The Bargaining (13 page)

I follow the painting's line of sight to the little mattress fort that forms a tunnel to the entrance of the closet. The opening of the fort faces the window on the far wall, which I only now notice is open.

Hadn't I closed that the other day to keep the rain out?

I stare at the mattresses, waiting for some sort of movement to give away a hiding child. But there's no indication that anything exists beyond the dirty fabric and busted springs.

I turn to leave, but a sound from behind me pulls me back. It's like someone clearing their throat, but not quite. A gravelly, phlegmy sound, but nothing that forms a word.

Until it does.

“Play.”

A laugh burbles out, at first childlike, but then it recedes into the deep, throaty laugh of someone too old to have a voice that young. Then a gasp, and the voice struggles against itself. It tries to form another word and fails, only managing to gurgle another sound that transitions with disturbing speed from that same childlike giggle to something old.

A sharp pain sears through my index finger, and I turn to find that the door frame I've been gripping has shoved a splinter deep under my nail.

I glance toward the boy on the wall for answers, but something else has shifted in the mural. Something I'm positive I would have noticed before. From a branch on one of the trees deep in the distance hangs a tiny rope swing, a plank of wood for a seat.

The gurgling sound from the mattress fort has stopped, and once again, the room is drenched in murky silence.

“Penny, I need to run out to meet—”

April stops midway down the hall when she sees my face. Then she rushes the rest of the way to join me in the doorway.

“What?”

“There's someone . . .” I start to say, but all I can do is point to the mattress fort. I drop my hand when I see my finger trembling in midair.

April points to where I just indicated, her face puckering, a request for details I can't provide.

She takes one step into the room, but before she can go any farther, I'm overcome with some bizarre, protective urge and barrel past her, knocking the first mattress in my path over with fists I didn't notice forming. I release a battle cry from somewhere deep in my gut, one that only reaches my ears after I've thrown the second mattress down to reveal absolutely nothing.

“Jesus, Penny!” April is across the room now, standing clear
of the demolition I've initiated in my animal state. She's clutching her cardigan around her, a flimsy shield against my mania.

I topple the rest of the mattresses for good measure, but I can already see that it's utterly pointless. There's no one there.

“Stop! Just stop!” April shouts, even though there's nothing to shout over. The chaos has passed.

“I heard a voice,” I say, desperate not to show her how terrified I was a second ago. I'm not sure what I expected to find, but it wasn't a little kid. That I know for sure. And Rae's never sounded like that.

“Well, the window's open,” she says, thrusting an arm toward the fluttering curtain. “You must have heard someone outside.”

“Who? Nobody lives here, remember? The agent told you that right before you signed your life away for this heap.”

April starts to say something, but then her eyes roll to the ceiling, and I can see the record in her head turn over.

“The Realtor. Dammit, I'm going to be late. She still hasn't given me the full inspection report, and I told her I'd meet her in town in . . .” She looks for the watch that's missing from her wrist. “Well, I'm not going to make it in time,” she says. Then she remembers my mini-breakdown. “Are you going to be okay if I leave you alone for a few hours?”

I don't answer her. I'm still looking at the mess of mat
tresses at my feet, the rubble where someone should have been hiding. I continue to scan the room for anything I might have missed.

“Penny?”

April's in front of me now, ducking to find my eyes, but I barely see her. All I see is the boy's face on the wall behind her, his forehead a smooth surface, unworried. And something else. A tiny, almost indistinguishable upturn at the corner of his mouth.

“I'm fine,” I say, an automatic response.

“Three hours max,” April says on her way out the door, then calling from the bottom of the stairs, “Maybe try priming the walls in that room? Could be a good way to release some of that pent-up energy, huh? But leave the mural. It's so beautiful!”

As soon as I hear the front door shut, I pick my way through the wreckage of the room toward the mural, heading straight for the swing hanging from the most distant tree of the little painted forest. I get up close, my face two feet from the boy's face, his eyes fixed on the remains of the mattress fort. I run my finger over the swing's wood plank, and it smears under my print. I pull back and rub the wet paint between my fingers.

I turn with some reluctance to the destroyed tunnel
­leading to the closet and kick one of the fallen mattresses. Now that I'm up close, I see something I couldn't have seen from my perspective in the doorway: a handprint, maybe two-thirds the size of my own, outlined in mud, smeared by falling mattresses.

I bend down to touch it. It's still wet.

From this angle, I see something else, in what I thought was an empty closet. Far in a shadowy corner, the edge of a bright red box no larger than a pack of gum is visible. Ornate yellow letters spell out
THE WASHINGTONIAN, EST. 1889
. I slide it open to reveal two wooden matchsticks.

Setting the matchbox down, I turn back to the boy on the wall, but his little smirk is as cryptic as before, the changes on the mural fraying the twine holding my nerves together. When I peer closer at his palms, I see something else has changed as well.

The boy's hands, still empty, are no longer identical. One of his palms is now smudged brown.

I hate this painting more and more as each hour passes.

A clicking sound in the room next door pulls me out of my trance, and I return to my temporary quarters. I find Linda lying on the floor, lens to the ceiling.

I consider and discard a thousand possibilities about how she could have wound up here.

Picking her up, I check for damage and find none. Her lens cap dangles from its string.

Then I think back to the last thing I told her.
Show me something new.

I turn the menu dial to view the register of digital images and see the last two pictures captured are of the ceiling. Then I advance to the previous frame.

I see my own heels, standing in the doorway of the room next door. A long strand of dark hair obscures one side of the picture almost entirely, but there I am and there the mattress fort is.

And there somebody was, taking a picture of all of it from right behind me.

10

T
HE WEIGHT OF
L
INDA'S STRAP
feels good against the back of my neck, and I close my eyes and count to five, the meditative practice recommended by Mr. Jakes, who freely admitted it was hippy crap but insisted we do it anyway.

