Elsinore Canyon

by J. M.

  What could he do? How was he to know anything? This mad phase of hers was so bedeviling that for the first time in their relationship he feared crowding her, but he was the one who had gone absent after that god-awful scene with his father and the Hamlets. Was that what had happened to her, during those weeks when he was in Anchorage? Did she still love him? Did she want him to get lost? Did she regret what they had done, was she ashamed? He thought about her constantly—he thought about her body. He’d been going in circles for weeks, and now he was not only back on the same territory as Dana, he was next door. No sooner had he come back than he was summoned for that interrogation. Had actions been set in motion as a result? Was Dana trapped, was she quietly dying for a word of explanation? The Christopher she had given him hung around his neck. He pulled it out and held it against his palm: the haloed stranger carrying a child on his shoulders, embedded in a tiny pewter surfboard. It had weight, it was physical evidence. He set his guitar down and slammed out the cottage door. He started purposefully for the main house.

  They walked towards each other stiffly.

  “Phil.”

  “Dana! Were you coming to…?”

  “I was running away.” She tried to pull on one shoe, but it hurt too much. She flung the stupid things on the ground.

  “Baby, baby—” Three strides and he was in front of her. “I haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?” He worked his fingertips around her wrists.

  “How should I be?” she said miserably. “Where have you been?”

  “My dad sent me away. I tried calling you a few times, you know that. Dana, if you need me now, here I am.”

  His fingers were brushing up her bare arms and his face was bending over hers. That hair of his, brown on top and sun-bleached on the ends like gold tassels. Whatever she had meant to say, it was gone. Her arms dangled at her sides and her head fell back. He was on her, around her, destroying her, his arms, his hands, his hard chest, the taste of his lips, the feel of his eyelashes on her cheek and his downy whiskers and warm, tan face on her mouth and chin and neck. He squeezed her and she felt him getting hot and hard. She knew what was going on with her body, too. By the time he touched her, she’d be dripping.

  He swept her legs out from under her, she was four feet up, enough to make her dizzy. She clung to him as he ran up the cottage steps. His strength! They were crossing the floor to his room—

  “Wait, Phil. Stop!”

  He loosened his grip.

  “I can’t do it. Here, put me down. Let me kiss you.”

  Her desire was racing lightning-quick, blood shooting through her veins and her nerves exploding like a thousand tiny pleasure-blisters, but Phil was actually going slowly, lowering her legs so that her feet touched down light as a feather. She was used to his body now and he could make her want things. To lie expectantly and lift a knee, arch her back, throw her elbows over her head—“I can’t do it right now, Phil.”

  “What’s wrong?” he breathed.

  “The time. Not you, not us. Phil.” Her palm passed over the back of his head while he gripped her other hand in his, and they poured their forgiveness for every sin they could ever commit against each other into their passionate kiss.

  “I can’t take anything more from you,” Dana said as they pulled gently apart.

  “You’re not taking.”

  “No, you don’t know. These awful thoughts knocking at my skull. I’m always afraid of them, they’re always in my head when I’m trying to think of you.”

  “Dana, are you all right?”

  “I can’t lie to you. You’d see through it anyway. I’m not all here, Phil. I’m hiding things from you. Hiding is lying.”

  “Dana, if they’ve made you…talk about us…”

  “Lord, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t breathe your name to them, not even to trick them. Have they tried to make you, Phil?”

  He shook his head, very slightly, very slowly, “No.” Then he asked her, “What could you possibly have to hide? From me?”

  That she was so full of poison she didn’t deserve to love him. That she fantasized about sinking knives into people, that she was a creature of hatred, including of things he loved. That so monstrous and consuming were her vengeful thoughts that they were corroding the Phil-shaped space inside her and implanting their loathsome selves. “I can’t tell you right now. Phil, I’ll—we’ll talk later. I need to get back to the house. I’ve got guests, and I ran away in a fit.”

