Chapter 8
8
Connor brings me dinner in the cabin. Chicken thighs in crackling skin rubbed with herbs, roasted new potatoes and carrots, a salad sprinkled with goat cheese and tossed with a bright vinaigrette, a glass of red wine and then another. I smile and say the right words and I don’t tell him about the box hidden on the upper shelf in the closet.
The texts aren’t from a romantic rival or from someone I used to know back home. They’re from someone on this mountain.
Someone who wants me gone.
We eat our fill and then sprawl together, sated, on the couch, Connor’s hand on my leg and his cheek against my stomach. I play my fingertips through his hair. No one should have been able to find out about what I did. It was supposed to be buried. Forgotten.
“I can hear you digesting,” Connor says.
“Sexy,” I reply distractedly.
“Glurb. Glubble. Your stomach is a flirt,” he says, and I force a smile. I should be here. With him. Not thinking about my apparent stalker. Blackmailer?
He turns his face to kiss the spot by my hip bone that always makes me gasp. I bite my lip, not willing to give him the satisfaction. He works his way up my side, rucking up my shirt as he goes until he reaches my breasts, and then he lifts himself the rest of the way up—neck, jaw, mouth. I put a single finger over his lips.
“What’s wrong?” he asks me, because he can see it on my face.
“I think this was a mistake,” I tell him.
He sits up, and I push myself upright as well, settling my shirt back down around my hips. “What part?” he asks, wary.
“Me being here. It’s too soon.”
“For you? Or for my family?” he asks.
I give him a look. He was at dinner. Does he really need to ask? “Maybe we should come up with some excuse. I can leave, and we can try again in the summer. After they have a chance to get used to the idea.”
“You can’t leave,” Connor says, and for a split second a spasm of panic goes through me. He takes my hand, kisses the point at the base of my thumb where my pulse flutters. “Don’t worry, Theo. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
He draws me to him, arms around me, and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like comfort but like a cage.
That night I dream of a knife in my hand and a body before me. I split it open down the center. The guts spill out. I look up into the glassy eyes of the deer, but it isn’t a deer at all, it’s Connor, antlers sprouting from his temples. He grabs my wrist. I run. I always run.
I’m in a cabin—not like this one, rustic, older. The distance to the door is impossibly far, and I can feel the antlered man’s breath on my neck.
I flee outside, slamming the door shut behind me even though I know it won’t help, and that’s when I see the dragonfly at last, hear its droning as it perches on the wooden door.
I wrench from the dream with my scream still trapped in my throat and I force myself to lie still, trembling beneath the comforter with Connor’s arm flung over me, even though every instinct in me is telling me to get away.
I wait until my heartbeat has slowed and the cabin beams above me seem more real than the branching antlers of the man in my dream before I extract myself from Connor and pad out to the living room. I touch things along the way—the doorframe, the back of a table. Real. All of it real, and the dream isn’t.
When I woke up screaming as a young child, the Scotts would sit up with me and pray. By the time I was a teenager, I was expected to have sorted the problem out. They brought me to our pastor, who suggested that the dream was because I was allowing something to interfere with my relationship with Jesus, a sign that I hadn’t accepted Him fully into my heart.
It’s been years since the dream came two nights in a row. But it seems impossibly present here—as if it’s just beyond the tips of my fingers, and if I step around a corner, I might find myself toppling into it.
My nightmare usually steals familiar things. The bookstore, my apartment, even the grocery store. The cabin was new. The door—it looked just like the fifth cabin, neglected out there in the woods.
Which means nothing. My mind has just taken fistfuls of whatever’s around me and added them to the jumble in my brain.
The dream keeps playing through my mind the next day as I drink my coffee, eat breakfast, tromp out with Connor for a lesson in cross-country skiing.
The lesson takes place a ways from the lodge, out past the cabins. The only tracks here are the spindly ones left by birds hopping along the snow, the pattering footprints of squirrels, the occasional larger track of a deer. There was enough snow last night that the surface is pristine, leaving the paths of these early-morning travelers unmistakable.
“You’re doing great,” Alexis tells me. It’s an obvious lie. “How are you feeling?”
“Fantastic,” I lie in return, clutching the poles they’ve given me for dear life.
