The Uninvited (11 page)

Jay looked at her frank expression. Nothing really ruffled her. Hell, she worked in the ER: crash victims, heart attacks, mortally wounded children. Why couldn’t he talk to her?

“Are things okay with Iris?”

“Sure. Of course. Why shouldn’t they be?”

Lou shrugged. “Just probing,” she said.

Jay glowered, without having any noticeable effect on her attentive smile.

“Is she still coming home this summer?”

Jay nodded. “In a week or so.”

“Good.” Lou grinned. “What a surprise this is going to be for her.”

Jay didn’t bother to comment. Right now Iris just seemed like one more thing to have to try to juggle, and he had run clean out of hands. He slid a little down in his bed, hoping his mother would get the hint and leave. She didn’t move. She was staring across the room at nothing.

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” said his mother.

“Who? Iris?”

“No.” Lou shook her head. “Iris
is
pretty. I adore Iris, as you know. But I was talking about Mimi.” His mother smiled at him in a way that made him think that she could see clear inside him, all the way down to thoughts he was trying very hard to hide from himself.

PART TWO

The room was quiet, but Mimi was there, up there, just beyond seeing. She wasn’t talking, but he could sense her, hovering nearby, like an angel. Maybe she was an angel. Maybe he had died without knowing it and this black hole was hell with her only an arm’s length away. So close, if he could only move his arms.

“I know you’re there,” she said, her voice quiet. “I think you can hear me.”

She had found him.

She had found him, but he couldn’t do a thing about it, couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move. She would go and he wouldn’t be able to stop her, or follow, or call after her.

“I want you to come out from there,” she said. “I think you’re hiding, Cramer, and I want to talk to you, okay?”

And this was the hardest thing of all, he thought. Because all he wanted in the whole world was to talk to her and it was beyond him. She was beyond him. And maybe it would be that way forever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

D
ESPITE THE AVALANCHE
of shocks and surprises, or maybe because of them, Mimi slept like a baby. The revelation that capped the evening—that someone had used her own camera to shoot footage of her—had stunned her speechless. Luckily Jay had been right beside her. She had grabbed on to his arm for support, and he had taken the camera away from her, gently, before she dropped it, as if it were a grenade with a loose firing pin. It was his serious eyes as much as his strong grip that held her up. And his eyes seemed to say,
Let’s keep this our secret.

“Good of him not to steal the JVC,” Jay said when they were alone. But the look in his eyes said what Mimi was thinking. It
wasn’t
good. It was intimidating.

They were in the guest room; he’d gone out to get her fresh towels, and just as he returned, her cell phone rang. She didn’t answer it, and, luckily, Jay got the hint and left her alone, pulling the door shut behind him.

She had gone to bed, missing the comforting sound of traffic, of car horns and sirens. Of cabbies arguing with drunk passengers.

The next thing she knew she was waking to birdsong and a radio playing classical music softly somewhere off in the blond house.

She pulled up the blinds and looked out at the garden. Jay came into view, walking from around the corner of the house in jeans and a ratty denim jacket, heading down toward the river with a carpenter’s tool belt hanging around his hips, the hammer tapping against his thigh.

“Very Village People,” she murmured.

Jay was also lugging an orange-colored case, which she supposed contained some kind of power tool. He loaded it into the forward hatch of the kayak. Then he undid his tool belt and lowered it into the hatch as well. He was going to do some carpentry work up at the snye, she gathered, and as soon as she realized this, she recalled the secret entrance, the storm door hidden behind the shed, and the phantom who had been using it to gain entrance to the little house. The same phantom, presumably, that had borrowed her camera. Her shoulders sagged.

Jay looked as if he were about to leave. She grabbed her NYU hoodie from the muddle of clothes she had thrown on a rocker and raced for the back door, pulling on the sweatshirt as she went. She called him from the step as he was about to launch the kayak. He stopped, looked back at her. His expression wasn’t quite impatience. It was the expression of someone too polite to be impatient.

