Moonlight on Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

Mila saved every single letter and reread each one many times. At first, she tied them all together with a red ribbon she had bought expressly for that purpose. But soon, there were too many of them for the ribbon to fit around, so she put the letters in a shoebox instead. And when they outgrew that, she moved them to a file box. And every time Mila and her mother moved during those years—and they moved a lot—Mila dragged the box along with her.

  She needed those letters. Those were hard years for her mom, and for Mila, too. Her mom had trouble keeping a job, and Mila soon understood why. When she did work, she wasn’t just serving cocktails, she was drinking them, too. And as soon as the manager or the bartender found out, she would get fired. Her jobs, and her tips, kept getting worse, and so did the apartments they moved into. Still, she pieced together a living, of sorts, and Mila helped out whenever she could, first babysitting, and then, as she got older, waiting tables, usually at some little dive of a restaurant where the management wasn’t too concerned about her being old enough to waitress legally, and where the customers, in turn, weren’t too concerned about the quality of the food.

  But through all this, Mila remained focused on becoming a nurse. And when she was in high school, and her mother started inviting friends over for loud, raucous parties that lasted far into the night, Mila locked her bedroom door, stuffed cotton in her ears, and studied until she was too tired to concentrate, then crawled into bed, clamped a pillow over her head, and fell into a fitful sleep.

  She wrote to Heather faithfully, though, always careful to put a positive spin on her life, even when she knew from the worried tone of Heather’s letters back to her that Heather understood more than she told her. Still, Heather’s letters kept coming, week after week, and year after year, and the box Mila put them in kept getting heavier, until, until recently. . . . But she wouldn’t think about that now, she decided. She couldn’t think about that now. She would be strong, she told herself. And she would stay strong. Even if she could only do it for one minute at a time. She glanced back at the clock on her bedside table now. It was twelve fifteen. She would study for fifteen more minutes, she decided. She reached back into the drawer, took the study guide out, and flipped it open again. Then she bent over it, and, returning to the problem where she’d left off, she shut the rest of the world out. At twelve thirty, though, she stopped. There was something else she needed to do. Something that was going to give her much more satisfaction than getting a sample problem right.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mila got up from the desk, walked over to the dresser, took the ring box out of the bottom drawer, and then took the ring out of the box. She left the bedroom with the ring, padding softly down the hallway and stopping outside Reid’s bedroom door. There was a faint yellow band of light visible beneath his door, but there were no sounds coming from his room. She waited there a minute before walking quietly to the kitchen, where, following Lonnie’s instructions, she disabled the alarm she’d already set. Then she walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, and to the sliding glass door that led onto the deck. She unlocked it and opened it, slowly. She hesitated there, wondering if she should turn on the deck lights, but she decided not to. Some things, she thought, were best done under the cover of night. So she crossed the unlit deck to the set of steps Lonnie had pointed out to her that afternoon, and she started down them. As soon as she did, though, the night seemed to envelop her, and she felt suddenly defenseless in its bigness, and its darkness. Still, she kept going, climbing carefully down the stone steps, whose whiteness glowed faintly in the light of a thin crescent moon, and whose roughness felt cool beneath her bare feet.

  When she reached the bottom step, she paused. The dock was much longer than she’d expected it to be. It jutted out, impossibly far, over the black, glassy surface of the lake. Did it have to be so long? she wondered anxiously. She’d always had a fear of deep water, and she knew that by the time she reached her destination, at the dock’s end, the lake’s depth would be well over her head. But she squeezed the ring in her hand to give herself courage, and when she felt it digging into her palm, she pressed on, careful to stay in the center of the dock, and careful, too, to stop a respectful distance from its end. And as she stood there, her bare toes gripping the smooth pine planks beneath them, she turned and looked back up at the cabin. It looked undisturbed, its outline only slightly blacker than the already black sky behind it. Good, she thought. She had the night to herself, and in more ways than one. She turned back to face the lake again, and, because she felt something was required of her now, something that would somehow mark this moment for the solemn thing it was, she gave a small, silent speech.

