The Spirit Wood (17 page)

Eighteen

A
S PETER GROPED
for the ignition, Caswell leaned in the open window on the passenger side and asked him if he was sure he could drive okay. Peter waved him away with one hand, put the car into reverse, and backed down the drive. Caswell was briefly caught in the headlights, the glass in his hand sparkling against the blackness behind him. Peter tooted the horn once, Caswell raised the glass.

There was no one else on the road. Peter turned his wrist until he could read his watch by the light from the dashboard—eleven-thirty. Eleven-thirty. It seemed late. But it wasn't really. Meg wouldn't approve. Of where he'd been. But Meg wasn't home, so what did it matter?

He drove slowly, not because he distrusted his own reactions, but because he was enjoying the night, the darkness, the solitude. Out here you could really appreciate the night; Mercer hadn't exactly been a metropolis, but even there the streets were well lighted and laid out neatly. Their apartment had been one of a row; often you could hear the guy from the music department, who lived two doors down, banging away at some dissonant postmodern piano composition.

None of that here. This was what you called silence. Unless, of course, you listened very closely. If you were standing outside, along the road, or on some-
one's lawn, anywhere but in town, you could hear the rustlings in the grass, insects, small animals like squirrels and rabbits—twice he'd spotted raccoons near the gates at Arcadia—and birds, all sorts of them, in the branches of the trees. It was just like tuning a radio, he thought—you had only to adjust your hearing to the right frequency, and then it all came in loud and clear. All the time it was playing on around you; you had merely to prick up your ears.

In Arcadia, he was hearing better all the time. The longer he was there, the more alive the place became to him. At any moment, anywhere on the grounds, he could stop, hold his breath, close his eyes, and
listen
—anyone else would have thought it perfectly silent—to the hummings and flittings and burrowings of the unseen life around him. He had never been conscious of such things before; he had never cared. Until moving to Passet Bay, he'd have been suspicious of anyone who had. Now he felt that even if he tried, he could no longer be oblivious to it all; it was like looking at one of those popular optical illusions—you couldn't see the face, or the vase, until it was pointed out to you, but after that, it was impossible not to see. It was a new talent, a new sensitivity, but at the same time, something that felt as natural to him as his own skin.

He managed the gates to Arcadia without difficulty. But a hundred yards in, there was a rasping sound as the protruding brush clutched and scraped at the side of the car. He'd mention it again, maybe this time directly to Angelos. Angelos seemed to be the one delegated to do the actual work around the place. What work
was
done.

He parked the car in front of the house, closer to the steps than he thought. And at a bad angle, with the back sticking straight out into the drive. He debated parking it again—then thought,
What the hell. What difference does it make? Leave it.

Inside, he turned on the entrance-hall light, a gaudy
electric chandelier; the stark white walls and interior columns sprang up around him, as if raised from nothing in just that moment. The beckoning naiads above the fireplace seemed to have been frozen, only seconds from reuniting, by the sudden blaze of light. The mosaic in the floor appeared unconvincingly passive and static. Everything seemed to Peter to be holding its breath, waiting for him to extinguish the light and pass by. He left the chandelier burning.

On the stairs to his bedroom, he stumbled, banged his elbow against the banister. He swore, and the words were swallowed up by the cavernous hall. In his room, the doors to the balcony were wide open, the curtains billowing out. He went across to close them, but down the back lawn—at the boathouse, it must be—he saw a light. There was a light on in Meg's workshop. Could she have come back early? Could she have returned to the house while he was over at the Caswells? Taken a cab from the station? But what would she be doing down there at this time of night?

It was probably just that she'd forgotten to turn off the light the day before, he thought. He'd go down and do it now and check on Diogenes on the way. Passing through the entrance hall again, he had that same feeling of things suspended, awaiting his absence. Dodger, when he pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen, had already lifted his head from the mat.

“How ya doin’, boy?” Peter asked. He expected the dog to bound up excitedly.

Instead, the dog regarded him with dull attention.

“You still asleep?” Peter said, coming into the room. “It's me, Dodger.”

The dog stayed right where he was, watching Peter approach.
Must be still dreaming,
Peter thought. He crouched down and extended one hand for the dog to lick but perhaps as an after-effect of that crack on the banister, his hand came, not below Diogenes's snout, but above the crown of his head, as if he were about to
grasp him by the ears or skull. He hadn't meant to do it that way, and the dog, startled, reacted by dropping his head and pulling away.

