Echoes Page 4

  “Ta-da,” Michael said, smiling expectantly. Lori managed a grin. The cabin before her was larger and newer than she’d expected, two stories of flat-cut logs stacked in clean yellow lines. It looked less like the decrepit lean-to she’d been expecting than a life-sized dollhouse, plastic and perfect, something that had until recently been stored under glass.

  “Looks like we’re here first,” Michael said, taking the Jeep out of gear and handing her the keys. “Why don’t you go on in while I get the rest of our stuff.”

  She left him to their things, climbed the few steps to a wraparound deck, and let herself in. It was cold and dim, the inside lit only by the winter daylight in the windows. There was a deep maroon couch, a few wing-backed chairs, and a thick aroma of woodsmoke and furniture polish that reminded her of a funeral parlor. In the far corner, a small but serviceable kitchenette sat on an island of white linoleum, where another door opened, presumably, to another portion of the deck. On the wall hung a wooden plaque with LINGER LONGER carved into it. She remembered the words from a brochure for the cabin Michael had showed her, and she remembered wondering why cabins needed names.

  In the center of the downstairs, an iron-spiral staircase climbed like a metal vine to the second-floor landing. Lori went up slowly, her night bag bumping against her hip. It was eerily quiet—all she heard were her footfalls on the iron rungs and the hiss of a steady rain that had just started falling—and she had to suppress an urge to call out and make sure the cabin was empty. At the top she walked to one end of the landing and pushed the door open into a small bedroom with a slanted ceiling of exposed rafters. Against the far wall stood a squat chest o’ drawers with an oval mirror hung above it. Her reflection met her with its plainness, her pale skin, her brown hair a haystack from hours in the car, her eyes tired and dull. She stepped inside and flinched—I sometimes don’t recognize myself in the mirror, 0 to 10!—when she saw the young woman sitting on the foot of an unmade bed.

  A high-pitched note of surprise escaped Lori.

  “You’re here!” Lori said. She took a deep breath, feeling more than a little embarrassed. “Sorry, you scared me.” She crossed the room, hand extended. “Nice to finally meet you. I’m Lori.”

  Michael had never described Mallory, but she appeared years younger than she could be, eighteen or twenty, with large blue eyes and long black hair parted down the middle. She wore a plain blue dress with three-quarter sleeves and a frayed neckline. She held her hands folded in her lap, the nails unpainted, rimmed with half moons of dirt. She wore no shoes.

  “Hello? You up there?” Michael called from below.

  A tear spilled down Mallory’s cheek, then another. She glanced up at Lori with her shoulders back, her face serene, even as the tears flowed faster, dropping in dark circles on her dress. Lori froze, wondering how someone could cry like that yet look so peaceful.

  “Let me tell you this story,” the woman said to her in a steady voice.

  Lori felt herself drawn close. The woman lifted her mouth to her ear; her breath was cold.

  “Babe?” she heard Michael call outside the door. “Everything okay?” He stepped quickly into the room, struggling with the buttons of his coat.

  “Michael, I think something’s wrong with her,” Lori whispered.

  He shrugged the coat off one shoulder, and then he took a sharp step back. “Who the fuck is she?”

  • • •

  I find myself someplace and I don’t remember how I got there. What would she give that right now? 5? 6? Lori found herself wondering more about the numbers—the grading scale? the self-evaluation metric?—than the question as she stood on the deck in the cold, watching the woman in the blue dress walk down the paved driveway. Why 0 through 10? It seemed an awful lot of degrees. She didn’t remember exactly how she’d gotten from the bedroom to the deck—judging how strongly she felt, this seemed beside the point. How many shades of lunatic gray were there? Or was it simply an indication of frequency? Or a measure of her own alarm? She resolved to ask Dr. Ryerson this when she returned.

  Beside her Michael leaned forward, wrists crossed over the railing. Together they watched the woman in the blue dress walk down the gravel road. She had her arms held out to her sides, like a child crossing a stream on a narrow log. One bare foot plunged into a puddle, but she neither slowed nor seemed to care as she disappeared around the bend. “We can’t just let her walk, can we?” Lori said. “It’s cold, and there’s nothing down that road for miles.”

