“We spent the night together,” I remind him. “I felt what you wanted.”
“Biology, sweetheart.” Henry gives me a small, pitying smile. My stomach twists. I wish I could say in anger.
“I always figured,” Henry continues, a bit sorrowfully, “that what we had was like a rubber band. No matter how far it stretched, it would snap back the next time we were together again. But last night, Faye…” He sighs and real regret shows on his face. “I slept next to you and I felt for it and it was gone. Whatever has happened to you in the years since we last saw each other, it’s made you, I don’t know…” I know the word he’s searching for before he says it. “Untouchable.”
I recover, but not quickly enough. Henry catches my grief, and I can see he feels sorry for me.
“I have no desire to fuck you,” he says gently, like he’s trying to let me down easy. “What I do want is to get into your email. Due to a suspicious sign-in, you’ve been logged out. Tech support said it could take up to four days, and here we are, on the fourth day. I’m going to shore so I can write down the security questions you need to answer to be able to reset your password. Do that, and then you can go home.”
I stare up at him, devastated, uncomprehending. “This is why I’m here?”
“Sorry to burst your bubble, but I have not been sitting around pining for you all these years.”
“I heard you,” I say. “Back at the hotel. I heard you say you’d been waiting for this for a long time. I don’t know what the fuck you want with my email, but that doesn’t line up with anything else you’ve said to me since we’ve been here.” I hear myself, I sound winded and desperate, but I keep going. “It doesn’t line up with the way you were with me last night.”
“I’ve said a lot of things I don’t mean the last few days,” Henry says coolly.
I stare at him, burning with indignation. “Who was that, calling out for me on the water?”
Henry turns to go. “You passed out. It was a dream.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say to his back. “I don’t believe anything you’re telling me.”
Henry steps out the door. “I’ll be leaving shortly. This will be over soon.”
Chapter 14
For the next hour, I sit on the bed with a sight line to the house and try in every way I can to make sense of my conversation with Henry. What does he want with my email? Does it have to do with money? Accessing my bank accounts? It’s the only scenario I can make fit. If Henry needs money, he would never be able to say so outright, especially not to me.
And what about his reaction, when I asked him about the voice I heard last night? I could not tell if I had imagined it, but his blithe insistence that I did has convinced me of the opposite.
I’m just about to risk a trip to the bathroom when the door to the main house bangs open. Henry bypasses the stone pathway to the cabin and heads straight for the dock. I hurry to the front window to see him off like a girl in an old movie set during wartimes, hand to the glass, sorrow scoring my face. Henry wears a light-colored baseball hat that is darkening by the second, and I look to the lake and see that it’s denting with a fast, light rain. Henry pats himself down, checking to make sure he has everything he needs to blow up my life in the pockets of his old waxed chore coat. There was a time he would drape that coat over my shoulders when I was not dressed warmly enough, but that time has long since passed.
I watch Henry untie the dock lines, toss them aside. He steps inside the boat and pushes off the dock. His wake wags like a tail as he motors away. Only then do I retract my hand from the window and stare in a state of giddy delirium. My palm is wet. Not condensation wet, but the kind that comes from a leak.
Chapter 15
I don’t know how I did it. There was a seal? Lining the window frame? It was a rubber or silicone substance. And that was where I found a crack. I scratched and scratched at it, and as I did I felt that the wood beneath was soft and rotted and eventually I got my fingernails in there, and that silicone-rubber-seal-like edge began to peel off in strips. There were still a couple screws holding the window frame in place, but unsealed they were loose enough that I could twist them free with my fingers. I dragged the dresser over to the window so that I could climb up and reach the ones at the top corners. The frame lifted off the wall as a whole piece, and I threw it to the ground, stomped on it until it splintered. Now I am holding one of the pieces like a fencing knife and poking at the panels of glass. They pop out and land on the wet earth outside. If they shatter, I don’t hear. The trees are thrashing and the rain riddles the lake like bullets.
I get those men’s slippers from the closet, layer on a matted fleece jacket. I climb on top of the dresser again and launch myself from the window, trying to clear any broken glass that may be beneath. I land on my hands and knees in slime and muck, twigs slicing my palms. I’ve bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper, but I think, with gasping astonishment, that I’ve been capable all along. And this renews me.
