I dug my nails into the canvas on his right shoulder. “My name is John Wilson,” I said.
He looked at me, his eyes wide. “That’s my name,” he said softly.
I stopped scratching the straitjacket. “What’s your middle name?” I asked.
He shook his head slightly and closed his eyes. “Same as yours,” he said. He shivered. It was cold. But my paper gown was soaked with dry sweat and my face was hot. I could smell smoke.
Monica Wood
That One Autumn
From Glimmer Train
That one autumn, when Marie got to the cabin, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years, the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles John used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.
Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed, the clean Maine air casting a sober whiteness over everything. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and John had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.
She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And John had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs — she had definitely straightened them — while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away, John’s body hit the water in a furious smack.
She minced up the steps and pushed open the screen door, which was unlocked. “Hello?” she called out fearfully. The inside door was slightly ajar. Take the dog, Ernie had told her, she’ll be good company. She wished now she had, though the dog, a Yorkie named Honey Girl, was a meek little thing and no good in a crisis. I don’t want company, Ernie. It’s a week, it’s forty miles, I’m not leaving you. Marie was sentimental, richly so, which is why her wish to be alone after seeing John off to college had astonished them both. But you’re still weak, Ernie argued. Look how pale you are. She packed a box of watercolors and a how-to book in her trunk as Ernie stood by, bewildered. I haven’t been alone in years, she told him. I want to find out what it feels like. John had missed Vietnam by six merciful months, then he’d chosen Berkeley, as far from his parents as he could get, and now Marie wanted to be alone. Ernie gripped her around the waist and she took a big breath of him: man, dog, house, yard, mill. She had known him most of her life, and from time to time, when she could bear to think about it, she wondered whether their uncommon closeness was what had made their son a stranger.
You be careful, he called after her as she drove off. The words came back to her now as she peered through the partly open door at a wedge of kitchen she barely recognized. She saw jam jars open on the counter, balled-up dishtowels, a box of oatmeal upended and spilling a bit of oatmeal dust, a snaggled hairbrush, a red lipstick ground to a nub. Through the adjacent window she caught part of a rumpled sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, plus an empty glass and a couple of books.
Marie felt a little breathless, but not afraid, recognizing the disorder as strictly female. She barreled in, searching the small rooms like an angry, old-fashioned mother with a hickory switch. She found the toilet filled with urine, the back hall cluttered with camping gear, and the two bedrooms largely untouched except for a grease-stained knapsack thrown across Marie and Ernie’s bed. By the time she got back out to the porch to scan the premises again, Marie had the knapsack in hand and sent it skidding across the gravel. The effort doubled her over, for Ernie was right: her body had not recovered from the thing it had suffered. As she held her stomach, the throbbing served only to stoke her fury.
Then she heard it: the sound of a person struggling up the steep, rocky path from the lake. Swishing grass. A scatter of pebbles. The subtle pulse of forward motion.
It was a girl. She came out of the trees into the sunlight, naked except for a towel bundled under one arm. Seeing the car, she stopped, then looked toward the cabin, where Marie uncoiled herself slowly, saying, “Who the hell are you?”
The girl stood there, apparently immune to shame. A delicate ladder of ribs showed through her paper-white skin. Her damp hair was fair and thin, her pubic hair equally thin and light. “Shit,” she said. “Busted.” Then she cocked her head, her face filled with a defiance Marie had seen so often in her own son that it barely registered.
“Cover yourself, for God’s sake,” Marie said.
The girl did, in her own good time, arranging the towel over her shoulders and covering her small breasts. Her walk was infuriatingly casual as she moved through the dooryard, picked up the knapsack, and sauntered up the steps, past Marie, and into the cabin. Marie followed her in. She smelled like the lake.
“Get out before I call the police,” Marie said.
“Your phone doesn’t work,” the girl said peevishly. “And I can’t say much for your toilet, either.”
Of course nothing worked. They’d turned everything off, buttoned the place up after their last visit, John and Ernie at each other’s throats as they hauled the dock up the slope, Ernie too slow on his end, John too fast on his, both of them arguing about whether or not Richard Nixon was a crook and should have resigned in disgrace.
“I said get out. This is my house.”
The girl pawed through the knapsack. She hauled out a pair of panties and slipped them on. Then a pair of frayed jeans, and a mildewy shirt that Marie could smell across the room. As she toweled her hair it became lighter, nearly white. She leveled Marie with a look as blank and stolid as a pillar.
“I said get out,” Marie snapped, jangling her car keys.
“I heard you.”
“Then do it.”
The girl dropped the towel on the floor, reached into the knapsack once more, extracted a comb, combed her flimsy, apparitional hair, and returned the comb. Then she pulled out a switchblade. It opened with a crisp, perfunctory snap.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I get to be in charge, and you get to shut up.”
Marie shot out of the cabin and sprinted into the dooryard, where a bolt of pain brought her up short and windless. The girl was too quick in any case, catching Marie by the wrist before she could reclaim her breath. “Don’t try anything,” the girl said, her voice low and cold. “I’m unpredictable.” She glanced around. “You expecting anybody?”