The Riverhouse (35 page)

Chapter Fifteen

When Shane was eleven years old, his parents had taken him on a vacation to the Grand Canyon. He remembered it as one of those crystalline, Polaroid moments of youth. He remembered the long, hot car ride, with all the windows rolled down so that air roared through the back seat like a wind tunnel, riffling his hair, flapping his tee shirt, making him feel worn out and beaten by the time they got to the various motels along the way.

He remembered breakfast at a crowded Waffle House adjacent to one of those motel parking lots, sitting across from his parents in the little booth, watching them drink black coffee while they waited for their pancakes and eggs, sipping orange juice from a miniature glass and listening to the hiss and clatter of the cook behind the counter. He remembered loving his parents very much in that moment, as they bantered about grown up things and studied the map unfolded on the table in front of them, remembered the warmth of that love, even though, being eleven years old, he himself felt awkward about showing it to them.

He remembered arriving at the Grand Canyon, suddenly and unexpectedly, after what had seemed like weeks in the car, remembered everyone clambering out into the hot sun, blinking, stretching, groaning contentedly.

They’d left their motel before dawn that morning, and by the time they’d arrived at the first lookout spot a thick fog was just beginning to burn away in the dawn sunlight. Where the fog remained, it was dazzlingly white, seamless, like an enormous movie screen.

Shane looked around, squinting in the brightness, wondering what the fog might do to the view. There was a low railing nearby, running in front of a line of parked cars. Shane stopped and looked at that railing, at the fog beyond it. In the warm morning air, he felt a sudden chill plait down his back. He’d never seen anything like it, never experienced such a sudden, delicious rush of mingled delight and fear.

His parents’ voices faded to silence as he drifted toward the railing, taking small, careful steps, reaching slowly out to touch the railing, as if to catch himself, as if he was running toward it rather than inching, mincing, feeling for the ground beneath his feet.

Shane had a thing about heights. Not a fear, necessarily, but a respect. An awe. The ground seemed to tilt beneath him, to tip him forward, toward that yawning, misty expanse beyond the railing. He looked, his eyes wide, his breath frozen in his chest. He touched the railing and leaned on it, gingerly, like a very old man leaning on a walker.

Beyond the railing was the end of the world.

Shane had heard tales of how people used to believe that the earth was flat, just a big Frisbee floating through space, with the sun going around it instead of the other way around. He’d been intrigued by the idea, entranced by the thought of how the world’s oceans might spill over its edges, forming a constant, enormous waterfall, spreading and turning to mist, evaporating after some incalculable distance.

For the first time, standing there with his hands on the railing overlooking the fog-filled Grand Canyon, it occurred to Shane that if the world had been flat, surely there would have been continents somewhere along its edge, not just oceans. If there were, if there were land masses that bordered the lip of a flat earth, and if you travelled along them, heading to where the horizon lowered and lowered, aiming for the place where the earth dropped away to nothing,
this
was what you would find when you got there.

Dizzying, craggy terraces of earth, like giant’s stair steps, dropped away before Shane, fading into white nothing. It was dreadful, apocalyptic, and intensely beautiful. It was one of those moments that etches immediately into the mind, becoming permanent and formative.

In the months and years following, Shane tried repeatedly to capture that scene on paper, to recreate it with his skilled fingers using any medium at his disposal. He tried pencils, crayons and markers. He even made a halting attempt with watercolors, which were still new to him at that point. Nothing worked, nothing got even close.

Eventually, he decided that the best picture of it was the one in his memory. Some things were simply too huge, too monumental and mysterious, to fit onto a piece of paper. If the scene had only been beautiful, he thought he could have done it. If it had been merely frightening, he suspected he could have captured that as well. But it had been both of those things, sublime and dreadful in equal parts, each in doses far greater than anything he’d ever experienced before. Such a thing could not be caged on paper, tamed with a pen or pencil or a paintbrush. It was a humbling realization, but it was also sort of nice. It was nice to know such places existed in the world, and that he could taste them, if only briefly, even if he couldn’t tame them. Maybe even
because
he couldn’t tame them.

Shane didn’t think consciously of these things in the weeks after Christiana washed the chalk drawing off the cellar floor, but they were there, running underneath his thoughts like a subterranean river. Being with Christiana at the cottage was like standing on the ledge of the Grand Canyon on that morning so long ago, when fog filled the depths, pretending to be the end of the world.

It was beautiful, because Shane loved being with her, loved the tapered grip of her hand when they walked together, and the casual delight of her weight across his lap as they lounged on the sunroom couch in the evenings, watching movies or just talking, comparing notes on life, on growing up, on family and dreams and the tentative soap bubble of the future. He wasn’t quite willing to admit yet that he loved these things because he loved Christiana herself, but the knowledge of it was there, unspoken and patient, unavoidable.

But there was Marlena, as well. If Christiana was the natural beauty of the scene, then Marlena was the fog, the part that made it mysterious, capricious, and quietly dreadful.

Shane couldn’t know why Christiana’s presence affected Marlena the way it did, but there was no mistaking it. Marlena hated Christiana, and wanted her gone. Thankfully, ever since his confrontation with the ghost on the stairs, when Marlena had shaken her hooked hand toward the sound of Christiana’s breathing, Shane had not seen Marlena at all. She no longer drifted on her nighttime haunts through the library and kitchen, no longer floated silently up the stairs to watch him paint.

Sometimes Shane thought this was a good thing. Maybe she’d gone completely. Part of him would be a little sad if that was the case, since he’d developed a sort of connection with her—a sympathy, if not an empathy. He thought he understood her, partly because they’d both lost their spouses and children, and partly because he’d painted her, shared that mysterious mind-meld of the artist and the subject.

