A Shadow of Death in The Woods (20 page)

Chapter 32

No-Date Dancing

Loneliness can grind on you. It stretches the time until it appears to stop. I missed my family especially the children. I phoned Katherine several times over the past few months to see if she had mellowed and would consider at a short supervised visit. The answer was no each time and finally she got so frustrated with my calls that she asked me not to call again. Something powerful was driving that woman and I was sure it was Mama and money. It was probably money for the children because Katherine wouldn’t do this for money for herself. Katherine made good money working. My bet was that it had to do with the children’s financial future. At the time I couldn’t come close to matching Mama’s financial gifts or promises of gifts. Now with my new job it was a different story. I got nowhere talking with Katherine. I called Bill and he was no more help than Katherine. It was completely out of the question to approach Mama because I had no proof that she was the problem. I was depressed. I liked to dance and I thought dancing would take my mind off my troubles. You can’t dance and think about troubles at the same time.

I was sitting around my Cabin apartment when Lydia came to mind. She was just down the hallway and yet in many respects she was light years away. She was a piece of work. I got along with The Cat much better than I got along with her. It was kind of funny. The Cat was the one with the terrible reputation but it was Lydia who was the terror as far as I was concerned. Lydia had some background experiences that sent her life into some weird places. In an abstract way it was sad, but in a real sense she was a pain in the butt. With that said, she could dance.

I thought about asking Lydia to dance. We could go downstairs and dance but that seemed a little strange to me although we had done that many times during our practice sessions. I was in the mood for going out dancing. That would take some strategy since dating for her was taboo. I didn’t want to date either; I just wanted to dance to make the blues go away for a few hours. I decided to risk it.

I phoned her. She was immediately suspicious of my motivations but I detected some interest in the dancing. After a long, and partially insane discussion, I was able to convince her to accompany me to The Gin Mill for some rug cutting. I had to emphasize that it was not a date; we were just going to the Mill to dance.

They had a band there that wasn’t too bad. The only thing that I didn’t like about it was the volume of the music. Why is it that people now days have to have the music at ear splitting levels? The irony is that the sound level is way above what is allowed in industry by OSHA to prevent permanent hearing loss. We are going to have a generation or two of deaf people. To combat the music volume I often wore ear plugs and I brought some along for Lydia. It was stupid to have to do that but there it was.

We drove my truck to the Mill. My pickup would fit right in with the rest of the mountain vehicles. There was a cover charge to get in to pay for the band. I paid and we went inside. It was crowded and the music was blasting. We hit the dance floor right away. No sense in ordering drinks when you had no table to put them on.

Lydia was dressed in slacks and a blouse, which was sensible for this place. She was radiant. Her auburn hair bounced as she danced. She was a vision and many eyes followed her moves. My size was an advantage in keeping all the would-be predators from descending on her. We danced the whole evening and just as predicted I forgot all of my troubles. I relaxed and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The evening passed too quickly. Before I knew it, it was late at night or rather early in the morning and we were headed back to The Cabin. Both of us were tired and there was no talk, which was fine with me. I would have had no idea what to say to her. Best not to wake up the sleeping tornado.

I went into my bedroom and undressed. The Cat woke up, meowed and yawned a huge yawn. It must have made him tired because he went right back to sleep. The dancing had tired me out. I had a warm drink to slow down and it made me sleepy. I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Chapter 33

Spring Flowers and Lydia

Call me sentimental if you want but I love flowers. The best flowers are wildflowers in situ, especially in the spring of the year. After a hard winter of snow and cold, nothing is more rejuvenating than searching for wildflowers in the forest. It is Mother Nature’s way of telling us that there is life after winter.

I hadn’t been in the forest looking for wildflowers in years. I was in the army, then in school and then too busy with the family and working. That was a sad commentary on my life. Now that I am living in the woods, it reminded me of those earlier days filled with happiness before my sister died.

When I was a boy, I used to take my sister into the forest, looking for flowers. She was such a delight with long brown hair. I liked to walk quietly in the woods but she laughed and shrieked every time she found a flower. She was a bundle of sunshine even in winter. In the spring she bounced through the woods, laughing. I missed her laughter. I hadn’t thought about it before but I hadn’t gone wildflower hunting since she died. I thought my not going wildflower hunting was because I was too busy, but maybe I was too busy because I couldn’t go wildflower hunting without my sister.

We looked for trilliums. We used to find them in red and in white. I am sure they come in other colors. I am not an expert on wildflowers, just an observer of what I see. Some people say that the red ones will give you a headache so we were not allowed to bring those home. Other flowers we carefully picked and took home for Mom to see. We put them in water, trying to keep them as long as possible.

