Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  “You really don’t think Baby Bouchard is up here a little too much?” Moss challenges me. “I mean, give the girl some fucking room to breathe. I know she hates going home after work. She tells me so, Junie.” Moss is worked up. “She hates their shitty little apartment and going home just to cook and clean some more. First for us, then for him. Dinner, dishes, all of it. And he’s constantly asking how she’s feeling—except Coral sees through that and sees that he’s really asking about the baby. Not Coral so much. And then he falls asleep in front of the TV at eight forty-five. And she’s alone again.”

  “I’m just worried about her,” I admit.

  “Oh, like I’m not? Like I don’t care about her, June? Jesus, come on! You’re not even friends. Like you know any-fucking-thing.”

  I feel contrite for a moment, because, honestly, it’s true. I don’t have evidence of anything. But then I let my eyes trail across the various drawings tacked up, easels half filled. Coral’s tears, ragged down a canvas. Coral screaming, lit up by firelight. Coral, spectral, otherworldly, dredged up from the lake beside a bobbing canoe. Rage bubbles up from deep within my belly. I point at the image.

  “And is that what you are? Friends?” I growl. “Look at this shit. Look at her, Moss! Coral, Coral, Coral, Coral. Fucked-up Coral. Sad Coral. Hurt Coral. Fucking drowned Coral. She is not your friend, she is your subject. And when she gets better, guess what? Your paintings get worse.” Moss is shaking his head, huffing, barely able to listen. “Everything you’ve done this past year has been shit except for your sad Coral paintings. You’re using her!”

  “Wow, you really don’t understand anything, do you, June?” He’s laughing at me now. And that’s what finally gets me. That condescending, wheedling laugh that makes me feel so small.

  “And the kicker is, Coral was doing just fine before you started monopolizing her,” I hiss. Moss’s face twitches in anger. “She was fine when she came here. A little quiet, a little shy, but perfectly happy. Perfectly well! Managing her ups and downs when they came for her. But then you got your needful little claws on her, and you started creating the first truly good paintings I’ve ever seen you make. Meanwhile, she’s a fucking wreck. Worse by the week.” I’m heaving. “You need her. She doesn’t need you!” I look right at him, down the barrel of a gun. “And you urge her on, don’t you?” His face is crimson. He’s furious. “What do you say, Moss? Huh? That the meds will dull her sparkle? That therapy is indulgent? Some messed-up bullshit like that?”

  “You don’t understand a fucking thing.” His voice is a serrated blade. “It’s what she wants. It’s what she needs.”

  “I bet that’s what Mantis says.”

  “Hey. Hey,” he snaps, grabbing my arm. I gasp, shocked by the strength of his grip. “We are not the same.” I yank my arm from him, breathing hard. He looks at me with wonder. Like he can’t believe I would—what?—disobey him? “Well.” A mean smile cuts his lips. “If you feel so sure, if you care so much, if you’re so close with her—you fucking psychology genius—well, go right on ahead, action hero!” he mocks. My breaths shake as I try to master them. “No, yeah—go ahead.” He pushes my shoulder. “Go save Coral! From me. From him. From herself. Go on.”

  “Moss, stop it,” I breathe, but he’s on his feet and pulling on my shoulder, on my arm, pulling me onto my feet with him. “Stop it,” I bark, my sobs crystallizing back into anger. But I’m wobbly on my legs.

  “No, go on, you coward. You enabler. We’re all so bad, the rest of us, huh?” His face is sweaty and very close to mine. “But just so you know, Junie, if Mantis and I are the same, then Christ, you and I are the same, too.”

  Eight

  No Hard Feelings

  Max

  Sunday, October 21, 2018

  Audra was right. This is perking me up.

  We’re ascending an easy, well-kept hiking trail through the forest about thirty-five minutes from her house. The air sings in its cool clarity, the sun dappling through the confetti-bright canopy. We left Audra’s car down at the trailhead of the Moosehead Lake Scenic Byway and have passed some other casual hikers in our progress. Mostly white-haired birder-types with sensible shoes and pressed trousers. We’ve smiled at each other, commenting on the glorious day.

