Chapter Five
The storm blew itself out sometime during the night. Grace wasn’t sure exactly when because she was too preoccupied with trying to memorize every detail of her waning hours with Abbie.
They didn’t sleep much.
In the end, Grendel wound up making a nest out of a couple of old quilts they’d piled up on the floor in the corner of the bedroom. Once the tired dog had eaten and taken another trip outside for a bathroom break, she trotted over to her makeshift bed, curled up in a ball, and never made another sound. Grace was incredulous. To be fair, she had never really paid attention to where Grendel spent her nights—but it seemed apparent that she was used to being inside.
It also seemed apparent that the jittery little dog was more than slightly attached to Abbie.
“You may end up having to adopt her,” Grace pointed out, after the pair returned from their respective trips to the outhouse before bed.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Abbie bent down and scrubbed the top of Grendel’s head. “I think she’d be a lot happier living with you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you have a fenced yard and a perfect back porch. And I have a life and a ridiculously overwrought new home—both filled with contradictions and uncertainty.”
Grace narrowed her eyes. “Almost thou persuadest me.”
Abbie smiled a bit rakishly. “Spoken like a woman accustomed to running around in a toga.”
“I only did that once.”
“I know. As I recall, it made undressing you a whole lot easier.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “I would’ve packed it for this weekend if I’d known I’d have occasion not to wear it.”
“About that.” Abbie stood up to face her. “Got anything I can borrow to sleep in?”
“Sorry.” Grace did her best to sound sincere. “I appear to be fresh out of sleepwear.”
Abbie raised an eyebrow. “Why do I think you’re lying?”
Grace took a step closer to her. “Beats me.”
“Well. When in Rome . . .” With one smooth gesture, Abbie shed Grady’s oversized hockey shirt.
She wasn’t wearing anything beneath it.
Grace’s spring-loaded inner Catholic reared up to remind her that a God-fearing, decent person should look away. But she wasn’t feeling particularly decent right then, and, although she certainly did fear God, she didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to aspire to anything approximating behavior sanctioned by the Church. All she wanted was to collapse into a heap and stare stupidly at the beatified vision before her.
But that wasn’t going to happen, either. Abbie had other ideas. Before she could concoct something pithy to say, Grace was flat on her back with Abbie’s face hovering above her.
“I think I remember this part.”
“Do you?” Abbie asked. “Then maybe you’ll remember this, too.” Abbie kissed her.
As they dissolved into each other, Grace understood with a hazy kind of clarity that her doleful memories of this amazing night would always be wrapped in the sounds of Grendel’s soft snores and the gentle patter of a waning storm.
When she woke up in the morning, Grace was immediately aware of two things—Abbie and Grendel were nowhere to be seen, and the air was rife with the intoxicating aroma of coffee.
She threw on her discarded clothes and headed out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there was a pot of coffee. It was about half full, so Grace surmised that Abbie had been up for a while. She poured herself a generous cup and headed outside in search of her companions. She found them sitting together in the same spot where she’d fallen asleep yesterday. Abbie didn’t hear her approach, but Grendel, who was dozing in the scrap of shade beneath Abbie’s chair, lifted her head like a prairie dog and stared as Grace drew closer.
Abbie was wearing her own clothes. Grace figured they must’ve dried out overnight. Her hair was loosely knotted on top of her head. One hand held a coffee mug; the other held a stack of papers. She looked fabulous. But Grace was learning that Abbie tended to look fabulous in anything—or nothing.
Seeing her sitting there against the backdrop of the lake and the distant, smoky-blue contours of the Green Mountains seemed . . . right. It was like she completed the landscape—a final flourish at the end of a near-perfect composition.
Grace could have stood there all day.
Abbie seemed particularly engrossed in whatever she was reading. As she drew closer, Grace felt a jolt of panic when she realized that the stack of loose-leaf papers balanced on Abbie’s lap were pages from her manuscript.
Oh, holy fucking shit . . .
She cleared her throat.
Abbie looked up at her. “Good morning.” She smiled. “I see you found the coffee.”
“Oh, yeah.” Grace took a healthy sip. “It’s good, too. You’ve managed to capitalize on another weakness of mine.”
