Chapter 14
Thora wasn’t singing after all. Lee shot Mack an accusing look, to which Mack gave him innocent eyes in return, as if his
name had appeared on the paper by accident. But he was a good sport and made his way to the stage end of the room.
Thora didn’t know the song. Mack’s mother had a deep love of music, meaning she knew all the hits from multiple generations
before her own.
When the guitar started strumming, Mack and Lee knew it was their time to perform. They pointed and motioned back and forth
to each other, negotiating who was singing which verse. Then Mack came in with the first verse, her powerful gravelly voice
capturing everyone in the room.
When the chorus hit, Lee joined her with the harmony.
Thora had never heard him sing. And here he was making eye contact with her about belonging to the light and the thunder.
Intense.
The two friends sounded great together; they’d definitely sung this before. Maybe it played on a portable speaker while they sat on chairs on the dock, drinking beers and shooting the shit. Maybe Lee played the guitar one night by a fire up at Juniper, performing for George.
This was Thora’s first window into their relationship. And a part of her couldn’t help but be a bit . . . jealous.
Mack and Cody had never gotten along particularly well. Mack could be loud and brash, and she brought out those traits in
Thora. But Mack and Lee? They had easy chemistry, like friends who went way back. The skittish teens could learn a thing or
two about having fun while performing from the two of them.
Mack was having fun up there because she was a complete ham. Lee, usually quiet and restrained, was clearly having a ball,
too. And it wasn’t because he liked the spotlight as Mack did. It was because he was never afraid of what people thought of
him.
Then a stab of regret hit her. Not that she wasn’t up there with Mack. She could easily accomplish that with another slip
of paper. But her obsession with Cody had kept her from learning any of Lee’s charms. And that number of charms kept increasing.
A good cook, a good singer, and a damn good kisser. She was going to have to make up for lost time.
The two finished their song to much applause, and they embraced warmly before heading back to their respective tables. Lee
had a glow about him. Maybe it had been there all along, and Thora hadn’t tuned in to its particular frequency. Cody’s megawatt
incandescence had a tendency to flood every space he was in with light. Without him, she could appreciate new things. The
sun needs to be gone in order to appreciate starlight, which holds a different sort of magic.
No one else had submitted songs to sing, so as originally expected, Mack signed the two of them up for “Shallow.” As soon as she heard the intro chords, she was transported to the dock at Woodhill House, where Mack made them listen to the song again and again until their voices blended perfectly.
Lee may have made eye contact with her during his song, but Thora was too nervous to reciprocate. She coped by looking at
Mack, who was singing to her as earnestly as she did to Lee minutes ago. As they alternated clutching their hands to their
chests and reaching longingly for each other, the song ascended to its howling bridge, trailing down again with the sha-la-las
of the last chorus. Not even a clink of a utensil against a dish stirred the air as Mack and Thora sang the final refrain.
Then came the hoots and hollers. Lee put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Since it was fresh on her mind, Thora initiated
their twenty-seven-step secret handshake for the audience, but particularly for Lee, as the ruckus died down. Part of her
wanted to show that she had her own relationship with Mack. And part just wanted to make him curious.
“What a finale!” the director said. “Thanks for coming out tonight, and again, feel free to tip your servers!”
When she sat back down, Lee asked, “Why couldn’t you look at me when you were singing?”
The question pinned her to her seat. “Eye contact can be so intimate,” she sputtered.
“You don’t say.”
His eyes—wow, they were properly topaz in this light—peered deep into her, the barest smile bowing his lips. It made her feel
stark naked. Not embarrassed, but stripped down, turned on, holding nothing back. She tried to project that raw desire back
at him, meeting his eyes, and his smile grew.
They looked at each other for seconds? Minutes? Until Mack came over and said, “Get in the car, you freaks, before you start
making out again.”
On the drive back to Woodhill, Lee asked about how their handshake had become so elaborate. “Basically any time we saw something that looked cool on movies or TV, it had to go in,” Thora said.
“We also invented parts of it ourselves. The part where I check your pulse? I’m pretty sure that’s original.”
