The Uninvited

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  She had been so happy to see Jay arrive that morning. But he was only stopping by to give her the news about his trip to Toronto. The news about Iris.

  “Oh, and these,” he said, heading back to the SUV. He returned with a neat pile of sunshine-yellow folded material. Curtains. “Lou figured it might be good on the downstairs windows, anyway.”

  Mimi opened one out. “Lou made these?”

  “Yeah, I know. A woman of many talents.”

  When she and Jo had carted out a “few sticks of furniture,” as Jo called it, Lou had measured the five downstairs windows. Mimi hadn’t even noticed. Jay had picked up curtain rods on his way out. Mimi was surprised at how happy she was. Curtains!

  Jay had dragged his mother’s kayak upstream a few days earlier so that they could both go down to the big house whenever they wanted without the long roundabout drive. Mimi laughed herself silly her first time out. “Hey, New York!” she shouted. “Look at me-Mimi Shapiro in a boat!” She imagined herself going back to the city buff and tanned. Yeah, right. Sore and drenched was more like it! She flipped three times the first day. She never felt really comfortable that first trip, though she was okay as long as she hugged the shore and moved at about five strokes per hour.

  “You go ahead, for God’s sake!” she said as Jay circled back to give helpful advice. “You’re making me nervous.”

  But he stayed close.

  “And to think the Eskimos hunt whales in these things,” she shouted.

  “Inuit,” he said.

  She looked at him, thinking maybe he was giving advice.

  “They’re not Eskimos; they’re Inuit.”

  Well, she certainly wasn’t Inuit.

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper,” she said to no one. “You will always be my favorite mode of transportation.”

  He had first left her alone on Friday night. He was meeting up with some friend who was in town.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Get! Scoot!”

  She had waved him off down the snye, standing barefoot in the shallow water as he glided off into the gloaming. He had to lie back on the kayak to pass under the arch of the bridge.

  “Have a good trip, honey,” she called after him. It was meant to be a joke. Jay laughed. Good.

  But the truth was she did feel like some hausfrau waving her hubby off to work. Then, as soon as he was out of sight, she returned to the little house, locked the doors, and checked the panic room. She hoisted up her mattress, opened the trapdoor, and dropped down to the earthen room, then shimmied along the tunnel with her flashlight in her teeth until she came to the door that led to the outside. Jay had put a good hefty hasp on it and padlocked it. So there were just the windows to worry about. She had gone to sleep the first couple of nights to the imagined tinkling of broken glass.

  But there was no broken glass and there were no dead birds or snake skins or messages of any kind.

  She had worried about the car, too, wished she could bring it closer, in sight of the house. Jay had suggested laying some boards down over the broken expanse of bridge-only a few feet, after all. But she couldn’t quite imagine driving on such a makeshift overpass. Worse still was the thought of having to escape the house and finding the planks gone! So she checked the car first thing every morning when she went out for her run. She checked the ground around it for signs of footsteps. For a week now, there had been nothing more serious than dew to contend with. Dew and the odd petal of a flowering tree.

  And once deer tracks.

  She imagined some deer peering into the Mini looking for whatever it was deer ate. Jelly beans? Cedar-flavored jelly beans.

  And so, bit by bit, she let the magic place settle down around her. She got into a kind of rhythm that was comforting and stimulating at the same time in ways she had never imagined possible. Up at seven, a jog down the Upper Valentine Road to where it ended at the river, a shower, breakfast, and sitting at her laptop by eight or so. Lunch at noon, like any working Joe. A little nap just for the luxury of it, a little reading, work until five, and treat yourself to a glass of wine. She found a video store in town and rented DVDs to play on her computer. What more could a girl want?

  EXT. TULLOCH-NIGHT

  FAIRY LIEUTENANT

  So what do you think, sir? Do we take her tonight?

  KING OF THE FAIRIES sips from a glass of mead. Stares at the little moonlit house.

  KING (Nodding)

  Alert the voles, the moths, the bats. Tonight we move in.

