by Jac Jemc
That the girl took care of her brother, and the opposite of that, too.
That they were lovers, not siblings. That they were both at the same time.
“Rolf, then?” I ask. “Was the next-door neighbor, Rolf, involved? He’s the brother?”
A woman arrives in a dress too fancy for the bar. Her hair looks as if it would crunch if I touched it. I can’t hold her face in my mind. I get the sense I might not recognize her if I saw her again. She drinks her whiskey straight, sipping it rhythmically, like a habit. She is older than me. She possesses the sultry gravity of having arrived in her forties. I remind myself this is all business. Still I slip into the motions of a bar flirt.
“My grandmother talked about the Kinslers,” she says. “They went to the same church. Lost one son when he fell out of a tree. Everyone was happy when they had the daughter, but something was off about her. It’s a small town—lots of gossip and stories rumbling about. You know, all friendly ‘How do you dos’ on Sundays, but the rest of the week, whispers tearing each other down.”
“What were they whispering about, though?” I force myself into silence by shoving pretzels in my mouth.
“She had a lot of nervous energy, I guess. Tapped out rhythms, scribbled on any surface she could reach. People wondered why the parents didn’t stop her. The mother seemed embarrassed, like nothing could be done, but the father and brother acted like nothing was wrong.”
The radius of reason narrows around this woman and me. She is setting out some ground rules I can work with. Her glass is empty. When she goes for her purse, I offer to buy the next round. “Was there something wrong with the girl?”
“That’s hard to tell—so much talk was bobbing about and modern medicine wasn’t what it is today. I’m sure there was something you could slap a diagnosis on. Hyperactivity, depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, multiple personalities, hysteria, a fugue, aphasia.”
My eyes pop at this woman’s easy list.
“In the end, I think they decided there was no use in naming her particular brand of dysfunction. My grandmother always used it as an example, especially when they sent me and my sister off to therapy: ‘Sometimes there’s no righting a wrong.’”
“But they lived in 891, right? Not 895?”
“That is beyond my knowledge,” she says. “I can show you where I live, though.”
I’m surprised at this suggestion even though, in a different set of circumstances, before I was married, I would have sensed a dynamic growing, too. I might have launched a similar cue. I decline her offer. She smiles wryly. “Such a shame. A new face in town, curious for answers that I might just have.”
I thank her for her time. I turn away. I don’t want to draw out our farewell any further. The bartender looks at me with pity. He tells me that my companion was making up stories to keep my attention. He points to her sidled up close to a gentleman in a suit near the door. I wonder if the bartender might be right.
The seats around me fill again. No one knows enough.
I make mistakes. I tell people about the sounds we hear. I mention the secret passages. I ask if they know anyone who’s had bruises like Julie’s. I tell them all the effects hoping they can offer a cause. I ask them if they know about the children in the trees. I meet skeptical glares. They think I’m making it all up. They see me unraveling in front of them.
The room starts to swirl. The bartender tells me that maybe I’ve had enough. He calls me a cab. I stand outside. I open the door of the first car that pulls up. A blankness takes over.
I wake up on a couch in Rolf’s house. I wonder how I got in. I remember only climbing into what I thought was a taxi. My clothes are covered in cat fur. I smell that rank odor. I hear no sounds. I see no lights when I peek up the stairs. I want to flee. Instead, I wait for a while. I tell myself that the shame of asking Rolf how this happened will be mitigated by having an answer. I begin to worry. If Rolf finds me downstairs, he might attack me or call the police. I edge around the corners of the rooms. The kitchen counter is covered in dark, sticky dust. Dirty dishes pile high blackened by smears of who knows what. I retch at the sour smell. I step out the back door, to try to get away from it. There is no reentering. Rolf surely heard the door slam. He can certainly hear me coughing now. I step down off his back stair. I cross his yard into the woods instead of going home. I hope this decision will save me some guilt. If Rolf sees someone heading into the forest, maybe he won’t realize it was me who had let myself in.
