The Mansion Read online

  Maybe the trip to the cabin hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

  SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  AN APPOINTMENT TO KEEP

  Billy had always liked working things out by hand. Odd for a computer guy, but he found it soothing. The tactile nature of pen and paper required an immersion different from the click of a keyboard. He was sure that Emily must have told him she was heading out, but he didn’t remember it. By the time the whirring lock and the door opening signaled her return, it was already dark out.

  Emily stepped into the room. She said something incomprehensible, a sequence of sounds that could have meant anything, and held up a plastic bag.

  He massaged the meat of his right hand. He’d transcribed the photos from the cabin into his notebook and then made pages and pages of notes of his own. Working off the old formulas and concepts for Nellie felt like hearing the echo in a cover of a song you once knew: haunting, eerie, but also so familiar. Or like seeing somebody you thought you knew. Maybe he could see something meaningful if only he turned his head fast enough. His wife was looking at him. Waiting.

  It was like surfacing from under the water of a swimming pool, the world above suddenly shifting into view. She had spoken to him. “Sorry,” he said. “What?”

  “I said”—she held the bag out to him—“Thai food. Figured we wouldn’t be able to get that in Whiskey Run.” She put it on the desk next to him and then unzipped her jacket. “Holy shit. It’s gotten cold out. It smells like snow. I feel bad for the little kids out there trick-or-treating. Or maybe it’s worse for the parents. The kids don’t feel it. You pump enough sugar into them and they’re little monsters on their own,” she said, grinning. “You should see it. Lots of little ghosts and goblins running around and dragging their parents behind them. Actually, not really. Mostly princesses and hockey players and ninjas. I don’t think I saw a single ghost. And then, of course, you’ve got the college students all dressed up. Girls in short skirts and frat boys dressed up as zombies.

  “Anyway, you seemed like you were in a rhythm with your work when I left. You didn’t even look up when I told you I was heading out. I texted you like ten times and I tried calling, but you didn’t pick up, and it’s after seven, so I just grabbed Thai takeout. If you want to keep working, that’s fine, but otherwise, I figured we could eat dinner in bed, watch a movie together.” She made her eyebrows jump twice. “Screw a little.”

  He glanced out the window. What time was it? He turned back to look at his wife. “We can get Thai if you want.”

  “No. You aren’t listening.” She poked the bag on the desk. “I got Thai already.”

  “Sorry. I meant we can get Thai in Whiskey Run. Shawn told me. He hired a guy from New York City to open a Thai restaurant in Whiskey Run. You’ll see. It’s surreal. A private city. So we can get Thai food in Whiskey Run if you want. But that’s weird, too. I told you, right, that even though he fixed up the road, it’s still the same half-hour drive from Eagle Mansion into town? Which means takeout would kind of suck, but we can go out for Thai whenever you want.” He picked up his pen again and looked at the notebook.

  She put her hand on his head, patting it affectionately, like he was a dog. Woof. Good boy, Billy. An old joke, one that had started in the first years of their marriage and then disappeared from their lexicon in the middle wilderness. She’d started doing it again recently, since they’d left their apartment. Old habits resurfacing.

  “That’s your takeaway from what I just said?”

  She was smiling. What had he missed?

  “Was there something else?” he said.

  “The part where I asked if you maybe wanted to watch a movie.” She paused. “And then screw a little.”

  Oh.

  “Oh,” he said. He put down his pen. “Right.”

  They had sex first, and then they ate the Thai food, still warm, and watched a nonsensical romantic comedy that Emily found on television, and by then it was almost ten o’clock. They had sex again—they normally had a good sex life, especially when Emily was reading a romance or erotic novel that was particularly good, but he’d noticed a few days after he took Shawn’s offer that her birth control pills were left unswallowed, and even if she hadn’t said anything about it, she’d been even more interested in sex than usual—and then Emily went to sleep, curled against him, her arm over his stomach.

