The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Shane pedaled hard. He pumped until his thighs began to sing with the exertion, and then he stood on the pedals, coasting and letting the hot air stream through his hair. Like the trail, his thoughts meandered. As he rode, the events of the past year unwound in his head like the carcass of a dead snake, one that had bitten, but could bite no more. Shane let it. It seemed safe to look at when he was riding, when his body was occupied and his brain was free to relax, to begin the long, possibly permanent work of resolution.

  The first part was hard but relatively simple. It had begun with the lay-off. It would have been easier if all the staff artists had gotten the axe, but they hadn’t. Tristan and Crane had let Shane and Rafael go, but they had kept Stuart and Monica. Shane had understood. At least, that’s what he’d told Harvey Crane when he’d called Shane into his office. Tough times called for hard choices. He’d be fine. He’d always done well as a freelancer (not as a starving artist, of course, but as a freelancer; Shane just wasn’t that kind of artist) and it would probably be nice to explore some new mediums and themes.

  This had been bullshit, of course, from start to finish. Shane wasn’t at all looking forward to going freelance again. It had been almost eight years since he had done contract work. All of his old industry contacts were surely by now either stale or nonexistent. Nor was Shane particularly interested in exploring any new mediums. It had just popped out of his mouth, sounding like an artsy thing to say, but Shane was an oil painter, pure and simple. He could draw, of course, and always sketched his paintings first, but when it came time to make the final product, when it came time to put in his shift, it was oils and sable hair brushes, period. Harvey Crane had nodded, his lips pressed together, and told Shane to let him know if he needed anything, anything at all: contacts, references, anything. Shane had assured him he would, but he hadn’t. He’d not spoken to Harvey Crane at all since his last day. By the time he’d gotten home that afternoon, contacts and references had been the last thing on his mind.

  Stephanie wanted a divorce. At first, wildly, Shane thought she had announced this because he’d lost his job. That certainly didn’t seem like something she would do. After all, she had married him back before he had landed his job at T and C, when he was still eking out a living on Hallmark greeting card illustrations and the occasional magazine cover. Then, slowly and with a sort of dazed wonder, Shane realized she’d been gearing up for this for some time. Some cosmic bad omen had simply arranged for it all to happen on the same day. It was like he’d won a sort of bad luck Powerball jackpot. “I’m sorry, Shane,” she’d said, not meeting his eyes as they stood in the kitchen of their apartment, standing with the butcher block between them, like a stubby referee. “It’s rotten timing, I know. Obviously I didn’t plan it this way. But I can’t pretend anymore. This has been coming for a long time now. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  When Harvey Crane had called Shane into his office, Shane had been disappointed, but not particularly surprised. In this economy, everyone was watching their backs, counting their eggs, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for Stephanie to leave him? That had come entirely out of the blue, like an asteroid in a disaster movie. He had been knocked completely speechless. When he could finally form words, he had simply asked her why. What had brought it on? His greatest fear was that she had been having an affair. He’d never even considered the idea before that day, but now, suddenly, the possibility of it loomed over his world, darkening everything in its awful shadow. It hadn’t been an affair, though.

  “Not yet,” Stephanie had said, enigmatically. She claimed that he had been growing less and less available to her for years. He’d become too engrossed in his work, too disinterested in her and her world. It had happened so slowly, so gradually, that it had been almost impossible to notice, “like the frog in the pot”, she’d explained. But she was no frog, and she had noticed. At first, she explained, she had felt hurt, but then, later (and far worse) she’d just gotten bored; bored with him, bored with their marriage, and bored with life. At the same time that Shane had come to believe that he had finally settled down into the kind of life he’d always expected, Stephanie had begun to feel disillusioned and restless, depressed and alone.

