Inside the Long House

by Joshua Jones Lofflin

 

It’s the boyfriend who finds it. He summered in these parts after all. Knew a guy who knew a guy who could get them the place for next to nothing. But let’s not start with him. This isn’t about the boyfriend. He’s more an accessory. Not as in crime (it’s not that kind of story) and not exactly as in fashion, even though our lead does consider him a kind of attachment, something she can trot out to friends or her ex or (most important) her mother. She doesn’t like the term ‘boyfriend’—never has—and doesn’t know what to call him when talking to Richard (the ex) or James (the son) or her mother (the mother), so she calls him Patrick. Not babe or honey or even Pat. She hates pet names, always has, and is grateful that her own name is rarely abbreviated.

So it’s Patrick who finds it, the Long House that is. It’s not that long nor especially house-like. Just a cabin, really, of indeterminate age and forgettable features. Its tin roof sags along with the front porch. It might have been crimson or burgundy once, but its paint has faded to the color of a scab. But our lead tries to be optimistic as she ventures inside and surveys the dingy interior, dusty and poorly lit: a living room, kitchen/dinette, a small bedroom for James, a larger one for her and Patrick. This is the part of the story where the writer—because of course she’s a writer—looks about the house and imagines how productive she’ll be: no Facebook, no TV, no crazy neighbor shouting at her through the walls. She’ll set up her laptop on a wobbly table in the corner of the bedroom. And now the scene is set: writer, cabin, isolation, a sensitive (high-strung, her mother says) child, and a clueless partner. A bit pedestrian, perhaps; a bit predictable. But let’s not forget the mirrors.

#

The locals might call it the Mirror House except hardly any of them venture up the winding drive to see it, not even after everything that happens. Yes, a local reporter will eventually come and snap photos of the makeshift garden. It’s a shabby thing filled with kitschy terracotta animals, their features weathered and indistinct so you can’t tell if they are rabbits or rats. And, among the rabbit-rats and weeds, rows of metal poles sprout like teeth, each pole with tiny mirrors affixed to spindly rods, like some rustic Calder knockoff. They scatter the light as they slowly spin, but in the photograph the local paper prints, they look like blurry daubs of ink. The reporter won’t take shots of the inside, won’t see the mirrors covering the walls or wedged between the knickknacks lining the bookshelves. They’re in every room: mirrored tiles in the kitchen, mirrors overlooking the built-in pine banquette, a skinny mirror at the end of the hall, mirrors on either side of the smaller bedroom reflecting one another and everything in between, an antiquated floor mirror beside the master bedroom’s writing table, and the usual mirrored medicine cabinet, still smudged with Patrick’s thumbprints. Only one mirror will be missing, the large gilt-framed one behind the living room sofa; its shattered glass will long since be cleaned up. But otherwise the mirrors will be just as Helen—the writer’s name is Helen—finds them: bright and glowing, the only things not rimed in dust.

On that first night, when Helen asks Patrick if he thinks the mirrors are weird, he shrugs into the mattress. His valerian root is kicking in, and his movements are sluggish and torpid. He doesn’t suffer Helen’s insomnia and thinks she’s exaggerating when she says she hasn’t slept in over a week, what with trying to wrap up grading finals and responding to her editor’s revisions—and let’s not forget her neighbor, always her neighbor, who would whisper and rant through her condo’s walls. To himself? To Helen? She’s never sure. Even so, when she heard him claim he could smell her fingers, she scrubbed her hands until her cuticles tingled. Patrick says he always slept through the neighbor’s ravings. He says he still doesn’t know what he sounds like.

Now Patrick rolls onto his side and answers, “I don’t know. They give the house an energy.” His voice is distant, hovering at the edge of sleep.

“What kind of energy?” Helen asks, but he’s asleep. Her own eyes won’t stay shut. From the corner of the room a pale light seems to glow mauve and green, the way darkness is never truly black. She won’t remember sleeping, only the sounds of Patrick’s breathing, a nasally whine, and the shifting of bones and muscle.

#

Helen is never sure how much sleep she gets. Even when she’d hear her neighbor’s ramblings echoing through the vents, she could never be certain where the rant ended and the dreams began or if she dreamt at all. Who’s to say how much she sleeps that first night with the house sighing all around her. In any case, it’s the sound of Patrick’s juicer that jolts her awake.

