You can have the bedroom,” said Jay.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. That way if I decide to stay over, I can work at all hours of the night and not bother you.”
She nodded. “Thanks.” She had thought the same thing herself.
“And you’ve got your desk in the front room,” he added.
“Right.” She grinned at him, felt awkward about him making all the decisions. She had never had to negotiate about who had what when and where. She was a spoiled brat and she knew it, but then so was he. This was so strange. She was moving in with a guy, and yet she wasn’t really. Not a guy — guy.
“I’ll help you with the mattress,” she said. And so they hefted his bedding upstairs and flopped it in a corner. That was when she saw the stones. They were lined up on the windowsill of the gable, but she hadn’t noticed them that first day up here; there had been too much else going on.
“These rocks are famous,” she said, picking one up and turning it over in her hands.
“You recognize them?”
She nodded. “The sketches in the guest room?”
Jay looked impressed. “You don’t miss much.”
“Actually, they’re even more famous than your guest room. There are paintings, too,” she said. “Humongous paintings.”
Jay looked skeptical.
“Utterly humongous,” she said, proud of her father, despite herself. “Twelve feet square. Seriously!”
Jay took one of the stones from her and looked it over.
“The paintings are pretty abstract,” she said. “More color-field stuff than really representational. But you’ll recognize them when you see them.”
“When I see them?”
She made a face. “Well, you’re going to visit me, aren’t you?”
“Hadn’t gotten that far,” he said. “But yeah, of course.”
“There was a retrospective at the Whitney a couple years back,” she said, putting the stone she was holding back down again. “There was this stupid column in the Herald: ‘Soto Gets His Rocks Off!’”
“Ugh.”
Then Jay’s attention had drifted to the windowsill, and he looked concerned all of a sudden.
“There’s supposed to be nine,” he said.
Mimi counted. Eight. There were supposed to be nine; she knew that. Then they looked at each other, and she stroked his arm because his face had gotten sad again, bent out of shape over a missing stone.
“It could have been gone for a while,” she said.
“Oh, that makes me feel much better.”
Mimi set up the desk right where her father’s desk must have been. It was in the big room, under the left front window, with a view of the snye, looking as pretty as a picture on a corny calendar. She could tell a desk had been in this spot-that her father had looked out at this same view-because the paint was faded above a certain line on the wall. Even though no one had lived in the place for over twenty years, it was as if there was still a shadow of him, his presence in this house. But that wasn’t all. Scrawled on the wall beside the window, above where his desktop must have been, there were phone numbers, written in ballpoint pen or pencil or Conte or charcoal-some numbers with names or initials, some without. Some retraced and darker than others-the hand busy while the ear listened. There was no phone line any longer.
It amazed Mimi how energetic her father’s writing was, even in such a mundane endeavor as scribbling down a phone number. But then, any mark making was serious to her father. There were also flurries of his very recognizable doodles. She stared at the wall-almost a piece of art itself. An art supplier in Ottawa, a framer in Richmond, a gallery in Montreal. There was even a 212 area code. She phoned it on her cell to see who it was. Caprice! So he had already made the connection with his present gallery way back then. It was a mini history-a connect-the-dots bio. The writing on the wall!
Tuesday and raining.
Eleven days since she arrived; almost a week since they took up residency. Except that only Mimi was in residence right now. Jay had stayed at the snye for the first three nights. Nothing had happened. Nothing bad had happened! Well, a famous rock went missing, but somehow she was sure that must have happened before. Jay had been back and forth since then, and she’d stayed in town at the Pages’ on the weekend. And nothing bad had happened. Whoever had been stalking the place and leaving mementos of his visits had made no appearance, as far as they could tell.
“Guess I scared him away, huh?”
“You are pretty scary,” he said.
They were old friends. Week-old friends.
But Jay wasn’t here now, and he wouldn’t be back until Thursday. He’d come by that rainy morning in Jo’s Honda to tell her he was driving to Toronto to pick up his girlfriend.
“Your what?”
“Iris. Iris Xu. She’s at school in Toronto.”
“And when were you going to tell me about Iris?” Mimi had said, her arms crossed like some jealous high-school coed.
A crack appeared in the edge of his smile. “You’re kidding, right?”
She wasn’t kidding. She couldn’t believe this hadn’t come up. A girlfriend?
But getting her wits together, she said, “Of course I’m kidding. It’s just the little-sister thing. You know. ‘Uh-oh, what’s he up to now, la-de-da.’ That kind of thing, you know.”
But of course he didn’t know what kind of thing. Neither of them did. They were only children.
Only children.
That’s what they had grown up thinking, anyway.
She would meet Jay and Iris at Conchita’s in town Thursday evening for drinks. He’d phone when he was back to confirm. So now she was really alone.
“How far away is Toronto?”
