‘That was it!” Jilly cried as Jim drove by a small gas bar and store on the right side of the highway. “You went right by it.”
Jim pulled over to the side of the road. He waited until there was a break in the traffic, then made a U-turn and took them back into the parking lot. The name of the store was written out in tiny letters compared to the enormous GAS sign above it. The building itself was functional rather than quaint—cinderblock walls with a flat shingled roof. All that added a picturesque element was the long wooden porch running along the front length of the building. It was simply furnished, with a pair of plastic lawn chairs, newspaper racks for both The Newford Star and The Daily Journal, and an ancient Coca-Cola machine belonging to an older time when the soft drink was sold only in its classic short bottles.
Jim parked in front of the store, away from the pumps, and killed the engine. Peering through the windshield, they could see an old woman at the store’s counter.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Jilly said. “Old people always seem to like me.”
“Everybody likes you,” Wendy said with a laugh.
Jilly gave a “can I help it” shrug before she opened her door and stepped out onto the asphalt.
“I’m coming,” Wendy added, sliding over across the seat.
In the end they all trooped inside. The store lived up to its name, selling everything from dried and canned goods and fresh produce to fishing gear, flannel shirts, hardware and the like. The goods were displayed on shelves that stood taller than either Jilly or Wendy, separated by narrow aisles. It was dim inside as well—the light seeming almost nonexistent compared to the bright sunlight outside.
The old woman behind the counter—she must be Ada, Jilly decided—looked up and smiled as they came in. She was grey-haired and on the thin side, dressed in rather tasteless orange polyester pants and a blouse that was either an off white or a very pale yellow—Jilly couldn’t quite decide which. Her hair was done up in a handkerchief from which stray strands protruded like so many dangling vines.
“I wish I could be of more help,” Ada said when Jilly showed her the photograph of Brenda that she’d brought along, “but I’ve never seen her before. She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”
Jilly nodded. “Are there any motels or bed-and-break-fasts nearby?” she asked.
“The closest would be Pine Mountain Cabins up by Sumac Lake,” Ada told her. “But that’s another fifteen or so miles up the highway.”
“Nothing closer?”
“Afraid not. Pine Mountain is certainly the closest— other than The Wishing Well, of course, but that’s been boarded up ever since the early seventies when the bank foreclosed on Ellie Carter.”
“That’s the place where Brenda goes on her Sunday drives,” Wendy put in.
Jilly nodded. She could remember Brenda having spoken of the place before. “And she’s got a newspaper clipping of it up above her desk in her apartment,” she added.
“I doubt your friend would be staying there,” Ada said. “The place is a shambles.”
“Let’s try it anyway,” Jilly said. “We’ve got nothing to lose. Thank you,” she added to Ada as she headed for the door with Jim in tow.
Wendy stopped long enough to buy a chocolate bar, before following them to the car. Jilly had already slid in beside Jim so this time Wendy got the window seat.
“What would Brenda be doing at an abandoned motel?” Wendy asked as Jim started up the car.
“Who knows?” he said.
“Besides,” Jilly said, “with the way this idea panned out, our only other option is to go back home.”
The motel was easy to find. They followed the long curve of the highway as it led away from the store and came upon it almost immediately as the road straightened once more.
“I don’t see a car,” Jim said.
He parked close to the highway and they all piled out of his car again. The soles of their shoes scuffed on the buckling pavement as they approached the motel proper. The tumbled-down structure looked worse the closer they came to it.
“Maybe she parked it around back,” Jilly said. “Out of sight of the highway.”
She was trying to sound hopeful, but the place didn’t look encouraging—at least not in terms of finding Brenda. It was so frustrating. She kicked at a discarded soda can and watched it skid across the parking lot until it was brought up short by a clump of weeds growing through the asphalt.
“God, it’s so creepy-looking,” Wendy said. “Way abandoned.”
It did have a forlorn air about it, but Jilly rather liked it— maybe because of that. She’d always had a soft spot in her heart for the abandoned and unwanted.
“I think it’s great,” she said.
“Oh, please.”
“No, really. I’ve got to come back here and do some paintings. Look at the way that shed’s almost leaning right into the field. The angle’s perfect. It’s like it’s pointing back at the motel sign. And the lattice work on that roofline— over there. It’s just—”
“What’s that weird sound?” Jim broke in.
Jilly fell silent and then both she and Wendy both heard it as well—an eerie mix of a high-pitched moan and a broken whisper. It was so quiet that it disappeared completely when a car passed on the highway behind them. Once the car was gone, though, they could hear it again.
“It… it must be some kind of animal,” Wendy said. “Caught in a trap or something.”
Jilly nodded and set off around the side of the motel at a run, quickly followed by the other two.
“Oh, shit,” Wendy said. “That’s Brenda’s car.”
Jilly had recognized it as well, but she didn’t bother replying. She had a bad feeling about all of this—the motel, Brenda’s car, that sound. Worry formed a knot in the pit of her stomach, but she ignored the discomfort as best she could. Head cocked, she tried to place where the sound originated. It made her shiver, crawling up her spine like a hundred little clawed feet.
