There the three stood. The wind was the only thing that dared make a sound in the dead and browned garden. Jeff held the shovel. He was dressed modestly, jeans and a respectable Sunday shirt he had never worn before. Chloe was more formal, wearing a long black skirt, a white blouse, and a dark waistcoat like someone from a past age. She stood across the grave from Jeff with Lana in the middle, emotionless and burdened, her rifle like a walking stick at her side.
There was no marker. Not even a creek stone. Lana knew he would always be there. There was no real ceremony. Whatever god Lana had once prayed to had abandoned her, and she spit at him every night before she went to sleep. It was her one kept tradition.
She thanked Jeff for all the work he had done on Michael’s behalf. It was he who had gone to town to find a coffin, and it was he who had done the digging. She had prepared a meal for them to show her gratitude.
“Not so far down,” the actress whispered at her husband’s coffin. “Stay nearer to the ground for me this time.”
The rifle was for everyone else in the world. For those curious townsfolk who tried sneaking up the hill to feed their bloody imaginings. For the press who had gotten wind that the fallen movie star had found her husband’s corpse in a well. And perhaps, most of all, for Michael’s family, or what remained of it—a sister who had been an annoyance to Lana since the day the actress and Michael, a carpenter by trade, had married. This rifle was for his sister’s lily white forehead if she so much as stepped into Lana’s view on Bad Luck Hill.
Now that Lana had finally begun roaming the grounds, and with a firearm no less, she emerged as a formidable woman. In the days before the burial, Chloe had heard the rifle fire numerous times and had even witnessed Lana nearly hit her target once.
“Come back and I’ll shoot your balls off!” she shouted at the terrified trespasser. She would have done it too. Lana, it seemed to Chloe, was now protecting rather fiercely her husband and daughter, both of them back in her company after being lost for so long. She would not abide any gossipmonger or family member trying to take a bit of what she had cried and mourned over for so many years.
The Wicker townsfolk, who climbed the hill in slow increments like zombies from the type of B movie Lana had got her start in, were deterred but not totally stopped. Their rise up Bad Luck Hill had a viral determination.
“You won’t really kill anyone, will you?” Chloe had asked once.
“The hell I won’t. They’re climbing for their own graves. I’ve got the law on my side. That’s trespassing, plain and simple. They’ve got ill intent and I’m just protecting what’s mine. I don’t want them so much as looking at my house with their beady little eyes that they mask behind their quaint shop windows.”
This passion for guarding her dead was evidenced at the burial when a helicopter flew overhead. Lana looked up, at first in disbelief and then in anger. She took her rifle and left the garden, heading into the house with broad steps. Chloe looked at Jeff, who offered her no explanation. She followed the actress up the stairs to the widow’s walk.
“Lana! You don’t know if they were trying to get a look at the burial. Maybe it’s just sightseers.”
The helicopter was hanging too low, too near the big house, like a red apple to be plucked. Lana raised the rifle and fired. She had done it so fast that Chloe had no time to try and stop her, and fell backward in shock. Lana fired again and the chopper veered sideways, fleeing for safer sky.
“That ought to tell them just how serious I am,” she said. She scanned the hill with the telescope. When she saw a suspicious lump in the bushes, she fired at it too. The lump grew legs and tumbled down the hill.
Lana turned to Chloe, who watched her, eyes wide and mouth agape. Chloe’s hands had instinctively flown up to protect her ears from the sound of rifle fire and still hung frozen in the air.
“This,” Lana said, looking at the platform on which they stood, “
this
will never happen again. I’ll never use this wretched widow’s walk ever again. Now, come.” She walked past Chloe and into the house. “Let us have a proper wake.”
***
Jeff had been feeling worse that day. The bug that he had caught—for he was certain that’s what it was—was not going away. This was his fault for not taking better care of himself. Golden boys were hardly invincible anymore. He felt chills at the burial, and though the strangeness of the event was not lost on him, he did not watch the goings-on with any real interest. He found himself more concerned with Chloe, with their matters of the heart. Since he had brought up Michael’s corpse, he had been thinking quite a bit about Chloe. About
them
.
It was evening and he stood at the kitchen door wrapped in a blanket and shivering. He had vomited earlier and Chloe had commented on how pale he looked. The itching had spread as well, making him mark up his legs and his face.
“It comes and goes,” he said. “Hour by hour, it goes from crap to shit and then back to crap.”
He watched her make chicken noodle soup for him on the old stove. It was from a can, and she was never very good in the kitchen, but there was caring there. More than he had shown to her in the past year. She stirred it with a wooden spoon, gently, her wrist swirling a delicate dance, and then she brought the bowl to the table.
“Sit,” she said.
Jeff pulled himself from the spot at the door with effort and plodded to the table. He sat down with an unsteady plop.
“There’s more down there,” he said.
“In the well?” she asked uneasily.
“Yeah. I still haven’t reached the bottom. I’m close, but there might be buried treasure yet. Buried secrets.”
“Or maybe it’s just garbage. Maybe everything thrown down there is broken and missing pieces.”
“Except Michael.”
“Except him.”
“Do you think we’re like them?” Jeff asked, swirling the soup and playing with the noodles. “Like the actress and her husband?”
“How do you mean?” Chloe sat opposite him, excited by the first real opportunity for a conversation with him in ages.
“They seemed so disconnected. She thought he had left her, but all this time he was only a few yards away… Is that us?” He looked up, his eyes straining to meet hers.
Chloe bit her lip, trying desperately to keep eye contact. “I don’t know. Maybe?”
“I don’t want that to be us.”
“What are you saying, Jeff? Do you want to…?”
“Try again.” He took a sip of the soup and grimaced. Still cold. “Maybe.”
“What would I have to do to make you understand how sorry I am? An apology means nothing unless it’s heard, Jeff.”