“Another?” Abbie’s face relaxed into a long, slow smile that made Grace go weak at the knees. “Do tell. What was the first?”
“It was . . . um . . . you know . . .”
Abbie raised an eyebrow. She lifted the pages from her lap. “Richly crafted descriptions like that would seen to cast doubt on the authorship of this stunning prose work.”
Stunning prose work?
“Um . . .” Grace waved a hand at the pages. “So, you’re reading something . . . interesting?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been reading for more than two hours now. It’s one of the best novels I’ve picked up in a very long time.”
Grace did her best to feign calm. “Do tell. Where’d you find it?”
“On your sofa.” She smiled again. “Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“In our haste, we did knock a few pages onto the floor. It took me a while to get them back into their correct order.”
Grace pulled another battered Adirondack chair over so she could sit beside Abbie. “Scrambling up the page order could only improve the narrative.”
“I disagree. This narrative flows superbly.”
Grace extended a hand toward Grendel, who inched forward on the grass to sniff at her palm. “I guess I should be grateful that at least one narrative in my life is flowing superbly.”
“Meaning?” Abbie asked.
Grace shrugged.
“Grace?” Abbie leaned forward and rested a hand on Grace’s knee. “Not talking about it won’t help either of us.”
Grace met her eyes. Today, they looked as blue as the lake, shimmering beneath the morning sun.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I want to pretend that right now is our new normal.”
Abbie sighed. “I do, too. But we can’t, and it isn’t.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.” Abbie squeezed her knee. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Define this.”
“Coming out here the way I did. It was a reckless impulse. I should never have given in to it. I just couldn’t . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.
“Couldn’t what?” Grace prodded.
Abbie sighed. “Couldn’t stop myself. I had to see you again. Just once more—as me—not as the new president of St. Albans.”
“Is there a difference?” Grace wondered if she sounded as morose as she was beginning to feel.
“You know there is.”
“Yeah,” Grace said with resignation. “I do know.” She rested her hand on top of Abbie’s. “I’m sorry, too.”
Abbie bent forward and kissed her on the temple. The gesture was soft and slow—and its sweet simplicity was the most deeply romantic thing Grace had ever experienced.
“So,” Abbie said, after sitting back against her chair, “how about I ask you some questions about this book of yours while we enjoy what’s left of the morning?”
Grace gazed out across the water. A couple of small fishing boats were visible—both idly drifting along over the usual favored spots. She watched the dark silhouettes of the standing fishermen as they cast their lines and slowly wound them back in. Over and over they repeated the practiced maneuver—as if they had all the time in the world to wait for the sleepy fish to rouse and decide to take their bait.
She looked back at Abbie. What did they have? Another hour? Maybe two? Then she’d take Abbie back to Burton Island, so she could catch the ferry to retrieve her car. And that would be that—an ellipsis at the end of their unfinished sentence.
No. Not an ellipsis. A period.
“Sure.” Grace took another sip of her coffee. Why not answer questions about another thing in her life that was going no place? “Fire away.”
# # #
Grendel accompanied them on the boat ride across the lake. Grace didn’t question it when the odd little dog trotted along behind them as they descended the path to the dock. She was surprised, however, when Grendel leapt from the dock onto the pontoon, where she quickly took up residence on a padded seat in front of the helm. Grace wasn’t sure if the dog was used to boats, or whether she simply feared being ditched . . . again.
Abbie followed along more sedately, and soon they’d pushed off and were underway.
Abbie sat just behind Grace and inconspicuously held her hand as they made their way across the lake. The winds were calm today so they didn’t get bounced around too much. As they drew closer to land, increasing numbers of recreational boaters slowed their progress.
They didn’t talk much. That didn’t really surprise Grace. What, after all, remained unsaid?
Not much.
It was all pretty straightforward. Once Abbie returned from North Carolina, she’d be inaugurated as president. That, as they say, would be that.
End of story.
At least, it would be the end of their pathetic little story.
