Chapter 9
Lee turned and dove again, back into the frigid pool. Not a pool, the fucking Devil’s Cauldron. The water was dark as blood.
What was she thinking endangering him like this?
She scanned the water again after he surfaced, wiping the tears from her eyes, looking for the man who could be George’s twin.
He still was nowhere, neither in the cauldron nor downriver from it, as far as she could see.
She called over to the people at the picnic table. “Did you see a man across the falls? Over on that cliff face?” She heard
her own voice and was afraid she sounded hysterical.
Lee’s jump into the water had already gotten their attention, as they were now standing on the picnic table for a different
vantage point.
“We didn’t see anyone,” one person said.
Thora checked the water again to see that Lee himself had not succumbed to the cold, then she scanned the opposite shore again, looking for the man’s clothes, any confirmation that he had been there. She couldn’t see anything for sure.
“Lee!” she called down to the water.
He shook his hair out of his face, sending spray in a wide circle.
“Come back,” she said. “It’s no use and it’s too cold.”
“Are you sure?” he called back.
She nodded affirmatively. Again he climbed the rocks to her. By the time he got to her, she was already standing, holding
the blankets they’d been sitting on to him.
“Here,” she said. “Get out of your wet clothes.”
He complied, teeth chattering, peeling off his sopping shirt and pants. He wrapped himself in both blankets as Thora gathered
all their belongings.
“Go to the truck,” she said. “I’ll turn on the heat.”
These terse commands were all she was capable of, but they could deal with feelings later. Right now she had to make sure
Lee wasn’t going into hypothermic shock. The thought of losing him too made her tremble.
Thankfully, she had driven this old truck herself, so she knew its workings. Lee sat shivering in the passenger side as the
engine idled, gradually heating the cab.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying over and over.
But it was Thora who was sorry. No one else saw the man. She couldn’t find any of his belongings. It was as if he never existed.
She had sent Lee into that treacherous water for nothing.
“Should we call 911?” he asked.
“Do you have a phone with you?”
“In my pants pocket.”
Fuck. She climbed out of the truck and looked for his pants in the bed, where she had tossed them.
The phone was there, and thank goodness for waterproofing, the time spent in the water had not killed it.
But there was no signal. Of course there was no fucking signal.
The Adirondacks had shockingly sparse coverage compared to the rest of the country.
They could drive to somewhere with coverage.
Or she could face the truth. That what she saw was a figment of her imagination. Some product of the grief she awakened by
coming to back to Camp Juniper.
And she’d have to tell Lee, who was not giving up on this easily. That wasn’t even getting into the fear lying underneath
this all—that what she saw was a ghost, and that all of those childhood campfire stories may be right.
She took several deep breaths before getting back into the driver’s seat. She dumped the phone in the center console like
the useless rectangle it was.
“Did it die?” he asked.
“No, but there’s no signal.”
“If we get to the Northway . . .”
“We should go back to Juniper and make sure you’re okay.”
“But if there’s a person, or a body . . .” He wasn’t any more sure how to end that sentence than she was.
The urgency in his expression overrode his teeth chattering. Adrenaline was pumping, that much was for sure. Thora was going
to try to break it to him—and herself—as gently as possible.
“I’m beginning to think there wasn’t a person at all.”
Lee’s brow crinkled. “Are you joking? Was this a prank?”
Thora was trying desperately not to cry more in front of Lee, but in trying to answer to this accusation, she let out a sob.
“No. I think it was all in my imagination.”
He swiveled in his seat to face her as squarely as he could.
“We can’t fuck around here, Thora. I need you to be serious right now.”
“I am. No one else saw him. You couldn’t find him. I watched him undress on the other side of the water, but when I looked again, I couldn’t see any of his clothes left behind.”
She steeled herself to tell him the worst of it.
“And he looked like George. He stripped down to his undershirt and underpants . . .”
Lee finished her sentence. “. . . the same as George always did when he swam.”
They sat in dazed silence. Thora concentrated on her breathing, trying to quell her sobs. This was what grief did to people.
Lee being here, being in Uncle George’s truck, being at this swimming hole. It was her mind playing tricks. It was the light
playing through the leaves on the trees, and her mind filling in the blanks. In fact, it was perfectly natural. The brain
always tries to find faces and bodies in random patterns; people do it instinctively.
