The Cartoonist (13 page)

He picked up the doll and tucked it under his arm.

Then, room by room, he roamed the entire house, turning on every light he could find. Tonight, the dark unsettled him.

Finally, Kath’s doll in his lap, he sat in a chair by the Mickey Mouse phone in the rec room and started to wait, glancing every now and again through the sliding screen doors and out across the moon-spilled surface of the lake.

KATH HAD NODDED OFF. THAT surprised Krista, because normally before Kath would even consider closing her eyes she needed Jinnie tucked under her arm. Smiling, Krista glanced at her daughter’s drowsing profile. The signs of Kath’s growing up were coming fast and furious now, forgetting her doll at home being much the least of them. She was sprouting breasts for God’s sake, and complaining of cramps that reminded Krista of her own early blossoming. She, at least, had been twelve before the action started...but
ten
.

Krista’s mood—which had gone from broody and smoldering at her sister’s the night before to a fierce and flaming red earlier this afternoon when she realized they were lost somewhere in the timber trails of the White Mountains—seemed finally on the mend. She’d promised herself this trip that she wouldn’t allow Klara to get her goat...but the promise had proved a shabby one.

Klara, like their mother, disapproved of everything; it was one big, overspreading blanket. And one of her pet peeves was Scott, whom she lustily tongue-lashed at every available opportunity. Though Krista recognized her sister’s rantings as mostly alcohol-induced, Klara’s cruel and unfounded attacks inevitably placed her on the defensive. Sunday night Krista had been trying to relate the details of Scott’s near-catastrophe—mostly as a means of venting some of the pent-up tension the experience had generated—but Klara had cut in almost immediately with her caustic tongue.

“You mean to tell me your shrink husband went diving with a hangover? Jesus, what an irresponsible shit you married. What are you and your kid supposed to do while he’s collecting barnacles at the bottom of the lake?” Klara had glared at Joe with dark, threatening eyes. “If
my
husband ever pulled a fool stunt like that, I’d kill him.”

Krista, feeling tense, angry and sorry for her invertebrate brother-in-law all at once, had begged off early and gone to bed. She’d tossed restlessly all night, and in the morning rose an hour ahead of the rooster—before Klara got a chance to start in on her again. She whispered her good-byes to Joe, left a note for her snoring sister, and whisked Kath away while the child was still eating her toast. The neatness of her escape and the promise of the clear blue sky gave her hope for the balance of their journey.

But, like a slowly brewing storm, things progressed inevitably from bad to worse. The Customs official at the border crossing was in a hassling mood, and he spent a good half-hour hunched over the Volvo’s open trunk, rummaging through every scrap of luggage he could find and leaving it in disarray. Ten minutes into Vermont a cop nailed her for speeding, then dragged her six miles back to a small-town station to pay the fine. She ran out of gas outside of Montpelier, got the finger from an irate hitchhiker, and was dive-bombed by a homicidal sea gull on the patio fronting the McDonald’s in Barre.

But the crunch, the real masterstroke of disaster, came just outside of Lincoln, New Hampshire.

“I guess we shoulda turned right instead of left back there, huh, Mom,” Kath said. A statement, rife with undertones of “I told you so.”

And Kath, who’d been studying the AAA map,
had
told her so. But Krista had gone left. No real reason. It had just felt...right, more flowing somehow. It struck her later as rather odd personal behavior. She wasn’t by nature impulsive, especially when she had someplace to get to. Sure, she’d noticed the abrupt change in the texture of the blacktop—it had become all sort of cracked and gray looking, making her think of the sunbaked mud flats she played in as a child on her Uncle Albert’s potato farm—and the narrower lanes. But the surroundings had been homey, the quaint looking farms and cultivated fields reminding her of Newfoundland, the province of her birth.

But fifteen or twenty miles into it the asphalt had abruptly ended. Just like that. An edge of concrete, with society on one side and a dinosaur path on the other. After the first half-hour of dirt road, Kath had suggested a hasty retreat. But again Krista kept on, and for two reasons. First, the road had forked more than a dozen times and not once had there been a road sign—and that meant their chances of getting back to a town were pretty slim. And second, it just wasn’t in her nature to go back. Never had been. Sometimes that was a good thing...and sometimes it wasn’t.