It’s an industrial grade unit he’d acquired, somehow, he wouldn’t say, not that she ever asked. Patrick doesn’t have the most entertaining anecdotes, and she wants to believe him capable of stealing it from one of the many jobs he’s bounced between. She hates the machine, how loud it is, the way Patrick coddles it, cleans and polishes its stainless-steel front. She’s sure he has a name for it (or her? he would feminize it, surely) and she wishes he would drink coffee like a normal adult instead of the garish smoothies he serves up.

She drinks too much coffee. She knows this. But she’s otherwise gotten on Patrick’s health kick, his plant-based uber-organic diet. No chemicals or dyes in her pantry; no more Big Pharma poisons in her medicine cabinet.

Did Patrick know what her pills were for, the ones she said were for allergies? All we know is he convinced her to throw them away. This was when they first began seeing each other, at the start of spring semester, when he began nosing around her medicine cabinet all the while clucking his tongue. Since then, she’s lost fifteen pounds. `She says her head’s never been clearer.

She told Richard as much when she and Patrick picked James up for the trip. Richard agreed that she looked well, though he did his normal song and dance of asking how she’s feeling and offering to pick James up early if he was too much for her. He pressed James’ spending money into her palm, more now, since she’d have James for two weeks instead of just the weekend, not that it made her feel any less like an au pair.

Richard will later say he asked if she was staying on top of her meds but she pretended not to hear. Patrick will dispute this, will say that Richard was too busy consoling James about the cabin’s lack of wifi and trying to convince the whining child that he’d have tons of fun exploring the woods with his mom and Patrick—saying this with strained enthusiasm, like the whole idea of being off-grid in Deliverance country was alien and anathema.

Will it matter who said what? In the end, the events unfold the same with Richard safe in suburbia, too far away to protect his son.

#

Now it’s their first full day, and Helen has the Long House to herself.

After breakfast, Patrick takes James out for a hike, and Helen announces she’ll get started on her edits. And she does try. She sets up her laptop, leafs through the reams of notes she’s already made, and stares at the first page. She hovers her fingers over the keys to type, but the words won’t come. It’s the mirror, she decides. How can you concentrate when your reflection is staring back at you? It’s only after she drapes a bathroom towel over the floor-length mirror that she’s able to relax, although she only manages to type a few paragraphs before she shuts her laptop. The house is too quiet, even with the windows open. There’s no sound of a breeze sifting through the treetops, no birdsong or buzzing of insects. When James and Patrick return late in the afternoon, she’s grateful for their stomping of feet and banging of cupboards, even for the growl of the juicer. “Post-hike smoothies,” Patrick says. He doesn’t ask how her revisions went, and for once she’s glad for his lack of curiosity.

#

Over dinner, Patrick goes on and on about all the things they saw: salamanders, deer scat, a series of five-fingered paw prints—a raccoon’s? James doesn’t answer, but absently scratches at his side. He hasn’t touched his dinner.

Patrick keeps talking, now about lichen, about finding what must’ve been snake holes, saying, “Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” over and over.

James says nothing. He digs his nails into his side and scratches until Helen tells him to take off his shirt. Underneath, red welts cover his torso and neck and spread like tendrils across his shoulders and armpits.

“It can’t be poison ivy,” Patrick says. “We were careful. Weren’t we, Jimmy.”

“Did he eat anything? Wild berries?” Helen tries to catalog all of James’ known allergens: strawberries, almonds, dairy—why couldn’t she remember the rest? Richard always took care of those things.

And now she has no Benadryl, nothing other than Patrick’s suggestion of bathing in baking soda.

“Trust me,” he says, “It will do the trick.”

And it does. After half an hour, the wheals can barely be seen. Only a faint network of spidery splotches remains.

“See?” Patrick says, his voice almost interchangeable with Richard’s, except without that academic lilt. “He’s fine.” This phrase, too, what Richard always trots out, followed by, “You worry too much. Let me do the worrying. I’m better at it,” before adding, “You’ve got enough on your plate.”

Even so, that night she stands in the darkened hall outside James’ room, the glow of his nightlight caught inside the oversized mirrors framing his bed. Beneath them sleeps James, so still he looks like a wax doll. There’s only the shrill sound of his breathing, like the whine of creaking floor joists.

