by Laura Brodie
Sarah shook her head as she stepped away from the paintings. Why did she always blame herself? David was the one at fault here—the sneaking voyeur—no matter how reasonable he might sound, how full of self-justifying logic. Her husband was a self-righteous man; even death had not humbled him.
At eight o’clock Sarah settled into bed with her remote control, lying in darkness while the local forecast crawled across the bottom of her screen. Somewhere between the wind speed and the barometric pressure she heard a voice close to her ear calling, “Sarahhh . . . Sarahhh,” and she swam up from the half-world between waking and sleep, sensing that the sound was in her room, coming from the shadows beside her bed. David was back.
“Leave me alone.” She wrapped a pillow around her ears, but a crackle in his voice made her sit upright, and she saw red lights blinking on the answering machine. “I know you’re there, Sarah. Please pick up . . . I need you to come to the river. The trees are still turning, you would like the colors.” A long pause followed, both of them listening for the other. “Come to the river, Sarah,” and the machine cut off. She remained silent while the memory of his voice evaporated, then she leaned back into her pillows and imagined mountains green and gold, with drops of bloodred maple.
The next morning she reached across her bed and pressed play, thinking to conjure David’s voice by daylight, but there were no new messages. Strange, she did not remember erasing his plea, but she did recall something else: he had no telephone. It was a dream. All of it, dreams.
Time to call a therapist, she thought as she walked into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Time to call Margaret and confess the whole story of her resurrected husband. The two of them could drive out to the cabin and search for David’s ghost in the closets and underneath the beds. And when they didn’t find him they could make a plan for Sarah’s future, a strategy for tethering her mind to this world.
No, she couldn’t call Margaret. If David was real, then she shouldn’t expose him, and if he wasn’t, why shame herself? One quick trip to the cabin could confirm or dispel all her delusions. Then why did she hesitate?
Sarah sat at the table for half an hour, trying to read the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. She knew the reason for her fear, although she wouldn’t say it aloud. It was not that David might be a hallucination; that idea was almost comforting in the power it granted her imagination. No—she dreaded something more obscure, something between life and illusion. What bothered her was the possibility that what had returned to her on Halloween night was a wandering spirit, a half-life caught in a purgatorial state.
Sarah had always believed in spirits. She had believed in them as a child, apologizing to the ghosts of birds and moles killed by her tabby cat, burying their frail corpses in blankets of pine straw. She had believed even more in adolescence, standing beside her grandmother’s grave on Kiawah Island, in a cemetery where spirits seemed to hiss in the Atlantic breezes. But her first true sighting had come in this very house, four days after her mother’s death. She had woken past midnight to find a hazy figure sitting at the foot of her bed, pale and translucent, neither female nor male, hardly a face at all, but somehow parental. She hadn’t woken David, sensing that the visitor was there for her sake alone, and the vision had faded as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. But she had told him the next morning, eliciting a single, indulgent nod. In all his medical school dissections, his years of flashlit searches into throats and ears and eyes, he had never encountered anything so amorphous as a soul.
How strange it would be if David, the unbeliever, had now become a ghost. How strange and how terrible. Because Sarah not only believed in ghosts, she feared them. She dreaded their loneliness, their longing and disappointments. In her experience, ghosts always seemed to want something—something that could never quite be given.
Another twenty minutes and she bowed to her inertia. A body at rest remains at rest, she thought as she carried a bagel to her bedside table and crawled beneath the covers, the weather maps flashing green and blue across her face. Drifting in and out of sleep, she heard the telephone again, one . . . two . . . three rings. The machine clicked on and Sarah waited for David’s coaxing syllables.
“Sarah? Are you there?”
Judith Keen’s crisp Boston accent had the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers.
“Hello, Judith? I’m here, let me turn off the machine.”
“I’m glad I reached you.” Judith didn’t pause. “I’ve been meaning to set up an appointment to go through David’s work. We’ve got less than three weeks before the show, but Tom Bradley says he can frame most of the paintings if I get them to him at the beginning of next week. I was wondering how Monday looks on your calendar.”
“My calendar,” Sarah answered, “is nonexistent.”
“Well then. All right. How about if I come by your place at ten o’clock to start picking things up?”
“Fine.”
“Wonderful. I’ll see you then.”
That decided it. Sarah rose from bed and opened her closet. She had a task and a deadline that required her to go to the cabin. Half of David’s paintings were stored there; a few of his best pieces hung on the walls. Armed with a practical reason for her visit, she could face him with dignity, not like some fish he had lured with a pretty fly. There, in his presence, she would know whether he was real, or whether her hand could pass through his chest and wave him off in a pillar of smoke.
• 16 •
Driving into the Appalachian foothills, Sarah felt the wind pushing at her doors. Damp red leaves blew onto her windshield, then somersaulted away over the sunroof. The trees were whittled down to lace, revealing glimmers of the Shannon to her right, backed by rocky cliffs that spanned the opposite shore. When the road leaned to the left, the river disappeared behind her, but always she came back to it, following its path through layer upon layer of the Blue Ridge.