Burton Island was hopping when she slowed the pontoon to search for a place to dock. The harbor was choked with boats. People crawled all over the waterfront and clogged the paths that led to campsites and the public restrooms. Grace began to think that coming here wasn’t the brightest idea. She’d thought most people would be heading out of town for the long holiday weekend. She didn’t count on the legions who would opt to stay around at the public parks.
She rummaged in a compartment beside her seat.
“Here.” She handed Abbie a pair of oversized sunglasses and a ball cap emblazoned with a Bass Pro Shops logo. “Put these on.”
Abbie took the items from her. “Why? Are we gonna knock off that hotdog stand?”
“Yes. That’s precisely what I had in mind. And after that, we can dance topless on the boat and try to draw even more attention to ourselves.”
Abbie laughed. “Feeling a little paranoid?”
“Aren’t you?”
Abbie adjusted her cap. “Not particularly. I don’t think I’m especially recognizable around here.”
Grace thought about telling Abbie she was nuts—that she’d be a standout even if she tried to hide behind a gang of mummers, sashaying down Two Street in Philadelphia. But she didn’t. Besides, maybe Abbie was right, and Grace was just being paranoid.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I guess you’re right,” she apologized. “I didn’t want you to have to endure the fallout if anyone saw us together.”
“Fallout? Is your reputation that toxic?” Abbie donned the enormous sunglasses—a castoff pair of Karen’s. They were absurdly large and made her look ridiculous. “To whom did these horrible things belong?” she asked. “Jackie O.?”
Grace was on the verge of delivering a snappy reply when she saw someone she recognized.
Fuck. Fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck.
It was Brittney—her fucking, starry-eyed stalker. Of course. She was standing near the water’s edge with another girl Grace didn’t recognize. They both were eating ice cream cones.
“Sit down,” she barked at Abbie. “Now.”
Grace couldn’t read Abbie’s expression because of the plate-sized lenses that covered most of her face, but she complied immediately. “I assume you’ll tell me why you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”
“In a minute,” Grace replied. She navigated the pontoon around an enormous motorboat that had stopped to off-load a couple of jet skis. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Okaayyy . . .” Abbie sat back against the side of the boat and refrained from comment while Grace steered them out of the harbor. Once they had safely returned to open water, she got to her feet and took off the sunglasses. “Care to tell me what that was all about?”
“I’m really sorry.” Grace looked at her sheepishly. “I saw someone I knew . . . a student of mine.” She rolled her eyes. “An overly-attentive student of mine.”
“Young love?”
“You might say that. She drives me crazy.”
“She?” Abbie raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah.” Grace held up a hand. “Don’t worry—it’s not what you think.”
“Really? How do you know what I think?”
“I can imagine.”
Abbie squinted her eyes. “I’m not sure you can, actually.”
“Forget about Brittney. We’re gonna have to drop you off back at Kamp Kill Kare.”
Abbie looked confused. “Won’t that increase the likelihood that we’ll run into other people you know?”
“Probably,” Grace agreed. “At this point, it doesn’t much matter. If Brittney saw us, the news will beat us back to the mainland.”
“Grace?” Abbie took hold of her elbow. “I’m sorry about this. And I’m even sorrier that all I can manage to do is keep repeating the same pitiful phrase.”
“It’s okay. No pain, no gain—right?”
“If you say so.”
“Besides, I need to hit a store in town to get some food for this damn dog.”
Grendel’s head whipped around as soon as Grace uttered the words, “damn dog.” Grace had a sudden, uncanny sense that Grendel possessed highly developed language skills. Either that, or she was used to hearing the phrase “damn dog” a lot. Knowing her former neighbors, she opted for the latter explanation.
“Where did you leave your car?” Grace asked.
“In the main lot near the park entrance.” Abbie hesitated. “Thanks for the curb service.”
Grace gave her a rueful smile. “I’d say ‘my pleasure,’ but I’d be lying.”
Abbie smiled, too. “I’m glad.”
