Chapter Fourteen
Maybe it was another one of those things people understood instinctively, or maybe Shane had just picked it up somewhere along the way, perhaps from a magazine article or one of those awful afternoon talk shows: relationships that begin as a result of some outside adversity rarely last once the crisis is past.
At first, Shane told himself that it was silly to even think about it. He and Christiana didn’t have a
relationship
, per se. At least not in the romantic sense. He’d just been the safe one. The good guy. That’s how it had always been in high school.
I can’t go out with you, Shane,
the girls would always say,
you’re too nice. You’re like my brother
. And they always smiled as they said it, crookedly, as if to say
silly rabbit, Trix are for kids; pretty girls are for bad boys. Nice guys just draw pictures and watch Star Trek, but that’s enough, isn’t it?
Shane knew that that was less true of grown-up romance than it was of the inbred world of high school dating, but it was a hard perception to shake. Sure, Christiana had come to him, had even called him first when she’d needed someone safe and solid in the midst of the awfulness with Randy. But that couldn’t be because she felt anything meaningful for him. Shane was a
nice guy
. He was safe. What kind of woman chooses to be with the
safe
guy?
Of course, Steph had chosen him, but that had been different. Shane had pursued her, pursued her like he’d never pursued any other woman in his life. She had let him, but she had never fallen for him, at least not like he had for her. Her love for him had been a choice that she’d made, based on logic and practicality. It had not been something that consumed her, drove her, fueled her passions. Later, she
had
come to feel some passion for him—Shane was sure of it, in his deepest heart—but that had only come as a result of her initial clinical choice to be with him. She hadn’t chosen to be with him because she couldn’t be without him, but because he’d scored well enough on the checklist of good husband requirements. Shane had gotten lucky with Steph. She was beautiful, intelligent and rock solid, even if she had been a little clinical and pragmatic.
But Christiana was different. She’d never choose a man based on how he scored on any mental checklist. If that had been the case, frankly, she’d have never been with Randy. Somehow, Shane sensed that Christiana was a woman driven slightly more by her passions than she was by logic, despite her formidable intellect, and despite how she might appear to the casual observer.
Christiana was a closet romantic. She’d probably hate being called that, and yet Shane felt certain that it was true, nonetheless. After all, she’d given up a solid future law career, funded by her lawyer parents, to pursue a nebulous livelihood in the world of art representation. She had done so merely because she liked art and wanted to share it with the world, despite the fact that she herself couldn’t create it. If that wasn’t the choice of a heart-and-soul romantic, Shane didn’t know what was.
Women like that didn’t fall for the
safe
guys. They fell for troublesome men with shady histories and dangerous demeanors. A woman like Christiana might fall in love with a starving artist, but never the trustworthy go-to commercial artist, the one who wore button-down shirts and khakis to his shift, who listened to the foreman in his head more than he did the muse. Things like that just didn’t happen.
No matter how much he might want them to.
Randy had been killed in the accident. Shane knew that right from the beginning, from the moment he’d seen the paramedic standing next to the closed ambulance, smoking a cigarette.
That afternoon, Christiana had gotten a call from Randy’s mother. Shane had been with her at the time, at Greenfeld’s office, having just unloaded the Florida painting. Christiana answered, and Shane could hear the woman’s voice on the other end, shrill and nearly incoherent. Her baby was dead, poor Randy, poor sweet little man.
Christiana listened and nodded and offered admirable condolences, and Shane thought he knew everything he needed to know about the woman on the phone. Randy had been the sort of boy who'd killed grasshoppers with a magnifying glass, burning their eyes out while they twitched on the sidewalk, and this woman had been the one who’d decided, from the very beginning, simply not to notice. Her perception of him had probably stopped developing around the time he'd turned five years old. To her, he was still a baby, still a sticky-faced toddler with skinned knees and tousled hair. After all, that was a far more pleasant image than that of the sullen, grown-up man with the cruel streak, the one who was just as likely to glower at her with murder in his eyes as he was to kiss her on the cheek.
Shane had been sitting at Greenfeld’s desk while Christiana talked to the woman, and Shane had doodled on a yellow Post-it pad with a dull pencil. He’d doodled the woman’s face, narrow and haggard, her eyes stunned wide, a phone clutched to her ear, her mouth hanging open, no teeth showing. As he sketched, the story grew in his mind, sending out tendrils of root, forming a disturbing scene.
The woman knew her son had been dangerous, but had hidden that knowledge away, buried it, refused to look at it. Part of her had always been afraid—terrified, even—that her baby would someday take away someone else’s baby. She’d expected him to show up at her house someday with a shapeless figure in his arms, wrapped in Glad garbage bags, or with blood all over his hands, telling her not to call the police, that he’d had a little accident, but that he could take care of it himself.
And she knew that she would do whatever he told her to do. Because secrets have their own kind of inertia. At a certain point, you just can’t stop them anymore. The weight of them will crush you. She would hide him, and protect him, and not ask any questions, no matter what.
Even now, she had not called Christiana just to commiserate, to share her woe with the only other woman who had been close to her son. She had called Christiana to ensure that she, Christiana, was still alive, that her son had not murdered her before barreling off to kill himself, to plow his car into a tree on some nameless back road, grinning to himself and saying,
you aren’t out of my reach yet, babe. Being dead won’t save you. I’m coming. Just you wait…
Shane stopped doodling. The scene in his head was fed by the picture on the paper, and that had been fed by the voice of the woman blathering incoherently on the phone (was it just grief that Shane heard in the woman’s voice? Or was there a little secret relief, as well?) but it wasn’t a nice picture, and he didn’t want to think about it anymore.