#

The hives come back in the morning, and a temperature to boot. Helen runs a bath for James while Patrick fishes around for some homeopathic fever reducers—belladonna and bryonia extract. He brews a mint tea and throws in clumps of herbs Helen doesn’t recognize. It smells rich, earthy, like worms after a spring rain, but James refuses to drink it, says it smells like cat poop. His fever is gone by then, and when Patrick isn’t looking, Helen pours the cup down the sink.

She leaves James to play in his room and Patrick to split firewood outside. He strips off his shirt to do so, and the nakedness of his torso—its wiry ginger tufts, its sagging paunch and concave chest—it fills her with relief that they didn’t go to the beach like she wanted. It’s not that he’s ugly, despite how he’s later rendered by the courtroom artists—they never get the features right—but neither is he classically handsome. Helen still hasn’t sent a picture to her mother, just told her he’s healthy, in great shape, which might be a stretch, but he’s not fat, or not yet anyway. His skin is good with no signs of poison ivy or whatever it was that James got into.

She searches for signs of splotching on herself, peeling back the towel from the bedroom mirror to study her reflection. There’s nothing, just a new pimple at the base of her throat, no bigger than a spider bite. An unease creeps over her. Might she detect malignant traces of decay? A varicose vein here, a lump there? The folds of flesh beneath her eyes are puffy and tender, and her skin is hot.

She replaces the towel and lies down on the bed. From outside, Patrick’s axe falls in a metronomic beat. She could probably fall asleep to it. She closes her eyes, feels herself grow heavy, feels the dim light shift about her. The axe stops its chopping, and a silence folds about her as if she’s sinking into the down comforter, into the depths of the earth. She can only hear the sound of her breath until a faint scratching, almost imperceptible, tugs at her consciousness, like some disembodied finger pulling its way toward her. She sits up with a start and gasps, but all is quiet except for a faint murmur that seeps through the cracked door.

The hallway is dim, James’ door now shut. Through it, Helen can make out sounds of talking: James speaking in a high-pitched breathy voice, then answering himself in his regular tone. She leans closer and tries to make out the words but only hears a breathy Shhh and then silence.

Some will doubtless bring up that James never before engaged in that kind of imaginary play, that Richard indulged him far too much with near constant screen time, and Helen was all too familiar with her son tunneling his attention deep inside a 3x5 touch screen, not even removing the headphones when his battery gave out and he was forced to draw or read or, most often, bug her for attention, tugging at her arm, her pants leg, even her hair until she yelled at him to quit it, that she’s busy, and why doesn’t he go play with the kids outside, they’re his age after all, and of course he’d burst into tears. This is the sensitive part. The high-strung part. Her mother has been forwarding her articles about kids on the “spectrum.”

So yes, this might seem out of character for James, but how much does Helen really know her son? He changes so much on her, from weekend to weekend, and Richard never helps, never lets Helen in on what’s going on at James’ school or what his counselors and therapists have been saying.

“Give him space,” he might say or, worse, “He needs stability in his life right now, not questions.”

#

At dinner that evening, James stabs at his plate, pushing around the vegetarian meatloaf Patrick made. He spears a chunk of eggplant and makes a retching face. “Howie doesn’t like this.”

“Howie?” Patrick asks. “Who’s he?”

“He lives here.”

Patrick arches his eyebrows at Helen. “Is that so? I don’t think I’ve seen him.”

“You can’t see him. He’s an elf.”

“Ahhh. That explains it.”

“Eat your dinner,” Helen says. “Patrick made it special. Don’t be rude.”

“I’m not being rude! That’s what Howie told me.”

“Well, James,” Patrick says, leaning close. “I’m sure he said that. Elves don’t eat this kind of food. But I’m sure he won’t mind if you try a bite and tell him how it tastes.”

James shoots him a skeptical look then takes a tentative bite. “I guess it’s okay.”

“I’ll take that as high praise,” Patrick says as James eats more rapidly.

James’ eyes are fixed on his plate, and he shovels food in like he’s not eaten all day until he glances up and sees the adults and their reflections staring at him. Then he sets down his fork and says he’s full and can he please be excused. He wants to play with Howie.

Helen sighs and empties the uneaten portions onto her own plate.

Patrick says nothing.