They approached the boat landing at Kamp Kill Kare in silence. This time, Grace didn’t have any trouble docking—although there were a lot of families scattered about, and hordes of free-range kids splashing in the shallow water and racing across the sandy beaches. This was the last big weekend of the tourist season—and the final one in which camp visitors could hike, picnic, swim or paddle about in the Kamp peninsula’s clear, blue water. Grace loved this place, which had been an elegant and sought-after tourist retreat in the late 1800s before its decades-long tenure as a summer boys’ camp. The park’s stately, three-story Rocky Point House now stood as a monument to the elegance of traditional lakeside architecture. Grace thought it was the best of Vermont—and when she couldn’t get out to Butler Island, her favorite pastime was to pack up a book and spend an afternoon or early summer evening out here—sprawled across a blanket in the long shadows cast by the former hotel.
“I love this place.”
Grace looked at Abbie with surprise. “You must’ve read my mind.”
“I seem to be making a habit of that.”
“Yeah. Go figure.”
Abbie sighed. “No use putting it off. If I leave now, I can try to make it as far as Harrisburg before stopping for the night.” She walked toward the bow to give Grendel a few pats and quick kiss on the head. “You be a good girl and don’t run off.”
Grace thought she heard a faint keening sound from the dog when Abbie turned away. She didn’t blame her one bit.
Abbie was certainly agile enough to not require any help getting off the pontoon, but Grace hopped onto the dock and reached down a hand to her, just the same. She knew the phony act of courtesy was nothing more than a flimsy excuse to touch her again before they said goodbye. If Abbie guessed her real motivation, she didn’t seem to mind it. She took hold of Grace’s extended hand and climbed up to stand beside her. She didn’t let go right away and the two of them stood together, stupidly holding hands for what felt to Grace like both the longest—and the painfully shortest—moments of her life.
“I’ll miss you,” Grace whispered.
Abbie squeezed her hand before releasing it. “Not as much as I’ll miss you.”
Grace closed her eyes. When she opened them, Abbie had turned away and started walking toward the parking lot where she’d left her car. With each step she took, Grace felt another leaf of hope wither and die on the vine inside her.
When she was nearly out of sight, Abbie stopped abruptly and turned around. She raised a hand to her head.
“The cap,” she called out. “I forgot to give it back.”
Grace smiled at the imposing picture she made: Élisabeth Abbot Williams—the esteemed fifteenth president of St. Albans College. A complex and accomplished scholar with an impeccable academic pedigree—provocative enough in appearance to command the cover of any fashion magazine—cast against a tumbled backdrop of recreational excess and faded elegance. The absurd cap with its garish, Day-Glo jumping fish logo was spot-on as a burlesque icon of her many contradictions.
“Keep it.” Grace smiled sadly and gave Abbie a mock salute. “It’s you.”
# # #
Grace was able to snag a bag of dry dog food and a box of Milk-Bone biscuits for Grendel at a mini-mart within walking distance of the harbor. She didn’t worry too much about Grendel disappearing if she left her alone on the pontoon. The little dog had already had numerous opportunities to bolt and had shown no inclination at all to flee. When she returned to the boat with her purchases, Grendel was exactly where Grace had left her: curled up on her bench seat at the bow of the pontoon.
Grace opened the box of dog biscuits and fished out a couple. She walked over to Grendel and held one out to her.
“Want this?” she asked, waving the tiny bone-shaped treat back and forth. “Want a cookie?”
Grendel ducked her head and scooted forward on the seat, wagging her tail. Grace gave her the cookie and sat down beside her.
“Looks like we’re stuck with each other, kiddo.”
Grendel looked up at her with sad brown eyes.
“Yeah.” Grace stroked the dog’s head. “We’re both a couple of castoffs, aren’t we?” She gave Grendel the other biscuit. “It’s okay. Tonight, we can howl at the moon together.”
Grendel sat beside her on the short ride back to Butler Island. Grace noticed that another rig was tied up at the dock Grady shared with Roscoe, and when she got closer, she recognized the souped-up deck boat belonging to her brother, Dean.
Why the hell is Dean out here on a holiday?
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. She saw him coming down the path from the cabin while she was mooring the pontoon.
“Yo,” he called out. “I thought you’d taken off already.”
“No. I had to run over to St. Albans to pick up some stuff. What are you doing here?”
“I came out to drop off some salvage wood I got yesterday in Hinesburg. Nice stuff. Wormy chestnut. Not enough of it to do anything with at your place so I thought maybe Grady could use it out here. Where you been? And what’s with the mutt?”