  And was it true? At first, Shane suspected that it probably was. Maybe he had gotten a little complacent. Maybe he had stopped pursuing her. But she’d never said anything, not until now. He loved her, and even if their life wasn’t exactly a storybook romance, it was pretty good, wasn’t it? And damn it, he was willing to work at it, if it would help. He’d asked her if it was too late to make a change, and even as he’d said it, he’d hated the way he sounded, like he was the bad guy, begging for a second chance. He had just been fired that day, and now here she was, pouring insult onto injury, and adding a good bit more injury as well. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be telling him it was going to be all right, that they would make it through, even if it was a little rough for a while, but that she’d stick by him no matter what. She certainly wasn’t supposed to be standing there on the other side of the butcher block, her eyes dry and avoiding his face, with her suitcase half-packed on the bed upstairs. It had to be some kind of dreadfully realistic nightmare. He’d wake up soon enough and find himself in his bed, slick with sweat, heavy with relief, and roll over and put his arm around Steph as she slept on obliviously next to him, still there, still his.

  But he didn’t wake up, because it wasn’t a dream. By that night, she was gone. Shane had lain awake on his side of the bed for hours, feeling the yawning emptiness next to him, her pillow untouched, her alarm clock not set. She wouldn’t be getting up early to put on her sports bra and go to Pilates class. She’d not roll over when the alarm clock went off, wearing her ADDICTED TO ENDORPHINS! tee shirt, and sleepily whisper, “What do you say, Shaney, should I get my work-out here this morning instead?” Apparently, those days were over. When she’d been standing across from Shane in the kitchen with the butcher block between them, he had been completely unable to believe it was actually happening, that she was really and truly leaving him. But that night, lying alone in their bed and staring up at the ceiling, he’d found it all too believable. She was gone. Maybe she’d come back, but then again, maybe not. It was suddenly a real possibility, even a likelihood, that his marriage was truly over. The realization of it had hung over him like an anvil, threatening to fall on him at any moment, threatening to crush him.

  It was true that she wasn’t having an affair, but it wasn’t true that there wasn’t someone else. As the weeks drug on, Shane had learned about the other man, a guy named Todd. He was “a friend”, someone Stephanie had met at the YMCA.

  At first, they had merely chatted in the weight room, between the machines. Eventually, it had led to sharing coffee at the corner café down from the Y. He’d just been a listening ear, and Stephanie insisted that that’s all he still was. Nothing had “happened” between them, but he cared for her, and she cared for him. And the horrible thing was that Shane knew it was true. Stephanie might be a lot of things, but she was not a liar, and she was as straight as an arrow. She’d not disrespect Shane with a betrayal. And that somehow made it worse. He wanted to believe that he was the wronged husband, deserving of the respect of her devotion and commitment, worthy of the work of making their marriage work. But what he felt like was a child getting in the way of Mommy’s love life. Her very propriety had reduced him to a mere nuisance. He almost wished she’d just screwed the detestable Todd, realized it was a terrible mistake, and then discreetly forgotten the whole thing. Of course, that might have been worse after all—maybe the human mind just liked to weigh the relative horrors of every possible betrayal—but it didn’t make Shane feel any better either way. Sometimes he was angry, other times he was devastated, but it never mattered. Once Stephanie had made up her mind, only Stephanie could change it again.

  The divorce had become final in early June. Todd had been long gone by then, although Shane never heard the fu
ll story of what had happened. Part of him suspected that Stephanie had gotten tired of him, too, that Todd had merely been a convenient tool, a shoe horn to smooth her transition out of their marriage. Another part of him—the mean-spirited, hurt part—hoped that Todd had gotten bored with Stephanie and had broken things off with her. Maybe she’d learn what it felt like.