“It’s coming from over there,” Jim said, pointing toward a thick tangle of rose bushes.
“That’s where Brenda said the well is,” Wendy said.
But Jilly wasn’t listening. She’d already taken the lead again and so it was she who, after pushing her way through a worn path in the rose bush tangle, first found Brenda.
Jilly almost didn’t recognize her. Brenda was wasted to the point of emaciation—a gaunt scarecrow version of the woman Jilly had known. Her clothes hung on her as though they were a few sizes too large, her hair seemed to have lost its vibrancy and was matted against her scalp and neck. She was leaning over a crumbling stone wall, head and shoulders in the well, thin arms pushing on the stones as though something was dragging her down. But there was nothing there. Only Brenda and the terrible soft keening sound she was making.
Afraid of startling her, Jilly waited until Jim and Wendy had pushed through the roses as well so that they could lend her a hand in case Brenda fell forward when she was touched. Speaking softly—just uttering meaningless comforting sounds, really—Jilly pulled Brenda back from the well with Jim’s help. When they laid her on the ground, Brenda’s eyes gazed sightless up at them, vision turned inward. But the sound she’d been making slowly faded away.
“Oh my God,” Wendy said as she took in the change that had been wrought on Brenda in just a few weeks. “There’s nothing left of her.”
Jilly nodded grimly. “We have to get her to a hospital.”
She and Wendy took Brenda’s legs, Jim her shoulders, then they carried her back through the rose bushes, all of them suffering scratches and cuts from the sharp thorns since the path was too narrow for this sort of maneuver. Brenda seemed to weigh nothing at all. Once they had her out on the lawn, Jim hoisted her up in his arms and they hurried back to his car.
“What about Brenda’s car?” Wendy said as they passed it on the way back to the motel’s parking lot.
“We’ll come back for it,” Jilly said.
25
&
nbsp; I don’t remember much about the hospital. I feel like I was underwater the whole time—from when I hung up the phone on Jim Saturday night until a few days later, when I found myself in a hospital bed in Newford General. I don’t know where the lost time went—down some dark well, I guess.
The doctor told me I’d been starving myself to death.
I was in the hospital forever and I’ve been in therapy ever since I got out. I’m really just starting to come to grips with the fact that I have an eating disorder. Have one, had one, and always have to guard against its recurrence.
Thank god I had my health insurance premiums paid up.
The thing that’s hardest to accept is that it’s not my fault. This is something Ellie told me and my therapist keeps returning to. Yes, I’m responsible for the messes I’ve made in my life, but I have to understand where the self-destructive impulses come from. The reason I feel so inadequate, so fat, so ugly, so mixed up, is because all my life I’ve had certain images pounded into my head—the same way that everybody does. Perfect ideals that no one can match. Roles to play that—for whatever reason—we can’t seem to adjust to. When you don’t toe the line, it’s not just the outside world that looks askance at you; you feel in your own head that you’ve let yourself down. »
Logically, it all makes sense, but it’s still a hard leap of faith to accept that the person I am is a good person and deserves recognition for that, rather than trying to be somebody I’m not, that I can never be, that it would even be wrong to be.
But though that’s part of my problem, it’s not the real root of it. Every woman has to deal with those same social strikes against her. For me, it all comes back to my dad, to this belief that if I’d been better, prettier, he wouldn’t have killed himself; that if I could somehow regain the sexless body of a child—look like a child, be the perfect child—I could win him back again.
Understanding that is even harder.
I weigh a hundred and twenty-seven pounds now, but I still haven’t taken up smoking again. As for my finances— I’m working on them. I had to declare personal bankruptcy, but I’m going to pay everybody back. I have to, because I don’t think anybody else should have to pay for my mistakes—no matter what the extenuating circumstances leading up to those mistakes. A friend of Jilly’s got me a job at The Daily Journal doing proofing, copyediting, that sort of thing. The pay’s not great, but there’s room to move up.
Things never really worked out between Jim and me—my fault again, but I’m trying not to feel guilty about it. I just couldn’t accept that he cared for me after he’d seen how screwed up I can get. I know it wasn’t pity he felt—I mean, he obviously liked me before things got really weird—but I could never look at him without wondering what he was seeing: me, or that creature I became by the well. Jilly says he still asks about me. Maybe one day I’ll feel confident enough to look him up again.
There was no rusalka—that’s pretty much the general consensus, myself included. Sort of. Wendy says I must have seen a reflection of myself in the window of the motel room and just freaked out. My therapist simply says there’s no such thing, but won’t offer explanations for what I thought I saw except to tell me that I was in a disturbed state of mind and that people are liable to experience anything in such a situation.
I don’t quite buy it. I don’t know if there really was a water-wraith or not, but there’s something in water that’s still haunting me. Not a bad something, not a nightmare creature like the rusalka, but still something not of this world. When I talked about it with Jilly once, she said, “You know the way Christy talks about ghosts being a kind of audiovisual memory that a place holds? Well, water’s supposedly the best conductor for that sort of a thing. And that’s why there are so many holy wells and sacred lakes and the like.”