He dropped the pencil onto Greenfeld’s desk, stripped the Post-it off the rest of the pad, and tore it in two. He balled the pieces up in his fist. Christiana looked at him, at his fist, then at his face, meeting his eyes. She shook her head sadly, listening to the woman on the phone.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right. He’s in a better place now.”
But Shane could tell she didn’t believe it. And neither did the woman on the phone.
Shane had invited Christiana to stay over at the cottage that night, but once they discovered that Randy was dead, there didn’t seem to be any point anymore. To his surprise, however, she didn’t seem to have any intentions of changing the plan.
Without a word, she drove them from Greenfeld’s office to her downtown St. Louis apartment, a little duplex in a long narrow street, crowded with small, old houses and sweetgum trees. Shane followed her inside and mooned around the kitchen while she gathered a few things.
Outside the little kitchen window he could see the corner of the rabbit hutch. He wondered if the rabbit inside was all right. He thought it would probably need watered and fed, but when he stepped out onto the back porch he found the hutch empty, its door neatly shut and clasped. The name painted over the door was “Winston”.
Shane couldn’t know for sure, but he had a creeping certainty that “Winston” had been in the car with Randy when he’d crashed. He had probably been on the passenger’s seat, inside a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. Randy may not have succeeded in capturing Christiana, but he’d managed to take two rabbits with him before he punched his ticket. For a guy like him, that probably wasn’t too bad a score. It was sad, but it could have been much worse.
It
would
have been, if not for a few stumps of chalk and Shane’s skilled fingers. He shuddered when he thought about it.
And yet, some part of him knew that the story wasn’t completely over. Christiana wasn’t safe yet. Not while Marlena was haunting the cottage, watching, filled with her inexplicable anger and misery.
At first, the ghost had been pretty frightening, but she had also been sad, confused, even a little quaint. Now, all that was changing. She was no longer quaint. Now she was just frightening, especially because of her increasingly neurotic and frantic rage.
Worst of all, Shane had a low, deep suspicion that Marlena was powerful, more so than she let on, maybe more so than even she knew. He thought of the last time he’d been out to the site of Riverhouse, thought of the way it had seemed to shimmer in the air over its dead foundation, faint, ghost-like in the twilight.
Was Marlena responsible for that? Or was he? Had he conjured the house again simply by painting it? Neither answer was a comforting one.
For the first time, he wondered if he should destroy the Riverhouse painting. It would pain him to do so, but he thought he could. If it would diminish Marlena’s power, if it would help keep Christiana safe, then he would do it.
But not yet. There was still one more painting in his head, one more addition to the Shane Bellamy Insanity Stairs series. When that was finished, when the set was complete, then he would destroy the Riverhouse painting. Maybe he’d destroy them all. Not yet, though. His curiosity about the last painting was simply too great a force to deny.
Besides, Marlena had never shown any sign that she could affect things in the physical world. Even when she attempted to speak, the most she seemed capable of was that awful, rattling sigh. She could be rather frightening, but surely she couldn’t pose any actual danger to himself or Christiana. Even the chalk drawing on the cellar floor—if, indeed, Marlena had been responsible for it—hadn’t he thought that it might just as likely have been a warning as a threat?
He was rationalizing, of course. He was aware of it, but that didn’t change anything. It
had
occurred to him that it might be dangerous to allow Christiana to stay at the cottage, at least for any length of time. But surely not for one or two days. After all, Marlena listened to Shane. She had heeded him ever since that very first night, when she had first appeared and he had shown her the silver baby rattle. She watched him paint sometimes, and he sometimes watched her go on her nightly rounds, haunting through the library and kitchen, up the studio stairs, restlessly roaming, her black eyes solemn. She was his muse. She may not like Christiana, but he felt confident that he could keep Marlena mollified for a day or two.
Nobody intends to get into an abusive relationship,
Christiana had said.
Some of us just don’t intend
not
to
.
Shane shuddered as he stood on the back porch of Christiana’s apartment, looking into the empty hutch. He touched it, leaned on it with his right hand. The new rabbit’s name had been painted over the previous one, but Shane could still read the original name, faint under a coat of white primer: Percy.
I kept thinking about how she’d died on my lap,
Christiana had told him in her calm, expressionless voice.
As I was stroking her fur. I hadn’t been able to protect her…
Shane shook his head, as if to dislodge his nagging, worrisome thoughts.
Ghosts can’t hurt the
living,
he told himself,
everybody knows that
. And then, a remnant of a nearly forgotten dream, a whisper:
boundary lands… rivers and valleys, shores and cliffs… here, the line is a lot deeper…
Christiana poked her head out of the back door. She had a duffle bag slung over her shoulder. She was ready.
Later, at the cottage, she said she would sleep on the couch, but Shane refused. He insisted that she take his bed again, and that he would camp out in the sunroom. He told her that he had, in fact, slept the entire night away there, konked out on the big couch, on the night she had arrived. That was probably why he hadn’t heard her pounding on the front door. She eventually agreed, reluctantly, and after a light dinner (pasta with olive oil and sautéed onions and garlic), a half glass of wine (a cheap Shiraz Shane had found in the basement), and an hour’s worth of an old Hitchcock movie on AMC (Vertigo), Christiana had headed off to bed.
Shane listened while she got ready. When she went into the bathroom and closed the door, he ducked into the bedroom and changed into a pair of old sweats and a tee shirt. The bedroom was a safe place, Shane was sure of it. He’d never seen Marlena there, only in the doorway as she passed by, heading silently up the studio stairs. Christiana would be safe from her there in his bed, or so he truly believed.