“Are you okay?” Lee said after a while.
“I am. Yes. I’m fine,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as him. “I got in my head, I think. I’m sorry. I didn’t
mean to put you in any danger. I truly didn’t.”
He sat with her words for a moment. He never felt a compunction to fill a silence. It was a double-edged sword. Some silences
were comfortable; this one was excruciating, and filling it with her own encouraging chatter was too exhausting a concept
at the moment.
“I believe you,” he said. “I believe you genuinely thought you saw someone and that you wanted me to help find them.”
“Thank you,” she said, feeling something tight in her chest slacken. He didn’t have to be effusive; he had to be honest. And
for all his faults, she’d never found him to be a liar.
“Let’s make sure you’re okay,” Thora said, and she pulled the truck back onto the road toward Juniper.
No amount of encouraging Lee to visit the urgent care in Woodhill was going to work, Thora could tell. As they drove back to Juniper, they passed through a brief window of cell phone coverage. Thora made Lee read from the WebMD article about hypothermia and report on his own symptoms.
His refusal to see a doctor did not reassure her that he was fine. It made her think of her own father, who ended up going
through costly, painful, and avoidable surgery instead of dealing with his persistent foot pain. Likewise, he avoided the
dentist and now had dentures. He refused to learn a lesson and saw his behavior as manly instead of anything else: cowardly,
time-wasting, expensive, stressful on his family. What was it they said about the patriarchy hurting men too?
Then, as she often did, she thought of George. George didn’t so much avoid doctors as avoid everyone. Bringing him into community,
showing him that people cared for him, could have been the thing that helped him seek care for himself. And once again, Thora
found herself boiling mad at Lee for his enabling of it all. She knew it wasn’t the time to have it out.
But she couldn’t completely bite her tongue.
“It doesn’t make you brave to tough it out like this,” she said.
“I don’t recall saying I was brave.”
“Then why won’t you check to make sure you’re okay?”
“I don’t need to. My heartbeat is perfectly regular. There’s good blood flow to all my extremities. I feel totally fine. As
a former lifeguard, I’ve spent plenty of time in cold water. I’ve dealt with hypothermia in other people. I know what it looks
like. Please trust that I have a little expertise here and I know what I need.”
It was probably the most sentences he’d ever strung together in her presence. He definitely did not want to seek medical attention.
“If you die in the middle of the night, I am going to kill you.”
“You have my blessing.”
Thora knew this tendency in herself, to discount others’ expertise. Call it anxiety, call it being dramatic. She could imagine
bad things happening even if a so-called expert couldn’t. But she was finished caring what Lee did. It would indeed be a pain
in the ass if he died on her at Juniper, but better a freshly dead body than one found much too late.
When they got back to Juniper, Thora got a fire going in the Great Room while Lee took a hot shower in the pantry bathroom.
She warmed up some leftover soup for them both, and they ate in not-so-companionable silence. As soon as she was finished,
Thora asked, “Do you need anything else? If not, I’m going to turn in for the night.”
Lee looked at her askance. Fair enough. She was being awfully brusque despite the fact that he nearly caught hypothermia chasing
after her hallucination.
“Do you need anything? Do you want to talk about why your imagination was running wild out there today?”
The question had her collapsing back into her chair.
“I don’t think it means anything,” she lied.
“Nothing means nothing.”
“Is that a quote from Socrates or Thoreau or someone?”
“Could be. I’m just saying that you honestly thought you saw George, or his doppelg?nger.”
“You don’t have to remind me,” she said hotly.
“I’m not trying to make you mad, Thora. I never have.”
She couldn’t say the same. Had she imagined George as a way of punishing Lee, sending him into water that probably wouldn’t
kill him but would be extremely unpleasant? That was some advanced-level psychological warfare if so.
Ever since he arrived, she felt herself scheming.
Finding some way to release the pettiness surrounding the changes to her childhood sanctuary and her last remaining memories of the man who made it that way.
Better to scheme than to think about his body, or those little comments he tossed off with an outrageously sexy confidence. This anger was serving her.
