For the twentieth time, Rae's hands had tightened on the steering wheel of the little truck until an ache crept into her wrists. Deliberately, she made herself relax.
She had been driving since before dawn, on her way to a place she did not want to go, to assume a debt she could not repay. Her muscles rebelled at what her conscious mind seemed to accept. Her conscious mind knew she did not so much accept as recognize that on another level, the choice had already been made.
Another choice. Like the one she'd made to avoid Russ, instead leaving a note in his mailbox asking him to look after the cabin for a few days. Removing HIS chance to make whatever choice he might have considered, ask whatever he might have asked.
A kindness to him really. However - comfortable - she had become with him, she would not have - risked - for him. She wouldn't risk for anyone. Not anymore. Not again. Not even if they'd made her blood burn again and turned her nights sleepless and her brain to mush. Not to someone like that least of all.
No. Making things easy with Russ, that had not been a mistake. As going back had not been a choice.
She had long since learned not to regard her dreams directly, not to challenge and intimidate and drive them out of sight into stronger and more virulent life underground, but instead to regard them from the corner of her eye, like something wild lured from the underbrush, something one studied and learned from without frightening away.
One could only fool oneself so far. When the attic dream had returned...
She could count on the fingers of one hand the times when that dream had become a frequent companion. Each time, it had reflected that she had lost her sense of having a place, of feeling safe, rooted. Each time it had foretold a change and then disappeared once the change had taken place, whether the change had been mental or physical.
But that didn't matter any more. What mattered was that once she had dreamed that dream again, she had known what had to be done and once she had known, there had been no reason to wait. She could tell herself stories and even convince herself of some of them, but once she had seen through the pretense, then there was no peace for her till the worst was faced and behind her.
After that dream had returned, hiding in Maine - hiding from the past - was no longer a choice.
Nor could she look aside now from what she worked her way nearer. She approached a legacy, the inheriting of not one house but two, and could only feel like she walked the last mile to certain death.
It was an illogical attitude. Losing her grip on logic bothered her. Falling prey to emotional storms, with where she was going, terrified her. And that she could have fought so long just to survive and in the process lost a sense of how she might define victory - was worst of all.
Not nearly enough distance separated where she had been from where she was going. Two hours brought her to the Maine state line. Another hour saw her through the neck of New Hampshire and into Massachusetts. And an hour and a half later, crossing into Rhode Island, the past sprang forward and wrapped itself around her.
She felt herself drawing inward, congealing, as she would have recoiled before a half grown dog intent upon knocking her down in order to lick her face.
Within twenty minutes, everything was familiar. She might have shopped there rarely, but she knew the places she passed. Could have found her way to any of a dozen places she had sought out at one time or another. Minutes later, she reached places with shops and bookstores she had more frequently prowled. More minutes, she skirted the edge of a town less than half a hour from where she had so long lived, a town where she had gone when she wanted to talk to friends and look at interesting things, books and stones and twilight zone realities. The little shop where she had gone when she needed to renew herself. One of the few places she had always felt comfortable, for no logical reason.
Then, she was surrounded by places that had been part of her daily routines. Where she had worked until nearly before she left. Smaller towns marking grocery shopping. The house where she'd once lived...
Some things faded. That place woke no more interest than the building holding the lawyer's offices. The lawyer who'd communicated this in such bizarre confusion...
That was the last place she wished to stop. Now that he had done his worst and snared her attention, she wanted to see for herself the reality his words had outlined. See what held no reality for her.
What her stepfather had snarled around both their feet mushroomed larger with each mile. She could not begin to fathom how he could ever have tangled himself in her warped daydreams, or how they had tangled themselves around him. But perhaps tangling wasn't really the word. Entrapment came closer. Tangling was a game. A puzzle. Being trapped was the sticky underside of power. Was something very different. In her writing the trick was in the puzzling - not in the simple one foot after another of persistent resistance.
Probably why she had turned to writing, since the simpler process was the one she found most difficult. It was a question of power and where it lay for her. Power she had accused someone else once of craving more than anything else, even if it were the power to turn away from what he most desired...
But it was still better to pick around the edges than probe for the heart of it. The past rushed up on her all too quickly.
She stopped in the town most familiar to her, sitting in the truck for long moments after she had turned off the engine. She felt sick, the tension coiling in her stomach, muscles knotting and unknotting as she looked at a life that had been hers when she had been a different person. That was what brought on the nausea, that sense of one image overlaying another and both shifting subtly.
How could she have thought she could simply sweep back into the past? Into a life no longer hers? That had belonged to someone else, but that shrieked at her, prickling over her skin with magnetic memories. Just by coming back there, she'd conceded the war while the battle raged on around her, unappeased.