#

From here, things unfold predictably enough: James withdrawing further, wanting to play in his room, with Howie, and sleeping poorly like Helen, poor Helen, who paces the hall of the cabin all night, what with Patrick’s valerian-induced snoring and her son’s thrashing against his mattress keeping her up. It’s only when she steps inside James’ room to watch the shallow rise of his chest that his limbs quieten until only his eyes move, fluttering left and right beneath his lids, searching.

Helen later wakes on the couch, stiff-necked and disoriented, still shaking off her own dreams of insects and scuttling legs. The mirrors reflect the pale light of morning, and it might be peaceful, idyllic, but for the juicer and its high-pitched whine.

“For fuck’s sake, I’m trying to sleep,” Helen mutters as James emerges from the kitchen. His hair stands on end. His eyes are ringed with dark circles.

“You said the F word,” he says, his voice scratchy.

Enter Patrick, looking hale and rested. He holds a glass brimming with something the color of Pepto-Bismol. “Dragon fruit, Jimmy. You’ll love it,” he says, his voice casual, blithe, like he’s determined to blunder ahead as if they’re only on a vacation, as if James’ hives or Helen’s insomnia or the goddamn mirrors that seem luminous from within (yes, they really do seem imbued with some otherworldly glow, Helen realizes, and isn’t that why she couldn’t sleep?

Or was it because she kept hearing the distant echo of her neighbor from across the miles telling her to come back, that he needs her, that he’s lost, she’s lost, that he’ll find her) as if none of those things are happening or aren’t real, and perhaps Patrick’s right, maybe none of those things are real, or not in a way that matters, like when James chugs the smoothie and Helen tells him to slow it down and Patrick ruffles James’ hair and James croaks “Don’t touch him!” and then lets out a long, liquidy burp, a cartoon belch—maybe Patrick’s right to laugh, to diffuse the weirdness of it all.

Can we blame him? Or blame Helen for fixating on the burp, for insisting that James say ‘Excuse me’? (“Excuse me,” James says, his voice normal now, his eyes bewildered.)

If Patrick senses anything, he hides it well and steers the conversation toward breakfast (“Smoothie? Avocado toast?”) after James is sent to his room to get dressed. (An outing is planned, not that it matters. They won’t end up going.)

“What is taking him so long?” Helen asks, not that she expects an answer; Patrick’s in breakfasting-mode, humming obnoxiously. From James’ room the floorboards creak, but there are no other sounds of him getting ready.

“James! You better be getting dressed,” she calls.

She knocks at his door. Waits. Knocks louder and pushes it open. James stands naked in the middle of the room, hugging himself. Helen is about to speak then catches sight of his back in the mirror and lets out a gasp. Long scratch marks stripe his back, as if he’s been mauled by an enormous cat. They’re puffy, already turning a bright pink, with flecks of crimson beading under the larger ones.  

“James! What did you do? You can’t scratch yourself like that.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Howie!” he cries.

“Come on, let’s get those cleaned up.” She grabs his wrist and yanks him into the bathroom where he wails “It stings!” over and over as she scrubs his back with soapy water.

“Hush. This will make it feel better. You’ve got to tell me if you’re itching. Understand?”

“But I wasn’t— Ow!”

“Hold still.” The bleeding has stopped, and she pats him dry with a towel. “Get some clean PJs on. I want you to take another bath in an hour.”

James nods and absently pulls at his penis. From down the hall, Patrick asks if everything is all right. When he asks if he can make up a poultice, some suggest he’s being genuine—feckless, yes—but truly interested in helping; others say not so fast, he’s just trying to appear helpful while he putters around in the kitchen, probably muddling avocado or banana for another smoothie. Helen pushes past him and grabs his car keys, her laptop in hand.

“I think it might be bedbugs.”

“Bedbugs?”

“You know, those bitey things? Now watch him. I mean really watch him. I’m going into town.”

“I’m sure it’s not bedbugs,” he says, but she’s already gone.

#

This is the part where we cut to the nearby café, the one with free wifi, and hear the local mavens dropping hints and back story, all designed to warn off an attentive protagonist with their tales of mysterious fires, Civil War curses, rumors of a witch, of a murdered child, or a history of not-rightness that’s infected the Long clan with madness or pederasty.