“Come on, boy,” Peter said, already becoming annoyed. “What
is
this shit?”

The dog must have sensed the edge of hostility in his voice. When he reached out again, stiffly, his elbow still cocked, Dodger growled and back-pedaled off the mat. Irritated, Peter brushed at the hair on the sides of his head; Leah had left it rather long there. Joan Caswell had said that it made him look very bohemian. “Do you wanna go for a walk or not?”

Dodger barked, his butt pressed hard against the side of the refrigerator.

“All right,” said Peter, straightening up. “Screw it, then.” He slammed out of the kitchen by the other swinging door, Diogenes following him closely with his eyes. He moved through the black-floored room that Meg had come to refer to, because the floor was so slippery smooth, as the “skating rink,” and out onto the lawn. The light in the boathouse was still burning. He kicked off his shoes, left them on the ledge of the fountain, and with his arms spread out like wings so that he could feel the cool night air coursing all around his body, trotted down the hill.

The slope was greater than he imagined it, and he quickly felt himself moving faster than he'd anticipated. His feet were acting almost independently of his body, racing along, carrying him not in a straight line toward the boathouse, but in broad, sweeping arcs that moved him only gradually down toward the water. More than once, he felt sure he was about to stumble again, to trip and roll down the incline, but each time he managed to recover from the imminent fall. Each time he regained his balance, his arms extended like a tightrope walker's, and he started to laugh, at the absurdity of it, at the speed he was traveling, barefoot and alone in the cool darkness, back and forth across
the wide lawn. At the gazebo, he grabbed hold of one of the wooden posts and swung in a full circle, an aerial pirouette; more amazing than that, he wasn't even out of breath. He felt, if anything, more invigorated than ever. The night air was like a bracing tonic, expanding his lungs, pumping the blood through his veins. He laughed again, louder, and shook himself all over, like a dog throwing off water.

Why hadn't he ever run like this before?

The light was still shining through the boathouse window; he pranced across the lawn, soundlessly, and then crept to the window, like a burglar, to peer in. Someone was there—not Meg but Leah, sitting on Meg's wooden stool, at Meg's work table. She was dressed all in white: white blouse, long white skirt; her black braid looked like a wet snake coiled across her shoulders. On the table in front of her were two sculptures of some sort; Peter couldn't quite make out what they were. She appeared to be studying them, occasionally reaching out to touch one or the other. Her back was to the window, and he considered stealing away without letting her know he'd ever been there, or seen her. It was a sort of trespassing, he thought, sneaking into Meg's studio without her okay; if he disturbed Leah now, what would she say? How would she explain what she was doing there?

He shifted his weight and something, a twig perhaps, snapped under his foot; he felt a tiny sharp pain in one heel. A splinter. Leah turned on the stool, slowly, not with alarm, and looked directly at him. For a moment, he wondered if she could actually see him, there in the dark, but she smiled and pointed at the door, as if to say that she had left it unlocked. Embarrassed at having been caught so—though he tried to remind himself that Leah had even more reason than he did to feel uncomfortable—he circled around to the door, limping slightly, and stepped inside.

As Leah herself said nothing, but simply folded her hands into her lap like a ready pupil, Peter found himself doing the talking. “I saw the light on,” he said, “from the bedroom. I thought Meg might have left it on. Or come back early.” He felt foolish, Leah was so impassive.

“No. I turned it on,” Leah said matter-of-factly. Then, at least acknowledging the situation, she said, “I probably shouldn't have. But I was curious. And I hadn't been in here at all for so long. I just wanted to look around again.”

“I didn't know you'd ever spent any time in here,” Peter said, fidgeting near the door; there was no other seat in the room. “You aren't the one who used to work in here, are you? The stuff about the previous tenant isn't a joke, is it?”

“No,” Leah replied, looking at the two statues, maybe two feet high, that stood on the worktable. “She is,” she said, tapping the base of one of them.

“Who is?”

“She is,” Leah repeated, tapping the statue again. “This is the girl who used to work in here—Demetria.”

