The Sea Horse Door

by Gina Rossi

  Blue Rocks—what a hard, cold name for such a beautiful house. A house that could be a home if someone loved it enough. Walking toward the porch, I half turn back. I shouldn’t have abandoned Lucas like that, never mind the scene. I’ll go back, apologise, tell him I love him—because I do, don’t I?—and we’ll discuss our way through this, support each other, get help, whatever it takes.

  But I don’t go back, because there’s no point. Whatever happened to Bonny, Lucas feels guilty. No, Lucas is guilty. That’s the way he sees it, and that’s the crux of the problem. I can do nothing about that, and neither can Lucas. The only person who can ease the nightmare by telling the truth is Bonny: a dead woman.

  Reminding myself that I tried to leave Lucas, Alice, Blue Rocks, Maine, everything, mere weeks ago, I wonder if I shouldn’t give it another go. Try harder. Stay away. Walking on, I get to the house, approaching the porch with a wary eye, glancing, like I always do now, at the ground, to see if Agat’s been back.

  Nothing.

  Nothing, until I’m up the steps and across the porch, standing in front of the swing. I look down to where I was sitting. Someone watched us leave the house. Someone did this while we were in the cove. I retreat into the deep shade against the house like it can protect me. With my back against the wooden cladding, my heart crashing against my ribs, I stand dead still and scan the garden.

  ****

  Lucas comes back. I watch him approach, picnic basket in one hand, rugs rolled up under the other arm.

  “Lucas,” I blurt, when he’s at the top of the steps.

  “Jeez. What are you doing? You scared the shit out of me!”

  His reaction alarms me. “Why? Why did I scare the shit out of you, Lucas? Did you see something?”

  He shakes his head. “What are doing hiding back there in the shadows?”

  “Look.” I point. “Look on the porch swing.”

  He stares at me for a full ten seconds—and I swear he gets paler with every passing one—puts down the stuff he’s carrying, and goes over to the swing. He looks at it for a minute, and then looks at me. “What?”

  “Someone’s finished the bunny.”

  “The what?”

  “The blue bunny Alice and I were knitting. We weren’t even halfway through. Someone’s finished it.”

  “For crying out. I was expecting Buster, disembowelled, at the very least!”

  Oh God. Don’t say that. “Don’t touch it.”

  Too late. Lucas picks up the bunny, looks at it, turning it over in his fingers, looks at me, looks at the bunny. “What’s the problem?”

  Hand over my mouth, sick and trembly, I turn my eyes on the garden again. The clouds have gone, pushed by the wind to the horizon, and the coastline basks in the mellow, early afternoon sunshine. I shudder. Somehow, everything about the scene is sinister. Dragging my eyes away, I watch Lucas, willing him not to come closer, willing him to put that thing down.

  He doesn’t. He brings it to me, holding it out. “Looks like someone did you and Alice a favour.”

  I shriek, stopping him. “Take it away!”

  He props the bunny on a windowsill, shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at me under his eyebrows. “Lara? What’s up?”

  I don’t know. Why is he speaking softly like that? Is he looking at me funny? What’s going on? “It’s Agat, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  He’s taken aback. “Agat?” His eyes shift. He strolls to the edge of the porch and looks down the distant shore, across the grass and out to sea, and to the east where the pebble beach ends in a jagged tumble of rocks.

  “Yes. She hangs around. Does stuff.”

  He comes back to me and stands a few yards off, like he doesn’t want to come near me. “What do you mean?”

  I tell him how I first ran into Agat outside her house and how I found out about Alombegwinosis, Dzeedzeebonda and Kisosen, the watcher in the night. How I learned about the stealer of rings, the shape-shifter, the upsetter of canoes, and the young, handsome Abenaki man, possessed by his woman, his head shaved. “And Agat planted horrible little crosses here,” I point to the grass, “to keep you away, from me, because she said you were evil, that you had blackened my heart!”

  “To keep me away?”

  “Yes! After you were hurt, diving. You stayed away. You didn’t contact me for ages at a time, you—”

  “Agat wouldn’t hurt you. It’s nothing.”

  Nothing? “Oh really?” My voice goes squeaky. “What about hurting you? What about Alice?”