I get to my feet, smear back the wet hair glued to my forehead, plunge headfirst into the cyclone of the woods. There, I stop. I look around and try to orient myself to find the trail. In the movies, when the captive character escapes, they take off running and they do not stop. But the trees act like an enclosure, shielding me from the sky’s bludgeon and containing the noise of the storm to a manageable, thinkable din. That way. The trail is that way, and so is the clubhouse, where there is an office, I remember, with a landline and a desktop, and all of it works, at least in the summertime, when the staff returns for the season. Henry told me the members agreed to outfit the communal space with cable and internet after 9/11, when the possibility of the world ending seemed imminent. It was to be a compromise between the island’s Thoreauvian origins and a new world order to have some sort of limited tether to the outside. Everything is powered down after Memorial Day, but they turn it back on for Thanksgiving weekend, and maybe it’s not as hard to figure out as I might think. Maybe there is literally a switch that I can flip and the lights will pop on and I’ll pick up the phone and hear the dull, invigorating note of a dial tone. Henry and I would occasionally walk to the clubhouse for breakfast, and I don’t remember exactly how long it took us, but it wasn’t arduous. I think I wore flip-flops. I set off, soaked and mud-crusted, but emboldened by Henry’s sloppiness and my ability to outwit him.
Almost immediately I realize the slippers are hopeless. They were big before they were waterlogged and stretched out, and my toes are cramping from curling in their soles. I take them off but carry them with me for a bit, in case I change my mind about walking barefoot. The forest floor is knifed with twigs and jagged rocks, slick as ice with wet leaves. With each passing second the afternoon sky darkens, the trail gets harder to see, and I think about turning back. I think about sitting in that cabin and allowing Henry to find me and seewhat I’ve done. Begging for his forgiveness. I won’t do it, but I keep imagining it, I keep it alive as a possibility the same way I cling to the slippers. I need to feel like I have options even when I do not. And this buoys me until I come upon the trailhead named after Harpo Marx. It’s said he used to cake his body in mud and don a red wig and go screaming along the beaches to scare off lookie-loos who’d gotten word that a famous person was staying somewhere nearby, and under his namesake sign is a mile marker I could kiss on the mouth. Only a quarter of a mile to the clubhouse. I drop the slippers. I run like all the girls in all the movies that climax in pursuit. Because now I am picturing Henry approaching the dock and seeing the busted-out window, his strong, wide strides to the door. His fury, his shame, when he finds I escaped him again. What he will do to me when he realizes I cannot be kept.
I am out of breath, and I realize with a bolt of adrenaline that the path has taken on a subtle incline. The clubhouse is built on the highest point of the island, and as it thrusts into view, I have the jarring sensation that I am in two places at the same time. It’s a craftsman style, I realize now, a style that celebrates natural elements and handcrafted details that is common all over Los Angeles, and for some reason in that moment I think,Fuck you, Henry. I know more about more things now. The woods thin, and I pass the old croquet court where Henry taught me to play and then I got so good he could never beat me.
The clubhouse is a narrow three-story stone structure with sliding barn doors, an iron hook lock on both sides. The inside lock is never latched in the summer, because employees come across the lake at all hours of the night ferrying provisions and groceries.What’s the point of locking it at all?I once asked Henry.Bears, he answered, and I amglad I had forgotten about the bears while I was in the thickest parts of the woods. I cannot believe it when I release the hook on the outside and slide the door open without resistance.
It is dark outside but pitch-black inside. I wheel my arms protectively, feeling for the walls, trying to find my touchpoints. I nick my shin on a pile of heavy ceremonial stones that have been kept next to the door for decades, and then I freeze when something featherlight and many-legged scuttles across my feet. I feel my way to the bend in the hall, then the door to the office. I imagine lifting the phone to my ear, running my fingers over the keyboard of the desktop computer. Civilization, steamed milk in my coffee, forty-two-dollar shampoo—I am so close.
I find the doorknob and experience an almost electrical shock that culminates in a vision of someone on the other side, sitting behind the desk—It’s you, that actress-slash-writer-slash-director I was supposed to know but didn’t until you went missing. We’ve been looking for you. I cannot believe it when I stumble through the door and find that I am somewhat right.
“Jesus Christ,” Campbell is saying as he comes over to me. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
We stare at each other, staggered. The small room is partially lit by an open laptop on the desk, next to a rusted metal canister of pens and paper clips. Campbell is dressed sensibly, in hiking boots and jeans. The hood of his windbreaker clings to a hook on the wall. It’s dry. I notice that right away because I am standing barefoot in a pool of my own sooty runoff. He’s been here at least a couple of hours. It wasn’t raining when I woke up.
“What are you doing here?” I gasp.