The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  It’s part of the view, the ghost of Christiana had told him, her voice hollow, resigned, the part you couldn’t see until you were standing right on the edge of the cliff.

  Shane rode, and soon enough he came to the gravel drive. It cut through the trees, leading up the first hill toward his old property. It had never really been his, though, even if the insurance people had sent him a decent check in the wake of its destruction. The cottage had never really stopped belonging to Gustav Wilhelm. It belonged to him still, wherever it was. He’d bound himself to his corpse, after all. Wherever the cottage was, he was there too, broken and smashed, half-devoured by the crazed thing that had once been his lover, Madeleine. Shane shuddered, thinking of it. He turned the bike’s wheel onto the gravel and pedaled it up the hill, shifting into first gear.

  The yard was there, but overgrown, dominated by weeds and tall, swishing grass, now mostly yellow. Part of the porch remained, reminding Shane of the portico of the Riverhouse, left like a headstone, a reminder of what once was. Beyond the remains of the porch, however, the ground fell away. Shane stood on the broken planks and looked down. The formerly steep angle of the river bluff had been reduced to a ragged jumble of boulders and scree, descending toward the river below. There were bits of the cottage buried in that chaotic slope, Shane knew. Not all of it had ended up in the river. He sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. Without another thought, he turned and walked back to the gravel drive, where his bike leaned on its kickstand, casting a hard, skeletal shadow.

  He pressed on, pedaling swiftly, feeling the cool wind push past him, listening to the crunch of the leaves under the bike’s tires.

  He stopped once more, at the end of the old brick driveway. The parks crews still used the lot as a storage facility, so it was hard to see the site of the old house, hard to make out the shape of the stone portico. He stood on tiptoes, still straddling his bike, and squinted toward the back of the lot. What he saw made him smile grimly. The portico was still there. The reason he hadn’t been able to see it was that weeds had grown up all around it, obscuring it. Beyond it, the dirt-filled cellar was completely buried in wild grass. It swished in the breeze, singing its own senseless tune. The boundary land could collect, but it couldn’t hold onto anything permanently. Nothing lasts forever, Wilhelm had said. Perhaps even he hadn’t fully understood the truth of those words.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Shane said aloud, looking at the portico in its grave of weeds, looking at the spot where he had found Christiana’s broken body. He’d wanted to go back himself to find her, once the storm was over, once the water had receded enough for him to return to the river valley. The parks workers had beaten him to it, however. Maybe that had been for the best. Detective Weekes, at the Bastion Falls Police Department, had been suspicious of Shane to begin with. If he had showed up with Christiana’s lifeless body, things probably would have gotten a lot more complicated.

  Shane hadn’t spoken to Detective Weekes since that night. For his own part, Weekes seemed to have let the matter go. Maybe he’d decided that, strange as it all seemed, there was nothing specifically incriminating about any of it. Or maybe he’d decided that some questions were simply best left unanswered, and some stories were best left untold. If that was the case, Shane gave him credit. If that was the case, then Weekes was a very smart man indeed.

  Shane pedaled on. He rode all the way to Bastion Falls and back. On the way back, he passed both the Riverhouse and the old gravel drive again without so much as a backwards glance.

  Shane’s new life, what he thought of as his second do-over, had started with taking a class at the university in nearby Webster Groves.

  He couldn’t bring himself to paint again, at least not yet, so he’d decided to learn Photoshop. He took an evening class, and was surprised to see how many other middle-aged men and women were sharing the class with him. The instructor was a tall guy, about Shane’s own age, and he’d explained to them that most college-agers had grown up using graphics programs like Photoshop. It was the people who’d entered the industry before the “digital revolution” who were coming back to classes like his, looking to pick up some new skills and “enhance their productivity”. He’d told them not to worry, that they’d catch up quickly, and soon enough be running rings around their younger counterparts, since they brought with them an old school sense of design and experience, rather than merely the ability to draw with a mouse and a love of video games.

  And to Shane’s delight, the instructor had been right. What had seemed utterly clumsy and incomprehensible on the first day of class had quickly become not only manageable, but inspirational. Shane began to tentatively envision how the mix of traditional art and digital enhancement could open up interesting new horizons for his own art. He started to experiment with it. He scanned some of his charcoal drawings and colored them in Photoshop, clumsily at first, but with a giddy sense of excitement at the possibilities. His instructor seemed impressed, not only with Shane’s curious fusion of styles, but with his drawings.

  “Have you ever considered teaching?” the instructor had asked him one evening after class.

  “Teaching? No,” Shane had said, shaking his head dismissively. “I’m not a teacher. What would I teach, anyway? I can barely keep up with all this stuff.”

  “That’s not true and you know it,” the instructor smiled. “But I’m not talking about teaching Photoshop. I’m talking about teaching drawing. You have an instinctive understanding of how it works, and why it’s important, especially in digital media. Most of the kids here don’t get that. They come in here thinking they can just grab a mouse and start creating. They don’t understand that art rarely starts that way. It can’t go straight from the head to the screen. It needs a halfway house, and that halfway house has to be something concrete, something real. Something as simple as a piece of paper and a pencil.

