Ren led her back to the bedroom. Her head swam and her legs felt leaden. The sleeping drug in the cocoa had kicked in. She was spilling toward sleep and it annoyed her. She wanted answers for her millions of questions, but her head was so fuzzy she was unsure what mattered more, her questions or Ren’s bizarre behavior.
“You never answered me,” she said, remembering the thread of their earlier conversation.
“I did. You’re not a nun.”
Moonlight spilled through the windows and illuminated the room in irregular blocks of soft light.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. You avoided my questions.”
They stood by the bed, Isabelle unwilling to get back in it. She’d spent eons in that bed. It was the last place she wanted to be. She fought down another yawn. Ren reached over and casually tugged her closer by the sash of her robe.
“I—” Isabelle clasped Ren’s muscular forearms, as if that would stop her if she chose to kiss her again. Ren lowered her head. Isabelle held her breath and closed her eyes in anticipation, her fingernails dug into Ren’s skin. Ren’s breath brushed across her cheek, and then her lips grazed her ear, so delicately every hair on the nape of her neck rose.
“I want you to remember us,” Ren whispered. “Not be told how it was.”
Isabelle gave a delicious shiver. She tilted her chin. Her lips were so close to Ren’s jawline that the merest pucker would—The room spun as she was lifted and laid down on the bed. Ren chastely drew the blankets up to her chin and withdrew, leaving a chasm of chilled air and confusion between them.
A knowing smile played on Ren’s lips.
“I have to go out tonight, and you need to sleep. It will help you heal,” she said. “You shouldn’t be running around so soon after your accident. You need rest.”
“I don’t want to sleep. I want to talk.” Isabelle wriggled upright. She was embarrassed at her urge to kiss Ren, and relieved she’d not given in to it. She suspected Ren was quietly laughing at her, and tried to read the sly smile, but the moon glowed behind Ren’s shoulder and cast her face in shadow.
“You’re so beautiful,” Ren said. She traced Isabelle’s cheek.
“No, I’m not.” Isabelle pulled away. “I don’t understand what’s going on, Ren. How are we connected? This doesn’t feel real to me. I have so many questions and you won’t answer me straight.”
“I’ll answer when you’re well enough. I promise to. But you’ve had a serious accident, Isabelle. You were lucky I found you. Everything else is just…complicated.” Ren gently pushed her back onto the pillows.
“And what makes you think I can’t deal with complicated?” She knew instinctively that she could. Complicated was no stranger, Isabelle was definite about that.
“And where are you going? You can’t just tuck me up in bed like a child whenever I get in the way.” She wasn’t so definite about that. She felt more childlike than ever at being abandoned. She wanted Ren’s company.
Where Ren was concerned, she knew very little but felt a lot. She’d awoken into a world that confused and scared her as much as any nightmare. The only answers she had were those she scraped together from errant memories and Ren’s cryptograms. She was in the middle of nowhere and she disliked the sight of herself in the mirror. What else did she know? Nothing. She was a vacuum. It was all a mess, and the one person who could help was walking away. At that moment the only certain thing was she wanted Ren to stay, to curl up beside her and hold her and keep the nightmares at bay. To stay and simply talk to her and help her make sense of it all.
“Hush. You need rest.” Ren soothed her, even as she made to leave.
“Don’t hush me. I’m your lover, aren’t I?” Isabelle’s anxiety put her on the offense. She watched Ren’s eyes narrow. “Are we having an affair? Running around behind someone’s back? Tell me the truth. Something isn’t right.” She pushed herself up to sit in the center of the bed. “Tell me. I can feel the truth writhing inside me, trying to get out, and it’s not a nice feeling.”
Ren bent over her until their faces were inches apart, her brow dark and frowning. Her eyes caught the moonlight in a weird amber glow.
“All you need to know is that you’re mine,” she snarled. “Everything about this is right.” She straightened and glared at Isabelle. “So start feeling it.”
A distant howl wavered from the woods, loaded with troubled melancholy. Ren stiffened, then abruptly strode from the room leaving Isabelle in bed, bewildered.