To Peter, who came around now to Leah's side of the table, gingerly avoiding stepping on his injured heel, the two statues looked like Leah herself, except that the hair on one was loose and not braided. The contours of the figures were certainly the same as hers, but the rough, seemingly hasty execution of the pieces—particularly of the nude figure, which was unlike anything Peter had ever seen Meg do—made any sort of identification of the model ultimately impossible; the facial features were only hinted at with a few expert cuts of a sharp sculpting tool.

“I don't think that's possible,” Peter said. “Meg couldn't ever have met this Demetria person.”

Leah didn't reply. She ran one hand fondly down
the side of the nude figure, then got up from the stool and, one at a time, carried the sculptures to the shelves near the door and replaced them there.

“I'd have guessed
you
were the model,” Peter persisted.

“Demetria and I look pretty much alike,” Leah said. “We're related.”

This family goes on forever,
Peter thought; maybe his grandfather had just imported the whole lot of them, all at once, from the old country. But why, he wondered, would anyone have gone to any trouble to acquire Nikos as a caretaker? Or Angelos?

Leah, at least, he could understand.

“Did you have a good time at the Caswells?” Leah asked, turning toward him again.

He couldn't remember having told her that that's where he was going that night; as far as he could recall, he'd only said he would be having dinner out. Nikos, who had been in the kitchen when he'd mentioned it, had looked chagrined.

“Yes, I did,” Peter said.
Skip it,
he thought; he must have said something to give it away. “I got a lot of compliments on my haircut, by the way. I was told I look very Byronic with it long on the sides.”

“Like Byron? I don't think you look like Byron at all,” she said vehemently, as if defending him from anyone who would make such a charge. Peter laughed and explained that it was
Lord
Byron he was being compared to. “In fact, he died while defending your homeland from the Turks. Sometime around 1820.” He half-expected her to know this; he'd always thought Greeks were brought up with a special appreciation for Lord Byron. But Leah looked utterly unimpressed, and he dropped it.

Something else crossed his mind. “I thought that Meg had the only key to this place,” he said, half to himself, then quickly raised one hand to his mouth to cover a sudden burp. He had an unpleasant aftertaste
of Joan Caswell's osso buco and Jack's twelve-year-old Scotch. “Was the door unlocked?”

“Yes,” Leah replied. “You don't think I'd break in, do you?” She glanced down at his feet and noticed that he was favoring one leg. “Is there something wrong with your foot?”

Peter glanced down, too, and saw to his own surprise that he was holding his left foot with the toes to the floor and the heel cocked upwards, like a dog with a lame paw.

“I think I stepped on something outside.”

“Let me take a look.”

He propped himself up on the worktable. Leah raised his leg by the ankle, pushed up the bottom of his trousers, and inspected his sole. “Do you know you're bleeding?” she said. “You also have a splinter in there.” She looked around for an implement with which to remove it. Her fingers rapidly rummaged through the small modeling knives, wire brushes, pencils, rulers, spoons that Meg worked with. “There's nothing here,” she said, before raising the foot again and studying the wound. “If you think you can stand it, I could probably get it out with my fingers.”

“You don't have to do that,” Peter said, embarrassed again and feeling as if he were back in the barber chair at Nikos's cottage. He was beginning to feel as though he was always in their hands—Leah's, Nikos's, even Angelos's. It was Angelos he had to ask to do the groundskeeping chores. He wondered how he appeared in their eyes—as some sort of buffoon or incompetent? “It's okay,” he said, “I'll get it myself, later.” But when he tried to stand up on the foot, he found an involuntary whistle of pain escaping his lips, and he immediately lifted it up again.

“It's really very deep,” Leah said. “Let me try.”

He leaned against the table, and Leah, sitting on the stool, held his foot steady on her upraised knees. Her skirt slipped back, revealing several inches of smooth,
olive-colored skin. As she probed at the splinter, she asked him questions about his evening at the Caswells: who else had been there, what had been served for dinner, what their home was like. It was the first time he had seen her display any curiosity at all about life beyond the gates of Arcadia; he assumed she was doing it to distract him from the pain in his foot. Which was considerable—he could feel the bit of wood, like a needle, being manipulated between Leah's fingers. When she pressed hard on the skin around it, cutting off the neural impulses, the pain was lessened. But when she let up again, to concentrate on catching and drawing out the splinter, it was difficult to resist yanking the foot away and squeezing the ankle like a vise. There was blood, he noticed, on Leah's fingertips.