  “I was just telling this to the head of the department, telling him we need a new class, something like ‘drawing for the digital age’. Something to show these kids how important that step is, and to give them the basics of how to get started with it, the simple building blocks of perspective and contrast, balance, conceptualization, all of that.”

  Shane shook his head, flattered but skeptical. “I see what you’re saying, but… you can’t mean me. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  The instructor shrugged. “Just think about it. I think you’d be surprised at yourself. I think you might even enjoy it.”

  Shane had thought about it. A few weeks later, he had approached the instructor and told him he was willing to give it a shot, if, that was, they were willing to take the risk that he might be awful at it. They were more than willing, and Shane suddenly found himself walking into a classroom as a teacher instead of a student. He was petrified on his first day, and spent most of the first twenty minutes standing behind his desk, reading verbatim from a sheaf of notes he’d prepared the night before. The students merely stared at him, dead-eyed and bored, until he’d finally sighed, dropped his notes on his desk, and told them he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

  This had, of course, brought a smile and a trickle of laughter from the students. Shane moved to the front of his desk, leaned on it, and simply asked them what they wanted from the class. Once he got them talking, he found it easier to relax, to step out of his own insecurities and into the role he had been hired for. He realized, with a small shock of surprise, that he really did have something he could teach these students. Further, he realized that they wanted to learn it. Slowly, tentatively, he developed a rapport with his students. They liked him, and Shane was pleasantly stupefied to realize, halfway through the semester, that they were, in fact, benefitting from his instruction. By the end of the fall term, Shane had signed a contract to teach full time the next year. It wasn’t great money, but it was enough. Shane had learned to live much more simply. In the wake of the previous few years, living simply had become a relatively easy choice.

/>   When he wasn’t teaching, Shane had begun to experiment with painting again. Not oils, of course. Shane had a feeling that he’d never paint with oils again. Instead, he tinkered with watercolors. One day, he had gone into the college art store and bought a set of cheap watercolors and a handful of brushes. He’d gone back to his apartment, feeling simultaneously hesitant and excited, and determined that he would paint the first thing he saw. As it turned out, the first thing he’d seen had been an old chair that he’d picked up at a junk shop downtown, a place called Burris Trader. He’d drug the chair out into his apartment’s tiny back yard, sat down on the rear stoop with a pad of watercolor paper on his lap, and painted the chair where it sat in the sun. The result had surprised him. The watercolor was light, messy, bleeding slightly where the colors touched, and yet Shane had sort of liked it. The image was pleasantly surreal, with the chair gleaming in the brightness, set against the backdrop of the alley and a chain link fence. It probably wasn’t what anyone else would call art, but Shane had been almost absurdly pleased with it. He liked it a lot, no matter what anyone else might think of it. He’d waited for it to dry, then placed it in an old frame and hung it in his kitchen, where the light from the window could play on it.

  The next weekend, he had gone down to Burris Trader and bought another chair. This one had been an antique dining room chair with a ratty velvet cushion. He paid twelve dollars for it, placed it on the back seat of his Saturn, and drove it out to the edge of town. He found an old, black train bridge that spanned a side road. Parking on the shoulder in the shadow of the bridge, he collected his paints from the trunk, hefted the chair in his other hand, and lugged it up the slope of the weedy hill. He set the chair in the middle of the tracks, sat down himself on one of the rails, and began to paint. He had to jump up and move the chair twice, making room for the occasional freight train, but that was all right. He smiled up at the engineers as they rumbled past, tipping a finger to his forehead. One of the engineers tipped a salute back at him, unsmiling.

  When the painting was done, Shane simply looked at it. He took it home, framed it, and hung it next to the first one. Together, they formed an interesting series, part whimsical, part bizarre. Shane thought, with some satisfaction, that they were delightful. It was a new series, and it was entirely his own, created independent of both the muse and the foreman in his head. Looking at the two paintings, he felt like he had rediscovered some small part of himself. It filled a hole. Not completely, but a little. Maybe that was the best he could hope for.

  He donated the old kitchen chair to Goodwill. The next weekend, he went back to Burris Trader and bought another chair. It became his hobby. He gave one of the paintings to his old Photoshop instructor, who was far more impressed with it than Shane had expected. He’d hung it in his office and suggested that Shane sell his works, maybe at the coffee shop near the campus. Shane thought it was a good idea, mainly because he had quickly run out of room for the paintings on his own walls. The manager of the coffee shop, a twenty-something girl with a nose ring and a half dozen short pony-tails jutting from her head at all angles, had agreed easily, especially since Shane insisted on selling them very cheaply.

  “Cheap enough for college students,” he’d told her, smiling. “I don’t want them hanging around here gathering dust. If I’m going to sell them, I want them sold.”