After thirty minutes she reached the eastern side of Hogback Mountain, where a cluster of white wooden houses, a Baptist church, and a tiny brick post office constituted the village of Eileen. Turning right onto Possum Run, she passed the general store that had provided David with his necessities; its picnic table and drink machine stood silent and conspiratorial. The road was draped with arching trees that threw shadows across her hood. Pavement gave way to gravel, with driveways every three hundred yards or so. They had bought the cabin for its invisibility. Even in winter, with the trees bare, there was no glimpse of other houses, no hum of distant highways. No postmen, no garbagemen, no salesmen or evan gelicals. Only a cluster of mountain laurel and rhododendron to mark the beginning of their property.
As she turned into the driveway, she noted how the summer rains had carved into the road, leaving long trenches that scraped the bottom of her car as she wound back toward the river. When she pulled up at the cabin’s side she was a little disappointed to find no one there to greet her. She had imagined that David might be waiting at the window, but perhaps that was a woman’s fate. Even so, the sound of the first car to arrive in months should have brought him out from any corner of the house or yard.
She stepped from the car, noticing the leaves that clogged the gutters, the pine straw on the walkway. She tried the doorknob and found it locked. Lifting a brick from underneath a holly bush, she took out the spare key and let herself inside.
The cabin appeared just as she and Margaret had left it. To her right was the open kitchen, its pine-green Formica uncluttered and clean, a washrag hanging over the silver faucet. To her left stood the back of the sofa, checked green and white and peppermint, draped with the navy-blue afghan she had crocheted in college. A braided rope rug lay in front of the sofa, and a cane-backed rocking chair sat beside a stone hearth that reached up to the ceiling’s exposed cedar beams. To the right of the hearth, David’s easel still held its unfinished painting, brushes soaking in acrid jars.
She entered the room and rested her purse on the kitchen island, where three wooden stools were tuck
ed neatly in place. Five more paces and she stood at the polished pine dining table with its four polished chairs, shining with sunlight that poured from glass double doors leading onto the deck. Opening those doors, she stepped outside, surveyed the mildewed deck cushions, the locked shed to her left, and the empty dock at the foot of the yard. The river beckoned, and she walked down the deck stairs and waded into the grass.
Ahead of her, the dock needed repair. Splintery boards formed curling grins, and the railing listed to port. Stepping carefully across the planks, she walked the fifteen feet out to the dock’s limit. When she glanced back, the cabin looked small and sad, its closed windows a pair of sleeping eyes. He is not here, she thought. He was never here.
Deep in the river the limbs of a tree reached up from the bottom, making her wonder what it would feel like to drown. Not in the metaphorical sense—she knew a little of that already—the sensation of darkness closing in, the muffled hearing, the constriction in her lungs. Half of the people around her seemed to be drowning daily, in their worries, their jobs, their uncontrollable excesses. But all of life was not metaphorical. There were real rivers, real lakes, real lungs breathing real water. It could not be peaceful, to drown for real.
She closed her eyes, lifted her face, and let her cheeks absorb the rare November warmth. Soon enough the weather would be chilly as her mood, but a scrap of summer was left in this day. In front of her, the river swelled into a swimming hole, deep enough in high water for headlong dives. To her left it narrowed into a mild rapid, where the water greeted the rocks in an ancient tongue. Its clicks and rolling consonants formed incantations, and Sarah’s mind joined the spell, repeating three words, over and over: David Robert McConnell.
A few minutes more and the snap of a branch switched open her eyes. Someone was walking along the riverbank, crushing the fallen leaves. She peered into the trees upstream and saw a moving shadow, scarcely human, a patch of shifting darkness. As she looked more carefully the figure assumed legs, arms, and fingers, each new appendage touching her with dread.
What had she conjured from the forest? She rose and hurried off the dock, gauging the distance she would have to cover to reach her car. This was stupid, so stupid, to have driven alone to the middle of the woods at a dead man’s invitation. Nothing good could come of this.
To her left, the figure was gaining height, hair, and clothes, and when she turned to look at the forest’s edge, where the trees gave way to clearing, a fully formed man emerged in the sunlight, with a fishing rod in one hand and a bucket in the other. It was David, still wearing his green flannel shirt.
When he saw her, his face broke into a reassuring grin. He approached within a few feet, laid his bucket and rod in the grass, and wiped his hands on the bottom of his shirt. “Thanks for coming.”
What was this brave new world, where dead men returned with smiles and open arms? He took two steps forward, ready to embrace her, but she moved back.
“I didn’t come for you. I came for your paintings.” David lowered his arms. “Judith wants to have an exhibit of your work.”
“A posthumous show?” He smiled, and reflexively she smiled back, but stopped short.
“Well . . .” David sighed. “Follow me.” When he knelt to lift his bucket, Sarah glimpsed two glassy-eyed trout floating in bloody water.