  A thought struck Phil. “Dana, about us. You don’t think I’d ever…I mean, you’re not worried about getting pregnant or anything, are you?”

  She froze. Her eyes slowly filled with an uncomprehending anger. “Pregnant?”

  Phil almost dared feel a stab of joy. “Or, did you want to? Or not want to, ever?”

  Dana backed away from him robotically. “I forgot.”

  “What?”

  She peered upward boldly, into corners. “I forgot about you, Polly.”

  “My father?”

  “Your father.”

  “He’s at the main house. Isn’t he?”

  “Part of him,” Dana said bitingly. “His eyes and ears are here.” She shouted out at the air. “Where else, Polly? Have you got my bedroom wired?”

  “Dana.” Phil took a ginger step towards her. “Dana, baby, I’m here.”

  Dana ran to the center of the room and shouted into the air. “Polly! You know what I’m here for? You know what we girls do!” She turned and shouted at each wall. “They were going to put monitors on our uteruses so we’d use them properly. Only I have a better idea. Hear me out! Since the do-goody life-lovers claim to be so concerned about the dear little babies, then all men should get their tubes tied!” A full-length portrait of Polly, Phil, and Laurie hung on the wall. She ran to it and jabbed her finger at Polly’s crotch. “All boys shall now report to a government-certified doctor by their eighteenth birthday for a mandatory vasectomy. Before the chop, they can make a deposit in a government sperm bank so if they ever want kids, they can go to the bank and make a withdrawal—which will be placed only into the uterus of a willing female. There! No more rape babies, no casual sex babies, no broken condom babies, no AIDS babies, no temptations to abortion. What pro-lifey uterus cop could refuse?” She turned to Phil. “How about it?”

  “Why are you saying these things to me?” he said, horror-struck.

  Dana took another step back from him and looked out the door. She spoke dazedly. “I’m not. Phil, can you keep away from me for a while?”

  “Not if you need m—”

  “Just a little while. I do need you—I need you to be here, and be Phil when I’ve finished working through these things.”

  “Dana, how could I not be part of them?”

  “You are, you have been, Phil. You’ve comforted me more than anyone.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t want you to see this part. I have dark feelings, and I don’t want them in you. I’m going to get through this as fast as I can, I’ve made up my mind since I saw you, I’m going to get clean of everything so we can be back together. Can you trust me, Phil?”

  He looked at her through soft, yearning eyes. “Are you sure there isn’t any problem about what we’ve done?”

  “No. It’s perfect. Keep that, just as it is.”

  “You make it sound like a memory. Something we’ll never do again.”

  “No, I’m talking about a precious flame, that only you can keep alive, so I can come back to it. I just feel so full of wrong, Phil, I don’t want to infect us. Keep what we have. Keep it safe for me.”

  He took her hand, kissed her palm, and placed it on his chest. “It’s locked in my heart, and you’ve got the key.”

  She pulled back, her hand drifting away but still held out to him, and walked away, through the room, and out the door without taking her eyes off him.

  In fear and pain, Phil watched her go. Dana was falling apart in some weird, scary way he couldn’t begin to understand. But on
e certainty was lodged in the depth of his aching heart: he had betrayed her.

  Dr. Claudia glared at a monitor in Polly’s office. The sound was fuzzy, but she had understood enough. The pregnancy thing again, and now universal vasectomies. She swatted the volume off. “She’s a lovesick teenager all right. And a few other things.”

  Polly shifted his weight nervously. “So, you agree I was right.”

  “Pah. Yeah, as rain.”

  Polly followed her around his office. “But I was right about her problem. Let me devise a solution—”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care about Dana’s problems anymore. I have my own.”

  Polly made a run around his desk and blocked her. “Then what do you want me to do?”

  Dr. Claudia marveled: the man literally appeared to have pinwheels in his eyes. She pushed him aside and stalked out and down the hall towards an elevator. Polly trotted at her heels. “Claudia?”

