McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “We’ve gone four-point-five miles,” Jennifer said.

  “I think we missed the Davis Creek turnoff,” Maureen said. “It was supposed to be four miles after the general store.”

  “We didn’t miss the turnoff,” Jennifer said. “There hasn’t been a turnoff. There hasn’t even been a house.”

  Maureen shrugged. Clearly she thought Jennifer had missed the turnoff.

  Jennifer white-knuckled the steering wheel and seethed. This whole trip was idiotic—three sort-of sisters spending a “relaxing” weekend before the fire, pretending to be excited about Helen’s upcoming wedding to Maureen’s ex-boyfriend.

  Ever since Helen asked the two of them to be her only bridesmaids, Maureen had decided that Helen was actually not so bad when, in Jennifer’s opinion, Helen was a manipulative and fake-cheerful pain in the ass. Jennifer and Maureen first met Helen in the lawyer’s waiting room before the reading of their father’s will, eight days after their father had drowned while fly-fishing on the Penatoqua River. A freak accident, that had yet to sink in—as had the fact that their father had a family before their family, and now they had a half sister named Helen who wore a straw hat with a daisy on it and was, as Jennifer later put it, effervescently flipping through a beauty magazine in the antechambers of Murray, Plumb and Murray. Helen the effervescent mourner, who left that afternoon quite a bit richer than either Maureen or Jennifer, had effervescently become their best friend in the past five years, getting drunk on blackberry schnapps and repetitively confiding in them how she’d also lost her mother when she was seven (she died in a fire), subjecting them to dull stories of the “dear, dear woman”—Aunt Margaret, actually her mother’s best friend—who had raised her in the suburbs of Louisville. But Aunt Margaret lived far away, and her friends from UCLA were well-meaning flakes. That explained why she was so immediately fond of her half sisters, with whom she shared nothing in common save a dead father. Dependable, she called them. Stalwart , which Jennifer took to mean she thought they were fat. My real family . The best thing Jennifer could say about Helen was that she was a passionate collector of dollhouses. This made Helen remarkably fun to mock, and mocking Helen helped Jennifer and Maureen continue to feel like members of the same family, now that they didn’t have parents to bind them together with commonly shared annoyances.

  Recently, however, this dynamic had changed. Jennifer would start to complain about Helen’s wedding invitation (hand-painted on an antique lace handkerchief) or her insistence that the father in her Victorian dollhouse “looks just like our dad!” and Maureen, typically an eager Helen-basher, would vacantly demur, She’s actually not so bad.

  This did not prevent Jennifer from trying to enlist Maureen’s dormant mean side.

  “Helen’s directions suck,” she said.

  “There’s a blizzard,” Maureen pointed out.

  “There’s a blizzard, and Helen’s directions suck,” Jennifer said.

  Maureen didn’t respond.

  Finally, a turnoff. Unmarked, as best Jennifer could tell.

  “Take this,” Maureen said.

  Jennifer didn’t ask why. Jennifer took the turnoff. She was happy to make it Maureen’s fault if it turned out to be a stupid decision.

  “What next?” she asked.

  “Keep an eye out for the mailbox that looks like a mini log cabin.”

  “How cute,” Jennifer said. She started to say something about Scott’s parents’ terrible taste—their home in suburban Seattle featured metallic wallpaper in the bathrooms—but stopped herself. Scott-bashing was also off-limits these days. Did it matter that he and Maureen had scarcely split before he fell in love with Helen? Hardly. Did it matter that he approached both Jennifer and Maureen with a glassine smile so bogus and vacant that it made them speculate he’d been turned into a pod person? Apparently not.

  Maureen, in Jennifer’s opinion, was far too forgiving. It verged on unethical. It meant she was capable of betrayal, in a purely passive sense, simply because she was too understanding to get appropriately angry with people who deserved it.

  If the main road was treacherous, this road was doubly so. From the dull, crunching sounds the chains made, they weren’t on a paved road. They were on dirt.

  “Do Helen’s directions say anything about a dirt road?” Jennifer asked.

  Maureen shook her head.

  There was a new sound, too. A high-pitched grinding that wasn’t coming from the tires.

