Authors: Jason McIntyre
It was getting on to late afternoon and the chill in the air was toothy and biting so Sebastion began lighting a fire in the stove which sat in the nook angled between the living room and the stairs. A dark sooty pipe ran from the stove up towards the roof of the living room, into it and beyond, between the two upstairs bedrooms where it would do little to heat them at all. Their dormer windows might fog a little and the slanted ceilings may become damp with a diminutive sweat, but that would be stretching it.
The cabin was insulated but not winterized. There had never been a water heater, and the plumbing and electricity were both late additions. The cottage had originally been built by a wealthy family near the turn of the twentieth century, with only the summer months in mind, but had been updated over the years to a point where it was nearly habitable in early spring and later autumn. Here, on the tail of January however, the septic tank beneath the house’s brick foundation would be empty, as well as the water tank clinging to its back wall in the yard. In summer it collected rain water and fed it to the kitchen and bathroom sink by way of retrofit copper pipes and an old electric pump under the house. Having those tanks emptied and the pipes drained, and being on hand when the tanker truck arrived each fall to do the job, was part of Felix Wagener’s informal custodial duty—he lived in Edan and supervised these activities for nearly this whole line of cottages. To leave the lines and tanks untended would be to let them freeze and rupture—an expensive error.
A shadow moved across the living room’s back wall and Sebastion’s eyes flicked to the front window, two large panels of glass. He threw down a crumpled bit of newspaper and turned from the stove on his haunches. Past the front deck of trodden and soggy looking pine—another late addition—there was a light tan fox bounding through the snow, kicking a fanning furl of powder up behind his hind legs and tail. Quick, his dark eyes keen on something unseen, he passed the frame of the windows in an instant.
The late afternoon winter sunlight, broken by the scurrying fox, was in two planks of pleasant color. They fell on the room’s back wall, letting their lower edges dangle romantically across the draped furniture covers. One piece of light, that which corresponded to the more easterly section of glass, was a droopy, sloppy set of spider-web lines, brilliant copper in color against the wood panel of the wall. The line work sagged, as though the sheet of glass had been melted by a hot metal strip, pressed against it repeatedly and with great diligence. But Zeb knew the effect was only the result of broken carbon and hydrogen bonds in the glass, deteriorated by the stare of the sun. Science and math, logic in other words, protruded into the surrealism of such beauty. It was an unreal effect from a real source. Melted, yes, but over fifty years and maybe longer, it was a feature given to the glass by an eternity of standing guard against weather and the world. Only that eastern pane was affected, as the other window was mainly shielded by the triplet pines sitting off to the west side of the front yard, cutting off the angle of the late morning, midday and remaining sun. For that one window, the torture if its slumping glass was a nasty effacement for a job well done. It had been left naked, unprotected, unsaved from the sun.
Still, the result was dazzling on the wall and he got to his feet, moved further into the room and looked at it, studied it, to see if he could witness its changes as the sun descended somewhere beyond the mass of those three pines and the brush that ran along the front and western edge of the property. His breath came into view in front of his eyes, and he realized how cold he was. The groceries he had bought at Edan’s MainWay Market would begin to freeze in the trunk of the Ci before long. The cashier had been the only other living soul he had seen and now he was alone again, with only that light, and a string of empty cottages further west along the gravel and snow-mixed road. They, like the Redfield septic tank, would be standing vacant, cold and desolate. But here, tonight at least, there would be heat, a meal, and some paint on some canvas.
Out there, beyond the driveway that unrolled down towards the tree line at the water, the heavy wrought gates, and the boat launch, there was a flat field of ice and snow: Charlemagne Lake. Across it was more hilly terrain, though not as substantial or extensive as that which ran further north, behind him. On that south side of the lake was the true swell of cottages and homes, the real summer resort, the place with all the beaches and summer activities. He thought he could see strands of smoke and porch lights in the distance beyond the triplets and the gate. Here, in summer, across the water from the campgrounds and the summer beach parties, the Redfield cottage and the rest of them in the line, probably seemed like that infamous other side of the world. Here was the place where lights twinkled in the distance to the people over there. Here was the mysterious place where only a few scattered souls among them might look out at and wonder about, the place none of them knew of, the place where none of them had ever been.
