Arcadia Falls (6 page)

When I see the lights of the cottage at the end of the path I imagine Lily Eberhardt setting off from there in the middle of the blizzard. I’ve always wondered why she would have risked the storm. Had she been that desperate to get away? Had she been afraid Nash would leave without her?

I’m thinking so hard about Lily Eberhardt that when a white-clad figure flits between the trees ahead of me I stop dead in my tracks, sure I’ve conjured her ghost. The apparition—if that’s what it is—stops, too, then glides off the path into the woods and disappears. I hurry to the end of the path and scan the trees but all I see is a slim white birch tree tilting among the surrounding pines. Is that what I saw? It must be, I think as I leave the woods. If it was a person why would they hide from me? I can’t quite banish the feeling, though, that I’ve summoned Lily’s ghost.

When I walk into the cottage I go straight to the fireplace and look at the cracked tiles. Vera had the cottage built for Lily. Fleur-de-Lis is a reference to the flower Lily was named for. The two women made each other tokens of the other’s name—tiles decorated with lilies and beech trees, cabinets engraved with those symbols, tapestries and rugs woven with interlocking tree and flower patterns. Examining the tiles above the fireplace again it’s clear that only the ones decorated with lilies have been cracked. Did Vera do this when she learned that her protégée—and, some believed, lover—had announced that she was leaving? If so, it might have been that final act of violence that drove Lily out into the storm.

I shiver thinking of poor Lily wandering lost in the middle of a snowstorm and dying by herself in the cold. When I can’t stop shivering I realize why I’m so cold. I left all the windows open and the afternoon, waning toward evening, has become chilly. I’d forgotten that even summer evenings this far north can be cold. Dymphna’s stew will be a welcome comfort.

I call Sally’s name while unpacking the food in the kitchen. She doesn’t respond, but then that could be because she’s plugged into her iPod, asleep, or just ignoring me. Pausing to listen, I hear the faint sound of music coming from upstairs—something by the Decemberists, I think. So she’s not plugged in, but listening to music on her laptop.
Hopefully while unpacking. I head toward the stairs but stop myself. The therapist we saw in Great Neck said that repeatedly calling for Sally when she didn’t answer me just enabled her helplessness. “Just put dinner on the table and let it get cold if she doesn’t come down for it,” she had told me. I’ve watched a lot of food congeal—and Sally grow thinner—over the last year. Still, I might as well unpack the boxes marked “kitchen” and get dinner ready before calling again.

Although I sold off all the good china on eBay and left the high-end appliances with the house, I’ve kept most of the everyday china and cookware. It didn’t have good resale value, I figured. Who would want someone else’s used pots and pans with the ghosts of past meals clinging to them? What stranger would want to braise pork chops on the tarnished copper-bottomed saucepan with the burn on its rim from when Jude stole up behind me while I was sautéing shallots and kissed me so long I let them burn? I can still smell the charred onion when I lift the pan from its nest of packing paper—a smell as intimate as the memory of sex. It would be like selling our marriage sheets. And how could I sell the blue-glazed Le Creuset casserole, a housewarming present from my mother, chipped on the lid from when I dropped it during a fight? It was in the apartment on Avenue B, two weeks after I had told Jude I was pregnant. He came home and announced that he’d dropped out of the MFA program at Pratt and taken a trading job with Morgan Stanley.

“Good thing I’m good at math as well as art,” he said just as I lifted the lid off the casserole. I looked down at the coq au vin I’d spent half the day making from a recipe in Julia Child and felt suddenly queasy.
Morning sickness
, I thought, even though it was night. When I picked up the pot to bring it to the table my arms went limp. It fell to the stained linoleum, splattering wine sauce and chicken bones everywhere.

“Shit, Meg,” Jude said, surveying the carnage, “if this is how you react to my first real job I’d better not bring home a Christmas bonus.”

As I pour Dymphna’s stew into the pot I touch the place where the iron shows through the blue glaze. Whenever I look at it I wonder what I might have said to change things. Should I have offered to get an abortion? Should I have told him we’d scrimp by on an art teacher’s salary? Or
that surely with his talent he’d be a famous artist someday? Should I have suggested we borrow from his parents? Or move to the country and raise goats for a living? Should I have recognized the look in his eyes as defeat and not pretended that giving up his dreams to support me and our unborn child was a good idea?

I turn on the gas under the chipped pot, but it hisses without catching. It takes me a long moment of smelling gas to realize that the stove is so old it needs a match to start. There’s a box of Diamond Tips in a rusted tin box screwed into the cabinet right above the range. I light one and step back as the flame lashes out like a cornered cat.

My hands are still shaking as I start unpacking the everyday china: the blue-and-white Marimekko Jude bought at the Scandinavian Design store our first married Christmas together. What a kind man, I had thought. The average guy his age would have spent his Christmas bonus on stereo equipment or a bigger TV set, not plates and bowls and saucers for his hugely pregnant wife who had burst into tears the week before because the paper plates she ate on made her think she wasn’t grown up enough to be a mother. I still remember how bright and cheerful it all looked laid out for Christmas breakfast. And even though the white glaze is scratched and the blue rims have faded it’s all still here—service for eight. “For our growing family,” Jude had said. Now it seems like a lot of crockery for just me and Sally.

I lay plates and bowls on the table and fish out spoons and knives from the jumble of flatware (the good silver went in February to pay the heating bill), and then sink down onto a spindly kitchen chair that creaks under my weight. A wave of exhaustion settles over me like the lead apron the dentists make you wear when you get your teeth X-rayed. How am I going to unpack all these boxes when every single cup and saucer carries the weight of all the mistakes I’ve made? Checking first to see that Sally hasn’t come downstairs, I lay my head down on the table.