That was why she had left before dawn to get back on a Friday, why she was already there before her fear could mushroom to crippling proportions. Why she was skirting the lawyer and heading straight to the problem before thinking about what she did could deflect her for once and all. Before thinking about any of that rendered her fatally immobile.
The single thing she could see was that nobody else was going to profit by her entrapment.
Forcing herself out of the truck, she went into the hardware store, remembering as she passed through the doors, how many times she had sought there for something to solve a problem she only partly understood. She had always been on her own, always struggled with some inanimate thing, always prowled the aisles of places like that, looking for pieces to bridge some gap, fill some need. Trapped by the same assumptions that earned her dubious looks when she asked her questions, she had always been surprised when she watched men who appeared to have wandered by mistake into some alien jungle.
Locks. She had been a great believer in locks for longer than she could remember. The first half of her life had not included them. The second half had revolved around them. With this ambiguous situation of a place and problem over which a lawyer had lost control, an unbelievable situation long before that particular problem, the only thing she could see to take along was a handful of locks and hasps and new batteries for her flashlight.
Afterwards, she blamed those locks for springing the trap around her feet. With her collection on the counter before her, watching the clerk ring up the total, the voice she heard behind her was only part of a familiar place.
The familiar was tormenting enough. But taking up the sack and turning away, she nearly collided with him.
A massive, shaggy haired man with a weathered face and heavy muscles straining against a half buttoned wool shirt, reached out, tipping the bag toward him to see her purchases, and two years and more vanished like smoke in the wind.
"No ammunition? So you're going for the low key approach." That dry voice had woven itself into her dreams and nightmares for years. She knew it and its intonations and its owner, nearly as well as she knew herself, for what that was worth. "You locking 'em in or out?"
Greg. Of course. What else could have been missing? Other than being stricken with some kind of drooling seizure in the middle of the main street? Rae tugged the bag free and rolled the top closed.
"So, you finally missed us," he said. "Or did you just hear the riffraff was lowering the property values?"
So many things lay in those words. Worlds of things, among which why she had had to return and what her stepfather had done, were only a fraction. Silence was her only retreat, silence inside which she screamed at herself for having forgotten how many traps lay waiting for her. Silence behind which the very accuracy of his aim worked for her, pushing her past response into icy control that let her slide past the sharp hazel eyes and on out to her truck.
One action at a time, she told herself, fighting to catch her breath, realizing she'd refused even to breathe once he'd challenged her. One thought at a time. She wouldn't waste her time fighting with him. If she didn't speak to him, if she didn't let him be real, she could do this. She could keep him in the twilight shadows where past failures belonged. Deal with just the immediate problem and no more.
Setting the bag of locks inside the back of her truck, swinging the cap window down and closed, she saw the market across the street. Little as she cared about food at the moment, having to risk more people later was worse.
Crossing between cars, she made quick work of collecting an assortment of unperishable foodstuffs, unperishable probably implying a total lack of nutrition, and set that bag inside the covered back of her truck beside the other, between the shallow footlocker with the leather handles she had so hastily packed and the toolbox.
So. There was that delay exhausted, that old wound reopened. Pushing that man and that voice back, she slid behind the wheel, flinching even from the blank numbness behind which they lurked. She pulled out onto the street and then found herself circling out of town, on a route halfway between two places.
If nothing else, moving away from a ghost who refused to obey the rules.
Where she had lived herself, that no longer existed for her. Connections to that place had been seared and left cauterized and clean and dead. But other places waited reproachfully.
The house where her stepfather had taken her mother when he married her - according to the lawyer, one of the two he had left to her - a tidy, comfortable little house in a small and charming village, with relatives of his on either hand, aunts and cousins and friends, that lay to the north and west of where she drove slowly down a secondary road so familiar as to have never been left... She had run to that house once. One of the few times in her whole life she had turned to someone, depended on the temper of that stepfather, with his Mickey Rooney bounce and strength and resilience.
And helped, rescued, she had then left, without being able to maintain the contact he had desired but had not demanded - and left him to die alone.
He was the last person who should have done that. Someone who had spent his life just liking people. Someone who'd left money to his own daughter with her life out west and property to this stepdaughter who so lacked roots and anchor. Who'd left her the one thing she might be able to accept, who'd understood her that well.
Two flavors of pain battled for dominance. One she understood and could probe like a rotten tooth. One - one lay beyond consideration - imagination, even. One told her what she had known from the first. That she would not go to that small house being watched over by neighbors, its contents untouched in the five months since his death, cared for, waiting, known.
There were some lies she could not tell herself. She could not even do him the honor of granting him the greater loss. With his dying, he had tapped into other things. Things he had understood more of than she had ever imagined or he would never have so involved himself. Things she wished he had understood a fraction better, so he could have saved them both this ordeal.