  “She loves Alice. She’s protective.”

  “But not you. She tried to keep you away by planting those stupid little crosses—” I choke on a gasp. Everything I’ve pondered over the last weeks falls into place with an explosive crash. “Did Agat kill Bonny and blame it on you?”

  He stares at me for a few seconds, impassive. “No.”

  “She’s a troublemaker, Lucas. She’s got it in for you.”

  “I am aware of that. But she loves Alice and was always nice to Bonny when no one else was.”

  “She doesn’t believe you’re innocent.”

  “Maybe I’m not.”

  All my muscles freeze. I’m so frightened I can’t move my mouth around the words. “What do you mean?”

  He comes a few steps closer. “If Bonny killed herself, it was my fault. If she killed herself, I murdered her. It’s all the same, don’t you see?”

  I shake my head. “No. No it’s not. Not to me.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” he says, softly. “To me. And it will be to Alice, when she’s old enough to ask questions about her mother.”

  He stands in front of me, blocking the sunlight, hands in pockets head down, while I’m still firmly jammed up against the back wall of the porch. We’re inches apart, but Bonny’s there, making sure we don’t touch.

  Something’s got to happen before I do that, Lucas said, earlier today, and this is it. Bonny is what has to happen.

  She has to go. Or I do.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Fetching Alice from school brings me back to reality. Waiting at the school gate in the autumn sunshine is the most normal thing in the world. Lucas is right. Agat is nothing more than a harmless old woman with—maybe—a sixth sense. How ridiculous to be spooked by her. She’s vibrant local colour, nothing more. Part of that famous Lobster Cove folklore. Go along with it, Lara; get with it!

  Here comes Alice with Molly, who’s coming over for a play date this afternoon. They climb into the car laden with carrier bags of craft paper, coloured pens, stickers, glitter and glue, brimming with ideas for the class party Halloween poster.

  At home, Alice is thrilled with the completed blue bunny—yes, I inspected it for pins—who sits central on the black poster card while she and Molly draw wonky spiders in fluorescent marker pen.

  “You see?” Lucas murmurs in my ear, when he comes into the kitchen drawn out of his studio by the smell of baking. “The bunny is a big success.”

  “I know, I feel stupid.” I touch his arm. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did earlier. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand.” His lips brush my temple. “I understand.”

  “I should thank Agat, really, for letting me off the hook. I’m a lousy knitter.”

  “Do that. She’s a good person to have on your side, especially at Halloween.” He steps away, surveying my handiwork for the Halloween bake sale—rows of orange pumpkin cookies with smiley faces, black witches’ hats iced with green hatbands, black cats with yellow eyes, squares with chocolate spider webs across one corner, ghosts with BOO and EEK written large on their robes. “Wow,” he says. “Which one should I try?”

  “No, Daddy, don’t eat them all,” Alice cries. “They’re for school!”

  “Just one little biscuit?” Lucas puts a whole ghost in his mouth.

  “What’s a biscuit?” Molly asks.

  “A cookie,” Alice replies. “Lara’s word for cookie is biscuit. Daddy likes to co
py her.”

  “That’s funny!”

  They giggle, scribbling away at the poster. Lucas picks up a pen and adds some pink Leonardo da Vinci bats. He changes pens to send bright green spiders scuttling to every corner, helps himself to a black cat and goes back to his studio, laughing.

  A perfect domestic scene. Everyone happy. Normalcy at its height.

  Jay collects Molly at six. I make supper and the three of us sit together at the kitchen table to eat.

  “Will tricksters and treatsters come to our house on Halloween?” Alice asks.

  Lucas glances at her. “No.”

  “Why, Daddy?”

  “Because we’re too far out of town.”

  Is that the real reason?

  I wonder.

  ****

  The next morning, under a hot, hard shower, I reflect that many things are not normal at all. The sex is, always, astonishing, fabulous, amazing, but Lucas is distant. We’re not intimate. That’s the only way I can describe it. I haven’t slept with oodles of men—far from it—but Lucas is way, way better than any of them in bed. He’s knees, waist, head and shoulders beyond the lot of them stacked together.

