Less than a year later, he had none of those things anymore, not even the Saab with its persistent new car smell. All he had left was the vacation cottage and his art, and even the art was, at the moment, a little shaky. It had been a long journey, a terrible, devastating flood, but Shane consoled himself in the knowledge that, at long last, the worst was finally over. Such things only happened once in a lifetime, and at least his was now behind him. By comparison, whatever rages the river below might have in store for him seemed fairly manageable.
He finished his sandwich and walked into the bedroom to change into shorts and a tee shirt. Now that his shift was over, he’d decided to go for a bike ride.
The sun was a high, bright diamond by the time Shane rolled his bike out of the little wooden shed attached to the side of the cottage. It was September, and even though there was a tang of autumn in the air, it was still almost stiflingly hot in the river valley. Tom, the cottage’s big gray cat, jumped off the tiny front porch, tail up, and padded over toward Shane, purring audibly. Shane had never thought of Tom as his and Steph’s cat, since they really didn’t do much to take care of him. He’d always just show up when they came to stay, and they would occasionally feed him or put out a saucer of milk.
“Why do you want to call him Tom?” Steph had asked when they’d first encountered the big gray cat, as they’d sat petting him on the back patio.
Shane had shrugged. “It just fits him, don’t you think? Tom-cat. Tom and Jerry.”
“I’d give him a girl’s name,” she replied, watching the cat stretch and spread its claws. “I can’t help it. When I was a little girl, I thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Some things just stick.”
Shane had thought it both silly and a little cute.
Shane squatted and petted Tom on his big, bullet-shaped head. In response, Tom pressed his head and back up into Shane’s hand, rubbing against his leg and purring like an outboard motor. There were a few burs buried in the fur on Tom’s flank. Steph used to brush them out when they’d come, and Tom would always patiently endure it, but it was a lost cause. He was an outdoor cat; for him, burs were a way of life. As Shane squatted, he glanced aside, into the tiny window that peeked into the cottage’s cramped basement. There was only one light inside, a bare bulb hung from ancient black wiring, and it was on. Shane shook his head a little.
“Whaddaya say, Tom?” he said, still peering through the dirty basement window. “Looks like Smithy knows we’re here, huh?”
Tom purred even louder and twined sinuously around Shane’s legs, arching his back luxuriously. Smithy was a pet name that Steph had come up with, the first time they had vacationed in the cottage. The real estate agent, a woman in her fifties, with square eyeglasses and very short blonde hair, had told them that the cottage was rumored to be haunted. She’d apparently found the idea rather charming. It was Steph’s idea to give the alleged ghost a name, and they had officially christened him “Smithy”, after the man that had taken care of Steph’s parents’ summer home when she’d been a kid.
“If he’s going to live here when we’re gone, he can at least earn his keep,” she’d said. “He can be the caretaker.” Later, whenever something would go missing—a sock in the wash or a set of keys—or whenever one of them forgot to lock the cabin door, it would be blamed on the elusive Smithy. It wasn’t until their second year vacationing in the cottage that Smithy had taken on any sort of reality. The cottage did indeed seem to have the sorts of quirks and idiosyncrasies that would lead people to call it haunted. The basement light would be found on more often than not, even when Shane knew he’d turned it off the night before. Same for the light in the upstairs bedroom, the room that was now his studio. The toilet would even flush sometimes, all by itself, although never while Stephanie or Shane were in the bathroom. “Smithy’s using the john again,” Steph would say, a little wigged out but not really frightened.
Once, according to the same real estate agent, a local radio station had held a Halloween contest nearby, getting people to stay in the old manor house next door, which was reputed to be even more haunted than the cottage. The truth was that both the cottage and the manor house had once been part of the same complex. There was a story connected to the property, but all Shane was able to remember of it was that the manor house and cottage had once belonged to a relatively famous artist and his wife. It had seemed comfortably fitting to him. After all, he was an artist, too, even if he wasn’t particularly famous.