  “My problems,” she said as she punched the call button. The elevator door slid open—she suddenly thought better of alienating him. Crazy tool. She relaxed her face and waved him into the booth. The doors slid shut and she pressed him in an urgent, confiding tone. “It’s more than her puppy love thing with Phil. She’s nursing some grudge. Some plot—and heaven only knows how dangerous it might be. What kind of irresponsible lies she’ll tell, the damage she can do. I told you before, it’s the very thing I’m worried about.” They got off the elevator and went down the hall towards her office.

  “Did you want me to keep watching her?”

  She tried not to swing her fists at his big, hollow head. “Yes—no, do what you want. She’s going to Costa Rica. She was threatening to go right after Garth and I got married, but he talked her out of it.” She swept through her office and hit the intercom. “Oscar!” She snapped her arms across her desk, looking for cigarettes, water, her keyboard. “Whatever it is that’s eating her, she can try to get over it down there. Different atmosphere. Different people. Let her practice Spanish, burn down the rainforests. Stay there until the term starts at Stanford.” She looked at Polly. “Where are Rosie and Gale?”

  “I—I’ll find them.”

  “People, guests,” she grumbled, “wandering around this place, left alone. I want all the arrangements made, I want this done and wrapped up before this movie night tonight. I’m actually going to try to relax and enjoy myself with my new husband, in my new home for a change.”

  WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT

  I was cleaned up from my workout at one o’clock. Hungry, too. When I got to my car, I found a message in my phone, from Dana. “Horst, please meet me at the adobe.”

  I got on the road and called her back, and she answered on the first ring. “Horst, I’ve had a horrible morning.” She described the last part of it, which made me groan. “Of course I’m not,” she said.

  “Good to hear.”

  “Horst, I will never tell you one false word. If you ever wonder about anything I say to anyone else, take me aside and I’ll let you know.”

  “All right.” A few seconds passed. “Dana, you there?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Dana?”

  “Yes. Horst, you know, I’ve never done it with him.”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t think you had.” Holy shit. I hoped she couldn’t tell from my voice that my guts were practically coming out my mouth. It was true, I didn’t think she had, but I still felt like I’d barely missed plunging off a cliff.

  “Other things, but—”

  “All right, whatever.”

  “It’s just that I know you and I have different opinions about some things, but I don’t want you to think I’d do certain things.”

  We did have different opinions about some things, and God had we had fights about them. I was beginning to wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Hamlet had been that way.

  We kept talking as I drove. I winced as her voice filled with concern over Phil. He was like a beautiful wild bird with its foot caught in a net, she said; she felt sad and scared. And her temper tantrum at brunch had snowballed. Costa Rica was officially on and she was flying out tomorrow. Rosie and Gale were going, and they were already at their homes packing. “If you see me acting halfway excited, don’t be fooled,” she said.

  “Are you going?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. It depends on what happens tonight. But I’m packing, just in case.”

  “Why do you want to meet me at the adobe?”

  “Because,” she said deliberately, “I want to tell you exactly what happened that night.”

  I hadn’t been down there since then. That small, stifling room. Dana, encased alive under that layer of black. I felt a familiar heartsickness as I threw my chair into a cart and rolled down to meet her.

  When I rolled in, Dana was sitting on the brick steps, barefoot. She came running down with a look of relief. “I brought food anyway,” she said, opening some paper bags. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

  “No, but you eat.”

  She stopped unpacking the food. “I’m not hungry either.” She picked up the bags and shouldered my wheelchair as we made our way up to the roof. I crawled behind her, as we had done dozens of times over the years in school, with me scarcely minding it back then. Today I did, as I imagined Phil with his godlike physique not only springing up the cottage steps but bearing Dana herself in his arms.

  The brick roof was warm and inviting under the sun, and the breeze was like being right on the beach—I seldom got to go down on the sand anymore. I didn’t get into my chair, just stayed on the ground, and Dana walked around and scattered the food for the birds. “Something for everyone,” she said. “The bread-eaters and the meat-eaters. I wonder how long it will take for them to pick it all clean.”