Grace and Grendel climbed up onto the aluminum dock. She had no idea why Roscoe had the damn thing set so high. He was either too lazy to adjust it, or he suspected the lake level would mysteriously rise up another two feet when no one was looking.
“She’s a stray. Somebody dumped her out here yesterday. Don’t you recognize her?”
“Recognize her?” Dean looked at Grendel more closely. “Why the fuck would I recognize her?”
“She belonged to the people who lived in the house next door to me.”
“No shit? Those assholes who took off during the night and skipped out on all that back rent they owed Joe?”
Grace nodded. “They would be the ones.”
“Fuckwads. I hate people like that. They’re what’s wrong with this country.”
“In this case, I won’t disagree with you.”
Dean reached out to take the bag of dog food from her. “Seems like they went to a lot of trouble to ditch their dog out here. Why not just dump its ass out along the road someplace?”
“Beats me. Maybe they actually cared about her and thought she’d have a better shot at getting taken care of on an island.”
Dean laughed. “Well they figured that one right, didn’t they?”
Grace shrugged.
“You always had a damn soft spot for things nobody wanted. How many bimbos who were kicked out or knocked-up did you drag home while we were in school?”
“I dunno, Dean. Didn’t you keep track of how many of them you fucked?”
“Can’t say I did.” He chuckled. “Besides, I only hit the good-lookin’ ones who were already preggers.”
“You’re really a pig, you know that?”
“Hey? It’s not like they didn’t want it. Nobody had anything to lose.”
“Yeah.” Grace led the way back up to the cabin. Grendel raced on ahead of her like she’d made the trip a hundred times. “Great economy in that, I guess.”
“No shit.” He huffed along behind her. Grace could tell by his breathing that he was smoking again.
“Speaking of women who should have better sense—where is CK?”
Dean didn’t bother to pretend he had no idea. That ship had sailed. “She’s working on some grant thingamajig. She’s gonna be in the library all day. We’re hooking up later.”
“Yeah.” Grace waved a hand. “TMI, dude.”
“Oh, get over it. We weren’t hurting anything. I don’t know why you had to get so bent out of shape about it.”
“Maybe because I had to boil the damn sheets.” Grace unlocked the cabin door so they could go inside. She began to wonder if the salvage wood was just an excuse for him to come out here and finally face the music about CK. She hadn’t spoken with him since the day she caught them together in her guest room.
“CK is my friend, Dean. I don’t want her to get hurt.”
He set the bag of dog food down on the floor beside the sofa. “Why the hell would she get hurt?”
“Forgetting something?”
He looked at her with a blank expression. “What?”
“Let’s see . . . Dina, Donna, Debbie, Darlene.” She ticked them off. “Four wives, Dean. Oh. Wait . . . I forgot about Dolly.”
“Hey, I never married her.”
“Only because you found out on your way to Vegas that she was already married to two other men—at the same time.”
“That one was not my fault. She was from Utah.”
Grace held up her hands. “Which means?”
“Hell if I know. It’s Utah. They’re into weird-ass crap out there.” He scratched the back of his head. “They all wear that magic underwear shit, too.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “They’re called ‘temple garments,’ Dean. And they’re supposed to be an aid in resisting temptation—something you, in particular, would derive great benefit from.”
“Whatever.” He sniffed. “I don’t see how any man can walk around in that getup—it’d be like having your junk in a straightjacket.”
The mention of “junk” was like a Skinner bell—causing Dean to hike and resettle his baggy jeans.
Grace shook her head. “Therein would be the point.”
Dean sniffed again.
Grace stared at her brother and tried again to solve the riddle of how he and CK could be . . . whatever the hell they were.
Fuck buddies?
What a stupid phrase to describe an even stupider concept. Besides, Dean only dated—or married—women who fit within his alliterative approach to relationships.
“I guess I don’t need to worry too much about you and CK,” she said. “Her name doesn’t begin with D.”
Her brother gave her a crooked smile. “Maybe I’m making an exception.”
“Branching out to a new frontier of the alphabet?”
