by Ninie Hammon
“Shoot.” Then she winced. “Unfortunate word choice.”
“I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest Condensed version.”
Then he told her the story of a sleepy little coal town on the edge of a lake with water so clear you could see the bottom until it got so deep the light faded. The town was called Shadow Rock because legend had it that there was a rock — though nobody seemed to know quite where — that early settlers used to tell time by the position of the mountain’s shadow on its round surface.
“It’s one of those stories that if it’s not true, it should be.”
He returned to a description of the lake.
“Scuba divers come here to practice. There’s not much to see down there, but you can see. We’re the warm-up for excursions to Florida and the Bahamas, where there are colorful reefs and weird-looking plants and fish.”
He said Shadow Rock was saved from the fate of the other West Virginia coal towns after the mines closed by a visit Andrew Carnegie made in the late 1800s, after he had already amassed a fortune in the steel industry. A friend brought him to a little out-of-the-way place within driving distance from his home in Pittsburgh where the fishing was spectacular and where deer, pheasant, elk — even wild boar — were plentiful in the deep woods blanketing the mountains.
“Carnegie fell in love with Kavanaugh County. He was a Scot, too, you know. The lake was named after Whispering Mountain, which has its own folklore dating back to pre-Civil-War times, but Carnegie called it Loch Cairn Brae. A lot of locals still call it that.”
“What does Cairn Brae mean?”
“Loch is Gaelic for lake, of course, and cairn is Gaelic for pile of rocks, or monument. Brae is a village on the island of Mainland in Shetland, Scotland where the Carnegie clan has its roots. There’s a pile of rocks on the lakeshore where the original dock was built that’s supposed to be the cairn, or the monument Irish and Scottish immigrant miners erected in tribute to Andrew Carnegie a hundred and fifty years ago.” He paused, then continued in a stage whisper, “If you ask me, that rock pile is a little too convenient as a tourist stop to be authentic. But it’s never a good idea to question the chamber of commerce’s version of history.”
Of course, the mansions were definitely authentic, he said, not built to entertain the tourists but as summer homes for the uber-rich friends of Andrew Carnegie.
“There are about two dozen of those summer ‘cottages’ still standing. A few are privately owned, and the others have been turned into museums — decked out in the finery of the early 1900s. Some of them have mannequins dressed in high-necked gowns or top hats and tails to represent the folks who frolicked on the lakeside, but four of them actually have guides dressed in period garb, conducting tours of the obscenely ornate mansions, or of the central dining hall where the rich gathered for communal meals, cooked by the finest chefs money could buy, and entertained by a full orchestra every night.”
He smiled.
“That dining hall has been turned into a food court where the tourists can get hamburgers or subway sandwiches during the day, or come to dinner at night and listen to jazz bands, bluegrass or country-western musicians — talented performers from Nashville who sing backup for the stars in the recording studios.”
“So Kavanaugh County is home to you.” She heard the wistfulness in her voice at the word “home,” but didn’t think the sheriff picked up on it.
“Yes, but I spent a considerable amount of my life in a scary, unknowable place West Virginians call ‘Away From Here.’ It’s where the wild things are, past the line on maps that says, ‘Beyond Here Be Dragons.’”
“What did you do in that strange land?”
“The military. Marines. I wasn’t famous, though. Didn’t haul home a trunk full of medals like T.J. did.”
T.J. Where had she heard—?
He saw her confused look. “T.J. Hamilton. He’s the man who was driving by your house, heard the gunshot and dialed 911. He saved your life.”
A hole opened up in the universe and Bailey tumbled off into it, out of the sunshine of the make-believe town, out of the presence of the too-good-to-be-true sheriff, down into the dark depths where the real wild things were.
The old man in the wet raincoat and the little dog that had curled up on her sofa, soaking the cushions.
Don’t do it! Don’t take that gun that’s probably lying on the kitchen table right now and put it to your head … your right temple, actually, and pull the trigger. Don’t do it!
The sheriff didn’t see her face, was looking left and checking traffic before he pulled out onto another too-quaint-for-words street.
“He said he met you that afternoon, was walking Sparky—” The man’s face lit up. “Now there is one cute pup. You might not remember T.J. but there’s no possible way to forget that dog. He’s like the town mascot, the—”
He saw her face then and stopped babbling.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to play games with each other.”
“We never agreed to any such thing.”
“Yes, we did. It was an unspoken agreement, but those are the most binding kind. What did I say that upset you?”
She kept her mouth resolutely shut.
“Sparky? If you’re upset by Sparky, you’re the only person for a hundred miles in every direction who is.”
She looked away from him, watching Oz float by outside her window.
“T.J. Something happened with T.J. What was it?”
Nothing.
“Would you rather I asked him, since you’re not inclined to talk about it?”
“Yes, ask him. Ask that old man what possible reason he could have to—”
She caught herself in time. Did she really want to get into a discussion with the sheriff about that painting? Worse, still, if the sheriff talked to him, the old man might remember that she’d told him her name was Jessie Cunningham. Her retrograde amnesia had not erased that memory.
