“That’s the bathroom-” he nodded toward a door on the other side of the stairway. “And here’s me…”
She followed him to the door in the far corner on the other side of the stairs. Seth’s room was comparatively blank. White walls…no curtains…just a lot of cardboard boxes and hockey equipment lying around, and a white bed with large pink daisies painted across the headboard. Chloe laughed out loud.
“Nice…nice bed there,” she giggled.
“You should see his My Little Pony collection,” Rachel said, coming up behind them.
“Yeah, yeah, you guys are pretty funny. It’s Maggie’s bed. When she moved into my room, she thought her old bed looked too childish, so she took mine,” Seth shrugged. “It is pretty though, isn’t it?”
Both girls laughed, as Seth picked up his backpack and hurled it inside.
“Alright, let’s get going,” he said to Chloe.
“Already?” Rachel whined. “You’ve been home five minutes, where are you going?”
“Thought I’d take Chloe over to the Isle before it gets dark,” he said.
Rachel rolled her eyes and wandered back to her room.
“Hope she brought her boots,” she said over her shoulder.
Downstairs, James Maird was in the living room, trying to start a fire in the old stone fireplace. Seth grinned as he watched his Dad attempt to jam flaming wads of newspaper under a stack of logs. Each time, the flames seemed to burn only the newspaper and then fizzle away.
“Try a blow torch Dad,” Seth suggested.
His Dad jumped at the sound of his voice and then threw his hands up comically.
“Blow torch, sure. Hey, where do you guys think you’re going?” he asked.
Seth was already handing Chloe her coat, and yanking another for himself off the coat tree.
“The Isle, just for a bit,” Seth said.
“Your Mom’s cooking. Since we have a guest, we’re actually going to get fed,” James reminded him stoically.
“I heard that!” snapped Seth’s mom, coming down the hallway. “Alright, dress warm. Do you need gloves? We have so many gloves! Most of them don’t match. And a hat, you have a hat?”
“I have the one you made,” Chloe said, pulling it out of her coat pocket and holding it up meekly.
“Does it fit okay? I had to guess,” Agnes worried.
“I love it, fits perfect. It’s a very nice hat,” Chloe gushed.
“Alright, so…gloves, hat, here’s a scarf-” she pulled down a purple wool scarf off the coat tree and wrapped it loosely around Chloe’s neck. “Boots…” she continued, checking Chloe off. “Okay, you’re good. Don’t be long, and Seth, don’t forget to call Mike, he’s already home and he called last night. Have fun, kids.”
Chloe crunched through the snow, following Seth behind the house. Halfway between the empty dock and the house was a metal pole barn. Seth jangled a set of keys until he found the one he wanted, unlocked a rusty padlock and slid open the door. It was full of shovels, rakes, hoses, lawnmower, tools, bikes, all the sort of things one would expect to find in a pole barn, but, parked dead center one next to the other next to the other, were three black snowmobiles.
“Do you want to drive one or ride behind me?” he asked.
“Ride behind!” Chloe answered quickly.
He tossed her a helmet, and backed a snowmobile out while she tried to figure out how to adjust the chin strap. He ended up having to do it for her.
As soon as she laced her gloved fingers across his stomach, he throttled the sled and they whizzed off, around the pole barn and down a frozen slope to the snow-crusted beach.
She kept her eyes closed for the first few minutes, squeezing him as tight as she could through the thick padding of his coat. When she opened them, they were still racing down the empty winter beach. Where the lake met the shore, a curving, unbroken line of ice made strange, sculpted-looking forms. On her other side, tall pines, and occasionally the backs of other houses blocked the longview. There were other snowmobile tracks. In fact, the traffic had been so heavy that it packed the snow down to hard white ice.
The beach ended, and they zipped upward onto hard land. To their left, the ground fell steeply down to the water, exposing red rock. They shot past a sign that announced “Presque Isle Park”, and into a deeply forested lane that might have been a walking trail in the summer. It was carpeted in clean unbroken snow, no other tracks marred the surface.
