The woods are quiet and empty. I feel jittery, like the sudden drop of a sugar crash, eager for somewhere soft to stash myself until the feeling passes.
Almost home. Almost home, I repeat to myself. Plucking open the back door feels like crossing a finish line, and I aim for the living room and find James on my way, spread out at the table, circling things in our art books with a red Sharpie. I don’t bother to ask what he’s up to and I don’t inquire as to why he’s not at work because it’s true that I am also not doing what I’m supposed to do. I sit and pull the couch pillows onto my lap, safe. It feels hard to get words out. “James, I went to the cave.” He looks up, the spell of the books broken. “It was like you said, the writing on the walls. Rolf was there until he wasn’t, and a sound, too.” James looks back down to his work, and I guess that’s it. I rest until I get up the energy to search for batteries for the flashlight and James’s camera and think about what those walls said, all language that had no apparent order, no logical sentences, no sequences to mine for meaning.
After I gather my supplies, I sit down beside James and look at what he’s doing, but none of the circles actually encompasses anything. I flip through the books he’s already set aside as finished, but make no sense of them. I turn to him and grab the hand with the marker. “James, you’re ruining them.”
He says nothing, pulls his hand away to lean his marker against the page, and finally I can see. It’s the shadows he’s circling.
45
“JAMES, THIS ISN’T helping. This isn’t all a trick of the light. I don’t think you’re going to figure it out by studying photographs.” Julie tucks my hair behind my ear and places a hand on my leg, watching me, and I feel her familiar tenderness and finally turn to her.
She tells me about the cave. Her voice is soft and matter-of-fact. I tell her about the haze of particulars I found on that barstool. Everything points to Rolf’s being connected to this house. Despite how far apart we are at the moment, Julie and I can feel that tiny overlap in our Venn diagram. That connection allows a little bit of the problem to disappear.
Julie idly massages my hand while she talks. She rubs tiny circles into the fleshy base of my palm and then squeezes each finger in three different spots, pulling gently on the end of each. She looks over my shoulder to remember and then into my eyes for confirmation. Julie brings up some specific drawing she saw in the cave. That image is nowhere to be found in my memory of my time there. She goes on. It sounds familiar now. I get overly sure. Julie tells me something she read on the wall. I feel convinced I remember that, too, but then uncertain. I worry I’m creating false memories. I consider whether I can call that experience. “This all sounds right, but now I’m questioning myself. I heard that if you remember a thing, you corrupt it. If you want to remember something closest to its truth, the trick is to remember it rarely. But, of course, if you don’t remember a thing often enough, you’re bound to forget it. There is no way for memory to be pure.” This is the closest I’ve felt to her in a long time. Everything is laid out between us. Julie is insistent on solving the mystery. I keep trying to talk myself out of believing there is a mystery at all.
Julie says, “I don’t know how you knew about the cave, but you were right.” She still can’t believe that I was really there. I wince. I grip her hand more tightly. I hold on. Julie tells me a game plan. We’ll return to the cave with brighter lights. I’ll take photos so we have something solid to reference.
I feel this threat to our credibility sharply behind my eyes. The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger. I fear what we could find there. I fear what we won’t.
What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what’s ahead?
46
I WANT TO return to the cave immediately, but James sees the scrapes on my palms, the new bruises on my knees and forearms from my climb up the rocks, my struggle with Rolf, and insists we wait until I’ve healed.
I ask where James put the journal, but he says it’s disappeared. I tap around the passage that had opened in the bedroom to see if it will open again, if the book has been returned to where I found it, with no luck. I wonder if Rolf has come into our home again. I wonder if James is hiding the book from me, hoarding some knowledge he’s gathering from it or preventing me from feeding my obsession.
I watch the neighbor’s house, looking for him in the windows and not finding him, wondering if he’s still back somewhere in the cave. I try to convince James to return with me. I tell the office I need to work from home around some repairs. I’m supposed to be doing research for a new product anyway. I tell my boss the timing is perfect. I’ll be able to focus without interruption and come in later in the week with a preliminary project plan. I expect an angry email from Connie, but hear nothing.
On the third day, still with no sign of him, I ring Rolf’s doorbell. I want to ask him more about the cave and our house. I worry something might have happened, that I could have caused a panic in him, but there’s my imagination again, prying itself open, sketching itself out. I think about opening the door and letting myself in. I tell myself that just because I’ve already done something doesn’t make it okay to do it again.
I sit at the window, and James asks me what I’m doing and I say, “Waiting.”
“You know you’ve turned into him, right? Watching for him the way he looked for us? What if he’s in the house and not answering?”
“No light ever comes on.”
James says, “Maybe you’ve finally run him off.”
“That is really the last thing I want.” I mean it.
“I appreciate your attempts to solve this case, Nancy Drew, but maybe we should mind our own business.”
But I keep my eyes trained out the window.
47
I LOOK AT job openings. Every posting says “Experience required.” I fixate on that threshold. An hour, a day, a year?
Every day I get a call from the office asking where I am. On the fifth day, my boss apologizes for relaying the information via voice mail. I’ve been terminated. “Good riddance,” I sigh. I delete the message.