  In the meantime, they had split up the household. She’d kept the apartment, and Shane had gotten the vacation cottage in Missouri. This had surprised Shane, since buying the cottage had been Steph’s idea in the first place. She’d grown up in St. Louis, and had always loved the area. When she’d first suggested a small vacation cabin there, she had been so excited and eager about the idea that Shane had been completely unable to turn her down. They had found the cottage during a house-hunting vacation in the Ozarks. It had been rather outside of their budget, but not so much that they couldn’t swing it if they’d really wanted to. And they’d decided they did want to. They signed on the property that very week. Their first night in the cottage had been the last night of that vacation, and they’d spent it in sleeping bags, zipped together and laid out on the bare floor in front of the fireplace. The next morning they’d eaten granola out of a plastic baggy on the flagstone patio overlooking the river, feeling the sun shine down, warming them, and Shane decided it had been a good purchase. The cottage was small and a little musty, but it would clean up well, and it was certainly idyllic. They had both come to love it.

  When Stephanie suggested that Shane take the cottage, he’d been surprised, but not shocked. Apparently, she was making a break from everything, not just him. This made him feel a very tiny bit better. He decided he’d move into the cottage, just for a while, just until he figured out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. It wasn’t meant to be permanent. But that was before his last phone call from Steph, the one that had changed everything, the one that had turned the world onto its head all over again. Shane had thought it was all over. The divorce hadn’t been nice—it had been extremely awful, in fact—but at least the book of their marriage had finally been closed. He could move on. That’s what he’d thought, until that one, final phone call. Now, of course, he’d never know.

  It occurred to him as he rode his bike through the flickering shadows, pedaling hard, as if to outrun something, that maybe life just doesn’t work that way. Maybe the idea of a neat ending is just a myth. Maybe in real life no story is ever really over, everything is unfinished business, and the best you can hope for is just to accept that. It may be frustrating, but fighting it just makes you crazy. Shane knew all about that. Fighting life’s unfinished business was a no-win game, no matter how you looked at it. Some things you just had to give up on, even if giving up was the last thing you wanted to do; even if giving up was the absolute hardest thing of all.

  He was thinking about these things when he rounded the long curve that bordered the old manor house. As the trees cleared, he glanced aside, looking out across the big weedy yard that fronted the property, and was so surprised by what he saw that he instantly squeezed the brake levers and leaned on the handlebars. The bike scrunched to a halt where the trail intersected the house’s ancient driveway, and Shane put down a foot to steady himself. The driveway was made of brick, embedded into the yard and framed with lengths of chipped granite. Normally, the bulk of the house overshadowed the circle drive, especially as the afternoon sun lowered, but now the yard was awash with sunlight, glinting copper on the bricks and sparkling on the cab of the big yellow bulldozer parked on the lawn. The bulldozer explained everything, really. Its tracks were stitched all over the yard, dark and muddy. There was a crane as well, with a wrecking ball hanging from it like a giant iron teardrop. It was parked in back, in the shadow of the tree line with the river sparkling gaily behind it. Shane shouldn’t have been able to see it; the house should’ve been in the way, but of course that wasn’t an issue anymore.

  The manor house was gone, reduced to a massive pile of rubble that choked the hole that had once been the cellar.

  During his previous vacations in the cottage, Shane had ridden past the manor house dozens of times but had never really paid any attention to it. It had been a singularly ugly and dilapidated building, despite how it might once have looked. Slip-shod renovations had hacked the place apart over the years, most recently converting into a duplex apartment, occupied on one side by a permanent resident and on the other by a series of itinerant fisherman and boaters who usually left their trucks and trailers parked on the grass by the front steps. By comparison, Shane’s cottage seemed perfectly regal and pristine, and he was glad that the properties had long since been split up. Now that the house had finally been demolished, however, he found himself strangely curious; even, somehow, a little sympathetic. He climbed off his bike, lowered the kickstand, and began to walk up the uneven driveway, examining the wreckage.

  It had probably been the most recent flood that had tipped the balance. Maybe the ground had shifted over the decades, or maybe the water had simply risen higher than usual. Maybe it was just that the house had finally outlived the cost of its upkeep. Probably it was all of those things, but the inevitable conclusion was that this last flood had sealed the house’s fate. Time and entropy, the hungry step-sisters of Mother Nature, had finally completed their work, transforming the house from what was once probably a glorious architectural jewel into the inevitable pile of rotting wood and broken glass.

