Chapter 15
I don’t know how I did it. There was a seal?
Lining the window frame? It was a rubber or silicone substance.
And that was where I found a crack. I scratched and scratched at it, and as I did I felt that the wood beneath was soft and rotted and eventually I got my fingernails in there, and that silicone-rubber-seal-like edge began to peel off in strips.
There were still a couple screws holding the window frame in place, but unsealed they were loose enough that I could twist them free with my fingers.
I dragged the dresser over to the window so that I could climb up and reach the ones at the top corners.
The frame lifted off the wall as a whole piece, and I threw it to the ground, stomped on it until it splintered.
Now I am holding one of the pieces like a fencing knife and poking at the panels of glass.
They pop out and land on the wet earth outside.
If they shatter, I don’t hear. The trees are thrashing and the rain riddles the lake like bullets.
I get those men’s slippers from the closet, layer on a matted fleece jacket.
I climb on top of the dresser again and launch myself from the window, trying to clear any broken glass that may be beneath.
I land on my hands and knees in slime and muck, twigs slicing my palms. I’ve bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper, but I think, with gasping astonishment, that I’ve been capable all along. And this renews me.
Almost immediately I realize the slippers are hopeless.
They were big before they were waterlogged and stretched out, and my toes are cramping from curling in their soles.
I take them off but carry them with me for a bit, in case I change my mind about walking barefoot.
The forest floor is knifed with twigs and jagged rocks, slick as ice with wet leaves.
With each passing second the afternoon sky darkens, the trail gets harder to see, and I think about turning back.
I think about sitting in that cabin and allowing Henry to find me and see what I’ve done.
Begging for his forgiveness. I won’t do it, but I keep imagining it, I keep it alive as a possibility the same way I cling to the slippers.
I need to feel like I have options even when I do not.
And this buoys me until I come upon the trailhead named after Harpo Marx.
It’s said he used to cake his body in mud and don a red wig and go screaming along the beaches to scare off lookie-loos who’d gotten word that a famous person was staying somewhere nearby, and under his namesake sign is a mile marker I could kiss on the mouth.
Only a quarter of a mile to the clubhouse.
I drop the slippers. I run like all the girls in all the movies that climax in pursuit.
Because now I am picturing Henry approaching the dock and seeing the busted-out window, his strong, wide strides to the door.
His fury, his shame, when he finds I escaped him again.
What he will do to me when he realizes I cannot be kept.
I am out of breath, and I realize with a bolt of adrenaline that the path has taken on a subtle incline.
The clubhouse is built on the highest point of the island, and as it thrusts into view, I have the jarring sensation that I am in two places at the same time.
It’s a craftsman style, I realize now, a style that celebrates natural elements and handcrafted details that is common all over Los Angeles, and for some reason in that moment I think, Fuck you, Henry.
I know more about more things now. The woods thin, and I pass the old croquet court where Henry taught me to play and then I got so good he could never beat me.
The clubhouse is a narrow three-story stone structure with sliding barn doors, an iron hook lock on both sides.
The inside lock is never latched in the summer, because employees come across the lake at all hours of the night ferrying provisions and groceries.
What’s the point of locking it at all? I once asked Henry.
Bears, he answered, and I am glad I had forgotten about the bears while I was in the thickest parts of the woods.
I cannot believe it when I release the hook on the outside and slide the door open without resistance.
It is dark outside but pitch-black inside.
I wheel my arms protectively, feeling for the walls, trying to find my touchpoints.
I nick my shin on a pile of heavy ceremonial stones that have been kept next to the door for decades, and then I freeze when something featherlight and many-legged scuttles across my feet.
I feel my way to the bend in the hall, then the door to the office.
I imagine lifting the phone to my ear, running my fingers over the keyboard of the desktop computer.
Civilization, steamed milk in my coffee, forty-two-dollar shampoo—I am so close.
I find the doorknob and experience an almost electrical shock that culminates in a vision of someone on the other side, sitting behind the desk—It’s you, that actress-slash-writer-slash-director I was supposed to know but didn’t until you went missing.