I say, “The woods are closer now,” and things like that can be true and logical. Forests seed. They grow out. At the beach, the shore appears narrower, too. The trees have advanced in the sand. “The water sneaks up on us,” I say. But that’s just the tide.
42
I SLEEP THROUGH the afternoon, evening, night. In the morning, I hope James has returned to work, that he left at first light to get an early start, to make up for the time he’s missed, but rather than try to figure this out, I slip on shoes and carry myself outside, through the trees, stepping over two that have recently fallen and walk and walk and think about never going home. I hear birds or children calling above me and through the thick trunks, I see someone else within shouting distance. His hair looks like James’s but his gait shapes itself the wrong way, and so I stop myself from calling his name. I keep moving until I get to the beach and walk out toward that rocky breakwater. I climb quickly, stumbling as I go, making more work for myself, clutching, feeling how weak my hands are. I scramble over the stone and reach the cave, and as I’m turning to peer inside, Rolf’s face rounds the bend to meet mine, lit by a camping lantern in his hand, and his expression is one of surprise, focusing on me as if I might disappear, and I startle and greet him out of impulse, but when I don’t dissolve, his wrinkles knit into anger. I see his clothes are soiled and ragged, and he withdraws and his light flips off, but not before I can see that something is written along the back walls. “Turn it back on,” I say. I am shaking, unsure I want to step inside, but I do. Rolf moves back into the darkness and it seems clear he knows his way around here and I certainly do not, but I follow him and grab his shoulder, trying to turn him so I can grab hold of the lantern. I expect him to be weak, but he pushes me off and I fall back, skinning my palms, feeling the stone beneath my already tender tailbone. I stand again, still able to see him in the shadow, wondering why he doesn’t retreat farther, but I see a glint of light along the ground and realize there’s water at the back of the cave. I gather some force and throw a shoulder into his gut and grab the lantern when the blow loosens his grip. With a whimper, higher and weaker than I’d have expected, he crumples against the wall, where puddles dot dimples in the stone, and I feel a jab of contrition for having attacked an old man, but flip the switch and there on the wall are the drawings, like the checkout lady from town told me were hiding in the walls of our house, like James had dreamed: crude figures like the ones in our bedroom, scribbles layered over each other, at different angles like in the journal. “Who did this? Is it you?” I ask.
We are silent together for a long while, but I know what it is to wait when something is coming toward you slowly.
Finally Rolf makes a simple statement: “My sister.” I can barely see his eyes beneath the ridge of his brow.
I scan the light slowly past him and can see the writing extends even to the walls above the water in the back, at least as far as the beam stretches.
I step back to try to see something larger but the lamp doesn’t shine far. It shows me some of what I want to know, but leaves out more. The writing brings back the questions of why the journal was in our home, reminds me of the dishware returned to our table through a locked door, my sweater on Rolf’s couch.
“Do you come into our house? How do you get in?”
Rolf will not look at me, an irritating reversal of every day preceding this one.
Instead of a response, my ears fill with another sound, like voices in a cathedral, everything echoing, muffled and clear
at once. The walls sing in a round. The warm morning has smeared itself on me, has shivered through my jacket until my skin feels spat on under all my layers and the sound is unbearable, like the sound in the house, a rough drone’s strata smoothed and compressed like sedimentary rock, and I feel something move through me that amounts to mere nausea and I lean over to vomit at the place where the wall of the cave transforms into the floor, where vertical changes to horizontal, but the man doesn’t move toward me. He is uninterested in my weakness.
I feel a knocking despair and pull up my face to see more drips of moisture where the marks run. The smell in the cave loops on itself sharply: urine, moss, mildew.
