The Cabin on Souder Hill Read online

  No scar. All his fingers. Everything she already knew but wanted visual proof of. She wanted Pink to have proof as well, some confirmation that he had not imagined everything. Could anything do that now? Could Michelle’s account possibly stitch together Pink’s two disparate worlds? She decided to tell Fisk about everything, the ceremony, the snowstorm, coming down the mountain, the dusk-to-dawn light. Validate Pink’s experience and at the same time, feel no responsibility for explaining it.

  “Cliff, everything you’re about to hear is going to sound strange,” she told him. “Just don’t freak out on me.”

  “Sure.” Cliff followed her into the house. Fisk stood and shook Cliff’s hand.

  “We’re thankful your wife is back,” Sheriff Fisk said to Cliff. Pink stared at Cliff, his face leached of life.

  “You!” Pink said. “You . . . you’re dead!”

  Cliff glanced at Michelle then at the sheriff. “Excuse me?” Cliff said.

  Pink trembled, moving in a wide arc around Cliff, knocking a picture from the wall as he scooted past him, giving Cliff wide berth. “You’re dead!” Pink looked over at Fisk. “Christ, Loudon, don’t you remember? You pried the damn gun from his hand, remember?”

  Cliff looked shocked, glancing toward Michelle then back to Pink, the sheriff.

  Pink implored the sheriff to remember, recounting the details of Cliff’s suicide, detailing the blood, the snow. Fisk urged Pink to stop.

  “Let’s go, Pink,” the sheriff said. “Sorry for the disturbance, folks.”

  Pink refused to go. Fisk grabbed him by the arm and led him toward the door.

  “Dammit, Loudon. I want some answers,” Pink said, jerking his arm free. “She knows what’s going on. Make her tell you!”

  “Not today, Pink,” Fisk said. “Let’s go.”

  The sheriff pushed Pink out onto the deck then led him down the stairs. The two men argued in the driveway for a few minutes before Michelle finally heard car doors slam. She looked over at Cliff.

  “What the hell was that about?” Cliff said.

  “Let’s go home,” Michelle said. “I can’t wait to see Cassie.”

  Chapter 40

  Pink sat in Fisk’s office trying to find the thread of his life. Fisk fired questions at him that made no sense. Pink bristled in the chair, annoyed. Elmer looked on from the doorway. Pink felt he was purposely blocking it, in case Pink tried to leave.

  “Pink, I need to know where Isabelle is?” Fisk said.

  “What the hell is going on here, Louden? She’s probably at home like I’ve told you a hundred times. Let’s drive up there. You’ll see.”

  “Pink . . . she’s not there. Trust me. I need to know—”

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, Louden? Christ, let’s drive up there. Have you called Claire? She can clear all of this up. Let’s call Claire.”

  Fisk looked over at Elmer. “Let’s just leave Claire out of this for now. Besides, we spoke with her after Isabelle disappeared. She had no idea where you were. All she could tell us was you and Isabelle had a big blowup the night before . . . Hell, Pink, we’ve already been through all this years ago.”

  Pink shot up from his chair and swung his arm across Fisk’s desk, knocking the lamp to the floor. “We ain’t been through nothing, Louden! I don’t have one goddamn clue what the hell you’re talking about!”

  Elmer bolted toward Pink to restrain him. Pink elbowed Elmer, catching him under the chin. When Elmer regained his balance, he drew his weapon.

  “Okay, okay now, everybody grab hold of your senses, here,” Fisk shouted, jumping up from his chair. “Elmer, put that away. Pink, sit back down.”

  “What the hell you gonna do with that, Elmer? The way I recollect it, you couldn’t hit a bull’s ass with a bass fiddle!”

  “Okay, Pink. Enough,” Fisk said. “We’re making no headway here. Elmer, get your coat. We’re taking a ride.”

  Elmer followed behind Pink. He reached to open the back door of the police car for Pink. Pink stopped.

  “You ride back there. I’ll ride up front with Louden,” Pink said, and he reached for the front door handle.

  “No, Pink. I need you in the back,” Fisk said. “Don’t make this difficult.”

  When Pink was seated, Elmer closed the door and slid into the front seat.