I suppose. The ghosts in my head are gone, but I hear water all the time and my dreams always seem to take me underwater. I’m never scared, it’s never spooky. Just … strange. Dark and cool. Peaceful in a way that I can’t explain.
Wendy says I shouldn’t let Jilly fill my head with her weird ideas, but I don’t know. The interesting thing about Jilly is that she’s totally impartial. She accepts everything with the same amount of interest and tolerance, just as she seems to love everybody the same—which is why I think she’s never really had a steady boyfriend. She never quite has that extra amount of love it would take to make a relationship with just one person work.
Wendy disagrees with that. She says that Jilly just can’t get close to a man that way. I get the feeling it’s got to do with something that happened to Jilly when she was growing up, but Wendy’s as closemouthed about that as she is with any bit of privileged information, and I’ve never quite got up the nerve to ask Jilly herself. I’d hate to remind her of some really awful thing in her past—if that’s truly the case.
Whatever it was, she’s moved beyond it now. Her life is so contained, so steady, for all her fey impulses. I think I envy that about her more than her thinness now.
I wonder if there’s anything she envies in other people.
It’s autumn now—months later. Like I said, the ghosts don’t come to me anymore, but sometimes I still hear voices drifting up from out of the well when I go for my Sunday drives up to the motel. Or maybe it’s only the wind. All I know is that I still like to come sit on the old stone wall here by the well and when I leave, I feel … different. It’s as though the calmness that’s hidden away in that well enclosed by its rose bushes imparts something to me: maybe no more than simply another way of seeing things.
I don’t worry about it; I just appreciate it. And if I come back a little spacey, saying odd things which seem very insightful to me, but are confusing to other people, nobody seems to mind. Or at least they don’t say anything about it to me.
As for Ellie, I went up into the rooms above the office where she said she lived and there was nothing there. No Ellie, no sign of anyone living there, except it was very clean, as though someone took the trouble to sweep it out regularly and maybe put some wildflowers in a vase on the window sill when they’re in season. There was a glass jar with dried flowers in it when I was there, and it didn’t smell musty the way the other rooms do.
I tried to find an obit for her, but as someone pointed out to me, she could have died anywhere. If she didn’t die in or around the city, there wouldn’t be an obit in the morgues of any of our local papers. Still, I looked.
Jilly’s got another answer, of course. She says she knows what Ellie meant about the well being cursed: Ellie must have wished that she’d always be at The Wishing Well, so after she died, her ghost was forever doomed to haunt the motel. Which, as Wendy put it, is par for the course, considering the way Jilly sees the world.
I like to think Elbe’s just gone south for the winter.
The first time I go back to the wishing well, I find four dollar bills held down by a stone on the wall of the well. I look at them and wonder, a refund for the days I’d paid for, but didn’t stay at the motel?
I drop them down into the shaft, one after the other, but I don’t make a wish. My life’s not perfect, but then whose is? All I can do is forget about miracles and try to take things one day at a time. I’m the only one who can empower myself—I don’t need my therapist to tell me that.
I don’t think the well ever was cursed. The only curse comes from the ghosts a person brings to it.
I still think about my dad a lot. I guess we had more in common than I thought, since we both screwed up our lives pretty badly. I think he’d be proud of me for finding a solution different from the one he did.
WKPN’s on the radio when I drive home. “Rock and gold, without the hard rock and rap.” They’re playing Buddy Holly.
Wella, wella.
I turn the dial, chasing static and stations until I hear a black woman’s voice, clipped rhymes, ghetto poetry riding the back of a sliding beat that’s so contagious my pulse can’t help but keep time with it. She’s talking about
standing up for herself, being herself, facing the world with what she calls a buffalo stance.
You can keep your “rock and gold,” I think. I’m tired of living in the past. I’m like the wishing well, in a lot of ways, full of old ghosts that I just can’t seem to exorcise. They’re what keeps dragging me down. It’s when I listen to them, when I start to believe that all the unhappy things they’re saying about me is true, that I’m at my worst.
What I want is what this woman’s singing about, something that’s here and now. What I need is my own buffalo stance.
I think I’m finally on the right road to finding it
DEAD MAN’S SHOES
There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.
—Elizabeth David
In her office, her head rests upon her arms, her arms upon the desk. She is alone. The only sounds are those of the clock on the wall, monotonously repeating its two-syllable vocabulary, and the faint noise of the street coming in through her closed windows. Her next appointment isn’t until nine P.M.
She meant merely to rest her eyes for a few moments; instead, she has fallen asleep.
In her dream, the rain falls in a mist. It crouches thicker at knee level, twining across the street. The dead man approaches her through the rain with a pantherlike grace he never displayed when alive. He is nothing like Hollywood’s shambling portrayals of animated corpses; confronted by the dead man, she is the one whose movements are stuttered and slow.
Because she is trapped in flesh, she thinks.
Because in this dreamscape, he is pure spirit, unfettered by gravity or body weight, while she still carries the burden of life. The world beyond this night’s dreams retains a firm grip, shackling her own spirit’s grace with the knowledge of its existence and her place in it.
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