by Jean Andrews
At midnight, I looked out at the lake, and there she was, the Lake Goddess, riding the white horse circling in front of the cabin, but she didn’t come ashore. “She’s looking at something or looking for something. What is it?” I asked out loud. “Levade is going to have to tell me what the hell she’s doing.”
* * *
Early the next morning, I walked to the Point through the woods. Not hard, I thought. I just need to keep the lake on my right in eyesight. Farther into the dense part of the forest, I momentarily lost my bearings. I reached a fork but could no longer see the lake and didn’t know which direction to take, so I headed for what I thought would be the shore as a cool wind picked up. A tall woman with European features, in jodhpurs and riding boots, intersected my path, startling me.
“If you’re looking for the point, it’s that way,” she said.
“You were on the plane! Angelique.” I was so happy to see her.
“I fly occasionally.”
“I’m sorry, but I thought everyone said you were no longer alive.” I glanced in the direction she’d indicated, and when I looked back, Angelique was gone. I was stunned, and the hair on my neck stood up. That’s way too creepy!
I headed in the direction she’d indicated, ending up in front of a long, rambling cabin with a nearly opaque screen, muting the glow of a long strand of tiny lights, making the place look more like a waterfront restaurant than someone’s home. The water’s edge was directly behind me and across from the porch steps.
Levade lay stretched out on an old slat swing, anchored to the ceiling by silver chains. She rocked above the worn and weathered porch boards and didn’t get up, but spoke through the screen.
“The writer from New York who has writer’s block.” She seemed to enjoy saying it, mocking the small town’s way of labeling people.
“What if I don’t have writer’s block but simply don’t have anything more to say?”
She poked fun. “Spoken like a Buddha.”
The two dogs were at attention, looking at me as if I were a squirrel they might need to decapitate.
“I assume the dogs are safe?”
“Why would you assume that?” She grinned.
I made no further attempt to approach them. “If I’m the Buddha, although that does seem to throw shade on my belly fat, then you’re the lady of White Horse Point, whose horse avoids roads.”
She stood suddenly and opened the screen door. “I’ve known for a while you were coming.”
I have no idea what that means, I thought. Coming over to see her, coming to this town, coming into her life?
Her tone switched to flat and business-like, as if to warn me away. “You would change everything, and I don’t see how that’s possible now.”
Despite her tone and the words she was saying, I felt like she wanted me to talk to her but was fighting the urge. She liked me but didn’t want to, was even angry with herself for liking me.
“What do you mean that I would ‘change everything’?”
“We’ll both know soon enough,” she replied, and I didn’t know what to say about that, so I stuck with what I did know.
“In the hardware store, you answered Frank on my behalf. Why?”
“Because I know him and you don’t.”
Nothing to argue about there. “I’m just curious because you silently paddle in front of my cabin—”
“I can quit doing it,” she said with a grin, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other.
This wasn’t going well. “Why do you do it? I mean, late at night in the lake instead of daylight on the road?”
“Too many cars on the road. Alizar isn’t fond of cars. And I can see your parking area under the pines from there. And no one on the road can see me.”
“I see.” My mind registered that she must be an eccentric. Nonetheless, I wasn’t too happy about the cold reception. After all, she showed up at my cabin, and we’d spoken, even laughed together, and I’d treated her with respect, so why was she being so haughty? “I suppose you’re sort of the self-assigned lake patrol and security detail. Well, then, thanks for caring, but I think I’m safe. Nice chatting. See you on your next lap…from a distance, of course.”
I turned to head back into the woods, sorry I’d given the woman that much of me. She is mercurial and rude…and sexy, I thought. Probably her aloofness makes her sexy. Or the way she carries herself in that straight, stately posture, as if she’s the fucking queen of the pines. As if on cue, the pine needles overhead brushed up against one another in the wind and, like an ethereal broom, literally swept me back around.
“I’ve met your aunt, at least I think it was your aunt—twice.” I had no idea why I said that. In fact I felt like Angelique was whispering in my ear and making me speak.
“She told me.”
“So your aunt’s still alive.”
“No…and yes.”
I paused to take that contradiction in. I believed in ghosts in the abstract, but ghosts who insert themselves into your life were, if not unbelievable, at least chilling. Nonetheless, I’d talked to some woman named Angelique who looked absolutely real. “She told you she met me? What did she tell you about me?”
“She likes you, but of course she’s operating from a different plane.”
“Well, you should listen to your aunt. I think she’s a pretty damned good judge of character.” I spotted the tarot card symbol tacked to her porch post. “You do readings?” I don’t know why I asked a woman who didn’t seem to want me around to do a reading for me. She could fuck it up just to torture me. Tell me I’ll be dead in three weeks or that I’ll lose my mind and remarry Ben.
“Would you like me to read for you?”
“I didn’t bring my wallet. Maybe next time.” My chance to escape.
“My ‘welcome to the woods’ gift.”