Sometimes we found trailing arbutus. I can remember my father picking them and taking them to my mother. I always suspected that there was a meaning to his actions that wasn’t shared with us kids. My mother always smiled and got a dreamy look in her eyes when he gave her the flowers.

It is now illegal to pick some wildflowers. One of these is the lady’s slipper, which is an orchid. I have seen them in pink and in yellow. They are relatively rare and hence the bar against picking them. It is a treat to find them.

I trained my sister to walk with care and not trample the flowers. Especially the dogtooth flowers. They are often hard to spot. They are little yellow flowers with striped green leaves.

I decided that I wanted to tramp the woods around The Cabin, looking for wildflowers. It made me sad to think about going without my sister. It wouldn’t be the same. She had been dead several years but I still missed her and the thought of going wildflower hunting without her made me sad.

Then I had a thought. Why not take Lydia? Why not indeed? I could think of a hundred reasons for not taking her. She was generally a pain in the butt. However, she was at The Cabin and as long as she wasn’t too big of a pain, it would be better having her along than being alone.

I knocked on her door. Typically she didn’t answer the door and instead yelled out, “Who is it?”

“Jack. Your neighbor.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know if you would like to go wildflower hunting with me.”

“What?”

I repeated my request. Finally, she opened the door and looked at me. I think she was trying to figure out what my angle was. I didn’t have an angle.

We bandied back and forth until finally she was convinced that I was serious and was not up to some trick. I never played tricks on her but she was suspicious of all men except her father and Bob. The clincher was when I threw in an offer of a meal back at my place after the hunt. I had chili ready to eat and I had baked bread that morning. Those along with some red wine should warm even Lydia’s heart. Well, in her case, just a little.

Finally, convinced of my sincere motives and my promise that it wasn’t a date, she agreed to go. We donned light jackets and set out. The woods were full of life coming out into the open. The birds were back and chattering in the trees. The squirrels took exception to our being in the woods and complained loudly.

I loved the feel of the springy, rotting leaf bed beneath our feet. It was soil in the making.

We walked along silently. I could tell Lydia was nervous because she didn’t fully trust me. She had more demons than a horror house. I didn’t know what had happened to her but she had had a terrible experience with a man at some time in her life. Calculating the odds, my money was that she had been sexually molested. I doubted that it was her father because she had a close relationship with him. It is a sad fact that a high percentage, somewhere around twenty percent, of women are sexually abused at some point in their lives.

Women are essentially mystery packages for men. However, one thing that I had learned was that you could not under any circumstances ask what was bothering her. One could only hold steady and hope that some day there was enough trust to break down the barriers.

Meanwhile we started finding flowers. Whenever one of us found a flower, we pointed it out so the other could see it. We got so busy that Lydia started to relax.

With no warning, I heard a big limb snap off from a tree. It made a sharp crack, like gunfire. I could feel the blood leave my face. It turned deadly quiet. I could hear nothing. There was a man in front of me with a questioning look on his face. Then his head split open and he fell to the ground. A wave of nauseousness swept over me. I knew I was going to be sick. I felt weak and my knees started to buckle. I dropped to my knees and bent over. I put my hands down to stop the vertigo. In a moment I started to feel a little better and I heard a voice far away. It was calling my name. It was a woman’s voice filled with deep concern, maybe a little panicky. The woods came into focus. I was lying on my side. I remembered I was in the woods, looking for wildflowers with Lydia. My brain made the connection; it was Lydia calling my name.

“Jack! Jack! My god, are you okay? What is happening?”

I slowly got up and told her that I was okay. Strictly speaking that was not the truth. I was very shaky but I knew I had to tough it out and get back to The Cabin.

We had been tramping for several miles, making a big circle around The Cabin. It was starting to get chilly as the sun dropped below the trees. By the time we got back to my apartment we were pretty cold. The chili was going to be perfect. I was beginning to feel better and I was getting hungry.

Lydia dropped her coat off at her apartment and probably used that as an opportunity to use her bathroom. I turned up the heat on the chili and washed up. I was setting the table when Lydia came back.

“Want some help?” she asked.

“No. I am almost finished. Thanks. It will take a few minutes for the chili to get hot. Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Actually, I am kind of too cold for wine.”

“How about an apple brandy? It is total bull that brandy will warm you up but it makes you feel better until you do get warm. And I’ll start a fire in the fireplace.” I always kept kindling and wood stacked in the fireplace so all I had to do was open the flue and strike a match. I did so and in just a few minutes we had a nice fire going. I poured two brandies and put on some easy listening music.

I could see Lydia starting to get nervous and I realized that I was making all the moves a guy on the make would make. I tried to calm her by keeping a good distance from her. It reminded me of being around a big cat. You always had to be on your toes so as not to spook the nervous animal.

