The cottage was more of a wreck than I had expected. It had been a harsh winter up here. The front porch floor was peeling and in places looked like a great potpourri of dark red flower petals, and a few shingles were missing from the roof. Several fresh cigarette butts littered the grass beside the porch. That was odd. Had some lobstermen come ashore and rested on our steps, or a dayfaring family out for a sail looked in through our windows?
Inside the house, on the first floor, the sheeted furniture and rolled rugs and all the rest of the chattels seemed fine. There was still plenty of propane in the tank, and the electricity was working. However, we discovered that one of the seaward windows was broken, and inside the upstairs bedroom where I always stayed we found the feathery bloodied remains of a black-back gull that had flown, or been blown, right through it. The room was, remarkably, undamaged by rain. I had never seen such a thing before but figured there must have been quite a storm sometime in the past days that disoriented the bird and slammed it, with a heavy whip of wind, into the glass. We three got the window boarded up temporarily, scoured the stained floor, and buried the huge sea bird, and within a few hours, just before sunset, had the place more or less up and running. I was determined not to treat this unusual mishap as an omen, wasn't going to let it intrude on my renewed sense of calm.
Weary though we were, Jonah carried the big lobster kettle down to the goldening shore, past corridors of beach roses, Rosa rugosa with their devoted drunken bees, and filled it with saltwater while Morgan got a driftwood fire started in the pit. Tradition was that the first night was always a dinner of lobsters— bugs the boys called them, adopting local slang—and we weren't here to break with tradition. I set the table and lit candles and a hurricane lamp, leaving the overhead lights off that first night as a way of clearing the world away, literally blacking it out. We had our supper and stayed up late talking. When I finally sent them to their shared room, finished the dishes, put out the fire with cooking water from the pot, and extinguished the candles, I was deliriously tired, deliciously so. Waves crashed on the shore under the spray of endless stars. I felt as if I could sleep for a week.
The Metcalfs had been no lovers of modernity, and while the family had allowed electricity to be cabled to Covey back in the twenties when the other outer islands were serviced from Mount Desert, a telephone was never installed. No one was going to call. I went upstairs, carrying my lamp ahead of me, and, ignoring the newly boarded window, climbed into bed feeling safe from the world for the first time in weeks. I who never said prayers even said one of thanks, a Nep-like agnostic prayer.
Dear Lord, if you're out there somewhere listening, I want you to know how grateful I am for your giving us protection during our journey, and please I ask you please let these days we have here be peace-filled and undisturbed. Thank you for watching over my sons. Amen.
9
HARD SUNLIGHT SO filled my room the next morning that I came awake in a literal flash. I was shocked not to find the bloody, thrashing seagull on my bed, where it had been just a moment before. In my nightmare, a figure hovering outside my window had cradled the gull in its arms like some demonic madonna, before burning each of the bird's eyes with the tip of a cigarette and throwing the helpless creature at me through the glass. I breathed in and out, tasting the sweet briny ocean air, trying to slow my pounding heart. Hearing no one astir, I figured the twins were sleeping in after yesterday's long drive, which was just as well. Sheltered though I was in truth, I questioned whether Covey was far enough away from Henderson's to be the sanctuary I'd sought. Rather than force myself out of bed and trek downstairs to prepare breakfast, I pulled the pillow over my head with the idea of stealing a few moments in order to think.
I didn't want to admit it, but my monster was back, aroused from its sleep, ranging around my perimeters. That much I had to acknowledge. A nightmare was just a nightmare, but I could no longer deny that the hanged girl bore all the hallmarks of one of my forevisions, though as forevisions went it was the most inscrutable, baffling one I had ever experienced. Unlike in times past, when I could see some direct correspondence between what I foresaw and people or events in my everyday life, this time I could make no such connection. The question was, What was I going to do about it? Or, more to the point, Was there anything I could do?
What finally decided me on leaving Little Eddy for Covey Island was, among other things, that the police investigation, largely based on forensics and the work of the expert Niles had me meet, preliminarily concluded that I had in fact suffered a hallucination. Some mess-up in a visual neural pathway. Plausibly Charles Bonnet syndrome, but my age and perfect eyesight didn't fit the profile. Peduncular hallucinosis was suggested, but I presented with none of the typical accompanying symptoms. Optic neuritis, schizophrenia? Not likely. In the end, they settled on a probable transient stress disorder, a delusional episode. If nature abhors a vacuum, authorities deplore the inexplicable.
The therapist was well-meaning to a fault, a woman who cited James Thurber as a possible fellow sufferer, saying the cartoonist who wrote "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" saw an old lady with a parasol walk right through the side of a truck once. A large rabbit spoke with him about world affairs from time to time. On another occasion, he witnessed a bridge rise lazily into the air, like a long balloon. She was, in essence, assuring me that even those afflicted with mild madness have a creative, viable place in our culture.
"Imaginative people such as yourself are sometimes carried away by the very thoughts that make them special in the first place," she had proposed. "But it's important not just to understand the difference, but feel it in your heart. Feel the difference between reality and the fantastic make-believe that you experience as real."
I remember lowering my eyes as she finished uncoiling this string of thought that reduced me, I felt, by its implication to a kind of infantilism.