She joined me on the wide porch steps, signaled the dogs, and they ignored me, going back to sleep under the porch swing. From a black velvet bag, she extracted a deck of worn tarot cards. “Concentrate on what you want to know, relax your mind, and draw several cards.” I was fixated on her long, slender legs and perfect breasts, and on the light on her features that turned her from woman to man, and girl to woman.
I did as she asked, thinking at this very moment, I would like to know if I will ever find someone I truly love. I don’t know where that thought came from. Only last week I’d made a pact with myself to trade true love for fame and fortune.
She touched the cards and stared at them for several minutes. Then she took my hand, turned it skyward, and brushed her fingers across my palm, and the wind trailed after her touch. My skin tingled all the way up my arm and onto my neck, my blood pressure skyrocketed, and I thought I’d pass out. She looked at my palm carefully, slowly drawing her index finger down every line in my hand.
“You’ve never really known love. You are in constant conflict with men. You’ve been waiting…for something or someone. It’s in front of you now…right here.” She pointed to a card with a queen on it. “But danger is associated with it. Some risk. That’s all I see.”
“What kind of danger,” although I didn’t care what kind. I just wanted her to keep holding my hand. Why do I want this strange woman to keep touching me?
“Your voice has been hiding in your work. It’s public yet silent. Until you ‘say it,’ you can’t ‘have it.’” She dropped my hand, got up, took her cards and went back onto the porch, then disappeared into the darkened house.
Well, that was a rude good-bye. I sat for a moment mulling over her mysterious words. What am I not saying? Then I walked into the woods. I could make out a muted image of a car slowly passing by on the road behind her cabin, and I stopped. Maybe she’s in danger herself. Maybe I just don’t like the idea that she has other friends. I’m not her friend. I don’t even know her.
The car disappeared down the road, but I stayed and watched as she came back out onto the porch, opened the black velvet pouch again, and extr
acted the worn cards, which she laid out on the table. Drawing three, she stared at them and finally shook her head from side to side as if telling herself no, then said something that sounded like “too dangerous.”
Chapter Ten
Saturday night, I heard a soft but somewhat formal knock at my door. Not the kind of knock that says, “Hey, it’s your neighbor,” but a more tentative, respectful knock, and on the lakeside, where no one ever entered. I opened the door and there she was. My heart skipped over several times, and I just stood there smiling at her.
“Would you like to have dinner with me on the island?” she asked, seeming far more normal than when we’d last met.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Do I need to bring anything?”
She shook her head no.
I was in shorts and a T-shirt and tennis shoes, but I didn’t dare request time to change, for fear she might go up in a puff of smoke since she was so mercurial. I locked the door and followed her over the embankment and down to the shoreline, this time not landing on my behind. She laughed anyway.
“Are you remembering that I fell down this hill the last time we met?”
“I remember that my aunt said I would recognize you because you would fall.”
“Angelique said I was clumsy?” That revelation put me off a little.
“She said that’s how I would recognize you. She made no comment as to your agility.”
I liked the rather elegant way she phrased things, carefully choosing her words. And I liked the way she moved—strong strides and then leaps like a dancer.
“How do we get to the island?”
“I have a boat.” She shot me a look. And she never forgets anything.
I climbed into her duck boat—a wide, flat-bottomed, green metal craft that was sturdy but slow—and she motored off out of the cove, handling the boat as someone would who’s done it all her life.
All around the lake were neat boat docks with small fishing craft tied to them, belonging to a tiny armada of fishermen here for a few weeks of recreation. About a mile farther, into the middle of the lake, a small island rose out of the water. Guiding the boat onto the shore, she told me to step onto the land, not into the water, because there was no beach. I stepped onto the boat’s first metal bench seat, then bounced off it to the second, and then leapt onto the prow and made another leap onto land, trying to appear agile, in case Angelique is watching, I thought, but truthfully, in case Levade is watching.
The underbrush was heavy, the island uninhabited save for a few rain-soaked campfires left behind, a sign that others had enjoyed this reclusive spot.
She spread an old horse blanket, bearing the initials LF discreetly stitched in one corner, onto the ground and unpacked our dinner from a modest tan wicker basket, which gave me a few minutes to look at her. She was small, but her short-sleeved T-shirt revealed tan and sculpted arms, and the calves of her legs were muscled. She was physically quick, but wary of her surroundings like a small animal. Her hair was more than blond. It was golden, and it seemed to swirl in directions that focused you on her ethereal blue eyes. Her ears were small and close to her head, and her nose aristocratic, like those I’d seen on Grecian marble busts. She had a relatively long neck that led to a determined chin and a magnificent smile, which she flashed in my direction as she unpacked chicken and some sort of pasta.
“I thought you’d be vegan,” I said.
“I thought you’d be fried chicken.” She smiled and then gave me a penetrating stare that didn’t feel like we were talking about fried chicken. I swallowed nervously. Why does this woman make me so uncomfortably excited?
She asked if I liked the food, and I told her it was the best fried chicken I’d ever eaten, and it was, but I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was in knots, over what I had no idea. I was just nervous and jittery and happy. It was as if she had an energy field around her, and I had entered it and started vibrating to a frequency I’d never known.