“Don’t you tell me what to feel,” she shouted with hollow bravado at the empty room. But she did feel it, in her own way. Ren was hers.
Now she was determined not to go to sleep. Despite feeling heavy-limbed and wooly-headed, she padded along the hallway on bare feet looking for the kitchen. A fresh pot of tea and a seat by the fire would help. She could sit and think and try and sift through the events of the past few days. Ren disturbed her. She drew out such a tangle of emotions in Isabelle. The liberty Ren had taken with that kiss, for example. Isabelle knew beyond all doubt they were lovers. She could feel it the moment they had touched; yet another part of her was uneasy with this insight.
“I’m a lesbian after all,” she told the planked floor in the hallway, watching her bare toes move along the warm pine. It didn’t feel wrong. In fact, it felt exhilarating and dangerous. “And I think I’ve fallen for the lesbian version of Heathcliff. ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of little visible delight, but necessary,’” she quoted and froze mid-step.
“I can quote from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights? Wow.” It thrilled her she knew the classic well enough to quote from it, and that it was a favorite book. Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place. She loved books. First Frankenstein and now Wuthering Heights. She knew the classics, she adored the Brontës…oh, oh, and Austen and Browning, and what about Eliot and Dickinson? Their names rattled through her head along with a dozen others. How strange: she could remember authors and book titles, and even prose and plot, but not her own address? It cheered her up, though. Her memories were returning. She was finally forming into something solid.
She tried to dredge up some other quote to build on the first, to underpin her discovery. Her mind went blank. Okay, so I can’t force it. She thought again of the book Ren had been reading. Frankenstein. How fantastic that they seemed to like the same books.
“I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me,” she quoted from Shelley, much to her delight. The classics were a linchpin to her identity. Somehow she had turned a corner.
The kitchen fascinated her. Ren obviously spent time in here. It had a lived-in homely feel like the living room. Although the cupboards were battered and the paint chipped and scratched, like the rest of the cabin it was a well-loved, well-used space. Pestles and mortars, measuring cups, and stirring spoons littered the work surface. Dried herbs hung from hooks fixed in the low ceiling beams. Enormous, dented copper pans sat washed and ready on the huge, cream enameled stove that looked like a relic from the fifties. Rows and rows of jar-lined shelves filled the far wall over a scoured work counter. Most were filled with herbs and oils, and all were labeled in a scrawling, uninhibited handwriting she assumed was Ren’s.
A thick, dog-eared volume on medicinal herbalism lay open on the countertop. Isabelle hovered over it, compelled by the beautiful plant illustrations to leaf through it and examine the pages in detail. It was an old almanac, a mixture of First Nation medicines, moon cycles, botany, and horticulture. Its spine gave the year as 1961, an exclusive, limited edition judging by the fine quality of the paper and the richness of the binding and illustrations. The flyleaf showed an inscription from the author: “To my darling niece, Dalia, with much love…” The name was heavily scored out with a sharp instrument, like a knife, but Isabelle could just make out enough letters to guess at “Sylvie.” The book had been written by a Sylvie Garoul. Isabelle wondered if it was a gift fro
m the author. It was a first edition collectable if only for the illustrations alone. They were quite superb, the work of one George Brookman, a name that rang a bell with her, but she couldn’t remember any details. The book was too precious to be lying around a messy kitchen. Already it had stains all over it.
Isabelle reluctantly set the book aside as the kettle whistled. She picked a lemon and ginger tea from a home-blend mixture she assumed Ren had made, and cup in hand, set off to explore the rest of the cabin. If she wanted answers she’d damned well have to provide them for herself.
The living room was cozy, and she whiled away a pleasant half hour sipping tea and examining the books in the wobbly bookcase. Most were secondhand and were much read. But their covers had a creased softness and the subtle smell of a million fingerprints and a hundred shelves. The old bureau was crammed with invoices and paperwork for Ren’s veterinary practice and what looked like a farming venture she ran nearby. A door to the left of the chimneybreast drew Isabelle’s attention. She drifted over to it, cup in hand, and gave it a gentle push.
