into my phone, marching stiffly across the dark yard back to the cabin.
“Maybell?”
I stop short. “Ruth!”
I don’t know why my attitude does a one-eighty. Too many years spent using my customer service voice, I suppose.
“Hi! Sorry it’s taken me so long to return your call. I’ve been swamped.” Right. Violet probably wasn’t her only client, and being a home health aide must be a demanding job. “My son moved back in with me, my mom decided to visit for the next few weeks unannounced, and I just found out my daughter dropped out of culinary school to get away from her ex-boyfriend.”
I feel stupid for having called days ago, wasting her time. “Oh my gosh. You’re so busy—I didn’t really have anything important to say—”
“No worries, I’m taking a drive right now to escape the madness. So, how are you settling in?” She’s bright and cheery. Friendly. It’s nice to know some people still know how to be.
“Fine, fine. Settling in fine!” I chirp. “Everything’s great. Fixing up the manor.”
“That’s wonderful! I’m so glad to hear it.” She genuinely sounds glad, too, which makes me smile. “How are you and Wesley getting along?” There’s a cautious edge to her question that tells me she suspects we might not be.
“We’re not,” I reply baldly. “He’s driving me nuts.”
“Ah, well.” Ruth is warm. Sympathetic. “Don’t worry, it probably won’t be long before the house is good to go and you’ll be off the couch in no time.”
“I’m not—”
“The plaid is quite an interesting choice,” she continues. “The couch, I mean. Wonder where Wesley got it from. It was so strange when I visited. Eerie to walk in and not see Violet’s hospital bed taking up the whole living room anymore.”
“Why’d she have a hospital bed in the living room?”
“Where else would she go?” I hear an ignition spur to life on the other side of the phone. “I’m just glad she had a room there, you know? The way she was living before Wesley moved in was . . .” She audibly shudders. “It took plenty of convincing on his part to get Violet out of that house, but he hated her sleeping there. Fire hazard, you know. And unsanitary. We’re lucky nothing fell on her. Then he got in touch with some doctors, brought me on board.”
I wheel around to peer up at the second floor of Falling Stars. All the windows have gone dark but two. In one yellow rectangle, a tall, broad silhouette looks down on the lawn. His body curves away slightly, as if preparing to make a quick getaway, but I don’t move and neither does he.
“Wesley’s the one who contacted you?”
“Before Wesley, Violet hadn’t been to a doctor in years. This woman was in her late eighties, mind you. Had nobody. I don’t like thinking about it. We tried to convince her to let us clean up. Let us donate all the stuff she didn’t need. She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything, kept saying we could get rid of it after she was gone if we hated her belongings so much. A benefit of moving into the groundskeeper’s cabin was that it’s only a one-bedroom, which meant no extra space to fill up with Amazon splurges.”
My attention wraps around one-bedroom and squeezes tight. “What about the bedroom upstairs?”
“The what? Hold on, Maybell.” I hear a window rolling down. “I’d like a number one, please. With cheese. No pickles or onions. An apple pie, too. Oh, and a Cherry Coke! Thank you very much.” To me, she adds, “Are you talking about the loft? Honey, that’s a closet.”
I stare at the silhouette in the window for one beat. Two beats. Three. The light gutters out, taking Wesley with it.
My thumb is already hovering over end call. “Thank you so much for calling me back, Ruth, I really appreciate it. Good luck with everything.”
“Good luck to you, too. I’m going to park five houses down from mine, listen to a podcast, and enjoy my food in peace.”
“You deserve it. Thank you again for talking to me.”
“Anytime, Maybell. Don’t be a stranger.”
Hanging up, I walk calmly into the cabin. I’m not going to go into his bedroom. I’m not. It’s an invasion of his privacy.
I grab a chair and clamber up, but only because I want to see if I can reach the cord on the ceiling. I won’t pull it.
As it happens, I can reach it. Just to experiment—I’m not actually going to go up—I grab the ladder and slide it down.