Connor laughs. “I didn’t know a person could stiffen up that much,” he says.
“It’s practically rigor mortis,” Alexis quips.
For the past hour, I’ve been doing my best “ungainly baby elephant” impression. Connor is a patient teacher. Alexis, less so. Both of them, though, are antsy to get on the move. As Connor urges me to relax, Paloma glides past, then comes to a stop with a sort of swooshing turn that looks effortlessly natural. She smiles warmly, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
“Pretty good,” Alexis says, in a tone that clearly means terrible, but I’m trying to be nice.
I snort. “I’m utterly incompetent.”
“Maybe you’re not a completely natural athlete,” Alexis allows.
“There’s nothing natural about strapping sticks to your feet and hurtling through the snow,” I point out.
“Well, you’re certainly not going to be hurtling . More like… inching gradually.” Alexis leans over her poles to smirk at me. Paloma smacks her arm, but I laugh.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” Connor assures me, glaring daggers at his sister. He looks to me. “Ready?”
“I don’t think I’m going to get more ready.” It’s more a statement of defeat than optimism. We set out, joining Rose up the path. The others move slowly to accommodate my turtle pace, and bit by bit I start to understand the rhythm and movement of the thing. At least I’m moving forward consistently.
Still, it isn’t long before Paloma, Connor, and Alexis have pulled ahead. Rose hangs back. At first I take her presence for charity. Then I catch Alexis looking back, and she and the others pick up their pace a bit, putting more distance between us—enough for a private conversation.
“I haven’t really gotten a chance to talk to you alone,” Rose says, confirming my suspicions. “I was going to borrow you yesterday, but…”
“Not up for a get-to-know-you conversation with someone drenched in deer blood?” I ask, and Rose’s eyes crinkle at the edges in amusement.
“You know, I didn’t think that these trips could hold any surprises at this point.”
“That’s me. Always unexpected,” I say, trying to cover my embarrassment with good cheer. At least all the huffing and puffing I’m doing provides an easy explanation for the red in my cheeks.
“I imagine you’re pretty tired of talking about yourself,” Rose says. I make a noise of not-quite-agreement. “How about the wedding? Tired of talking about that yet?”
“I honestly haven’t started thinking about it.” Or rather, every time I think about it, I start to panic. Planning a wedding is one thing. Planning a Dalton wedding is another. There will be at least one senator on the invitation list.
“You’re not one of those girls who’s had her wedding planned since you were eight?”
“I never wanted to get married at all,” I confess. When I was growing up, marriage wasn’t about love. It was about partnership, practicality, shared goals. My husband would be someone vetted and approved by my parents, just shy of an arranged marriage; babies would naturally and swiftly follow.
“What changed your mind?” she asks.
“Connor,” I say. She looks at me like she’s trying to decide if this is a rehearsed answer. I flush. “Not like—I just mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before. Not like this. Not… not real, like this. All of a sudden I understood the point.”
“And have you talked about a prenup yet?” she asks.
I choke. “No! Or, I mean, I guess I assume there will be one—”
“There will,” she confirms. Up ahead, Connor and the others swing out of view around a curve in the path. “Is that a problem for you?”
A nuthatch on the trail in front of us watches us approach with a cynical eye before taking off in a burst of feathery movement. “Of course not.” I’m grateful that I have to keep my eyes on my skis. This isn’t the conversation I was expecting. “I’ll sign whatever.”
“Don’t,” she says. I look up at her in surprise. “I mean, you’ll want to have a lawyer look over everything and negotiate for you. We’ll pay for it, of course, but it’ll be their job to protect your interests. That’s what it should do—protect both of you. It’s what I should have done, but I was too head over heels and worried I’d lose it all if I pushed back even a little, and I ended up with a prenup that would have left me with next to nothing when…” She stops herself. Speaks carefully. “It would have been better to have some kind of protection.”
When , she said, not if . “That’s… very practical,” I say.
She makes a sound of amusement. “One thing you will find out quickly is that you have to be the practical one. Connor is like Liam—too optimistic for practicality. He always trusts that things will just work out. Never a mind for the consequences.”
“People keep saying how much Connor is like his father.” I don’t make it a question—not a demand for information. For several seconds, there is nothing but the rhythmic sound of our skis through the snow.