“To stick his nose in where it doesn’t belong. I didn’t ask him to save my life. If I hadn’t wanted to die, chances are I wouldn’t have put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.” She paused, scrambling for a way to change the subject. “And speaking of pulling the trigger, where is my gun? Did you take it?”
“I did. It was a firearm used in a shooting. I confiscated it.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Well, seeing as how the shooting wasn’t a crime, I can’t legally hold onto it. But I think I’ll keep it all the same.”
They turned a corner and Bailey recognized the house at the end of the block, the one the real estate agent had proudly pronounced was the “historic Watford House.” Though it was big and drafty and very old, it was not one of the Carnegie posse’s original homes, just a wannabe. As soon as she’d gotten a good look at it, she’d understood that “historic” was real-estate-speak for “should have been bulldozed twenty years ago.”
When the sheriff turned into her driveway, Bailey turned to face him.
“It’s my gun. I bought it legally. I paid for it. It belongs to me.”
There was an echo to those words that distracted her. She’d said them that night, told the old man—
“I want it back, but if you’re bound and determined to keep it, be my guest. I know the doctors must have told you about my … problem.” She tapped her temple gently. “I could sneeze getting out of this car and drop over dead. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Given the availability of ropes, knives and other methods of self-destruction — coupled with a bullet already in my brain, do you really think keeping my gun away from me will change anything?”
“No, I guess not.” But he didn’t offer to give her back the gun, merely got out of the car and walked around to her side and opened her door. When she got out, he stood there. Didn’t offer to walk her to the door.
Well, it wasn�
�t like he was a prom date.
He held out his hand, though, and when he took hers he held it firmly in a hand that was uncharacteristically soft.
“It was good to meet you, Ms. Cunningham, and I wish it could have been under other circumstances. You know that if you ever need anything, anything at all…”
“Thank you.” She pulled her hand free. “It was good to meet you, too.”
She walked up the steps, inserted the antique skeleton key into the door lock and stepped inside, resisting the urge to look back at him through the crack in the curtains beside the door.
She heard his car door close, heard the car crunch out of the gravel driveway. She let out a sigh of relief then, though she couldn’t have articulated what she’d been so tense about. She took two steps away from the door before it hit her.
The force of the realization literally staggered her and she sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa.
He had called her Ms. Cunningham! How had he…? The old man! Again! What grievous transgression had she committed against the universe that’d sentenced her to a meddling old fool—?
The sheriff had called her Ms. Cunningham and she hadn’t corrected him.
He’d used her real name. No, not her real name. Her real name wasn’t Ms. Cunningham. It was Mrs. Cunningham. Mrs. Aaron Webster Cunningham. Webster had been his mother’s family name — of the Fox Grove Websters, of course. He’d teased her when Bethany was born, said he wanted that to be her middle name, too.
He’d mentioned it that night on the way to the airport.
It’s raining, a cold winter rain. Pouring. They have barely come to a complete stop at the stop sign at the end of their block when Jessie turns to Aaron.
“I miss Bethany,” she says.
He laughs.
“I’m not joking! I miss her. A whole week. That’s too long!”
“We’ll survive.” He glances away from the road. “We’ll be … busy.” And he gives her the look that always sets free flocks of delicious butterflies inside her.
Not this time, though. Instead of butterflies in her belly, she feels her gut yank into a knot. She wouldn’t be rocking Bethany to sleep tonight, cuddled up in her yellow Minion blanket, sucking on the corner of it! She had rocked the child to sleep every night since she was born, wrapped snug in that blanket. But tonight—
“Aaron,” she sounds bereft but she can’t help it, “I’m not sure—”
“Sure we need a vacation? Are you serious? Working ten- and twelve-hour days on the Madison account for a month without a day off … that does not a happy husband make.”
“But—”
He reaches his hand across the seat and takes hers.
“Honey, we need this, we need you-and-me time. It’s been too long. I miss you!”
“But Bethany—”
“Will be fine. Your sister has been itching to get her hands on that baby ever since we brought her home from the hospital. She will spoil her rotten, you know she will, give her anything she wants.”
He stops and his smile broadens. “Remember how horrified María was when I had her convinced we were going to name the baby ‘Webster’?”
Jessie has to smile at that. It’s true, her little sister had been so upset she literally cried in relief when Aaron admitted he’d been joking. María had fallen head-over-heels in love with Bethany the first time she held the baby in her arms. She had been almost as omnipresent as Aaron during Jessie’s labor, would have been there every second if not for school. And she had cut all her morning classes and spent the whole day of Bethany’s birth in the waiting room — pacing back and forth. There was no one short of Jessie herself who would take better, more tender, attentive care of Bethany than María would.
She lets out a sigh. “Okay, you’re right.”
Thunder rumbles as the rain that had been a light drizzle ratchets up to a downpour.
