The Riverhouse (23 page)

If she had only divorced him, it would have been much easier. He could tell himself that she was still out there, probably with another man, that her rejection of him had been final and complete. It would have been awful, but he could have moved on.

Instead, he was left to wonder. Had she wanted to get back together? Would the baby have been healthy? Would the three of them have been happy together? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. It was easy to create elaborate idyllic fantasies about it, to gnaw on the infinite possibilities of a failed what-if. And yet he couldn’t let it go. Her last phone call hung over him, vibrating in the air like an unresolved chord, constantly nagging, teasing, speculating about an answer that could never come.

Shane painted quickly, almost feverishly. By two o’clock, he was nearly done with the third of the Florida paintings. The Marlena portrait sat on the smaller easel in the corner. It was finished, and Shane was glad. Whatever bizarre passion had gripped him and pressed him to create those two strange images, the Riverhouse and Marlena, it had fallen away now, at least for the moment.

Maybe he would put the portrait in the attic after all. Or maybe he’d merely leave it there on the little easel. On its own, it was a rather captivating picture. It told a story. The woman in the painting was beautiful, if only because of the stunned vulnerability on her face as she looked down at the letter. Her white hands were perfectly crafted, lovingly shaped and shaded as they gripped the paper.

Where the Riverhouse painting had been disturbing, the Marlena painting was strangely heartbreaking. The viewer didn’t need to know what the letter said to know that it had devastated her. One couldn’t help wanting to reach out to the woman, to comfort her and soothe her, if that were possible. In its own way, the Marlena portrait was no more pleasant to look at than the Riverhouse painting, and yet her misery was undeniably enthralling to the outside viewer. It was very nearly indulgent.

Shane found himself staring at the portrait once his shift was over. His arm ached and he was ravenously hungry, and yet he didn’t feel like moving. He sat on his stool, his head turned to the side, and studied Marlena. He thought of Stephanie, but no more tears came to his eyes. He seemed to have used up all of his tears over the past few months. He no longer felt that exquisite sadness at her loss. That was old hat now. Now, he just felt empty. Empty and alone.

He stared at Marlena, because he thought she knew that feeling. He thought she knew that feeling very well.

Downstairs, the phone began to ring.

“Hello?”

Nothing. There was a clatter, a sound like a car with the windows rolled down. A shiver coursed down Shane’s spine, but then a voice spoke.

“Shane?” It was Christiana.

“That’s me. Chris? What’s going on?”

“Hi. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have called. I… believe it or not, I don’t have a lot of friends at the moment. Not since I dropped out of school and started working for Morrie. I… where are you at?”

Shane blinked. “I’m at home, standing here in my library. What’s wrong?”

“Of course,” Christiana said, as if talking to herself. “You don’t have a cell phone. I knew that. I forgot. God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called.” She sounded strangely hectic, distracted.

“Chris, just tell me what’s wrong. Where are you?”

“I’m driving. I’m downtown. I’m… I guess I’m heading back to work. I was supposed to have the afternoon off, but…”

Shane was becoming alarmed. “Chris, I can tell something’s wrong. What is it? You obviously called for a reason.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, and laughed. It sounded high and forced. “I just wanted to chat with someone. Sometimes you just want to hear someone’s voice and say hi, talk about whatever. You know? Maybe that only happens to girls. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Shane said, clutching the phone to his ear. “You want me to meet you somewhere? We could get a drink or something, like the other night. That was nice. What do you say?”

She replied immediately. “No, no, that’s fine. I don’t want to interrupt you. I’m sure you’re in the middle of work. That Florida series must be keeping you plenty busy. Morrie would probably kill me if I kept you from your work.”

Shane frowned as an idea surfaced in his thoughts. It was an awful idea, but it was strangely compelling. “Chris, are you all right? Is someone with you?”

“I’m fine, I told you. I’m alone. Why do you ask?”

“You sound… I don’t really know. You sound like you’re afraid.”

She laughed again, that high, forced laugh that sounded so unnatural coming from her. “You’re imagining things. I’m a little stressed out, that’s all. Things have been crazy since the show. Everything’s fine. Look, like I said, this was stupid. I was just feeling like chatting, taking a little sanity break, you know? Maybe we will get together for a drink again soon. I think I’d like that. Not tonight, though. Gotta take a rain-check. All right?”

Shane nodded to himself, slowly. “All right. You can call me anytime you want, Chris. I mean that. I like hearing from you. Do you believe me?”