Ren’s bedroom was tucked away off the main living room. Isabelle stood inside the doorway drinking in the detail. It was a total mess. What clothes weren’t hanging out of the chest of drawers lay in a tangled ball on the unmade bed. The armoire door hung open, its full-length mirror catching the light from the hallway behind her. A jumble of shoes and shirts spilled from it onto the floor. Only the dressing table gave a clue as to the usual order of the room and reflected the general tidiness of the rest of the cabin. Though the drawers hung open, the surface was uniform and neat. Combs and brushes lay beside handcrafted wooden bowls filled with loose change and stray buttons. An antique leather manicure set and a few colored glass bottles took up the rest of the space. The only closed drawer in the dresser was locked. This was curious in itself, given the general upheaval of the other drawers. Isabelle shook the handle several times and looked for the key in the small bowls on the countertop, but to no avail. She gave up and turned her attention to an empty suitcase wide open on the bedside chair.
Had Ren been hurriedly packing to go somewhere? The thought made Isabelle anxious. A road map lay unfolded inside the case. Pushed on by her unease, Isabelle lifted it. A red marker pen traced a journey from Lonesome Lake, over to Bella Coola, and down across the U.S./Canada border straight to Portland, Oregon. She set it back and frowned. The journey meant something to her. She’d traveled that way before. But Lonesome Lake? That was miles east of Bella Coola in the middle of Tweedsmuir National Park. Ren had said they were in the Coast Mountains, but given the sheer size of the mountain range, they could be anywhere.
Isabelle dropped the map back in the suitcase. It wasn’t that much of a clue after all. She turned her attention to the bottles on the dressing table. All held homemade lotions and looked medicinal rather than cosmetic. There was a heavy, languorous scent in the bedroom and she tried to identify it. She unscrewed a bottle top and sniffed the contents. It reminded her of the ointment on her shoulder, but it wasn’t the smell she was now fixed upon. That scent was stronger on the hairbrush, and she realized it belonged to Ren. It was her scent.
Isabelle drifted over to the wide unmade bed. She lifted a shirtsleeve and pressed it against her nose to confirm the scent was definitely Ren’s. The cloth was crisp and clean and held a thousand stories. Like fine wine against her palate, the flavors exploded onto her senses and her imagination galloped.
Ren’s hot, peppery scent was subtlety layered with cherry and cool notes of vanilla. It drifted through her like opium smoke. She closed her eyes and saw sweat-slick skin, tight and tan, stretching in the sun, then contracting and twisting into swaths of ink-black fur that rippled like waves of prairie grass. She felt dense muscle weigh down her bones and heard the snap of twigs as her feet sank in heavy loam. Wind rattled the leaves and hissed through fir needles, and ran through her coat like a million stroking fingers. Fine rain misted her face and she flicked her ears against the damp. Her lungs expanded as she drew in more and more of Ren’s scent and the heady visions that came with it.
Her heart hitched into a tight knot of want, and suddenly she needed Ren. Why had she left her? Why hadn’t she told her where she was going and when she’d be back? Isabelle frowned, and a discontented growl rumbled in the back of her throat. She pulled her face away from the cotton shirt and scowled at it. She didn’t want to sleep alone; she wanted the heat of Ren’s body. She wanted to drift into dreams with this scent wrapped all around her. She took a corner of the cuff into her mouth and sucked, her teeth worrying the fabric.
Wire grass crackled with summer heat. The drooping heads of lady’s slipper and clumps of purple violet shivered in a lazy breeze. Insects droned in a crown around her head—Isabelle spat out the fabric and stared at it in disbelief. She had been chewing on the sleeve like a pup on a slipper. What the hell was happening to her? Had she lost her mind?
Her tongue smacked against the roof of her mouth, wanting more. She recalled the images that had flashed through her head, as exciting and vivid as if she had really been sprawled out in a hazy summer meadow. It was addictive. She raised the shirt to her nose and breathed in. She felt sunshine dancing against her eyelids and heard the high-pitched trill of waxwings circling above.