  They drove in silence, the radio bleating out garbled noises. Pink looked at his hands, his trousers. The bleeding had stopped, but he still hadn’t had a chance to clean up. His pants were stained and ripped. His fingers and palms were covered in small cuts and abrasions. He suddenly felt dizzy and thought he might need Fisk to pull over. Just then, he was visited by a strange image: a woman in a lavender nightgown, wet and dark, imploring him toward her. The image vanished too quickly for him to be sure, but she almost looked like Isabelle.

  “Pink, now don’t go crazy on me here,” Fisk said as he pulled into Pink’s driveway.

  Pink looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes. His house was fully engulfed in kudzu. Leafy vines writhed up the siding and along the roof, covering the gutters like some insidious green predator. Windows were broken out. The porch was rotted away. Light fixtures were missing and loose wires dangling from ragged holes.

  Pink reached for the handle, but there was none, and he was unable to release himself from the back seat. “Goddamn it, Elmer, open this fucking door!”

  Elmer looked over at the sheriff, then got out of the car and jerked the door open. Pink sprung from the car and darted toward the house. He stopped dead and stared at it for a few seconds before spinning back toward Fisk. “What the fuck is going on here, Fisk?”

  Pink stood motionless, his mouth open, his arms limp at his sides. A moment later, his large frame listed to the left, his eyes rolling back in his head. Before Fisk could reach him, Pink was down.

  Chapter 41

  On the drive back to Atlanta, Cliff apologized to Michelle, taking full responsibility for her getting lost, saying that if he hadn’t gone searching for the light, she would never have gone looking for him. He explained about going down the mountainside, losing sight of the cabin and the light, and getting sick. He said it was like the flu or something, then he passed out. When he woke the next morning, he was lost. He was weak and wandered most of the day, resting often, finding refuge that night under a hemlock. He used his jacket to cover himself. The next morning, he felt better and found a dirt road where an old man with a chainsaw was cutting firewood.

  “He felt sorry for me,” Cliff said. “Gave me a sandwich and insisted on driving me all the way home. I don’t know how, but I had ended up almost twenty miles from the cabin.”

  Cliff never went through the gateway! The realization hit Michelle like a punch. If she had just waited another day, Michelle thought, an old man would have pulled into the driveway and Cliff would have gotten out, come into the cabin and taken a shower, telling her about the rain, being sick and lost in the woods. And that would have been the end of it.

  *****

  Back in Atlanta, Cassie wanted to know about Michelle’s experience. Michelle fabricated details surrounding her absence, invented scenarios of amnesia and isolation. Using memories of Charlene House, Michelle pieced together a story of falling and forgetting who she was, claiming to have been found and cared for by an old woman secluded away in the woods. She even called the old woman Charlene House. Michelle told Cassie and Cliff that Mrs. House had no phone, no car, no connection to town. In the evenings, Mrs. House would return to the cabin with a possum or coon to make into a stew.

  “You ate a raccoon?” Cassie asked.

  The day her memory returned, Michelle told Cassie, Mrs. House escorted her through the woods to within a hundred yards of the highway, where Michelle could hear the traffic, could see the colored flashes of metal rush past beyond the trees.

  “Probably the raccoon made you rememb
er,” Cassie said, chuckling. “Your brain probably figured it better recall something quick before you had to eat a skunk.” Cassie seemed content with Michelle’s story. Michelle wasn’t sure it convinced Cliff though.

  “I’m just so glad to be home, baby,” Michelle said, hugging Cassie to her.

  *****

  The days spun off routinely with swim meets, meals, and homework. Cliff talked about selling the dealership, moving back to Maine, working for his brother selling suits. “Remember how you loved Maine?” Cliff said one morning at breakfast. Michelle recalled it perfectly—the shiny expanse of ocean, the snow in winter, always alive, always new.

  “Cassie would never go for it,” she said.

  “Yes, she will. We already talked about it,” Cliff said. “I told Cassie I couldn’t stay in the house without you, that I wanted to go back to Maine. Cassie agreed, but she told me not to give up on finding you. And I hadn’t. But I was scared.”

  Michelle wasn’t sure about the plan—or Cliff.

