by Lis Wiehl
“I’ll give you three days to leave, and then I’m telling Leon to take care of it,” she said into the darkness. Her heart beat faster, but she was being foolish again, she thought, scared of the dark like a child.
She felt her way forward, tapping the floor in front of her with her toe before she stepped. Finally she found the top of the stairs and the railing.
Back on the second-floor landing, Ruth closed the door leading to the attic. And locked it. At the reception desk she wrote herself a note to tell Leon to change the lightbulbs in the attic and to find whatever it was that was making that smell.
Carl nudged the gear lever up with his left boot toe to shift the motorcycle into fifth and rolled the throttle back with his right hand as he sped onto the Taconic at 80 mph. He rode north at a speed well over the legal limit because he didn’t care if he got a ticket, and he didn’t care if he had an accident, and he didn’t care about anything at all. He tried to let the deep thrum of the engine and the roar of the wind and the fierce vibration of the machine nullify the many sad and dark things he felt inside. He turned into Taconic State Park and paused, idling at the waterfall, where he remembered the man with the poodle, the man Tommy thought could be an angel. When Carl remembered him, he saw only a man who was pathetic and alone except for a dog, a man who’d settled for something far less than what was possible, and then Carl hated the man with the dog, which made no sense, he knew. What Carl hated was himself. That made sense.
When Carl returned to his house, he took off his coat, then went to the cupboard above his refrigerator, where he found a bottle of bourbon toward the back of the cupboard. Carl generally never drank to excess, but tonight seemed like a good night to make an exception. Tonight he had a secret that he’d kept from Tommy and the others. The story of Hiawatha losing his daughter had served to make the pain all the more acute. Today was Esme’s birthday. She would have been twenty-six, an elegant young woman, possibly with a family of her own. No. Would have been was wrong. Should have been was more like it.
He found a rocks glass in the cabinet, opened the bottle, filled his glass with ice and bourbon, and took a sip. The sip was good. If the sip was good, the gulp would be better, and if a gulp was good—it was—several gulps would be exquisite. He refilled his glass and emptied it again just as quickly, feeling the alcohol burn and glow inside, coating him with a false warmth, because inside he felt empty, dead, like the cast-iron woodstove in his living room that he knew he probably should fill with a couple of fat pieces of hardwood that would burn all night. Instead, feeling frivolous, he loaded the stove with split birch, tossed in some kindling, and struck a match.
He opened his mouth to sing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” but no sound came out.
The birch quickly jumped to life and gave off a sharp dry heat and a golden light that made the shadows dance. Carl pulled his chair in front of the stove and refilled his glass. This time he sipped more slowly. The house was small, but tonight it felt like an enormous cavern, too large for one man to live in or, more accurately, too large for half a man to live in.
He sipped and briefly thought that tonight might be the night he would go upstairs and open the door to the room down the hall from his, a door he had not opened in ten years.
The room was probably a mess, with the bed half made and a basket of dirty laundry on the closet floor, with a few items on the floor that had not made it all the way into the basket. Resting against the pillows would be a well-used stuffed bear named Figaro with one eye coming loose. The left one or the right one? He couldn’t recall, though he could remember promising Esme he’d fix it for her, and saying her mother was the one who knew how to sew and fix things like that, but now that Mom was gone and it was just the two of them . . .
There would be a picture in a frame on her desk, somewhere amid the books and drawings, of a boy named Louis. Esme had just started dating and Louis was a nice boy. Carl had gotten a Christmas card from him last year. He’d probably get another this year. The last time Carl had opened the door to Esme’s room, he’d seen the photograph of Louis, and he’d told himself he really needed to have The Talk about sex with Esme, even though he was certain she would roll her eyes and say, “I know, Daddy, I know!”
He sipped and then gulped. He’d already had too much to drink. But so what? It took so much effort to maintain the positive façade that other people saw, when he knew how he really felt inside. For one night he could let go. Collapse. Tomorrow he would rally, the way he always did.
He thought about the long summer afternoons when, starting in first grade, he’d meet Esme at the town park at three o’clock after her day camp was over. It was his job, because his wife had a nine-to-five job, to keep Esme happy and occupied until dinner. She’d insist that they go to the pool. She’d change into her suit in the girls’ locker room—first she’d hold up a finger and tell him, “Daddies are not allowed”—and then she’d jump bravely into the water, without testing it first by dipping a toe. Carl always tested the water first, and then he had to count to three, sometimes more than once, while Esme treaded water and called out, “Come on, Daddy!”
Then they’d play a game she’d invented called Cherry-on-Top, in which they’d pretend he had a cherry on the top of his head and it was Esme’s task to pluck it off and eat it. First he’d try to fend her off with one arm, then one arm and one leg, then two arms, then two arms and two legs, and finally the last level when he was free to run around in the pool and fend her off in any way he could while she swam after him. If her feet ever touched the bottom, or if he was able to shake her loose once she’d latched onto him, it was a fail and she had to start the level over. They’d spent long hours playing the game, but then one day he’d realized that she’d gotten older, her body filling the bathing suit with curves and bumps, and he’d told her they couldn’t play the game anymore.
