Cradle Lake (21 page)

She, too, is possessed by evil thoughts,
Alan told himself, picturing the bottle of pills and the way Heather had lain in that bathtub, her wrists opened up, the water a pinkish hue.

She, too, is—

He jerked his head and stared out into the black soup of shadows that comprised the living room. Someone was standing before one of the windows, his silhouette perfectly outlined against the windowpane.

“Who's there?” His mind raced. Feeling foolish, he nonetheless said, “Dad?”

The shape moved across the living room, vanishing as it crossed the sections of wall between the lighted windows. A moment later, Alan heard the knob on the front door turn. The door opened, a sliver of vertical dawn creeping along the frame.

Still carrying the empty water jug, Alan went to the front door. He kicked on a pair of worn slippers. When he stepped onto the porch, the cold, early morning wind made him overly aware of every inch of exposed flesh on his body. Hugging himself with one arm, he walked to the back of the house. The moon was a shimmering diode in the ether while the sun hinted at its arrival beyond the distant trees in the east.

Owen Moreland stood in front of the entrance to the path. He was dressed in a gray sweatshirt splattered with blood as dark as motor oil, and there was a nonspecific
unfurling
to one corner of his cranium, as if the skin there had doubled in size, burst, and peeled back like the petals of a wilting flower. Muddy blood dribbled from the wound in streaks down his pallid face. “Hey, Professor, happy trails.”

I'm dreaming. This isn't real.

Owen turned and slipped between the trees, down the path.

After a moment, Alan followed. Part of him believed he was dreaming. Another part knew with unrivaled certainty he was awake. When he reached the lake, Owen had disappeared. The ground fog dissipated off the lake's surface revealing a mirror-like placidity that reflected perfectly the full image of the moon. Shimmering, twinkling, spectral …

“Happy trails,” Owen said, suddenly grinning directly in front of him.

Owen's teeth had been blown from his mouth, his lower jaw a dangling, broken party favor streaming with fibrils of coagulated sinew and ink-black gore. His face split down the center, his eyes bulging off to the sides on expanding, flattened stalks like the eyes of a hammerhead shark. A gush of blood rushed forth through the vertical precipice that split his face in two, pumping like a geyser. Icy blood splashed against Alan's own face; it felt like a million shards of glass spearing into his flesh.

Alan didn't scream.

There was nothing left inside him at the moment.

Bending at the edge of the lake and moving as if still asleep, Alan filled the plastic jug.

When Alan came through the front door, he was wet, shivering, and cold. He knew instantly without remembering any of it that he had been in the lake. He was a somnambulist, a fevered perambulator with no recollection of his past, no portent of his future.

Jerry Lee was in the foyer, whimpering at the sight of Alan standing in the doorway, dripping water onto the carpet.

“Bad dog,” Alan muttered, grinning.

Jerry Lee retreated into the shadows and hid beneath a credenza.

Kicking off his sopping wet slippers and dropping his soaked T-shirt and boxer shorts to the floor, Alan crept quietly to the bathroom. The water jug was heavy, filled to the top. He set it on the edge of the bathroom sink and breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. The muscles in his chest flexed in the bathroom mirror.

He urinated for what felt like one complete revolution
of the earth. In his hands, holding himself, he felt different. He looked down. Easily discernible was the lengthening of a fleshy hood creeping toward the tip of his penis. He was flaccid and the skin was loose … but there was more of it now than there had ever been.

It's growing back, every last cut off part of me.

His ancient boyhood scars had healed, too. Two days ago, his molars had expelled the blackened pellets of his fillings into the sink while he'd brushed his teeth. And now, as insane as it seemed, his foreskin was growing back …

He shook off but stood over the toilet for what felt like two eternities.

Then, from habit, he rummaged through the medicine cabinet for his ulcer medication. However, upon locating the little white plastic tub of pills, he realized he was no longer tormented by the ulcer. It had vanished. Gone.

