Christiana shook her head ruefully. “That doesn’t give her an excuse. What she did…it’s still an awful thing to do to somebody.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She changed her expression, lowered her voice a little. “You think there’s any chance you’d ever be able to work things out with her again?”
Shane laughed. It was a hard, humorless sound. “No, I’d say that’s pretty much out of the question.”
“Why?”
Shane looked at Christiana, tried to smile, and then let it fall away. He sighed instead. There was no pretty way to say it. “She’s dead.”
Christiana nodded soberly. “I wondered. You kept referring to her in the past tense. What happened?”
Shane shook his head minutely. He shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Christiana said suddenly. “Never mind. I’ve got no reason to ask. I’m too curious and too blunt, most of the time. It’s another thing that’s just bred in the grain.”
“It was a car accident,” Shane said, smiling a little. “She was hit by a drunk driver. And I don’t mind. It’s kind of refreshing.” He reached across the bar and touched her hand, covering it with his own. She looked up at him, studying his face.
“I’m seeing someone,” she said.
Shane blinked. “Hmm?”
She sighed quickly. “I’m seeing someone. It’s not Morrie, but it’s someone. We’ve been dating for a little over a year now. He’s a law student.”
Shane withdrew his hand slowly. “OK. I didn’t…”
“I know you didn’t,” she said, interrupting. “But I have a habit of… of leaving out certain important details. It’s also bred in the grain, right alongside being curious and blunt. I’m telling you now because if I don’t…” She lifted her shoulders and raised her hands, palms up. “I may not tell you at all. And I think that might be a mistake. A mean mistake, even if it’s unintentional. All right?”
Shane nodded, feeling suddenly very foolish. “Yeah. I get it.”
There was a long silence between them as they looked around the bar, watched the laughing, talking faces of those around them. It was a less comfortable silence this time. Finally, Christiana picked up her nearly empty wineglass and held it by the stem. She looked at Shane over it.
“Money’s not the only thing that gets traded on its potential, is it?” She said, smiling a small, crooked smile.
Shane tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.
“Here’s to life,” she said, nodding toward her glass. “Here’s to figuring out the difference between potential life and the real thing.”
Shane lifted his own glass and nodded agreement. “The best toast I’ve heard in years.”
Their glasses clinked and they drank. A little while later, Shane walked Christiana to the parking lot at the end of the block. He wanted to link arms with her, even if just as a sign of camaraderie, but he didn’t. They said goodnight at her car, a little awkwardly, and Shane turned toward his truck as she pulled out onto the busy street. He drove home thinking about her toast, thinking about the difference between potential life and the real thing. It was a lot to consider. It really had been one of the best toasts he’d ever heard.
Chapter Eight
Over the next week, Shane worked his normal shift from nine until two, plugging away at the Florida tourism paintings.
It started slow, but by the middle of the week, he had hit his old stride. The foreman in his mind called out the brush strokes like a quarterback calling out plays in a huddle. Shane’s hand obeyed diligently, and the paintings sprang quickly to life.
The corkboard under the Escher quote had been cleared of the reference material from the matte painting and refilled with printouts of surfers and scuba divers, water skiers and sunlit beaches.
By Thursday, Shane had nearly finished the first painting in the series, ending with a large representation of a woman in a white bikini leaning against a surfboard stuck upright in the sand. He’d printed the reference photo for this picture from an image he’d found on the Internet. In the reference photo, the woman was wearing jean shorts and a yellow tube top, and she was leaning against a Coke machine instead of a surfboard. She was laughing, holding a cigarette in her right hand.
Shane had found the image on a photo sharing website called Flickr, and even though all the minor details were wrong, the woman in the photo had the perfect pose and expression. For Shane, getting the poses right was the hardest part. Once he’d sketched the woman’s essential shape, the act of redressing her in a bikini—as well as removing the cigarette and giving her a voluminous blond hair-do instead of the mousy brown locks in the photo—was easy work, nearly effortless.