"To be balanced, you must know how to distinguish between dreaming subjective experience, such as your waking nightmare, and objective living experience. Does that make sense to you?"
"It does and thanks," I answered, knowing this was the only response that might spring me from her soft leather chair.
Point was, I hadn't been dreaming, but none of them had the least tangible reason to believe me, nor was there any hard neuroscience or accepted psychological model known to them that might connect my "vision" of the dead girl to the discovery of the lost girl. So, what I saw never "objectively" happened. The rope we found that day came back from the lab with no identifiable evidence suggesting any possible narrative that would indicate a recent hanging. The fibers were too weathered and weak to readily support the weight of even a child. As for the Styrofoam cup, it did turn out to have been dropped by one of Townsend's survey team, a cup from Crowley's General Store in the small downtown of Little Eddy, hazelnut with sugar. The pink knit cap was the girl's. She apparently lost it while running, trying to avoid being seen by Niles and me when we descended into the forest. And though the search and investigation were supposed to have been an in-house affair, with details kept under strict wraps, word got out, I assume courtesy of Bledsoe. Much of the story was picked up, with errors and exaggerations abounding, by some regional papers and beyond. Not as if I had a clipping service, but my phone started ringing, and most of the people on the other end with questions for me weren't locals. A few unfriendly letters, most of them unsigned, populated my mailbox. A call from Rosalie's pastor offering to speak with me. Turned heads at the grocery store. Even the boys had gone a little quiet on me, not knowing what to say.
Only after I got the call from Matt Newburg, the school principal, telling me a number of concerned parents wanted to remove their children from my summer school class, was it clear I might want to consider getting away for a while. When he added that my continuing education course on Homer and Virgil was canceled due to low—that is, no —enrollment, all nine people having pulled out, the die was cast. For obvious reasons, I myself postponed the dowsing appointments on m
y schedule. I was in no state to ramble around alone in some remote field or woods. Never before had the uninhabited earth seemed threatening. And the telephone might as well have been an exposed live wire.
Even my phone call with Rosalie was charged. When I told her my plan and asked her blessing to use the cottage as an escape, she said fine, but made her own request. She and Nep wanted to join us the following week, after we had opened the house and got settled a bit. Nep's health being what it was, she thought it wise to move our annual August vacation forward this year. Given all that had been going on, time together seemed imperative.
"Wonderful," I agreed, before getting off the phone. But I knew what it meant. Knew she was traveling here to talk. To hike with me the craggy hard-going shore of the island, picking our way along while she detailed everything that was wrong with my life that I already knew was wrong with my life. No doubt she intended to warn me—to protect me from myself, as she would have put it—that when the monster was near, I needed to be especially mindful not to speak about matters best left buried in the past. My mother had mapped all the chinks in my tinfoil-thin armor. The thought crossed my mind, as we said our goodbyes, that I ought to tell her I didn't want to discuss Christopher or any of his, and by turn our, long-dead secrets while we were at Covey—a place he had never known—but decided against saying anything. Perhaps once Rosalie arrived and breathed in the purifying ocean air, her worries would disappear much as I hoped mine would.
For his part, Niles assured me I shouldn't worry about the garbage that was written in the papers or what people were saying, insisting I shouldn't be ashamed or distressed. He met me nearly every day after the encounter, during his lunch break or whenever he could get away. Out of public view, we walked together along the outskirts of the local firemen's park, or around the far side of a nearby lake. During the drives through the green, anonymous hills to meet him I sometimes felt like a discreet lover hooking up with her married boyfriend. My nerves were so jangled and thoughts so given to shadowy feelings of guilt that I might as well have been up to something adulterous like that. Instead, I tried to heed his advice to stay proud, calm, strong, not to worry. But I knew his voice too well, and the look on his face proposed he himself was worried. When I asked what Melanie thought, he pulled a frown and said, "Doesn't matter," which was easily interpretable. She no doubt warned Niles he risked hurting his reputation by continuing to associate with his crazy childhood friend.
Niles, though, didn't treat me as crazy. He treated me with respect, cutting through the nonsense in the news reports and telling me the truth about the found girl's story. Her name turned out to be Laura Bryant. No feral child, no dryad, the girl had been missing for some two weeks. She disappeared at a train terminal on an early May morning. Laura and her mother had gone to a riverfront station to meet her father, who was returning from a business trip. His train was running behind schedule because of track work down the line. Wind coming off the river was stiff, and though any ice floes had long since melted away, it was chilly. She told her mother she wanted to go to the car and get the coat and cap she'd left behind. The parking lot was plainly visible, right on the other side of the tracks, and her mother said no problem, just hurry back since he's arriving any minute now. So Laura, shivering a bit, paced down the platform and up the stairs to the enclosed overpass, a glass and girder affair, and while a southbound train rumbled into the station, temporarily blinding her mother's view and distracting her, the girl vanished, as many children do, into the awaiting void.