They’ll talk about disappearances. They’ll say these woods can swallow someone up and never spit them out. It’s not known which stories are told to Helen—she’s not sure herself. She’s too busy trying to get the Wi-Fi password and ordering another latte and deciding whether to get the Alpine Burger with mushrooms or the Mountainman Double with bacon. That, and there’s the Facebook blow-up (yet another article, this one about vaccinations) that ends with her blocking her mom. Besides, the Wi-Fi is spotty and cuts in and out.

By the time she gets back, she’s jittery from all the coffee and has to pee. It’s late afternoon, and the mirrored mobiles spin their eyes at her, and yes there’s a shift in the atmosphere as Helen steps across the threshold, but she really has to pee so is she going to notice that sort of thing? Also, she’s worried Patrick will see the drugstore bag brimming with Tylenol and Benadryl, Band-Aids and Neosporin. She’s glad he’s in the kitchen—the sound of the juicer is unmistakable—and she hides the Big Pharma poisons in her toiletry bag.

James’ door is shut again. She presses an ear to it but hears nothing. In the hall mirror her reflection wavers, warps—then jumps as a fluttery rasp ripples through the walls. She flings the door open to see James sitting cross-legged, his cars overturned in front of him like there was an enormous accident. Everything else in the room is undisturbed.

“Feeling better?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!”

“Have you been scratching?”

He lifts his shirt. The scars still glow pink but look no worse. “See? Can’t you see we’re playing?”

She shuts the door. Doesn’t comment on his use of ‘we.’ Is she nonplussed by it? Or did it fail to register? Sounds of crashing cars pepper through the door, then more rustling, and again no reaction from her other than a slight hunching of the shoulders, the briefest catch in her step.

In the kitchen, Patrick is spooning wheatgerm into the juicer. He’s shirtless and covered in fruit pulp. He reeks of kale.

“Find what you’re looking for?” he asks.

No doubt Helen wants to tell him he looks ridiculous. And she does seem to pause—perhaps weighing the gravity of her choice to spend an entire summer with this sparrow-chested man—before slumping into one of the chairs. The caffeine buzz is gone; she’s too exhausted to tell him about page after page of Google searches for bedbug symptoms—how the bites are too large, the coloration all wrong—and she hopes he doesn’t catch the scent of bacon grease in her hair. Down the hall comes more papery rasping, louder now, like the stridulation of some giant insect.

“What on earth is he doing?” Helen starts to ask, but her voice is cut off by the juicer’s wail.

#

She still hasn’t made any progress on her manuscript. She spends the remainder of the afternoon at her laptop writing and rewriting the beginning, but the words keep coming out jumbled and worse than before. She needs to see it on paper. After untangling a mess of cables and hooking up her printer, she spends an hour contemplating the right typeface and adjusting the margins. In the end she uses what she always does and sets the opening chapters to print.

By the time they finish printing, James is in bed, and Helen joins Patrick outside by the firepit. They pass a joint back and forth, and for a brief moment it feels like a real vacation. Behind them, the back garden’s mirrors catch the firelight and scatter it into weird patterns. The mirrors shift and twist, shift and twist. Helen takes a long drag and stokes the flames with a stick.

“We should get rid of the mirrors,” she says. “I think they scare the birds.”

“What birds?”

“Exactly. There aren’t any. No insects either. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

She passes the joint. It’s almost too small to smoke, but he manages to hold it between his fingertips. “Maybe that’s what the owners want. Birds can be pretty destructive.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think birds can damage homes? Building nests? Shitting everywhere?”

“Not that. I don’t think the owner wants that,” she says, though she’s not sure why—perhaps one of the local stories did sink in.

She prods the coals until sparks shoot skyward.

“I kinda like them,” Patrick says. “They’re kooky. Unique. Authentic, right?”

Helen peers at his face but can’t tell if he’s joking or not. This has been a problem with him all along. At least Richard used to make her laugh. Patrick tosses the roach into the fire and begins to roll another.

“I’m too tired,” she says and returns indoors, not bothering to turn on the lights, not wishing to see her reflections all glare at her.

She undresses in the darkness and slips beneath the sheets, pulls them to her chin and squeezes her eyes shut. Strange murmurings and susurrations ripple through the air. The scratching sounds—small scrabblings in the walls and ceiling—are unmistakable now. When she opens her eyes, the noises stop, as if the house is holding its breath. Had the locals said anything about infestations? She’s sure they said something. She can’t remember. She hates her memory, how jumbled it gets. Richard, her mom, everyone likes to correct her, to set the record straight, to tell her No, this is how it happened, saying, Don’t you remember? Saying, Maybe you dreamt it. Now she shuts her eyes and waits for the approach of sleep, for a charred landscape of clawed things, two-legged and four-, with hissing breath and a child’s aspirated laugh.