It was fun painting the young woman in the photo, because painting was a strangely intimate thing. In his mind, as he painted her shape, he chatted her up, asking her where the photo had been taken, who she’d been with. The young woman modeled for him in his mind, and told him she’d been on a road trip with her girlfriends, skipping a Friday of classes at Georgia State University to drive down to the coast and blow off some steam.
She was dating this guy, a poly-sci major, who hadn’t approved of the road trip, had been jealous of her and her girlfriends. He’d called her on her cell phone to complain and ask why she wasn’t spending her time with him instead, and she’d told him to go have a good cry and get over it. This had offended him immensely, but had reduced the young women in the car to gales of caffeine-induced laughter so raucous that they’d had to pull the car over at a gas station to recover.
There, to commemorate the event, they had taken pictures of each other, posing and snapping them off with one of the other girls’ cell phone cameras. It had been a fun day, a day of irresponsible delights perfectly suited to the lifestyle of a young college girl on her way to a disappointingly conventional suburban future.
The timestamp in the bottom right of the printed photo said 05.07.03, and as the young woman in Shane’s mind modeled for him, he saw that those days of free-wheeling carelessness were now long over. In his mind she had married the poly-sci major (who hadn’t had a good cry since he’d been seven years old) and had born him two kids. In Shane’s mind, the woman never went on road trips anymore, never shirked a Friday’s responsibilities to blow off steam. She missed those days, missed them sorely, although she never admitted it to anyone.
She loved her kids desperately, loved her husband a little more prosaically, and spent her evenings scanning old pictures and posting them on Flickr and on her Facebook page. By doing that, she relived the old memories. She revisited the laughter. As she’d scanned the photo of herself leaning against the Coke machine, she’d smiled ruefully and thought, ‘go have a good cry’. Damn that was funny. We laughed so hard.
Shane finished painting the refurbished adaptation of the woman in the photo and said goodbye to the version of her in his head. She wasn’t real, of course. She was just a daydreaming concoction of his subconscious mind, bringing the woman in the photo to life for the time it took to transfer her onto the canvas. In his mind, her name was Renee, but the title of the image on Flickr had been “Lisa and me at Cape Canaveral”. Maybe Shane had changed the name on purpose, just to be safe. He’d felt a little strange while he’d painted her, even though he knew the version of her in his mind was entirely made up.
As he finished for the day, he realized what it was. The other painting, the one of the woman with the letter in her hands, standing in front of the blood-red fireplace, was on the smaller easel across the room, facing him. He’d had the weird sense that she’d looked up from the letter while he’d been painting the other woman; that she’d watched him, trying to decide if she should be jealous or not.
“She’s just a model,” he said, scrubbing his hands with an old handkerchief, cleaning up after his shift. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re still my main squeeze, M, whatever your full name is.”
He smiled to himself. Of course the painting hadn’t been looking at
him. That sense of being watched was common enough during his shift, especially lately.
And besides, he did know her full name, despite what he’d told Penn Oliver at the gallery showing. He simply wasn’t particularly comfortable with admitting it. Her name had been in his head ever since the morning he’d woken up with red paint drying on his fingers. It had come to him repeatedly during the previous evening, flitting in his thoughts like a bat at twilight, as he’d finished painting in the fine features of her nose and lips, adding the highlight of a tear in the corner of her left eye. Her name was Marlena.
“Marlena,” he said idly, approaching the painting and studying it. It was nearly finished, but not quite. Maybe he’d finish it later that night.
He had fallen into a routine with the muse, painting at night, when her influence was strongest. It also happened to be the time when the presence of the woman’s ghost was most apparent, when he saw her sometimes flitting through the library, attending to her own otherworldly agenda. Often, she’d look at him as she went, just a passing glance, her face calm, her eyes black and bottomless. Shane had almost gotten used to it.