  Yikes! Maybe the aloneness was getting to her. Her script would not behave. She stared out the window at the hill in the meadow. No sign of fairy troops. Still, she wished Jay were here.

  It had been great to have him around. He had worked on his music a lot. Compared to him, she felt like a fraud. Writing a film script, yeah, right! He’s four years older than you, she told herself. But it was more than that. There was this commitment toward his art she didn’t feel, not in the same way. Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was always this conscientious or whether he was making some kind of a point.

  He worked with headphones, so it was almost as if no one was there except for the squeaking of his chair. Then he’d come down and ask if it was all right if he played or listened to something out loud. So polite. And what could she say? If she was writing, she’d close the door to her bedroom and work with her laptop on her lap and her iPod playing music she could tune out. She couldn’t tune out Jay’s music. Couldn’t tune him out, either.

  Apart from her morning run along the road, she explored the island, her mace in her pocket, though it seemed absurd in the light of day. She explored but not too far. Never into the Dark Forest. And never to the end of the snye, where the wetlands took over. The land down where the snye met the river was owned by mosquitoes that seemed to have a thing for her virgin New York flesh.

  It had been strange to watch Jay from her “office window,” arriving at the little house, pulling his kayak up onto the bank. She had felt like a voyeur watching him strip off his flotation device. Odd the feeling she felt to look at him, the fluttering inside. Don’t go there, girl, she warned herself.

  And now there was Iris. This would help to settle things down-batten down the hatches on any unwarranted flights of fantasy. She would have to decide to like Iris.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Distance was a funny thing.

  Cramer was twelve when Mavis found the little yellow house overlooking Butchard’s Creek. It was so near to Chester’s Corner, she didn’t even have to change her phone number when they moved there. The school bus that picked him up at the foot of the drive took under fifteen minutes to get him to the school in the village, Eden Elementary. The bus trundled west along the Upper Valentine over the old bridge, and they were there, just like that.

  Then in ’96, the bridge was closed down.

  The county seemed to take forever settling on what to do with it, deciding, at last, that it was underused and too expensive to rebuild. So it was condemned. And because it was unsafe to leave standing, it was torn down. All that was left now were two sets of crumbling concrete pylons in the middle of the river and the yellow-and-black barricades with DANGER written all over them, where the Upper Valentine Road ended. From the barricade, you could see the township works garage on the edge of the village. In winter when the foliage was off the trees, you could even see his old middle school. You didn’t have to have much of an arm to hurl a stone most of the way across the Eden from where the road ended. But the bus that picked Cramer up after they tore down the bridge took over forty-five minutes to get him to school each morning. Chester’s Corner, where he and his mother had lived since his birth-with its little wooden-floored grocery store and post office and the garage where she had bought the Taurus, second-hand-might as well have been the moon.

  Distance was a funny thing.

  His second year at Ladybank Collegiate, Cramer realized he could get to town quicker by river than road. It took
him just over half an hour if he put some muscle into it. He didn’t know back then who lived in the striking low house of window and yellow stone on the outskirts of town, the house with the sweeping lawns and the little jetty out onto the Eden. He passed it every good-weather morning and again as he returned in the afternoon without knowing that Marc Soto had lived there. And he didn’t know about the snye, farther upriver, the secret stream that led to the little house that had been Soto’s studio. When he had followed Jay there last fall, it was the first time he had laid eyes upon the place, but he guessed right off what it was-what it had been-and he took it all in, in its every detail. This, he knew, was the house in which he must have been conceived. The little bridge leading to it was crumbling. He noticed that as well. All these bridges that used to lead somewhere and no longer did.

  Distance was a funny thing.

  It was not until he was in high school that Cramer found himself walking the same hallways as his half-brother, Jackson Page. He had known of his existence since he was a kid. Once or twice on trips to town, Mavis had pointed Jay out to him, a boy the same age as he was, shopping with his mother, skateboarding with a friend. Now here he was every day.

