The Shuddering (3 page)

Lauren twisted a piece of blonde hair around her finger, looking through the kitchen to the centerpiece of the living room, visible through a large stone arch that connected the rooms. The fireplace was ostentatious, big enough for her to lie down in and not have her head or feet touch either end. Imposing stones crawled up the wall above the hearth, and she couldn’t help but wonder how on earth anyone had managed to get them inside the house, let alone up on the wall like that. An elk’s head stared at her from across the room, challenging her to recall a more impressive creature, dead or alive. The challenge was a futile one. Growing up in a two-room trailer in Winnfield, Louisiana, the only elk she’d seen before this one were the ones her dad skinned in the backyard.

Oona padded past her, crossed the expanse of the kitchen, and jumped onto the leather sofa. Lauren opened her mouth to protest but stalled when amusement danced across Ryan’s face.

“That’s okay?” she asked, nodding to the dog, who was dancing a circle on top of an expensive-looking couch cushion, her paws wet from the snow.

“It’s fine,” Ryan replied.

“Huh.” She hadn’t expected him to be so obliging. “I wouldn’t have guessed.” Her face flushed before the words had completely escaped her throat, her heart fluttering at the shadow of a beguiling smile lingering at the corners of his mouth.

There was something about Ryan that held her attention—the way he carried himself, graceful and self-assured; the way he leaned against the table, his feet crossed at the ankles. He was one of those people who seemed always ready to be photographed even while doing the most everyday things; annoying, when she always looked awkward in pictures even when she tried to look good.

She had heard things about him over the years, like the fact that he was an adrenaline junkie, and how he’d turned his passion for snowboarding into a winning business venture. From what Jane had told her, what was once little more than a hobby now pulled in a hefty salary by way of advertising. Big companies paid to have their ads on Ryan’s website—snowboards and winter gear—and all Ryan had to do was pay for bandwidth and travel to exotic destinations all in the name of photographs and reviews. And judging from the size of the place, if Ryan was anywhere near as successful as his father, he was as loaded as he was attractive.

“Are you going to come?” she asked, turning to face Ryan fully for the first time. “To the store,” she clarified. “With us.”

Ryan lifted his shoulders in a shrug, haphazardly tossing his phone onto the table, assuring her that cell phone service out here was a bust. “I guess I should,” he said. “She doesn’t drink, so, you know, asking her to buy booze… You haven’t been brainwashed into her wino ways, have you?”

“Wino ways?”

“Sure,” he said, sliding off the table. “You don’t believe that whole ‘oh, I hate the taste of anything but Bordeaux’ argument she gives, do you?”

Lauren stood silent, not sure whether to play along or defend Jane’s honor.

“I’m convinced this is just the beginning. Today, only red wine; tomorrow, she’ll be converting to Mormonism.”

“I’ll go find her.” She hooked a thumb toward the hallway, waiting for Ryan to tell her it was okay to breach the perimeter of the kitchen and explore further.

“Sweet,” he said, failing to look up.

Lauren ducked into the hallway, feeling awkward.

Jane paused at the top of the stairs and glanced down the hallway, which was gloomy despite the bay window at its center. The only door on the right side of the wall led to the master bedroom. She was sure Ryan wouldn’t want it—too many bad memories, too much resentment—and she wasn’t about to give it up to Sawyer and his girl once they arrived.

Her heart twisted against the splinter that had been lodged there since high school. She’d nearly bailed on the entire outing when Ryan had broken the news, but had stopped just shy of telling him to forget it. The place was on the market, ready to sell to the highest bidder, furniture and all. And to pile one heartache on top of another, Ryan had just sold half his company to a guy out in Switzerland. It was a huge step forward for Powder 360, but her brother would be spending six months out of the year traveling Europe, living in an adorable Swiss bungalow at the foot of the Matterhorn and calling her on Skype. She was sick over it, not sure how she’d be able to handle life
without her twin brother at her elbow, always there when she needed him—sometimes there when she didn’t. This was their last chance to visit their childhood haunt: Ryan’s favorite place in all the world. She refused to screw it up, no matter how hard her heart thudded in her chest at the mere thought of seeing Sawyer with another girl.

