“Good.” Campbell gestures impatiently. “Please sign in. It will take two seconds, and then we can get out of here. I promise it’s not a big deal.”
I don’t see another way out, but still I feel like I’m giving in too easily as I sit down in the ugly black rolling office chair from 1997 and navigate to the sign-in page. “I’ve been locked out of my account for the last few days,” I say. “It might not even let me reset my password.” But instead of shaking its electronic head at me, my email server informs me that my request to reset my password has been approved. Fuck.
“Hurry,” Campbell says, glancing at the door.
The process can’t take more than three minutes, but it feels unbearably tedious and drawn out with Campbell standing behind me, taking sharp, shallow breaths that waterboard the same sensitivespot in my scalp. The moment I’m in, Campbell drops to his knees next to me and brushes my hands off the keyboard with his. I hate when people do that to me, but I am also dying to know what the hell he is looking for. I watch as he navigates to the search bar, then types in a name.
The email from PT appears, adorned with the little paperclip icon that indicates an attachment.
Here’s Emma’s script. I haven’t even read it yet, because she changed her mind about what she wanted to write about at the last minute. She’s really great, but it’s inexcusable that this is late. Anyway, let’s catch up when we’ve both had a chance to read.
Campbell selects the message and deletes it. Then he empties my trash and signs me out.
“There,” he says, somewhat cheerfully, at the same time I put a pen into his ear canal.
I expected blood, but there is none, not even a trickle. For about five full seconds, Campbell and I just stare at each other, horrified, like neither of us wants to believe that I took things to the next level, that we have to deal with this now. The pen sticks out of Campbell’s ear at a perfect right angle. He coughs, like something is stuck in his throat, then brings his hand up to feel the mutilation for himself. His fingers trace the sturdy implant of the pen and he begins to gag aggressively. I push the rolling chair back into the wall so that I can slide off the seat and crawl underneath the desk to the door.
In the doorway I stop and look back at him. Campbell is curled up in a ball, batting at his ear and making small, whimpering noises.Impossibly, I feel embarrassed.DidI overreact? Is there a simple explanation for all of this?
“I’ll get help,” I promise him. He gives no indication that he believes me, let alone can hear me, and I hurry for the sliding barn door.
I had been sure to latch it behind me when I came in—bears—and the iron hook is jammed at an odd angle. I push my hip against the door, trying to dislodge it, and in my peripheral vision I see Campbell coming toward me with his arms raised above his head, like a bear did manage to get inside and now he’s trying to scare it off. One of the heavy ceremonial stones that earlier bruised my shin slams into the ground and somehow, miraculously, I’m staring at it from outside on the covered front patio, the rain roaring all around like a beast disturbed from its hundred-year slumber. I expel one short cloud of breath, and in the time it takes to dissipate, I process the reality that Campbell just tried to kill me.
Campbell hadn’t expected me to get the door open, and momentum has sent him skidding onto the wet porch, landing with a bone-breaking crack on his knees. I look down at him and feel a surge of pleasurable, white-hot rage as I reach for the stone and raise it above my head. I did not, in fact, overreact. I have every right to do what I am about to do. I bring down the rock with the force of an axe, and Campbell’s skull makes a soft, rotting sound. It can’t possibly be enough to kill him, to stop him, but he falls forward on his hands and knees, gurgling in a way that seems disproportionate to the squishy little sound his skull made. His elbows buckle, and he flops flat on the wooden slats of the patio with his head turned to the side, one eye fine and the other discharging a pus-like substance. He does not blink or breathe. I stare at him, amazed. I did not realize it would be that easy to kill someone.
And then.
I feel it. I feelhim. I raise my eyes. Henry stands at the base of the wide porch stairs, wet clothes clinging to him like plastic wrap, the elements outlining his absurd stature like a warning.You will not beat him; don’t even bother trying. He’s beneath me, and by the laws of scale and perception, he should feel dwarfed. But I am eye to his hawkish eye. I feel like a prairie animal, something small and low on the food chain, like Henry is waiting me out until hunger or thirst forces me into an open field. I take a step back. He steps forward. Something hot and hopeful springs to life inside me.
Fine.
Kill me.
But chase me first.
Chapter 16
I turn and go crashing through the clubhouse. Inside, the rain is thousands of sharp fingers jabbing the roof, the windows, the walls, jabbing at me.This way, Henry. She went this way. The sky pulses purple with lightning, ratting out my ascent on the stairs. Henry bangs up behind me, a tremendous force that avalanches the three-story structure and sends books flying off shelves and my teeth rattling in the sockets of my gums. He says my name. I wish he would shout it, frenzied and furious. But he sounds calm. Like everything that happens next is natural and inevitable. No reason at all to panic.
The gun room is on the third level. That’s what I am going for. But I’ll never fucking make it. I duck into the game room and slam the door closed, turn the dinky little lock. Immediately the door handle begins to strain and jiggle. “I’m going to get this door open in two seconds, Faye.”