Sometimes he’d close the sunroom doors while he was watching television in the evenings, not wishing to be surprised by her wafting, misty shape as he watched the Mets on satellite. Other times—most of the time—he left the doors open. In a bizarre but undeniable way, he rather liked sharing the place with a woman again, even if she was a little creepy and somber. Earl Kirchenbauer had been right: the cottage did need a woman’s touch. The ghost wasn’t much, but her presence was pervasive, especially at night. Morning might be the domain of the mysterious and mischievous Smithy, who still flushed the toilet sometimes and turned on and off the basement light, but the night belonged to Marlena. She left the basement lights alone. After all, she had the candle in the secret window.
Shane shook himself. In the painting, Marlena studied the letter, her face pale and oddly expressionless except for that subtle glimmer of a tear in her left eye. The painting was nearly done. When it was finished, he’d put it away. Hell, maybe he’d put it in the attic. She’d probably be happy there.
Not for the first time, Shane felt a secret relief that the Riverhouse painting was gone. Somehow, keeping both the Marlena painting and the Riverhouse painting in the cottage at the same time seemed like a bad idea. That’s why he’d decided to sell it, after all. It had been a good decision, too. Now that it was gone, he felt a little bit saner, a little more in control. He hadn’t painted anymore in his sleep, for one thing. And his shift had come back, along with the foreman in his mind. Everything was jake. Selling the painting had been a very smart move.
Even if he did sort of miss it.
Recovery, Dr. Taylor had said, is a slippery slope.
Shane remembered when he’d first heard the man say it. They’d been in his office just over the river in New Jersey, a month after Stephanie’s last phone call, and it had been raining outside.
“You don’t get over something like this,” Norm Taylor had said, taking off his glasses and putting them in his shirt pocket. He was skinny, and the glasses made a heavy lump on his shirt. Shane had stared at it, willing his eyes not to tear up for the umpteenth time.
Taylor had sighed and gone on. “You get over a cold. A shock like the one you’ve experienced is more like pneumonia. In today’s medical world, most people don’t die of pneumonia, but it isn’t unheard of. It can still be fatal. You don’t just ‘get over’ pneumonia. You recover from it. You endure, you take your meds, and you eventually survive it. And just like any other recovery, it’s often a slippery slope. Just when you think you’re finally past it, it’ll come back and hit you in the back of the head. Your experience is like that, Shane. Just like any recovery, it’ll take time. Don’t expect it to go away easily or quickly. Just when you think you’re over it, something will happen, and bam. You’ll be right back in the middle of it again.”
Shane had raised his eyes at that point, and they were indeed shiny with tears. He’d hated the tears, hated how easy they were in those days. “Sounds pretty damn bleak,” he’d croaked.
Norm Taylor had smiled. It was a sardonic smile, but sympathetic. “Welcome to the buffet of life,” he’d said quietly. “Sometimes the kitchen’s all out of Kobe steak. Sometimes all they have to offer up is ten courses of tough shit. What’re you going to do, Shane? You still have to eat, right? We all do. We have to eat whatever life dishes out.”
Shane hadn’t thought those were the kinds of things psychologists were supposed to say, but then again, Norm Taylor didn’t often seem like a typical psychologist.
The first time they’d met, they’d talked about the Mets for the entire hour. Shane had been reluctant to discuss the real reason he’d called Taylor’s office, even though he’d known he needed to. He’d sat ramrod straight on one end of the big couch, mentally convincing himself that he was actually fine, that he was entirely capable of managing things on his own, and knowing it was a lie. Dr. Taylor had begun their session by commenting about the previous night’s baseball game, and Shane had blinked. He hadn’t watched it, of course. He’d been at his wife’s funeral.
Taylor hadn’t even paused. “Shame you missed it. It was a corker. Martinez drilled seventy-seven pitches against the Braves. At least that’s what the Times says. I wasn’t counting, but you can bet I was watching. Says he’s thinking about retiring next year. You think that’s a good idea?”