  “It’s not a mile to the main road,” Michael said. “Besides, we can’t exactly restrain her.” He slipped an arm around Lori’s waist. She felt the attempt but her body tensed, refusing to play along.

  “Should we follow her?”

  “There’s a phone inside. I’ll call the manager’s office,” Michael said. It occurred to Lori that this wasn’t really an answer, but she wasn’t sure she wanted one.

  “What do you think happened to her? How’d she end up here?”

  “Beats me. Probably got drunk in town and came back to sleep it off in the wrong cabin.”

  “On foot?”

  “Maybe she had someone drop her off, gave bad directions.” Michael shrugged impatiently. Lori hated this tendency of his, when he confused her asking questions with her questioning him. “The property manager’s number is on the paperwork. I’ll go get it. Give him quick call.”

  He kissed the top of her head and went inside. The rain fell harder now, tapping flat and lonely on the deck’s overhang and on the dead leaves scattering the forest floor. About thirty yards into the woods, she glimpsed a deer. It was a full-grown doe, thin and gray with its late-winter coat. It twitched, as if generally aware of Lori without knowing exactly where the danger was. From some distance, she heard a faint mechanical grind of an engine. A large green pickup took the road’s bend in a wild spray of gravel. When she looked back, the deer had vanished.

  II. The Blue Bride

  Derek and Mallory lay siege to the cabin in a confusion of hugs, luggage, and food.

  “We bring comestibles,” Derek had said, greeting Michael with a lift of his chin and a deep Tennessee twang. “Not that you need any. You’ve fattened up, Lofton.”

  Michael worked his fingers into his side and pinched a handful of stomach. “More cushion for the pushing.”

  “Later,” Derek said. “The women will get jealous.” He was tall and rangy, cloaked in an olive-drab jacket and a thick, sandy beard, like a slightly older version of the college students on Tennessee Avenue back home, Lori thought, doing their best impressions of the genuinely poor. Mallory was tiny at five feet even. She looked like she didn’t weigh any more than a hundred pounds, even in her wool skirt and cowboy boots. She seemed a strange fit for Derek, outsized in every way except volume, in which she cheerfully exceeded him.

  “You’re Lori,” she trumpeted, offering a tiny mittened hand. “You’re lovely and I’m happy to know you.”

  “Likewise,” Lori said. She was wary of Mallory’s enthusiasm, even as she felt herself wanting to be carried away by it.

  “It’s freezing,” Mallory said. “Tell me you weren’t waiting outside for us!”

  “Not at all,” Michael said. He shook his head at Lori, a gesture she understood to mean save the woman in blue for later.

  “Well, dear heart,” Derek said, “I guess we’ll bunk here tonight, if you can handle such scrofulous company.” He dropped the bags on the deck, then turned to Lori and executed a shallow but efficient bow. “The lady excluded, of course.”

  “The lady doesn’t know what scrofulous means,” Lori said, “but it probably applies.”

  It took over half an hour to move Derek and Mallory in. While the boys pack-muled everything inside, Lori and Mallory sorted the food: plastic bins of berries, softball-sized Granny Smith apples, rice crackers and baguettes and tins of sardines in mustard sauce. Lori unloaded a cardboard box full of meats and cheeses with labels that made no pronounceable sounds in her head
—bresaola and sopressata, manchego and Roquefort.

  “God, we could eat for a month off this,” Lori said. Apologetically, she added, “Michael and I didn’t bring any food.” Shame stirred in her brain, threatening to trigger a return of the morning’s dark mood. Did she bring all of this just to show me up? To make me feel bad?

  “It’s ridiculous, I know,” Mallory said. “We stopped by this little market in Pigeon Forge and I said, ‘Blackberries in February? In Tennessee?’ I was powerless after that, lost in a spending fugue.”

  There was a certain theatricality to how she talked and moved, unpacking food with wiggling fingers, like a stage magician conjuring cheeses from a top hat. Lori felt herself seesawing between finding the show enjoyable or irksome.