  Brandon, I don’t know if it will ever be possible to legally end our marriage, especially if legally ending it means that you’ll know where I am. But the fact that somewhere there will be a piece of paper that says we’re still married isn’t important to me. What’s important to me is that our real marriage ends tonight. For good, and forever. And another thing, Brandon. Even if you were to eventually find me here, I’ll die before I’ll ever let you hurt me again. That’s a promise to you, and it’s a promise to me, too.

  And with that, she threw the ring into the lake, threw it as hard as she could, so hard, in fact, that she stumbled backward a little with the effort. But she caught herself and listened as the ring landed in the lake with a small plink. She pictured it, then, falling through the dark water, bumping gently against the lake bottom, and settling there on the sand or the silt or among the weeds. Would anyone ever find it? she wondered. She doubted it. As she was considering that question, though, the wind suddenly picked up, stirring the pine trees on the bluff behind her, ruffling the surface of the black water, and sending little waves slapping against the dock’s pilings. She shivered and turned to go back up to the cabin. But as she climbed the steps, she imagined that she felt physically lighter without her wedding ring to weigh her down.

  Reid shifted restlessly in his wheelchair and wondered, not for the first time, if his hearing was somehow more sensitive now than it had been before the accident. How else, really, to explain the fact that tonight, as he sat in a shadowy corner of his bedroom, he could hear every one of the cabin’s after-dark sounds with near perfect clarity: every creak of the rafters, every rattle of the windows, every sigh of the wind in the chimney? Then again, he thought, maybe it wasn’t his hearing that had changed since the accident, maybe it was him. Maybe he heard these sounds because he wanted to hear them, wanted to be reassured by their comforting familiarity. After all, these little creaks and sighs were the only things keeping him company during these otherwise desolate nights.

  Tonight, though, tonight had been different. Tonight there’d been something new to listen to. Because unlike his other home health aides, Mila hadn’t gone to sleep early or, as in Mrs. Everson’s case, passed out early. No, she’d been on the move. She’d left her room about an hour ago, around twelve thirty, pausing first outside his bedroom door, where she’d stood and listened to him—listened to him listening to her—before she’d gone to the kitchen and turned off the alarm. Is she leaving already, he’d thought? And he’d felt a little surge of hope. But then he’d remembered the ultimatum Allie had given him at Pearl’s that afternoon, and his joy had been tempered somewhat.

  In any case, Mila hadn’t left. Or rather, she had left, but she hadn’t gone out the front door, and driven away, as he’d initially thought she might. Instead, she’d gone out the back door, the door that led to the deck and to the steps down to the dock. She’d stayed outside for about five minutes, and then she’d come back in, locked the sliding glass door, reset the alarm, and retreated back to her bedroom.

  What had she done outside? he wondered now, absently turning his wheelchair first one way and then the other. Had she plotted her escape, by powerboat instead of by wheelchair-accessible van? Or had she looked at the stars? Or gone for a quick dip in the lake? He considered, and then rejected, each of these possibilities. He didn’t
know her very well, of course; he knew her only as well as you could know someone you’d had only two conversations with, and, in his case, they’d been two very tense conversations. But he couldn’t picture her racing a stolen powerboat into the night, any more than he could picture her leisurely backstroking through the dark water. No, she was not a reckless person, and not a frivolous one, either, he decided. She was the opposite, in fact, of those things. She was cautious, careful, and watchful.

  But . . . but she was something else, too, he realized with surprise. He’d noticed it that afternoon at Pearl’s, when he’d made the remark about her stealing from her former patients, and he’d noticed it again this evening, here in his bedroom, when he’d initially refused to hand over his prescription medications to her. Both times he’d seen something in her eyes that was like a tiny flicker of light. Of life, he realized. And it had transformed not just her eyes, but the rest of her too. Transformed her from someone who was ordinary, if attractive looking, into someone who was . . . who was what? Well, who was anything but ordinary looking.