  “I want to hear about the ghost,” I said.

  Dana wadded up the wrappers. She came to me and sat with her dress rippling at her knees. “I’m still not sure if she meant for me to tell.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  “I need to share things with you, Horst. It’s selfish of me because it feels like spilling acid all over you.” Her eyes and voice softened. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She made me want to do things I couldn’t tell anyone. I felt guilty, and scared.”

  “I’m not liking her.”

  “Then listen.” She started with the moment she had left me and Marcellus behind. Him groaning in the blackness over the bite she’d given him, me crawling towards the stairs, whacking my way through legs of chairs and feeling wildly vulnerable and exposed on top, as if the brick roof might collapse on our heads. She had ascended in terror and awe behind the ghost, which glanced behind at her twice as it made its way to the top and out the trap door. Dana thought we would make good on our threats to follow, but frighteningly, the door had slammed behind her, and she was alone, outside on the roof, with the thing.

  Dana emerged under a translucent navy sky. The ghost stood on the edge of the roof, near the ocean. There wasn’t a sound of the waves or the wind even though it licked and pricked Dana’s skin as if it should have shaken every leaf and blade of grass in the canyon.

  Dana took a step towards it, then stopped, transfixed, her throat shut tight with fear. “What, what are you?” she barely mouthed. “What are you? Don’t let me call you ‘Mom’ unless you are.”

  The ghost stared at Dana in anguish. Its voice was slow and labored, as if coming through passages obstructed with tubes. “Dana, I’m your mother’s spirit. I’m in pain.”

  “Mom!” Dana whispered.

  “My darling. Don’t. Don’t come closer. Don’t talk. Just listen. I can’t stay long. Dana, I wasn’t perfect in life.”

  “Oh, Mom—”

  “The path to where I am now begins with the first time we choose wrong over right, even in the smallest way.” The ghost’s voice continued slow and difficult. “It might have been different if I’d had warning, and ti
me, but the failings I didn’t settle and the wrongs I didn’t right surround me and burn like—oh, Dana, I’ve seen suffering beyond human comprehension!” Her face was pure agony. “I didn’t get my chance. I didn’t soothe or heal the injuries I did to others.”

  “Mom, you were good!”

  “Those things seem small in life, easily prevented, but here they’re magnified and they’re all I feel: wounds my hands needed to fix, tears of sympathy and remorse I needed to shed to wash my conscience.”

  “Not for me! None for me. Just know that, Mom!”

  “If you love me, Dana—”

  “Oh dear God!”

  “—restore justice to the life I left! I’m nothing but ashes, unable to move my arms or speak, and the world is turning without me. I loved you, Dana. I built and straitened myself on you. You’re all I have! You can’t undo the sins I committed. Only, avenge me against the killer who put me in this state.”

  “Killer?”

  “They say I died of natural causes, but the true cause is the creature who replaced me.”

  “Oh, I knew it!”

  “She’s an opportunistic germ that invades at a site of weakness. I was a good wife—but after my death your father was corrupted by his luxury and fine joy. In his need, he forgot me and she sucked him into the life they share now. With all my faults and all her charms, she’s nothing to what I was.”

  Dana covered her face with her hands wretchedly. “I can’t stand this!”

  “Listen to me, Dana. You have to hear the worst. It was my custom to drink tea every afternoon, from an engraved cup your father gave me. On the day I died, the wife he has now prepared that cup herself and carried it to me. It made me drowsy. I couldn’t stand. It plunged me into a hard sleep and stifled my senses, and she injected me in my heart with a deadly poison. She abused her office to misreport the nature of my death. That was how she stole my husband, the achievements of my life, and now the comfort of my soul. And you, Dana. It cuts me like a knife, that my daughter should be forced to watch her father live the way he does! The gossips speak your name with his, and mix you in his degrading lust as if you chose your part in it.”