  He was a month and a bit older, a big brother to Cramer. He was Jay to everyone who knew him, and everyone did-everybody, it seemed, but Cramer himself. How strange was that? They might have shared the same halls, but they were never in the same class. Jay read announcements on the school intercom, played piano at assemblies, served on the student council. He was valedictorian. They went through four years of school together but not really together, because the currents in a high school were not ones that Cramer could negotiate. He had no Bunny to handle school. He had no quick, responsive craft to find his way through those waters. But he watched Jay all the same, like he was some exotic animal or a movie star. Never talked to him, though.

  Well, once.

  He was in a line for something, and turning around he found to his surprise that Jay was standing right behind him with Iris Xu.

  “Hi,” said Cramer before he knew what he was doing.

  Jay smiled. “Hi,” he said. “Long line, eh?”

  “Yeah,” said Cramer, already regretting his impulsiveness. What was he supposed to say now?

  “Hi,” said Iris. Cramer nodded, words abandoning him. Then Iris remembered something she had been meaning to show Jay, and as she dug into her backpack to find it, the line moved on. Just like that.

  And just like that they graduated. Jay went west and Iris went to University of Toronto and Cramer stayed in Ladybank, never really expecting to see any of that crowd again, the college crowd-the ones that got away. And he didn’t, until last fall, when Jay returned and started hanging out at the house on the snye. Didn’t have a job, as far as Cramer could tell. Didn’t have to work. That stuck in Cramer’s craw. Not working. He could hardly imagine such a luxury. But that first day he saw him on the river, Cramer didn’t feel anything like anger. On the contrary! He had been sitting in the shade of a huge willow on the south shore of the Eden, looking through binoculars at the Page house across the way, and then suddenly there was Jay, climbing into his kayak, heading upstream. For one crazy moment, Cramer wanted to call to him. To paddle out of the shadows toward him “Hey, Jay. Hi! It’s me, remember?”

  Like they were soul mates or something. Princes of the river.

  Jay became a project, something to do on his days off. The house on the snye became somewhere to go. Then he started leaving him things. It happened almost by accident. A bluebird crashed into his mother’s studio window and broke its neck. She’d heard the crash and it had startled her. Cramer found the bird in the uncut grass, cradled it in his hands. It scarcely weighed a thing. But the iridescence of its wings was something. It was exactly the kind of thing you would run to show your big brother. And so he did.

  Then there was the snake skin he’d found in the woodpile. Cramer was no poet, but he looked hard at things and saw what was there. And when he looked hard at their two lives-his and Jackson Page’s-he decided that a snake skin might also be a good thing for Jay to think about. The thing you had to crawl out of if you were to grow. Anyway, a little reminder to the golden boy that he was not alone in the world.

  Then Jay fixed the upstairs window and Cramer was locked out, until he discovered the trapdoor. It was something he knew that Jay didn’t. Something he had over him.

  Cramer had never taken anything from him. The stone, but that was worthless. It was just to play with his head. Nothing truly nasty. He didn’t want to scare him away. He wanted to be noticed, and he had no idea how-no other idea how. And yes, he wanted to disturb Jay’s comfort. Comfort was what Jay had a whole lot of. A world of comfort! He wanted Jay to know what it felt like to never really be able to relax, to never really feel at ease, to never have any time off. In a way, though he couldn’t exactly explain it, he was just trying to make smaller the distance-the gulf-between them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Conchita’s was down a flight of wooden stairs to a deck suspended only a foot or two above the river, shallow at this point, offering little risk of drowning if one happened to fall drunk over the railing. Or if you accidentally pushed someone. Now, now, Mimi, she muttered to herself. I’m sure Iris will be lovely.

  The restaurant was tucked into what was once the basement of a building constructed by Scottish stonemasons a hundred and fifty years ago, never knowing that the building would one day serve quesadillas and killer margaritas.