  Michael came in, toting a wooden crate on his shoulder. “You may have just become Lori’s best friend, Mal,” Michael said. He set the crate down and winked at Lori. “Think a whole case will be enough for you, babe?”

  “That’s a whole lotta wine,” she said, uncertain how else to answer.

  “I didn’t buy the case, not today anyway. Old crate, new wine,” Mallory said. “That’s a beautiful metaphor for something, I’m sure, but I just don’t know what it is.”

  “Pour the wine,” Michael said, “and the metaphors will come.”

  • • •

  “Waitaminute, waitaminute, waitaminute!” Mallory sounded drunk, but Lori—who definitely was—couldn’t be sure. They were outside despite the cold and the dark, huddled in their coats around a patio table crowded with empty wine bottles and paper plates sticky with the congealed remnants of dinner. Behind them, a hot tub kicked on and off intermittently, perfuming the air with a clean chemical scent. An electric camping lantern dimly cast an orange glow no farther than the table’s edge. “Gimme a light, Lofton.”

  Lori heard the click of Michael’s Zippo opening. The flame plucked Mallory’s face from the shadows like a white tulip bulb.

  “Grazie mille.”

  “Prego,” he said, and clicked the lighter shut.

  She blew a jet of smoke—Lori could smell the spiced scent of a clove cigarette—into the lantern’s glow. “So she was just there? In your room?”

  “Just there,” Michael said. He had saved the story until after dinner, until enough drinks had flowed and—as Michael was so fond of saying—the time was propitious. “All alone in a pretty blue dress.”

  Lori didn’t remember the dress being particularly pretty, but the woman was, and she guessed that was what Michael meant.

  “Y’all call the police?”

  “Nope,” Michael said. “Called the property manager. Once I reassured him nothing had been broken or stolen, he lost interest tout de suite. He recommended I call the sheriff’s department if she comes back.”

  “I should fucking think so,” Mallory said. “She say anything before she left?”

  “She was crying,” Lori said, recalling those quiet, effortless tears. “Not crying, but you know, tears. Not tearing up, I mean they were falling.” Frustrated, she lit a cigarette.

  “Mater Lachrymarum,” Derek offered knowingly.

  Michael shook his head. “Just got up, shot by me, and then she was down the road.”

  “Well,” Derek said, “I reckon your mystery woman was a revenant. If we’re telling ghost stories, let’s do it right.” He leaned his chair back and produced a large bottle of whiskey from somewhere beyond the lantern’s electric-orange reach. He took Lori’s glass by the stem, tossed the rest of her wine into the night, and poured her glass half full. She sipped, and the whiskey filled a crack in her chapped upper lip with fire.

  “She did say something to me,” Lori said. She’d been quiet for most of the dinner, letting the old friends catch up. She had liked listening to their stories, a weekend in an old brothel in New Orleans, a rafting trip in West Virginia. Lori had never really been anywhere, just a few trips to the beaches down south when she was a kid, Disneyworld a handful of times. She nursed a private hope that one thing Michael would bring into her life was more travel—high adventure in exotic locales! She found herself now grateful for the mysterious appearance of the woman. It had given her something to contribute.

  “Really?” Derek said. “Do tell.”

  Lori struggled to collect the memory. She could see the pale face, eerily serene behind a wash of tears, her silently working mouth. There was a coldness in her ear. Is that even possible? Am I remembering that right? Sometimes I feel like my memories aren’t mine, 7.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like a dream I can’t remember, just remember having, you know?”

  “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,” Derek said.

  Mallory squealed like a theremin. “Creepy,” she said, beating her small fists against her thighs. “So fucking creepy.”

  “Sounds like an old mountain legend,” Derek said. “The Blue Bride of Bluff Mountain. Abandoned at the altar, the comely young bride threw herself over the falls. Now she roams the mountains weeping tears of river water whilst seeking her revenge.”

  “Enough! Enough,” Mallory cried. “Can we just skip the ghost stories, please? Lori, please, tell us all about yourself. I want to know everything about you, inside and out.”