Deep into the woods, she felt the sled slow. He pulled off the trail, and drove until the trees became too dense. When he cut the engine, the silence in the woods was almost too loud.
Chloe let go and stretched her fingers a couple of times. She had been holding tight enough to restrict the blood flow and her hands tingled.
Seth set his helmet on the seat, and held out his hand for hers. Snow crunched under their feet, while the white-coated branches above filtered out the already dying light. Seth was walking quickly, with a purpose. She wondered what the point of hurrying was. Ahead, the dim light of the forest gave way to the bright, warmer hues of a true dusk. Chloe decided it had to be the beach again. When they got to the clearing, she gasped.
The solid ground stopped just past the trees. It seemed to have broken off in chunks and pieces, like something shook it apart. A tiny rock-strewn beach was sheltered on either side by cliff walls, and the sun was sinking towards the distant point where the lake met the sky. The icy water lapped the frosted shore gently.
“Oh this is…” Chloe breathed.
“Amazing, yeah,” Seth agreed.
Tugging on her hand, he led her closer to the water, stopping to brush the snow off of a long, flat-toped stone. Chloe sat next to him, wrapping her arms around her legs as she watched the sun edge closer and closer to the water. The sky seemed enormous. Far over the water it burned yellow and orange, streaming into a flaming pink. Directly overhead the pink was fading to daytime blue. Behind the trees, the blue deepened to violet and then to almost black. A few stars already winked in the painted sky, the lake reflected the colors, broken into gentle waves which sparked and shimmered gold where the setting sun touched them.
When the last crescent of orange sun slipped under the waves, Chloe let out her breath in a long sigh.
“It’s beautiful here,” she smiled sadly. Seth was watching her, and might have been for a long time.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s a good place to grow up, a good place to be outdoors. When I was little, and I wasn’t in school, I was outside from sun-up to sundown. It gets inside you, the water…the woods, like the outside is in the very center of me.”
Chloe nodded. If you opened her up, dark things would flap away. Free of their captivity, black hard nasty things would skitter into the shadows, afraid of the light, of this she was sure.
“Nothing’s perfect though, not even my childhood,” he mused, staring out at the water, the violet black of night was chasing the sun towards the water. It would be true night soon.
“Pretty near perfect,” Chloe suggested. “Your family is…well, they’re great, really.”
“Yeah,” Seth nodded. He was staring over the water with a distracted frown.
“What?” Chloe smiled up at him.
“When I was a kid, Mike and I used to come out here a lot,” he said.
“He’s been your friend a long time,” Chloe said.
“Yeah, he has. My best friend though, was his cousin Billy. He lived right down the road from us, back when we used to live in town.” .
“Does he still live around here?” she asked.
“No. He…well, he died, a couple of years ago,” Seth shrugged.
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Seth’s forehead wrinkled when he frowned.
“We went to Birch Harbor together. He roomed with me freshman year. We were always together, all the time. He didn‘t seem depressed, he didn‘t seem any different than he ever had. I don‘t know why it happened, why he did it. Mike and I were away,
for a road game. When I came back, I…I went into our room…and I thought that he was sleeping, and when I…” Seth cleared his throat and frowned again, thinking, remembering probably. “He took a couple of bottles of pills, and went to bed…and never got up again.”
“I’m so sorry,” Chloe whispered.
“After that, I didn’t go to school for awhile. I went home. I thought it was something I could wake up from. Like one day, I would wake up and it wouldn’t have happened. I would see him walking up the driveway and I would go outside and tell him that I had a crazy dream about him. It took a long time for me to realize I wasn’t going to wake up. When I went back to school, I thought everyone was staring at me. I thought they were all wondering how I could have failed him. How I didn‘t know he was going to do it. I was sure they were all blaming me, for leaving him alone,” Seth said slowly.