But to Zeb,
that side
, the side with the thriving flourish and the decadent bustle of hot summer nights, had always been the mysterious one.
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The cabin was now warm. Or, at least, the living room was warm. Some of the white shrouds had been thrown on the floor and the foyer near the front door, and the kitchen where a nearly empty soup pot stood, were all warm too. The light was gone and beyond the melted window and the three pines was blackness. Candles found under the kitchen sink glowed with a gentle swell of halo about them and there was one lamp in the corner of the living room switched on. It all provided a gloriously dim mood; a space where shadows stretched and flicked at edges but did not loom.
After trotting through heavy snow to the shed, Zeb found some two-by-fours, a hammer, and some nails. He pounded three pieces together to form a slant tepee and then tacked another horizontally onto the structure’s legs facing him. He set the easel up near the front window, pleased with its functionality, and from the trunk of the Ci he brought his groceries and a stack of four blank canvases. One of them, he discovered, had a dark smudged foot print, petite, drawn out of some faint oil and dust from the concrete pad of his garage in Vaughan. Malin had left her mark, a beautiful thumb print of herself, despite the terror which had undoubtedly been swimming in her heart and her head at the moment when it occurred.
As his camel-hair brush dabbed at the pebbly surface, Zeb’s thoughts went to her and then to his own ankle where the Druid had snapped around him. He thought he could still feel—if he concentrated—the tight metal ring of that hand reaching out from under the car. He stopped concentrating and floated back to an image of Malin, the one in his head, and the one on his canvas.
He had started a dazzling display of color first, making it distend like an aura around the footprint’s presence. But the glow of it became something new, a landscape that pulsed in his head like a living creature. It was something innovative and wonderful...But he put it aside and started a new painting—a portrait of the woman who had, in essence, saved his life, brought him back. Pointed him towards something that had color of its own.
He stayed up late that night, forgetting the bullet and the fact that it even hurt anymore. Maybe it didn’t. The painting, like all good works, was a living and breathing beast. It went where it wanted. It became what it wanted. And he was unfazed, focused. Into the early morning hours, out of elation and peacefulness, he worked at finishing the portrait—the room where it was conceived had its own special radiance—and it was alive. The second colorful canvas to sit on the lip of his makeshift easel was Malin standing beyond a window frame and staring back. He put his brush down, sat and stared at her in the flickering light, then drifted off to sleep in the warmth of the cabin’s living room. It was a sleep unlike any for a long time before.
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Daniela stood by John Merridew’s bronze Lexus, at its back door. She casually looked around as though she had never been out of the city before. In her hands, she held the strap of a small overnight bag and it dangled from her slender white arms in front of her equally milky legs. She wore shorts and a tank top and her gold hair was held in a loose ponytail behind her head. The day was hot, humid and overbearing but she did not look like it was affecting. Her face was fragile and her eyes were glassy. Pensive. She looked hesitant and preoccupied.
Experimenting with the water paints his mom had given him earlier in the year, Zeb sat in the living room at a TV tray by the window, with sheets of paper scattered all around him. His feet dangled from the tall stool and there was sweat on his forehead under tangles of his careless, boyish hair. The room was stuffy and oppressive. The intricate spider scrawl of August light from the east window pane dropped a detail of designs across him, but he looked past it at the girl in the driveway of gravel and clover which ambled down towards the gate and the water on its other side.
His mother rushed into the room from the kitchen where she had been chopping vegetables at the counter. She leaned to the left, past the shadows thrown across the front window by the triplets and regarded the Lexus and its emerging occupants with casual furor. She rubbed her hands on a dish towel. “They brought someone,” she said under her breath, not to her little boy, and not really to anyone at all, “Or do they have a kid? I didn’t know they had a kid.”
Then she looked around at all the papers and drawings scattered in the room. “C’mon, hon, pick all this up. Lunch is soon and we’ve got company.”