  “I think we should turn around,” Jennifer said. “This is a logging road or something.”

  She looked at Maureen, peering tensely through the windshield at the snow. It was starting to get dark; the snow was a gray color, not even pretty and new-seeming as it fell.

  The road was growing more and more narrow and soon turning around would be impossible, unless they found a driveway, which seemed unlikely. Where the fuck were they? They should return to the general store and ask directions. Never mind that the parking lot was full of trucks with gun racks and whale-sized plow attachments (the interior metal scoops strangely gilled, they looked like beached Pleistocene fossils to Jennifer, abandoned at this high altitude by the receding ocean some trillion-odd years ago), and that she and Maureen had as good a chance of getting gang-raped in the restroom as receiving directional assistance of any sort. It was all Helen’s fault, and she would make sure that Helen knew it. It almost made her want to get raped, so that she had more reason to be mad at Helen.

  It was this attitude—cavalier, pissed off, vaguely self-destructive—that made her a bit uncareful. Normally, she was skepticism personified—her skepticism intensified by a wild imagination that could seek out the dark possibilities in even the most banal situation. Normally, she knew better than to drive onto the presumed shoulder of a road that was obscured beneath a layer of snow and could have been anything—could have been air.

  Jennifer swung the car perpendicular to the road. The chains restricted her turning radius, and she had to back up, then forward, then back, then forward. Each time she put the car into gear she heard the whining sound, the hysterical pitch of the wind that a person might mistake for human screams, if a person were so inclined. Jennifer was not so inclined at this moment. She jolted the transmission into drive a final time, nudging the right wheels onto the shoulder that wasn’t a shoulder, which was in fact, she was soon to learn, a deep, if narrow, ditch. She felt the wheels start to slide, and she corrected, swinging the wheel hard to the left. The chains clawed at the slope and the car hung there for two or three seconds as the wheels spun, long enough for her to catch Maureen’s expression, which struck her as strangely, passively sad, given the circumstances. Or disappointed, but really it was a look of sadness, as if Jennifer had, one final foolish time, fallen prey to her own infrequent impetuosity, and screwed them both for good.

  The sound of the chains breaking off the right front tire was unmistakable, a muffled, metal-bone twang. The tire slipped, and the car dropped thuggishly onto its own chassis; Jennifer felt her spine compress.

  She and Maureen sat without speaking and stared through the windshield at the darkening woods, now tilted at a thirty-degree angle.

  Jennifer’s first impulse, a defensive one, was to blame Maureen. But Maureen didn’t seem to fault Jennifer for their current predicament; she seemed weirdly detached, or at peace with their newly befucked circumstances.

  Maureen smiled. “I guess we’re walking,” she said.

  Where was the question. They were at least five miles from the gang-bang store. They’d passed no houses. Where was on the tip of Jennifer’s tongue, still unspoken, when, in the rearview mirror, a light flashed. Jennifer turned to see where the light was coming from, but she couldn’t see it. There was nothing in the woods but blackness and snow. She turned back to the rearview mirror. She saw it again. The light, unmistakable.

  “Look,” Maureen said, pointing at the mirror.

  The light disappeared again but they walked uproad anyway, assuming they wo
uld find a driveway, and hopefully a house. After a half hour of trudging through the six inches of snow (which quickly became eight inches, nine inches, ten) Jennifer wanted to turn back. In the car there was wine, and corn chips and limited heat. They had a half tank of gas, which would probably last them a few hours. They had lots of clothes plus both their bridesmaid dresses, each zipped in its own individual thick plastic bag that might even work as a tent or windbreaker. Helen had wanted them to bring the bridesmaid dresses to the Cascades because, she’d said coyly, I have a fun idea. The bridesmaid dresses were white, which Jennifer thought peculiar, but Helen assured her it was very au courant in the hipper bridal circles.

  But they should return to the car. They wouldn’t freeze. Probably, at least, they wouldn’t freeze. And they wouldn’t have to spend the night with some isolation-loony local, who might or might not decide to kill his family and whomever else was available for killing that night.

  Jennifer was about to suggest that they return to the car, when Maureen pointed to the left and quickened her pace.

  Jennifer squinted. She couldn’t see anything but Maureen, hopping up and down beside something.

