Ivory and the Horn (21 page)

The motel was easy to find. They followed the long curve of the highway as it led away from the store and came upon it almost immediately as the road straightened once more.

“I don’t see a car,” Jim said.

He parked close to the highway and they all piled out of his car again. The soles of their shoes scuffed on the buckling pavement as they approached the motel proper. The tumbled-down structure looked worse the closer they came to it.

“Maybe she parked it around back,” Jilly said. “Out of sight of the highway.”

She was trying to sound hopeful, but the place didn’t look encouraging—at least not in terms of finding Brenda. It was so frustrating. She kicked at a discarded soda can and watched it skid across the parking lot until it was brought up short by a clump of weeds growing through the asphalt.

“God, it’s so creepy-looking,” Wendy said. “Way abandoned.”

It did have a forlorn air about it, but Jilly rather liked it— maybe because of that. She’d always had a soft spot in her heart for the abandoned and unwanted.

“I think it’s great,” she said.

“Oh, please.”

“No, really. I’ve got to come back here and do some paintings. Look at the way that shed’s almost leaning right into the field. The angle’s perfect. It’s like it’s pointing back at the motel sign. And the lattice work on that roofline— over there. It’s just—”

“What’s that weird
sound
?” Jim broke in.

Jilly fell silent and then both she and Wendy both heard it as well—an eerie mix of a high-pitched moan and a broken whisper. It was so quiet that it disappeared completely when a car passed on the highway behind them. Once the car was gone, though, they could hear it again.

“It… it must be some kind of animal,” Wendy said. “Caught in a trap or something.”

Jilly nodded and set off around the side of the motel at a run, quickly followed by the other two.

“Oh, shit,” Wendy said. “That’s Brenda’s car.”

Jilly had recognized it as well, but she didn’t bother replying. She had a bad feeling about all of this—the motel, Brenda’s car, that
sound.
Worry formed a knot in the pit of her stomach, but she ignored the discomfort as best she could. Head cocked, she tried to place where the sound originated. It made her shiver, crawling up her spine like a hundred little clawed feet.

“It’s coming from over there,” Jim said, pointing toward a thick tangle of rose bushes.

“That’s where Brenda said the well is,” Wendy said.

But Jilly wasn’t listening. She’d already taken the lead again and so it was she who, after pushing her way through a worn path in the rose bush tangle, first found Brenda.

Jilly almost didn’t recognize her. Brenda was wasted to the point of emaciation—a gaunt scarecrow version of the woman Jilly had known. Her clothes hung on her as though they were a few sizes too large, her hair seemed to have lost its vibrancy and was matted against her scalp and neck. She was leaning over a crumbling stone wall, head and shoulders in the well, thin arms pushing on the stones as though something was dragging her down. But there was nothing there. Only Brenda and the terrible soft keening sound she was making.

Afraid of startling her, Jilly waited until Jim and Wendy had pushed through the roses as well so that they could lend her a hand in case Brenda fell forward when she was touched. Speaking softly—just uttering meaningless comforting sounds, really—Jilly pulled Brenda back from the well with Jim’s help. When they laid her on the ground, Brenda’s eyes gazed sightless up at them, vision turned inward. But the sound she’d been making slowly faded away.

“Oh my God,” Wendy said as she took in the change that had been wrought on Brenda in just a few weeks. “There’s nothing left of her.”

Jilly nodded grimly. “We have to get her to a hospital.”

She and Wendy took Brenda’s legs, Jim her shoulders, then they carried her back through the rose bushes, all of them suffering scratches and cuts from the sharp thorns since the path was too narrow for this sort of maneuver. Brenda seemed to weigh nothing at all. Once they had her out on the lawn, Jim hoisted her up in his arms and they hurried back to his car.

“What about Brenda’s car?” Wendy said as they passed it on the way back to the motel’s parking lot.

“We’ll come back for it,” Jilly said.

25

I don’t remember much about the hospital. I feel like I was underwater the whole time—from when I hung up the phone on Jim Saturday night until a few days later, when I found myself in a hospital bed in Newford General. I don’t know where the lost time went—down some dark well, I guess.

The doctor told me I’d been starving myself to death.

I was in the hospital forever and I’ve been in therapy ever since I got out. I’m really just starting to come to grips with the fact that I have an eating disorder. Have one, had one, and always have to guard against its recurrence.

Thank god I had my health insurance premiums paid up.

The thing that’s hardest to accept is that it’s not my fault. This is something Ellie told me and my therapist keeps returning to. Yes, I’m responsible for the messes I’ve made in my life, but I have to understand where the self-destructive impulses come from. The reason I feel so inadequate, so fat, so ugly, so mixed up, is because all my life I’ve had certain images pounded into my head—the same way that everybody does. Perfect ideals that no one can match. Roles to play that—for whatever reason—we can’t seem to adjust to. When you don’t toe the line, it’s not just the outside world that looks askance at you; you feel in your own head that you’ve let yourself down. »

Logically, it all makes sense, but it’s still a hard leap of faith to accept that the person I am is a good person and deserves recognition for that, rather than trying to be somebody I’m not, that I can never be, that it would even be wrong to be.