  But…and it’s a big but, there’s that same old barrier, or perhaps it’s a void. Lucas doesn’t give himself—his whole self—to me in those intense intimate moments in the big bed upstairs, wrapped in the moonlit darkness. Either he’s holding something back, or there’s someplace I can’t reach. Make no mistake, sex with Lucas is brilliant—perfect—but it’s a bit like this:

  “I’d like some astounding sex please, Lucas.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  That’s it. There’s something between us, something he can’t, or won’t, give.

  He’s told me he loves me.

  I love him back, but I can’t say the words.

  You know, Lucas is still paying me. That’s weird, and maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps I’m the problem.

  “Lucas,” I say, once I’m home from taking Alice to school. “I feel uncomfortable that you’re still paying me and we’re…we’re sleeping together. It doesn’t feel right.”

  He’s in the studio, sitting at one of his computers. I’m standing behind him, my hands stroking his hair, ears, neck, shoulders. He reaches up and runs his fingers over my forearms causing riots in many parts of my body.

  “If I stop paying you, you might leave.”

  “I might anyway, Lucas. Perhaps I should.”

  He grips my arms, but says nothing until I try to pull away and then he lets me go and stands up, turning, pushing the chair away and catching me in his arms. The movement is so quick I’m unprepared. He holds me tight. I can’t move or breathe. “I love you,” he growls. I can hear the words resonate in his chest, through my squashed ear. “So no more talk about leaving, okay? Stop talking about leaving.”

  “We need to talk about it.”

  “We just did.”

  We stand, fused together until he releases me in a sudden movement. I stagger back, looking away from those potent eyes. “Lucas, there’s something—”

  His phone rings. He glances at the screen. “I have to take this. It’s going to be a long one.” He answers the call, and I slip out of the room and go onto the sea porch, gasping for air like a beached fish.

  Later that day, Lucas hears that he’s failed his second medical. I keep watch, looking for signs of stubble and empty whisky bottles, but he hangs together.

  “Is that it?” I ask. “I mean, can you not do any sort of diving ever again, as long as you live?”

  “Alex Campbell says I’m only good for honeymoon diving from now on in.”

  “Honeymoon diving?”

  “Diving in two feet of warm, crystal clear water to look at pretty fish.”

  “That sounds rather nice.”

  He grins. “It does?”

  “As long as there are no sharks.”

  “I could probably swim with dolphins.”

  “Alice would enjoy that.”

  “Yes.” He goes out, and I don’t ask him where.

  He comes back after midnight and gets into bed with me.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, cheek pressed to his chest. “I wish I could help.”

  “You do,” he says—I think—kissing the top of my head and falling asleep.

  I raise my head and sniff. Toothpaste, that’s all.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The last weekday of October already. I collect Alice from school, and we drive out to Emerald Lake to see Agat. I’ve got a tin of cookies for her; they’re a mix of cheerful pumpkins and brightly coloured spider webs. I thought it better to leave off the witches and ghosts. I’m trying to thank her, not make a point. Alice is tremendously excited. All along the way we pass gateways decorated with all the trappings of Halloween—barrows piled with pumpkins, witches, wizards and warlocks hovering in trees, and black cats sneaking and creeping along and over walls. On fire with fall foliage and redolent with the rich smell of wood smoke, it couldn’t be more festive. Christmas must be amazing in Maine. I wonder what I’ll be doing at Christmas? Where will I be?

  Agat has jolly jack o’ lanterns along the front of her porch, and some not so jolly ones. “Unhappy.” Alice points to one with a hideous grin and plus signs for eyes.

  “Evil,” Agat says, opening the front door.

  “What’s evil?” Alice asks.

  “Naughty,” I say quickly. “What do you say to Agat?”

  “Hello, and thank you for knitting my bunny!” she sings, like I’ve told her to.

  “You like it?” There’s no denial. Agat’s voice is soft. I wouldn’t say she smiles, but she moves her mouth into an expression of acceptance. She reaches out to touch Alice’s hair. “Precious Lis,” she murmurs.

  “Lara made you biscuits, Aunty Agat. They are cookies, but she says biscuits and Daddy loves them.”

