Maybe that “something in the air” had gotten under his skin. That’s exactly what it felt like: a crawling beneath his skin. And it was spreading. The air was packed with
maybes
.
Chloe was still in town. He was beginning to feel bad that he wished her away so often. But it was what it was. False happiness comes off as condescension. From an early age, Jeff was never able to pull any kind of performance out of that particular hat. His eyes always betrayed him. His best performances had always been in the sports arena.
He had come in from the well, if hesitantly, to take a small rest from his work. He was nearly at the bottom from what he could tell. He had used a flashlight and could see strewn treasures. Rusting relics. What project would he have to keep him busy after the well, though? That was a thought that made his heart beat a little faster like a sour excitement.
The TV was going in and out. Reception in the cottage wasn’t the best. The power to the whole place had failed more than once. It had moved past annoying and on to expected by now. It seemed to annoy Chloe more than him.
Through the haze and fuzz of the television screen, Jeff was able to make out an older film. He knew immediately what it was. He’d seen it before, years ago. It was one of her most famous roles, the actress on the hill.
The Unseen
, one of those old Gothic thrillers filled with large houses, sparse lighting, and folded people. She looked younger, but it was still the actress. Her eyes were alive, though. Even through the struggling reception, Jeff saw the eyes. They were determined. She had lost those eyes now. She was merely existing these days. Her old eyes—the ones she wore in the film—had fallen to the floor and shattered.
He wondered if, higher up on the hill, the actress had power at all. If the cottage had issues with power, surely the big house did as well. Did she live by candlelight? Did she even have a television so she could watch her old films? By the looks of her on-screen, she was one of those types who enjoyed watching herself, or at least had been. But then, who didn’t enjoy reliving past victories? He watched his own recorded ball games all the time.
The television hissed at him, flashing an impressionistic conglomeration of gray, black, and white. No. Not hissed. Laughed. Giggled. Giggled like a child in church.
The giggling. “Yeah, I heard it,” he had wanted to tell Chloe in the barn. But he couldn’t make himself admit that to her. He had his own theories about its source, and he was reticent to share them. That would mean a link, a new connection to his wife. That did not need to happen.
No. Chloe did not deserve to hear the giggling of the son she had killed. The son she had denied a father. So why, then,
did
she hear it?
The actress’s face reappeared on the screen. She stared straight into Jeff. He didn’t even try to hear what she was saying through the thick fog of sound. Her eyes glowed white. The power surged and then went out completely.
“Just as well,” he said, still slouched. Still vacant. He scratched at his thigh.
Sitting there, the idea came to him that he should call his brother Ethan. They hadn’t talked in so long. Not that they had ever really been close. But he was family and Jeff still cared about him. In fact, the reason he had never told Ethan about his diagnosis was because he didn’t want his younger brother to worry.
The Jeep pulled up to the house.
Chloe, my wife, is home. My wife, Chloe, is home.
He felt that twinge of guilt again, the feeling that he was treating her too harshly. He knew any shrink would tell him it would be best to try and forgive. Reconnect with his brother and forgive his wife.
And then he remembered the giggles. A son. And he rose from the couch and walked out the back door to the well.
***
Ethan walked the long corridor to his mother’s room with a fresh bouquet of morning glories. These were his mother’s favorite flower when she was cognizant. He brought a new bunch for her every week, purchased from the florist one block over. The late afternoon sky was dimmed, the last rays of sunlight streaming through the care facility’s tall windows. It was a relatively quiet place. Only a few other visitors and the nurses walked the floors.
Ethan gave his obligatory nod and smile to one of his mother’s caretakers in the hallway. “So nice to see you, Mr. Cane!” she said. “Every mother should be as lucky as to have a son like you.”
Lucky? One son who couldn’t even take care of his own mother and another who never saw her. That passed as luck?
He shut the door behind him and freshened up the vase. Old flowers out. New flowers in. “Hello, Mother,” he said. He bent down and kissed her forehead.
She looked good. Restful, at least. Her silver hair was kept short and manageable, and she always wore her favorite nightgown. There was a closet full of them. She was well looked after here.
For a time after she was first put in the care facility, Ethan was always shocked when he came to visit her. She looked as if she might wake up at any moment. He had even sat in the very same chair he sat in now beside the bed and whispered through tears and clenched teeth, “Wake up, Mom! Wake up!”
He took the hairbrush from the dresser top and began lightly pulling it through her hair. He hoped it offered some type of comfort to her, somewhere deep inside.
“I’m sorry my husband and son couldn’t come. You remember Kel and Bug? Life gets in the way. I promise, next time.”
Ethan had been promising next times for years now. The truth was, he didn’t want his child to see his grandmother like this. To have his only memory of her be that of a broken woman in a sterile room at a care facility? That was not the woman Ethan had grown up with. His mother could fight wild lions and then draw up a peace accord with them. She was a war settler. That was a quality Ethan lacked. Ethan held grudges and rarely acted to fix the matter that caused those grudges. Whenever he and Jeff argued as kids, his mother would sit them down until they had hashed things out. He hated those times. He couldn’t help but feel she was always secretly siding with Jeff. He realized now that he should have learned from those occasions.
“Has Jeff been to see you lately, Mom?” It was a question with an answer that never changed. “I guess he lives too far away to get here very often, huh? I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. I don’t know why.”
He took the brush and absentmindedly scratched at his forearm before returning it to his mother’s silver hair.
