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When I exit the bathroom, I see that Adrian has already turned down the covers for me. All the lights are off except for a small lamp beside the bed. The sketch pad and pencils are on the nightstand—within easy reach if I’m seized by inspiration, or something else.
Adrian is standing in the kitchen with his back to me, reaching into the refrigerator for a can of seltzer. He doesn’t notice me until I’m standing right behind him. “I think I’m ready.”
He turns around and smiles. “You look ready.”
“I hope this isn’t too boring for you.”
He shows me his phone. “I’ve got Call of Duty Mobile. I’ll be rescuing hostages in Uzbekistan.”
I stand on my tiptoes and give him a kiss. “Good night.”
“Good luck,” he says.
I get into bed and get under the covers, and Adrian settles into a chair at the far end of the cottage. With the ceiling fan spinning and the noisy crickets chirping outside my window, I’m barely aware of Adrian’s presence. I turn on my side and face the wall. After two long and exhausting days, I realize I’m not going to have any trouble falling asleep. As soon as I rest my face on my pillow, I feel all my stress ebbing away; I feel my muscles relaxing, my body letting go. And even with Adrian just a few feet away, it’s the first night in a long time when I don’t feel like I’m being watched.
I remember only one of my dreams. I’m in the Enchanted Forest, lying on a path of hard-packed earth and looking up at the black night sky. My legs are off the ground. A shadowy figure is pulling me by the ankles, dragging my body through a bed of dry leaves. My arms are raised up and over my head. I can feel my fingers grazing past rocks and roots but I’m unable to grasp them; it’s like I’m paralyzed and I’m unable to stop what’s happening.
And then I’m looking up from the bottom of a hole; it’s like I’ve fallen to the bottom of a well. My body has been twisted into a pretzel. My left arm is pinned beneath my back and my legs are splayed wide open. I know it ought to hurt more than it does, but somehow I’m in my body and out of my body at the same time. High above me, there’s a man looking down into the hole. Something soft and small strikes my chest. It falls away and I see that it’s a toy, a child’s stuffed bunny rabbit. It’s followed by a stuffed bear and a small plastic ball. “I’m sorry,” the man says, and his voice sounds hollow, like he’s talking underwater. “I am so, so sorry.”
Then my face is struck by a clod of dirt. I can hear the soft chop of a shovel spearing into a mound of earth—and then more dirt and rocks fall down upon me. I hear the man grunting; I can feel weight accumulating on my chest, the growing pressure on my body, and then I can’t see anymore. It’s just blackness.
Then I try to open my eyes, and I’m back in my cottage. The lights are off and the tiny clock on my nightstand says 3:03. I’m lying in bed, clutching a pencil with a broken point. Even in the darkness, I can see that my kitchen chairs are empty; I can only assume that Adrian got tired of waiting for something to happen, and he went home.
I get up to make sure the door is locked. I lift back the sheets and swing my legs out of bed, and only then do I see a bare-chested Adrian sleeping on my floor, lying parallel to my bed, using the crook of his arm and his balled-up shirt as a pillow.
I reach down and gently shake his shoulder. “Hey.”
Instantly, he sits up. “What’s wrong?”
“Did it work? Did I draw anything?”
“Well, yes and no.” He switches on the tiny lamp, then opens the sketch pad to reveal the first page. It’s nearly covered in scribbles; the surface of the paper has been obliterated with graphite. There are just two small patches of white—two places where the pencil point gouged through the paper, revealing the blank page underneath.
“It was just past one o’clock,” Adrian explains. “You’d been asleep for an hour or so. I was getting ready to give up and go to bed. So I turned off the lights and lay down on the floor. And then I heard you turn over and reach for the pad. You didn’t even sit up. You drew this lying down in the dark.”
“It’s not much of a picture.”
“Maybe Anya’s telling us she’s finished. There are no more pictures. We already have everything we need.”
But this can’t be right. Something is still missing, I’m sure of it. “I dreamed I was at the bottom of a hole. A man was shoveling dirt on top of me. Maybe this picture is the dirt.”
“Maybe, but how would that help us? What do we learn from a picture of dirt?”
I stand up to get the rest of the drawings. I want to spread them out on the floor and see how the all-black scribbles might fit into the sequence. Adrian pleads with me to get some sleep. “You need to rest, Mallory. Tomorrow’s our last chance to figure this out. Just go to bed.”
He reshapes his T-shirt into the world’s saddest pillow and lies back on the hardwood floor. He closes his eyes and I stop thinking about Anya just long enough to register his upper body. He’s tan and toned all over, the natural by-product of working outdoors all summer. I could probably bounce a quarter off his stomach. He’s been kind and supportive and he might have the best physique I’ve ever seen on a man, and like a dummy I’ve made him sleep on the floor.
Adrian opens his eyes and realizes I’m still staring at him. “Can you turn off the light?”
I reach down, skim my fingers across his chest, and take his hand. “Okay,” I tell him. “But first I want you to come up here.”
25
I wake to the smell of butter and cinnamon. Adrian’s already dressed and moving around my kitchen. He’s found the granny smith apples in my pantry and he’s standing over the range with a spatula, flipping some kind of pancake. I glance at the clock and it’s just past seven thirty in the morning.
“Why are you awake?”
“I’m driving to Akron. To see Dolores Campbell. If I leave now, Google says I’ll be there by two.”