Chapter Forty-Five
Helen took a bath, bandaged the cut on her leg, and put on a clean dress. She went down to the cellar to get her favorite
photo of Tyler, and she put it in her dress pocket. She needed to leave the farmhouse and get help. She didn’t know if she
could drive out of here in the truck when the men returned, because if they weren’t real, was the truck real? But she’d figure
it out one way or another.
She slid a record onto the spindle of the vintage Zenith player and gently set the arm on the outer edge of the record. The
violins began to cry. She turned up the volume, so she’d be able to hear the music throughout the house, and then she drifted
into the next room to wait.
The men came home late, so much later than usual. Helen was standing in front of the burning fireplace, staring at her book
titles in a daze.
As she heard the truck doors shutting outside, she dragged herself into the kitchen and was greeted with a quiet little hiss, like a serpent’s.
Was her house turning into the Garden of Eden?
She paused and then realized she’d forgotten to take the record from the turntable.
The needle must have been spinning in the run-out groove for hours, filling the kitchen with an endless hiss.
She lifted the needle, killing the snake.
Wade and Isaac entered, each carrying a grocery bag of food. Make-believe men bringing her make-believe food.
“Oh, how nice of you two to show up again, and with more food,” Helen snapped. “What a vision you both are.”
Wade gave her a perplexed look as he set his bag on the table. “We had to go into town again.”
Helen turned toward Isaac’s impenetrable gaze. He was like a Renaissance painting, saying everything and nothing all at once.
His eyes, inscrutable. She wasn’t going to be able to break him. She turned back to Wade.
“Why’d you go into town?”
“The truck was acting up. We went to get a part, but the carburetor’s shot, so we had to leave it at the shop.”
Helen’s body went rigid. “So the truck isn’t here?”
“I just said I had to leave it.”
“How did you get here then?”
“Tommy Tompkins dropped us off.”
“Bullshit,” Helen said.
“What?”
“Nobody’s named Tommy Tompkins.”
Wade looked at her strangely. “This guy is.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t know, Helen. I didn’t see his birth certificate. But why the hell does it matter? We got a few things from
the store that I forgot yesterday.”
“That’s funny. You think you need to eat?”
“Huh?”
“Do you have an intestinal tract, Wade?” Helen stepped forward and pressed her hand to his torso. It felt solid, but she wasn’t fooled. “Or is this all air in here?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? All kinds of things, apparently. For one, the fact that you two just waltzed back through my front
door uninvited. How long do you plan on coming around?”
Wade slammed his hands down on the table. “I’m tired of you acting crazy like this!”
Helen slammed her hands down on the table even harder and leaned toward Wade. “I can’t help it, Wade. Because I am crazy!”
Isaac softly touched her shoulder. “Helen?”
She reeled around and gave him a patronizing look. “What?”
“Just take a deep breath,” Isaac said.
“That’s rich,” Wade said. “My dead brother telling my crazy wife to calm down.”
Despite it all, Isaac’s touch and the sound of his voice did have a calming effect on her. She stepped away from the table
to put distance between herself and both men.
Wade said, “I went all the way into town to get food, and I expect dinner to be ready in a half hour.”
A long moment passed. Then Helen smiled brightly. “Okay, honey.”
While the men cleaned themselves up, Helen slipped outside. Just as Wade had said, the truck wasn’t there. She walked at least
fifty yards down the driveway to be sure he hadn’t parked it around the first bend, but it wasn’t there either.
She was in the middle of nowhere with two imaginary men, and the only way to leave was to walk alone miles in the dark. The
last time she’d done that, wolves had attacked her.
She would have to plan an escape in the morning.
Helen went back inside.
Three steaming hot plates of white pasta sat on the kitchen counter. The room smelled of fresh garlic and cream and retribution. Helen was ready to put the finishing touch on her cooking.
Alone in the kitchen, she twisted the lid off the glass jar of the powdered antipsychotic medication and dumped it over two
plates of pasta. It didn’t make much sense to drug phantom men, but maybe she could defeat them both inside her mind with
human defenses, the way you beat monsters asleep in your nightmares with fighting and running and screaming. No matter what,
she was leaving tomorrow one way or another, so she may as well use up the rest of the meds. She sprinkled the very last of
the powder on the third plate, her own serving. She probably needed it most of all.
Isaac entered in clean clothes, and she vaguely registered that he was in Wade’s dark green plaid flannel shirt, which was
her favorite. Isaac’s gaze fastened on hers as he approached, speaking in a soft tone. “I want to see you alone later.”
Helen picked up a plate of pasta and held it out to him. Isaac momentarily hesitated, then he reached for it with the same
hands that had pinned her hips down the night before. She turned away, and Isaac brought his plate to the table.
Wade walked in then, his clothes clean too, a brown button-up shirt and khaki pants. For some inexplicable reason, these men
had dressed for dinner. What kind of game were they playing now inside her head?
Wade came to her with a look of contrition on his face. “I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier.”
She nodded and handed him a plate.
During the meal, Helen found her eyes floating from Wade to Isaac, pondering how it was that she could have fallen down such
a twisted rabbit hole and how she was going to get out of it. Both men were shoveling large bites of pasta in their mouths.
She needed to eat too, but she just didn’t feel hungry. She hadn’t even lifted her fork yet.
She wondered what her family understood about her present state.
Perhaps they thought that by living here alone with nature she might be able to heal her grief.