There was another long pause. Shane could hear the wind blowing through the car, whistling and roaring. Christiana blew out a breath. “Yeah, I do,” she said, sounding a bit more like herself. “And there’s something I need you to believe, too, all right?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m fine. Believe me when I say that. I’m a little shaken, yes, but that’s no big deal. Life’s a little crazy right now. Look at how pathetic I am. I’ve spoken to you, what, twice? Three times counting this phone call?”

Shane was perplexed. “Why’s that pathetic?”

She laughed a third time, but there was no humor in it. “It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Not on the phone. I should get off now anyway. I’m about to get on the highway.”

Shane shuddered again, but forced himself to keep his voice even. “Look, you can come over. I’d love it. I don’t have any wine, but beer’s in the fridge. I can grill us up something. Strictly business. Well, business and bratwurst. What do you say?”

“I gotta go, Shane,” she said, distracted now. “I’ll take you up on that soon. I promise. See ya.”

“Wait—!” Shane said, almost barking into the phone, but she was gone. The whine of the wind through her car clicked off. He lowered the phone and stared at it, his eyes a little wild. He considered calling her back, was already reaching to press star sixty-nine for the automatic trace-back, but stopped himself. It wouldn’t do any good. In her own way, Christiana was a lot like Steph. Once she’d made up her mind, there was no changing it. Slowly, as if in a daze, Shane placed the phone back onto its charger.

Outside the window, something moved. Shane glanced toward it, jumping in surprise. It was huge and brown, lumbering, pulling a plume of dust behind it: a UPS truck. Shane walked toward the window and leaned to peer out. The truck leaned and bounced as it descended the driveway. Shane could hear the sound of the radio coming out of the truck’s open side door. The driver was listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Puzzled, feeling a disconnected sense of growing dread, he approached the front door. The morning’s cool had burned away in the autumn sunlight, leaving the front porch stuffy and still as Shane stepped out onto it. Tom the cat lay in the far corner of the porch, dozing in the sunlight, his eyes slitted sleepily. He looked up at Shane and flicked his tail. There was a large, flat box leaning against the side of the cottage, half in the shade of the porch roof. Shane approached it slowly, that sense of dread creeping up his back, sinking deep, chilling him in spite of the afternoon heat. The front of the carton was split into two huge flaps, affixed with a long, neat strip of packing tape. Shane used a pen to split the tape. Gingerly at first, and then with mounting impatience, he pulled the flaps open, ripping the tape apart, tearing the flaps at the bottom. Sunlight poured into the carton, glaring on its contents. Shane stepped back weakly, dropping the pen onto the gravel drive.

It was the Riverhouse. The painting stood in the carton, neatly packed, with foam buffers affixed onto its corners. There was a note pinned carefully to the top right corner. Handwritten in neat blue ink, it read:

This painting is better suited to your River House than my house. I had the sense that you were reluctant to part with it, so consider this my gift. Cheers!

Penn Oliver

P.S. I want to see more of your work! Call me
.

Shane stared at the painting, and at the little note pinned discreetly to its corner. After a few minutes, he sighed deeply and carried the painting into the house. He left the carton on the porch, but didn’t remove the note attached to the corner of the painting. Somehow, it just seemed appropriate to leave it there.

Unseen in the upper window on the east side of the cottage, almost hidden behind the lush leaves of the magnolia tree, a candle flame burned and flickered, flickered and burned.

Chapter Nine

The next morning, Shane stood in the front room with his coffee in hand, wearing only his boxers and a faded gray tee shirt. Mist rose beyond the windows, bright in the early sun. There was a distant thump and hum as the furnace in the basement switched on.

For a moment, he wondered if Penn Oliver was playing some kind of elaborate practical joke on him. He stared at the painting where it stood on the small mantel over the fireplace, his hand cupped to his jaw and his brow mildly furrowed.

It was his painting, the Riverhouse, and yet it was different somehow.

For several minutes he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. It was like the afternoon when he’d discovered the abandoned footpath in the corner of his yard and then returned to realize that he’d drawn the footpath entrance into the painting the previous night. When he finally saw it, it was like an optical illusion clicking into place, like seeing the two black silhouetted faces instead of the white candlestick. Once he saw it, he couldn’t
not
see it anymore.

In the Riverhouse painting, the woman on the front portico wasn’t alone; there was someone on the path approaching the house, someone coming to meet her. The second individual was not physically visible on the path—they were just outside the range of the painting—but their shadow was there, in the lower right corner, spilling across the foreground and forming an irregular shape on the arc of the brick driveway.

Shane had no recollection of painting that shadow.

He stepped toward the painting and touched the bottom right of the canvas, brushed it lightly with his fingers. The ridges of dried paint were as hard as stone, as distinct as the whorls of a fingerprint. He recognized the strokes of his medium sized sable brush. The shadow had obviously been placed there by his own hand. How could he have missed it before?