Chloe shivered in her thick coat. She knew that feeling. Eyes followed her down the long high school corridors for years, always looking, judging. She wrapped his arm around herself and squeezed closer to him.
“I got over it. Mike did too. No one becomes an adult with a clean slate though Clo, not really. No one I ever met at least. You didn’t step out of a 1950’s sitcom. Neither did I. I just want you to know that you don’t have to hide things from me.” He wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her closer still.
Tell him something, she thought. You have to give him something, some small thing that’s real about you.
“My dad died,” Chloe admitted. “A couple of years ago, he died. I didn’t know him or anything, so it wasn’t like it was sad. He left when I was a baby. Him and my mom argued all the time, my sisters told me about it. He couldn’t keep a job, I think he drank a lot too. He didn’t want another kid, he told my mom he didn’t want another one. She didn’t plan me, I just, I just…happened. I was the straw that broke his back, I guess. He left. They got divorced.”
“Who told you that he left because he didn’t want you…your mother?” Seth asked quietly.
“Yeah, in so many words,” she agreed. Truthfully, her mother had been kind enough to chalk her father not wanting a baby up to his deteriorating mental health, but that was better left unsaid.
“You believe that?” he wondered.
“Sure, why?” Chloe shrugged
“Because what kind of mother tells her child something like that? That’s psychotic. I find it hard to believe. What guy is going to leave his wife and the two children he already has because of one more kid? It doesn’t make sense,” Seth argued gently.
“I dunno. I never thought about it like that,” she said dully.
“And you never saw him or heard from him once?” Seth continued.
“Never saw him but…but he sent cards and stuff, sometimes. Like on my birthday or my sisters’ birthdays, sometimes he’d send a card with some money in it. He’d just sign it Dad. And he’d write an address inside it too, always a different address. Like maybe he moved around a lot,” she remembered.
“Did you or your sisters ever write to him?” he asked.
“I did…one time. He always wrote the address in my cards, never theirs. When I was older, maybe in middle school, I thought it meant something. I thought it meant that he might want me to write to him, just me, you know? So I did. I wrote him a letter, and I sent it to the address in the card. And a couple of weeks later, it got sent back to me. ‘Return to Sender’ stamped on it. So I don’t know why he bothered. I never wrote to him again after that,” Chloe kept her voice monotone.
“And that’s all the contact you had with him? A couple of birthday cards he sent you?” Seth confirmed.
“And a book. He sent me a book once, on my birthday. It must have been my thirteenth or fourteenth. It wasn’t even a new book, it was all marked up and dog-eared,” Chloe added.
“What book was it?” he asked.
Chloe blew her breath out, it formed a hot cloud that quickly dissipated in front of her. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and stared up at the sky, pretending to try and remember. What book! She wished she didn’t know, wished she could shrug and say she couldn‘t recall, play it off like she didn’t care. The truth was that the stupid old book went everywhere with her. Even now, it was on the window ledge next to her bed in the dorm room she shared with Sam. She had considered bringing it with her to Seth’s house.
“Frankenstein,” she said.
“Frankenstein,” he repeated. “How random. The only gift he ever gave you, a random used copy of Frankenstein. He must have liked it.”
“I don’t think he was right in the head,” Chloe laughed harshly. “Not like he was mental or anything, but you know what I mean There was something wrong with the guy. Anyway, he died. Maybe two years ago now, and he left me…all of us girls a much better present--money! We each got enough to cover college, and mom got what was left after that, I don’t know how much it was total. So he came through in the end.”
“I’m sorry,” Seth said, squeezing her again.
“Don’t be, I didn’t even know him,” she said.
They stayed that way, sitting on the rock wrapped around each other for what seemed to her a very long time. She could still hear the water lapping against the icy rocks on the shore. Farther up the beach, the moonlight made the iced-over snow glisten brightly. The shore seemed almost too luminous for the time of night. Chloe gazed upwards, out over the water. The obsidian sky had a green tinge to it that, as she watched, faded to yellow.
“Do you see…?” she began.
