The Intruders

But when Madison and her mom had arrived yesterday they had been sailing under different colours. It was the wrong time of year, and cold. They unpacked in silence and dutifully walked up the beach a little way, but though her mother’s eyes appeared to be on the tide line Madison didn’t see her bend down once, even for a quartz pebble that was flushed rose pink at one end and which she’d normally have had like a shot. When they got back Maddy managed to find some Kool-Aid from last time in the cupboard but her mom had not remembered to buy Doritos or anything else. Madison had started to protest but saw how slowly her mom was moving and so she stopped. Cowgirls was closed for winter renovations so they went somewhere else and sat by a window in a big empty room overlooking a dark sea under flat clouds. She had spaghetti, which was okay, but not what you had at the beach.

That morning it had started out freezing and they had barely walked at all. Mom spent the morning near the bottom of the walkway over the dunes, huddled in a blanket, wearing dark glasses and holding a book. Mid-afternoon she went back inside, telling Madison it was all right for her to stay out but she had to remain within forty yards of the cottage.

This was okay for a while, even kind of fun to have the beach to herself. She didn’t go into the sea. Though she had enjoyed this in the past, for the last couple of years she had found herself slightly wary of large bodies of water, even when it wasn’t this cold. She built and refined a castle instead, which was fun. She dug as deep a hole as she was able.

But when it got close to five o’clock her feet started itching. She stood up, sat down. Played a little longer, though the game was getting old. It was bad enough skipping the walk in the morning, but not doing it now was really weird. The walking was important. It must be. Or why else did they always do it?

In the end she walked down to the surf alone and stood irresolute for a few moments. The beach remained deserted in both directions, the sky low and heavy and grey and the air getting cool. She waited as the first strong breeze came running ahead of the storm, worrying at the leg of her shorts and buzzing it against her leg. She waited, looking up at the dunes at the point where it hid the cottage, just over the other side.

Her mother did not appear.

She started slowly. She walked forty yards to the right, using the length of a big stride as a rough guide. It felt strange. She immediately turned around and walked back to where she’d started, and then another forty yards. This double length almost felt like walking, nearly reached the point where you forgot you were supposed to be going anywhere – because you weren’t – and instead it became just the wet rustle of waves in your ears and the blur of your feet swishing in and out of view as your eyes picked over shapes and colours between the curling water and the hard, wet sand.

And so she did it again, and again. Kept doing it until the two turning points were just like odd, curved steps. Trying to make the waves sound like they always had. Trying not to imagine where they would eat tonight, and how little they would talk. Trying not to …

Then she stopped. Slowly she bent down, hand outstretched. She picked something out of the collage of seaweed, driftwood fragments, battered homes of dead sea-dwellers. Held it up to her face, scarcely believing.

She had found an almost complete sand dollar.

It was small, admittedly, not much bigger than a quarter. It had a couple of dinks around the edges. It was a grottier grey than most, and stained green on one side. But it would count. Would have counted, that is, if things were counting as normal. Things were not.

What should have been a moment of jubilation felt heavy and dull. She realized the thing she held in her hand might as well be as big as a dinner plate and have no chips in it at all. It could be dry, sandy-golden and perfect like the ones you saw for sale in stores. It wouldn’t matter.

Madison sat down suddenly and stared at the flat shell in her hand. She made a gentle fist around it, then looked out at the sea.

She was still sitting there ten minutes later when she heard a noise. A whapping sound, as if a large bird was flying up the tide line towards her, long black wings slowly beating. Madison turned her head.

A man was standing on the beach.

He was about thirty feet away. He was tall and the noise was the sound of his black coat flapping in cold winds from a storm now boiling across the sky like a purple-black second sea. The man was motionless, hands pushed deep in the pockets of his coat. What low light made its way through the cloud was behind him, and you could not see his face. Madison knew immediately the man was looking at her, however. Why else would he be standing there, like a scarecrow made of shadows, dressed not for the beach but for church or the cemetery?

She glanced casually back over her shoulder, logging her position in relation to the cottage’s walkway. It was not directly behind, but it was close enough. She could get there quickly. Maybe that would be a good idea, especially as the big hand was at quarter to.

But instead she turned back, and once more looked out at the dark and choppy ocean. It was a bad decision, and partly caused by something as simple as the lack of a congratulatory clap on the shoulder when she’d found what she held in her hand; but she made the call and in the end no one else was to blame.

The man waited a moment, and then headed towards her. He walked in a straight line, seemingly unbothered by the water that hissed around his shoes, up and back. He crunched as he came. He was not looking for shells and did not care what happened to them.

Madison realized she’d been dumb. She should have moved straight away, when she had a bigger advantage. Just got up, walked home. Now she’d have to rely on surprise, on the fact the man was probably assuming that if she hadn’t run before then she wouldn’t now. Madison decided she would wait until the man got a little closer and then suddenly bolt: moving as fast as she could and shouting loud. Mom would have the door open. She might even be on her way out right now, come to see why she was not yet back. She should be – she was officially late. But Madison knew in her heart that her mother might just be sitting in her chair instead, shoulders rounded and bent, looking down at her hands the way she had after they came back from the restaurant the night before.