She gave Lee her best interpretation. “Obviously, George has been on my mind a lot ever since I got here. And the light filtering
through the trees played tricks on me. I don’t think it has to be anything more than that.”
“Avoiding your feelings doesn’t make you brave,” he said.
She could have punched him, turning her words back on her like that.
“And you, Mister Strong and Silent Type, think you’re fluent in talking about your feelings?”
“I could be fluent in talking about your feelings if you’d open up.”
Absolutely not. Her feelings about him were changing so rapidly that she was afraid of what she might say.
“Thanks for the offer, but I’m heading to bed,” she said, excusing herself. He’d either clean up after dinner himself or she
could deal with it tomorrow. Until then it would be her chilling with the stuffed birds. Barney the stuffed owl looked at
her with wide eyes. Was that what I looked like when I saw him coming out of the water with his wet clothes clinging to his body like that?
She wasn’t out of control. Her imagination ran away with her for a bit, and nothing bad actually happened.
She changed into her pajamas and lay down.
Schuss to the rescue. Bless Bryony Brooks, honestly.
It was easy to understand how she sold millions of books.
These bestsellers could whisk her away from any pesky problems, and they absolutely would, until she could free herself of Lee forever and get started with her new life.
She read until her eyelids drooped, and fell asleep still holding the book, quail lamp still emitting its warm glow on the
cover.
A rapping on the door woke her up, sending the book to the floor.
“Thora, it’s me.”
Lee walked into the room before Thora could say that it was okay. She was still clearing the sleep from her eyes when she
got a good look at him, standing with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, shivering violently.
Fuck. She should have taken him to the urgent care against his will. Now she had to deal with this in the middle of the night.
“I think I might be sick.”
She got out of her bed, feeling slightly self-conscious in her skimpy pajamas, but it was Lee in the more vulnerable state
at the moment.
This might be worse than hypothermia. There may have been something in the water, beaver fever or who knows what. She touched
the back of her hand to his forehead, and it felt cool. Way too cool, like the flesh of a corpse. His teeth were chattering.
“It’s so cold.”
Thora’s room maintained a perfectly fine temperature overnight. She hadn’t made a fire, but a space heater was more than sufficient
to keep the room at a reasonable temperature.
“Sit by the heater,” she told him, and he dutifully hunched down in a sad little pile.
She crossed the hallway to the Blue Room and was hit with a shocking wave of cold.
Her breath hung in front of her in a frozen puff.
The room had to be way below freezing, maybe even below zero. She leaped back out of the room and shut the door. The temperature
outdoors couldn’t be this cold. Walking through the Great Room and the kitchen, she checked. The air after the warm day was
chill, but nothing like the arctic frost of the Blue Room.
What the fuck?
She returned to the Bird Room, where Lee was still tucked against the heater. At least his teeth chattering had ceased.
“It’s only that room,” she said.
“What?”
“The Blue Room is ice-cold. It’s not you.”
He tilted his head. “I am feeling a little better.”
She started to say, You would have frozen to death if you’d stayed in there, but she didn’t want to scare them both. She swerved in the middle of the sentence instead. “You would have . . . no way
of knowing. There aren’t any thermostats in the house.”
“Is there another space heater?” he asked.
There wasn’t. Thora brought this one herself, reasoning she could tote it from room to room. It was practical from an electricity
use perspective and a safety perspective as well, minimizing the chance of her leaving a notoriously dangerous device running
unattended.
Instead of answering, she left him there and visited the other rooms down the hallway. The Wood Room was chilly but fine,
as were the Bell Room, the Junk Room, and the bathroom. She braced herself to open up the Blue Room again, and this time the
shock of cold stole her breath. She couldn’t send Lee back there.
Back in the Bird Room, his shivering was starting to subside.
“I could build a fire for you in the Bell Room.”
“Not the fucking bells.”
It was all fun and games until you had to be in the room with those creepy bells. He was okay enough to crack a joke. That
was a good sign, and she could breathe a little easier.
They could drag the mattress out of the Bell Room somewhere, the floor of the Great Room perhaps, or he could try out the
settee in the Wood Room, but Thora lost patience with all of it.
“Get into the bed,” she said, gesturing to her bed, the one she had been sleeping in minutes ago.
“With you?”
“Don’t make it into a thing.”