“We don’t do things by halves,” she explained. “You know how Mack’s dogs are named Lottie and Dottie?”
“Yeah.”
“Those are actually our nicknames for each other,” Mack jumped in. “How did I end up as Dottie? I can never remember.”
“It started with Macaroon, and that eventually became Macaroony Loony Tuna Fishing Polka Dot. And then that got shortened
back to Dottie.”
Lee’s trademark laughter, weird and distinctive, incited everyone in the car to laugh along with him. That laugh was becoming
precious to her, like the cackling of blue jays audible from the porch at Juniper.
“Do yours,” Mack said between panting breaths.
“It’s not as long. Thorassic Parking Lot. To Lottie.”
Their laughter carried them up the hill to Juniper, where the autumn air hung heavier, more solemn. Thora couldn’t explain
it, but it felt like the house didn’t want their carefree joy at this moment. The air was still, with no birdsong or crickets.
Instead of the silence between the end of the song and the applause, which felt electric, this air was different. It felt
dead.
Once Mack was on her way back to Woodhill, Thora and Lee had to make a decision.
Were they going to share a bed again?
Perhaps Cody’s explosion earlier in the day had cast a pall over the house. Or maybe it had rattled her. Her feelings of guilt had funny ways of manifesting. And she didn’t want to cause any more trouble.
“I do not want to sleep in the Blue Room tonight,” Lee said.
“There’s always the Bell Room.”
He gave her a stern look, which she perhaps enjoyed more than she should. The smart thing to do would be to be direct, but
that would require knowing what she wanted. Sharing a bed again with Lee sounded delicious, especially on the heels of this
unexpectedly delightful evening, but she wanted to sort through her feelings properly. She was quite sure what would happen
if she and Lee shared a bed again, and it was only going to complicate matters.
“We can swap rooms,” she said. “I’ll take the Blue Room.”
“What if it’s cold again?”
“I’m not afraid of the cold.” She was much more afraid of the warmth of Lee’s body, how his touch made her lose her bearings.
“The Bird Room it is,” he said.
Thora would miss those birds. She had originally assumed the taxidermy would be the second batch of stuff to go from the house
after the bells, but she actually liked the birds. Especially the quail lamp. But the Blue Room, even with its previous odd
behavior, was the nicest to sleep in, the simple theme being the most pleasant and conducive to rest.
As she and Lee swapped their nighttime essentials between the rooms, she felt shy. The previous night had been a little too
hectic for him to notice that she slept with an extremely bedraggled chicken stuffie (which explained why the Bird Room was
so comforting, come to think of it) or that her vibrator was charging on the nightstand. Thankfully he declined to comment
on either.
His nightstand, given his short stay, was less lived-in, but he did have his notebook and a piece of translucent aqua sea glass.
The notebook was opened to the page on which she had requested a drawing of a skunk.
The page depicted a crowd of animals with disgusted faces leaving a movie theater, Saw III on its marquee.
The skunk, talking to its rabbit companion, said, “You told me there weren’t any jump scares. ” Thora grinned.
He hadn’t shown her any of his drawings on purpose, but she was enjoying this game. She turned the page and wrote Make a drawing of me.
She performed her bedtime routine in the old bathroom, while he did his in the updated pantry one. Looking at the copper bathtub,
she thought it was about time she took a nice soak.
Once Lee was gone. Otherwise she’d be tempted to invite him to join her.
Tucked under the blue coverlet, she read Schuss until she felt properly drowsy. As she was drifting off to sleep, she conjured warm thoughts to ward off the cold. The cozy
lighting at Farmers’, the pleasant hum of conversation and background music, and Lee’s hands on hers.
Sometime in the night, she awoke to use the bathroom. She pulled on her robe and stepped into her slippers, knowing how chilly
the old bathroom would be at night this time of year. Stepping into the hallway, something caught her attention to the right.
It was a lit candle.
Someone, or rather Lee, had pulled the hallway table in front of the basement door. Directly under the doorknob, the candle
flickered, making a grotesque imitation of the prank that had left her scarred. The Green Man glowed in the dim light, beckoning
her to touch the doorknob once again.