The Shadow Box(45)

CLAIRE


Daylight. I tried to sleep during the day and be up at night when it was safe, but a sound awakened me. Something crashing through the brush. Was that a swear word, a human voice? I lay still in my sleeping bag, clawing myself out of wild dreams, and listened.

Yes, it was a person. No big animal would stalk the woods at this hour, when bright sun was streaming through branches and new leaves. It couldn’t be my mountain lion, and I felt a million times more danger than if it were.

I thought: Griffin.

The cabin was hidden so deeply—and it was so camouflaged by its weathered boards, with vines growing up the walls—that I wanted to believe he would never see it, no matter how close he passed by.

I started to sit up, but my bones ached. I hadn’t eaten much since I had seen the mountain lion—not because I was scared of him, or at least I don’t think that was the reason—but because I was so tired. I’d gathered green seaweed—“sea lettuce”—both to eat and to press into my wounds. It contained alginate, known to aid healing. My father had taught me that. Yarrow worked as well, and I had picked some and mixed it with water to make a poultice and pack the worst cuts. I thought I was getting better, but this extreme exhaustion made me wonder if an infection had seeped in.

The weakness spread from the cuts in my skin into my blood, my bones, my brain. I would tell myself to move a muscle, but nothing would happen. I began to see the mountain lion sitting in the corner of my cabin. At night, where the North Star used to appear in the cracks of the cabin roof, I would see the cougar’s eyes. What did it mean that I was no less comforted? My father was the mountain lion, and the mountain lion was my father.

The sound of someone coming through the woods got closer. No animal would be so clumsy, breaking branches and tossing leaves. I imagined Griffin approaching. He was so deft in his legal work—never a wrong word in a brief, never a mistake in court. But in the woods? He loved the water, going out on his boat, but he’d never enjoyed hiking or exploring the woodland with me.

It was true, however, that on that night when he and I had met at the cove twenty-five years ago, not half a mile south of here, he had moved like a jungle cat along the path—but that had been the main trail, not the narrow, meandering, and hard-to-spot deer tracks that crisscrossed the woods and marsh around the cabin.

I had a vision of Griffin on the beach, the night of shooting stars. I tasted his lips. In my dream, I felt the heat of his mouth. His body pressed against mine. Time slipped away and came back.

I thought of the love I had had as a child—the strength it gave me now. And I thought of the day I learned how cruelty in a childhood could create a demon.

It was just one year into our marriage. By then, I had seen the black-eyes phenomenon several times. It always terrified me, and immediately after each bout of rage, I would think of leaving him. Sometimes I would come to this cabin to think. And once I calmed down, once the reverberations of fear passing through my body had subsided, I would decide to stay.

I had already been divorced once—I didn’t want to fail in another marriage. I’d tell myself he would never physically hurt me—everyone got angry, and in fact, it was a healthy emotion. With his high-pressure job and the tragedies he encountered at work, he had to let off steam. I’d just have to find a way to tell him venting was fine but he couldn’t take his stress out on me.

And almost every time I returned, shaken and full of doubt, he would hold me and tell me he loved me.

“You’re my life,” he said, walking into our house, finding me curled up on the living room sofa after one especially bad episode. “We’re made in heaven.”

“But it doesn’t feel like heaven when you act that way toward me,” I said, unable to meet his eyes. I looked out the window at sunlight glittering on the Sound.

“I don’t mean to,” he said. “I’m thinking about the scumbag I’m prosecuting, who stabbed a woman to death and left her body in a pile of garbage. Or last month—the mother who let her boyfriend beat and burn her son, refused to speak out against him until one day the beating went too far and the boy died.”

I just kept staring outside.

“Can’t you try to understand?” he asked, an unusually plaintive tone in his voice—conciliatory, asking for forgiveness. It got my attention.

“I know you see the worst in life,” I said. “When you come home, I’ve wanted you to feel the best in life. Our love. I try to give that to you, but . . . then something happens inside you. I’m never even sure what causes it, and you act like you hate me.”

“I could never hate you.”

“Just like you could never hit me, or at least that’s what you say. But you know what, Griffin? Your anger and the things you say to me hurt worse than fists. My heart aches so much right now . . .”

“No, Claire, please don’t tell me that. I can’t stand to know I’ve made you feel this way. Will you let me try, give me another chance?” he asked, taking my hands, pulling me gently off the couch. He put his arms around me. My body was stiff, defensive.

“I want to, but it keeps happening,” I said, my voice cracking.

“Oh God, I can’t bear to know I make you cry,” he said. “Claire, I promise, I will try so hard.”

“That’s not saying you won’t do it again.”