And so she got ready, making sure her heels were well-planted in the hard sand, that her legs were tensed like springs, ready to push off with everything she had.

The man stopped.

Madison had intended to keep looking out at the waves until the last second, as if she wasn’t even aware of the man’s presence, but instead found herself turning her head a little to check what was going on.

The man had come to a halt earlier than Madison expected, still about twenty feet away. Now she could see his face she could tell he was way older than her dad, maybe even past Uncle Brian’s age, which was fifty. Uncle Brian was always smiling, though, as if he was trying to remember a joke he’d heard at the office and was sure you were going to enjoy. This man did not look like that.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. His voice was dry and quiet, but carried.

Madison hurriedly looked away, heart thumping. Unthinkingly protecting the flat shell still in her left hand, she braced her right palm into the sand too now, ready to push off against it, hard.

‘But first I need to know something,’ he said.

Madison realized she had to reach maximum speed immediately. Uncle Brian was fat and looked like he couldn’t run at all. This man was different that way too. She took a deep breath. Decided to do it on three. One …

‘Look at me, girl.’

Two …

Then suddenly the man was between Madison and the dunes. He moved so quickly Madison barely saw it happen.

‘You’ll like it,’ he said, as if he had done nothing at all. ‘I promise. You want it. But first you have to answer my question. Okay?’

His voice sounded wetter now and Madison realized dismally just how stupid she had been, understood why moms and dads said children had to be back at certain times, and not to stray too far, and not talk to strangers, and so many other things. Parents were not just being mean or difficult or boring, it turned out. They were trying to prevent what was about to happen.

She looked up at the man’s face, nodded. She didn’t know what else to do, and hoped it might help. The man smiled. He had a spray of small, dark moles across one cheek. His teeth were stained and uneven.

‘Good,’ he said. He took another step towards her, and now his hands were out of his coat pockets. His fingers were long, and pale.

Madison heard the word ‘Three …’ in her head, but it was too quiet and she did not believe in it. Her arms and legs were no longer like springs. They felt like rubber. She couldn’t even tell if they were still tensed.

The man was too close now. He smelt damp. There was a strange light in his eyes, as if he had found something he’d been looking for a long time.

He squatted down close to her, and the smell suddenly got worse, an earthy odour on his breath, a smell that spoke of parts of the body normally kept hidden.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ he said.

Chapter 4

I got home around quarter after nine in the evening. Apart from milk and coffee the trip had been make-work: Amy kept the cupboards well stocked. I’d walked into town from the house, which took twenty minutes. It was a pleasant stroll and I’d have done it that way even if the car hadn’t been unavailable. I sat outside the coffee place and stretched an Americano while leafing through the local paper, learning several things: the trajectories of two cars had intersected a few nights before – nobody was hurt, not even a little bit; some worthy got re-elected to the schools board for the twelfth straight year, which seemed borderline obsessional; and the Cascades Gallery needed a mature person to help sell paintings and sculptures of eagles and bears and Indian braves. Experience was judged unnecessary but candidates were instructed to bring a willingness to follow a dream. That didn’t sound like me, even if the writing project remained stalled. I hoped the gallery did find someone, however, and that they were sufficiently mature. I hated to think of limited edition art prints being sold in a juvenile manner.

I prowled the aisles of Sam’s Market for longer than necessary, picking items up and putting them back. Found a couple things too outré to have featured on more enlightened shopping agendas, chiefly beers, and at the checkout added a paperback Stephen King. I’d read it before but most of my books were still in storage down in LA, plus it was right there in front of me, in a rickety spinner full of second-hand Dan Brown and triple-named romantic women done out in lurid gilt.

Back in the lot I loaded the bag into my backpack and stood irresolute. A pickup truck sat ticking in the silence. I’d seen the owner inside, a local with craggy features and moss in his ears, and he’d ignored me in the way incomers deserved. I’d made a point of saying hi, just to mess with his head. A couple emerged from Laverne’s Rib across the street, rolling as if on the deck of a ship. Laverne’s prided itself on the magnitude of its portions. The couple looked like they’d known this ahead of time. A tired-looking woman pushed a stroller past the market with the air of someone not engaged in the activity for the sheer fun of it. Within, her baby fought the night with everything it had, principally sound. The woman saw me looking and muttered ‘Ten months’, as if that explained everything. I looked away from her awkwardly.

Down the road, a stop light blinked.

I still wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to go drink a beer somewhere public. I could walk up the street, see if the little bookstore was still open. It wasn’t likely and I now had a novel to read, which was what ultimately took the wind out of the night’s sails. The expedition was over, run aground on an impulse purchase.

So now what? Pick your own adventure.

In the end I walked back the way I’d come, past the hundred yards of stores which constituted Birch Crossing. Most were single storey and wood-fronted, a dentist, hair salon and drug store interspersing places of more transitory appeal, including the Cascades Gallery itself, from which Amy had already acquired two aimlessly competent paintings of the generic West. The blocks were rooted by stolid brick structures built when the town’s frock-coated boosters believed it would amount to more than it had. One of these held Laverne’s, another was a bank no longer locally-owned, and the last offered the opportunity to buy decoratively battered bits of furniture. Amy had availed herself of these wares, too, an example of which currently served as my desk. The street petered out into a small gas station that had been tricked out long ago to look like a mountain chalet, and finally the local sheriff’s office, set back from the road. I had to fight an impulse to look at this as I passed, and wondered how long it would take before some part of me got the message.

