The Shadow Box(5)

That summer before senior year, when Griffin picked her up after her shift, I tried not to look at him—I was afraid Ellen, or even worse, Griffin, would see that my attraction to him made me want to explode. But sometimes I couldn’t avoid saying hi when I walked past his car, a vintage MGB, British racing green. He would be sitting there with the top down, engine running, watching me with those serious eyes. And then Ellen would come out, and they’d drive away.

I went to RISD—the Rhode Island School of Design—and fell in love with the world of art and artists. I dated a sculptor who etched transcripts of his therapy sessions into polished steel, then a performance artist who channeled Orpheus and visited the underworld onstage. But I still dreamed of Griffin.

He and Ellen broke up right after graduation. Instead of going to London for July, as planned, she moved back home with her parents. He began showing up at the Inn, after my shift was done, even though she no longer worked there. “Ellen changed, Claire. She went away on spring break, and nothing has been the same,” he said.

“Why?”

“I have no idea. She won’t talk about what happened, and she knows she can tell me anything. Now she doesn’t even want to see me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “The worst part is, I’m positive something bad happened down there. Did she mention anything to you?”

“No, like what?”

“Not sure,” he said. “You sure she didn’t say anything?”

“Positive,” I said.

Jackie and I had gotten to know Ellen at the Inn, and we cared about her. I felt guilty, getting close to Griffin, so Jackie was the one to approach her, to find out how she was doing. She had gone to Cancún with family friends for a beach vacation, a last blast before college graduation. She asked Jackie, “Do you believe in evil?”

“What was she talking about?” I asked.

“I have no idea. She just stared at me. Claire, her eyes were hollow.”

“God, poor Ellen,” I said.

Griffin was devastated, and I became his confidante. At first that’s all it was—a boy with a broken heart and the girl who consoled him. But that began to change, and I couldn’t believe it. We were from the same town, but from completely different worlds.

I lived at Hubbard’s Point—a magical beach area that time forgot. Small shingled cottages, built in the 1920s and ’30s by working-class families, were perched on a rock ledge at the edge of Long Island Sound. The weather-beaten cottages had window boxes, spilling over with geraniums and petunias, and brightly colored shutters with seahorse and sailboat cutouts.

Hubbard’s Point families had cookouts together. Friends as kids became friends for life, just like Jackie and me. Every Fourth of July there was a clambake and a kids’ bike parade. Movies were shown on Sunday and Thursday nights on the half-moon beach, and everyone would bring beach chairs and watch classics on a screen so wind rippled it might well have been a canvas sail. At the end of the beach was a secret path, winding through the woods to a hidden cove. I could have found my way along it blindfolded.

Griffin grew up at the other end of that narrow trail, in a posh enclave called Catamount Bluff, with only four properties on a private road. The Chases’ house—the one in which we now live—was built on the headland by his paternal great-grandfather, Dexter Chase. He had founded Parthenon Insurance—the biggest insurance company in Hartford—before running for governor and holding that office for two terms. His son, Griffin’s grandfather, had been a three-term senator representing Connecticut. Griffin’s father had been a lawyer—in-house council for Parthenon. They used summer as a verb—they summered at Catamount Bluff. When I asked Griffin about his mother, he said, “You don’t want to know.”

I am an only child, unconditionally loved by my parents; we “went to the beach” when school got out in June. My mother was an art teacher in public school, my father an environmental studies professor at Easterly College. He taught me everything I know about the woods, and she encouraged me to paint what I saw. When I was nine, she died in a car accident; she lost control in an ice storm, crashed into a tree, and was killed instantly.

The shock and sorrow paralyzed my father and me. We turned to nature. After school and work and on weekends, we trudged the woods, climbed the rock face between Hubbard’s Point and Catamount Bluff. Members of the Pequot tribe had lived in these woodlands. A burial ground sat atop one boulder-strewn hill. My father told me to always treat this land as sacred.

He taught me how to blaze a trail—to notice rocks, trees, a broken branch and use these landmarks to orient myself and not get lost. At night he showed me Polaris and taught me to navigate by the stars. Late that summer we built a cabin at the edge of the marsh on the far side of the hilltop, in almost-impenetrable woods. One night we stayed there and heard an eerie, blood-chilling cry.

There was an enduring myth that mountain lions, their woodland habitat displaced by farms in northern Connecticut, had been driven south through the greenways of open space and conservation land to the river valley. The name Catamount Bluff, given to the land in the 1800s, was testament to the legend’s long history. My father and I scanned the ledges and rock shelves. We searched for tracks, remains of white-tailed deer, any sign that mountain lions lived here.