It’s surprisingly cool. I’d thought the top—white with a trim of green leaves and brown pinecones—was painted wood, but with my cheek on its smooth surface I realize it’s actually enameled steel. My grandmother had a table like it in her Brooklyn kitchen. It had two folding leaves like
this one that could be let down and then, when you sat underneath it, you felt like you were in a little house. The scalloped edges of the leaves looked like the trim on the cottages of fairy tales. A word was stamped on the underside of the table: Porceliron. I had thought it sounded like a fantasy kingdom, but my grandmother told me it was the brand name of the table because the top was iron coated with an enameled layer of porcelain. That was why I loved those Le Creuset pots when I grew up; they had that same odd marriage of delicate porcelain over hard steel. Right now the cool surface of the table feels like my grandmother’s hand on my forehead when I had a fever. The aroma of some herb in Dymphna’s stew steals out of the pot on the stove and I feel the fatigue lift off me just a little. Enough to get me to my feet. I’ll go get Sally and serve us dinner on our old scratched dishes. Hot stew and homebaked bread with coffee and apple cake for dessert. We’ll be okay, I say to myself for what might well be the millionth time since Jude died. We’ll get through this.

The narrow stairs are pitched so steeply I can feel the muscles in the backs of my legs pinching by the time I reach the second floor. What a strange little house. Nothing about it—windows, door frames—seems to be built according to any standard. It feels like a child’s playhouse put together from odd bits and pieces. The steps creak and bow in the middle. The newel post at the top of the stairs is carved in the shape of an owl. The second-floor hall slopes down to a narrow window seat squeezed under the sharply pitched eaves. Peering through one open door I see an empty bedroom that’s all angles and corners. Good thing I ditched our old bedroom set—nothing would have fit. Besides, it looks like there are cabinets and shelves built into all those nooks and crannies.

It’s charming in a way, and I find myself hoping as I knock on the second bedroom door that Sally has found it so. Probably it’s a good sign that she’s shut herself into her new room. This could mean she’s settling in. I knock again, louder, in case she’s plugged in to her iPod or fallen asleep, but the only sound coming from behind the door is the Clash singing “London Calling.” She must be asleep. I turn the knob—tarnished brass with some design of vines and leaves—and open the door.

Whatever image I’d had in my head of Sally settling in is instantly vanquished by the bare mattress and unopened boxes on the floor. The only light in the room comes from Sally’s open laptop where her screen-saver cycles through images of outer space. Nebulae bloom and gas giants explode in the time it takes me to realize that the room is empty. Sally’s gone.

I
t takes only a few minutes to go through the whole cottage: two upstairs bedrooms crammed under the sharply sloping eaves, a bathroom fitted with a stained clawfoot tub (no shower—what must Sally have made of that?), then kitchen, parlor, and pantry downstairs. I even check the closets. I don’t check the basement because there’s no way Sally would ever go into one of her own free will. Ditto the garage, which I haven’t even had the nerve to go into yet. The thought that her absence might
not
be of her own free will licks at the corners of my mind with the same darting stealth as the flame on the gas range, but I draw back from it just as quickly.

No, this is just Sally punishing me for bringing her here. I can already imagine her defense:
I thought you wanted me to get acquainted with our new home
. I’ll yell at her for not leaving a note, and she’ll shrug and say she forgot. It’s such a familiar scenario that I’m almost comforted until I step out into the darkness that’s fallen over the campus.

Beyond the wedge of light spilling out from the cottage door, the night is as dark as the outer reaches of space moving across Sally’s laptop screen in the empty room above me. Darker. There are no exploding gas giants here to light my way. When I close the door behind me and step off the front stoop I can’t even see as far as the car.

The car
. Was it still in the driveway when I came back from the dean’s? I can’t remember. Does Sally have a spare key? I remember now that Jude had had a spare stashed somewhere in the house, but I hadn’t been able to find it before moving. Had Sally? Has she been secretly holding on to it all this time and planning her getaway?

It’s an elaborate plot I never would have suspected her capable of a year ago, but she’s done a lot I wouldn’t have thought her capable of over the last year. She’s memorized my credit card number and ordered concert tickets over the phone and then taken the train into the city to see the concert while claiming to be at the local movie theater. She’s hidden report cards, intercepted phone calls from teachers, forged my signature, hacked into my AOL account to buy several hundred dollars’ worth of CDs and XBox games from
Amazon.com
, and impersonated me on the phone to get her out of taking the bio Regents. She’s become such an expert at subterfuge and clandestine activity that I might have suspected car theft would be her next move.

I stumble down the front path in the direction where I left the Jag, tripping twice over the uneven flagstones, and run straight into the jagged edge of the broken passenger door. The pain is almost welcome. At least wherever Sally is she’s on foot, not trapped in a twisted metal wreck.

On the other hand, if she’d taken the car I could at least have called the police and given them a license plate to track down.

The thought of the police reminds me that there is a town sheriff
somewhere on the campus: the blond, green-eyed man I saw in Dymphna’s kitchen. I even recall his name—Callum Reade. I get out my cell phone from the car before remembering that there’s no service, which means that I won’t be able to reach Sally on
her
cell phone. I could go inside and call the police, but what will I say? My sixteen-year-old has been missing for—how long? I have no idea when she left the house. I imagine the amused and condescending look that will appear in the sheriff’s eyes. I’ll look like an idiot, when probably all Sally’s done is go looking for me at Beech Hall … or gone to the library in search of a wi-fi connection. The thought cheers me up for the three or four seconds it takes to remember that she would have brought her laptop along if that’s where she was going.

Still, I decide it’s worth looking in the library before I call Sheriff Reade and brand myself a nervous, neurotic mother in front of the whole town and my new colleagues.