Still naked, he went into the bedroom. To his surprise, Heather was awake but not up, lying on her side and watching the pinkish sunrise coming through the pursed slats in the blinds. Alan stood for some time in the doorway, unwilling to move. He heard the incessant, nearly mocking drone of an invisible ticking clock—huge in his head, the Big fucking Ben of psychosomatic timepieces.

She didn't ask where he'd been. She didn't even look at him.

(He recalled snapshot images of a timeless New York—autumn trees and colors like smeared and oily paint on a palette. The smell of coffee strong in late morning, the windows open and the noises of the city pulled into the apartment as if by invisible strings. Jerry Lee barking at the passing taxis while he urinated on a sickly looking
tree surrounded by a wire-mesh sleeve out along the curb. Heather, long before the miscarriages, long before the heartache, laughing in silent reverie at things she remembered from her childhood, the beautiful memories beautiful people carry with them …)

Broken
was the word that came to him now.

“Hey,” he said. It was like speaking into a drainpipe. “Are you going to stay in bed all day?”

“I don't feel well.”

“Can I get you something?”

She shook her head.

“Water?” he said.

Again, she shook her head.

“I'll get you water,” he said anyway.

As if walking through a dream, he went into the kitchen and retrieved a glass from the cupboard, which he filled with water from the jug he'd left on the bathroom sink. Back in the bedroom, he crouched down beside Heather until they were at eye level. Her stare was lifeless, listless, as if she could see right through him.

Do you remember that summer when we went to Atlantic City for the weekend, just on a whim, and got drunk while we won nine hundred dollars playing the reds and blacks on roulette, and how we wanted you to sing at the karaoke bar—remember the karaoke bar?—but there was such a long line that we gave up and drank some more? Remember the girl named Amanda we met and how the three of us got drunk on overpriced whiskey, then went to the ocean in the middle of the night? We tore off our underwear and threw them into the sea, all of us. And we laughed. In the morning you looked like death
and said you were never going to drink again in your life, but by noon we were sipping mimosas at the bar and grill along the boardwalk and you touched my hand from across the table and your big eyes looked at me and you said, “This is it, Alan. This is what it's all about,” and you smiled so prettily, mermaid, and, Jesus fuck, that was before the nightmare, Heather, and I want that back, I want that back, I want that back …

“Here.” He had to grab one of her hands and physically wrap it around the glass of water. “Drink it. You'll feel better.”

“I don't want it.”

“Heather,” he said, his voice grave, “
drink
it.”

Without speaking another word, she brought the glass to her lips and drank.

“I don't blame you for any of this.” The words came from his mouth but they were someone else's; surely he wasn't speaking now, wasn't in control of his body, his voice. His mind was elsewhere. He was on autopilot. “I've never blamed you for any of this.”

Heather finished the water and clung to the glass. Her eyes were moist but still void of life.

Alan ran one hand across her head, smoothing back her sweaty hair. He could smell the depression coming off her in waves. She seemed to be burning up with fever. “I've been meaning—”

In the kitchen, the telephone trilled.

He rubbed her hair. Rubbed her hair. He rubbed her hair.

Ringing …

Eventually, he walked to the kitchen to answer the phone. Sunlight beamed through the windows and pooled on the linoleum. Birds were already singing in the trees. He stood
there, naked and cold, with the receiver to his ear. “Yeah?”

He thought he could hear breathing.

“Is someone there?”

But whoever it was had already hung up; the dial tone rang on like a mournful call.

He hung up the phone and went to the window, parted the curtain, peered at the street. All the houses looked silent. Still asleep. The world could crumble and fall apart in the blink of an eye. He scanned for Hearn Landry's police car but saw no sign of it.

By the time he returned to the bedroom, Heather was asleep once again. She snored lightly, her chest and belly rising and falling with ease. Alan pulled the sheets and bedspread over her and adjusted the pillows behind her head without waking her. Then he retrieved the empty glass from her hand and set it on the nightstand.