But after the other day, I'd say Linda has seen stranger things than meditation.

I brush away the chill that's crept to the surface of my skin probably a hundred times since then. No amount of renovation has been able to fully clear my mind of its questions. April and I primed all the walls in that room after she got back, but the wall with the mural stays. Much like the rest of this house that's inches away from being condemned, April thinks it's charming.

“Charming like marionette puppets are charming,” I'd said in response to her assessment. “Like clowns, or those antique dolls with teeth that look real from a distance.”

Now, alone while April focuses on all the wrong things and tries to find a repairman who works on ancient ovens (her earlier sense of reason apparently taking a backseat to adorable kitchens), I raise Linda, then slowly open my eyes, my first vision reborn inside the lens.

It's out of focus, a too-tight close-up on a moss-covered tree stump. I click to capture the image, another lesson from Mr. Jakes, who thinks the first shot is the genesis of photographic magic. And while I'm still not sure I believe him, he was always so passionate about his process that I can't imagine doing it any differently.

Now that I've got my first shot, I'm free to fiddle. I pull the focus out and scan my periphery, never taking my eye from behind the viewfinder. I capture a tree, horizontal when it should be upright, its roots exposed and curled into loose coils. I follow my ear and chase a squirrel up a tree, capturing at least three good shots of a rodent in flight. I imagine that series on a vertical display, framed, titled “Heads or Tails.” I'm not that great with titles, or photography for that matter, but I click away and try not to think too hard about how this feels exactly the way it used to.

Before tattoos of stars or Melissa Corey or letters written to no one or bonfires in the desert.

I follow another sound, this time to a monstrous tree with needles bunched in knobs all over the branches like spiny tentacles. Spindling arms sway in the ever-present breeze of the woods, and as I stand underneath the tree, I hear better the sound that drew me, though I have no idea what it is I'm hearing. It's crackling, almost as though tiny popcorn kernels are bursting in every crevice of the tree. Now that I'm standing underneath, it feels less like a tree and more like some sort of needled umbrella, the clear kind that hugs maybe a little too closely to the person holding it.

“Bugs.” Miller approaches, his burnt red hair looking violet under the tree canopy. “They should be dead by June, but stuff never seems to die out here.”

I snap a picture of him without even thinking about it, ducking from under the tree's claustrophobic enclosure.

“Would you think I was weird if I told you it sounded like the trees were chattering?” I say.

“I would probably think you were weird even if you didn't tell me that,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You
should
thank me,” he says. “Boring people are ­boring.”

“Profound,” I say. I notice he's carrying a paper bag and ask, “So what brings you to our creepy little house in the woods?”

“
Your
creepy little house,” he says, and I get that same feeling I got from him in the store, right before April came over. Like I crossed some imaginary line.

“I mean the house where we're staying while my stepmom fixes it up to sell it to someone later. Why are you here?” I find a smooth oblong rock beside my foot and pick it up, thinking how it would make a great photo sitting there in the bowl of my palm, but feeling too self-conscious now to take a picture.

He reaches into the bag and pulls out a box containing a Pulverizer Max Strength In-Sink Disposal. “April ordered it the other day. I know the supplier, and he was able to rush deliver it.”

“Pays to be connected, huh?”

“Oh yeah, I know all the important people. Plumbers, electricians, general contractors. And from what I know about this house, she's going to need all of them.”

“Yeah, well, you might try telling her that. Right now, she seems to be more focused on authentic decor, whatever that means,” I say, not wanting to be rude, but wishing I could have just a few more minutes alone to take some pictures in
peace. I didn't realize how much that house was getting to me, and even though the woods don't exactly feel inviting, it beats breathing in the stale air of someone else's abandoned problem.

He lifts his chin toward Linda, which I've only half-dropped out of my sightline. “You want to aim that thing somewhere else? Cameras make me nervous.”

“Worried you're not photogenic?”

“Point and click feels, I don't know, too fast. You should have to take your time with a picture. Painting's kind of more my thing,” he says.

“You know, some might call
that
weird,” I say, and it totally sounds like I'm trying to flirt, which just makes me want to be alone even more. I can't remember the last time I even thought about a guy in that way.

You mean aside from the other day in Scoot's?

“And I'd take it as a compliment,” he says pointedly, and I let the camera fall around my neck. Even though I know he's referring to my last comment, I can't escape the feeling that he somehow divined my internal dialogue instead.

Miller takes a seat on the fallen tree with its coiled roots, and I fight the urge to ask him not to. It's not my tree, and these aren't my woods. But now that their images reside in my camera, I feel responsible for them. So I sit with Miller,
maybe to take some of the ownership. Or maybe to snuff out the feeling that any of this should have an emotional response beyond me just wanting to be alone right now.

“So, what's new? I mean, besides the need to fight the skull-crushing boredom of living like a hermit out in the woods?” he says.

“I'm here against my will, remember?”

“That's right. I forgot. Kidnapped by your evil stepmother.”

I pull in a deep breath, then look at him. “It's your ­garden-variety troubled teen sabbatical,” I say, hoping this closes the topic.

Miller flips the Pulverizer box in the air, then turns it between his hands, examining it from every angle.

“You don't seem too troubled,” he says, his thumb tracing the
P
on the box over and over. “I've seen troubled, and you don't seem like that.”

“Okay, no offense, but whether or not I'm boring or screwed up or whatever else you think I am, I'm not really interested in changing your mind. I just want to take some pictures and get a decent night's sleep in this place and get the next two months over with so I can go back to Seattle and resume my other screwed up existence.”

“Whoa, okay,” Miller holds his hands in surrender,
­standing up from the tree I was so protective of a second ago. Now I wish he'd sit back down.