The shadow changed the picture in a subtle but important way. When Shane had first painted the house, he’d added the woman on the portico simply for human interest—after all, a house without an occupant is just architecture. He hadn’t known her name at the time, had simply meant to show her leaning in the sun, content with her work, a pair of gardening shears and a stack of neatly cut roses lying nearby. He’d painted her with one arm raised, her forearm crossed over her brow to shield her eyes from the sun.

It had been meant to be a languid pose, but the shadow in the foreground transformed the pose entirely. Marlena was not just resting in the sun. She was looking up as someone approached, shading her eyes to see who it was.

Suddenly, Shane remembered something Greenfeld had said when he’d first looked at the painting. “It’s all just a stage,” he’d said, sitting in his car and looking up at Shane. “The first act is about to begin, and she’s going to be the main character. That’s the point, right? Why’s she sitting there, watching, waiting? Who’s coming up the path, and what happens when they get there?”

Greenfeld had apparently seen it immediately. Maybe everyone had. The unsettling thing was that Shane felt rather sure that, when he’d first painted the woman on the portico, he’d painted her with her head turned slightly, looking out of the left of the picture. Now, however, he saw that she was looking toward the right of the canvas, peering into the foreground, toward something just out of sight. The setting sun cast a bar of impenetrable shadow under her raised arm, hiding her eyes, and yet she was unmistakably looking up, peering toward the source of the shadow, her expression mild, unreadable.

It was a very slight difference, but it was unsettling. Had the painting always looked that way?

For a fleeting moment, Shane wondered if he had sleepwalked again, unconsciously gathering his brushes and painting the shadow and the subtle shift in Marlena’s pose. He hadn’t awoken with paint on his fingers, however. And the paint on the canvas was bone dry. Obviously, this is how the painting had always appeared, and he had just never quite seen it. It was funny how one missed detail could change the story.

In the front room, Shane shook his head slowly. He’d known the muse could be tricky. He hadn’t known that she could be secretive.

Later that morning, Shane painted. His shift came and went and he made some decent headway on the fourth of the Florida paintings. He was two-thirds of the way done with the series, and felt very pleased with himself. At this rate, he’d be done well before the deadline. Greenfeld would probably have kittens, he’d be so delighted.

More importantly, however, the Florida paintings were
good.
They were simultaneously campy and edgy, colorful but cohesive. The foreman in Shane’s head was back on the job, calling out direction with his mental megaphone, telling Shane’s right hand where to go, and what to do when it got there. It had taken a little while for the foreman to hit his stride again, but things had finally clicked. Everything was jake.

At two-thirteen, Shane stopped, cleaned up, and went downstairs for some lunch.

A little while later, he went for a bike ride.

He thought very little as he pedaled. The air was cool and bright, with beams of stark sunlight cutting through the trees, lighting the foliage like fireworks. The path was carpeted with fallen leaves. Red, yellow and green crunched gaily under his wheels as he sped on, leaning into the turns, watching the river where it lay like a giant brown ribbon in the valley. He made it to the grassy floodwall of Bastion Falls and turned around immediately, right where the path crossed the road in front of the open floodgates.

He stood on the pedals and pumped, gaining speed, pushing himself forward and leaning hard on the turns. His thighs sang with the effort.

Vaguely, Shane realized that when he rode like this, he was usually trying to outrun something. Today, what he was outrunning was Christiana. Her last phone call replayed over and over in his head, mingling unsettlingly with his recent thoughts about Stephanie, James Herk, the Spring Garden, and the Paddington Bear rattle.

Other than the fact that they were both women and somewhat stubborn, Stephanie and Christiana had almost nothing in common. Stephanie had been fair and blond, so skinny that she was almost bird-like, single-minded and possessed of a sort of innate confidence that struck most people as arrogance. Christiana, on the other hand, was dark, athletic, and random, filled with equal parts self-doubt and unshakable determination. Still, the two women were uncomfortably linked in his thoughts, emerging repeatedly like jokers in a trick deck of cards.

Maybe
I’ll tell you later, not on the phone,
Christiana had said, sounding eerily like Steph during her final phone call.
I should get off now anyway. I’m about to get on the highway.

Shane shut off his thoughts again. He was getting somewhat good at that. He rounded another curve and the river swung into view, bright and brown, lying low in its banks. Dragonflies darted out over it, chasing their reflections, glittering greenly, as if they were made of recycled beer bottles.

Near the end of his ride, Shane passed the lot where the Riverhouse had once stood. He slowed and coasted, squinting in the lowering sun.