In her sleep, Heather clutched at the air. As if she didn't want to let the glass go.

As if clinging to things that were not there.

By the time classes started in the fall, Heather Hammerstun had changed. She gained some of her natural weight back and looked healthier, brighter. She had made contact with an art history professor from Alan's college, and she began painting again. By mid-September, looking spry and youthful and dedicated, she was put in touch with a gallery in the next town over, the owner of which agreed to have her work three days a week, leaving the rest of her time free to paint.

The lines that had creased her mouth and eyes for far too long had vanished seemingly overnight, along with the scars on her wrists. In fact, there was no evidence of the scars whatsoever. She never brought up the horrible events they'd left behind in New York—those events never even seemed to cross her mind anymore, Alan noticed. And he certainly did not bring them up. Soon those things had happened to some other couple, doppelgangers whose ties had been severed. The Hammerstuns were haunted no longer.

They went for long walks in Groom Park, where they picnicked on potato salad and read James Merrill, Sartre, Dylan Thomas in the fading warmth of the season. Heather
laughed
—it became this all-encompassing charm that he held on to in his own subconscious tightly at first, for fear he would lose it. But he slowly loosened the reins when the charm continued to sparkle. He began to trust it again.
You will always be here.
There was faith in that, new as it was for a man like Alan Hammerstun to finally find hope in faith.
Laughed.
He found her hypnotizing again, as he had on the day they'd married.

Of course, Heather noticed the changes in herself, too—those changes that were simply unavoidable. He heard her utter a sharp, surprised laugh one afternoon. He rushed to her only to find her leaning over the bathroom sink toward the mirror, so close her nose was practically pressed against the glass. She was tugging on her earlobes.

“This,” she'd said, “is so completely bizarre.”

He asked her what was so bizarre.

“Look,” she told him, still tugging on her earlobes. “My ears aren't pierced anymore. How the heck do you think that happened?”

He'd said he didn't know, and she had shrugged it off … though he could tell the notion stuck with her for some time.

And things got even more peculiar one evening when she experienced mild discomfort, then bled during sex. She cleaned up as best she could in the bathroom, both confused and embarrassed, while swearing it was too early for her period. (Alan could only remain motionless in bed, wondering if her hymen had grown back.)

But these things, as puzzling as they must have been to his wife, were inconsequential in the face of her release from her depression. If they bothered her, she did not say. If she thought about them throughout the day, Alan could not tell.

Moreover, Heather didn't mention the changes that were so evident in
him:
the rejuvenation of his foreskin, the childhood scars that had vanished into nothingness. Even his faded tattoos were unremarkable to her (though some nights after lovemaking she traced the ghostly remembrances of where those tattoos used to be. But she never asked what happened to them, never seemed curious in the least. Alan wondered if that was somehow part of the magic of the lake—to heal but to conceal as well.)

Happy trails.

On the darkest nights, Alan could hear Jimmy Carmichael's words whispered in his ear like the day in the morgue when he stood over his father's body. He could smell the man's stale sweat, overpowering cologne, and sour breath.

Happy trails, sport.

The singular bad event that happened in September was the death of Jerry Lee. The golden retriever's clock had finally wound down. Heather was morose for two days following the dog's death, though it was a different sort of sadness than the one that had claimed her for so long.

Alan was equally saddened, although he had grown distant with the dog in the weeks prior to its passing. Jerry Lee had become distempered and nervous. Different somehow. Frequently, the dog would urinate in the house, which Alan understood many old dogs did. But sometimes Jerry Lee would growl at Alan and twice had even snapped at him
with what Alan surmised was an intention to draw blood. Alan wondered if the freedom of the country was too much for the dog—Jerry Lee had been a city dog all his life, and the scent of the open countryside and the dog's distant, feral brethren had awoken in it some previously dormant sense of wildness. For a while, Alan even contemplated putting the dog down. He loved Jerry Lee but didn't want the beast lunging at him or Heather, of course, and he feared it was only a matter of time before that happened.