I shut my eyes tight and reopen them, and the light shines more dimly. I get tired and kneel and try to think clearly, but it’s like trying to focus on something caught in your eye, too near the thing to see it. The whine is so loud, I can’t hear my own thoughts, and when I look around me, Rolf is gone. I wonder when he left, how long I’ve been here, and I look toward the back of the cave and wonder if he’s waded farther into the darkness, down into the water, if I should dive in and pull him up. I let myself wonder if this is a dream, like the one James had. I make my way out of the cave, into a pink morning light that feels mistaken, and when I emerge, the noise blurs, and the nausea is replaced with a sense of loss.
43
WHEN I REACH our backyard, I can see Julie’s car out front and know she hasn’t gone to work. I steel myself for the lecture about how worried she was when I didn’t come home last night. I hunt for the neighbor in the windows of his house.
At the back door, I see two of my shadow instead of one. I glance behind me to see if I’m being followed. I find no one. I look for something that might be reflecting the sunlight—a cloud or a window—darkening a duplicate of my silhouette on the side of the house. The sky is clear. The windows don’t angle themselves the right way. I take a few steps back to see where the shadow gives up. The shadow to my right seems to stutter for a moment. When both shadows fall off the wall, the first lands flat before me on the ground, alone. I notice my breath has formed itself higher in my chest. I let myself inside. In the kitchen, the second shadow returns. This I can make sense of, though. The overhead light is supplemented by the sun through the window. Two light sources allow for two forms on the wall.
I move myself to the bookshelves. I pull off the oversize art books and pile them on the dining room table. I feel the adrenaline relaying up my spine. I sit down to look.
44
ON MY WAY back from the cave, my ankles hinge to push off the unreliable carpet of rotten leaves and my stride flexes to step around rocks and branches.
The woods are quiet and empty. I feel jittery, like the sudden drop of a sugar crash, eager for somewhere soft to stash myself until the feeling passes.
Almost home. Almost home, I repeat to myself. Plucking open the back door feels like crossing a finish line, and I aim for the living room and find James on my way, spread out at the table, circling things in our art books with a red Sharpie. I don’t bother to ask what he’s up to and I don’t inquire as to why he’s not at work because it’s true that I am also not doing what I’m supposed to do. I sit and pull the couch pillows onto my lap, safe. It feels hard to get words out. “James, I went to the cave.” He looks up, the spell of the books broken. “It was like you said, the writing on the walls. Rolf was there until he wasn’t, and a sound, too.” James looks back down to his work, and I guess that’s it. I rest until I get up the energy to search for batteries for the flashlight and James’s camera and think about what those walls said, all language that had no apparent order, no logical sentences, no sequences to mine for meaning.
After I gather my supplies, I sit down beside James and look at what he’s doing, but none of the circles actually encompasses anything. I flip through the books he’s already set aside as finished, but make no sense of them. I turn to him and grab the hand with the marker. “James, you’re ruining them.”
He says nothing, pulls his hand away to lean his marker against the page, and finally I can see. It’s the shadows he’s circling.
45
“JAMES, THIS ISN’T helping. This isn’t all a trick of the light. I don’t think you’re going to figure it out by studying photographs.” Julie tucks my hair behind my ear and places a hand on my leg, watching me, and I feel her familiar tenderness and finally turn to her.
She tells me about the cave. Her voice is soft and matter-of-fact. I tell her about the haze of particulars I found on that barstool. Everything points to Rolf’s being connected to this house. Despite how far apart we are at the moment, Julie and I can feel that tiny overlap in our Venn diagram. That connection allows a little bit of the problem to disappear.