Veering right, she pushed the door open into the master bedroom—her favorite room in the house despite its history. There had been many a fight within those walls during family getaways that had been intended to be fun but always turned sour, and the master bedroom was where all of that bitterness was born. But the window that swallowed the majority of the far wall pushed the sadness of her father’s yelling and her mother’s tears out of her mind. Spectacular in its size and view, that window overlooked tree-dotted hills and a stone-topped mountain distant against the sky. She’d spent many an afternoon sitting in front of that very window as a girl, gazing out onto the wilderness. The view, and the fact that the room had its own fireplace, was irresistible.

Lauren stepped inside the room, gaping at its size.

“Please tell me we’re bunking together,” she said. “I know there are plenty of rooms to go around, but,
Janey
…”

“I know,” Jane mused, still appreciative of its grandeur after all these years.

Lauren immediately went for the bathroom, and Jane couldn’t help but laugh when a gasp sounded from the open door. The master bathroom was just as extravagant as the bedroom, fit for a queen, with its oversize tub and vanity. For the next four days Jane planned on forgetting her students, the fact that Ryan was going to leave her soon, and that Alex was still back in Phoenix, waiting to make her life a living hell; she’d soak in that amazing bathtub every night. If she was lucky, their
father’s Italian girlfriend had left expensive toiletries that could be exploited. It was the least that bombshell of a runway model could do.

“Oh my god.” Lauren’s voice echoed from inside the bathroom. Jane crossed the length of the room and cocked a hip against the doorjamb, her arms pretzeling over her chest as she chuckled at her best friend’s astonishment. “You don’t get it,” Lauren protested, plucking a delicate perfume atomizer off the vanity and lifting it to her nose. “I grew up in a trailer.”

“I know.”

“In the
back
country.”

“With the alligators, right?” Jane smiled.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lauren asked, and Jane shrugged a single shoulder in reply.

“It makes me feel weird, I guess.”

“What does?” Lauren asked, uncapping a tube of lipstick, twisting it to reveal fire engine red. “This house?”

“The money,” Jane confessed. Her father’s piles of cash had always been a source of discomfort for her. Ryan had embraced it, investing it wherever he could, taking advantage of the fact they had an absent father who liked to buy their love with hundred-dollar bills. But Jane had always turned away.

“Yeah?” Lauren cast a sidelong glance her way. “At least you don’t let it show.”

Jane gave the bathroom tile a sad sort of smile, unsure whether that was good or just plain stupid. She’d settled into an almost mundane lifestyle of teaching second graders how to glue together collages and how to play the recorder because it made her happy, but she struggled.

“Sometimes I wonder whether my dignity outweighs my brain.” Jane shifted her weight from one foot to the other, watching Lauren lean into the oval gilded mirror. She pulled the
lipstick across her bottom lip, running her pinkie along the rim of her mouth a second later.

“That’s what makes you who you are, Jane,” Lauren reminded her, hypnotized by her own bright red mouth.

“Yeah, except that I borrowed money from Ryan last month for rent.” Jane rolled her eyes at herself. “I won’t take the money from my father, but I’ll take it from my brother. It’s completely idiotic.”

“Maybe it’s because you love your brother but hate your dad.” Lauren turned to face Jane, puckering her lips, revealing the new her. “Slutty,” she said, raising an eyebrow at her friend. “Speaking of daddy, does this stuff belong to that chick he’s banging?”

Jane pushed away from the door, taking a seat on the edge of the tub while Lauren snooped around, completely unabashed in her curiosity.

“Alessandra,” Jane said. “From Milan.”

“I bet it’s easy to look amazing when your lipstick costs fifty bucks a tube,” Lauren said, then struck a pose. “What do you think? Am I runway ready? Think Mr. Adler would approve?” Jane furrowed her eyebrows. “Your brother, not your cheating ass of a dad.” She puckered again before capping the lipstick and tossing it onto the vanity. “Or is this too brazen for him?” She mussed her long blonde hair, piling it on top of her head before glancing over her shoulder at Jane.

“I thought you didn’t like guys with money.” Jane smiled to herself. She was glad Lauren found her brother so intriguing—God knew he needed a good woman in his life. There had been so many girls—athletic types, clubbing types, the kind who wore nothing but sneakers following the type who grocery shopped in heels. After a few dates, Ryan had dismissed them all.

And then there was Summer.