  But we haven’t seen anyone for the last half hour. We got a late start, and the afternoon light is already starting to fade into something dimmer, more amber. I’m sure Audra blames me for that—I woke this morning with the worst hangover of my life and couldn’t pry myself from bed until about noon. The throbbing in my skull was excruciating. And with the pain came undesirable mental set pieces: the horrible emails. Black type. The gin and tonics. Diamond. The Vicodin. White. The stale Barbera in her studio. Burgundy. Broken glass. Green.

  My brain was torn up; a jagged kaleidoscope of colors pulsing with every cranial throb.

  But she made me good, strong coffee, sunny-side-up eggs, and toast. I smoked a cigarette.

  I’ve got just the thing for you. A nice, easy walk. Fresh air. I felt I couldn’t say no.

  “We’re nearly there now,” she says, turning back to look at me, smiling. “It’s worth it—I promise!”

  “I hope so. My ankle is really getting on top of me again,” I tell her, puffing just a little. Too many cigarettes, Max.

  A few minutes later, when we make it through the parting of the forest at the end of the path, a windblown rocky sill materializes. The elevation we’ve achieved is clear now; we’re tucked into the notch of a small mountain. The notch looks out over an expanse of blazing foliage, fire colors flickering over the earth. And there, the lake. The most dazzling blue I’ve ever seen, the sky above it seeming to meld with and mimic it, as if the lake has poured itself out up there. The clouds are pure white, voluminous, buoyant. My stomach plummets.

  I know this view.

  I know this frame of pine and granite. I understand the particular diffuse autumn light of a late afternoon in October from this precise vantage. A sour tickle skewers my middle. We’ve stopped walking, but it’s harder to breathe.

  “The Ledge,” Audra says, gesturing at a little sign affixed to a nearby tree that says the same. I feel ripped back in time thirty years. “Pretty good, right?” She is smiling, beaming; proud that she has been able to hand me this gift of expansive, obliterating beauty. She looks over at me and squeezes my hand. In the setting sunlight, in my squinting, her hair looks almost white for a moment, white-blond, the angles of her face sharper and thinner, and it shocks me. The resemblance.

  I blink, and it is Audra again, rosy-cheeked with that squall of reddish-brown hair, healthy, vivacious, gap-toothed, beaming—a woman beyond belief. I smile back at her, terrified of what my face might be doing, might be telling. I squeeze her hand in return. The deep scrape in the flesh of my palm stings me, like she’s been hiding a wasp in her hand. She looks at me and seems to take my silence for awe. She smiles and then pats me on the back, walking closer to the edge. She puts her hand over her eyes like a visor and takes it all in.

  I don’t move. I just stand there. Looking at the rock beneath my feet. Where I led meditation sessions with other young, supple bodies. Yoga sessions to center and ground. Where I painted in the nascent, too-early morning, hauling an easel, canvas, paint kit. I look at the framing trees, the tenor of the light. It’s the same. Like I never left. The images, the memories flock and amass now like a murmuration of sky-blotting starlings.

  I feel swallowed whole. I don’t want to be here any longer. Here at the Ledge. Here in Maine, in King City. Oh, god, King City. The name gives rise to something like terror. Terror at this terrible, this wonderful, this Hadean, this divine place. The urge to flee curls in me, coils at my feet. But I can’t move. I am possessed, haunted.

  “Shall we?” Audra’s face is open, welcoming. Without shadow. She holds out her arm, and I take it.

  A few steps down the path that
leads out the other side of the Ledge clearing stands a fat, old tree with naked patches, the bark torn and worn away by years of wind and passersby. There are initials and hearts and plus signs gouged and carved all over it. It’s Lover’s Tree.

  KAF + MKL 4EVR

  KEN + MARY SO MOTE IT BE

  CHRIS + MEG ’09

  1998 EVAN + BETH + DREW 1998

  WORKMAN POWERS 4 FUN TIME

  On and on and on. So many initials. So many names. So many dates. So many people carving an imagined fate at various times over the years, all likely broken up by now. Audra must see me looking. Eyes tracing for something specific.

  “Cute, right?” she says. “Do you have your knife?” I pause and look at her then pull the beautiful thing from my pocket. “Well, make your mark, Durant.” That Colfax smile springs forth. I step up to the tree and run my hand over the surface, feeling the cuts and gouges like a primitive braille. The surface is surprisingly smooth. Older carvings have faded and receded into near illegibility. Others are clearly much fresher.