I smiled at her, and she said, “You know of course that you have a very sexy smile. You should never stop smiling.”
“Not a hard request in this environment,” I said, and never stopped smiling. “How did you end up here?”
“I invited you to dinner.” She grinned mischievously and then grew serious. “I came to stay with my aunt Angelique when I was young, to help with the horses. When she died, she left the cabin and land to me. And before you ask, I promised her I wouldn’t sell it. I was raised forty-five minutes from here. My parents divorced a long time ago, and my mother died of dementia six months ago. So it’s me, and Alizar, and of course Angelique.”
“Doesn’t make for a very big Thanksgiving dinner,” I said. “My parents live on a small farm in Missouri, and I don’t see much of them. Ben, my ex, didn’t like the center of the country. But it’s on me. I could have taken a vacation and gone there if I’d wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I laughed. “You’re the psychic. You tell me.”
She pursed her lips and was silent for a moment, then drew little symbols in the dirt with one finger as she spoke. “They don’t like what you write…too many murders. And they wish you’d married a nice farm boy twenty years ago and given them grandchildren.”
“You are psychic.”
“You should go see them.” She brushed away her drawings with the palm of her hand.
“Is something wrong? Are they sick?”
“No. You just need the connection.”
“I’ll put that on my to-do list. That’s quite a subzero promise you made your aunt, that you’d never leave here. Don’t you get lonely, particularly when summer is over?”
“Sometimes. But my aunt promised me…” her tone indicated even she knew the promise was a bit futile, “that if I would stay, she would send me someone who would love and protect me.”
“And has she made good on her promise?”
“Over the years, she’s sent me a few people.” Her eyes were suddenly riveted on me. “But she and I have different taste in women.”
My heart slapped against my chest as it had in the subway when I thought a woman’s life was in danger, perhaps this time mine.
“I’ve talked to her about that.” She laughed, and I found myself giddy and laughing along with her.
So I’m on an island with a gorgeous lesbian, or bisexual, or pan-sexual who has prepared me a picnic dinner, and I don’t want to delve into the meaning of that, and I don’t want this evening to end.
“I think I was behind you one day when you were in the post office.” I nervously changed the subject as we ate. “You don’t talk very much when you go into town.”
“You followed me.”
My cheeks flushed. “I did. Because there’s no one up here who—”
“Because you like the way I look.” Her pointed delivery skewered me whenever I tried to state something that wasn’t perfectly true.
I must have gone from red to purple, because she laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with liking the way people look. I like the way you look. You have an elegant but just slightly disheveled appearance. Like you know how to dress but you don’t really care. My aunt was like that, and she was more psychic than I am, but she didn’t advertise it. Why are you here, Taylor?” Her tone startled me. I felt like I’d been voted off the lesbian love-island and deposited on a therapist’s couch. “It’s not just about writing.”
“Well, good question,” I said, giving myself time to decide what I wanted to share. “I’ve been married, and, in fact, I’ve had several other relationships, but nothing’s really worked. Men are so different from women.”
“How’s that?”
“Men are ‘in the moment’—let’s eat, let’s fight, let’s fuck. Women are more in their heads—let’s think about it, analyze it, organize it. So when you put men and women together in a relationship, they’re just not seeing things the same way, or maybe I’m not your normal woman. Anyway, emotional connection with my
lovers was always my challenge, so I’m told, and it got worse with Ben. I’ve been jammed, and that’s affected my ability to write, and, I guess, I’ve been trying to…waiting to…” I paused, searching for the right words.
“To feel something.” Levade supplied them.
“Yes.” I hadn’t really been able to articulate that idea, and it seemed to beg that I reveal more than I wanted to, so I quickly shifted to a lighter topic. “Feeling something is easier in the city, because you’re always in sensory overload, but I’m not a true New Yorker. Having been raised in Missouri, I struggle a bit with the culture—lusting after Gold Rush nail polish at a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a bottle, or craving a massage from a Japanese guy who jumps up on the massage table and walks on your back.”
“You don’t like massages?”
“I do. It’s just not something…” And before I could finish the sentence, she was behind me, rubbing my neck and shoulders. Her hands, intensely strong, massaged up and down my arms, then clasped my neck, kneading the tightness, running up and down my spine, massaging each vertebrae, her palms coming to rest beside one another at the nape of my neck, then separating quickly, whereupon she grabbed my shoulders, squeezed firmly, and then threw her hands into the air as if discarding my pain into the universe.
“Your energy is blocked,” she said, and I moaned, though I could just as easily have toppled over or gone into a trance. I felt like I was up above the pine trees, over the lake, floating with a feeling so warm and relaxing I never wanted her to stop. “You’re way too tense,” she added for good measure, and then suddenly, I felt her focus shift.
Before I could thank her for the amazing massage, she had danced away and was packing up the basket and folding the blanket, as she signaled for my silence. I was physically limp and completely confused as she hurried us into the boat.
A silver flash of light from the metal prow of a fishing boat caught my eye, and I could barely make out two men mooring their craft on the opposite side of the island.
“Who are they?” I whispered.
