42
I SLEEP THROUGH the afternoon, evening, night. In the morning, I hope James has returned to work, that he left at first light to get an early start, to make up for the time he’s missed, but rather than try to figure this out, I slip on shoes and carry myself outside, through the trees, stepping over two that have recently fallen and walk and walk and think about never going home. I hear birds or children calling above me and through the thick trunks, I see someone else within shouting distance. His hair looks like James’s but his gait shapes itself the wrong way, and so I stop myself from calling his name. I keep moving until I get to the beach and walk out toward that rocky breakwater. I climb quickly, stumbling as I go, making more work for myself, clutching, feeling how weak my hands are. I scramble over the stone and reach the cave, and as I’m turning to peer inside, Rolf’s face rounds the bend to meet mine, lit by a camping lantern in his hand, and his expression is one of surprise, focusing on me as if I might disappear, and I startle and greet him out of impulse, but when I don’t dissolve, his wrinkles knit into anger. I see his clothes are soiled and ragged, and he withdraws and his light flips off, but not before I can see that something is written along the back walls. “Turn it back on,” I say. I am shaking, unsure I want to step inside, but I do. Rolf moves back into the darkness and it seems clear he knows his way around here and I certainly do not, but I follow him and grab his shoulder, trying to turn him so I can grab hold of the lantern. I expect him to be weak, but he pushes me off and I fall back, skinning my palms, feeling the stone beneath my already tender tailbone. I stand again, still able to see him in the shadow, wondering why he doesn’t retreat farther, but I see a glint of light along the ground and realize there’s water at the back of the cave. I gather some force and throw a shoulder into his gut and grab the lantern when the blow loosens his grip. With a whimper, higher and weaker than I’d have expected, he crumples against the wall, where puddles dot dimples in the stone, and I feel a jab of contrition for having attacked an old man, but flip the switch and there on the wall are the drawings, like the checkout lady from town told me were hiding in the walls of our house, like James had dreamed: crude figures like the ones in our bedroom, scribbles layered over each other, at different angles like in the journal. “Who did this? Is it you?” I ask.
We are silent together for a long while, but I know what it is to wait when something is coming toward you slowly.
Finally Rolf makes a simple statement: “My sister.” I can barely see his eyes beneath the ridge of his brow.
I scan the light slowly past him and can see the writing extends even to the walls above the water in the back, at least as far as the beam stretches.
I step back to try to see something larger but the lamp doesn’t shine far. It shows me some of what I want to know, but leaves out more. The writing brings back the questions of why the journal was in our home, reminds me of the dishware returned to our table through a locked door, my sweater on Rolf’s couch.
“Do you come into our house? How do you get in?”
Rolf will not look at me, an irritating reversal of every day preceding this one.
Instead of a response, my ears fill with another sound, like voices in a cathedral, everything echoing, muffled and clear at once. The walls sing in a round. The warm morning has smeared itself on me, has shivered through my jacket until my skin feels spat on under all my layers and the sound is unbearable, like the sound in the house, a rough drone’s strata smoothed and compressed like sedimentary rock, and I feel something move through me that amounts to mere nausea and I lean over to vomit at the place where the wall of the cave transforms into the floor, where vertical changes to horizontal, but the man doesn’t move toward me. He is uninterested in my weakness.
I feel a knocking despair and pull up my face to see more drips of moisture where the marks run. The smell in the cave loops on itself sharply: urine, moss, mildew.
I shut my eyes tight and reopen them, and the light shines more dimly. I get tired and kneel and try to think clearly, but it’s like trying to focus on something caught in your eye, too near the thing to see it. The whine is so loud, I can’t hear my own thoughts, and when I look around me, Rolf is gone. I wonder when he left, how long I’ve been here, and I look toward the back of the cave and wonder if he’s waded farther into the darkness, down into the water, if I should dive in and pull him up. I let myself wonder if this is a dream, like the one James had. I make my way out of the cave, into a pink morning light that feels mistaken, and when I emerge, the noise blurs, and the nausea is replaced with a sense of loss.
43
WHEN I REACH our backyard, I can see Julie’s car out front and know she hasn’t gone to work. I steel myself for the lecture about how worried she was when I didn’t come home last night. I hunt for the neighbor in the windows of his house.
At the back door, I see two of my shadow instead of one. I glance behind me to see if I’m being followed. I find no one. I look for something that might be reflecting the sunlight—a cloud or a window—darkening a duplicate of my silhouette on the side of the house. The sky is clear. The windows don’t angle themselves the right way. I take a few steps back to see where the shadow gives up. The shadow to my right seems to stutter for a moment. When both shadows fall off the wall, the first lands flat before me on the ground, alone. I notice my breath has formed itself higher in my chest. I let myself inside. In the kitchen, the second shadow returns. This I can make sense of, though. The overhead light is supplemented by the sun through the window. Two light sources allow for two forms on the wall.
I move myself to the bookshelves. I pull off the oversize art books and pile them on the dining room table. I feel the adrenaline relaying up my spine. I sit down to look.
44
ON MY WAY back from the cave, my ankles hinge to push off the unreliable carpet of rotten leaves and my stride flexes to step around rocks and branches.