“It could happen.”
“I doubt it.” Grace folded her arms. “You’re too damned cheap to replace all those monogrammed towels Mum gave you when you married Dina.”
“So? They’re nice towels . . . eighty-zillion thread count or something. I’m not gonna trash ’em.”
“Dean? I’d venture a guess that four divorces have cost you more than a set of Egyptian cotton towels.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean picked up the bag of dog food. “Where do you want this? I gotta hit the head and get back to town before noon.”
“I’ve got a plastic bin in the kitchen.” Grace led the way. “Where’d you leave the wood?”
“Under a tarp on the back porch. It’ll be fine out there until you and Grady can figure out what you wanna do with it. If you think it’ll be longer than another month or two, you’ll wanna bring it inside before he closes this place up for the season. I think it would make a great accent wall—maybe in this dining area.”
Dean’s ability to shape-shift from knuckle-dragging bubba to feng shui master never ceased to amaze Grace. He was simply a genius at interior design and space utilization.
“I like that idea. Why can’t we do this at my place?”
Dean shook his head. “You don’t need this at your place because we don’t have to cover anything up. All we need to do is rip shit out to show off what’s already there.”
Grace opened the Rubbermaid bin, and Dean stashed the big bag of dog food inside.
“Why don’t you apply these searing insights to your personal relationships?”
Dean looked at her. “Why should I? Last time I checked, your scruples didn’t seem to be doing you any good.”
“Touché.”
Dean seemed to think better of his comment. He laid a hand on Grace’s shoulder. “Hey. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I know you’re still having a rough time of it since that bitch took off.”
Grace patted her brother’s hand. “It’s okay. You’re right. I need to get my head out of my ass.”
“Yeah. CK said you might be starting to come back to life.”
Grace felt a tinge of panic. She had a momentary, irrational fear that CK would say something to Dean about Abbie. But she’d never do that . . . would she?
“She did?” Grace tried to make her voice as casual as possible. “What prompted that conversation?”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t really what I’d call a conversation. I was telling her about Agnes coming for Thanksgiving—and how you’d probably throw a rod.”
“Wait a minute. Mum is coming for Thanksgiving?”
He nodded.
“When the hell was that decided? I thought we were going to Wilkes-Barre?”
“Nope.”
“Dean. What the fuck? I’m not ready to have company—especially not Mum’s brand of company.”
“First off—it’s not ‘company.’ It’s Agnes. Second, she’s only staying a week.”
A week? Grace would never survive a week under the same roof with her mother.
“She’s not staying with me.”
“Oh, come on, Grace.”
“I’m not kidding, Dean. She’s staying with you.”
“In Plattsburgh?”
“Why not? Don’t they have turkeys in New York State?”
Dean rolled his eyes. “What’s your problem? She’s a nice old lady who doesn’t want to be alone for the holidays.”
“She’s an overbearing virago who defines me as a lesbian with bad shoes.”
“So? You are a lesbian,” Dean dropped his eyes to look at Grace’s feet, “with bad shoes.”
“Fuck you.”
Dean laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Fuck you, too. See you on Tuesday.”
“Okay.”
Grace held the back door open for him. He left the cabin and made a beeline for the outhouse. She knew he’d be disappointed to discover that none of his favorite reading materials were left out there.
“Hey, Dean?” she called out. “Be careful with CK. And quit having sex in my guestroom.”
“What-ever.” He waved a hand over his head without looking back. “You and that mangy mutt stay safe out here.”
He disappeared inside the privy.
# # #
Grace was determined to spend the rest of the day and evening working on her GAN.
She tried to convince herself that she was motivated more by a surge of creative enthusiasm than by the lavish praise Abbie had heaped on the story that morning.
She set up a makeshift desk on the north side of the cabin, in some shade cast by a cluster of cottonwood trees. She hadn’t bothered to bring her laptop along, so she was writing longhand.
This introduced a new set of variables to the exercise.