“Sunny Caribbean, here we come!”
Jessie loves Aaron’s smile. And if she lets herself, and doesn’t dwell on how much she’s going to miss Bethany, she can get excited about spending alone time with the gorgeous dimpled man beside her whose slightest touch could make those butterflies in her belly take flight and flutter so fast they were a blur of color.
The downpour turns into a monsoon. Raindrops thunder like a thousand harried hooves on the roof of the car. The windshield wipers have trouble keeping the windshield clear and traffic is reduced to a crawl. They spot the girl when they come to a stop at the corner of Juniper Street and Lakewood. A lone young woman is standing in the pouring rain beside the bus stop sign — only a sign with a three-foot square awning. No bus shelter. Obviously homeless, clutching her every worldly possession in her arms, she is a pitiful, dismal sight.
There are no businesses nearby where she can take shelter, no trees or roof overhangs. The bus stop post stands lone sentinel next to the curb and the drenched woman huddles beside it trying to squeeze her whole body up under the meager protection of the awning above.
“There’s a bus shelter at the Crocker Street stop,” Aaron says. “We’re going right by it. Roll your window down and tell her we’ll give her a ride.”
It was an act of simple kindness, so like Aaron. It was sick and sad and ironic that it was his generosity that had cost Aaron his life and Jessie her husband and child.
Chapter Twelve
The silence in the room throbbed full and heavy. Bailey sat in the too-quiet house in the dark. Just sat, like some toy discarded by a child because the battery was dead.
She was sitting on the couch facing the window that looked out over the front yard, but she hadn’t noticed sundown, hadn’t noticed the lengthening shadows that slid out from the dark pools where they lived under trees and bushes, and spread out across the yard.
She ought to get up and turn on the lamp.
Why?
Well, because it was dark and … light was better than dark, somehow.
She started over.
She ought to get up off the couch and turn on the lamp, because…
Alright, she knew why. But there was a much larger question than why she didn’t turn on the lamp.
Why anything?
An image formed. They did that sometimes now, popped into her mind and she didn’t know where they’d come from. Crazy images. In this one, she is clinging to a piece of something, a board or pole or mast — yes, the mast of a ship — in a body of water that stretches out for as far as she can see in every direction. The water is still. The sky is cloudless, so much the same color as the water it’s hard to see the stitching of horizon, sky and water seamed together.
She is alone. The only survivor of some mighty shipwreck. Or maybe she is the lone survivor of some cataclysmic end of the world, and maybe she alone lived through Armageddon.
Her reward for survival is life.
Her punishment for survival is life.
She’d never had any trouble articulating the whys of her life. And when her world had come crashing down around her, she had clung to the only why left: Bethany. Bethany was why she got up every morning to face another day. Bethany was why she was willing to endure the loneliness of a total outcast, the emptiness of every day, every hour. Bethany was why!
And when realization had seeped into her being like groundwater into the foundation of a house, that soon was an illusion, a mirage, a fantasy. She would never see Bethany again, she had no why. No reason to keep on living.
But her decision to die had given her a new why, a new purpose. She got up in the morning, went about the day’s tasks, made preparations, propelled by the purpose of exiting existence before Bethany’s third birthday.
Now, even that purpose was gone.
She did not want to go on living.
But right now, she lacked the resolve to get on with planning her death.
She got up, turned on the lamp and started toward her bedroom. She would take a hot shower, feel the water punishing the skin of her face. She would…
Bailey raised her hand and there was a paintbrush in it.
When did she go into her studio and get a paintbrush? And what for?
There was wet paint on it. Blue paint.
She turned toward the door to the studio and saw that it was standing open. She kept it shut because the curtainless windows admitted so much sunlight the heat defied the air conditioner. Her thoughts had been muddy since she woke up in the hospital, the new best bud of a stick-figure water spot on a ceiling tile, but there had been no real holes in her thought processes, nothing like…
She walked into the studio and flipped on the light. There was a canvas on the easel. The paint on it was still wet. It was not a dissected section of lung tissue, an enlarged spleen or a canker sore. What was painted on it looked like an illustration from Oil Painting for Dummies. A table. Checkered tablecloth. A bowl of fruit — an apple, an orange and banana. All out of proportion, childlike in the lack of depth perception.
Behind the table was a window. The window was ridiculously too large for the room, took up almost the whole canvas. The window looked out on … nothing. It was empty. Blank.
Bailey’s heart kicked into a gallop, causing echoes of pain in her head with every heartbeat.
The painting she’d found leaned up against the arm of the couch when she came home from the hospital, the one she’d shoved under the china cabinet so she wouldn’t have to look at it until she felt up to destroying it. Smashing it or cutting the canvas to ribbons or burning it — yes, burning it! — that painting had had a table and bowl of fruit, too, all dwarfed by a giant window.
But there was a face in the window. Her face, with a bullet hole in her temple. Bailey began to tremble so violently she dropped the paintbrush on the floor, splattering blue paint on the rag rug.