A flicker of movement from the window startled her. The flicker was followed by a rustle as something dropped out of sight under the windowsill. Isabelle crept cautiously toward the window, her bare feet silent on the floor. Something or someone was outside. She heard the crunch of footsteps on fresh snow and held her breath. Pressed against the wall, she angled her head to peek out, but the glass tricked her and reflected back the light shining from the hallway. She could see nothing but the shadowy bedroom mirrored back at her…and then, she saw it. Distorted by the weak interior light, two eyes, elongated and slanted, glowed like burning embers as they glared through the glass. They darted from side to side searching the room for her. Isabelle began to make out other details—a pointed ear and a curved canine tooth, and a wet snout. She was alarmed that a wild animal would come so close to the cabin, but she felt safe enough inside the stout walls.
The animal’s ears flattened, and with a sharp hiss, the face was gone from the window. Isabelle started, but saw what had spooked it. Across the room, she stood reflected in the armoire mirror, clearly visible from the window. Pressed against the wall, wide-eyed and fearful, she looked like some sort of half-crazed animal herself.
She glanced out the window and stared into the night. She could see nothing. Isabelle shivered. She was about to give up and turn away when a blur on the edge of the tree line caught her eye. Something crouched in the murk. As she watched, it lifted its head toward the cabin as if sampling the air. It hesitated for a moment, then slunk into the underbrush and melted away. From what she could make out it looked like a small wolf or a wildcat. Whatever it was, it moved like a predator and was bold enough to come right up to a human dwelling.
A wavering, reedy howl echoed close by in the darkness and was answered by a distant chorus from the hills beyond. A chill ran through her. It was wilderness out there, and she was miles from civilization. She had best remember that and hope the thaw came soon. She had to get out of here and find the missing pieces of her life. The questions were mounting and the answers were few…and selective.
Chapter Six
Isabelle was curled up on the sofa when Ren came back. Frankenstein lay open on her lap and Ren’s shirt was pillowed under her head. The quiet click of the door jerked her out of her fire-gazing stupor. She sat upright, groggy and disheveled. Ren appeared at her side and reached out to touch her shoulder. The night air clung to her clothes.
“Hey. Why are you sleeping out here? Is the bedroom too cold? I can put a heater—”
“There was an animal at the window,” Isabelle said. Ren’s hand stilled.
“An animal?”
“Yes. It ran off when it saw me.” Isabelle felt awkward. What if Ren asked mo
re questions and she had to admit she was snooping in her room…sucking on her clothes and acting weird.
“Just nosy, I suppose.”
“Huh?” Isabelle started with guilt.
“The animal. Just being nosy. Lots of deer and elk come close. They’re curious by nature, probably hoping to sniff out dinner in my garden,” Ren said. “Under all that snow I’ve got some very tasty rosebushes.”
“It had teeth. Big pointy ones. Elk and deer don’t have pointy teeth.”
“Oh?” Ren hesitated, as if unsure what to say to that.
“It ran away when it saw me.”
“Ah. Okay.” She seemed satisfied with this. “I’ll check for tracks in the morning.”
Isabelle shuffled upright, and Ren perched on the edge of the couch beside her and began to unlace her boots.
“Why won’t you answer my questions?” Isabelle jumped right into the subject that had been burning her up all evening. She had to know.
“What makes you think I know all the answers?”
“Stop playing with me. You said you didn’t want me to go home. You said it wasn’t safe.” You said I had to stay here with you.
“I’m not playing with you. Look at your face. Some of those injuries go way back. Beyond the car crash.”
Isabelle touched her bruised face. It was true. She had seen her broken nose and the scar on her lip and knew they were old wounds. She’d even recalled the whining voice begging for forgiveness.
“Your arm’s been broken before, too,” Ren said, then shifted uncomfortably. “Isabelle. Your husband beat you and you started a divorce,” she stated bluntly. “You came to Canada to get away from it all.”
“I came here from Portland, didn’t I?” Isabelle remembered the map lying open on Ren’s suitcase. Ren looked surprised but nodded in reluctant agreement.
“So I’m married? How long was I married?”
“A year maybe. Not long. You knew you’d made a mistake pretty quick.” The answer was brusque, and Isabelle surveyed Ren carefully. Ren was uncomfortable with the conversation. She pulled hard on her laces and kicked off her boots.
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