The Uninvited (15 page)

She had brought with her a box of dishes and silverware, for one. And she had planned on buying a microwave or toaster oven if necessary. But the stove worked, and so she had purchased a tiny little beer fridge at the Canadian Tire store in Ladybank. A beer fridge from a tire store. Go figure. She kept soy milk and veggies in her little blue beer fridge. And wine.

She had settled in.

The first few days had been fun, a chance to get to know each other. A brother. She had a brother. The idea still seemed impossible. She had yet to phone her father to confront him with the news, which, apparently, wasn’t news to him. She was still too angry, and yet she wasn’t really sure why. And what was the point of being angry with him, anyway? Anger slid off his hide like water off a duck.

INT. SOHO STUDIO—NIGHT

HENRI sips from a glass of wine. Dabs a Venetian blue smear across his canvas.

SASHA pours herself a large refill of the wine, then hurls the contents all over the canvas.

She hadn’t told her mother about Jay, either. Not yet. She had fished to see if Grier knew anything about other siblings. She didn’t seem to. So the only person back home who knew was Jamila. And when Jamila had gotten over the shock, she had said, “Oh, my God, welcome to the club!” Because Jamila had four brothers, and she had promised to get Mimi up to speed on the whole thing. They had chatted furiously back and forth by e-mail while Mimi was still staying at the Pages’, but there was no Internet connection out here. And, for that matter, the connection at the Pages’ had been dial-up, so not exactly a furious rate. They were too far out of town for the local tower to get high-speed, although there were rumors of a new tower going up soon. So Mimi had felt very far from home. She was welcome to use the dial-up at the Page house anytime—welcome to stay there whenever she wanted. Lou had given her a key. There was also a great little Internet café in town right on the park. But Mimi was trying very hard to do what she had set out to do, which was to be on her own, sorting things out, digging deep. Trying, in one way or another, to figure out who the sap was who had gotten herself in so deep with an almost forty-year-old professor who just might be mentally unstable.

She had been so happy to see Jay arrive that morning. But he was only stopping by to give her the news about his trip to Toronto. The news about Iris.

“Oh, and these,” he said, heading back to the SUV. He returned with a neat pile of sunshine-yellow folded material. Curtains. “Lou figured it might be good on the downstairs windows, anyway.”

Mimi opened one out. “Lou made these?”

“Yeah, I know. A woman of many talents.”

When she and Jo had carted out a “few sticks of furniture,” as Jo called it, Lou had measured the five downstairs windows. Mimi hadn’t even noticed. Jay had picked up curtain rods on his way out. Mimi was surprised at how happy she was. Curtains!

Jay had dragged his mother’s kayak upstream a few days earlier so that they could both go down to the big house whenever they wanted without the long roundabout drive. Mimi laughed herself silly her first time out. “Hey, New York!” she shouted. “Look at me—Mimi Shapiro in a
boat
!” She imagined herself going back to the city buff and tanned. Yeah, right. Sore and drenched was more like it! She flipped three times the first day. She never felt really comfortable that first trip, though she was okay as long as she hugged the shore and moved at about five strokes per hour.

“You go ahead, for God’s sake!” she said as Jay circled back to give helpful advice. “You’re making me nervous.”

But he stayed close.

“And to think the Eskimos hunt whales in these things,” she shouted.

“Inuit,” he said.

She looked at him, thinking maybe he was giving advice.

“They’re not Eskimos; they’re Inuit.”

Well, she certainly wasn’t Inuit.

“Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper,” she said to no one. “You will always be my favorite mode of transportation.”

He had first left her alone on Friday night. He was meeting up with some friend who was in town.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Get! Scoot!”

She had waved him off down the snye, standing barefoot in the shallow water as he glided off into the gloaming. He had to lie back on the kayak to pass under the arch of the bridge.

“Have a good trip, honey,” she called after him. It was meant to be a joke. Jay laughed. Good.

But the truth was she did feel like some hausfrau waving her hubby off to work. Then, as soon as he was out of sight, she returned to the little house, locked the doors, and checked the panic room. She hoisted up her mattress, opened the trapdoor, and dropped down to the earthen room, then shimmied along the tunnel with her flashlight in her teeth until she came to the door that led to the outside. Jay had put a good hefty hasp on it and padlocked it. So there were just the windows to worry about. She had gone to sleep the first couple of nights to the imagined tinkling of broken glass.

But there was no broken glass and there were no dead birds or snake skins or messages of any kind.

She had worried about the car, too, wished she could bring it closer, in sight of the house. Jay had suggested laying some boards down over the broken expanse of bridge—only a few feet, after all. But she couldn’t quite imagine driving on such a makeshift overpass. Worse still was the thought of having to escape the house and finding the planks gone! So she checked the car first thing every morning when she went out for her run. She checked the ground around it for signs of footsteps. For a week now, there had been nothing more serious than dew to contend with. Dew and the odd petal of a flowering tree.

And once deer tracks.

She imagined some deer peering into the Mini looking for whatever it was deer ate. Jelly beans? Cedar-flavored jelly beans.

And so, bit by bit, she let the magic place settle down around her. She got into a kind of rhythm that was comforting and stimulating at the same time in ways she had never imagined possible. Up at seven, a jog down the Upper Valentine Road to where it ended at the river, a shower, breakfast, and sitting at her laptop by eight or so. Lunch at noon, like any working Joe. A little nap just for the luxury of it, a little reading, work until five, and treat yourself to a glass of wine. She found a video store in town and rented DVDs to play on her computer. What more could a girl want?

EXT. TULLOCH—NIGHT

KING OF THE FAIRIES sips from a glass of mead. Stares at the little moonlit house.

Yikes! Maybe the aloneness was getting to her. Her script would not behave. She stared out the window at the hill in the meadow. No sign of fairy troops. Still, she wished Jay were here.

It had been great to have him around. He had worked on his music a lot. Compared to him, she felt like a fraud. Writing a film script, yeah, right!
He’s four years older than you,
she told herself. But it was more than that. There was this commitment toward his art she didn’t feel, not in the same way. Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was always this conscientious or whether he was making some kind of a point.

He worked with headphones, so it was almost as if no one was there except for the squeaking of his chair. Then he’d come down and ask if it was all right if he played or listened to something out loud. So polite. And what could she say? If she was writing, she’d close the door to her bedroom and work with her laptop on her lap and her iPod playing music she could tune out. She couldn’t tune out Jay’s music. Couldn’t tune him out, either.

Apart from her morning run along the road, she explored the island, her mace in her pocket, though it seemed absurd in the light of day. She explored but not too far. Never into the Dark Forest. And never to the end of the snye, where the wetlands took over. The land down where the snye met the river was owned by mosquitoes that seemed to have a thing for her virgin New York flesh.

It had been strange to watch Jay from her “office window,” arriving at the little house, pulling his kayak up onto the bank. She had felt like a voyeur watching him strip off his flotation device. Odd the feeling she felt to look at him, the fluttering inside.
Don’t go there, girl,
she warned herself.

And now there was Iris. This would help to settle things down—batten down the hatches on any unwarranted flights of fantasy. She would have to decide to like Iris.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

D
ISTANCE WAS A FUNNY THING.

Cramer was twelve when Mavis found the little yellow house overlooking Butchard’s Creek. It was so near to Chester’s Corner, she didn’t even have to change her phone number when they moved there. The school bus that picked him up at the foot of the drive took under fifteen minutes to get him to the school in the village, Eden Elementary. The bus trundled west along the Upper Valentine over the old bridge, and they were there, just like that.