The city had converted the lot into a sort of storage facility for the Parks and Recreation crews. Huge concrete blocks had been erected on the weedy lawn, forming low walls and dividers. The dividers enclosed mounds of mulch, gravel and peat. Parked in the middle of the old brick driveway was a yellow front-loader, its bucket raised.

Shane stopped his bike on the path and leaned on one foot. He was interested to see that the foundation of the house itself had been left undisturbed. The yard was stitched with the tracks of the front-loader where it had navigated around the storage bunkers, but the cellar of the Riverhouse, now packed with dirt, looked completely untouched. Curiously, no weeds had even begun to grow on it. The remaining portico floor caught the sun and threw it back blindingly. From his position on the bike path, Shane could just make out the circular scars where the pillars had once stood.

For a moment, the sunlight illuminated something in the air over the portico. It glinted, almost as if it were shining on some tall, invisible shape.

Shane blinked and frowned. His mind was playing tricks on him. For a moment, he seemed to see sunlight reflecting off of tall windows and drawing pencil-thin highlights down the necks of pillars. High up, taller than the trees themselves, something glimmered, forming a small round shape, like a decorative window, almost like the secret window on the east side of his cottage. Shane armed sweat off his forehead and swiped at his eyes; they were dazzled in the sun, that was all. When he looked again, there were no phantom shapes in the air over the old foundation.

A crow launched from one of the trees that bordered the right side of the driveway. Shane watched it flap up and out over the yard, heading toward the river beyond. Interestingly, it seemed to bank suddenly, to wheel around in a long arc. For a moment, Shane thought it looked as if the crow was avoiding the airspace over the dirt-filled cellar. He smiled to himself and shook his head. That was crazy, of course.

He stepped on the pedals and pushed on, entering the shadow of the trees, leaving the Riverhouse, and his chasing thoughts, behind him.

There was a car in the turn-off next to the cottage, parked crookedly next to Shane’s pickup. Shane saw it sitting in the sun as he navigated his bike up the gravel drive. It was a Pontiac Bonneville, huge and old, with brown fleck paint and a cream hardtop. Its fat chrome bumper tossed the sun back and forth like a mobster flipping a quarter. Shane furrowed his brow, scanning the yard, but no one seemed to be there. He coasted, slowed, and then hopped off the bike and pushed it the rest of the way toward the cottage.

“Mr. Bellamy!” a voice called. It came from the shadow of the porch. Shane shaded his eyes with his hand and saw a thin figure standing there, peering out at him. “Hey Mr. Bellamy! It’s me, Brian. We came out to see how you’re getting along,” he turned and glanced aside, toward someone Shane couldn’t see. “Here he comes. He was on his bike, that’s all.”

There was a mumbled response and another figure moved in the shadow of the porch. Shane smiled, recognizing Earl Kirchenbauer, the old man from the rest home in Bastion Falls. He had been sitting on the porch’s single piece of furniture, a very old metal lawn chair with flaking red paint. It creaked as he pushed himself to his feet, leaning on his cane. He glared out at Shane, his expression unreadable in the shadows.

“Hi Brian,” Shane called, waving a hand. “And hi to you, too, Earl. What a nice surprise.”

The old man didn’t respond. Brian glanced back at his grandfather, and then returned his gaze to Shane. “Sorry, Mr. Bellamy. I hope we didn’t freak you out or anything. It was Grandpa’s idea. I think he wanted to make sure you were keeping all the cracks spackled up nice or something,”

“Shut up, boy,” the old man said mildly, then to Shane, “Hope you don’t mind us dropping by. Just wanted to see how you’re faring out here is all. Looks like you’ve been keeping the place up all right, for the most part.”

Shane shrugged and armed sweat from his brow again. He popped the bike’s kickstand and approached the porch. “There’s not a whole lot to do, frankly. The place is small enough that it sort of takes care of itself.”

“That so?” Earl said, unsmiling.

“You two want something to drink? I’ve got beers and water and a few cans of Coke.”

“Beer’s good for me,” Brian said, nodding and smiling.

“Beer will probably do us all good,” Earl agreed. “But not inside. Let’s sit out back, assuming you’ve kept the patio cleared off. I recall it used to get pretty chock full of leaves and twigs this time of year.”

Shane caught the man’s eye, saw that he was studying him critically. “Just swept it off yesterday, as a matter of fact. Come on through. There’re only two chairs back there, but I can sit on the wall.”

As they cut through the narrow alcove into the kitchen, Shane sensed Earl looking around sharply, his bushy eyebrows low and furrowed.

“Looks nice,” Brian said. “Small, but comfy. A lot better than the last time we were here, right Grandpa?”