  Whoever had renovated the inn had done a good job. He was on the side of the bed closest to the window, the bedsheet and blankets pushed down to his hips. Even naked, however, there was no sense of the night’s chill coming through the glass, no drafty corners. He knew he should be sleeping. They were expected in Whiskey Run to meet Shawn’s plane in almost twelve hours, which meant that Emily would get up for a run around six o’clock, be back by seven, wake him up at eight, and want to be in the car by eight forty-five. He was too wired to sleep, though. Too many things. There was the sweet hum of his wife beside him, the gorgeous warmth of their relationship feeling new again, the first time since he’d gotten out of rehab that he truly felt good about the two of them. There was the knowledge that tomorrow, November 1, they’d head up to Shawn’s ridiculous house to begin their residency. And there was what he’d copied down from the walls of the cabin. He could feel something living, breathing in those letters and numbers, a tickle deep in the back of his brain. The excitement he remembered feeling in the first months of working in the cabin was coming back to him. Why had they given up on Nellie? Why had they settled on Eagle Logic?

  Takata.

  He shivered. The room suddenly felt cold, and he decided he didn’t want to stay in bed. He got up and slid on a T-shirt and his underwear and jeans. He thought about turning on the light on the desk, but he didn’t want to wake up Emily. He grabbed his notebook and pen, stuffed a room key and his wallet into his pocket, and picked up his cowboy boots and jacket. He stopped on the threshold and looked back at Emily. She was still curled into the space that he had just vacated, the skin of her shoulder looking delicate in the light drifting in through the window. He stepped out into the hallway, closing the door carefully behind him, and slid his boots on over his bare feet. The thick carpet swallowed the heels of his cowboy boots, but by the time he reached the head of the stairs he could hear the hum of voices from downstairs. There’d be light down there. He could find a table in the corner and sit with his notebook and drink seltzer and lime.

  The bar was trying too hard, he thought, the sort of place he’d frequented in those first few years after they left Whiskey Run, when Emily thought it was still fun to go out with him and money seemed like a thing to take for granted. The kind of bar where everything was artisanal and the bartenders were either tattooed pixies or mustached hipsters who liked to tell you the story behind your drink, as if you wanted something other than the belt of fire in your throat, as if you cared about anything other than the way the ice cubes rattling in your empty glass could bring them running. There were tables by the front, but a group of professionals old enough to be out of college but young enough to still go out for Halloween had pulled them together. Overstuffed chairs dotted the room, but most of those were occupied or sitting in shadows. It wasn’t his kind of joint, anyway. Even for a glass of seltzer and lime, he liked things a little more run-down. Too many young men and young women trying too hard to act like they weren’t trying at all. He preferred the kind of place where people had given up trying years earlier. That’s where he wanted to be.

  He stepped out into the night, surprised at how cold it was. He knew he’d regret not bothering with socks, but at least he had his jacket. He started down the pedestrian mall. In the old days, he’d have walked all the way across, to the Rooster, but they’d passed his old bar earlier that morning: the Rooster had been abandoned. The sign was gone. Instead of the light silhouette of a crowing rooster, there were just two metal poles on the side of the building. One of the two windows had been boarded over, and when he cupped his hands against the gla
ss and peered inside, he’d seen that the Rooster was empty and derelict. His old bar was just a haunt of dust and emptiness.

  Somewhere else would have to do. He was cold, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He popped his collar up against the wind and tucked his hands into his pockets. He peered through the windows of the first bar, but it was packed with dancing college students, and the second bar, only a few doors down, was full of televisions and frat boys. He looked down the pedestrian mall and froze.

  Was that . . . ?

  He started walking, quickly. The figure was three-quarters turned from him, and far enough away so that Billy wouldn’t have had a good look even if he were closer. But it was impossible. Takata was . . .

  Billy realized he was running now. The figure started walking and reached the end of the commons, turning left, out of sight.

  When Billy turned the corner, the sidewalk was empty. No sign of him. Like he’d never been there.

  He looked up. The familiar sign for the Rooster was hanging above his head, the lights guttering like candles.