  Reid, it’s official, he thought now, giving his wheelchair an impatient spin. You’ve lost your mind. Completely and totally lost it. Because why else would you be expending so much mental energy on some woman, some girl, really, who just happens to be passing through your life? Some girl who won’t be with you any longer than the other two home health aides were. And he sighed, knowing it was true. Knowing that she’d quit, the way the others had quit, and knowing, too, that he’d be shipped back to the rehab center, just as Allie had promised he would be.

  He glanced bleakly at the clock on the bedside table. It was 2:00 A.M. now, time to begin the arduous nightly ritual of using his crutches to lever himself out of his wheelchair and into his hospital bed. Walker had watched him do it, once, and swore he’d never watch him do it again. It was too terrifying, he’d said. Reid didn’t find it terrifying, though, so much as tiring. Exhausting, really. And pointless. Because what was the point of getting into bed if he didn’t want to sleep? If he wanted, in fact, to stay awake, staying awake being the only way to ensure he didn’t dream? Still, night after night, he went through these same motions. He got into bed, he turned out the light, and he lay in the darkness. Some habits, apparently, died hard. But maybe, he thought, brightening momentarily, maybe tonight would be different. Maybe he wouldn’t sleep. Or maybe he would sleep but he wouldn’t dream. If you could call what he did dreaming.

  Because his dreams were too real to be dreams. They were . . . they were virtual re-creations of the accident and its aftermath. There was no other way to describe them. And it wasn’t simply that his dreams got all the details right—the feel of the steering wheel digging into his chest, the taste of blood in his mouth, the smell of motor oil leaking out of his car’s engine—it was that his dreams got everything else right, too, the shock, the confusion, the claustrophobia, the pain, and even, sometimes, the despair. It was there, all of it, in his dreams. But most of all, the pain was there. He would never have imagined it was possible to feel pain in a dream. But he felt it, a pain so intense, and emanating from so many different parts of his body, that it seemed to defy logic. He couldn’t catalogue this pain, couldn’t organize it, couldn’t describe it even. Except, maybe, the pain in his left leg. There the pain ranged, at any given moment, from excruciating to unbearable. But most of the time, it was just unbearable.

  The dream he dreaded the most was the one where he was calling for help. In this dream, it was late afternoon on his third day in the car. He knew it was late afternoon because he could see through the shattered glass of his windshield that the shadows of the pine trees were lengthening and darkening. Soon, it would be evening, and, after that, nighttime. And nighttime was the worst time in the car. It was the coldest time, for one, for while it had been an unusually mild spring, and while he’d been wearing a jacket when he’d gotten into the accident, the nights trapped in the car were cold enough to make him shiver, uncontrollably, thereby wasting what little energy he had left, energy he desperately needed if he was going to get himself out of this alive.

  But nighttime was also the time when he came closest to running out of hope. By the third afternoon in the car, he’d realized that no one was coming for him. Obviously, there’d been no guardrail on the road, which meant, in all likelihood, that there was no sign of his car going off the road, either. Getting out of the wreckage himself wasn’t a possibility; his car had literally collapsed in on him, and he barely had room to fill his lungs with air, let alone move his arms and legs. Besides, even in the unlikely event that he found a way to work himself free of the wreckage and crawl out of it, he knew he wouldn’t get far dragging what was obviously a broken leg over uneven terrain.

  His cell phone wasn’t any use to him either. Typically, he kept it in the car’s drink holder, but the accident had thrown it into the backseat, out of reach, where it had buzzed, uselessly, with phone calls, e-mails, and texts for a couple of days until its battery had died. That meant that if he called for help, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way—he’d have to shout for it. There was a problem with this, too, though. Because while he could occasionally hear the faint hum of a car or a truck going by on the road above him, it was far enough above him—around sixty feet, in his estimation—that it was unlikely anyone passing by on it would hear his calls for help. It was more likely, he thought, that he could attract the attention of someone on foot, a hiker, maybe, or a bird-watcher, though given the steepness of the terrain, and the thickness of the foliage, it was hard to imagine even the most intrepid outdoorsman or -woman wandering through the area where his car had landed.