For a while he’d missed the little girl who had burst into the house one day holding a wrinkled purple balloon that had fallen to earth in the yard. “Daddy! Daddy! Look what I found! This is the balloon I let go of when I was three—it came back to me! You never know what’s going to fall from the sky.” He missed the little girl who had proclaimed with absolute confidence, “Do know what the cure is for the common cold? Cheese.”
But he’d gotten used to the young woman who’d replaced her. He’d gotten to know her better the summer before her sophomore year in high school, when she’d proposed they take a trip together. The summer before her junior year, she explained, she’d need to study for her SATs, and the summer before her senior year she’d need to work on her college applications. So this was the summer when she had to do something, so that she’d have something to write about on those applications. She’d recently finished a book Carl had recommended to her, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book of philosophy that told the story of a man who takes a trip across the country on his motorcycle with his son, from whom he has become detached, and during the trip he rediscovers both his son and himself. Her idea was to take a cross-country motorcycle trip.
He agreed and did her one better, suggesting they travel all the way to Alaska. She’d always wanted to see where the glaciers calved and chunks fell explosively into the ocean. He’d bought a sidecar for the bike and a helmet for Esme, and a tent. They saw amazing things along the way, fields bursting with wildflowers after a particularly wet summer in Montana, the northern lights above Lake Louise in Banff. They’d roared through British Columbia and up the Yukon Highway, the air getting cooler at night but still warm during the day. They’d rented a two-seat kayak in Juneau and traveled with an outfitter to a lodge in Glacier Bay National Park, and the next day they set out for a place called Taylor Bay, where Brady Glacier was calving.
And there it ended. They’d camped on a small island, just the two of them, ate fish they caught and cooked, talked about Louis and school and Mom, and then they’d set out on a bright sunny morning in the kayak. But after just twenty minutes in the
water, the weather changed. Carl had done everything he could afterward to try to comprehend what had happened: a phenomenon called “extratropical cyclogenesis,” in which a tropical typhoon, moving poleward, meets a trough of low-pressure air moving south, seeding a sustained squall of gale-force winds generating enormous “trapped-fetch” ocean waves.
They’d seen the weather coming, but they were too far from shore to get back to land. They fought as hard as they could to keep the kayak upright. The wind was so fierce they could hardly hear each other, with Esme in the front and Carl in the back, paddling frantically, summoning strength he didn’t know he had, but the storm was stronger than even the two of them paddling together. He heard a voice in his head screaming a kind of mantra, Cherry on top! Cherry on top! When the kayak flipped over, the cold of the water took his breath away. They were wearing life vests, but not the cold-water protective suits they would have needed to survive. They were in icy water, the wind and the waves pushing them under, again and again. He’d shouted, “Esme! Esme! ESME!”
When it all went black, he’d prayed to Jesus with his last breath to let it stay black, to bring him to Esme so that they might enter heaven together, hand in hand. But it didn’t stay black. He’d opened his eyes and the light struck them, and he realized he was lying on a rocky beach, being attended to by a park ranger. He’d tried to sit up, saying, “Esme,” but a hand on his chest pushed him back down and told him to wait until the EMTs arrived.
What happened immediately after that wasn’t clear, but he remembered being told that they’d found only Esme’s life vest. He remembered being wrapped in a blanket, while a woman wearing an orange hunting jacket told him that in water as cold as Glacier Bay, no one could survive for more than a few minutes, and that he’d probably survived only because of his greater body mass. She’d explained that in cold water the gases that ordinarily formed in the stomach of drowning victims, bringing them to the surface, generally did not build up in sufficient quantity to float a body. The Alaska Coast Guard rescue units rarely recovered drowning victims in waters this cold.
He’d stayed up there two weeks, praying with every bit of his strength, asking Jesus for a miracle while admitting he’d done nothing to deserve special treatment, and that in fact he deserved all the pain he felt, because he should have known better, should have checked the weather report, should have stayed closer to shore, should have . . .
The woman in the orange jacket had visited him, tried to get him to eat, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was inconsolable. Finally he’d journeyed home, jettisoning the sidecar over a cliff somewhere in the Yukon. What he’d never been able to jettison was the guilt, the shame, the craving for some kind of punishment. Without it, he would never be able to atone. He’d survived and Esme had not, and that was absolutely and eternally unacceptable.
Many nights he thought it was some sort of cosmic joke, where God had told the wise man—the man who’d studied so hard to understand God and sin and resurrection and salvation and all the ways that people had sought to understand God—God had said, “Okay, wise guy—if you think you’re so smart, figure this one out.”
This was a dangerous place to be, Carl knew, because then the anger he felt toward himself turned into an anger at God—to whom he had pledged his very life, to whom he had promised to teach his lessons and tell others of his infinite love. The anger made him scream, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud, “Where was that love when I needed it? Why did you take the little girl who adored you and honored you in everything she did. Why should you have her and not me? How did I ever offend you so, that you would do this to me?”
He refilled his glass, emptying the bottle, and drank, wiping the tears from his cheeks with his sleeve. Everything was blurry and at the same time not blurry enough.