The day was a wickedly fun one at the start. Zeb would later remember it as fun, then confusing. And then fun again. He would not see it as the beginning of the end.
Greetings were short. Oliver met the Merridews and their mystery guest on the front steps of the pine deck as Zeb quickly brought together all his sheets of paper into a disorderly stack. Originally he had an order in mind for all of them—a story about mom—but they would have to be re-ordered later. Mom’s tone was not angry—not yet—but it could reach angry with an extenuated finger. Through the spider-glass, Zeb saw dad’s handshake with Mr. Merridew. It was stiff but his smile was big and wide, all white with teeth. Mom came out after him, letting the front screen door bang gently as she still wiped her hands on the dish cloth. Then she shook Mr. Merridew’s hand, then his wife’s whom she had never met prior. Among them, staring back at the lake and at the sky, Daniela looked like a lost dog out of the rain but still feeling lonely. She followed behind them—only, it seemed, for the smell of food on their clothes or some such.
Though he would not know the term “Eastern Europe,” or where it could be located on a spinning globe for a number of years yet, Zeb was courageous and curious with his questions for Daniela. He thought her beautiful but it was still that innocent kind of connection with beauty. There was no sexual intrigue in it—just intrigue, a longing to talk to her. The two of them set off to the northern trails and pathways; Zeb was already an expert at them by then. And Sadie, uncomfortable already, but not angry yet, instructed him to bring the girl back in an hour. No later.
Her accent he found alluring. Zeb remembered the girl, older than he was by some years, as vibrant and thoughtful and she didn’t seem to mind spending that little bit of time with a nine year old. Her hair seemed to shimmer like it had an internal light bulb. And her skin! The sensations he imagined emanating in him if he were to touch that skin threatened to overwhelm. She asked questions about his mom and dad, in her broken English, and he asked her why she had come all this way. “For school,” she said, when they got to a little clearing of clover, patchy grass and tender saplings. “And for money.”
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By the time Zeb and Daniela returned to the cabin, the picnic table had been moved from its usual spot by the fire pit in the small space of the backyard. It now sat under the gently wind-shaken pine-needles of the triplets and it was covered in a white table-cloth, a little rose petal patterned thing bought new for that day, pinned with shiny metal clamps at the corners of the old table. The barbecue was on the side deck, visible just under the kitchen window. Its lid was down and smoke was gently pouring out. Burgers and dogs. Maybe some ribs or steaks, since there was company that day.
A gentle breeze was coming off the lake past the three pines and the gate which stood open and squeaking gently. But the breeze was no respite from the heat. Mr. Wittman—dad’s boss, Zeb knew—and his wife, had joined them all by then and the two of them sat still and nearly silent—appearing to whisper only to each other when Zeb rounded the corner at the side of the house by the front deck.
Now his mother was angry and he could feel it like it was a tickle on an earlobe. When she was upset it was the color of dark shiny tiles, not square, but odd-shaped, and there were many sides to those shapes. Zeb had no idea what had transpired in that hour since he took porcelain-doll Daniela out into the woods but he saw those little black shingles with shine to them so he knew something was amiss. When they were silent with each other, that was bad. But it was predictable. When he saw the black tiles that was worse—because things were prone to take off in an erratic, unknown direction.
She slammed a bowl of potato salad down on the white and red petal table cloth, startling everyone. Zeb sat. So did Daniela. At the head of the table, seated at a kitchen chair brought from the house and looking uncomfortable yet frightfully benign, was Oliver. Across from him, nearer to Zeb’s side, his wife took her chair. Zeb sat across from Mr. and Mrs. Wittman, side by side. Next to them was Daniela, equally as startled as everyone else. Thick and goopy, white and tan with bits of pink radish, the potato salad settled down from the sides of the glass bowl leaving a smeary film and for Zeb it created the image of a camel’s insides, though he had never seen a camel cut open—not even on television. The unpalatable look of that salad was so real to him that his stomach nearly turned. But the black tiles were more oppressive, so, out of paleness in comparison, it felt easier to keep from making pukey noises—something his father would have reprimanded him for with ruthlessness.