She got up and walked a few steps and groped blindly for the light in the bathroom at the back of the Forest. The room and wall felt unfamiliar. She clawed the wall until harsh fluorescence filled the room like a gray- tinged sickness.
A horror mask leered out at her from the mirror.
Sunken pits for eyes. Hair astray. A sadness in the mouth and a weight dragging the shoulders to the floor. A being withdrawn and frightened. The face looking back at her in the flat gray-green light at three in the morning was not the Cadence she knew. Some hallucinogenic fiend had obviously entered from the other side — the Anti- Cadence that dwells in the soulless land of flat reflection and eternal doubt. This, she told herself, was not just a precursor to a bad hair day.
And why should it be? The week, commencing with rain breaking the fall heat and so promising of discovery about her grandfather, was already frustrating. What might have been a helpful meeting with Mel turned out to be inconclusive. Then there was the non-conversation and mini-lecture from Bruce. Then the troubling, accusatory reference in the documents to a “steward”, not to mention the scary Banjo Dog. But worst of all was the nightmare that preceded it.
She tried to steady herself.
She had always managed her way through bright beginnings that turned to disaster. She recalled her freshman year as a member of the crew team. She had rowed her single scull into a morning fog that quickly clamped down around her and would not lift. She knew that roped buoys marked the only dangerous area in the entire six square miles of lake: a great black hole that was the spillway. This round, concrete maw swallowed tons of water along with trees, rowboats and swimmers that got too close and were pulled in by its current.
Soon there was zero visibility. She could not even see the water or her oar tip. She tried rowing one direction, then another, then shipped her oars in the oarlocks and listened as she glided along. Everything was deadly silent. She yelled, but it was like screaming into a feather pillow. The fog did that, muffling everything. The few sounds she heard were hollow and distant, coming from nowhere.
Then she did hear something recognizable — the rush and fall of water. It was the full, throaty roar of the spillway pipe somewhere out there as torrents of water poured into the long, dark fall down to something … very bad, maybe a mesh of angular jagged steel leading to a compressed sluiceway far beneath the lake.
She couldn’t pinpoint the direction, but it was getting louder. She readied her oars. Her heart rate jumped as she panicked. Should she row backward? Forward? Was she drifting sideways toward the inescapable current?
The roar grew louder.
She dug timidly, turning her head every direction in the swirl of blank grayness. Then she felt the scull start to move. Her body, imbedded in the hull, was intimate with the slightest nuance of the water — current, waves, temperature. The quickening feeling around her only punctuated the reality that at any second she would see the spillway mouth looming through the fog, and her boat would tip and topple down as the torrent opened up to take her.
She had to guess. All that existed was the roar and this moment of decision. She rotated the bow with her right oar, dug hard and felt the pull of current against her effort. The hull lurched, gaining only an inch with her utmost effort. But that was lost as she was suddenly pulled backward several feet. An enormous tree limb swept past her, one branch reaching up, splayed leaves parading along level with her eyes. She dug again, head down. She had trained for six months, three hours a day on the rowing machine. If there was ever a time for that training to pay off, this was it.
She rowed for a long time, lost in the effort and the blank light that blended perfectly with the water. She was like an airplane pilot that lost sight of the horizon. Forced to go solely by the treacherous instincts of feel. Maybe she was gaining, maybe she was losing.
At the point of exhaustion she checked her stroke. The roar had receded. Her hull was making smooth wake in the glassy stillness of the water. She rested for a moment and an orange marker buoy slid past her. How had she not seen them before or felt their connecting safety ropes drag beneath her?
The fog opened like a curtain pulled away, and she saw her instructor and other crewmates out on the lake looking for her.
The power of decision never left her after that, at least until recently. She could peg the moment exactly: it was her arrival at the doorstep of the Mirkwood Forest, bag and hopes in hand, to find nobody home.
The face in the mirror seemed incapable of choice. It had already entered the anxiety lane, merging toward the panic exit.
Her father once said that three o’clock in the morning, a time he embraced and inhabited most of his life, was the time when women and children sleep the sleep of the dead and men’s souls awake to reflect in a bitter pool. He was cribbing F. Scott Fitzgerald, she later realized, but underneath was the truth. It was for him the time to ponder the quiet desperation of a failed life, often with a tumbler of bourbon in his hand.
The real nightmare last night, the zinger, was a visitation from her father.
He was a younger man in the dream.
She knew he had been a roadie, working on tour with obscure 1980s hair bands with names like Twisted Forest and Drop. Promotion of the bands, if any, amounted to grainy Xerox pictures of scruffy longhairs pasted on cheap, three-color flyers stapled to utility poles.
He helped with setups, sometimes also working the sound or the light show. She’d seen the torn and creased posters and the flyers in a box he kept in his closet.
He had also worked as a carnie, which was pretty much the same job. The caravan of battered trucks and trailers would pull into some small, nameless Midwestern city park late on a summer’s night, and immediately start setting up for the next day’s opening. The Ferris wheel was the biggest job. The riggers started on that first, assembling the wheel spoke by spoke, then hoisting it onto the two steel support towers that were mounted into the trailer chassis.
In Cadence’s dream, it was the proverbial three in the morning. Her father was at the top of one of the support tower ladders, connecting the lighting cables to the copper rings at the hub. The whole trembling exoskeleton was held together with spliced, crimped, and frayed support cables; stripped bolts; and big steel bars hammered into place but lacking the cotter pins that could insure they wouldn’t slip out. The Ferris Wheel was a big creaking disaster waiting to happen. Moms and dads would, that very day entrust their children to the swinging gondolas, gaily dangling a hundred feet up in the air.
Standing in the center of the wheel, sixty feet above ground, Arnie Grande felt strangely apart from the others. The work lights below made everything either blinding white or opaquely shadowed. But one of the lights suddenly went out and he could suddenly see everything in surprising detail: trucks like toys, people milling about … and there he saw his father, Cadence’s grandfather, the Scissor Sharpener himself. A man Arnie had last seen five years before, when he was sixteen. The man was walking away from him along the midway. There was no mistaking him, with his old fedora, his valise with the leather shoulder strap, and his solid, steady gait etched into place by years of walking, walking, walking.
Arnie Grande yelled, screamed, and pointed, but no one could hear or cared to see. For just a moment, the man below seemed to pause, as if he thought he heard something, but then kept walking. Arnie tried to keep him in sight. He last glimpsed the man stepping between partially unloaded trucks.
Arnie shot down the tower ladder and hit the ground running.
The sludgy movement of dreams took over, and the horrible truth emerged: his father never even heard him, and was gone.
She splashed water on her face and looked at her reflection again. It was beat up, but still looking straight in.
Looking at herself, she felt certain there was a misweave in her own tapestry. If only she could but undo the knots and pick out the errant weft and reweave it all into sensible order. If only she could but find the careless hand that moved the shuttle. Yes, her grandfather. Jess was out there. She would find him. Perhaps in a place of refuge, candled window light spreading out to greet her. They would talk dispassionately about life’s hows and whys and she would understand how to set the order of things.