But though that’s part of my problem, it’s not the real root of it. Every woman has to deal with those same social strikes against her. For me, it all comes back to my dad, to this belief that if I’d been better, prettier, he wouldn’t have killed himself; that if I could somehow regain the sexless body of a child—look like a child, be the perfect child—I could win him back again.

Understanding that is even harder.

I weigh a hundred and twenty-seven pounds now, but I still haven’t taken up smoking again. As for my finances— I’m working on them. I had to declare personal bankruptcy, but I’m going to pay everybody back. I have to, because I don’t think anybody else should have to pay for my mistakes—no matter what the extenuating circumstances leading up to those mistakes. A friend of Jilly’s got me a job at
The Daily Journal
doing proofing, copyediting, that sort of thing. The pay’s not great, but there’s room to move up.

Things never really worked out between Jim and me—my fault again, but I’m trying not to feel guilty about it. I just couldn’t accept that he cared for me after he’d seen how screwed up I can get. I know it wasn’t pity he felt—I mean, he obviously liked me before things got really weird—but I could never look at him without wondering what he was seeing: me, or that creature I became by the well. Jilly says he still asks about me. Maybe one day I’ll feel confident enough to look him up again.

There was no
rusalka
—that’s pretty much the general consensus, myself included. Sort of. Wendy says I must have seen a reflection of myself in the window of the motel room and just freaked out. My therapist simply says there’s no such thing, but won’t offer explanations for what I thought I saw except to tell me that I was in a disturbed state of mind and that people are liable to experience anything in such a situation.

I don’t quite buy it. I don’t know if there really was a water-wraith or not, but there’s something in water that’s still haunting me. Not a bad something, not a nightmare creature like the
rusalka,
but still something not of this world. When I talked about it with Jilly once, she said, “You know the way Christy talks about ghosts being a kind of audiovisual memory that a place holds? Well, water’s supposedly the best conductor for that sort of a thing. And that’s why there are so many holy wells and sacred lakes and the like.”

I suppose. The ghosts in my head are gone, but I hear water all the time and my dreams always seem to take me underwater. I’m never scared, it’s never spooky. Just … strange. Dark and cool. Peaceful in a way that I can’t explain.

Wendy says I shouldn’t let Jilly fill my head with her weird ideas, but I don’t know. The interesting thing about Jilly is that she’s totally impartial. She accepts everything with the same amount of interest and tolerance, just as she seems to love everybody the same—which is why I think she’s never really had a steady boyfriend. She never quite has that extra amount of love it would take to make a relationship with just one person work.

Wendy disagrees with that. She says that Jilly just can’t get close to a man that way. I get the feeling it’s got to do with something that happened to Jilly when she was growing up, but Wendy’s as closemouthed about that as she is with any bit of privileged information, and I’ve never quite got up the nerve to ask Jilly herself. I’d hate to remind her of some really awful thing in her past—if that’s truly the case.

Whatever it was, she’s moved beyond it now. Her life is so contained, so steady, for all her fey impulses. I think I envy that about her more than her thinness now.

I wonder if there’s anything she envies in other people.

It’s autumn now—months later. Like I said, the ghosts don’t come to me anymore, but sometimes I still hear voices drifting up from out of the well when I go for my Sunday drives up to the motel. Or maybe it’s only the wind. All I know is that I still like to come sit on the old stone wall here by the well and when I leave, I feel … different. It’s as though the calmness that’s hidden away in that well enclosed by its rose bushes imparts something to me: maybe no more than simply another way of seeing things.

I don’t worry about it; I just appreciate it. And if I come back a little spacey, saying odd things which seem very insightful to me, but are confusing to other people, nobody seems to mind. Or at least they don’t say anything about it to me.

As for Ellie, I went up into the rooms above the office where she said she lived and there was nothing there. No Ellie, no sign of anyone living there, except it was very clean, as though someone took the trouble to sweep it out regularly and maybe put some wildflowers in a vase on the window sill when they’re in season. There was a glass jar with dried flowers in it when I was there, and it didn’t smell musty the way the other rooms do.

I tried to find an obit for her, but as someone pointed out to me, she could have died anywhere. If she didn’t die in or around the city, there wouldn’t be an obit in the morgues of any of our local papers. Still, I looked.

Jilly’s got another answer, of course. She says she knows what Ellie meant about the well being cursed: Ellie must have wished that she’d always be at The Wishing Well, so after she died, her ghost was forever doomed to haunt the motel. Which, as Wendy put it, is par for the course, considering the way Jilly sees the world.

I like to think Elbe’s just gone south for the winter.

The first time I go back to the wishing well, I find four dollar bills held down by a stone on the wall of the well. I look at them and wonder, a refund for the days I’d paid for, but didn’t stay at the motel?

I drop them down into the shaft, one after the other, but I don’t make a wish. My life’s not perfect, but then whose is? All I can do is forget about miracles and try to take things one day at a time. I’m the only one who can empower myself—I don’t need my therapist to tell me that.