For a long moment, she sat on her knees, the dirt-smeared rag in her hand forgotten, and stared at the bed as if waiting for the covers to rise up and the thing beneath them to turn its head on a neck like a crooked twig as the sheets slipped away from a face more skull than flesh, cheeks sunken into shadowy graves, skin as gray as smoke and marred by red sores, the wet, raw meat glistening. And those eyes, the hazel eyes that had once stared lovingly down at her when she was a baby, now bulging and wide as if lidless, seeming to float in the sockets of that flesh-draped skull.
This did not happen, even as Kris waited another full minute, listening to the pull and release of her soft, steady breaths.
It was a bed. Nothing more.
For better or worse, it was her bed now.
Twenty minutes later, Kris had finally managed to clean the smudge from the mirrored closet doors. She could see her own face, although the sight made her uneasy. It was like staring into the face of someone who looked exactly like her, but someone who had a completely separate life. As if the smudge had been trying to protect her from her own insignificance.
She turned back to take in the enormity of her task.
Hanging on the wall directly across from the foot of the bed was a painting in a distressed frame. In the picture, a young girl stood at the end of a dock. Lily pads dotted the still blue water behind her. She was facing straight ahead, but the wind had blown her brown hair across her face. Only one of her blue eyes was visible through the stray locks. She was staring up at something in front of her, just out of frame.
This had been her mother’s favorite painting. It had been here when her father bought the lake house. Kris didn’t know if the real estate agent had hung it to stage the house or if the previous occupants had left it behind, but she did know that her mother wanted it to remain in that exact spot. She did not want it taken down at the end of each summer to travel home with them to Blantonville. Her mother wanted it in the lake house, so that it could greet them when they returned every June.
Kris recalled, as a little girl, peering up at the painting and only seeing the girl in her pretty dress and the lily pads. She loved the painting because her mother loved it. But the last time she had seen this particular print was thirty years ago, and now she looked at it not through her mother’s adoring eyes but through her own, through three decades of her own pain and joy, her own hopes and fears. There was something about the girl’s posture—one foot behind the other as if she were backing up, a hand raised slightly as if preparing to defend herself—that made Kris uneasy. The girl seemed to have been backed to the end of the dock, her one visible eye peering not at the viewer of the painting but at something beyond, the thing that had made her run in the first place, the thing that was now creeping cruelly toward her.
Kris gripped the painting on either side of the frame and lifted it from its hook. The picture wire gave a soft twang as it came loose, like an out-of-tune guitar string. She carefully slid the painting under the bed until only the edge of its frame could be seen in the thick shadows beneath.
Guilt rippled like faint thunder through her chest, and she felt her heartbeat quicken, ever so slightly, knocking against the backside of her rib cage.
You are trying to forget her, Kris’s mind accused.
“No,” Kris whispered to the empty room, and she knew it was the truth. She did not want to forget her mother. She wanted to forget the pain.
Kris turned back to the wall. There was a clear rectangle of darker paint where the picture had hung, and of course the naked hook remained, but at least the painting was gone. It was a start.
Taking a step toward the master bathroom, she saw that the details were the same as when she was a child: a long, narrow room lined with darker wood panels than the rest of the house; a small shower tucked into one corner where a large round showerhead protruded from walls of smooth river rock; a steel sink set into a rustic wooden cabinet in the same grayish-brown shade as the walls; and a pocket door that opened to a tiny water closet containing a simple porcelain toilet. The toilet paper holder was shaped like a largemouth bass, its head and tail turned forward so that the wooden spool fit between them, its body hand-painted and covered in a shiny resin finish.
Yet what had been, in her memory, a quaint space now had a strange, unsettling quality to it. The single frosted window set between the sink and the shower provided little light. Its pale glow actually contributed to the bathroom’s gloomy appearance. And then there was that fish, that bug-eyed, gape-mouthed fish, staring out from the shadows of the water closet.
She decided to focus on the positives. For being left unattended for God knows how long, the master bathroom was in surprisingly good shape. There were no signs of mold in the shower, no creeping mildew like they had found in the hall bathroom, no rotting wood to suggest the steady drip of a leaky pipe. It should take no more than fifteen or twenty minutes to clean. Another fifteen to mop and dust the bedroom, five to put fresh sheets on the bed, and then cleaning this room would be thankfully behind her.
As she stepped into the bathroom, the toe of her sneaker squeaked as it scuffed the limestone tile floor, and Kris was suddenly aware of how intensely silent the house had become. The gust of wind that had whipped over the house a few minutes before had vanished. Even the occasional knock of Sadie’s movements in her bedroom had ceased.
Kris moved quickly out of the bathroom and over to the bedroom doorway. She leaned out.
“Sa-die …”
From above came the faint sound of muffled laughter.
Crossing to the staircase opposite the master bedroom, Kris quietly crept up the steps to the second-floor landing, where she found herself staring through an archway constructed from ghostly white birch trunks. The room before her was cluttered with random, unwanted items from the house.
Again, the soft sound of a child giggling came from nearby, like the tinkling of glass.
At the end of the room, a small passageway had opened low on the wall. Sunshine spilling in from a row of double-hung windows on the north side of the house hit the far wall at such an angle that the pale plaster around the tiny doorway seemed to glow. Yet the space inside the passage remained infinitely dark.
Kris stepped through the archway and began to cross the room. Her eyes never left that black square cut into the wall.
Alice, she thought suddenly, and the name confused her. The memory of a taste, of something sweet, slipped across her tongue.
Cake. Chocolate cupcakes with rubbery chocolate frosting and two thin white lines that zigzagged across the top, intertwining again and again like the bodies of mating snakes.
Hostess Cupcakes. The kind Dad always packed as a snack for the road. The perfect items for a tea party, for Alice to bring as she passed into Wonderland. But to get to Wonderland, she first had to crawl through that strange little door. She had to shrink down, smaller than small, and enter the darkness.
She was a child again—eight years old when she first came to the lake house, when she discovered the entrance to the extra storage area beyond the main room. The same age Sadie was now.
That’s where she is, Kris realized. She had found it on her own. She had found her mother’s secret place.
Kris knelt down next to the opening in the wall, trying to be as quiet as possible. The tips of her fingers licked the darkness, but she did not move any farther.
She listened.
Sadie’s soft voice floated, disembodied, in the blackness. At her age, almost everything she said had a singsong quality to it. Yet since Jonah’s death, Kris had heard that dancing lilt begin to fade, like the song of a bird that had finally accepted it would never escape its cage.