#

“Think it might be squirrels?” Helen asks, shouts really, what with the goddamn juicer going again.

The kitchen reeks of mango or carrots, and Helen craves salt. James sits across from her, staring sullen-eyed at his bowl of oatmeal, untouched, even after Patrick topped it with a smiley-face made from raisins.

“Beats me,” Patrick says. “Maybe you dreamt it?”

“Howie says there aren’t any squirrels,” James says and stabs a spoon at the oatmeal. The smile goes crooked, begins to submerge.

“Maybe it’s mice? We should call about it.” By ‘we’ she means Patrick. She hates the phone. The perforated receiver. How electric and disembodied the voices sound.

“Howie says it’s not mice either. He eats them all.”

“Well, that’s handy,” Patrick says. “Does he eat all the mosquitoes too?”

“Yes.”

“He has quite the appetite.”

“He’s always hungry.”

“I don’t care about your friend’s appetite,” Helen says. “I care about you finishing your oatmeal.”

“Howie doesn’t like it.”

“But James does. Now eat up.”

“Howie says he can see in the dark, that you can’t hide from him by keeping the lights off.”

“What did you say?” Helen’s voice spikes and breaks.

She snakes out a hand and grabs James by the arm. He twists beneath her whitening grip and whimpers.

Patrick steps forward, says, “Hel.”

“Don’t,” she warns without taking her eyes off James. “What did you say?” she repeats, her voice quiet now, steely.

James’ eyes grow liquid. His lip trembles.

“I don’t want to hear another word about this Howie. Understand?”

James gives a small nod then a loud sniff. “I don’t feel well.”

Helen sighs and feels his forehead.

“Goddamnit, he’s burning up.”

#

She draws a cool bath and opens up the package of Tylenol while Patrick stands in the doorway. He watches her struggle with the child-safety cap and looks like he’s ready to say something. She wants him to say something, anything. You can tell she’s ready for it, the way her mouth twitches, like a dog ready to bite.

If only he’d open up his mouth—maybe things would’ve ended differently—but he just leans there, his shoulder merging with the door jamb. He looks useless.

She gets the cap off. Hands the pills to James.

Patrick finally speaks, tells her he’s going to chop some firewood.

“Good,” she says. “You do that,” she says. She will not look at him.

#

Now she sits in the front room, hunched over her newly printed chapters and her months-worth of edits, all stacked in precarious piles across the pine floor. She has different colored Sharpies: red for excisions, blue for paragraphs needing expanding, green for final passages. She likes the roughness of the paper, the slight scrape of marker on page as she highlights sentences and paragraphs with red and blue slashes.

This is what she wanted all along, the house quiet (but not too quiet!) so she can focus. Only the distant slosh of James in the tub or the dull thwack of Patrick’s axe breaks the silence. Above her, the squirrels or mice are still, and for once she’s able to make progress.

Was Patrick right? Did she dream up the noises? It wouldn’t be the first time. But no, when she gets up to check on James, she can hear the rodents’ telltale rustling above her—or perhaps it’s her own footsteps traveling along joists and beams through some acoustical wormhole. Patrick would say it’s the house settling. He would say it’s her neighbor all over again. His axe sounds louder now, more urgent, and James empties the tub.

It’s around this point that she leaves the house. To clear her head? Or because of the noises? Patrick’s lawyer will suggest it’s due to the strain of revising, but he’s one of those ambulance chasers with an airbrushed smile. Most agree that she departs before lunch, that she tells Patrick to keep an eye on James. That she looks at his axe slung across his shoulder and thinks he’s a fool.

She winds her way out of the mirrored maze and passes into the woods, following a faint path upward out of the valley. Seasons and seasons of dried leaves crunch underfoot, and the air smells older, primal, flecked with an iron tang. The forest is still, and then, as she crests a small rise, birdsong erupts all about her.