“Liam had his flaws,” Rose says at last, and in those words, I sense a depth of complicated grief. Whatever those flaws might be, though, she doesn’t elaborate. “When you’re a kid, you know the best version of your parents. That’s the version of Liam that Connor knew. That’s the version of him he’s tried all his life to emulate.”
I think of Beth Scott on the other side of the closet door, holding it shut with her whole body as I flung myself against it, screeching. There was never a version of Beth I wanted to be like.
Though I can’t promise I would have done better, with a daughter like me.
“It must be hard coming back here,” I say.
She makes a sound as if to say this is an understatement. “I almost didn’t, that first summer. I didn’t understand how we could all be here like it didn’t happen. But I’m glad that I did. We couldn’t let… all of that take this place away from us.” She squares her shoulders, blinking back tears.
Why do I have the sudden feeling that she had been about to say let him take this away from us ?
I’m imagining it, I tell myself. But that old urge is rising up in me. Little thief , Beth used to call me, but I never stole things to take them. I took them to understand. I need to know the names of things. Their reasons.
You would think curiosity was one of the seven deadly sins, the way the Scotts treated it. Questions were defiance. A child should receive the truth and know it is true because it comes from authority, and authority is truth.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“It was a very long time ago,” she replies. She inhales. “Cherish your loved ones, Theo. And make sure they stay off the lodge roof.” Her lips twist mirthlessly. “But that’s enough of grim subjects.”
“I’m sorry to have brought it up,” I say.
“No, no, it’s no problem. We should be able to talk about these things, instead of pretending they didn’t happen,” she says, and again I feel like I’m stepping into an argument she’s had with someone else entirely.
I don’t know what to do with this conversation—this talk of prenups and Liam’s faults, every topic its own peculiar test. I don’t know who it is Rose wants me to be, and whether she would rather I prove worthy or slip up in some way that justifies throwing me out.
The sound of laughter comes from up ahead. My calves and thighs are burning, and we’re hopelessly behind. I see a look flit across Rose’s face—she wants to be up there, joining in the laughter.
“I think I’m going to head back,” I say, seizing on the moment.
“Are you sure?” she asks. It’s more polite than a genuine objection.
“If I go much farther, one of you is going to have to carry me back,” I reply frankly. I wave a hand. “You go catch up. I’m going to go make myself some cocoa while you all voluntarily get cold and exhausted.”
“I’ll tell Connor you took off,” she tells me by way of acknowledgment, and by the time I get myself turned around—a laborious process—she’s winging away at a speed that makes it embarrassingly obvious how much she slowed down to accommodate me.
The trail back is clear, pummeled by our passage already. I make it a short distance on the skis before giving up and unclipping myself, opting to carry them under my arm while I tramp along in boots. The conversation rattles around in my head as I walk.
Connor talks about his father with something like awe. But the way Rose spoke of the prenup made things sound less blissful.
Make sure they stay off the lodge roof , she said. But didn’t Mr. Vance tell me it was the abandoned cabin where the accident happened?
I suppose that technically, he didn’t. I made an assumption. He didn’t correct me.
But if Liam Dalton died falling off the lodge roof, why abandon the cabin at all?
It’s none of my business , I remind myself.
I stop. The path snakes out before me. The ruts our skis carved are clear, leading onward. They will take me faultlessly back to White Pine, to the place I am meant to be.
Off among the trees, the fifth cabin stands. I can see its gray-brown flank from here. Icicles line its eaves. I wonder if the snow has covered the footprints leading to its door. Mine, and Mr. Vance’s, and someone else’s.
There is a reason that cabin was abandoned. But it isn’t the one I assumed.
And there’s that feeling, tugging me forward. That sense of not familiarity, exactly, but the thing nearest to it. Like looking at a photograph of a family vacation from when you were very young that you don’t actually remember but feel like you ought to.
Not that I would know, of course. Other than hunting with Joseph and trips to see family in Idaho, we never went anywhere. I didn’t know to be jealous; I thought trips like that were things invented for books, to make them more interesting. It wasn’t like I had friends at school to compare notes with. My classroom was the kitchen table and Beth glancing over my work as she moved about cooking.
