I spent the next two weeks at the bottom of the world. Overcome by obsession, I thought about Kyle and trembled under the weight of my own guilt. With the dedication of someone newly possessed, I scribbled furious entries in my notebooks and smoked cigarettes like a longshoreman. I quit changing my clothes, which was no longer considered artistic as it had been in college.
My guilt was a pool in which I was drowning . . . though to suggest I was drowning elicits visuals of flailing arms and shouts of help. That was not me. I drowned in my grief with grotesque acceptance, like the captain of a ship who sinks with obligation to the ocean floor, tethered through sacrifice and commitment to the ship that drags him down. Something suggestive of fever claimed me—I let it claim me—and I spent several days in bed, muddy-eyed and swaying back and forth, at least spiritually, like a cattail in the wind. I feared Jodie would leave me. She didn’t, but my depression seemed to weaken her, too. Two weeks later, by the time I returned to some semblance of normalcy, there was an unspoken fatigue that had run its course through both of us like some strain of illness undiagnosed.
I would not speak with Adam again until much, much later, well after Jodie and I had moved across the Atlantic to North London.
Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.
CHAPTER SIX
I was vaguely aware of a sudden sweeping sound followed by the sharp knife of bright daylight stabbing me through the eyelids. I groaned and rolled over onto Jodie’s side of the bed, which was cold in her absence.
“Explain to me,” came Jodie’s voice from some ethereal vortex, “how this happened . . .”
Some stupid, delinquent part of me was not in the bed in our new house but instead suspended in midair over a glistening lake, night having fallen all around me, the moonlight sparking like bursts of electric current on the black waters. Trapped in a freeze-frame, I held my breath while waiting for the icy plunge that would never come. Jodie’s voice was the disembodied voice of God, shocking me into consciousness.
Weakly, I opened one eye and winced at the daylight pouring in through the part in the curtains. Jodie stood at the foot of the bed holding my pajama pants.
“Morning,” I growled.
“You must have some brilliant explanation for this, I’m sure.” She shook the pajama pants in both hands. “They’re soaking wet. The hallway carpet is wet, too. What gives?”
“Must have been a wet dream.” I dropped my bare feet onto the floor, my naked flesh prickling at the chill in the air.
“Hysterical. Your sneakers are half frozen by the front door, too,” she said, balling the pajama pants up and stuffing them into the laundry hamper. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you raced the Iditarod before coming to bed last night.”
All at once I remembered creeping out of the house and going down to the frozen lake. Had it not been for the soaking wet pajama bottoms, I would have written it off as a vivid dream. Now, in the sobriety of daylight, I realized just how careless I’d been last night. “What time is it?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“Noon.”
“Why’d you let me sleep so late?”
“I tried waking you about an hour ago, but you wouldn’t have any of it.” She disappeared into the bedroom closet only to return a moment later, her arms laden in clothes that had yet to find a home. She dumped them on the edge of the bed. “I’d like you to move that desk into the spare room.” Unsure where to put the desk, the movers had left it in the hallway upstairs. “Also, go through some of the boxes in the basement, if you have time. I feel completely unsettled.”
I sighed. “That’s because we are unsettled.”
“Help me out here, will you?” She selected a blouse from the pile and carried it over to the bevel glass beside the bedroom door. I watched her peel away her shirt and slip into the blouse. Her dark hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she was wearing makeup.
“Where are you going?”
“To the college to see about transferring those outstanding credits.”
This had been Jodie’s only hesitation about moving from North London back to the States. She’d been on course to receive her doctorate in psychology by the end of the upcoming spring semester and was on the verge of completing her doctoral thesis; the last thing she wanted to do was lose credits in the move.
“There shouldn’t be a problem, but I wanted to make sure, just in case. I don’t think I have the patience to make up any course work. I’ll sooner quit the program.” She tucked her blouse into a pair of nice black slacks, then examined her reflection in the glass.
“You’re not going to quit.”
“Maybe I’ll take up bartending. Or stripping.”
“Cut it out. You’ll be fine.”
Adjusting the top button of her blouse, Jodie came over and planted a kiss squarely on my forehead. “Don’t forget those boxes. And the desk.”
“I won’t.”
“See you later, alligator,” she said and left.
Somewhat awkwardly, I negotiated Jodie’s desk down the hall and into the spare room we’d decided to turn into an office. There were more boxes hoarded against the walls here, too, and the closet was already overflowing with Jodie’s clothes. I moved a few of the boxes out of the way, then dragged the desk along the carpet where I finally set it beneath the single window that looked out upon the side yard. Through the window I spotted the appliqué of black tamarack pines running down the slope of the property to the lake.
Then I noticed a small, rectangular perforation in the Sheetrock at the base of one wall, only slightly bigger than a doggy door. I would have missed it completely had I not moved boxes out of the way to make room for the desk. I knelt down and realized it was actually a little door, no different than the cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat, which we’d utilized for storage. The cubbyholes had been hinged on one side and stayed closed by a magnetic latch on the inside of the door.
I pushed against the door and felt the magnetic latch give. A second later, a bracket of darkness appeared in the wall as the door opened. A breath of freezing air issued out of the opening, causing shivers to cascade down the length of my spine. Poor insulation.
I opened the door all the way and looked inside. The squared-off compartment was no bigger than the inside of a washing machine, the flooring unfinished wood boards, the struts in the walls covered by opaque plastic through which tufts of pink insulation burst like stuffing in an old couch.
I managed to make out a few items on the floor. One was undeniably a baseball. A tattered Scrooge McDuck comic book. Several Matchbox cars (and just seeing these jabbed me with a cold spear, for I was suddenly thinking of the Matchbox cars I’d found under Kyle’s bed after his funeral and how my father, in his grief, had beat me with his belt before going off to sob in his study). There was a cardboard shoe box back there, too, covered in a fine coat of dust.
This had been some little kid’s secret hideout, I thought, reaching in and sliding the shoe box toward me. I picked it up, leaving a distinct handprint in the dust on the lid, and set it in my lap. The box felt very light, though not empty. I opened the lid and, with lightning quick reflexes, shoved the box off my lap while simultaneously scooting backward on the carpet.
The box tumbled over on its side, and two of the things inside bounced out.
The shoe box was full of dead birds, their eyes the color of marble and twisted, skeletal claws frozen in the air. Catching my breath, I leaned forward and studied the birds that had rolled out of the box. They were frozen stiff, their brown-gray feathers glistening with pixels of frost. Some of their beaks were partially opened.