We’ve been looking for you. I cannot believe it when I stumble through the door and find that I am somewhat right.
“Jesus Christ,” Campbell is saying as he comes over to me. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
We stare at each other, staggered. The small room is partially lit by an open laptop on the desk, next to a rusted metal canister of pens and paper clips.
Campbell is dressed sensibly, in hiking boots and jeans.
The hood of his windbreaker clings to a hook on the wall.
It’s dry. I notice that right away because I am standing barefoot in a pool of my own sooty runoff.
He’s been here at least a couple of hours. It wasn’t raining when I woke up.
“What are you doing here?” I gasp.
Campbell gapes at me a moment longer. “I was checking on PT’s place. There was a problem with some of the drainage pipes before he died and with the storm—I mean, whatever. What the fuck, Faye? Are you okay? Why are you—”
I throw myself into his arms, babbling about Henry bringing me here, locking me inside the cabin, taunting me, torturing me.
Campbell is holding me in one of those swaying hugs, alternating from foot to foot like we’re dancing.
When he releases me, I note, faintly, that our positions are now reversed.
Campbell is the one with his back to the door and I am the one stuck on the inside.
“Did he say why?” Campbell asks.
I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and shake my head. Something inside me screams at me to be evasive, and though I listen, it makes no sense. This is Campbell. One of my oldest and only real friends. “Revenge?” I guess. “For writing about him? Humiliating him?”
“Okay.” Campbell exhales hard, hands on hips, looking around us like he is trying to come up with a game plan.
Under normal circumstances, nothing could be more reassuring, but for some reason my teeth will not stop knocking together and I have to bite down hard to make them stop.
“Okay,” Campbell repeats. “Where is he now?”
“He went to shore. I got out through a window and ended up here.” I go mute with anxiety as I realize that Henry will have to pass the clubhouse on his way back to his property. He will see Campbell’s boat docked, he will pull over, investigate… My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
“We have to go,” I say, sounding like I’ve got a wad of cotton balled up in my throat. “Before he comes back.”
Campbell nods, but he stands there, unmoving and in the way. “Yeah,” he agrees, the way people do when they’re not really listening to you. “The backup battery should be charged soon. Then we can call someone.”
“The backup battery?” I stare at Campbell’s formerly white T-shirt, now stamped with my mucky silhouette.
I must look like a wild thing, roughed up from the storm, and yet Campbell has not moved to offer me his dry windbreaker, or a towel from one of the linen closets.
It would be musty and maybe even crawling with something, but it is at least a considerate gesture.
And long ago I filed away Campbell as someone with pristine manners.
“The storm knocked out the main generator,” he explains.
“But if there’s no power, how are you charging a backup battery?
” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back.
Campbell gives me a blank stare that renders him utterly unrecognizable to me.
Though, that’s not really true, is it? I saw something in him the morning I ran into him outside the chapel.
Something different. Something black. I begin to shake, hard and uncontrollably.
“What’s going on?” I whisper, like the answer is something we are trying to hide from the real bad guys.
Campbell does not speak. He holds out an arm and begins to herd me back behind the desk, and I’m performing an Olympian floor routine in my head to assign a reasonable explanation to all this.
This is Campbell. Campbell, who installed the window unit in the bedroom of the small yellow house I lived in my senior year, Campbell who paid for things when I was broke and never made a big deal about it, Campbell who sent me flowers after I won my Emmy, Campbell who went on a coke rant about girls and their three-quarter-length-sleeve shirts and made us all howl, Campbell who once dumped a drink on a townie girl in a knockoff Juicy Couture sweatsuit, who cheated on Corrine with a freshman girl and then ostracized her so severely she transferred in the middle of the year, who is older now, and meaner around the eyes.
Campbell, who is caging me into the farthest corner of the small office with his chest, which is broader than I remembered it being.
“Does Corrine know you’re here?” I ask accusingly.