“Just beyond the edge of the world where everything falls off into the Great Turtle’s mouth.”
She wished she hadn’t asked.
Mimi stared at the screen of her computer. She was using Final Draft, screenwriting software that took all the work out of formatting-almost wrote the screenplay for you. Almost. You’re in a scene with two people? The software knows it; as soon as you push the Return key after writing a bit of dialogue, it automatically centers the name of the other person in the scene. You type Z-it knows who you mean.
ZORBA
INT. OFFICE AT UNIVERSITY-DAY
ZORBA
For Christ’s sake, pick up the phone! Little bitch.
Her cell phone rang again. “Let me go, let me go, let me go!” She was beginning to hate “Bohemian Rhapsody.” She checked the caller, didn’t recognize the number; she didn’t answer. If it was Lazar calling from some booth, she had to shudder at his uncanny timing.
EXT. PASTORAL SETTING-DAY
SASHA steps into the stream, bends down, and lowers her screaming cell phone below the water. She holds it there until it stops.
She pushed the laptop out of the way and flopped her head onto the desk. She closed her eyes and listened to the rain. There was a drip somewhere inside she didn’t have the energy to deal with. She checked that it wasn’t directly over her bed. Then she went upstairs and checked on Jay’s computer, his instruments. Everything was fine. She sat for a moment and picked up the fat electric guitar. She had learned a song once, from Jamila. She tried to recall the chords. But then the cell phone rang. Again. Shit.
Jay was right. She should get a new one. She’d been here long enough; there was a place in town, but she kept putting it off. Why? Because she expected Lazar to stop. She expected him to get the message-to give up. To do the right thing. To act his age! That was part of it. Why should she be turning her life upside down because this supposedly mature- way mature-man couldn’t take no for an answer? But it was more than that. She knew at some point she would have to pick up; she would have to have it out with him. But not until she was good and ready. And she wasn’t ready yet. She was frightened of Lazar Cosic, and she didn’t want him to know that, didn’t want her voice to betray her.
She had brought with her a box of dishes and silverware, for one. And she had planned on buying a microwave or toaster oven if necessary. But the stove worked, and so she had purchased a tiny little beer fridge at the Canadian Tire store in Ladybank. A beer fridge from a tire store. Go figure. She kept soy milk and veggies in her little blue beer fridge. And wine.
She had settled in.
The first few days had been fun, a chance to get to know each other. A brother. She had a brother. The idea still seemed impossible. She had yet to phone her father to confront him with the news, which, apparently, wasn’t news to him. She was still too angry, and yet she wasn’t really sure why. And what was the point of being angry with him, anyway? Anger slid off his hide like water off a duck.
INT. SOHO STUDIO-NIGHT
HENRI
So, you’ve met him. Hell, I’d forgotten all about the boy. What do you think?
HENRI sips from a glass of wine. Dabs a Venetian blue smear across his canvas.
SASHA
Has it ever occurred to you that you are a first-class schmuck?
HENRI
So I’m told. But seriously, what’s he like?
SASHA pours herself a large refill of the wine, then hurls the contents all over the canvas.
She hadn’t told her mother about Jay, either. Not yet. She had fished to see if Grier knew anything about other siblings. She didn’t seem to. So the only person back home who knew was Jamila. And when Jamila had gotten over the shock, she had said, “Oh, my God, welcome to the club!” Because Jamila had four brothers, and she had promised to get Mimi up to speed on the whole thing. They had chatted furiously back and forth by e-mail while Mimi was still staying at the Pages’, but there was no Internet connection out here. And, for that matter, the connection at the Pages’ had been dial-up, so not exactly a furious rate. They were too far out of town for the local tower to get high-speed, although there were rumors of a new tower going up soon. So Mimi had felt very far from home. She was welcome to use the dial-up at the Page house anytime-welcome to stay there whenever she wanted. Lou had given her a key. There was also a great little Internet cafe in town right on the park. But Mimi was trying very hard to do what she had set out to do, which was to be on her own, sorting things out, digging deep. Trying, in one way or another, to figure out who the sap was who had gotten herself in so deep with an almost forty-year-old professor who just might be mentally unstable.
She had been so happy to see Jay arrive that morning. But he was only stopping by to give her the news about his trip to Toronto. The news about Iris.
“Oh, and these,” he said, heading back to the SUV. He returned with a neat pile of sunshine-yellow folded material. Curtains. “Lou figured it might be good on the downstairs windows, anyway.”
Mimi opened one out. “Lou made these?”
“Yeah, I know. A woman of many talents.”
When she and Jo had carted out a “few sticks of furniture,” as Jo called it, Lou had measured the five downstairs windows. Mimi hadn’t even noticed. Jay had picked up curtain rods on his way out. Mimi was surprised at how happy she was. Curtains!