Inside, he laid the fish on a cutting board and walked into the bedroom: “I want to show you something.” Sarah followed, noting how the bed was neatly made, just as she had left it three months before, but within the shuttered closet David revealed a cache of charcoal sketches and chalk drawings she had never seen. He stepped back into the hall and opened the door to the second bedroom, where half a dozen oil paintings leaned against the wall—detailed depictions of the surrounding landscape.
“You’ve been busy,” she said.
“I’ve run through most of my supplies. I was hoping you could get some more.”
Ah yes, his girl Friday. Running errands, buying supplies, helping to make things easy. That would make him happy, the selfish idiot. And yet, as she knelt to study the landscapes, some of the bitterness started to fade. These were better than anything he’d done in the past ten years. Three months of solitude had allowed him time to pore minutely over his canvases, experimenting with color and light and texture.
“They’re lovely,” she said, impressed by how each goose feather was carefully delineated. Inside the second bedroom she thumbed through the charcoal sketches, stopping at the final work. Her own eyes stared back, dark and brooding. She was lying in bed among disheveled covers, turned slightly toward the viewer, drowsy and dream-filled. Light filtered through her bedside curtains, illuminating strands of hair that circled her breasts. The effect was tender, wistful, and utterly foreign.
David watched from the door. “Choose what you like. Or better yet, take them all. But stay for lunch.”
Inside the main room she sat at the table, watching David clean his fish. He sliced the tail, fins, and head with surgical precision, and scooted them to the side of the board. Then he split open the white belly and scooped out its organs, shaking them into the trash. “I’ve become quite a fisherman,” he said as he pulled out the skeleton. “It’s the only fresh food I can get right now. During the summer the general store sells local vegetables and eggs. But now it’s filled with chips and hot dogs.”
She watched in silence as he washed the blood from his hands.
“I saw the paper’s announcement,” he continued. “About the exhibit. How did that happen?”
Sarah shrugged. “Judith came out to the house on a condolence call. She saw some of your paintings and seemed genuinely impressed. So I took her into the basement and let her look through everything. She said she had no idea you were so talented.”
He laughed. “I suppose it’s flattering.”
Sarah turned her face away, toward the river. He had no right to be pleased with himself, this man who ran away from his commitments, who snuck into houses and listened to other people’s conversations.
“What is your plan?” she asked. “Are you going to come back?”
He turned off the water, took two beers from the refrigerator, and placed one in front of her. “I don’t know if I could come back at this point. I know I couldn’t get my job back. They wouldn’t want a doctor who takes a three-month sabbatical without asking anyone. And I don’t know about the neighbors. I guess we could tell them that I had some sort of nervous breakdown.” He twisted the cap and took a long swallow. “But you’ve already got the insurance money, right? And the college’s death benefit? We’d have to return all that. I suppose we might be accused of insurance fraud.”
Sarah winced. It had never occurred to her that she might be blamed for this, that she could be viewed as anything other than a passive victim.
“I’m giving half the insurance money to the college. To set up a scholarship fund in your name.”
David laughed again. “I don’t think that will satisfy the Allstate men.”
Her nails dug thin crescents into her palms. “So what is it that you want?”
David peeled a thin strip of label from his bottle. “I thought we might go kayaking, the way we used to. Or go biking up into the hills.” He paused to look into her eyes. “I’d like to go back to the way things were ten years ago. Or not back really, but forward to someplace different.”
Sarah merely stared. “You’ve set us up for insurance fraud because you’re feeling nostalgic?”
“No one will ever know,” he said, “unless you tell them.”
When Sarah didn’t answer, he rose from his chair. “I don’t have any plans beyond this week, or even this afternoon. I just wanted to see you.”
He walked out to the deck to turn on the grill, and all the while her eyes followed, impressed with his aura of health. David no longer seemed to have the pallor she had noticed when he sat in her kitchen. Here, his cheeks were bright, his face rough-shaven, his arms muscular. To the left of the
hearth a two-foot log pile testified to his major pastime; he must have started chopping when the power went out.
It would serve him right, thought Sarah, to go home and turn off the electricity, change her bank account, cancel his ATM card. Let him see how long he could survive on his fishing rod. But much as she wanted to hurt David, to crush his arrogant soul, a part of her still loved him—loved him now even more than in the past twelve months, because now there was nothing predictable about her husband. Nothing was left of the old routine. He had endowed their marriage with a sense of mystery.
David served the grilled trout with a slice of wheat bread and a thick chunk of Cheddar cheese, and Sarah ate in silence, appreciative of the meal’s simplicity. A few times she thought to say something conciliatory, but no words came. When he was done, he pushed his plate aside and looked out toward the river.
“I can’t describe how it felt to rise up out of that water and be able to breathe. It was like I was a new person. I’d been given a new life, and I couldn’t go back to the old one. Staying here seemed like the best option. Maybe it was a mistake, but it’s done, and now I’m trying to deal with it.”
Sarah carried both of their plates to the sink. “I understand your motives. I just don’t know if I want to be a part of this.”
An hour later, as he helped her pack the paintings and sketches into her station wagon, she tried to speak lightly: “You know, there are better ways to get a marriage back on track.”