Thinking that, and dismissing the troublesome but harmless Smithy, Shane stood up, brushed gray cat hairs off his hands, and straddled his bike. If Steph had been there, she’d have told him to remember his helmet. He hated wearing a bike helmet, but he usually would when she asked him to. It always annoyed him a little when she nagged him about it, but he sort of missed it now, nonetheless. Her nagging had meant she cared. He considered wearing the bike helmet this time, for old time’s sake, but decided against it. This was a do-over. Steph was gone, and nobody cared if he wore his bike helmet or not, least of all him. He sighed and paused, looking over the cottage that was now, at least for the foreseeable future, his permanent home.
Everything about the cottage was sort of pleasantly miniature. There was a miniature porch that wrapped around the northwest corner, facing the driveway, a miniature flagstone patio in the back that overlooked the river far below, and even a miniature crooked chimney that climbed up the north side, in the shade of an elderly eighty-foot pine. The cottage itself was mostly made of stone with a cedar shingled roof, thick with moss. It had always looked to Shane like something a Hobbit might live in, sans the round door. It was perched on a rocky bluff that brooded over a bend in the river, surrounded on three sides by trees, and accessed only by a long gravel driveway. As Shane began his ride, pedaling down into the shaded valley of the driveway, he saw mud caked onto the weeds on both sides, dulling it and matting it down. It was possible that he could get stuck here sometime, he thought, hemmed in by floodwaters even if his cottage remained high and dry. It was something to keep in mind for next year, when the spring rains started up again.
Trees crowded the driveway on both sides, still and limp in the humidity. Shane was sweating freely by the time he came to the paved bike trail that crossed his driveway, almost in sight of Valley Road. He slowed and turned left, heading away from Simpson Park and in the general direction of Bastion Falls. He’d probably not ride all the way into town today, but he could if he wanted to. The bike path meandered and wove through the woods, curving back and forth between the river and Valley Road, and eventually merging with the road where it entered the town, at the gate of the floodwall.
Riding bike was the only form of exercise Shane enjoyed. Stephanie had loved to exercise. She had been a runner and a swimmer. She had been into yoga and Pilates and whatever else new work-out was being offered at the YMCA three times a week. She had been addicted to endorphins. As a joke, Shane had even had that phrase printed on a tee shirt for her—ADDICTED TO ENDORPHINS!—in huge block letters on a blue background, and had given the shirt to her for Christmas five years ago. She’d laughed out loud, because she’d known it was true, and had worn the shirt regularly to her workouts. Shane had been absurdly proud of that. The tee shirt had been meant as a joke, a sort of a booby prize (so to speak, hah-hah), but she had truly loved it, wearing it until it had gotten thin and faded, finally relegated to nightshirt status.
When she divorced him and moved out, she’d left the tee shirt. Shane had found it neatly folded in the bottom drawer of her old dresser, sitting all by itself in the back corner, like a forgotten relic. He’d taken it out and sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at it on his lap. The letters were still perfectly legible, even though he couldn’t see all of them because of how it was folded. It read: ICTED TO END. It didn’t make any sense, but then again, maybe it did. Maybe it made all the sense in the world.
Shane pedaled hard. He pumped until his thighs began to sing with the exertion, and then he stood on the pedals, coasting and letting the hot air stream through his hair. Like the trail, his thoughts meandered. As he rode, the events of the past year unwound in his head like the carcass of a dead snake, one that had bitten, but could bite no more. Shane let it. It seemed safe to look at when he was riding, when his body was occupied and his brain was free to relax, to begin the long, possibly permanent work of resolution.
The first part was hard but relatively simple. It had begun with the lay-off. It would have been easier if all the staff artists had gotten the axe, but they hadn’t. Tristan and Crane had let Shane and Rafael go, but they had kept Stuart and Monica. Shane had understood. At least, that’s what he’d told Harvey Crane when he’d called Shane into his office. Tough times called for hard choices. He’d be fine. He’d always done well as a freelancer (not as a starving artist, of course, but as a
freelancer
; Shane just wasn’t that kind of artist) and it would probably be nice to explore some new mediums and themes.