  *****

  On Mondays and Thursdays Michelle helped Darcy at the store. Michelle told her sister the same story she’d told Cliff and Cassie. She wondered if the knot would always tighten in her chest when she recounted the lie. Or would the story eventually feel like truth?

  One afternoon Michelle was reading by the pool. Cassie stepped out onto the patio in her yellow bathing suit, a Coke can in one hand, the cordless phone in the other. “Mom, for you.”

  Michelle didn’t want to answer any more questions. A reporter from the Atlanta Globe called several times a day wanting Michelle’s story. “People love to read about stories of survival,” the woman told Michelle. “It gives them hope.” Cliff handled most of the calls, dismissing them with promises of future interviews.

  “They’ll forget about it by the end of the week, when the next big story breaks,” Cliff had assured her. She hoped he was right.

  Michelle took the phone from Cassie. “Hello?”

  The woman on the other end introduced herself as Lulu Martin. Michelle got up and went into the house, leaving Cassie on the patio. Michelle hurried into the dining room and sat in one of the chairs. Lulu said she was calling because of Pink Souder, explaining that she was his mother’s best friend.

  “I know who you are,” Michelle said.

  She could hear Lulu’s breathing, but the woman fell silent.

  “Pink is in the hospital,” she finally told Michelle. “He had a nervous breakdown.”

  Lulu asked Michelle to recount everything that happened so that maybe she could help Pink. Michelle told her every detail she could recall, from the moment Cliff went down the mountain in search of the light to the evening of the snowstorm; the faceless people, Pink showing up at the cabin with the sheriff, and about Pink seeing Cliff—who was supposed to be dead.

  “I’m sorry,” Michelle said. “Mrs. Souder warned me, but I couldn’t stand to see him suffer that night. It was awful.”

  Lulu assured her it wasn’t her fault. “If anybody’s to blame, it’s Mattie, Ida, and me. But there is nothing to be done about that now. I’m sorry you were involved.”

  Lulu gave Michelle her phone number and told her to call if she needed to talk and apologized for any trouble it may have caused Michelle’s family.

  “Is Pink going to be okay?” Michelle asked.

  “He’s doing better . . . but he’s still confused. I’m picking him up from the hospital in the morning. He’s going to stay with me for a while. He has no family here anymore.”

  “Lulu,” Michelle said, uncomfortable with what she was about to share with the old woman. “I don’t know how to tell you . . . you’re dead in Pink’s reality. He won’t . . .”

  “We’ve already been through that,” she said. “It set off another episode for Pink, but he seems okay with it now . . . maybe because he knows they’ll release him from the hospital if he can accept it.”

  After hanging up, Michelle stared at the floor, the events of the past week wheeling through her, a dizzying spin of emotions and images.

  “Mom?” Cassie said.

  Michelle turned to see Cassie standing in the doorway to the dining room. She didn’t know how long Cassie had been standing there, but her arms were folded across her chest as if she were cold and her eyes were caught beneath a swell of tears.

  “Hey, baby, are you okay?” Michelle stood to hug her daughter.

  “Is it true? What you told that woman on the phone?”

  The buoyancy Michelle had felt a moment earlier relaying everything to Lulu flattened under a surge of humiliation. Her skin tingled.

  Michelle hugged her closer. Cassie felt like clay in her arms, no bones in her body.

  “I can’t explain it, Cassie,” Michelle said. “I only know what I think happened. Do you understand? I don’t know if any of it is true. That’s what scares me.”

  Cassie held her tighter.

  “Does Dad know?” Cassie asked.

  “No.”

  Chapter 42

  A week later, amidst a maelstrom of fears, nightmares, and anxieties, Michelle called Cliff and told him she wanted to sell the cabin. She was having difficulty focusing—her dreams and memories shaping every waking thought. The energy of the cabin pulled at her constantly, a nagging and persistent thread running through each and every day. Even sleep provided no solace. Her dreams spewed up ghastly images of people shot through the head, or buried up to their neck in snow, or frozen to death. Or the reoccurring figure in black, its face hidden by the shadow of a large hood, coming toward her like death itself. She awoke crying out, sweating, afraid to drift back into sleep. Perhaps by severing all ties with their mountain retreat, she might orient herself back in her own existence.