“We weren’t close as kids, but I do remember a couple times it almost seemed we were. I remember how, occasionally, for whatever reason, Jeff used to make me feel better after I had a rough day at school, after the kids had teased me.” Ethan smiled warmly with a bittersweet nostalgia. “We’d lay on the couch, his arm around me, and he’d say, ‘Ethan, I don’t care what anyone says about you. I think you’re pretty cool.’” He laughed. “The jackass. And then, when Dad would go into one of his fits and blame me for everything, Jeff was right there. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just be there. And you. You, of course, were there too. I wish one of you would have said something. It makes me sad that… But then, you never fought my battles, did you? You had your own war with Dad.”
He grew more stoic. “And then, after the accident, Jeff left me to the state. I resented him so much for that. But in the end, it was for the best. I would never have met Kel if he hadn’t… I think I’ve been a bad brother, Mom. I think me and Jeff, we’ve been bad brothers to each other lately.”
Hash it out
, he heard her say.
Sit your asses down and get it figured out
.
If you don’t, who knows what that resentment will turn into. No dinner until you get this worked out. Understand?
He put the brush down and continued touching her hair with his hand. “I had one hell of a dream last week. I think that’s what started this whole thing. It’s why Jeff has been on my mind so much.” He shuddered thinking about the nightmare.
“We were here, in the care facility. Except we were in the hall, and it was dark. There was nobody but you and me at first. You were wearing your hair like you did when we were kids, pulled back in a ponytail. I miss your long hair.”
He took up the brush again.
“I was so happy to see you. But you… you looked sad. Worried. Even scared. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead all the way down the corridor. You know, like in those old movies when you know something bad is about to happen. Jeff always loved those movies. They scared the crap out of me. Still do.
“Anyway, at the other end of the corridor, just past this door, in fact, Jeff and Dad sat facing each other at a table. I don’t think they saw either of us. But you were shouting. You were shouting at Jeff. I couldn’t make out what you were saying, but you were terrified.”
Ethan swallowed and leaned farther over his mother, as if imparting a secret but forgetting to whisper.
“And behind them… behind them, Mom, was this boy. I’ve never seen him before. Don’t you have to have seen a person in real life for them to appear that clearly in a dream? I’m sure this guy was a complete figment, though, because I would have remembered that face. Even the rim of his farm hat couldn’t hide the face—gaunt, pale, and eyes that seemed grown too large for his eye sockets. And he had a grin that…” Ethan shook and sat back in his chair.
“And then it went dark, and something tugged at my arm. I screamed and then I woke up. Bug was crying so I got up and sat with him for a while until he fell back to sleep. That was a good moment. Me and Bug, sitting up in the early hours. I don’t know who was comforting who the most.”
His mother was as serene as ever. Not that he expected her to wake up, but he hoped against hope for some sort of comfort. Some answer. It was then that he realized she had, in fact, given him one. Mother always knew what to do.
“I need to get hold of Jeff, don’t I?”
She’s Right There
Chloe had felt underdressed when she arrived at the big house for tea. Lana answered the door in a long black velvet coat that fit perfectly around her still small waist. There was an ivory brooch of pink roses on a black beaded choker, and her blonde and silver hair was coifed for a night out, kinked and curled. She smelled of expensive perfume.
Chloe, on the other hand, wore an oversized gray sweatshirt with a bleach stain on the shoulder and rolled-up sleeves. She had on comfortable jeans and an old pair of sneakers. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail to keep it from whipping at her face. She blushed at her carelessness, but Lana didn’t seem to notice.
Chloe was happy with her choice of apparel, however, once Lana had led her up the old stairs to the widow’s walk. A small and unheated glass-enclosed cupola prepared Chloe to step once more into the wind. As they stepped out, the wind still bit, but the thick sweatshirt helped defend her.
Lana’s face took a daily beating from the wind. Chloe could see it clearly now. Her face was dry and bruised pink. Chloe couldn’t fathom staying up on the widow’s walk for more than five minutes, much less coming up there every day. She became bleary-eyed from the wind to the point she had to wipe them before she looked through the telescope. Chloe drew a quick breath when she saw the strength of the telescope. If Lana were so inclined, she could spy quite a bit of what was happening at the cottage, and across the bay, homes could be seen in detail. Chloe felt intrusive and voyeuristic, yet she could not turn away.
“Not what you were expecting?” the actress said.
“Expecting?” Her voice shivered.
“I imagine you think me a crazy old woman who reads mysteries and has tea every day with crumpets while roasting in front of a fireplace. I do like tea, but I hardly ever sit down to drink it.”
“I had no expectations.”
Lana looked at her quite seriously. “That’s dangerous,” she said. “You should always expect something, my dear. How else will you protect yourself? Why, I could have brought you up here to throw you off and kill you. If you didn’t expect it, you might deserve it.”
Chloe backed away from the telescope. Whispers of rumors out-voiced the howling wind.
“Don’t worry,” Lana assured her. “I’m no killer.” She said it with more warmth than Chloe had been accustomed to recently, and it calmed her. Still, she remained back against the house by the cupola door.
“It certainly is chilly here,” Chloe said. “Not at all what I’m used to. I prefer humidity to frozen landscapes.”
“Then what in the world are you doing here, my girl? It never gets warm here. Not even in summer. It’s perpetually cold. You should have done your research.” Lana trained her eyes out to sea. “There’s nothing heavier than stone-cold sea.”
The waves hit the rocks, another onslaught in their eternal role as combatants. The sound was lulling and peaceful, but there was, in fact, nothing peaceful about it. Beneath even the calmest of waters there was extreme violence, and in her travels, Chloe knew that well. The gulls above encouraged the war.
“How do you like the cottage?” Lana asked.
“It’s… fine.”
Lana gave a smirk. “You’re too pretty to be a good liar. Pretty girls don’t have to lie, so they don’t get practice at perfecting the art. When pretty girls become liars, they give it a more respectable name. Like acting.”