Jay had dragged his mother’s kayak upstream a few days earlier so that they could both go down to the big house whenever they wanted without the long roundabout drive. Mimi laughed herself silly her first time out. “Hey, New York!” she shouted. “Look at me-Mimi Shapiro in a boat!” She imagined herself going back to the city buff and tanned. Yeah, right. Sore and drenched was more like it! She flipped three times the first day. She never felt really comfortable that first trip, though she was okay as long as she hugged the shore and moved at about five strokes per hour.
“You go ahead, for God’s sake!” she said as Jay circled back to give helpful advice. “You’re making me nervous.”
But he stayed close.
“And to think the Eskimos hunt whales in these things,” she shouted.
“Inuit,” he said.
She looked at him, thinking maybe he was giving advice.
“They’re not Eskimos; they’re Inuit.”
Well, she certainly wasn’t Inuit.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper,” she said to no one. “You will always be my favorite mode of transportation.”
He had first left her alone on Friday night. He was meeting up with some friend who was in town.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Get! Scoot!”
She had waved him off down the snye, standing barefoot in the shallow water as he glided off into the gloaming. He had to lie back on the kayak to pass under the arch of the bridge.
“Have a good trip, honey,” she called after him. It was meant to be a joke. Jay laughed. Good.
But the truth was she did feel like some hausfrau waving her hubby off to work. Then, as soon as he was out of sight, she returned to the little house, locked the doors, and checked the panic room. She hoisted up her mattress, opened the trapdoor, and dropped down to the earthen room, then shimmied along the tunnel with her flashlight in her teeth until she came to the door that led to the outside. Jay had put a good hefty hasp on it and padlocked it. So there were just the windows to worry about. She had gone to sleep the first couple of nights to the imagined tinkling of broken glass.
But there was no broken glass and there were no dead birds or snake skins or messages of any kind.
She had worried about the car, too, wished she could bring it closer, in sight of the house. Jay had suggested laying some boards down over the broken expanse of bridge-only a few feet, after all. But she couldn’t quite imagine driving on such a makeshift overpass. Worse still was the thought of having to escape the house and finding the planks gone! So she checked the car first thing every morning when she went out for her run. She checked the ground around it for signs of footsteps. For a week now, there had been nothing more serious than dew to contend with. Dew and the odd petal of a flowering tree.
And once deer tracks.
She imagined some deer peering into the Mini looking for whatever it was deer ate. Jelly beans? Cedar-flavored jelly beans.
And so, bit by bit, she let the magic place settle down around her. She got into a kind of rhythm that was comforting and stimulating at the same time in ways she had never imagined possible. Up at seven, a jog down the Upper Valentine Road to where it ended at the river, a shower, breakfast, and sitting at her laptop by eight or so. Lunch at noon, like any working Joe. A little nap just for the luxury of it, a little reading, work until five, and treat yourself to a glass of wine. She found a video store in town and rented DVDs to play on her computer. What more could a girl want?
EXT. TULLOCH-NIGHT
FAIRY LIEUTENANT
So what do you think, sir? Do we take her tonight?
KING OF THE FAIRIES sips from a glass of mead. Stares at the little moonlit house.
KING (Nodding)
Alert the voles, the moths, the bats. Tonight we move in.
Yikes! Maybe the aloneness was getting to her. Her script would not behave. She stared out the window at the hill in the meadow. No sign of fairy troops. Still, she wished Jay were here.
It had been great to have him around. He had worked on his music a lot. Compared to him, she felt like a fraud. Writing a film script, yeah, right! He’s four years older than you, she told herself. But it was more than that. There was this commitment toward his art she didn’t feel, not in the same way. Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was always this conscientious or whether he was making some kind of a point.
He worked with headphones, so it was almost as if no one was there except for the squeaking of his chair. Then he’d come down and ask if it was all right if he played or listened to something out loud. So polite. And what could she say? If she was writing, she’d close the door to her bedroom and work with her laptop on her lap and her iPod playing music she could tune out. She couldn’t tune out Jay’s music. Couldn’t tune him out, either.
Apart from her morning run along the road, she explored the island, her mace in her pocket, though it seemed absurd in the light of day. She explored but not too far. Never into the Dark Forest. And never to the end of the snye, where the wetlands took over. The land down where the snye met the river was owned by mosquitoes that seemed to have a thing for her virgin New York flesh.
It had been strange to watch Jay from her “office window,” arriving at the little house, pulling his kayak up onto the bank. She had felt like a voyeur watching him strip off his flotation device. Odd the feeling she felt to look at him, the fluttering inside. Don’t go there, girl, she warned herself.
And now there was Iris. This would help to settle things down-batten down the hatches on any unwarranted flights of fantasy. She would have to decide to like Iris.