  It was a waist-high pole. Atop it—a tiny log cabin.

  “We found it!” Maureen said.

  Maureen practically ran up the driveway, energized by their incredible luck. Jennifer tromped behind her. She did not feel lucky or saved; she felt strangely endangered by their accidental discovery. She had never been a lucky person, for one. And she mistrusted easy solutions to problems. This miraculously easy solution seemed worthy of scrutiny. But her sense of unease was quashed by a new wave of irritation toward Helen, inspired by the twee, snow-smothered log cabin. Though most of Helen’s collection was in storage, she kept a five-story Victorian dollhouse (mauve clapboards, plum gingerbread trim, truly hideous, in Jennifer’s opinion) on the dining room table in her small Seattle apartment, the back glassed-off, the dolls within engaged for cryogenic eternity in moronic dollhouse tasks: Sweeping. Sleeping. Staring at a fake bowl of soup. Jennifer fantasized about removing the glass backs and putting the mother naked on the toilet, forcing the father into a missionary sex position with the daughter on the dining room table. Helen would catch Jennifer staring at the dollhouses malevolently, and she would pinch her arm and say to her, You’re so adorable! I just want to squash you up and put you in one of my dollhouses!

  By the time Jennifer reached the top of the driveway, Maureen was already knocking on the door of an old log cabin. Old. No way was this Scott’s family’s new ski house. This made her feel both better and worse. It was a coincidence about the mini log cabin, a bizarre coincidence, nothing more.

  “This isn’t Scott’s place,” Jennifer said.

  She saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. What the fuck? She looked. Nothing. But in her peripheral vision she saw a woman in a white dress, running. Again she turned her head. Again, nothing, just gusts of snow threading between the birches.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  Jennifer scrutinized Maureen.

  “Nothing,” she said finally. “This house isn’t Scott’s house. It’s old.”

  “So? Scott’s place is old,” Maureen said.

  “It’s not old. It’s new.”

  “It’s new to them.”

  “If this is Scott’s place, where’s Helen’s car?”

  There were no cars in the driveway. Not Helen’s or anyone’s.

  “She’s probably out looking for us,” Maureen said.

  Jennifer was too tired to point out the obvious—there were no tire tracks on the driveway, no tire tracks on the road. There was no mattress-sized indentation in the snow where the car might have been parked.

  She was about to suggest they go back to the car—she was suddenly overtaken with a trembly, manic twang that might have been nothing more ominous than the innocent beginnings of hypothermia—when the door to the cabin opened. An older woman, hunched and small and harmless-seeming, at least from a distance. She pulled Maureen inside by the wrist, as if she already knew her.

  Jennifer stood in the snow, shivering. Then her heart jumped. In her peripheral vision she saw the woman in white dash into the woods, but when she turned her head, again, the woman had disappeared. Though she felt wrong in the bones, and drained, and paranoid to the point of nausea, she had no choice but to follow her sister inside.

  The house’s interior smelled of camphor and stale dresser sachets and wool. A few oil lamps and a pair of ugly purple candles threw their paltry light over the shapeless, afghan-strewn furniture, the chaotic, knickknacky shelves. It was the sort of interior that usually featured many, many cats, cats like throw pillows on the couch, cats like andirons in the fireplace, cats like cookie jars on the counters. There were no cats, and this bothered Jennifer, who wanted something predictable to latch onto at this moment, a way to make generic sense of this woman—“Meg”—and who the hell she was, aside from a suspiciously sweet ex-hippie and possible serial killer. Jennifer guessed from her slightly hobbled gait and her tree root hands she was about seventy, though her face—round and freakishly lineless—introduced a level of doubt to her estimations. She seemed pleasant enough, if a bit unskilled socially. She smiled a lot in lieu of talking; she didn’t nod, but her look implied that she was nodding constantly as if to say yes or of course, I already knew that.

  Meg made tea and served it to them in ancient cups with tobaccoed fissures traversing the insides. Maureen explained their situation: the directions, the car, the ditch.

  “Is this Davis Creek Road?” Jennifer asked.

  Meg smiled. “Pardon?”

  “Davis Creek Road. Is this it?”