Soon they were twenty-odd miles into no place—somewhere, Krista thought, to the south of Mount Hancock, a 4,430-foot mountain reduced to a microscopic triangle on the map—crawling along at fifteen miles per hour on a pocked and runneled goatpath through a cloistering tunnel of trees. Trees were everywhere: joining leafy hands overhead, filing away to infinity on either side, and in places threatening to block off the road entirely. Here and there bars of late afternoon sunlight broke through, but the overall mood was one of gloom.

They were lost.

As always, Kath was unruffled. Like her father, she saw the sunny side of almost any situation. She nudged a cassette into the deck and “Thriller” intruded on the silence. On the video screen in her head, Michael Jackson strutted past a fog-wound graveyard, while Vincent Price prophesied doom in that famous
basso profundo
. Kath, a Jackson fan for life, began to break dance from the knees down.

They drove on, never exceeding twenty, in spots grinding to a near halt. Krista didn’t mind the loud music—it dulled the metallic spangs and clunks from the Volvo’s undercarriage.

The road was bad.

Alert for wildlife, Kath’s gaze darted randomly from side to side. She had already spotted a few rabbits and one wobbly-legged fawn.

“Neat, huh, Mom?” she yelled over the music.

Krista nodded, thinking:
Yeah, real neat. Lost, tired, and knocking the shit out of your father’s car. A regular laff-riot, kid
.

After another five miles (and twenty minutes) Kath spotted a man in a sunlit clearing by the roadside. He was loading fresh-cut logs onto a wagon attached to a small red tractor. Resting on one fender, a chainsaw glinted sunlight.

Kath pointed. “Mom. Look. There’s a guy in the trees over there.”

Krista, who felt as if she’d just stumbled onto the planet’s last surviving human, stopped the car with a jerk. Straightening, the man in the clearing wiped his hands on the legs of his coveralls and turned toward the road. Krista bailed out and moved stiffly to the opposite side of the car. The paint job was gray with road dust.

“Excuse me,” she called into the bush, waving her hands over her head. Returning her wave, the fellow began plodding toward her through the underbrush.

Krista felt suddenly intimidated by his enormous size.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said almost deferentially, climbing sure-footedly up the embankment. His grin was wholesome and friendly, and he was younger than Krista had originally estimated—up close he looked no more than eighteen or twenty. “What can I do for ya?” He pulled a blue bandanna out of his hip pocket, scrubbed his forehead with it, then tucked it away. “Lost?”

“Yep,” Krista said. “Took a wrong turn back near Lincoln.”

The man’s grin broadened knowingly. “Happens a lot. Where’re ya headed?”

“Well, Boston eventually, but just now I’d be happy to get back to the main road.” She glanced over her shoulder at the cow trail they’d been traveling. “Any road for that matter.”

“Heck, that’s easy enough.” He angled his body into a half-turn and pointed, sighting along his extended arm like a gunbarrel. “Just keep goin’ the way you’re goin’, ’cept stay right at the forks. That’ll put you back on the pavement in nothing flat.” Grinning, he took a half-step closer. “You folks from Canada?”

“Yes,” Krista said, edging back toward the driver’s side of the car. “We are that.”

She felt better with the solid width of the hood between them. He was grinning now at Kath, who was still bebopping in her seat behind the closed window. The guy seemed friendly enough...but he smelled bad, and he was a full head taller than Scott’s six-one. And there was something wrong with his eyes. They shifted too much, and one of them was turned out, as if he were peering off sneakily behind you. Krista’s imagination had a way of getting off on her. She’d seen
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. There would be no getting away from this guy if he took it into his head to drag them into the woods, aerobics or no aerobics.

“Thanks for your help,” she said, sliding deftly into her seat. “And have a nice day.” It was an expression she secretly loathed...it just seemed appropriate for the occasion.

He dug out the bandanna again and gave his forehead another swipe. “You too, ma’am. And remember, keep right at the forks.”

As she motored away, Krista watched him in the rearview mirror. He stood for a moment, looking after them. Then, tucking the bandanna away, he trailed back into the woods.

* * *

The safari into the tree-choked reaches of the White Mountains wound up costing them three hours. To make up time they skipped their supper stop, nibbling instead on hoagies as they drove.