“Mmmm…” Seth agreed, he was watching avidly.
The colors became deeper, more defined, sheets of light cascaded across the black background. Green tinged in red, fading again to yellow…white streaks shot through it.
“Oh….Wow…” was all she could think to say.
“Yeah,” Seth agreed.
“Does this…is it like this every night?”
“No, it’s pretty rare. We seem to get the best shows in July, sometimes August, but you never really know. It all depends on conditions in space, solar flare-ups…things like that. I just had a feeling about tonight,” he whispered.
“Wow,” she repeated.
Together they watched the northern lights dance across Lake Superior, their colors reflected in the black, shimmering water. She turned to look at Seth. His eyes seemed green in that strange light. When he realized he was being watched, he smiled.
“What?” he demanded.
“I was thinking…well, I was just thinking. If you wanted to be romantic, now would probably be an opportune time to kiss me,” she shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.
He laughed deep in his throat, and tweaked her nose.
“Are you happy? Right now, sitting here with me in the freezing cold, knowing that you have to go back and spend a week with my crazy family…are you happy in this moment?” he asked.
“What a strange question,” she said, leaning away and tilting her head back to watch the light show.
“Answer,” he pressed quietly.
“Yeah…yes, I am,” she pursed her lips and scrunched her eyes in mock imitation of his thoughtfulness and then laughed. “Yes, Velma! Why ask that?”
“Because you never are. Because you never relax, it’s like you’re always waiting for the axe to drop,” he observed.
Chloe flinched.
“When we go back, tell Dr. Willard you have too many credit hours to be his TA anymore. Tell him you don’t have the time. He’ll understand,” he suggested.
“No! I can’t do that. I can’t bail on Sam, there’s a lot of work still, and she’d be pissed!” Chloe insisted.
“Then get her to quit on him too,” he said.
“Why? You think that that’s why I’m not happy? Because I have to spend too much time at the library?” she asked.
“I think it makes everything worse,” he admitted. “I think if you could just give up on this whole ghost-asylum-conspiracy thing, you would be a lot happier. Co
me on, Clo…I know you guys hit a dead end. What are you going to do? Are you going to go digging around the dorm at night, trying to find some mysterious cornerstone that may or may not even be there, and then try to smash it to bits…really? What do you think that’s going to accomplish? Are you going to go chasing after the oh-so-mysterious bad ones? You’ve got your future to think about, why waste this time trying to figure out something that can’t make any difference anymore anyways?”
“Are you lecturing me?”
“No. I’m asking you to make a decision to be happy,” he said in a low voice.
Chloe didn’t answer. Did he think it was that easy? Did he really think she could shrug her shoulders and say ‘oh well’ at this point? She wasn’t pursuing it anymore, it was pursuing her! It had always pursued her. She had tried to ignore it, tried to start over and play normal college girl. How long had that lasted, a few days at most? Give up on it…sure.
“I’ll think about it,” she said dismissively, not meeting his eyes.
“That’s a ‘no’, isn’t it?” Seth said.
“Are you happy?” Chloe twisted away from him, and stood up. “Are you happy now…or ever? You always look worried. How can you be happy with me when we’re so different? You’re like this hot awesome star athlete that everyone on campus loves and you’re dating the resident freshman psychopath. How can you be happy?”
Seth clasped his hands and looked thoughtful.
“Why would you refer to yourself as a psychopath?” he asked. “You think that that’s what I think about you? Because I’m not sure what’s happening in you and Sam’s room, because I’m not sure what to believe it is, you assume that I think you’re a psychopath?”
“No,” Chloe shifted her weight from one foot to the other nervously. “No, that’s not it. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We should go back, your mom made dinner and-”
“and now I’m pushing too hard. Trying to make you open up to me,” Seth guessed. “And that makes you nervous. Why do you feel that you’ve got to hide from me? Is there something I’ve done that makes you think I’m the kind of guy that would hurt you somehow?”
Asylum Page 24