I invited her to sit and I took the seat farthest from her. I leaned back in a comfortable position. No sense for both of us to be nervous. Besides the quickest way to calm her was to be calm myself.

I said, “Well, I enjoyed our tramp through the woods except of course for my poor spell. I thank you for going with me. I used to take my sister into the woods when we were little kids, looking for wildflowers. I miss those times.”

As I sat before the fire, letting the warmth soak in, it began to dawn on me what had happened in the woods. Not only did I have a flashback but Lydia witnessed the whole thing. What if she mentioned it to Bob? Or, worse, what if she mentioned it in front of Mike. Mike’s reflex would be to kill me out of fear that I couldn’t control myself. Mike acted the friend but I never completely trusted him. I always felt that one reason I was living at The Cabin was to keep me under surveillance. If I proved unreliable, even Bob couldn’t save my life.

I had to find a way to keep Lydia from telling anyone about what happened today. I couldn’t tell her the whole story and burden her with things that she didn’t need to know. I decided to take her into my confidence and tell her enough to demonstrate how important it was to me that she not talk about my episode in the woods today.

Before I could gather my thoughts she said, “You know, Jack, you scared the Hell out of me today. What if you had passed out? What was I to do? There was no way I could carry or have dragged you out of the woods. I wasn’t even sure where we were. How would I tell a rescue squad how to find you? Jesus. I was scared.”

I had never heard Lydia swear this much. I had been so upset I hadn’t thought about the effects this would have on her. I plunged ahead, “Lydia, I have to tell you a secret and ask a huge favor of you. I want to tell you something but you must swear never to tell anyone, including Bob. Actually, especially Bob. It could mean my life. Can you swear to that?”

She looked at me quizzically and finally said, “Yes.”

“Thank you. Some time ago something bad happened to me in a woods that looked like the woods we were in today. It was a very bad experience. When that big limb broke off, making the noise, it reminded me of that time in the woods. I had a flashback and it made me sick. I want you to promise me that you will never tell anyone about what happened today. Okay?”

Lydia sat looking at me and thinking. Finally, she asked, “Why would this mean your life?”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you too much but if this got back to some people, they might take it as a sign that they couldn’t trust me.”

Lydia said nothing. She sat looking at me but I could see that she was running the whole thing through that brilliant mind of hers. In the end she said, “Oh my god, I just figured out the whole thing. It makes perfect sense. I have had my suspicions but now I have it all figured out.”

I didn’t want to ask her what she thought she had figured out. I wanted to leave it so that she had deniability for legal reasons. I said, “I don’t want to get into what you might have figured out. I just need to know if I can trust you not to tell anyone about my episode in the woods today.”

“Yes. You can trust me. I will never mention it to a soul. You have a terrible burden.”

“Lydia, we all have demons. Some are worse than others.” She gave me a strange look but said nothing.

“Hey look. I think the chili is ready to eat.” We sat down to a nice meal of chili, fresh bread, butter (real) and red wine. I always eat real butter. Just by saying “real” butter shows you how messed up the food industry has made things. Butter is butter and it is always real. The problem is that the food industry, especially restaurants, serve what they call butter but it is a synthetic. It doesn’t taste as good and eventually nutritionists will determine that butter is better for us than the phony baloney.

Also, you should never heat butter before putting it on bread. Restaurants do that and it is wrong. The butter soaks in the bread too much. I like to toast my bread to have with chili. I sparingly spread just enough butter on the toast to give it flavor.

Lydia didn’t want toast. That was fine. In fact it was probably the normal way to go. She loved the bread. The only better bread you are going to get is bread that comes directly from the oven. I couldn’t do that today because we were in the woods.

As we ate I thought through my situation. I wanted to trust her but could I? I knew that she wanted me out of The Cabin and I just gave her a guaranteed way of doing just that. All she had to do was tell the Officers-of-the-Club that I was a wacko and I would be whacked. I would be out of The Cabin and out of her hair permanently. That would put my death on her conscience if she had one.

We are all going to die so that part is not open to question. However, the timing was another matter all together. I wanted to push it off way into the future. To do that it was crucial that my little spell in the woods not get back to Mike. Would Lydia keep her mouth shut?

Then I started to panic. What if I pulled this kind of stunt in front of one of the Officers-of-the-Club or a business client? Now that would be great. I needed counseling but that was out of the question because I could not disclose the cause.

I also questioned the advisability of counseling. Posttraumatic stress syndrome victims as far as I could tell seldom got much relief from counseling. I believed that the best path was to forget the incident, which meant reliving it weekly in counseling was not a good idea. In any case I had no choice. C’est la vie, which is French for you’re screwed.