  They did sell. As they did, Shane painted more. The students that frequented the coffee shop called them Crazy Chairs, with that strange mixture of affection and sarcasm that seemed to be the hallmark of their generation. Shane didn’t mind, but he didn’t call them that himself. He didn’t really call them anything, but what he thought of them was just the opposite. He thought of the paintings as his Sanity Chairs series.

  He supposed that didn’t have quite the same ring to it, though.

  At night, Shane thought sometimes about Christiana. He thought about how much he missed her, and what their life together might have been like, had he done things just a little bit differently. He tried not to dwell on it, but in the long sleepless hours after the lights went off and the world shut off its distractions, it was hard not to. He sort of thought he owed it to her. It was his penance, maybe. It was just part of the view, the part he hadn’t been able to see until he’d stood right on the edge.

  He thought about Stephanie, too. He thought about the daughter he’d never know, the one who had two different colored eyes, just like her mother. He wondered what her name was, and where she was, if she was with Stephanie. And he wondered if he’d ever find them, someday, when it was all over. He hoped so, but he couldn’t know for sure. For now, hope was good enough, even if, in those long nighttime hours, the hope felt tiny and flimsy, and reality felt hard and cold, more like a stone than a curtain, separating them from him, maybe forever.

  The day after Shane went on his last bike ride along the river trail, he slept in late. It was Sunday, and he knew that Burris Trader wouldn’t open until eleven, if that. The owner, Henry Burris, was an old guy who kept fairly sporadic hours. Henry had asked Shane what in the world he bought all those chairs for, and Shane had told him about his paintings, even showing him one of his most recent examples, which had been in the back of the Saturn, on its way to the coffee shop. Henry had studied it critically, apparently unimpressed. From then on, however, Henry had taken it upon himself to point out any new chairs that came into his junk shop, even suggesting which ones he thought would make the best subjects for Shane’s “pitchers”.

  “Got a new one in for ya,” Henry said when Shane entered the store that day, jingling the bell over the door. He stood up from the wooden chair behind the front counter, peering over his reading glasses and nodding toward the far corner of the crowded showroom. “Over there in the back, under the window. Came in with a whole truckload of salvaged junk from one of my dealers. Water damaged, I’d guess, based on the condition of the upholstery. I’ll give you a good deal on it. Go take a look.”

  Shane went and took a look. As he approached the far end of the store, weaving through the precariously stacked antiques and shelves of forgotten miscellany, the musty showroom brightened. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, spearing through the big, dirty window and lightening the entire place, transforming it from a drab junk shop into a whimsical attic, packed with unknown treasures. The sunbeam landed on the chair, lighting it like a diamond in a jeweler’s display case. Shane stopped, blinking at it. It was upholstered in a dull embroidered fabric that had probably once been very colorful. The legs were wooden, crafted into tapering curves.

  Shane approached it slowly. He recognized it, of course. He’d already painted it once. The only thing missing was the purse, sitting open on its cushion. He touched it, felt its threadbare upholstery. It smelled musty and old.

  And then he turned, slowly, looking behind him, sweeping his gaze over the rest of the recent salvage. It was piled haphazardly, not quite ready for display. None of it had price tags on it yet. Shane stopped. His expression didn’t change. The truth was, he wasn’t really surprised at what he saw. He crossed the aisle, moving to the dark corner beneath the window.

  The Riverhouse painting sat atop an old roll-top desk, leaning in the shadow of a pile of old shutters.

  Shane approached it. It was frameless, filthy, bent out of true so that the canvas bulged slightly, loose in its struts. It looked far older than Shane knew it was. He squinted at it, and then reached to touch it. He felt the texture of the paint, ran his fingers gently over it, over the lower right corner, where Christiana’s shadow had once appeared. It wasn’t there now. The image looked exactly as he had originally painted it. Marlena sat on the portico, leaning back on one hand, her other raised to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked like she was peering right out of the painting, right at the viewer. It was just a trick of perspective, however. She wasn’t looking at anything. She was only paint on canvas. Marlena was gone.

  Shane raised his eyes, looking toward the top of the pain
ting, and blinked in surprise. Penn Oliver’s note card was still there, pinned to the upper right corner. It had gotten wet and adhered itself to the canvas. It looked like an old receipt that had accidentally gone through the wash. He reached for it, tentatively, and plucked at it. It came away easily, leaving a lighter patch on the canvas beneath it.

  He looked at in his hands. It had bent over onto itself, obscuring the handwriting. He unfolded it gently, careful not to tear it. He remembered what Penn Oliver had written, but for some reason he was curious. He had a suspicion, an inkling, and as he opened the note, he saw just what he expected. The handwriting was different now. Christiana was a lefty, after all. Her backward slanting cursive was immediately recognizable. Shane read it several times.

  Her name is Amelia. After your mother.

  Shane didn’t buy the painting, or the chair that had come with it. But he did keep the note. Henry Burris didn’t mind one bit.

  The end