When he saw in the dim light a man sitting in the chair across from him, he knew who it was. Part of him had been expecting this visit for a long time. Part of him, if he was being honest, welcomed it.
“What are you doing here?” Carl said.
“You know what I want,” the demon said.
“What?” Carl said, gesturing with his glass to the room, the house, the world. “You want this? You want to take this from me? You don’t seem to realize—I don’t care.”
He drained the last of the bourbon, but instead of making him feel better, the drink only made him feel emptier, until he thought he could hear his heartbeats echoing off the walls of his empty shell of a life. He saw no advantage to living beyond the present moment. He didn’t deserve another breath.
“I don’t want your possessions,” the demon said. “I’m here to give you the pain you’ve been asking for.”
“You want this?” Carl said, laughing, as he poked himself in the chest and threw his glass into the fire, where the alcohol fumes flared. “This is what you want? You can have it—give it your best shot!”
With that, the demon overwhelmed him and took command of his body. When he realized what he’d done, Carl tried to resist, but he was too old and too drunk and too tired, and soon he felt the emptiness inside fill with something even worse, though it had been impossible to imagine anything worse. His blood turned black and his skin tightened, choking him. Whatever it was inside him was furious, and hated everything it saw, and wanted to snuff the life from anything that lived.
He went to the mirror in the bathroom and looked at himself. He looked the same. When he pinched his skin, he felt the pinch. He looked into his eyes. Tommy had once asked him a serious question posed with a light heart, “Why is it that you can only look into your own eyes for a minute or less before you start to feel totally weird?” He’d replied that he didn’t know, but they’d both tried it, and they’d both burst out laughing.
Now when he looked in his eyes, Carl felt nothing. He saw nothing. He felt that he was looking at someone else, someone who moved when he moved and blinked when he blinked but who was not him.
“I am Carl Thorstein,” he said.
But what he heard himself say was, “I am Thadodaho.”
16.
Tommy went to George Gardener’s place again the next morning, with the same results; the card from the art historian was still tucked beneath the brass hammer of the door knocker.
He decided to find out what Julian Villanegre knew about Gardener, so he drove to the Peter Keeler Inn, where the young woman behind the desk told him that the Englishman was still registered as a guest, though no one answered the phone when she rang his room. When he asked about Ben Whitehorse, her face lit up.
“Mr. Whitehorse went for a walk early this morning.”
“What time is early?” Tommy asked.
“Well, my shift starts at five. He was down in the lobby eating blueberry muffins from the breakfast buffet by five thirty.”
“That’s early.”
“He’s such a sweet man,” she said. “He told me I was an excellent baker. I tried to tell him the muffins come from Sara Lee and all I did was microwave them, but he insisted that nobody could microwave a muffin as good as me.”
“If he comes back, could you ask him to call me?”
Walking back to his car, Tommy called his aunt to thank her for letting them use the library the night before. She told him that she’d found the time to bake him a strawberry-rhubarb pie, though if it was more than he thought he could finish, he was free to share it with Carl.
“By the way,” she added, “that strange Englishman is back. He asked if Abigail Gardener had left any of her papers to the library.”
“I’ll be right over,” Tommy said.
He found the historian sitting on a couch in the reading room, perusing a week-old copy of the London Times. Tommy took a concealed position behind a bookshelf with a view of the reading room and used his RAZ-IR PRO 2 to scan the library. The Englishman appeared to be normal. Well, human at least.
Tommy sat down across from him. On the back page of the newspaper was a story about a cricket match between Warwickshire
and Lancashire.
Villanegre lowered his paper and neatly folded it.
“Mr. Gunderson—how are you?” he said. “Would you like a section of the Times when I’m finished with it, or do you have something to say to me?”
“How do you know my name?”
“Well, your aunt is enormously proud of you,” Villanegre said. “When I asked her if she could tell me anything about Abigail Gardener, she said she knew her quite well and you had been talking about her just last night. She has a picture of you on her desk, you know.”
It didn’t surprise Tommy to learn that his aunt was entirely without guile.
“We were talking about Abbie,” Tommy said. “And I hear you’ve been asking about her as well.”
“Indeed.” Villanegre nodded. “Maybe you can help me—I’m trying to find her son, George. He left a message at the inn saying that his mother had an art collection he believed may be of value, so he’d hoped I might have a look. I’m afraid if I don’t hear from him soon, I will have to leave for home.”
“We’re not sure where George is,” Tommy said. “Last I heard, the police were unable to locate him to tell him about his mom.”
“Tell me—when you were watching Dr. Harris and me the other night at Starbucks, you seemed concerned. I can’t imagine you’d feel jealous of a withered old prune like me.”
“She’s a good friend,” Tommy said.
“I’m glad to know she has people looking after her, though I doubt she needs much help. Very self-sufficient, as so many American women are. English women try, but too often it’s a bluff.”
“Do you know if Udo Bauer is planning to buy the Gardener farm?” Tommy said. The idea had occurred to him that morning. Lots of people had tried over the years to buy the place, and had made Abbie offers that were, according to rumor, beyond extravagant. She’d always said no, but now that she was gone, there was no telling what George might say. And for someone as rich as Udo Bauer, no price would be too high for something he wanted.