Not for the first time, she looked at herself and did not like what she saw. But he had set this in motion. He had set the other house to lie in wait until it saw its chance to pounce upon her. The other house, towards which she wove her way down smaller back roads.
That clouded and unattended investment, made just as she had been blindly preparing to flee. The farm owned by an old woman and kept barely together by her grown son, when he had come back there at the dissolving of the marriage and life he had tried to make for himself, with so foggy a notion of the goal in either the leaving or the coming back.
Just an investment, her stepfather had called it. A bit of property, he'd said. She remembered more than she had thought. Or maybe she had known it all, in some corner of her mind, and been unable to deal with anything more.
Her hands tightened on the wheel.
Spring was sharper there. In the woods along the fire trails, in that place near the shore, April sprayed a bright yellow green haze over everything, defying the lingering chill in the air. As hard as it had been to peel herself away from that older blue-green pine grove, she slid back into the feel of these southern woods. Back around town, and familiar places, any lingering bond had been thin and weak. But in these woods where scrubby oak and pine marked the ocean's nearness - scrubby, homely pine and oak, like what surrounded that old farm -
Here it had always been easy to lose herself.
The road bent and split, a tar road going off to the east, a gravel road to the west. She took the gravel arm, slowing as she neared the driveway, and stopped before making the final turn.
It was a huge old house. A monstrosity. Three full stories, white and square, with a roof peaking north to south and equal eaves peaking east and west. Square, white, plain. Surrounded by equally huge old oak trees and a single blue spruce and the skeletons of elms, turned into green still-life statuary by the ivy that had claimed them as trellises, and a single willow.
A huge old white house, more than two hundred years old, of post and beam construction, that hadn't seen paint in years and care in longer. Gone gray and tattered, with ripped screens on the first story and no screens at all above that. And beside and behind, an unpainted board sided barn, nearly as large as the house, backing to a meadow dotted with yews working to reestablish the forest's foothold.
This was the 'investment' her stepfather had made. Somewhere around a hundred and fifty acres of land and that old house and barn. A place worth a fortune if a developer had gotten his hands on it. That must have gone instead for a song, if her stepfather had picked it up. That must have been aimed at avoiding developers, to have been so sacrificed.
It was an incestuous area. Everyone knew everyone else and about everyone else. And he, her stepfather, had liked and been liked by nearly everyone, making his hold on the network even tighter. He'd known that woman long before his stepdaughter had stumbled across the son. The old woman had known him and his, recognizing Rae by her ancestry from her first introduction. Her son - Greg - had known Rae - in other ways.
As Greg had known, as he stood behind her earlier, watching her for God only knew how long, that she had come back because of the problem with the people to whom her stepfather had rented the farm. The farm he had bought from Greg's mother's estate, or whoever had had the handling of the debts she must have left, balanced only by that place.
Greg's farm. Which was now hers, if she could claim it. If she could stand to enter it. If she could endure coming - home.
The huge old willow he had always muttered about still hung over the door yard, that curiously New England description of the area between house and barns and fields. The skeleton of a picnic table poked through the raspberry canes that had wrapped around the bench nearest them. Canes that had been ten feet or so away the last time they had sat at that table. And the path to the back meadow where he had taken her more than once - even through the thickened brush, she knew where that would be...
Slowly, she took her foot off the brake, letting the truck roll forward, a decision without a decision, by default.
As long as she had known that place, the gate had always been closed. She had wondered each time she went there, when it was they went in and out or why she never came at those times. Always closed, like a statement about that farm.
The gate was open now.
As the hood of her truck passed into the yard, her window came even with the newly decorated gate and she stopped again.
Someone had been busy with a spray can. Flying Saucer Farm. Ghost Haven. Idiot Acres. The other suggestions were equally divided between illegibility and illiteracy. But she stared at those three most prominent, wondering how long they had been there. Wondering what HE had thought, seeing them, with the ghost of his retarded half brother who had died in his early twenties.
The brother who had been the reason for the gate. Who had sat in the dust of the yard and sang to nothing. She had known him a long time, known a lot about how he lived in that uneasy household. Idiot Acres.
Flying Saucer Farm - as long as anyone could remember, the old woman had taken any chance she got to tell anyone who'd listen about the things she saw in the night sky. Rae had never talked to her about it. She didn't know whether something she claimed to have seen or ridden within or what, had triggered the fascination. Greg had set himself to keeping them separate, clearly fearing some potential rudeness on the old woman's part. Rae hadn't pushed it, but she had come a few times when he had not happened to be there and spoken with his mother without his presence or protection and never sensed a threat.