Grace found this style of writing led her to work more thoughtfully. The prose she generated wasn’t actually better—it was just more careful. There was something about the exercise of mechanically crafting the letters with a pen and ink that led her to be more precise about the words she chose to use. Hand-written sentences took on greater meaning—probably because anything she typed on a mechanical device seemed, by definition, to be less permanent . . . immediately tagged as a candidate for change or revision. Strings of words that were backlit on a computer screen existed more like placeholders than actual prose.
She sometimes mused about the possible benefits her students might derive if she insisted that they write their theme papers out in longhand first, before typing them up for submission. For one thing, it might provoke them to actually notice things like missing punctuation, dangling participles, or sentences without verbs.
Not very likely . . .
She had been making halting progress. It was a battle to stay focused on the words and not let her attention wander to the boat traffic on the lake. The weather was glorious today—a nearly cloudless sky and soft winds from the north. There was next to no chop on the water—which meant jet skis were out in droves, furiously racing behind motorboats to zigzag back and forth across their wakes. It was a textbook, late-summer Vermont day.
She was now writing a scene where Ochre had taken up reluctant residence on the back wall of a booth choked with indifferent antiques housed inside a barn-sized “super flea” complex that sagged inelegantly near an off-ramp on Interstate 80 in South Bend. The proprietor of the booth had acquired her—along with twenty-two other works of “art”—from a back room full of “everything’s five bucks” objets at an estate auction in suburban Muncie.
Ochre knew the drill. She’d hang here, unadorned, overlooked and unrecognized, until the day some poor loser took a liking to her unique color palette or her ’50s-era gestalt. Although any would-be buyer would never be able to articulate what it was about Ochre that made her so alluring. More often than not, some untutored lummox would eventually notice her bare breasts and decide that her family of warm mustard tones was a perfect match for his natty harvest-gold recliner.
Then her unending American Gothic nightmare would commence its next chapter . . .
But for now, Ochre was content to rest quietly in obscurity, nestled among the mishmash of Hoosier cabinets, distressed Coca-Cola crates, castoff Lodge skillets and motor oil cans that doubled as coin banks. Sometimes, like today, a weary individual would stop and stare at her—long enough for Ochre to wonder if, at last, her true provenance was about to be divined.
Why do you look so familiar? the pensive one would ask.
Because, like you, I do not belong here, she would answer.
I don’t know what you mean, the stranger would say.
Then sit down here beside me, Ochre would reply, and I will explain it to you.
And so their dialogue would begin.
I am not what you perceive—yet am the culmination of all you seek.
I don’t understand.
You will gain understanding when you stop seeking it.
Why must you speak in riddles?
A riddle is a mirror that reveals a hidden path to meaning.
Another riddle.
Another path.
I have another question.
What was your first question?
Why you look familiar?
I abide in the temple of all familiars.
Yet you are here—naked and unashamed.
I am enlightened. That is true.
What else is true?
It is true that you fear my power over you.
I fear only what I do not understand.
That is your curse.
Why is it a curse to be cautious?
Because you have allowed your fear to become your pearl of great price.
Are you saying I’m wrong to avoid risking my happiness on an unknown?
I am saying the known and the unknown are two sides of the same coin.
So there are no wrong answers?
There are only wrong questions.
How do I learn the right questions?
If you have to ask, you will never know the answer.
I am afraid.
To face your fear is to embrace your humanity. To flee it is to embrace a life of misery.
I no longer wish to be miserable.
Then it behooves you to change your perspective.
How do I do that?
What do you seek?
Happiness.
The known and the unknown are two halves of a whole.
Which means?
To embrace one is to possess the other.
Which one are you?
I am the known that remains unknown.
And what am I?
You are a mirror without a path . . .
Grace abruptly closed her notebook.
Where the hell did that come from?
She held her pen up to the light and examined it. No telltale glimmers of diode-emitting ink. No residue of perspicacious pixie dust. No magic. No nothing. Just a plain old 41¢ Bic Cristal ballpoint.
That meant all the sophomoric, Kierkegaardian mumbo-jumbo came from her.
She stood up and heaved the pen over the cliff into the lake.
She blamed Dean. Damn him and his fucking inferences about her pathetic sex life.
Damn him for being right. She was a coward who was a prisoner of her scruples.
Something needed to change. Something needed to give.
And soon . . .