The trail climbs higher through thinning trees and tumbled slabs of limestone then ends abruptly at a small clearing. Under a splatter of sky sits a crumbling foundation and the moss-covered remains of a chimney. The chimney stone is warm to the touch, a vestigial heat, perhaps, from some long-ago fire. She pulls at a loose section, turns it over, exposing a colony of pill bugs. They mill absently then curl into balls when she nudges their segmented shells. Gnats drone about her, thickening the air like smoke, and Helen feels a soupy drowsiness rise within her.

She almost stumbles as she finds a flat stone, smooth and free of lichen, what once might’ve been the hearth. Here she sits and stares upward, listening to the cries of nuthatches and wrens and grackles. She wonders how old the ruins are, how long ago its ghosts faded away.

#

She opens her eyes. Had she been dozing? The air seems cooler, the sky a deeper blue. She rises unsteadily thinking of James. If Patrick had called for her, could she have heard him? She trots, half-runs down the trail, sliding down the steeper portions, praying that she won’t twist an ankle. By the time she sees the glint of mirrors through the gaps in the trees, she’s clutching at her side and gasping for breath. She emerges into the clearing, the mirrored mobiles static, not spinning, their eyes all fixed on her.

Patrick walks around the far side of the house dragging a large branch. He smiles at her, but in the bent reflections of the mirrors, the myriad lips each form a disapproving frown. “So. There you are.”

“I wasn’t gone long. Was I?” Helen glances at the empty sky. “Is James—”

“He’s fine. No temperature. I tried to get him to play outside, but he wanted to play indoors. With Howie, of course.” Of course.

But his room is empty. Only her reflection stares back at her, all eyes and flared nostrils, her face red and blotchy. And here, a brief moment of panic that he’s gone, really gone, and shouldn’t she be more scared? But no, here he is, in the front room, the floor blanketed in white and a confusion of red with James in the center of it all, sitting on the couch and crashing two metal cars into one another.

It’s then that Helen sees it’s her manuscript strewn across the floor, page after page scrawled with fiery pen marks. Scribbles spiral across her edits in dizzying circles.

All her work ruined.

“James!” she gasps. A sharp pain lances her side.

Her eyes go from James to the papers to James again. He doesn’t look up. The back door squeaks open and slaps shut. Footsteps echo across the planks.

“James!” she says again, gasping for air. He goes vroom vroom. Sends a car careening off the couch.

“James!” she shouts now, and he looks up like a startled deer, his eyes wide, fearful.

“It wasn’t me!”

“What were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t me! I swear!” He draws his knees to his chest and squeezes his eyes shut.

Patrick steps into the room, his mouth opening and closing trying to form words.

“Don’t even start!” Helen screams as a dizziness surges through her.

The red whirls on the papers threaten to overtake her entire vision. She shoots out a hand, finds a coffee mug she’d left on the sideboard, and flings it blindly across the room. It sails over James’ head and into the largest of the mirrors, gilt-framed and ancient looking. A splintering sound fills the air as well as something higher, sharper, a screeching—James’ screeching. His hands cover his ears as shards of glass shower him. He rocks back and forth, then topples off the couch like one of his ruined cars. His body flops about on the markered papers, arms and legs flailing.

A trickle of blood seeps from his mouth.

#

The waiting room feels like every other waiting room, or a movie set of one. The fluorescent lighting, the uncomfortable vinyl chairs, each with a tear down its cushion, the burnt smell of vending machine coffee. Patrick rests his head against a greasy pillar across from the nurse’s station. James is sleeping, somewhere in the warren of curtained rooms, just for observation, the doctor had said, pressing his hands together the way doctors do when they don’t want to touch you. Helen is sick of doctors. 

“You folks get some rest,” he said and smiled at them with small gray teeth.

Richard will say the same thing. He’ll be here any moment now. I’ll take things from here, he’ll say, and he’ll talk to the doctor about MRIs and CAT scans, about blood tests and anti-seizure medication. He’ll clap a hand on Patrick’s shoulder and thank him for his help. In a quiet voice, he’ll ask, How’s she holding up? He’ll lean even closer and ask, Is she staying on top of her meds?

#

It’s not clear what follows. Conclusions are messy things.

Yes, Patrick and Helen go back to the Long House, drive the whole way in silence. Helen staring out the window, at the landscape and its gathering shadows, at her own drawn face in the passenger mirror, at her sunken eyes, almost black in the fading light.

Does Patrick broach the subject? Does he say something stupid like, “You said they were allergy pills,” as they park in front of the house?