The dash clock read 10 p.m. Krista knew that by now Caroline would be expecting them, but they were still on Route 122, a good four hours from Boston. It had occurred to her to stop and find a phone...but she knew Caroline would understand. Like sister, like half sister.

As she drove through the deepening night, Kath snoring softly beside her, Krista’s thoughts turned warmly to Scott. The scare he’d given her on Saturday morning had made her acutely aware of how much he meant to her, of how pointless her life would have been, apart from her love for Kath, had he died. Scott knew almost all there was to know about Krista, and he loved her madly—there was no question in her mind about that. He’d been a prince through ten years of marriage.

But sometimes Krista got the disquieting feeling there was something deep—and not entirely pleasant—that she didn’t know about Scott. Some dark secret...something. She’d sensed it less and less as the years crept by. But still, there were times...

Like Friday night, for instance, the night of his birthday. What had he been hiding about the content of the letter he’d received, the one informing him of his old classmate’s death? The look on his face had been one of unalloyed horror, a look she’d’ve been surprised to see even if it had been Gerry who’d died. What had made him pitch the letter into the fire as he might a wriggling snake?

Years ago, when they were first married, it had been the dreams, night-horrors that had wrenched him awake screaming and sheeted with sweat. Afterward, he always claimed he’d forgotten their content. And there had been other things: times when she was alone with him, nestled in the crook of his arm and watching TV perhaps, when Krista got the distinct (and spooky) feeling that he wasn’t even aware she was there, so far had he lapsed from reality.

But those times had passed, she reminded herself. They had a wonderful family now, and a good future. They were going to grow old and fat together. Though she missed Scott when they were apart, she knew that separation was harder on him. After a few days he became sort of unstrung, drank too much, didn’t eat properly or clean house. And yet, when Krista was home, he often cooked the meals and cleaned up and seemed genuinely to enjoy doing it. He wasn’t habitually sloppy or neglectful. He just needed his people close. They were the cement that kept him whole. This, too, was a comforting feeling for Krista...her man truly needed her. It was an obligation she openly treasured.

Beyond the horizon heat lightning flared like silently exploding bombs. In the steady glow of the headlights, Krista noticed the leaves of the roadside trees, flipping over in the gusts to reveal their silvery underbellies. Her mother had always said that was a sign that a storm was coming.

Annoyed at the prospect of yet another delay, Krista nudged the accelerator a little harder, coaxing the needle up to seventy. In the Volvo it didn’t seem fast at all, especially now, with traffic virtually nonexistent. The car hugged the roadway with ease, and Krista slowed only when passing through the smaller rural towns, which were far less frequent now.

Suddenly Krista jammed her foot on the brake pedal, grinding the car to a halt. Outside, shiny amber eyes became a family of raccoons, mama and two little ones, waddling in sloppy single file across the blacktop. The coons glanced at the car with what appeared to be only mild interest, then vanished into the tall grass skirting the shoulder.

Kath snorted awake, saying, “What happened?”screwing a fist into one sleepy eye.

Resuming speed, Krista said, “Nothing, babe. Just a family of coons.” Her heart had begun to triphammer in her chest.

Kath spun in her seat and squinted through the back window. “Aw, I missed ’em.”

“So did I,” Krista said. “Lucky for them.”

Kath smiled. Then, like a chameleon, she stuck her bottom lip out in a pout. “Where’s Jinnie?”

“In your room at home I guess,” Krista said, thinking:
At least in her sleep she’s still a little girl
.

“I forgot her...
oops
.” Kath broke wind, a small but definite
pop.
“I farted,” she said, giggling.

Krista stifled a laugh. “Don’t say ‘fart.’ It’s unladylike.”

“I didn’t say ‘fart.’ I said ‘farted.’”

“Kath,” Krista said, her voice mock-stern.

“What do I say, then?”

“Don’t say anything. When you fart, it’s better to say nothing. Try to have it blamed on someone else.”

Kath laughed. After a quiet interlude she said, “Are we almost there?”

“Almost,” Krista said, hoping Kath would nod off again. “Tired?”

“Uh-huh.” She brushed away a wet spot from the corner of one eye. “I hope Daddy’s okay.”