Should I tell him about my sensing Whalen in our bedroom last night while we slept? Tell him about my hearing his voice, smelling his stale cigarette smell? About the open bathroom window? My sense of reason said, yes, tell him everything. But caution told me to shut up about it. Shut up for now. Last night had been as perfect a night as I’d had in years. The last thing I wanted was to spoil it all this morning-spoil it for us. Michael was back in tune with me, with my thoughts and fears. He was here to protect me. I wanted to give him some peace, some space from whatever was happening to me. Was a little peace too much to ask?
“Rebecca?” he called out from the bedroom. “What time is it?”
I grabbed a second mug from the cabinet.
Michael would need a good jolt of coffee before he started biting the nail.
Chapter 36
An hour later, I was getting out of the shower when the buzzer sounded on the front door. Michael was at his writing desk in the living room. I heard him curse as he got up from the table and tended to the interruption.
While I towel dried my hair, I heard him open the apartment door, then head up the small set of concrete stairs to the building’s main entrance. From where I stood before the mirror I heard the door open.
No words exchanged. At least, from where I stood in the bathroom, I didn’t hear any.
After a few seconds, Michael came back into apartment, closing the door behind him.
I stepped out of the bedroom.
With one towel wrapped around my body, another wrapped around my head and hair, I saw him standing in the small vestibule, a thin square-shaped package held in his hands. The package looked a whole lot like a canvas wrapped in brown butcher’s paper.
Standing beside Michael I began to feel the now too familiar blood pressure increase; the usual dry mouth.
Michael just stared at me, the package gripped in his hands. Neither one of us had to say a word to know what it was.
“Open it,” I said.
“How about I just chuck it out?”
“Open it. We can’t just ignore it.”
He exhaled, stuck a finger through the paper, tore into it, and pulled it away from the painting. Immediately, even before all the paper was torn away, I recognized the scene. It was a house in the woods. The house in the woods. The one from my dream; the one from my past. Whalen’s house. The house my sister found some weeks before me while on one of her secret expeditions into the forbidden woods. The house I remembered so well; a house that appeared not to have been built from wood, brick and stone, but that appeared to have grown up in the forest out of nothing at all; a house that to me had sprung up from the ground like a thorn bush but that to Molly seemed like a miracle.
The painting was a realistic rendering of that old, long forgotten farmhouse. The house was set in the middle of a second growth forest that had grown up all around it, consumed it for its own once its original owners had died off or simply abandoned it.
Pulling the rest of the brown paper from the piece, Michael stared down at the image. My eyes began to tear. I took a tentative step forward toward my distant past, stood not beside my ex-husband but up against him. My unfocused eyes viewed Franny’s painting, but I did not see a static rendering of brown tress or overgrown pines or the heavy brush or the gray-brown clapboard house that stood in its center. My eyes instead saw the real events of that day, like watching a real-time film that somehow was being broadcast on the canvas itself.
Molly leads me through the woods, bushwhacking our way through the thick growth, twigs and branches slapping at our exposed faces, at our bare arms and legs, making our eyes tear from the sting. When we come upon the old two-story farmhouse it is like a vision or an illustration out of an old storybook-Little Red Riding Hood maybe; a secret place in the forest that would be entirely familiar to the Big Bad Wolf. It is a long-abandoned farmhouse, the farm having given over to nature; nature in turn devouring any semblance of humankind.
But the closer we come to the dilapidated and rotting clapboard house, the more I can smell a foul odor. It is an odor I sometimes recognize when walking over a sewer grate.
Molly turns to me, seemingly unaffected by the smell (or perhaps used to it by now?). She clothespins her nose and nostrils with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand; does it more for show than for the need to block out the rancid smell.
“ It’s the old septic system, Bec,” she exclaims while coming upon a front porch that has all but collapsed into the earth from rot and neglect.
“ God, how did you find this place, Mol?” I ask her, careful to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose.
“ It’s always been here,” she smiles. “The house just kind of found me.” Holding up her hands as if to say Voila! “It’s our place now; our secret fairytale castle in the forest; our hideaway home away from home.”
I find myself just staring at my sister who is me in every way, but so different at the same time. I’m not sure what I’m more amazed at: her or the discovery of this house and the possibility of having it all to ourselves. But then, unlike Molly, I’m half scared out of my wits. There’s a reason our father does not want us in these woods. At first I blamed the stream, the waterfall and the sudden drop off in the hill-side. But now I blame this old decaying house set in the middle of nowhere.
Molly goes up to the front door and tosses me another one of her irresistible John Wayne ‘Move ‘em out’ waves. She sets her right hand on the old blackened knob and, shifting her shoulder like a running back about to take on some linebackers, shoves the door open…
“Rebecca,” Michael barks. “What is this place?”
But I couldn’t answer him yet; couldn’t find the words inside my brain or my heart. I didn’t have it in me to speak. Instead I looked at the trees and the house and I saw it all in my mind like it was only yesterday: our entry though the front door into the dark home, the spider-webbed interior, the horrible stench that I tasted more on my tongue than I smelled though my nose.
Lifting my left hand, I touched the home with my fingertips, running the pad of my index finger along the five red-brown letters that made up the word ‘Smell’, each individual letter tattooed along the side of the house like graffiti.
“Smell,” Michael read, the word pouring like acid off his lips.
He could see the word clearly. It told me that Franny no longer felt the need to hide their titles. The lack of subtlety told me that Franny was screaming at me now. On Monday, when no one but me could recognize the word in his painting, he’d been whispering. Now that everyone could see the word, he was screaming. Screaming for me to use my senses, to pay attention, to watch my back.
“What. Is. This. Place?” Michael repeated.
I swallowed. He knew all about my secret. He knew exactly what this place was. He just needed to hear it from me; from my mouth.
“It’s the house in the woods,” I said. “It’s where Whalen took Molly and me.”
Confirming his worst fear, Michael cocked the painting over his head and threw it across the room.
Chapter 37
It was up to me to calm Michael down. It didn’t matter now how much I tried to preserve the happiness of the previous night, Franny’s painting, his warning, had ruined the moment.
My ex-husband was sitting on the edge of the couch, hands pressed against his face, muttering something about tearing Franny ‘a new one.’
“It’s not his fault,” I exclaimed. “Franny is simply doing what Franny does. I know without a doubt now that