  His memory was playing tricks on him. It was the same place he’d been earlier that day, he was sure of it, but now the sign was hanging, and both windows were whole and unboarded. He stood there, staring through the glass. It looked the same inside as it always had. Nothing had changed in a dozen years. A scarred pool table in the back, a line of backless stools by the bar, a couple of booths and tables. Billy opened the door, hesitating until he heard somebody yell that he was letting in the cold. The door swung shut heavily behind him, like a boulder sealing up a cave. From the outside, looking through the glass, the bar had seemed like it was well lit, but now that he was inside, it seemed dark and faded. He stood there, by the door, adjusting to the dimness, and then he made his way to the bar. He fully intended to order a seltzer and lime, but the bartender, whom he didn’t recognize, a diminutive woman whose ears were snaked with hoops and who was wearing a pair of devil horns in a nod to Halloween, slid him a glass that was already full. He held it up to the single, bare lightbulb that failed to illuminate the bar area. Thin, cheap, hollow cubes of ice already melting into the bubbles of the drink, a mean slice of lime. The astringent taste of Gordon’s gin was a time machine; he couldn’t have ordered Sapphire gin in here if he’d tried. It was just like it had always been. He could have been sitting here at the Rooster his entire life. He might as well have not even left. It could have been now, it could have been a hundred years ago, and he knew it wouldn’t matter. The Rooster would always exist like this for him, a haunt calling him home.

  He pulled out his notebook and sat and drank.

  When the bartender told him she was closing out, he was surprised at the size of his tab. He went to hand her his credit card—it felt so good to be able to slap it down and know that it wouldn’t be handed back with a grim embarrassment—and then changed his mind, sliding it back into his wallet and dropping three twenties on the bar. Walking out the door was like traveling in time again, and for a moment he hesitated. He wondered what he would see if he turned around to look at the bar. The Rooster was a memory that should have stayed a memory, the cold a reminder of who he had been, but maybe it was open for him tonight as a reminder that he’d never escape his past.

  He wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: turning and seeing that the Rooster was gone, boarded up and empty as he’d seen it earlier that day, or turning and seeing the sign flickering and calling him back. He decided he didn’t want to know.

  Instead, he walked carefully across the pedestrian mall, taking his time and letting the wind whip against his face. It was completely deserted. He thought he’d be passing drunk sorority girls trying to stay warm in their skimpy costumes, or couples who could barely wait to make it home, but it was just him and the emptiness of the open walk.

  It took him a couple of tries to work the front door of the inn, and once he was upstairs, he stopped outside the door of their room and leaned against the wall to take off first one boot and then the other. The hallway was tastefully bulwarked against the darkness, with dim sconces after every door, and the sound of the lock retracting might as well have been a brass band. He pushed gently and then held the door handle up so that the hydraulic system could close it behind him noiselessly.

  He froze.

  Emily was on her side, turned toward him. She’d kicked the blankets down so that they were dangling off the bed, but the sheet still covered her in twisted rivers of cotton, tucked under her arm so that her shoulder and one of her breasts were bare to what light still came in from the window.

  Her eyes were open. She was staring at him.

  He took a deep breath and bent over to put his cowboy boots down. When he stood up, her eyes were closed. She was sleeping. He’d imagined it. He shed his jacket and jeans, took a piss, and drowned his teeth in mouthwash, rubbing it on his lips as well. When he got into bed he moved slowly and gently, careful not to let his cold feet brush against her. He fell asleep almost instantly.

  The next morning, he felt the bed shifting as she got up. She never seemed to need an alarm clock, and even the time change between Seattle and Cortaca didn’t throw her. He didn’t have to flutter his eyes open to know that it was within a few minutes of six o’clock. He waited, keeping his breathing even while he heard her go in and then out of the bathroom, the rustle of her tights and running shirt, the friction of her laces, the zip of her jacket, the breath and click of the door closing behind her.

  By the time she got back, sweaty and cold at the same time, her face red from the wind and her fingers balled up into her sleeves, he’d already thrown down two Advil, brushed his teeth and gargled with mouthwash, gone to the bathroom, shaved, showered, and brought a carafe of coffee up to the room from the dining room below.