Perhaps they thought she just needed time to let go of Tyler and return to the land of the living.
But if they knew she’d lost her mind, she found it hard to believe they would have just left her out here by herself.
Every time she called home, she’d tell her mother about the things Wade was doing.
If Wade didn’t exist, wouldn’t that be alarming for her mother to hear?
Surely, she wouldn’t just let Helen live here like that, enabling an array of delusions.
A disquieting feeling took hold. Something wasn’t adding up. There was something that she knew but wasn’t seeing. Her eyes
drifted to the Edgar Allan Poe book, still sitting on the edge of the table.
Helen watched Wade lift another bite of food to his mouth. There was dirt etched into the contour of his cuticles. If you
worked the trees, you could never get all the dirt off no matter how hard you scrubbed your hands.
She looked at Isaac’s hands. His fingernails were clean. Unnaturally so for someone who had been hitchhiking cross-country,
then working in the forest multiple days in a row.
She looked at Wade again and noticed the shaving nick on his jawline. He was always cutting himself.
Helen turned back to Isaac, taking in the stubble on his face.
“Your facial hair,” she said. “It’s been the same length the entire time you’ve been here.”
“I like to keep it the same,” Isaac said.
“How? We only have razors here.”
Abruptly, Wade dropped his fork and it clanged on his plate. “I don’t feel so good. I think I need to lie down.”
“You look like you could use a hand, Brother.” Isaac stood and put an arm around Wade to help him from the room.
“Isaac, do you feel okay?” Helen asked.
His plate was almost empty too, but he seemed unaffected by the meds.
“Yeah, fine.”
As Helen watched Isaac give Wade a rare dose of brotherly love, a stunning realization came over her. Isaac wasn’t sick from the meds, and he didn’t have a black eye. Two nights ago, Wade had punched him in the face, and there wasn’t a bruise on him. There’d never been a bruise. How had
she not noticed?
The men disappeared around the corner.
Alarmed, she rose from her seat and tipped over her water glass in the process. She snatched it and set it upright, but not
before a puddle of water spread across the wood. Her mind had bent in so many directions since Isaac had shown up. First Wade
was losing his mind. Then he was lying to her. Then she was losing hers. She’d been so quick to place the blame on Wade, in
part because it hadn’t been until Wade had claimed Isaac was a ghost that Helen had started to have her own disturbing visions.
Wade’s claims—lies?—had triggered something in her. They had pulled her down to a dark place that scared her, and she’d been desperate to stop
it.
Helen tossed her place mat on top of the puddle of water, then went to the kitchen sink with her empty water glass. She filled
the glass with water and turned from the sink, surveying the room. The empty kitchen table looked so lonely. And that’s when
she suddenly recognized her error in memory. These past several days, she’d been thinking the dark visions had started after
Wade had claimed Isaac was dead, but that wasn’t quite right. The first one had happened right there, at the kitchen table.
Isaac’s first meal with them. The woman—her, essentially—in the dirtied nightgown. She had seen that before Wade had made any claims about Isaac being dead.
Something inside her shifted as she remembered the events that occurred before Isaac’s arrival. The way she’d screamed at
the sky, demanding a response from the universe, quite literally wanting to shoot a hole through it. If she couldn’t have
Tyler, she wanted something, and she’d felt the thunder ripple through her soul.
And then Isaac had shown up.
Prior to that, Helen had been sad, deeply so, but she had never questioned the fabric of reality in the days since moving to the farmhouse. She’d left that all behind in the city. It wasn’t until Isaac’s arrival that her mind started to unravel.
Helen’s throat felt dry.
As she brought the water glass to her lips, something caught her eye. Beneath the side table, she saw a manila envelope.
It was the envelope Agnes had brought her! There it was, still in her kitchen.
Today, Helen had been so trapped inside her spiderweb of theories that she hadn’t wanted to listen to Agnes and hadn’t wanted
to look at the envelope, the very thing that might hold a concrete answer. Had she really questioned only hours earlier if
Agnes was a real person? Of course Agnes was real, and she’d left the envelope for Helen.
She set aside her glass and crossed the room, sensing she was crossing a bridge over this canyon of confusion into a land
that might make sense. She knelt and reached beneath the side table, feeling a nervous spark in her chest as her hand closed
around the envelope.
Helen brought it to the kitchen table and opened it. Inside were several sheets of paper folded in half.
She took a deep breath and unfolded them, revealing internet articles printed from a computer. She spread them on the table,
and as she read the headlines of each one, she felt a terrible sensation move through her:
CAPICHON MAN, ISAAC FARRIS, KILLED IN FARMING ACCIDENT
CORONER YET TO RULE IN FARMER ISAAC FARRIS’S DEATH
WADE FARRIS IS CLEARED BY POLICE AS HIS brOTHER’S DEATH IS RULED AN ACCIDENT
Smiling photographs of Isaac and Wade at different ages accompanied the text.
Helen’s eyes devoured the articles one after another. They all said versions of the same thing: Isaac Farris had died in a
farming accident, and Wade Farris had been driving the tractor that had run over his brother. The community was shocked by
the tragedy, and the Farris farm was put up for sale after five generations of family ownership. In lieu of sending flowers,
Wade Farris was requesting that donations be sent to the Oregon Farmers Emergency Relief Fund.
Isaac Farris’s body was buried in the Capichon Hillside Cemetery.