  Meg fiddled with her white hair, catching a lock by her chin between two fingers and sweeping them upward, encouraging the ends to curl. This was a familiar and intensely grating gesture to Jennifer; Helen, who’d recently had her hair bobbed, started doing it with an obsessiveness Jennifer couldn’t help but point out to her. Helen had stopped for five minutes, before absently resuming.

  “I don’t know of a Davis Creek Road,” Meg said.

  “Have you lived here long?” Jennifer asked, perhaps more sharply than she intended. Maureen tossed her a rein it in look.

  “About twenty-five years,” Meg said.

  “You said it’s a new house, right, Jennifer?” Maureen interjected. “Maybe it’s a new road, too.”

  “No new houses around here,” Meg said. “I’d know about a new house.”

  “Well,” Jennifer said, “Helen gave us shitty directions. We’re probably not even in the right town.”

  Meg smiled. Maureen smiled. They sat in silence and listened to the hard snow pelting like rice against the windows. Meg kept smiling long past the reasonable fade point for polite smiles and Jennifer began to wonder if she’d been lobotomized thirty years ago, then dumped on the mountain by some relative to live out her years in emptily grinning solitude, conversing with finches and beavers.

  “Do you have a phone?” Jennifer asked. Suddenly, she wanted out of here. She’d prefer even Helen’s company to this woman’s bland eeriness. Jennifer asked Maureen for the directions to Scott’s house.

  “There’s no phone number on the directions,” Maureen said.

  Jennifer rolled her eyes. Typical Helen. “Do you have a phone book?”

  Meg said yes, she had a phone book, but she doubted that a new house would be listed. She told Jennifer to call Information, and pointed her toward a bedroom. The phone was on the nightstand between two twin beds, each with a white coverlet sewn with tiny white pompons. Jennifer heard something rustle under the bed—a cat!—and she made kissing noises at the coverlet hem as she waited on the line for the directory assistance operator. No cat appeared, so she reached under the bed to feel for it. Instead she found a flat, padded book. She slid it from under the coverlet. A photo album, or a scrapbook, an old one, the leather cracked, the gold-leaf border flaked away.

&
nbsp; The phone rang and rang. She hung up and dialed again. Absently, she flipped through the leather album. It didn’t seem like snooping; it felt like a way to legitimately pass time while waiting for the operator. She opened to a page of newspaper clippings from February 1936. In one clipping: a photo of a bride with a bobbed haircut, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Helen, if Helen were a brunette. Helen Helen Helen. She felt polluted by her. Jennifer clapped the book shut and slid it hastily under the bed. Ever since that day in the lawyer’s waiting room, Helen had been insinuating herself into Jennifer’s life with increasing coziness, until Jennifer couldn’t go two minutes without hearing Helen’s name. She had become friends with Jennifer’s friends, she had lassoed Scott, and now she’d won Maureen’s affections. Why couldn’t people see her for the inexpert manipulator she was? How could all these people allow themselves to be seduced by her? The question was: What did Helen want? Jennifer didn’t know the answer to this question, and this unnerved her more than knowing might.

  The operator came on the line.

  When she returned to the living room, Maureen and Meg were still sitting on the couch.

  “There’s no listing,” Jennifer reported. “In fact, there’s no Davis Creek Road.”

  Maureen appeared puzzled, but not puzzled enough. Jennifer was moving past puzzled to completely pissed off and vaguely scared. It occurred to her that Helen had sent them on a wild goose chase to the Cascades. It made sense—much more sense than her asking Maureen and Jennifer to be her only bridesmaids, especially when she supposedly had such a devoted cadre of cap-toothed (if flaky) sorority confidantes to fill the slots. She’d always secretly suspected that Helen hated them as much as they hated her—and who could blame her? She and Maureen had been their father’s daughters, while Helen spent her childhood as an abandoned, dirty mystery he’d kept hidden from everyone but his lawyer. Her niceness was a ruse. It had always been a ruse, and this weekend she’d planned to expose it as a ruse—just before she married Maureen’s ex-boyfriend at a spectacularly expensive wedding (where all of Jennifer’s and Maureen’s friends would be in attendance) paid for with money that might have been theirs, if only she hadn’t existed.