  MIKE + BEC WERE HERE 08-17-2018

  I start to carve my initials, somewhat surprised at the force it takes to make the cuts deep enough. MFD. Maxwell Fiore Durant.

  I add the plus sign.

  I add Audra’s initials. AGC. Audra Genevieve Colfax.

  And there we are: MFD + AGC

  And I leave it at that. Audra comes close, running her finger along the marks I made. Her fingers then trail elsewhere, following some invisible, wandering, subterranean logic. She takes in all the names and dates and promises.

  “Hey, look,” she points. “Another MFD. 1989.”

  And sure enough, there it is. MFD + CCD 1989 ART OUTLASTS ALL.

  My pulse surges to a gallop.

  “Looks like another moony artist type.” She laughs. Audra’s intense brown eyes are on me. She holds out her hand. “Come.” I look at her hand for a long moment, immobile. I look past her and see a narrow, less manicured path beyond her tunneling into the forest. A path you might miss if you didn’t know what it was. I take her hand. Wherever we are going, we’re going together.

  We make our way down the narrow path, barely speaking now. I’m afraid that if I open my mouth, I might scream.

  “This next thing I’m going to show you—just wait. It’s wild.” She turns her head, her gap-toothed smile winking at me. She turns back around and keeps walking. But I already know. I am a sentenced man walking to the block. She doesn’t have to say another word. What lies before us swells inside of me in picture-perfect clarity—monstrous, miraculous. “Most people just know the Moosehead Scenic Byway, and they don’t know the Ledge also connects to this other super cool place. It used to be like a—like a rental cabin place, a camp,” she says, voice easy. But there is nothing easy here. “Tourists rented them. Went out of business in, oh, I’d say…2007?” My ankle throbs. Sweat beads my brow, even in the chill air. Audra’s steps are so sure. So practiced. Like she’s walked this as many times as I have. “Before that the land and the cabins were used for this little arts community. Isn’t that neat?” she tries brightly. “It was a thing from the mid-seventies until about…1996?”

  We’re not far now. I can feel it. I can feel the place calling me, a siren song, pulling me into its embrace. Just as it did then.

  “I thought I’d get bonus points for showing you some beautiful scenery and a piece of property way out here in the sticks with an arts ethos. No?” She pauses just ahead of me, puts her hands on her hips and looks back, sparks of mirth in her eyes. But my face must be set with a horrid mix of things. Terror. Sentimentality. Shock. Nostalgia. “No? Have I misstepped?” She chuckles almost anxiously, eyes ping-ponging from me back down the path. “Too remote?” she asks. But then she keeps on walking. I do the only thing I can do. I follow her, each step taking us closer to my past. To a dread long buried.

  The leaves blaze and flare tangerine, scarlet, goldenrod. I close my eyes, and the ribbons in her trees spring to mind. I have to open my eyes to banish them.

  “You alright, Max?” she calls back.

  “Fine. I’m fine,” I assure her, but my voice sounds disconnected from me.

  Pieces of myself from a time I have long put in the rearview mirror are resurfacing through the muck, resurrecting against my will.

  The big, brown mess hall rises and looms first. A shudder seizes me.

  We’re here. I’m back.

  It’s at this far back edge, set into the tree line. Mess. It was always the first thing you saw when you came back down from the Ledge. It still is. The brown paint is cheap looking, chipping and cruddy. The mural of Little Chickadee has been painted over entirely. Only innocuous graffiti breaks up the massive brown mothership now. My mouth opens, as if to gulp down the air, as if there could never be enough to save me.

  In what feels like the space of a blink, we’re in the nucleus of the place.

  The Village Commons.

  I feel stony. Hardened. My face must be a mask of illegibility. My jaw set in tension. What must Audra be thinking? I can’t tell her now that I’ve been here—I can’t admit I’ve been lying to her this whole time.

  But I’m terrified. And afraid that she will see it.

  It’s Lupine Valley. Lupine Valley.

  I look around me, feeling surreal. The air smells just the same: sweet and wide-open. The cabins sprinkled around the periphery of the communal field are ragged, the grass everywhere wild and overgrown.