The whole scenario was so simple. The southbound pulled out soon enough. Laura's mother glanced toward where she had parked but she didn't see her daughter. Dawdling, most likely, or maybe she was in the overpass that straddled the tracks, looking out its windows. Well, she would get a talking-to, Mrs. Bryant was thinking. Laura's father's train arrived, greetings were exchanged, a welcome-back kiss. Then he asked, Where is Laura? The woman explained what had happened and together they walked to the car. The coat and cap that Laura had gone to fetch, because it really was quite cold with that wind coming off the water, were missing, and so was she. They began looking around for her. Began asking people in the lot if anyone had seen a girl with brownish-blond hair, fifteen years old, wearing a new dark blue dress, the color of a violet. They canvassed shop owners to ask if a girl had come in, maybe used the restroom. Rang doorbells of houses by the station. No one had seen her. No one could help. Their day descended into chaos.
Niles continued to tell me about Laura's recovery as he learned more about her. Said he wanted to keep me current and keep current with me. Whenever he called me Casper, however, I couldn't help but think of myself in cartoonish terms. Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Within several days of being found, Laura overcame her diffident muteness and asked what was going on? Who are you people? Where am I? She made tentative eye contact with those who were looking after her, though it appeared she had been traumatized into a kind of inconsolable shyness. She did finally express interest in food, and when a plate was set before her, she ate heartily. She seemed to answer questions to the best of her ability, but Niles couldn't tell whether she was groping for information she couldn't express, or holding back what she didn't want to reveal.
When he visited her in the facility, she recognized and acknowledged him. Asked if Renee, the female officer, was coming again. Still, during those first long days it was as if she was in reversion, had backtracked a few years and was thinking with the mind of a younger, terrified self. Or else she was some sort of bravura actress, coy as a chameleon.
"Damned confounding," he said.
Apropos of nothing, she announced after breakfast one morning that her name was Laura. Said she knew that was only part of her name but claimed not to remember more. She apologized about this, since the people trying to comfort her wanted so badly to know.
"At least she knew she was Laura," I told Niles, who was relating all this to me. "Names are doors to ideas."
Laura went on to say she lived by a river that was very wide and there was an old church by this river she remembered quite distinctly—Niles said he racked his brain trying to recall anything up or down the Delaware that matched this. The river changed color all the time, from brown to blue to white, and across the river was a mountain. Before she was here, she said, she lived in a house. She was sorry she couldn't describe it further. No, she couldn't make a drawing for them because she would be inventing and what good would that be? They wanted her to draw it anyway? She made several, all different. She pushed aside the paper and colored pencils. Didn't want to draw anymore. The pictures were a waste of time. Besides, she wasn't some baby and she'd had enough of this childishness.
No, she answered another question put to her. No, she didn't know anybody in the forest. She hated the forest. She hated the filthy hunter's cabin. The roof leaked and it was cold at night and her fire kept going out whenever she fell asleep. She hated the guy in the long car who came and went but mostly left her alone there, locking her in the shanty with a bar through a latch. No, she didn't know who he was. No, he didn't tell her why he took her there and warned her to stay, or else. He had said horrible things to her while he touched himself, threatened to kill her if she didn't behave. Said he could make bad girls disappear right out of this world. No, she didn't know anything else now. That was all she knew. And the next day claimed not to have meant a single word of any of it.
At the same time Laura was recovering physically, while offering her confusing, contradictory, and questionable stories, I gathered from Niles that discovering her identity wasn't finally that difficult. A matter of circulating the girl's image and a basic description of her for other departments to check against their missing-persons databases.
It all transpired within the week. A match, a positive ID. The river turned out to be the Hudson, not the Delaware. The mountain across from it was Bear. She lived in the village of Cold Spring, where the train station was but a block from the river.
The church proved to be the Chapel of Our Lady Restoration, perched on the water's edge, a Greek Revival temple with Doric columns that might as well have been facing the Aegean as the Hudson. A place where people used to pray for the safe return of mariners.
Reuniting Laura with her family was most important both to Niles and to the child welfare services people, but when Renee told Laura her parents were very excited that she was safe and were driving here to be with her, the girl's response was a crosscurrent of enthusiasm and alarm. Under the circumstances, not an unexpected reaction. A background check on the parents turned up clean—no records, no warrants, no traffic tickets even, just an upstanding family of comfortable means—and so Laura would be released into their custody and that would more or less be that, although child services would recommend individual as well as family counseling.
The attention turned for a time to investigating her purported abduction. In light of her failure to provide any further workable description of this man and his car, other than that the latter was long, there was little to work with beyond the possible pretensions of a scared girl. No fingerprints other than hers were traced on any of the small cache of supplies at her makeshift camp, and the only footprints they found, largely erased by the rain, were the size of a girl's Laura's age. No one had come forward to claim having witnessed her being abducted, or accompanied by anyone on the road. The investigation edged forward into a vacuum. Nothing supported her claim of having been the victim of kidnap, while everything pointed to her being a frightened runaway.
I hadn't seen Laura since the day she was found; it wouldn't have been useful to her or healthy for me—and now that her situation seemed settled, I told Niles I was taking the boys and escaping to Maine for a while.
"No reason not to. You know that by leaving you're giving some people more reason to talk. 'What's she skipping town for?' Not that they should stop you."
The Diviner's Tale Page 9