But Ghost Haven...
She drove into the yard, parking without thinking, and climbing stiffly out of the truck, went into the shed between the path to the chicken coop and the barn. Rummaging around in the boxes of debris that looked unchanged, she finally found a couple of cans of spray paint.
They'd been frozen. The first two she picked up were wrecked. But at the bottom of the box, a can sporting dark green trickles had some life in it.
She started at the right hand side of the gate and painted out Idiot Acres first. That was the most offensive. Then Flying Saucer Farm. Hesitating on the middle offering, she concentrated instead on covering all the fragments and idle graffiti scrawled on the sides and bottom gate boards.
Returning to the words in the center of the wide top board, with green paint still left, she stopped. She could stop people from ridiculing those who had gone. But she couldn't make them not have been, nor banish whatever of them might remain.
Ghost Haven.
She put the cracked cap back on the paint can. Put the can back with the other discards.
That had been another time. Another life. Rae dragged her eyes away from the past and regarded the present.
The house had always been old. Always looked - forlorn. But it had been sound and kept functional. She remembered when he had put on the new roof. And when he had replaced the floor in the bathroom behind the kitchen, before the toilet had quite threatened to slide into what passed for a cellar.
It had had the bare minimum of attention. Then.
Screens hadn't hung tattered from the window frames then. A kitchen window had not been mended with tape.
The back door, the one leading into what had been a summer kitchen and now was only storage, had not hung open. Nor had there been three cars without plates in various stages of decay clogging the yard. The barn door must have hung partway open all winter. It was sunk in the dried mud, slumped in defeat.
All that kept it from the worst stereotyped rural abandon was the lack of a discarded washing machine or refrigerator, but the littered ground and scattering of soda and beer cans compensated for that.
Something was wrong. Very wrong. Her stepfather would not have rented to people who lived so. She shook her head, fighting the tightening pain behind her eyes.
Even though she had a key, she had the vague notion that landlords, if that was what she was, were not supposed to enter without permission. But then tenants were not supposed to destroy the property and there was the matter of the rent nobody had paid for more than three months...
The knob turned easily in her hand, the door swinging open. So much for tenant's rights. The place wasn't even locked. And stepping inside, what she could see of the kitchen, front room and bathroom without moving from the center hall, gave her a better idea of why it wasn't locked.
Someone would have been a fool to have wanted to wander in there. Fools already had. The graffiti on the gate might have been more appropriate than she had known, or than the authors had intended.
Dirty dishes, counters piled with half empty cans garnished with spoons, garbage overflowing a grease-stained trashcan and filled garbage bags piled on the floor beside it. The old yellow linoleum floor was black on grime. The refrigerator she remembered as being old and yellowed ivory, also had a circle of black grimed hand prints around the handle. Cupboards hung open.
She turned only her head to see that the bathroom floor was the same color black, more trash overflowing. And in the front room, bags left from takeout food littered the floor around the couch, punctuated by Styrofoam coffee cups and glasses half full of some liquid used as ashtrays.
Greg's mother had been bizarre and kept too many cats, but compared to this -
It wasn't that she didn't understand life at the bottom of the food chain. She had spent time enough there. She also knew that unless one intended something more, one would never move from that position and would even continue to sink.
She had lived poor for years enough, had worked in a pit and come home dirty and tried cutting corners and paid dearly for each attempted shortcut. She was the last to claim virtue for anything she had learned to do. Her decisions had only been Pavlovian responses to learning that the alternatives were worse.
These people had not yet learned that. From the looks, she didn't think they would. They, or at least some of them, had instead perfected blindness, always one of the alternatives.
Suppressing a shudder, she glanced up the stairs beside her, decorated by trails of socks and tools and coffee cups between the stair rails where someone had set them in passing, and then picked her way through the litter, on up to the second floor.
There were six bedrooms on that floor. All six had been - inhabited. She didn't know what word she would use for the bathroom.
Seeing the stairs wind upwards, she was only too willing to follow them, finding that in this case, gravity had worked in the house's favor, for from the relatively deserted and untrashed look of the four larger rooms on the third floor, noone had wasted their energy climbing that far to trash things.
Those rooms looked relatively untouched. She looked in the first one on the right and then the second and then the one Greg had used...
Nothing changed. Nothing HAD changed. She'd been up there, in the old days, more than once. Nothing seemed to have even been touched. He must have walked away with nothing but the shirt on his back. Frowning at that wrongness, she backed out, looking around her to see a door opening on the last flight of stairs.
It had only gotten better as she climbed higher. She didn't see any point in stopping there. But when she reached the top of those stairs, she did stop, the air leaving her lungs in a long sigh as she forgot to breathe.