This had been bullshit, of course, from start to finish. Shane wasn’t at all looking forward to going freelance again. It had been almost eight years since he had done contract work. All of his old industry contacts were surely by now either stale or nonexistent. Nor was Shane particularly interested in exploring any new mediums. It had just popped out of his mouth, sounding like an artsy thing to say, but Shane was an oil painter, pure and simple. He could draw, of course, and always sketched his paintings first, but when it came time to make the final product, when it came time to put in his shift, it was oils and sable hair brushes, period. Harvey Crane had nodded, his lips pressed together, and told Shane to let him know if he needed anything, anything at all: contacts, references, anything. Shane had assured him he would, but he hadn’t. He’d not spoken to Harvey Crane at all since his last day. By the time he’d gotten home that afternoon, contacts and references had been the last thing on his mind.
Stephanie wanted a divorce. At first, wildly, Shane thought she had announced this because he’d lost his job. That certainly didn’t seem like something she would do. After all, she had married him back before he had landed his job at T and C, when he was still eking out a living on Hallmark greeting card illustrations and the occasional magazine cover. Then, slowly and with a sort of dazed wonder, Shane realized she’d been gearing up for this for some time. Some cosmic bad omen had simply arranged for it all to happen on the same day. It was like he’d won a sort of bad luck Powerball jackpot. “I’m sorry, Shane,” she’d said, not meeting his eyes as they stood in the kitchen of their apartment, standing with the butcher block between them, like a stubby referee. “It’s rotten timing, I know. Obviously I didn’t plan it this way. But I can’t pretend anymore. This has been coming for a long time now. I’m sorry. I really am.”
When Harvey Crane had called Shane into his office, Shane had been disappointed, but not particularly surprised. In this economy, everyone was watching their backs, counting their eggs, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for Stephanie to leave him? That had come entirely out of the blue, like an asteroid in a disaster movie. He had been knocked completely speechless. When he could finally form words, he had simply asked her why. What had brought it on? His greatest fear was that she had been having an affair. He’d never even considered the idea before that day, but now, suddenly, the possibility of it loomed over his world, darkening everything in its awful shadow. It hadn’t been an affair, though.
“Not yet,” Stephanie had said, enigmatically. She claimed that he had been growing less and less available to her for years. He’d become too engrossed in his work, too disinterested in her and her world. It had happened so slowly, so gradually, that it had been almost impossible to notice, “like the frog in the pot”, she’d explained. But she was no frog, and she
had
noticed. At first, she explained, she had felt hurt, but then, later (and far worse) she’d just gotten bored; bored with him, bored with their marriage, and bored with life. At the same time that Shane had come to believe that he had finally settled down into the kind of life he’d always expected, Stephanie had begun to feel disillusioned and restless, depressed and alone.
And was it true? At first, Shane suspected that it probably was. Maybe he
had
gotten a little complacent. Maybe he had stopped pursuing her. But she’d never said anything, not until now. He loved her, and even if their life wasn’t exactly a storybook romance, it was pretty good, wasn’t it? And damn it, he was willing to work at it, if it would help. He’d asked her if it was too late to make a change, and even as he’d said it, he’d hated the way he sounded, like he was the bad guy, begging for a second chance. He had just been fired that day, and now here she was, pouring insult onto injury, and adding a good bit more injury as well. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be telling him it was going to be all right, that they would make it through, even if it was a little rough for a while, but that she’d stick by him no matter what. She certainly
wasn’t
supposed to be standing there on the other side of the butcher block, her eyes dry and avoiding his face, with her suitcase half-packed on the bed upstairs. It had to be some kind of dreadfully realistic nightmare. He’d wake up soon enough and find himself in his bed, slick with sweat, heavy with relief, and roll over and put his arm around Steph as she slept on obliviously next to him, still there, still his.