He had met his dream girl in a business management course at ASU. Summer was smart and funny and drop-dead
gorgeous, and she knew how to ride as well as he did. She had been tenacious, challenging him like nobody else ever had, pushing him further than he thought he could go, and Jane had loved her for it. Summer had been the one who had believed in him when he had come up with the crazy idea of starting a website dedicated to the sport they both adored—she had been the one to convince Jane it was a fantastic plan, that it didn’t matter that they had to drive hours for a mediocre mountain at best. It was the passion that mattered, and Ryan had enough of it for the whole world. And yet, despite the love Jane was sure Ryan had for Summer, their relationship crumbled. Jane hoped that infidelity—the very thing that had destroyed their family—hadn’t been what had done them in. She didn’t want to think of her brother like that, didn’t want to think that he could be as callous as the man he insisted he didn’t want to become.

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “He’s starting to grow on me.”

“What, after spending six hours with him?”

Lauren made a face, let her hair sweep across her shoulders, and plucked a tissue from its holder before rubbing the lipstick from her mouth.

“And what about Sawyer; you’re sure you’re okay with this?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Jane shrugged. “Ryan already asked me that like a hundred thousand times, anyway.”

“I’m sure he has, but did you tell him the truth?”

Jane offered her friend a tight-lipped smile. That was the million-dollar question, and the answer was no. She’d spared Ryan the truth and told him what he wanted to hear—it was fine, she was over it. Because what kind of a girl pined over a guy for a decade? If she wanted to grieve the loss of a relationship, it should have been the one she’d lost less than three months ago, not one that ended in her senior year of high school.

“There’s probably nothing to eat downstairs,” Jane concluded, changing the subject. It would have been nice to have stopped at the store along the way, but Ryan had taken a shortcut to save them nearly an hour, and they had bypassed the nearest town by a good twenty miles.

Lauren gave her a strange smile in response, like she’d just remembered a joke.

“What?”

Lauren shook her head and tossed the red-smeared tissue into the trash can next to her sneakered feet. “Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Pulling the wood-paneled door open, Jane stared into an empty refrigerator. There were a couple of bottles of Evian lined up in a row along the right side of the unit. A half-empty bottle of merlot sat in the door, along with a collection of condiments. She grabbed the wine bottle by its neck and uncorked it, breathing it in, immediately recoiling at the smell. As far as alcohol went, wine was the only thing Jane could stand, but this had turned to vinegar. She let the fridge door swing shut as she stepped away from it, abandoning the spoiled bottle of wine on the counter. She pivoted on the soles of her sneakers and stepped into the walk-in pantry, flipping on the light. When they were kids, their mother kept the pantry lined with a barrage of various dried goods—boxes of whole-grain pasta and rice; enough to keep them fed in case someone dropped an atom bomb. But Michael Adler, while amazing at mergers and acquisitions, wasn’t much of a planner; for the two years they had known her, Alessandra hadn’t exactly proven herself to be “domestic.” The pantry was nearly empty. Jane and Ryan hadn’t visited the cabin in over a year, and from the look of it, if Alessandra and her father had ventured to southwestern Colorado, they certainly
hadn’t shopped. Next to the obligatory boxes of stale saltines and graham crackers nobody ate, a bag of gluten-free chocolate chip cookies roused a smirk. Their father had a serious sweet tooth, one that had been passed on to both his children, but since he’d gotten together with his Italian girlfriend, it was sugar-free this and gluten-free that. Jane considered it karma.

She plucked a can of tomato soup off the shelf and checked the expiration date: still good, but most certainly not enough.

“I already looked,” Ryan said, startling her. She pressed a hand to her chest and gave him a look. He responded with a sheepish grin. “But we knew we’d have to swing into town, regardless.”

“You should have thought of that earlier,” she told him. “Your shortcut is actually going to waste time, not save it, and I don’t think I can make it up the driveway myself.”

“I don’t want you to make it up the driveway yourself.” Ryan unclipped the bag of cookies and stuck his nose inside. “I need the Nissan for another few months. After that, you can destroy it all you want.” Fishing one of the cookies out, he took an overly cautious bite. She watched him as he chewed, his face twisting in confused disgust. “Sawdust flavor?” He coughed, checking the bag to see what in the world he was eating, and, despite his protest, stuck the rest of the cookie in his mouth before rolling up the bag and tossing it back onto the shelf. “I’ll just leave those right there. Sweet Jesus.”