  The ornamental metal birds are gone from the grass.

  The cobbled rock structures are disappeared or toppled.

  The flags are nowhere to be seen.

  The cabins—ah, it’s gutting—they’re each painted a different Rainbow Brite color now. But it’s a sad, deranged feeling it gives you, not light and playful. The paint is chipping, peeling, and some of it is water and dirt stained. Oh, what a shame it is. It used to be so pristine. So natural looking. So of the forest, one with nature. Back then, the cabins were tidy and puritanically clean and well kept. The outsides natural wood, unpainted. The grass was clipped. And Old Gus was here to greet us. Gus McCue. He captained this place. He ran it. Anxiety flares in my chest, hotter than a kiln.

  The kiln.

  I remember the dying heat of that room in the evening, the flash of smiling teeth, flaxen hair covering thin ribs. I shake myself from these thoughts and look at Audra, who is all placidity and softness and awe at seeing the height of the ancient pines.

  The photo from the guest room bathroom drops into my consciousness like a slide in a viewfinder. A man and a woman from behind, looking down at something. Scavenger Hunt.

  Rowan Augustus McCue.

  Gus.

  I knew I knew that fucking photographer’s name. Gus McCue. Old Gus.

  Fuck.

  His photo in her house, in the bathroom I’ve been using this whole time. I place my hand against a cabin—what was once, ironically, Balance—to brace myself. My system is utterly overwhelmed. I need to breathe. I need to catch my breath. I’m drowning in thin air.

  I look over at Audra, who is toeing a rock in the dirt drive, looking toward the Pepto-pink cabin nearest to her.

  What is this? What is going on here?

  “How”—I swallow, working so hard to keep it together, keeping my face turned away from her—“do you know about this place?” Audra slowly rotates her body to take it all in. She’s not even looking at me.

  “The rental cabins went out of business in 2007, like I said. I actually can’t believe it’s been that long, but it has. No one has done anything with the place.” She shakes her head, disappointed. “Anyway, there were commercials for it back in the day. Stay like a king in King City. Stay at the Lupine Valley Cabins.” She sing-songs what must have been their jingle. To hear her say the words—to hear her say it—rocks me. “But after that went under, it
became a known teenager hang spot. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Fireworks. Firepits. Ghost stories. The whole nine. I remember kids in school coming up here to party—there were even a few urban legends about the place. The whole woman haunting the woods bit. Classic, right?” She chuckles. “Added to the vibe of it all. But even that bit of activity has waned, from what I can tell. People usually just come up here to get to the lake. It’s a pass-through. Whoever owns the land must not be local. I don’t think anyone really looks in on it.” She turns, hands in her black jacket pockets, and smiles at me. “Kind of cool, right?”

  Old Gus always walked around with that goddamned camera around his neck. Taking pictures when you knew it and pictures when you didn’t. I feel sick, being back here. Like the pinprick of light down that long, dark tunnel of time has suddenly exploded into blinding incandescence. The past. It’s right here. Right now. King City, Maine. Lupine Valley. The place where I became me.

  I can’t help it, I have to look. All I want to do is go into my cabin, go into the mess hall, go into Motif; I want to scour and study every square inch of this place that was my home. I want to find my friends. I need my friends. A deep desire to never leave this place consumes me. I can see it as it was: vibrant, tidy, whimsical, alive with the bodies and minds of electric people. I can’t help but gawk. I feel like crying. Lupine Valley is welcoming me back.

  I brace myself, and then I gather my bearings and find the cabin. The one that was mine. It’s right where I remember it being, though the trees around it are bigger now, the undergrowth behind it pushing against it more aggressively than it ever did when I was here. It’s now a moldering banana color. I walk slowly toward it, remembering how many times I went in and out of that screen door, the sound it made when it slammed. It now hangs half off the hinge, the screen torn away. I was in that damned little cabin for almost two years. Focus. The sheer volume of work I did in this tiny, 8’ by 8’ cabin, Christ. The sketches, the drawings, the paintings. They had to have been the most generative years of my artistic life. They were certainly the most pivotal. The work I created here was what jump-started my career. In this shitty old cabin. In the middle of nowhere.