I crossed the empty two-lane highway before taking the last left in town. This led into the woods, the fences sparsely punctuated with heavy-duty mailboxes and gates leading to houses down long driveways. After ten minutes I reached the box labelled Jack and Amy Whalen. Rather than open the gate I vaulted over it, as I had on the way out. I forgot to compensate for the weight in the backpack, and almost reached the other side face-first. I’d started exercising again recently, taking runs through the National Forest land that started at the boundary of our property. Now the initial aches had worn off I felt better than in a while, but my body wasn’t ready to forget it was a year since I’d been truly fit. Though there was no one to see I still felt like an ass, and swore briskly at the gate for fucking me around. My father used to claim inanimate objects hate us, and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.

I walked up the rutted track towards the place a rental agreement said was now home. It was colder again and I wondered if tonight was going to be when the snows finally dropped. I wondered also – not for the first time – how we were going to get in and out when that happened. The locals referred to snow without starry-eyed romanticism. They talked about it like death or taxes. The realtor had breezily said something about a snowmobile being advisable in the deepest months. We didn’t have a snowmobile. Weren’t going to be getting one either. Nowhere in my life-plans did ownership of a snowmobile feature. Instead I was laying in reserves of fuse wire, canned chilli and sauerkraut. Always been a bear for sauerkraut, not sure why.

The drive curved down into a hollow before climbing back up along the ridge. About a half mile from the road it widened into the parking area. From this side the house wasn’t much to look at, a single-storey band of weathered cedar shingles largely obscured in summer by trees. It had been that way in the photo I’d seen on the internet, and looked rustic and cute. In winter and real life it looked like a nuclear bunker caught between the legs of dead spiders. It was only when you got inside that you realized you’d entered at the top of two-and-a-half levels, and there was double height glass along most of the north face of the building, where the hillside dropped away sharply. In daylight this gave a view across a forest valley that climbed up to the Wenatchee Mountains, segueing into the Cascades and from there to Canada by and by. As Gary Fisher had found, you tended to just look at it for a while. From the deck you could also see a pond, about a hundred and fifty yards in diameter, which lay within the property’s four acre boundary. In the afternoons birds of prey floated across the valley like distant leaves.

I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their pre-determined slots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.

‘About time,’ I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.

But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting Caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much non-messages piss me off, and would at least have intoned ‘No message, master’ in a gravely tone.

I got out my cell and pressed her speed dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering service, yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.

‘Soon would be nice,’ I muttered, when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.

I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because I made a point of wiping it with my sleeve every morning. It was not nailed shut because we didn’t have any nails. I dimmed the lights and sat. When I opened the lid the machine sprang into life, not learning from experience. It presented me with a word processing document in which not many words had yet been processed. This was partly because of the panoramic view of bitterbrush and Douglas firs from the window, which I’d found myself able to stare at for hours. When the snows did come I knew I might just as well leave the computer shut. It was harder to be distracted in the room at night, however, because aside from a few branches picked out by the light from the window, you couldn’t see anything at all. So maybe now my fingers and mind would unlock and start working together. Maybe I’d think of something to say and fall into it for a while.

Maybe I’d be able to ignore the fact that after only a month I was bored out of my tiny mind.

I was sitting at the table because two years ago I wrote a book about certain places in LA. I say ‘wrote’ but mainly it was photographs, and even that word stretches the truth. I took the pictures with the camera in my cell phone: one day I happened to be somewhere with my phone in my hand, and I clicked a picture off. When I transferred it to the computer later, I realised it was actually okay. The technical quality was so low that you saw through the image to the place, caught in a moment, blurred and ephemeral. After that it became a habit, and when I had enough I threw them into a document, jotting a comment about each. Over time these annotations grew until there was a page or two of text accompanying each photograph, sometimes more. Amy came in one evening when I was doing this, asked to read it. I let her. I felt no anxiety while it was in her hands, knowing she would be kind, and had only mild interest in what she’d say. A couple days later she handed me the name and phone number of someone who worked at an art house publisher. I laughed hard, but she said try it, and so I mailed the file to this guy without thinking much more about it.

Three weeks after that he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and took me out to dinner.

It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you’d have to be out of your mind even to pick up, let alone buy, but the LA Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and weirdly it became something that sold a little, for a while.

The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.

A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of web ‘research’ I’d half-heartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.

I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now house guests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by passive smoking, and it just made life easier all round.

I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire – likely our neighbours, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: pickups and SUVs were equally represented and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a brace of retired history professors from Berkeley and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies – Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with grey. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected his wife had the measure of me.

And yet a week ago I had been standing right there on the deck, when something had happened.

I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only mid-afternoon and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both sides and front and back too. I’d even got an idea down that morning, and halfway believed that I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.

Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town, I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d got to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.