  Lori lit a cigarette, then noticed she already had one going in the ashtray. She was ready for this, had even rehearsed a little scripted introduction of herself to perform for Derek and Mallory. No, I never went to college, we couldn’t afford it after Dad died, but I work at a bookstore where a certain tall, handsome high school teacher just happened to bring his class on Friday nights—and here she would lovingly clutch his hand, or maybe kiss his cheek. But sitting in boozy comfort with Michael’s friends, she found little need of it.

  “Ask me anything,” she said, “and I shall answer true.”

  A silence followed, the longest of the night. Lori worried how the others were filling it in their minds; she struggled not to blame herself for it, to not feel like she was somehow lacking.

  “Wot’s the best fing about livin’ wit’ Lofton, then?” came a high Cockney accent. It was Michael’s best Dickensian urchin, a voice that came out sometimes with the liquor. Everyone laughed.

  “Well,” she said. She walked two fingers up Michael’s arm, clutched his coat sleeve, and pulled him into a deep, whiskey-wet kiss.

  “My goodness,” Mallory said to Derek. “She’s absolutely glowing.” She folded her small hands on the table, laid her forehead against them, and dropped a sleepy wink at Lori.

  III. Falling Hazards

  Michael was inside her.

  Their sex was slow, prodding, but not without rhythm. She felt her body return to her in a series of waking sensations. Her mouth rubbed slickly against his smooth, nearly hairless chest; her body was a small burning coal in the otherwise frigid bedroom. She felt Michael’s weight, her face pressed too tightly against him. She struggled for air.

  “Get off.” The words were muffled against his flesh. “Can’t breathe.”

  “Hey, babe, what’s—”

  “Get off.” She couldn’t pull any air. Panic lit her brain, but its messages couldn’t find her limbs. She felt as trapped in her body as under his—My body feels like it doesn’t belong to me, 10—and starbursts of light, yellow and blue, flared in a great distance.

  “Babe, are you okay?”

  She felt his hands on her shoulders, shoving, and she was suddenly upright, straddling him in the dark, not wedged beneath but sitting high and panting on top of him. In one of the room’s high windows, a cloud hovered, brightly silvered by the moon behind it. She took in deep, wet breaths and tried to make her heart go slower.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She slid off him and collapsed onto a cool spread of sheet.

  The sheets, I should have changed them, she thought. They had come upstairs after dinner and too much to drink, Michael behind her, patting her ass with upturned palms, a pantomime of unbridled lechery that wasn’t all pla
y-pretend, hurrying her into the bedroom where they embraced and kissed and undressed, falling onto the bed, which had remained unmade since the woman in the blue dress had been sitting on it.

  “Too much to drink,” she said. “We made love in someone else’s dirty sheets, ten.”

  “What?” he said. “Whose sheets? What do you mean, ‘ten’?”

  “Never mind,” she said. There was no way to explain it just then.

  “Hold on.” He got up and crossed the dark room. Light spilled from the bathroom, and she heard him running the sink. He returned and placed a glass of water in her hands. Lori rose up on her elbows and drank. Cool water dribbled down her chin and spilled onto her chest. The rest of the day was returning to her, memories swimming up from the blackout void like strange fish from some sunless deep. There was something else wrong. She looked for it in darkness but could see only the woman, sitting there, crying.

  “Is it like, one of your,” she heard him sigh, then surrender to the word, her mother’s favorite, “difficulties?”

  She sipped more, shaking her head slowly. Michael pressed his lips together and smoothed her hair—tangled and sweaty from their lovemaking. She hated the word, but, like him, had no other shorthand for it, for nights like the one when she had scalded herself so badly. She had been making spaghetti—nothing fancy, a homemade red sauce, a box of noodles—and talking to her mother, the phone cradled uncomfortably between her neck and shoulder. Michael was grading papers at the table, and she was in the process of explaining their situation to her mother—how Michael had let her move in to his spare room after her lease expired; how, yes, she was living with him but still looking for her own place (this was back when she was still at least pretending to look).