She wondered how he had gotten the kayak back from the snye and then realized that it was not the same one he had left up there. The one they had hauled into the house had been completely yellow. This one was yellow on top but the hull was white.

Jay looked up at the sky. It was overcast. There was a bit of chop on the river caused by a stiff breeze. Mimi breathed in; the air was fresh, and the grass was wet with dew or maybe it had rained. She didn’t often get to go outside in just her nightclothes and a hoodie. The garden was closed off, private. It felt liberating.

She joined him at the riverside. He didn’t look like he’d had much sleep. She kicked the kayak lightly with her bare toe. “You buy these things by the six-pack?” she asked.

He didn’t smile. “It’s my mom’s,” he said.

“You’re going to have a marina up there at this rate.”

“I can tow the other one back. I want to get a lock on that door as soon as possible.”

“Figured. I can drive you, if you give me two minutes.”

He looked her up and down and frowned as if to say it would take more than two minutes for her to get ready.

“I didn’t know you wore specs,” he said.

She held out her arms and twirled around, presenting herself for inspection. “This is your new sibling in the morning: bed-head, sarcastic glasses, and bad plaid pajamas.”

Jay tried not to smile, mostly succeeded.

“You have a bad night?” she asked.

He looked out at the river and took a deep breath. “I’m not much of a morning person,” he said.

“Sorry.”

He looked out at the river, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “It’s just that I want to get up to the place and deal with this thing.”

“I understand. I want to help. Could I drive up and meet you there?” His eyes got shifty-looking. She spoke slowly to him, as if language was the problem. “Jay, I know you need to go batten down the hatches, but we need to talk. And, anyway, I could help. Maybe not with the hatches, but with … you know. Stuff.”

He puckered his brow. “Stuff?” he said.

Mimi rolled her eyes. “I’m smart and resourceful and … something else. Oh, right—fearless!”

“You looked pretty scared when you saw yourself on the camera.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got to admit, that was special, wasn’t it? Give me a break.”

Jay raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve been around, Jay. I’m not some bimbo. Besides, I’ve got an idea.”

“An idea?”

“Yeah. It involves motion detectors, infrared cameras, and land mines, but we can improvise.” She coaxed a grin out of him, but she was working overtime.

He sighed. “So we’ll talk,” he said, “when I get back.” He looked at his watch, showed it to her. It was nearly ten. “I should be back by one.”

“Great! We’ll do lunch,” she said, all perky-eyed. “I’ll head into town and find something. Is there a sushi bar? Just kidding.”

Now Jay just looked worn-out.

“Okay?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“Good. I’ll make lunch for everyone.”

“It’ll just be us. Mom and Jo went to Ottawa, won’t be back until dinner.”

“Lunch for two, then.”

“Cool.”

Then he started to push the kayak into the water.

“Oops!” said Mimi.

He stopped and turned around with a what-is-it-this-time look on his face.

“The security system,” she said, pointing back ­toward the house. “How do you work it?”

Jay showed her how to arm the system and then took off.

Mimi explored the house, which she finally had all to herself, just her and the radio. Then she took a shower and went back to her room to get dressed. There were a series of framed drawings on the wall above the low dresser. They were lively Conté crayon sketches of rocks. She knew those rocks. She leaned close to see her father’s scrawl of a signature in the lower right-hand corner with the year ’82 after it. Six years before she was born. These rocks had gone on to big things. Literally. Mark’s first major show in New York featured these very same rocks, nine of them in all, but painted huge—boulder size—and ganged up in diptychs and triptychs. She had read about it in an article in
Artforum:
“Soto—The Stone Age.” Part of her father’s long history.

She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. She felt good. Rested. Seeing these sketches made her feel as if she belonged here somehow. She would ask Jay if they could share the house at the snye. It wasn’t his fault—or hers—that they were both here. She’d stay out of his hair. And it would be good to have two people there, really.

She got up and started sorting through her clothes. She had understood Jay’s caginess with her. It was kind of a weird variant of waking up after a one-night stand. Now there was a thought! He’d get over it. So would she. Had to.