When we reach the Blue Trees, I say, “Such a fruitful sojourn. Thank you. And still I have so many questions. May I see you again, my dear? Maybe when I come back through town, in about a week?”
She beams up at me. “That would belovely.”
“And perhaps I could see your place? It was Margaret’s house, yes?”
“I wish,” she says. “The original house was bulldozed long ago. But the land is the same.”
“Either way,” I say, “it’s where the magic happens.” I open my arms. “More anon, okay?”
As we hug, I realize there is one way Cyndi is like Simone: She’s short enough that I could rest my chin on her head. But I don’t. It feels like a sacrilege. Instead I absently cup her skull beneath her honey-colored hair, learning the shape of it, gazing through the Blue Trees and wondering what the world has done to her, why she had this sudden break with reality. Not that it really matters, but still. It is a curiosity. Simone waswounded, too, I know. That story about her father, and now she is adrift. There are so many lonely women, so many ways in which they’ve been hurt. It could break your heart.
Then I do see Simone, flitting among the trees like a wraith or a fairy. Or a witch.
Simone?I glimpse the bright blond of her braid between two blue trunks; I even think I see light glinting off the fountain pen she keeps tucked in it.It’s you!I scan the street for her yellow Jeep, see a flash of sneakered sole—she always wears sneakers—and then she is gone. Or has ducked behind a tree. Or maybe, I think as I detach Cyndi’s face from my previously pristine blue shirt, maybe Simone was not there at all. Maybe I wanted to see her badly enough that I dreamed her up.
Chapter 22
At Cyndi’s
The afternoon I go to Cyndi’s condo is the first day it feels like fall. October is a deceptive bitch that way, smiling at you with her lazy warmth, then parting her skirts and blasting you with cold. When I leave my hotel in the morning, there’s frost on my windshield, and there’s suddenly credence to the pumpkin everything I’ve seen for a month: coffee, candles, hand soap, bread. Orange leaves on all the bookstore sidewalk signs, and the new big books of autumn replacing summer blockbusters on the front tables. Though thankfullyAll the Lambent Soulsremains. If the trend continues, according to the numbers my editor Jayne forwards me every week, my latest novel will remain on the bestseller list well into the holiday season. Huzzah! No humbug here.
Still, I am inching ever closer to that second-book deadline, and that means I am ready to be home. The road is wonderful, and it is tiring: all those accolades, all that smiling up at readers from the signing table and making small talk about their lives while trying to spell their names right; all the unknown female bodies and unfamiliar beds. Plus all the harrowing drama with Simone. I’m not Father Time, but I’m not twenty anymore, either, and I do best churning out pages when I’m back in my study, in sweatpants andHarringtonT-shirt, getting up from the desk only to feed the fire. It’s physical, this yearning for my house, the onlysound the occasional coyote or crack of ice on the lake. There’s just one thing I have to do first.
Cyndi’s home is a triple-decker in Witchcraft Heights, squeezed in among a row of others, their lawns cluttered with toys and cordoned by chain-link fences. Cyndi’s Victorian is painted those lugubrious historically correct colors;Look for the purple house, she told me, and indeed it is, lavender with mustard, maroon, and forest-green trim. It looks exactly as you’d expect a house to look if the woman who owned it believed herself to be the descendent of witches, with a mansard roof and dormer windows from which harpies might fly on brooms. Although Cyndi lives on just the top floor, she told me, and rents out the others. It makes sense. No writer can survive on savings alone.
Cyndi is late answering the door. Her tardiness is habitual, then, not an aberration. This is a problem. We’ll need to have words about it, how she left me shivering on the porch with a bag of catnip. I press the buzzer again, counting to thirty before I release it, and canvass the street as I wait. There’s a yellow Jeep at the end of the block.Simone? Is that you?I squint, but I can’t see the driver. Get a grip, man, I tell myself. Ever since I severed communication, I’ve been seeing Simone everywhere. It’s like when I had an infestation of mice at my home in Maine, how constantly in my peripheral vision there was scrambling movement. Until I put down poison. But this is not real.Do you know how many yellow Jeeps there are in the world?Not many, actually.But why would Simone be following me?Because she can’t let me go. Because she’s desperate. There are women for whom the love of William Corwyn was not a good thing. If Simone is tailing me, all the more reason to cut her off. Simone, the Rabbit, the others: How many of these deranged stalker women is a man supposed to take?
I’m striding down the steps to confront her when the door opens behind me. “Oh, no,” Cyndi groans, putting her hands to her cheeks and making an Edvard Munch face. “I’m so sorry! The bell is broken.”
Nice of you to tell me, I think. “No worries at all,” I say.
“Your hands are freezing,” she laments. “You must have been waiting forever!”
“Only about a hundred years,” I say, smiling.
“I was writing and I totally lost track of time,” she says, ushering me up a dark stairwell. “Thank goodness I set my phone alarm to check the porch!”
“That was smart,” I agree. “But I’m so glad the writing was flowing; that’s more important than my comfort.” This is true. Almost. The smell of pumpkin spice candle and cat litter grows stronger as we approach her door. I thought Cyndi was exaggerating about the number of cats she had, but I’m starting to get a bad feeling.
“Do you really have nineteen cats?” I ask, as we enter a foyer that seethes with sinuous shadows, coiling, twining, leaping from high places. My eyes burn. Is this even legal? If I were allergic, I’d be dead.
“I do!” Cyndi says. “One for each of the murdered accused. Every time one cat crosses over, I get another from the shelter.”
“That makes sense,” I say, concealing my dismay. I’m notagainstanimals per se; it’s more that I was not raised with them as pets. They were in service to science, and never allowed inside the house.
Cyndi ushers me into a living room dominated by a magnificent mausoleum of a fireplace. It’s hard for me to stand up straight in this garret under the eaves. I have to hunch unless we’re in the center of the room. It’s a mess, a hoarder’s nest of books and melted candles and charred clumps of sage and bundles of yarn and discarded sweaters. The windows are tiny, the walls painted eggplant. God save us from creative paint colors,plumandsaffronandsageandyolk. A home should offer respite from the world outside, including visually, and in mine the walls are white, or bookshelves, or windows. Of course, every inch of this room is infested with cats. If I lived here, I’d be mad too.
Above the mantel is an oil painting of a dour bonneted woman whose eyes would follow me around the room if I could move. “Goodwife Scott, I presume,” I say.
“Yes, that’s Margaret! My relative.”
“Please tell her to turn away,” I say, “so I can do this,” and I’m bending to kiss Cyndi when something sinks hot needles into my calf. “What the fuck!” I say, lashing out with my foot.
“Oh, Reverend!” Cyndi says. She detaches a large gray cat from my pants, leaving tufted holes. It inflates and hisses at me. “That’s Reverend Burroughs. He’s usually better behaved.”
“Perhaps he senses my impure thoughts,” I say.
“Catsarepsychic.” Cyndi looks around in distress. “I meant to tidy up before you got here.”