  As Shane got closer he saw that dust still hung in the air around the wreckage. The air smelled like mold and plaster. The foundation of the entryway was still there, with three stone steps leading up to a broad portico, now littered with bits of wooden siding and shingles. The torso of a not-quite-life-sized marble statue lay on what had once been the doorstep, looking like a fairy-tale crime scene. The front door was half buried in the rubble, split neatly in two right down the middle.

  Shane looked out over the wreckage. The footprint of the cellar seemed remarkably small. Of course, the house itself had been larger than the cellar, having been added onto over the decades, but the original house must have been rather cozy, even with its high ceilings and tall, imposing windows. Shane liked classic architecture, with its painstaking craftsmanship and minute details, and he could imagine the house as it might have originally looked, tall and sprightly, its windows thrown open to admit the river breeze, its solid doors creaking on their hinges like contented sighs, huge oriental rugs on gleaming hardwood floors, the clank of pots in the kitchen, the snip of shears in the rose garden.

  He could barely remember what the house had looked like when it still stood, in its final configuration, but the image of it in his mind, as it might have looked on the summer it was first built, was strangely, almost eerily perfect. In it, he saw pillars on the portico, two on each side, supporting a high colonial porch roof. He could almost feel them, the cool weight of their shadow. Was it possible he was right? He didn’t remember noticing any pillars or high, overhanging porches on the manor house during his summer bike rides. Besides, even if such things had existed in the past, surely they had long since been stripped away, probably resold to some architectural salvage yard somewhere. Shane glanced down, at the front right corner of the portico floor, and then walked over to it, kicking aside a few chunks of rotted wood. Sure enough, there were two large circular scars on the old stone, faded but clearly visible in the bright sunlight. Obviously, he had seen these marks as he’d approached, at least on a subliminal level, otherwise how could he have known that the original house had had pillars framing the portico? Still, the picture in his head was strangely vivid, almost persistent. It nagged at his thoughts, like an itch in the center of his brain, an itch he couldn’t quite reach.

  Or could he?

  An idea struck him, and as soon as he thought it, he knew he had to try it. He walked quickly over to the opposite side of the portico, where the debris lay in a thick pile. There, sticking out of the top of the pile was the perfect thing: a length of wo
od, broken into a sharp point. Shane wrapped his hand around it, careful to avoid splinters (an artist’s hands, after all, were his life) and pulled tentatively. The stick came free easily, about two feet long and heavy, like some kind of hardwood. With the stick in hand, Shane backed carefully down the portico steps, looking up at where the house used to be, letting the mental picture of it solidify, placing it in space. It was so clear he could almost see it. In his mind, the pillars were white, somehow both smooth and rough, like a stone from the riverbed. They tapered inwards as they rose, supporting the squat triangle of the porch roof, and there was a decorative window in the center of that triangle. It was round and intricately patterned, made of leaded glass and wrought iron.

  Shane stopped in the center of the circle formed by the driveway. The ground here was packed dirt, with very little grass, and he remembered that this is where the renters had often parked their trucks and boat trailers. It was perfect. He hunkered down on one knee, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again, staring down at the blank ground before him. Using the sharp stick as a stylus, he began to sketch rough lines on the dirt. It was quick work, and utterly temporary, but as he scratched the lines, forming simple shapes, he could feel the sublime sigh of scratching that weird mental itch. The picture in his head had wanted out, that was all. In all of his years as an artist, he’d not felt anything quite like it, or at least not for a very, very long time. Not since he’d been a kid. He frowned studiously down at the lines as he made them, and then adjusted his grip, choking up on the stick to get more leverage with it. Weightier lines now, framing the initial sketch; eight deep vertical scratches to define the pillars, three more for the overhanging porch roof. Finally, leaning close to the dirt and using both hands on the stick now, steadying it, he drew a rough circle right in the center of the triangular porch shape: the leaded glass window.