Shane hadn’t. He liked Martinez. He’d said so, and within ten minutes he and Dr. Taylor were deep in conversation about the Mets playoffs chances, about Martinez and his hamstring injury and his Cy Young awards, and whether or not his glory days were behind him, and Shane had eventually forgotten why he’d originally called Taylor’s office. By the end of their hour, Shane was leaning back on the leather sofa, his arms thrown back on either side, his foot cocked on the corner of the ottoman, even smiling a little. Taylor’s glasses were in his shirt pocket, making that hard, heavy lump on his skinny chest. “What do you say, Shane?” he’d asked at the end. “You want to do this again next Tuesday?”
“What,” Shane had answered, shaking his head, still smiling. “Talk about the Mets?”
Taylor had shrugged. “We can talk about the Mets. Or the Giants preseason. Or how far the stock market’s fallen down the crapper. Or, of course, we can talk about your wife. If you want. You think you’ll want to?”
Shane had drawn a huge sigh. He didn’t answer. He did, however, meet Dr. Taylor again the next Tuesday, and for nine Tuesdays after that. They talked about Stephanie, as well as a few other things. Shane remembered a lot of what Dr. Taylor had said. Often, he recalled his comments about how the buffet of life sometimes ran out of Kobe steaks, but that you had to eat no matter what, even if the only thing on the menu was ten courses of tough shit. Mostly, though, he reminded himself of the thing Taylor had said most often: recovery is a slippery slope. Just when you think you’ve made it to the top of the mountain, something will come out of the blue, and bam: you’re right back in the middle of it again.
On Friday, the day after finishing the painting of Marlena, Shane got two packages. One came in the morning, and the other came in the afternoon, after his phone call from Christiana. Much later, looking back, Shane would think that that was when things had really begun to slip out of his control. Two harmless deliveries, both completely unconnected (or so it seemed) and both utterly innocuous, at least on the surface.
Bam.
The first one was a manila envelope, thick and heavy, neatly sealed and stamped on the back with red: PRIVATE DOCUMENTS – TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY.
The return address was also stamped, and Shane groaned inwardly when he saw it. It was from Price, Hayes and Whitaker, the law firm that had handled first his and Stephanie’s divorce, and then the disbursement of her assets after her death. Janice Hayes, the woman who’d left the message on Shane’s answering machine several days earlier, had been Stephanie’s lawyer.
He’d completely forgotten about the phone message, as well as the package the message had mentioned.
He stood in the early morning sunlight at the end of his long gravel driveway, looking down at the envelope in his hands, and it occurred to him that his posture was eerily similar to the pose of Marlena in the painting back in the upstairs studio. He lowered the manila envelope, folded it over the rest of the mail, and stuffed the whole thing into the pocket of his jeans. He closed the mouth of the big black mailbox and turned to hike back toward the house. The coffee percolator was probably boiling by now. He’d have a cup on the back patio and watch the river for awhile before starting his shift. The leaves were in full color now, after all, and there was a pleasant crispness to the morning air.
He’d ignore the big manila envelope. There was nothing in there that he needed to see, nothing that demanded his immediate attention. How could there be? For one brief, black moment, he imagined opening the envelope and finding one sheet of paper on top of the legal records, blank except for six type-written words: YES, YOUR WIFE IS STILL DEAD.
He grinned at the absurdity of it, and then laughed harshly, and the laugh was partly a sob. He choked it back and looked up at the trees. Recovery is a slippery slope, he thought. Just when you think you’ve made it to the top of the mountain…
He wouldn’t open the envelope. He didn’t need to. He knew what was in it, had seen all of it before. One of the things in the envelope was a photocopy of a highway patrol report, complete with a grainy black and white printout of a photo showing Stephanie’s silver Honda. In the picture, it was hard to tell what kind of car it was. Frankly, it was a little hard to tell that it was a car at all. The first time Shane had seen it, he’d thought it looked more like mechanical hamburger. The only recognizable part had been the passenger’s door, which jutted up out of the mess like the wing of a dead bird.
The Riverhouse Page 18