I spin in a circle, whimpering. The game room was made the game room because it has those little clerestory windows that wrap around just under the ceiling and the little kids can’t reach them and crawl out and fall to their deaths. I can’t reach them either, and even if I could I wouldn’t fit through. Henry is throwing his huge body against the door, and that’s when I see it. A door-shaped seam in the wall, peeking out from behind a chair. I shove furniture out of the way andunlatch the lock. Inside, I find a small storage space cluttered with junk and reeking of mildew. I twist my head and see a tunneled space and, on the other end, the gloomy sky that is still somehow lighter than it is inside, and I realize this strangely shaped room used to be somebody’s bedroom, that I’m looking up through a chimney. The door is cracking and splintering behind me, and I stack whatever I can find. Encyclopedias. A decaying cloth suitcase. I flip over one of those old sleds with the metal runners. I put one foot on top of my pile, then another. Miracle of miracles, it holds. Chimneys tend not to be straight. I know this because of the fireplace in my house, the one with the crack that PT immediately recognized. The crack is superficial, we’ve had it inspected, and I refused to restore the brickwork once PT told me the story of how it got there. It spikes diagonally like a wave in an abnormal EKG reading, and though my husband has been a proponent of gutting the whole wall anyway and building out into the yard, I’ve gotten him to agree to an annual inspection to ensure the damage does not become structural. It feels like bad luck to do anything about it until we have to. One day our assistant couldn’t be there to meet the technician, and the guy roped me into a conversation from which I couldn’t politely extract myself, and so now I know everything I never wanted to know about chimneys. They’re designed with these little shelves inside; that’s how he gets up there to clean everything out. I reach and feel the ridging like one of those polyester bumps on a climbing wall at a gym, and I pull myself up one step, then another, and is a part of me disappointed that Henry didn’t catch me? Above the clatter of the storm rises a snappy mechanical sound, later I will understand it was the metal hinges of the door splitting in two. A strong hand snaps closed around my ankle, and as I go down, I get that butterfly feeling in my stomach, like I am riding a roller coaster, one last thrilling shot of euphoria before it all turns to black.
PART 3
Chapter 17
Henry floated the idea of a summer at the lake about a month before we graduated. It was April and a hard one. The trees would not bloom. There was a once-in-a-century ice storm that shocked the buds and delayed the dogwoods. At the colleges, the surest sign of spring appeared at the lake, when crew practice transitioned from indoors to out. Sometimes, on your way to class, you would find yourself neck and neck with the needlefish-like body of the racing shell, eight rowers moving as one to cut a neat center seam down the center of Seneca Lake. But that spring was the coldest on record since World War II, and only three weeks earlier, PT’s wife had left a suicide note alongside her latest negative pregnancy test and paddled her single scull into the lake in the middle of the night. They said it probably happened in an instant. Something called cold shock response. Falling into water so bracing she would have involuntarily gasped, aspirated, and choked, all the while sinking into even colder deep water. They believe Sarah died without surfacing and that the currents carried her to the Erie Canal and eventually out into the Atlantic. The search for her body was called off after only two days.
PT had returned to teaching, though he was scattered and half there. He needed a dedicated assistant, Henry said. Someone to helphim sort through Sarah’s belongings, decide what should be kept and donate what should be donated. Henry had spoken to him, and PT had agreed to pay me twenty dollars an hour, an ungodly sum I would not come close to clearing if I moved to New York or LA to waitress while I searched for a real job in a fake and fickle industry. Henry told me to think about all the money I would save on rent and incidentals while I simultaneously sent out my résumé and accepted any interview opportunities that came up. The Albany train station was a two-hour drive, and an Amtrak from there to Penn Station took another three hours, but this was not any more inconvenient than if I chose to live at home in Massachusetts while doing all the same things. Plus, Henry said, this was the last summer we could respectably spend free of the demands of adulthood, and we would always look back and remember that we spent it at Lake Wanika, together.
I broke the news to my parents at graduation. I thought it would soften the blow that I’d decided to move in with my boyfriend if I told them in front of Henry’s parents. His father was a big, warm man, and his mother a natural blonde with ruddy cheeks, a merciless snob, but she liked me for Henry. I caught a look she gave to him the first time he introduced us—it was a look of droll humility that said,I take it back, I was wrong—and I knew he had told her about me and she had asked all kinds of questions about where I was from and the schools I had attended and found his answers lacking. Occasionally, I still wonder what it must have been like to have a son who was so handsome that you also had to worry about in the romance department. Henry should have been the grand slam of offspring—good-looking, tall, monied, and male. But the way his mother embraced me, despite my lack of pedigree, carried with it the distinct whiff of relief.
“Hmmm” was all my mother said when I told her about my postgraduation plans.
“We will be there, of course,” Henry’s mother jumped in to say.
My mother gave her a hard smile.