  Blue-and-yellow Corona umbrellas were open above every table on the crowded deck but served no real purpose, for the setting sun was blocked from the patrons’ eyes by the massive old place that housed the restaurant, a craft store, and bookstore as well.

  Jay and Iris had already ordered a pitcher of margaritas when Mimi arrived, Thursday evening. She arrived late, on purpose, determined not to be the one sitting there alone and waiting. She had only packed a couple of dresses for her trip, and she dressed in the flirtiest of them before remembering that it was hardly a date. So she changed, a little reluctantly, back into her black capris and a black V-neck. She wore a lime-green plastic belt and a button that read IMPEACH NIXON. A girl had to show some style.

  Jay actually stood to introduce the two women. Could he be more chivalrous? Iris Xu was petite, but her handshake was firm. Her smile dissolved her face into a glinting array of smooth and burnished plains. Her long hair shimmered; her eyes were warm. Mimi laughed with relief. Liking her was not going to be hard at all.

  “Are you beat from the drive?”

  “No, it’s just three and a half hours,” said Iris. “Except that Jay drives exactly at the speed limit!”

  “How boring is that.”

  “I know,” said Iris, and patted Jay’s hand affectionately. High-school sweethearts now old-marrieds. Mimi wasn’t sure if she felt very young or very grown up in their company.

  Then a waitress arrived, smiling-mostly at Jay. And Mimi got carded.

  “I can vouch for her, Nikki,” said Jay while Mimi fumbled for her ID.

  “Okay, Jay,” said Nikki, blinking and winking at him and stumbling away with her tray clasped to her chest.

  Iris leaned forward, with her hand to the side of her mouth. “Nikki’s been in love with Jay since third grade.”

  “Poor thing,” said Mimi. “What does she see in him?”

  Iris shrugged. “Back then I think it was his Han Solo action figure. But now I think she’s after his kayak.”

  “Well, it is a really long kayak,” said Mimi, and Iris cracked up.

  “All right, ladies,” said Jay. “Let’s keep it down.”

  Nikki soon returned with the beer and a plate of nachos with jalapenos, sour cream-the works.

  “Restraint is so last year,” said Iris, who was as thin as a rail. And then leaning against the table, she whispered, wide-eyed, “So how weird is it to find you have a brother you never knew about?”

  Mimi poured herself a drink. �
��Oh, it’s right up there with getting arrested in the Uffizi,” she said. And she told them all about it.

  They talked about travel misadventures and then history, which was Iris’s major, and art and music and New York. Spent napkins piled up around them.

  “Sour cream alert,” said Iris, and taking Mimi’s face in her hand, she removed a smear from her cheek. They exchanged smiles and, unless Mimi was imagining it, blessings.

  “Jay was telling me you left New York in a bit of a hurry.”

  Mimi frowned. “What exactly did he tell you?”

  “A predatory prof?”

  Mimi glared at Jay.

  He threw up his hands. “She forced it out of me,” he said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Dish!” said Iris.

  Note to self, thought Mimi. Keep secrets from Jay. But Iris was not about to be put off and so Mimi dished. She didn’t mind. In fact, she was a little amazed at how crazy hungry she was to talk about it. So she told them about the exhilaration in the early days of the affair, the clandestine dates, the off-the-beaten-track venues, the surprising places one could find to be totally alone together even in an academic establishment. Then she told them how it all came undone, as Lazar got more and more infatuated.

  “It got kind of surreal,” she said.

  “Like melty?” said Iris.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, that picture by Salvador Dali with the melting clocks hanging from dead trees or whatever.”

  “Ah, melty,” said Mimi. “I guess.” But what she guessed was that Iris was getting pretty drunk. Come to think of it, so was she. Nikki had come back with a second pitcher of margaritas. Mimi had tried to decline, but Jay guessed her only real concern.

  “Nobody’s driving,” he said. “Transportation is under control.”

  She didn’t bother to ask what that meant, mostly because she wanted to keep drinking. Wanted to let go. And she had let go. Except that letting go had led to this discussion about her love life.