Beth wasn’t a natural teacher, but she did her best. Math came easily to me, and I would devour anything about literature or history. It would be much later, of course, that I found out how questionable the history I was learning was, and discovered that my college classmates did not have a section in their history textbooks about “the men who walked with dinosaurs” or sidebars about why Buddhists were going to hell.
School was the only time I ever pleased her. You’re so sharp , she’d tell me, wagging her head, but when I started to get older there was worry in that, too. So full of questions , she would say, and it meant something much different at fifteen than it did at five.
I learned that if I wanted answers, I had to find them myself.
It’s only a few steps out of my way. The snow is ankle-deep here where the trees have sheltered the path. And it can’t hurt to look, so I turn. I cross the distance quickly and lean the skis against the steps of the cabin.
In the light of day, I can more clearly see the pale silhouette on the door where the ornament must have once hung. My fingers trace the shape of it. A cross, almost—but not quite. The horizontal bar splits at its ends.
A jolt goes through me. I know what that shape is. Or I did, for a moment so brief all I can feel is the reverberation in the air after it’s gone. I recognize it the way I recognized Connor, that night at Harper’s party.
I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I? I asked him.
I think I would remember , he said.
My hand falls to the door, certain that it’s locked—but as if it has been expecting me, the knob turns. I push the door inward. It catches slightly, the door sitting unevenly in its frame, and then springs open. I let go. The door swings inward, and I try to remember how to breathe.
Dried leaves and pine needles litter the floorboards. The welcome mat inside the door has gone gray with years of dirt. A woodstove stands against one wall, and in the back of the main room is a silent refrigerator. I flip the switch a few times, but the lights don’t come on—no power.
I try for a moment to match this cabin to the one in my dream, but of course that’s not how dreams work. My dream was more the impression of a place, no precise details or identifiable architecture. Besides, I’ve never been here before. I have never been to the East Coast at all, and even if I had, what would I be doing at Idlewood?
It’s only some long-faded memory, finding echoes in this place.
You may never remember , my therapist told me. Or it may come back to you at odd times. The strangest little details make memories return. A smell, a sound.
I close my eyes, and the image of the woman in the red scarf surfaces. I can never recall what she looked like—even what color her hair was, or if she was old or young. But I remember lying down next to her, our faces nearly touching. Did she smile? Did she say my name, tuck a strand of hair behind my ear?
The answers never come.
I step inside, moving quietly on instinct. I’m not supposed to be here—not that there’s anyone to notice that I’ve intruded.
Pale circles dot the floorboards. Candle wax. I turn slowly, picking out the places where the wax has spattered and dried. A dozen or so candles, arranged in a semicircle. I scratch at the wax with my thumb. It’s not as dusty as the rest of the floor. Someone has been in here.
I shiver. Straighten up. The stairs are before me, leading upward.
I inhale the scent of cedar, and memories eddy at the back of my mind.
Where did I come from? I would ask Beth and Joseph.
God brought you to us , Beth would say and Joseph, occasionally more practical, would explain, You came to us through the church. Some folks who knew we were praying for a child and knew you needed a family.
Years of infertility. Three pregnancies, three miscarriages. After that, nothing, not even the whisper of a positive on a pregnancy test. But then, out of nowhere, their prayers were answered.
Of course, that was before they started thinking I wasn’t so much an answer to their prayers as a trick played by the other side. They might have set out to love me at some point, but it rapidly became clear that I was unlovable by their standards.
Poor lamb, they called me. Abandoned. Voiceless.
Damaged. Demented.
I drift toward the stairs. That other cabin, the one flitting through my memories like a figure at the end of a corridor, always out of reach—I can almost picture it. “Two bedrooms upstairs. One smaller. Flowers on the bed,” I murmur to myself without quite realizing it, seizing on a flicker of memory. I try to fix the image in my head before I reach the top of the stairs and the sight of the real cabin chases it from my mind.
The flowers. They were white, I think. I practiced counting them, but there were too many. I always lost track.
There are two doors off the landing above. The one in front of me is shut. I turn my head. This door yawns open. The room is tiny—not much more than a closet. There’s space for a single bed, sized for a toddler or small child, with a metal frame and a nightstand. The bedspread is faded and dingy, but I can just make out the pattern.
The white daisies, their stems intertwined, spilling across the fabric.