  “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t expect you up yet. I tried to be quiet heading out. Did I wake you up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  He was sitting at the desk, the notebook open in front of him again, but he was just pretending to do work. Whatever it was that had made the numbers and letters seem alive the night before, had made them almost vibrate insistently in his mind, was gone. The notebook was open only for show. She stared at him in a way that made him uncomfortable, an extra breath of time that didn’t make sense, and then she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Yeah. I heard you go out last night. Were you working?” she said.

  What she didn’t say, what he heard: Please, tell me you were working. Please. Please. You were working.

  “I was working. I didn’t want to bother you. I went to sit down in the lobby.”

  “Okay. If you’re tired, you can sleep in the car. There’s enough time for a nap. Let me grab a shower and then we can head down and have breakfast.”

  He nodded and then sat there at the desk, looking at the notebook but not seeing anything, listening to the water play as she showered. Downstairs, there were warm cinnamon scones and pitchers of orange juice already on the table. The woman working the dining room was, thankfully, less solicitous than he found most owners of bed-and-breakfasts to be. They ate quickly, scrambled eggs and bacon for him, oatmeal with maple syrup and nuts for her, and were on the road a few minutes early, even with a quick stop for coffee.

  In the car, they chatted aimlessly for a while, but Emily seemed to sense that he was elsewhere, because they settled into the comfortable silence of the long married. He turned the heat up a couple of ticks and relaxed into the gentle sway of the car on the road.

  He closed his eyes.

  He must have dozed off, because when he opened his eyes again it was to a world transformed.

  A whisper of snow covered the farmer’s fields to his right. The barn and the main house were untouched, the buildings’ exteriors holding enough residual heat to stay clear, but the rolling meadows were silvered. They passed a cluster of cows that ignored the car with a studied uninterest. To the left was thickly wooded old growth, pine trees wearing the snow like grace, a
contrast to the deep shadows hidden from the road. In front of them, hills dipped and rolled, but while there was a sheen of moisture, no snow stuck to the road. Emily looked at him, patted his thigh, and smiled.

  “It’s saying five more minutes to Whiskey Run. You picked a good time to wake up. We should be there with plenty of time to grab another coffee or something if you want before Shawn’s plane touches down. It will be good to see him again. I think.” She laughed, but it sounded strained.

  He rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth and straightened up in his seat. Would this be the first time that she’d seen Shawn since the day they left the cabin together? How could that be? She’d stayed away from the lawsuit, unable to bear it, she’d said. Yes. She hadn’t seen him then and she hadn’t come to Baltimore with Billy in September. How was it that he was just realizing this now? Had it been something he wanted to avoid? Was it his way of pretending it didn’t matter, or was he secretly looking forward to it, to the chance to see her face as she looked upon Shawn’s? Was there something he was hoping to see there, or, perhaps more important, something he was hoping he wouldn’t see?

  He rubbed harder at his mouth. The corners were dry and gritty, and he reached for the water bottle. Empty. She saw him shake it.

  “Sorry,” she said. “We’re here, though.”

  And they were there, but at the same time, they weren’t there yet. It took several more minutes for them to go down the hill and pass the airstrip. Coming in by car felt elementally different to him from his previous trip by jet. Maybe, he thought, it was the simple difference between coming with Shawn and coming with Emily. With Shawn, it was like a god visiting the earth below. I am here to see the gifts of my greatness. Look upon what I have created and tremble on your knees at my power. With Emily, it was a descent into a new world, like going through an air lock from a past life into a new one. By driving into Whiskey Run, they’d be leaving their past behind. The drinking, the drugs, the ways in which he’d disappointed her. She’d wanted to get away from Kansas City and that’s how she’d ended up at Cortaca University, but in some ways, no matter how far they’d been in terms of miles, he’d made it so she always carried at least a small part of Kansas City with her. But no longer. Not here. He thought that Whiskey Run would scrub him clean, that crossing through the forest to Shawn’s property would be a baptism of sorts. A fresh start. Again. Another fresh start.