  Still, he had called for help. He’d called for it in real life, and he called for it in his dreams, too. He didn’t do it because he thought anyone would actually hear him. He did it because he knew he wouldn’t survive another night, and as tempting as it was sometimes to slip into unconsciousness one final time, he didn’t want to go down without a fight. Not then, and not later, either. In his dreams. He looked warily at his bed and wheeled himself over to it, his motions slow and reluctant. The optimism he’d felt earlier was gone. There were no good nights anymore. There were only bad nights and less bad nights. And tonight would probably be the first kind of night.

  At the same time that Reid, who’d finally gotten into bed, was trying to stay awake, Mila was trying to fall asleep. It wasn’t easy. The vigilance that she’d worked so hard to maintain all day refused to relax itself now, and it was hours before she fell, exhausted, into an uneasy sleep. It wasn’t long, though, before something tugged at her consciousness. She resisted it, but it tugged again, harder this time. It was a sound, she realized, opening her eyes onto the darkness of her room. A very strange sound. She sat up in bed, her body tense, her ears straining to hear it again. But there was nothing. Only silence. Could it have been . . . could it have been Brandon? she wondered, a cold, prickly sensation spreading all over her. Could he have found her already and broken into the cabin? But, no, if he had, he would have set off the alarm. And besides, the sound she’d heard hadn’t been human. It had been, well . . . animal. Which made sense, really, when you considered that there was a whole forest outside her bedroom window.

  She started to get out of bed then, to look out the window, but she heard the sound again, and she stopped, and sat perfectly still, listening to it. It wasn’t coming from outside the cabin. It was coming from inside the cabin. From right down the hall from her room. “Reid,” she whispered, understanding, and she slipped out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and stood on its threshold. The sound stopped, then started again almost immediately. So this was what Walker had tried to warn her about after he’d picked her up at the bus stop that afternoon. This was one of Reid’s nightmares. No wonder she’d mistaken his screams for an animal; they had a feral, wild, not-quite-human quality to them. She shivered in her thin cotton nightgown and considered returning to the tempting warmth of her bed.

  But R
eid started another round of his strange, tuneless screaming then, and she knew she couldn’t leave him that way. She turned on the lights in her room, and, her hands shaking slightly, pulled off her nightgown and pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Then she walked haltingly down the hallway, trying to ignore the fact that her heart was pounding so hard now it was knocking against her ribcage. When she paused outside his door though, hand on his doorknob, she found she couldn’t make herself open it. Now that she was this close, she could hear not just screaming, but actual words, too. Words like help and please. Come on, Mila, just open it, she told herself, and by some miracle she did. She edged into the room then and saw Reid was in his hospital bed, lit by the faint pool of light from a nearby night-light. He was quiet and still for a moment, and then he started to scream and to thrash around again.

  She reached for the switch beside the door and flipped it on, but the light didn’t wake him up. It did give her a better view of him, though, and she saw that he was drenched with perspiration and tangled up in his sheets. “Help me,” he said, his voice hoarse from screaming, and he struggled again, struggled so hard that it was almost as if he was drowning on dry land.

  Mila stepped closer. She could reach out and touch him now, if she wanted to, but the truth was, she didn’t want to, and what was more, she didn’t know if she should. She racked her brain, trying to remember if they’d ever covered anything like this in her home health aide class, but she came up empty. Just then, though, Reid made a screaming noise again, and the sheer desperation, and sheer helplessness of it spurred her into action.

  “Reid,” she said softly, and she put a hand on one of his shoulders. “Reid,” she said, louder this time. “Reid, wake up. Please. I want to help you.” If I can help you. But he slept on, in his strange, combative sleep.

  She gripped his shoulder harder—it was encased in an undershirt that was soaked with sweat—and shook him, gently, at first, and then harder. “Reid! Wake up!”