  Agat raises her eyes to mine. “Good,” she says.

  “He also says biscuit now. Molly thinks it’s funny!”

  I hold out the container. Agat won’t take it, but steps aside and points to a space on the old tabletop at the back of the porch. I gather I have to put it there, that she doesn’t want to touch it while I am. That’s okay, so long as there’s no spitting and finger wagging. The cookies get placed between a jar of seagull feathers and a chipped, white enamel bowl containing a lifetime’s collection of seaglass.

  “Wait,” Agat says, going inside. Alice fiddles about, touching everything, while I look out at the trees, leaves rustling in the smoky wind, falling like coloured rain.

  A few minutes later, Agat’s back with a small plastic bag of something frozen. “Wild duck for Buster,” she tells Alice, placing it on the table. “Take. Check for bones before you give it.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Come, Alice, we must go.”

  Alice picks up the little bag. We leave. Agat watches us until we’re in the car, and then goes inside and shuts the door.

  Back at Blue Rocks, Lucas has put out huge happy-carved pumpkins on either side of the gate. There are more merry pumpkins on the porch flickering in the dusk.

  “Who’s going to see those?” I ask, when he comes to open the sea horse door for us.

  “We are.”

  Lucas has colonized the kitchen to make chilli. There’s music on, wine open—and a cheery pile of carved pumpkin debris, used pots, dishes and chopping boards on every surface, reminding me of that evening back in June when I first walked in here.

  “How did it go with Agat?” he asks, on the point of going upstairs to supervise Alice’s bath time.

  “Not bad. We’re not big mates, but she was okay with Alice. She gave us wild duck for Buster.”

  “Great.” He chases Alice upstairs with such spooky wails, that even Buster pays attention. He looks up from extensive tail-grooming in the middle of the kitchen doorway, his yellow eyes shining with the thrill of the hunt.

  “For a black cat on Halloween, you sure are laid-back,” I tell h
im, “and very indoor-orientated. Shouldn’t you be out and about scaring people?”

  Buster watches the stairs for a minute and then carries on licking, ignoring me. I’m not sure I’ll give him the wild duck. I know he’s a naturally large cat, but he’s a teensy overweight in my opinion. Perhaps rich, fatty treats aren’t the best idea. Also, call me mad, but what if Agat’s poisoned it? Lucas’s Buster-disembowelling comment sticks in my mind. I’ll ask Lucas what he thinks. Meanwhile, I won’t put it in the freezer because we might forget it. Someone might eat it by mistake, months hence. I’ll put it away, somewhere high up in the pantry, discuss with Lucas, and either debone it for consumption tomorrow morning or chuck it out. I put the duck in a recycled, sealed plastic container and stash it on the top shelf, closing the door. I help myself to a glass of wine, take one sip and change my mind. Sod it, I’m going to chuck the duck. Why take risks?

  Retrieving the container, I hover at the kitchen bin. Not good enough, because I know that cat. I go out through the sea horse door, checking from habit that the key’s in my pocket—where it mostly lives—and put the duck, container and all, in the outside bin behind the garage. The wind’s picked up, driving sharp arrows of drizzle into my face. I run back to the house, where the pumpkin lanterns gutter in the porch and the open door throws a long rectangle of yellow light. I crunch over stray leaves on the threshold and quickly shut myself inside.

  “Where were you?” Lucas comes down the stairs with Alice in his arms, wrapped in a towel.

  “Outside.” I shiver.

  “Why?” Alice asks.

  “To check I’d locked the car.” I see no problem telling a small white lie if it keeps someone safe, even Buster. I glance at him. He’s in exactly the same place, only stretched out on his side, fast asleep.

  Lucas carries Alice into the den and puts her on the sofa. He lights a fire and closes the shutters against the throb of sudden, heavy rain on the windows. I dry Alice and help her into her pyjamas. We turn down the lights, light candles and watch Halloween cartoons suitable for a four-year-old until Alice’s bedtime. Before he takes her upstairs, Lucas reads aloud two Winnie stories and then carries Alice out onto the sea porch to look for witches. The rain’s cleared, the air’s crisp and still and the moon’s beautiful, burning a track of white fire on the dark sea.