Hidden Pictures(16)
“Right, that’s true.” I reach into a canvas grocery bag and pull out a six-pack of coconut water. “Except they used the cottage as a toolshed, right? No one was sleeping out there.”
Caroline looks exasperated. I sense she’s had a long day at the VA clinic, that she doesn’t appreciate being ambushed with questions the minute she walks through the door. “Mallory, that woman has probably done more drugs than all my patients combined. I don’t know how she’s still alive, but her mind is definitely not right. She is a nervous, twitchy, paranoid mess. And as someone who cares about your sobriety, I’m going to strongly suggest you limit contact with her, okay?”
“No, I know,” I tell her, and I feel bad, because this is the closest Caroline has ever come to yelling at me. I don’t say anything else after that, I just open the pantry and unpack boxes of arborio rice, couscous, and whole grain crackers. I put away bags and bags of rolled oats, raw almonds, Turkish dates, and weird shriveled-up mushrooms. After everything is unpacked, I tell Caroline I’m heading out. And she must sense that I’m still upset because she comes over and rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, we have a terrific guest bedroom on the second floor. If you want to move over here, we’d be thrilled to have you. Teddy would go bananas. What do you think?”
And somehow, since she already has one arm around me, it turns into a kind of hug. “I’m fine out there,” I tell her. “I like having my own space. It’s good practice for the real world.”
“If you change your mind just say the word. You are always welcome in this house.”
* * *
That night I put on my good sneakers and go out for a run. I wait until after dark but the weather is still muggy and gross. It feels good to push myself, to run through the pain. Russell has a saying that I love—he says we don’t know how much our bodies can endure until we make cruel demands of them. Well, that night I demand a lot of myself. I do wind sprints up and down the neighborhood sidewalks, running through shadows of streetlamps and clusters of fireflies, past the ever-present hum of central air conditioners. I finish 5.2 miles in thirty-eight minutes and walk home feeling deliriously spent.
I take another shower—this time, in the small, cramped bathroom of the cottage—and then fix myself a simple supper: a frozen pizza heated in the toaster oven and a half-pint of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. I feel like I deserve it.
By the time I’m finished with everything, it’s after nine o’clock. I turn out all the lights except for the lamp on my nightstand. I get into the big white bed with my phone and put on a Hallmark movie called Winter Love. I have a hard time focusing, though. I can’t tell if maybe I’ve seen it before, or maybe the story is just identical to a dozen other Hallmark movies. Also, it’s a little stuffy inside the cottage, so I stand up and open the curtains.
There’s a large window next to the front door, and a smaller window over my bed, and at night I keep them open to generate a cross-breeze. The ceiling fan spins in slow, lazy circles. Outside in the woods, the crickets are chirping, and sometimes I’ll hear small animals pacing through the forest, soft footsteps padding over dead leaves.
I get back into bed and start the movie again. Every minute or so, a moth smacks against my window screens, drawn to the light. There’s a tap-tap-tapping on the wall behind my bed but I know it’s just a branch; there are trees growing close on three sides of the cottage and they scrape at the walls every time the wind picks up. I glance at the door and make sure it’s locked, and it is, but it’s a very flimsy lock, nothing that would stop a determined intruder.
And then I hear the sound, a sort of high-frequency humming, like a mosquito flying too close to my ear. I wave it off, but after a few seconds it’s back again, a gray speck flitting around my peripheral vision, always just out of reach. And I think back to the doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and the research experiment that didn’t actually happen.
And it’s the first night I feel like someone might be watching me.
5
My weekends are pretty quiet. Caroline and Ted will often plan a family activity—they’ll drive to the shore for a Beach Day, or they’ll take Teddy to a museum in the city. And they always invite me along but I never go, because I don’t want to intrude on their family time. Instead I’ll just putter around my cottage, trying to keep busy, because idle hands invite temptation, etc. On Saturday night, while millions of young people across America are drinking and flirting and laughing and making love, I’m kneeling in front of my toilet with a spray bottle of Clorox bleach, scrubbing the grout on my bathroom floor. Sundays aren’t much better. I’ve sampled all the local churches, but so far nothing’s clicking. I’m always the youngest person by twenty years, and I hate the way the other parishioners stare at me, like I’m some kind of zoological oddity.
Sometimes I’m tempted to go back on social media, to reactivate my accounts with Instagram and Facebook, but all my NA counselors have warned me to steer clear. They say these sites carry addiction risks of their own, that they wreak havoc on a young person’s self-esteem. So I try to keep busy with simple, real-world pleasures: running, cooking, taking a walk.
But I’m always happiest when the weekend is over and I can finally go back to work. Monday morning, I arrive at the main house and find Teddy down under the kitchen table, playing with plastic farm animals.