Maybe I’ll climb a little bit, but not all the way to the top. This is Wesley’s bedroom. It is indubitably, 100 percent, no-gray-area, none of my business.
Up at the top, I press on the ceiling and it gives way, a warped square of thin wood that pitches forward easily. Invitingly. A wave of hot air slams me upside the head.
I suck in a sharp breath, pressing a hand to my mouth. Oh my god.
It’s not a bedroom.
Exposed beams, exposed insulation, exposed wiring, dust motes eddying in stagnant air. A small window with a hand towel stapled to its frame to block the light that would stream in at sunrise and aim directly at the bed, which isn’t a bed at all. It’s a sleeping bag on the floor.
A sleeping bag that takes up the entire floor, the bottom six inches of it curling up the wall because there’s not enough floor for it to lie completely flat.
A miniature desk fan blows loose sheets of paper as it oscillates, plugged into a surge protector along with a small table lamp resting on a stack of books. There’s a flashlight and a wallet. Three neat piles of clothes at the head of the sleeping bag, functioning as a pillow. Headphones attached to a thin cord that snakes beneath a laptop. A half-empty cup of water.
It’s stuffy, cramped, the ceiling too low—Wesley would have to duck or risk hitting his head, even in the middle of the room, where the vaulted roof slants up to its highest point.
I lock gazes with a familiar pair of blue eyes staring out of Wesley’s sleeping bag and sway, overtaken by dizziness.
It’s me. I’m lying in his bed.
Chapter 10
A TWO-DIMENSIONAL MAYBELL PARRISH PEERS out at me with colored-pencil features, wearing a sunset-colored rocky top tree house splash zone racer-back tank, four black hair bands like bracelets tracking up the left wrist. Glow-in-the-dark nail polish. She’s up close, so close that I can make out the strawberry tints in her wind-disheveled brown hair that you don’t notice unless she’s standing in the full sun. Faint reflections of trees flash in her round glasses, but she’s staring right at me with a guarded expression, and my stomach hits the floor because I know exactly what she’s thinking. I know exactly when she was thinking it, and where she was. It was the day I came to Falling Stars.
I was thinking, You look just like a lie I know.
The hairs on my neck rise, but at the same time I flush, an extraordinary awareness pumping through me
. I feel like I’ve had a mask ripped off my face. It would appear that the man who ignores my existence 99 percent of the time has an eye for my every tiny detail. He must have a photographic memory.
There are other sketches in pen, pencils, and oil pastels, of Falling Stars and the woods and flowers I don’t know by name, strewn haphazardly; I envision Wesley with the artwork on his lap, back a crescent slope, profile close to the page. The instrument in his hand races feverishly across the paper in elegant, expert slashes, capturing a flashbulb moment in time. He has to get up suddenly—maybe he checks the time and it’s almost eight in the morning, which means I’m going to be opening my bedroom door soon and coming out. If he wants to avoid bumping into me all day, he’s got to get moving. He rises. The papers go sliding everywhere.
I’m kneeling on Wesley’s sleeping bag, the hard floor beneath it pinching my knee, when the top half of him emerges three feet away from me without warning. I’ll never understand how someone of his size can move without a sound.
“Oh!” I hasten to stand up, but my shoe slides on the slippery material and I knock into his stacks of clothes. Boxers and rolled-up socks topple off, which, in my panic, I pick up and put back. I am touching his underwear now. Wesley’s eyes are unusually hollow; he watches with a drifting, faraway expression, saying nothing.
“I’m sorry.” I have no excuse to be up here, so I don’t even try to come up with one. There is no talking my way out of this. He looks so lost. This looks so bad.
It feels really, really bad.
I straighten the drawings. When the drawing of me passes into my hands Wesley drags his face away from me to focus on the wall, forehead furrowing. He’s still standing on the ladder, gripping either side of the hatch with pale knuckles.
“I . . .” My mouth opens and closes, heart accelerating so fast my chest is overheating. I’m up to my ears in broken pieces of apologies, swimming in them, but I can’t link any of them together.
He begins to sink back down the ladder.