Jeff stared at her and said nothing. His right eye twitched. He shook his head in uncertainty. The house creaked around them and the clock ticked. Chloe sighed. Jeff felt relief explode from her like a dam broken. He pushed the soup away and set back in his chair, searching her face for an answer. Chloe rose and moistened a washcloth she had retrieved from a cabinet. The house was silent around them, the silence of the darkening night. Not even the wind blew outside.
“We should get some rest,” she said, placing the damp cloth on his forehead. He hadn’t realized how much he missed being touched. He closed his eyes and let the sensation in.
Jeff swallowed. He needed to tell her the truth. He scratched at his raw forearm. “I hear this voice.” He did not look at her when he said this. “I know you’ve heard it too. At first I thought it was… It doesn’t matter. But now it feels like it’s inside me. Like whatever is here…”
She grabbed his hand. “Let’s get out of here, Jeff. Let’s move. It was a bad idea to come here in the first place. I admit it and take full responsibility for all of this.”
“Can we do that? Just up and move?”
Chloe offered an uncertain and frightened smile. It shook like a leaf clinging to a tree in a storm. “We’ll just sell. We’ll put it up on the Internet. Somebody will see it. In the meantime, we can stay with family. What do you say?”
“Not your parents.”
“Ethan, then. We can stay with Ethan. He’d be happy to have us.”
For once he was compliant. He gave her the reins, but said nothing more about the subject.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said, still holding his hand and pulling him up.
His hand went to her face and he touched her cheek gently. “Not just yet,” he said. “Soon, but not tonight. I’m not ready.”
She seemed to lose air. “I understand,” she said as she let go of his hand and slowly walked to the bedroom.
The power faded again as he watched her walk away. He expected her to turn around and plead with him to come to bed, but that did not happen. The couch awaited him.
Ghost of a Mad Dog
Chloe drove a couple of hours out of her way to avoid shopping in Wicker. It wasn’t that she had anything against the quality of merchandise in town. All the shops were stocked with the best foods for winter storms. She took issue with the people. She knew she would get stares, both judging and stupefied, from those in town who had heard, or had possibly been on the receiving end, of Lana’s arms rage. Chloe wanted to avoid that conversation as long as possible. The fact was, she now thought everyone who climbed Bad Luck Hill to get a peek at the actress deserved whatever they got. The one consolation about her eventual trip back into Wicker for shopping would be the absence of nosy Odette. Her sister Alma didn’t talk at all, it seemed, and so Chloe would be able to get in and out of their store without problem.
Chloe was so excited for a fresh start with Jeff—until yesterday the man she had felt a growing dislike for with each passing hour—that she didn’t mind the drive out of Wicker. She imagined the townsfolk with their mouths agape as she passed them by. “What about us?” they said in her imaginings. “Come shop with us. Tell us your secrets. Let us pry.”
“No,” she was saying with a condescending half grin as she sat proudly with both hands on the steering wheel. “Fuck off.”
She had slept well the night before. She wished Jeff had come to bed with her, but that would take time. Sooner or later, they would curl up like kittens, like they did when they were first dating. Like they did when they had led an adventure tour through the Rocky Mountains. They had cuddled and curled then too. They had also purred. The memory of him around her was what had gotten her to sleep last night.
And yet… there was still that resentment in the air of the cottage. It slept with them both. Chloe knew the faces of certain invisible things. These things had no real form and only scientific definitions. Oxygen. Regret. Rage. These things were more like encompassments. They surrounded everyone all the time. Love looked like sunshine through a cracked window. Death looked like the dark in a hospital room the night before brain surgery. Resentment was the midnight glowering in the bedroom of a cabin in the woods.
Chloe found a grocery store and pharmacy in a town called Ready. Inside, it was a frenzy of people hoarding for the storm. To her relief, none of them paid much attention to her. None of them knew a thing about her, nor did they care to. She filled her shopping cart with cans of soup and boxes of cereal. She avoided meats. They would spoil if the power went off for any long periods of time. She got some cold medicine for Jeff and remembered to get food for Lana as well, though the actress had not asked it of her. Chloe imagined somewhere in the big house there was a great storage room of food that fed the actress well.
She was inspecting a bottle of blackberry wine—not a necessity, but a nicety—when her cell phone buzzed. Ethan. He was one of the few she had given the new number to and the only one who had yet used it.
“How’s Jeff?” he said. Not a word of hello. He was brisk, and the words came like a slap over the phone. “Hello, Ethan. Jeff is fine. He’s still sick. I’m at the store getting him some meds and stocking up for the storm heading our way.” She had the aisle to herself. There weren’t many people interested in purchasing liquor when a blizzard was bearing down on them.
“Do you have enough food?” There was that accusatory edge to his voice again. As if Chloe couldn’t possibly take care of Jeff. She was surprised by the clarity with which that tone came through, but then remembered she was no longer on Bad Luck Hill. There was reception in Ready.
“That’s why I’m here at the grocery store, Ethan,” she said, throwing her own edge into the conversation. She put the wine in the cart and wheeled it up to the register. There was a line, but not as long as she had expected.
“I meant to call the other day, but got busy with school. I heard about Lana and her rifle. Shooting at a chopper? There will be charges. Not exactly the safest neighbor, is she?”
“There are no safe neighbors.” She realized she believed this. And aside from that, she felt protective of her new crazy Hollywood friend. “I think we’re all one slipped phrase away from going postal.”
There was silence on the line. The woman in front of her looked over her shoulder nervously.
“Listen, Ethan, I’ve got to go. I’m at the register.” There were five carts ahead of her. “Jeff and I are planning on selling the cottage and moving back. Do you think you could put us up? It would just be for a bit until we find someplace new.”
“Really? That’s—”