Julie idly massages my hand while she talks. She rubs tiny circles into the fleshy base of my palm and then squeezes each finger in three different spots, pulling gently on the end of each. She looks over my shoulder to remember and then into my eyes for confirmation. Julie brings up some specific drawing she saw in the cave. That image is nowhere to be found in my memory of my time there. She goes on. It sounds familiar now. I get overly sure. Julie tells me something she read on the wall. I feel convinced I remember that, too, but then uncertain. I worry I’m creating false memories. I consider whether I can call that experience. “This all sounds right, but now I’m questioning myself. I heard that if you remember a thing, you corrupt it. If you want to remember something closest to its truth, the trick is to remember it rarely. But, of course, if you don’t remember a thing often enough, you’re bound to forget it. There is no way for memory to be pure.” This is the closest I’ve felt to her in a long time. Everything is laid out between us. Julie is insistent on solving the mystery. I keep trying to talk myself out of believing there is a mystery at all.
Julie says, “I don’t know how you knew about the cave, but you were right.” She still can’t believe that I was really there. I wince. I grip her hand more tightly. I hold on. Julie tells me a game plan. We’ll return to the cave with brighter lights. I’ll take photos so we have something solid to reference.
I feel this threat to our credibility sharply behind my eyes. The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger. I fear what we could find there. I fear what we won’t.
What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what’s ahead?
46
I WANT TO return to the cave immediately, but James sees the scrapes on my palms, the new bruises on my knees and forearms from my climb up the rocks, my struggle with Rolf, and insists we wait until I’ve healed.
I ask where James put the journal, but he says it’s disappeared. I tap around the passage that had opened in the bedroom to see if it will open again, if the book has been returned to where I found it, with no luck. I wonder if Rolf has come into our home again. I wonder if James is hiding the book from me, hoarding some knowledge he’s gathering from it or preventing me from feeding my obsession.
I watch the neighbor’s house, looking for him in the windows and not finding him, wondering if he’s still back somewhere in the cave. I try to convince James to return with me. I tell the office I need to work from home around some repairs. I’m supposed to be doing research for a new product anyway. I tell my boss the timing is perfect. I’ll be able to focus without interruption and come in later in the week with a preliminary project plan. I expect an angry email from Connie, but hear nothing.
On the third day, still with no sign of him, I ring Rolf’s doorbell. I want to ask him more about the cave and our house. I worry something might have happened, that I could have caused a panic in him, but there’s my imagination again, prying itself open, sketching itself out. I think about opening the door and letting myself in. I tell myself that just because I’ve already done something doesn’t make it okay to do it again.
I sit at the window, and James asks me what I’m doing and I say, “Waiting.”
“You know you’ve turned into him, right? Watching for him the way he looked for us? What if he’s in the house and not answering?”
“No light ever comes on.”
James says, “Maybe you’ve finally run him off.”
“That is really the last thing I want.” I mean it.
“I appreciate your attempts to solve this case, Nancy Drew, but maybe we should mind our own business.”
But I keep my eyes trained out the window.
47
I LOOK AT job openings. Every posting says “Experience required.” I fixate on that threshold. An hour, a day, a year?
Every day I get a call from the office asking where I am. On the fifth day, my boss apologizes for relaying the information via voice mail. I’ve been terminated. “Good riddance,” I sigh. I delete the message.
Julie doesn’t notice. In all of the distraction, she sees me leave the house every day and return home. She doesn’t question my destination. She doesn’t realize I’ve been going to the library. I tell myself I’m looking for work. Really, I spend more time hunting for clues to our puzzle. I hunt the microfiche for more information about Rolf’s family and the history of our house. Nothing is coming together, though. I scoot the computer screen right up to the edge of the desk to get a better look. I push my eyes as close as possible so I can see the grid of pixels. I can’t see the graininess I used to with older screens. I miss that shocking fluorescence that would appear if you got in tight enough.
I call Sam to ask him if he has any job leads. He whispers, “Jim, I don’t think you should be calling me here anymore. I can talk to you later from home. Deal?”
“Do you want to get a beer tonight?” I ask.
“I think it’s better if we don’t.” He hangs up. I can’t blame him.
I’d had no interest in walking into a boss’s office and quitting. I thought I would see how much they’d put up with before I was let go. I was taking chances and hoping for the worst. I was hoping the worst would hold out for as long as possible.