  Cliff agreed without hesitation to selling the cabin. He could not see going back up there either. “Too many ghosts,” he said. He’d meant it metaphorically, but for Michelle, the ghosts were real, always there.

  “Michelle, I don’t want to push you . . . but . . . could we talk about us this weekend?”

  Michelle was relieved Cliff hadn’t fought her when she’d suggested he find his own apartment for a while, but he brought up their marriage every time they spoke. “I need time, Cliff,” Michelle said. “It would be so helpful if you could just not bring it up for now.”

  That night, the woman in the lavender gown came in Michelle’s dreams, her lips moving. Michelle strained to hear what she was saying, but there was no sound. Some nights a black panther stalked Michelle, moving ever closer, Michelle and the animal linked on some tangential plane of existence, revolving against a stationary landscape, changing, fading, aging. She woke up screaming.

  “Mom,” Cassie said, shaking her. “It’s just a dream.”

  Just a dream. Michelle trembled. She thought her eyes were open, but for a few seconds, even though she knew she was in bed, she could see only the panther. She looked at the clock. Three thirty-three in the morning. It was black outside. They sat quietly, Cassie with her arms around Michelle’s shoulders. Her breathing came back slowly, sinking into her lungs like something foreign, slipping deeper until rooted once again in her diaphragm, filling, emptying, a million near-deaths a day.

  “Is everything okay?” Cliff asked, when they talked on the phone the next day.

  “When can we go?” Michelle asked.

  “Go?” Cliff said.

  “To the cabin. I want to sell it as soon as possible.”

  *****

  When Cassie fell asleep on the drive up to the cabin, Cliff brought up the old woman who had found Michelle. He told Michelle that there had been a Charlene House in the newspapers a few weeks earlier. Some hikers had found her dead on the Appalachian Trail, several miles from her tent and sleeping bag. She had died of exposure.

  Michelle recalled Charlene’s glacier-blue eyes, both hopeful and skeptical, the day
the old woman had left the hospital. Dead in the woods? Michelle thought. One of many possibilities. How queer it all felt.

  “That’s odd, isn’t it? That she would have the same name as the woman who found you?” Cliff said. “She died in the big snowstorm over a week ago. While you were missing. You must remember that?”

  Michelle didn’t know what to say. So there had been a snowstorm, she thought, just earlier than the one she’d experienced.

  “Look,” Cliff said. “I didn’t tell you that to make you uncomfortable, and I certainly don’t want to give you reasons to lie to me, even though I know I don’t deserve honesty. I just want us to start over. No lies. No bullshit.”

  She looked over at him, surprised he hadn’t pressed her on Pink and his ravings. Maybe he’d forgotten, but she doubted it.

  “Here’s the thing, Cliff,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what happened. It was . . . queer. So, for now . . . I hope you can accept what I’ve told you.”

  Chapter 43

  They arrived at the cabin before noon. Bright green buds sprinkled the tree branches. Daffodils lined the driveway, the sky polished to deep blue. Michelle could hardly believe this was the same place from a few weeks earlier.

  Cassie was the first one from the car, asking for the key, saying she needed to use the bathroom. She bounded up the front walk with her overnight bag and schoolbooks.

  Cliff assured Michelle it shouldn’t take more than a day to put everything in order, get the listing set up, pack the Cherokee. They might spend the night, but they’d spend it in town at the Hampton Inn.

  Michelle was halfway up the steps when she heard Cassie scream. She dropped her bag and ran for the door. Cassie was in the living room, dancing from foot to foot—part laughing, part hysterical—the cuffs of her jeans pulled up to her knees. “Get Dad! The toilet’s gone berserk! There’s water everywhere.”

  Michelle ran into the bathroom and knelt by the toilet, turning off the valve behind the tank until the water stopped flowing over the rim of the bowl. Water soaked her jeans and she half-expected to see the pentacle lying there, the way it had the night she’d gone looking for Cliff. Nothing but a cobweb in the corner. She wasn’t even sure what she’d done with the thing, where she’d left it.