“I feel fine.”
“You look haunted.” Her words chilled me. “Maybe you’re working yourself too hard on this new book. Take a few days off.”
“All right,” I said, not wanting to prolong this conversation any further.
“You’re stressed out. That’s why you’ve been having those nightmares.”
“What nightmares?”
“I don’t know.” She drew her eyebrows together. “You sort of whimper like a puppy in your sleep.”
“Do I?”
“It’s stress,” Jodie said, returning to her schoolwork.
“What about those blocks?” I questioned the small of her back again.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t play with blocks.”
I went downstairs and gathered the blocks, carried them into the basement, and returned them to their plastic blue pail. With a huff I sat at Elijah’s tiny writing desk, my knees crammed beneath it at awkward angles, and opened one of my writing notebooks.
Staring up at me were Earl’s eight-by-tens, the top one the shot of Veronica partially hidden behind a stand of junipers. Once again I felt that needling insistence that something was trying to jump out at me from the photos, waving its arms like a drowning man to come to my attention. Yet just like before I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Let the writing hunt for it, I thought, grabbing a pen and setting the photos down beside one of my open notebooks on the desk.
In college I’d had a creative writing instructor who’d once said, “Quite often fiction is the best reality; cruelties are so much easier to swallow when they’re dressed up and capering about like circus clowns.”
So I let the writing hunt for the missing puzzle piece, printing lengthy descriptions of what I saw in each of Earl’s photographs, describing the leathery gray water, the crenellated staircase rising from its glassy surface, the police cars and the fullness of the summer trees, and the scudding cumuli on the horizon. I described the vacuous look in Veronica’s eyes and the blurry, almost nonexistent face of David behind a wedge of policemen’s hats.
(Although I couldn’t be certain, I swore—throughout the entirety of the writing—that someone had come up behind me, slight and hesitant, and began stacking the wooden blocks on the floor. I was aware of this only distantly and through a mental fog, the way drunks remember bits and pieces of their escapades after waking up the next morning with a hangover.)
I was writing and studying the photographs with such intensity that I hadn’t heard Jodie come down the basement stairs. She nearly sent me through the roof when she cleared her throat in deliberate irritation.
“Jesus,” I croaked, my heart pumping like a piston.
“What’s going on here?” She leaned against the cutout in the wall, her arms folded across her chest. Whether it was subconscious or not, she hadn’t taken a step into the room.
“What do you mean?” I quickly set one of my notebooks down over the photos.
“This room,” Jodie said. “This stuff. I thought you called someone.”
“I did.”
“And what happened?”
I thought about lying to her.
But before I could think of what to say, she interrupted my train of thought. “You’re scaring me. Something’s not right with you.”
“Hon . . .”
“Don’t shut me down. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like shit.”
“I know. I know. But I’m right on the verge of something here.”
“The verge of something,” she echoed. “It’s more like you’re obsessed.”
“I’m just trying to figure something out.”
She touched a pair of fingers to her chin. She looked on the brink of tears, and when she spoke again, her voice trembled. “Adam said you’ve been going around the neighborhood asking people about that boy who died.”
“Adam doesn’t get it,” I said, and it was a chore keeping my voice calm. What I wanted to do was call him a son of a bitch who couldn’t keep his nose out of my business. “What happened to that boy wasn’t an accident. He was killed.”
I didn’t like the way Jodie was looking at me—like I was a stranger and she was trying to understand how I got here.
“Adam’s worried about you,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “So am I.”
“There’s nothing to be worried about. I swear it.”
“I’m just afraid you’re doing it again . . .”
“Doing what again?”
“What you did after your mom’s funeral. The depression that followed, the days you wouldn’t get out of bed. Your obsessive behavior. You’re becoming that same person again.” Her voice cracked. “You’ve been sitting in this depressing goddamn coffin of a room down here scribbling stories about dead boys in your notebooks. It’s scaring me.”
Somehow I managed to offer her a meager, harmless little smile. “You said it yourself just ten minutes ago—it’s the stress. I guess I’m stressed out. You’re right.”
She shook her head, her eyes blurry with tears.
“Upstairs, remember? You said I should take a couple days off from writing. Maybe we should get out and do something together—”
Jodie continued to shake her head with mounting vigor. “No,” she whispered. “No, Travis. We had that discussion last night, not ten minutes ago. You’ve been down here almost a full day.”
The absurdity of this caused me to laugh. In hindsight, that laugh probably frightened her more than it helped to ease any tension, but admittedly I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the time. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been down here since yesterday evening.”
“That’s not—” I cut myself off. My mind was spinning like a wheel. Frantically I tried to put the pieces together, to assemble the time and date, but I couldn’t. Was it actually possible? “Jodie . . .” I took a step toward her.
She held up both hands and took a step back.
“No. Stop.”
“Babe—”
“Stop it. I want you to stop it. I want you to snap out of it.”
“I’m not—”
“Because you’re scaring me.”
I stopped walking, one foot over the threshold of the hidden basement bedchamber. Jodie had backed into the washer and dryer, her hands still up in a heartbreaking defensive posture. She was genuinely, visibly frightened. Her fear of me was unwarranted—I’d never struck her or any other woman in my life—and made me tremble.
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid for you.”
“Listen—”
“No. Just stop.” She took a shuddery breath. “Listen to me and don’t get angry. I’m going to stay the night with Beth and Adam. I want you to know that I won’t come back to this house until this room is cleared out, all that stuff is carried away, and the wall is sealed shut. Am I understood?”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Am I under-fucking-stood?”
A chill rippled through me. “Yes,” I rasped.
“Okay.” Jodie went for the stairs and was halfway up when she paused and said, “I love you. But I’m not doing you any good pretending nothing’s wrong.”
I listened to her heavy shoes clump up the stairs and tread across the floorboards above my head. There was some rustling around, and then I heard the front door slam. If she was taking any bags with her, they were probably already across the street.
A whole fucking day? I’ve been down here overnight? The sheer implausibility of it caused me to laugh again, the sound of which instantly chilled me to the roots of my soul.
Something was moving around behind me in Elijah’s room. I turned and saw nothing out of the ordinary at first . . . yet on closer inspection I noticed that two of the colored blocks—a yellow one and a green one—now stood on the writing desk, one standing vertically while the other balanced horizontally atop the first. Together they formed a capital T.