“Is everything okay?” Cliff asked, when they talked on the phone the next day.
“When can we go?” Michelle asked.
“Go?” Cliff said.
“To the cabin. I want to sell it as soon as possible.”
*****
When Cassie fell asleep on the drive up to the cabin, Cliff brought up the old woman who had found Michelle. He told Michelle that there had been a Charlene House in the newspapers a few weeks earlier. Some hikers had found her dead on the Appalachian Trail, several miles from her tent and sleeping bag. She had died of exposure.
Michelle recalled Charlene’s glacier-blue eyes, both hopeful and skeptical, the day the old woman had left the hospital. Dead in the woods? Michelle thought. One of many possibilities. How queer it all felt.
“That’s odd, isn’t it? That she would have the same name as the woman who found you?” Cliff said. “She died in the big snowstorm over a week ago. While you were missing. You must remember that?”
Michelle didn’t know what to say. So there had been a snowstorm, she thought, just earlier than the one she’d experienced.
“Look,” Cliff said. “I didn’t tell you that to make you uncomfortable, and I certainly don’t want to give you reasons to lie to me, even though I know I don’t deserve honesty. I just want us to start over. No lies. No bullshit.”
She looked over at him, surprised he hadn’t pressed her on Pink and his ravings. Maybe he’d forgotten, but she doubted it.
“Here’s the thing, Cliff,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what happened. It was . . . queer. So, for now . . . I hope you can accept what I’ve told you.”
Chapter 43
They arrived at the cabin before noon. Bright green buds sprinkled the tree branches. Daffodils lined the driveway, the sky polished to deep blue. Michelle could hardly believe this was the same place from a few weeks earlier.
Cassie was the first one from the car, asking for the key, saying she needed to use the bathroom. She bounded up the front walk with her overnight bag and schoolbooks.
Cliff assured Michelle it shouldn’t take more than a day to put everything in order, get the listing set up, pack the Cherokee. They might spend the night, but they’d spend it in town at the Hampton Inn.
Michelle was halfway up the steps when she heard Cassie scream. She dropped her bag and ran for the door. Cassie was in the living room, dancing from foot to foot—part laughing, part hysterical—the cuffs of her jeans pulled up to her knees. “Get Dad! The toilet’s gone berserk! There’s water everywhere.”
Michelle ran into the bathroom and knelt by the toilet, turning off the valve behind the tank until the water stopped flowing over the rim of the bowl. Water soaked her jeans and she half-expected to see the pentacle lying there, the way it had the night she’d gone looking for Cliff. Nothing but a cobweb in the corner. She wasn’t even sure what she’d done with the thing, where she’d left it.
Cassie stood in the doorway on her tiptoes. “It wasn’t like there was anything gross in there,” Cassie said. “Except this ugly black and red bug. I flushed it before I sat down because it was disgusting.”
Cliff appeared in the doorway and put his arm around Cassie’s shoulder.
“Did you break the cabin? If you break it, you buy it,” Cliff joked with Cassie.
Michelle appreciated Cliff’s easy manner, the way the sharp corners of his intensity were seemingly rounded off.
“Yeah, I broke the whole cabin. Here’s a dollar,” Cassie said, handing him a wrinkled bill from her pocket.
“Hey, is this my change from the gas station?” he said, studying the money. “I forgot about that. Where’s the rest? I gave you a twenty.”
The familiarity of Cassie and Cliff’s banter was both reassuring and heartbreaking, since Michelle’s own feelings for Cliff were so different now.
Cassie returned with a mop and bucket and swabbed the water from the floor. Michelle changed into a spare pair of jeans. Cliff called a plumber, then suggested having lunch before they got too carried away with packing.
Michelle and Cassie drove into Ardenwood and ordered lunch from Thai Mountain. After picking up the food, they passed the converted house on Main that had been Pink’s office. Michelle hardly recognized it. It was now an ice cream parlor called Sprinkles and Cream.
Cliff was packing canned food from the pantry when they came in. Michelle placed the take-out on the kitchen counter, and Cliff came over behind her and put his hands on her waist. The caress surprised her. Since she’d been back, they slept in the same bed but hadn’t touched each other. After he moved out, she hadn’t even thought about it, their lack of intimacy over the past few years having become routine. She thought about them making love that one afternoon upon returning from the cemetery. But that was a different Cliff, the man missing a finger. She was quick to remind herself that that wasn’t part of this reality, and Cliff would have no knowledge of that afternoon.
Michelle pulled his change from her pocket and laid it on the kitchen counter, surprised to see the pentagram among the nickels and dimes. She picked it up. Maybe these were the jeans she’d been wearing that night with Pink, the pentagram making it through a wash and dry cycle at home. She didn’t want it, still unsure how to dispose of it. Cliff saw it in her hand.
“Is that Cassie’s?”
Michelle looked up. “This? No.”
Cliff pulled plates down from the cabinet, and then tore off paper towels to use as napkins. They ate out on the deck. They had just finished eating when the plumbers arrived, two men wearing blue shirts and jeans, both with name patches. Cassie and Michelle went out on the deck while the men checked the bathroom pipes, the drains in the laundry room, the kitchen. Cliff came out on the deck a while later and told Michelle and Cassie they might want to come watch.
“The plumbers?” Cassie said.
“Yeah, they have a video camera like surgeons use for laparoscopic surgery. I mean it’s bigger and clunkier, but it’s amazing.”
“Ughh, no thanks,” Cassie said. “I don’t want the guided tour of our sewer system.”
“You’d have something to share with your friends,” Cliff said, laughing.
“Yeah, right. That’s the kind of thing we always talk about.”
Even though Michelle was glad that Cliff’s relationship with Cassie was intact, Michelle felt like she was trapped behind two-inch thick bulletproof glass. She wanted some of the lightness Cassie and Cliff enjoyed, to be part of the jokes they tossed between each other. Had it always been this way, them laughing, joking, and her on the periphery watching in silence?