But another part of him, the larger part that loved Christiana and worried for her, was secretly glad at the idea that Marlena might be gone for good. He hoped it was true, even if he had his doubts. Maybe Marlena wasn’t gone at all. Maybe she was merely hiding, biding her time, planning, simmering in her rage. She was the fog in the scene, secretive and erratic and potentially dangerous.

As the weeks progressed, Shane found himself frequently sitting in front of the painting of Marlena, the one he had begun to simply think of as “Dear M”. He’d stare at her image on the canvas, at the white delicacy of her fingers where they held the note, or the calm dread on her face, or the subtle sparkle of the tear trembling in the corner of one bright, brown eye.

He knew a lot more about Marlena now than he had when he’d first painted this picture. He knew the story of the candle in the mysterious, hidden window, knew the awful secret contained in the letter in her white hands. He’d heard her tale, and had begun to put all the pieces of her sad life together. Most of it had come from Earl Kirchenbauer’s story, but not all of it. His retelling of Marlena’s and Wilhelm’s unhappy tale had filled in the blanks, but Shane had understood the essential framework of their marriage from the moment he’d begun the Riverhouse painting, maybe even from that first line etched in the dirt in front of the demolished house.

Somehow, the art was a gateway. It connected him with the muse, and at least in this case, the muse had a very specific tale to tell. Earl had provided the fine points, but most of the story had come straight out of the canvas, from each individual brush stroke, even as Shane had painted them. It happened when he was fathoms deep in the creative process, in that strange limbo where the realities blended, where the canvas stopped being a flat surface and became a portal, a secret doorway. It was there that Shane had learned the story of the Riverhouse, and of Marlena.

And yet, even here, he had encountered closed doors, hidden secrets. There was more to the Riverhouse's story; Shane was sure of it. Marlena might be his muse, but she wasn’t telling him everything.

For one thing, there was the shadow in the corner of the Riverhouse painting, the approaching figure that Marlena was looking up at from her vantage point on the portico steps, shading her eyes and smiling enigmatically.

It was crazy, of course, but Shane had become certain that that shadow was becoming longer, growing on a daily basis, preceding the figure. Someday, he’d look at the picture and see that the second person had finally come into view.
It’s all just a stage,
Greenfeld had said on the day he’d first seen the Riverhouse painting.
The first act is about to begin, and she’s going to be the main character… why’s she sitting there, watching, waiting? Who’s coming up the path, and what happens when they get there?

That was the question Shane kept returning to. Who is it? Whose shadow was spreading along the driveway, nearing the portico? And what would Marlena do when that person finally got there?

That was one of Marlena’s secrets. The other one was the upstairs window with its mysterious white candle, the one he so often saw when he was returning from the old footpath, The candle flame would tease and flicker beyond the limbs of the magnolia tree, begging him to paint, to come to the sordid embrace of the muse.

He still hadn’t gone into the attic to look for that window and its mysterious candle. He could lie to himself, pretending he simply hadn’t had time, or had forgotten about it, but those things weren’t the real truth. The
real
truth was that he was afraid of the answer. The shadow in the painting was a puzzle, but the mystery of the window and the beacon candle was a Pandora’s box. Someday he
would
open that box, but not yet, and certainly not while Christiana was around. He was curious, but not yet curious enough.

Marlena had her secrets, and Shane had an idea that her painting was part of the map to revealing them, whether she liked it or not.

Often, he’d tinker with the image on the canvas, dabbing at it with his brush, adding insignificant details, refining it, focusing it. One afternoon he added a vase of roses on the mantel behind Marlena, drooping in the darkness, leaving a small drift of petals in the shadow beneath the portrait of Woodrow Wilson. The next evening he added the upholstered arm of a sofa in the foreground, in the far right of the canvas, dark except for a fringe of light cast from the fireplace beyond. Finally, he added a small shape abandoned on the corner of the sofa, lost in its shadow.

When he finished the object on the sofa he looked at it, wondering why he’d painted it there. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit into the scene, exactly. On the contrary, it seemed perfectly essential, despite its position and apparent insignificance, lost in shadow. It was odd, but somehow exactly right. It hinted at meaning, like a keyhole, one that would unlock every mystery, if only Shane could find the right key. For the moment, however, the strange, inexplicable object on the painted sofa didn’t make any sense at all.

Shane stared at, puzzling over it, not quite obsessed with it but certainly distracted by it, and maybe even a little disturbed. After all, he knew that shape very well. The last time he’d seen it, it had been sitting on a conference table, scuffed and torn, like an exhibit in a museum.

It was Steph’s purse, propped there in the shadow of the sofa, almost lost in the corner of the painting. It was unmistakable. Why had he painted it there? More importantly, why did it seem to belong there? Why did it seem like the axle upon which the entire scene turned?

Eventually, he would find the answer to that question. After all, there was still one more painting to complete, one final addition to the Shane Bellamy Insanity Stairs series. He’d barely begun it, but he had a sense of it already. The anchor on the end of this long chain was going to be huge indeed; the final painting was going to be amazing. He knew almost nothing about it so far except for one thing, one small detail that had popped into his head the moment he’d painted that first curving brush stroke: the title.

“Sleepwalker,” he’d said aloud to himself, looking down at that first line, still wet on the canvas, glistening in the sunset light that streamed from the window over the stairs. That was going to be the title. It had just popped into his head. It didn’t mean anything, but it would. And when the meaning to that one word came, he had a sense that the answer to every other question would also fall into place.

After all, this last painting was his alone, even if it did come from the same mysterious well as the previous two. Marlena had opened the portal for him, but she couldn’t completely control it. Not anymore. Because Shane was good at going to the well all by himself, good at dipping out whatever he needed,
without
the help of the muse.

Perhaps even in spite of her.