He won’t notice if the mirrors are spinning or not. Perhaps Helen won’t either. She’s tired. Exhausted. She won’t remember undressing or climbing into bed or anything other than vague dreams of heat and grinding teeth. She’ll wake in a sheen of sweat.

The juicer is probably going like everything is normal. Does Helen feel normal? Refreshed even? She brushes her teeth. Flosses. Spits out coppery globs. But she looks rested in the mirror. Yes, the flesh beneath her eyes is tender to the touch, but her complexion is bright, her skin clear. Radiant, she thinks.

And Patrick? He’s washing up. He’ll point to the smoothie he made for her. It’s viscous and green, like phlegm, Helen thinks, but she takes it anyway and sits down. In front of her, her manuscript has been neatly stacked. James’ scrawlings are an illegible maze, slipping in and out of the paragraphs and margins like a byzantine game of chutes and ladders. In the mirrors lining the wall, the marks twist and writhe.

“This smoothie tastes terrible,” she says.

Patrick takes the glass, sniffs it, and says, “But you love kale-kiwi.”

Maybe he’ll ask if she’s feeling well. Maybe he’ll tell her she looks rough, haggard even, as she stares out the back window. Outside, the mobiles twist and shift slowly, back and forth. But Patrick still won’t notice this. Won’t see how they match the rhythm of Helen’s breathing: exhale, twist, inhale, twist.

He’ll claim he can’t recall how the argument started. Probably with a question about her medication, about when she was going to tell him, about how they can’t have secrets.

“Don’t,” is all she says.

She won’t face him. Watches his reflection instead, his drawn and withered reflection. Sallow. She’ll close her eyes and focus on her breathing. When she opens them again, Patrick’s still there, staring, with those dumb animal eyes.

Does it matter exactly what is said? That she blames him for not watching James? Blames him for his stupid diet, this goddamn house, these goddamn woods. Maybe she throws something. Or else he slinks out the back door and shuffles off while she shouts louder and louder, the exhaustion of the argument overcoming her until she slumps to the floor and rests her cheek against the wall. It’s cool and dry.

She’ll close her eyes here, and a hundred tiny images of Patrick walking into the woods will drift into her head.

#

And that’s it really.

Sure, there’s gossip about what happens afterward, when Patrick returns late in the afternoon. The sky is smudged with charcoal streaks, and a warm rain strikes the tin roof like small stones. (His deposition will state he tried the back door, convinced she’d say she’s sorry, that things would go back to normal, that they’d have glorious make-up sex.) But now the handle rattles and clacks. He tries it again. Calls her name. Waits. Shouts once more then tromps around the house to the front, shoulders hunching beneath the growing shower. (His lawyer will be adamant about those details and insist that all of Patrick’s things were strewn about the front garden with his suitcase open, slowly filling with rain, and beside it the juicer, ruined, an axe-shaped wedge in its crown.)

And what does Patrick do? He looks to the blackening sky, then to his jeans and hideous checked shirts all coated in mud. He stares at his juicer for a long time. (He’ll testify he never bothered trying the front door, only piled his things into his car and drove away.)

Some people will say he should be locked up. So what if there won’t be any evidence, no blood, no incriminating DNA, that all they can do is file a missing persons report. Where is the axe, they’ll ask.

But others won’t be so sure. Richard, her mother—they both will come to Patrick’s defense. They’ll say the axe was surely in Helen’s hands the entire time, that she’d heft it up and down as Patrick tried the door, that she’d stroke its rough grain as he stared at his scattered possessions while the rain fell harder and harder. You had to know her, they’ll say. But even they don’t know, not really.

And James? Nobody will ask him. He’s just a child, and hasn’t he been through enough? What could he possibly say?

#

The Long House sits, quiet and still. Outside, the shower has washed away the Prius’ tire tracks. Inside, something stirs. There’s a flutter, a rasp, a voice.

“He’s gone now.”

“Yes.”

“He won’t bother you anymore.”

“I know.”

The air is warm, close, the windows fogged over. Beyond, the curtain of rain hides the line of trees, but inside everything is bright, clearer than it’s ever been, and Helen climbs out of the wall. She still clutches the axe and sets it down among the scattered pages that cover the floor. They’re everywhere. She sits in the middle beside the pens.

She picks up the red one and begins to draw.

END