Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel
To Harry and Rose, my bright, shining stars
CONTENTS
O
kay, sleepyhead, time to wake up,” Allie said, reaching into the backseat of the car and giving her five-year-old son, Wyatt, a gentle prod. “We’re here. We’re at the cabin.” Wyatt stirred but didn’t wake up. She didn’t blame him. It had been a long day. Make that a long
week,
she corrected herself. And, if she were really counting, it had been a long two years. But she tried, whenever possible, not to count. It didn’t make the time go any faster, or the loss any easier to bear.
She exhaled slowly and resisted the urge to put her head down on the steering wheel. She was exhausted—beyond exhausted, really—and it occurred to her, in that instant, that they could just sleep in the car that night. God knows, they were tired enough.
But no sooner had she considered the idea than she rejected it. This was supposed to be a fresh start. A new beginning. For both of them. It wouldn’t do to wake up in the car tomorrow morning, wearing wrinkled clothes and stretching stiff limbs. They would spend the night in the cabin. The cabin that would hereafter be known as their home.
The only problem with that, she thought, studying the cabin by the light of the car’s headlights, was that it didn’t look very home
like
. And that was putting it mildly. Several shingles had fallen off the roof. Knee-high grass was growing right up to the front porch. And the porch itself was listing dangerously to one side.
But it was still standing, she told herself. And
that
was something, wasn’t it?
It had been over ten years since she’d last seen it. Part of her had thought it might have vanished altogether, swallowed up by the forest around it. But of course that hadn’t happened. This wasn’t a fairy tale. This was real life. She, of all people, knew that. She’d learned it the hard way.
She turned off the car’s headlights, and the cabin all but disappeared into the darkness. She shivered unconsciously. Living on a suburban cul-de-sac these last several years, she’d forgotten how dark the darkness could be.
Maybe she should just keep driving. If memory served her correctly, there was a motel on Highway 169. They could be there in fifteen minutes. But then what? They’d still have to come back here in the morning. And the cabin wouldn’t look any better by daylight. It might, in fact, look worse.
“Mommy?” Wyatt’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Are we there?”
“Yes, we’re here,” she said, in her best imitation of cheerfulness. She turned to smile at him. “We’re at the cabin.”
“The cabin?” Wyatt asked, struggling to get out of his car seat.
“That’s right,” Allie said. “I’ll show you.” She reached for the flashlight in the glove compartment and turned it on. But as soon as she got out of the car, she could see the flashlight was no match for the night’s darkness. Its weak beam barely cut through the blackness. She glanced up at the sky. No moon that she could see, no stars, either.
She shivered again and tried to ignore the sensation that the darkness itself was somehow palpable, like a weight pressing down on her. Even the air, she realized, seemed to have a cottony thickness to it.
She opened the car’s back door, unfastened Wyatt’s seat belt, and lifted him out of his car seat. She settled him on her hip and shone the flashlight in the direction of the cabin.
“There it is,” she said. She hoped her voice sounded reassuring. Especially since she was feeling in need of some reassurance herself. Wyatt frowned in the direction of the cabin.
“I can’t really see it,” he whispered. “
It’s so dark
.”
“It
is
dark,” Allie agreed, and her heart sank a little more. But she caught herself.
Stop it. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Peace. Quiet. Solitude. And now you’re unnerved by a little darkness?
She reached for the canvas tote bag she’d placed on the backseat beside Wyatt. She’d filled it with everything they might need their first night here. She’d unload their other belongings in the morning. Right now, the important thing was to get Wyatt inside and into bed.
Poor kid,
she thought, slamming the car door and walking up the cracked, overgrown flagstone path to the front porch. She’d woken him up at dawn that morning, when the movers had come to put the contents of their house into storage, and, except for a few well-timed rest stops, he’d spent the whole afternoon and evening in the car. But he hadn’t complained. He almost never did that anymore. And it worried Allie. Complaining, after all, was one of childhood’s God-given rights.
She stepped gingerly onto the cabin’s front steps, testing them for stability. They held. So, too, did the warped and slanting front porch. She fished the front door key out of her tote bag and opened the rusted lock. And as she pushed the door open, she said a silent prayer. Something like,
Please don’t let there be three generations of raccoons living here now
. But when she turned on the lights, the cabin looked exactly as it had the last time she’d seen it. Relief flooded through her.
Wyatt, though, didn’t like what he saw. After a quick look around, he buried his face in the nape of her neck.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Allie asked, lugging him and the tote bag inside and locking the door behind them.
But Wyatt refused to lift his head. He just burrowed it deeper into her neck.
She frowned, looking around the cabin’s living room. It looked fine to her. Homey, even. She could see there was a layer of dust on the furniture, and a few spider webs in the corners of the room. And it was stuffy, after being shut up for so long. But for the most part, it had stood the test of time remarkably well. There was nothing wrong with it that a little elbow grease wouldn’t set right.
Still, she tried to see it from Wyatt’s perspective. After all, he’d lived his whole life in a three-bedroom ranch house replete with all of life’s modern conveniences. By his standards, this cabin wouldn’t just look rustic. It would look downright primitive. But scary? She didn’t think so.
“Wyatt,” she said softly. “What’s wrong, honey? I know it’s not like our old house. But it’s fine, really. It’s just a little dusty, that’s all. And the furniture is a little old. But it’s nothing you and I can’t fix up together.”
But he shook his head violently and whispered something she couldn’t understand.
“What did you say?” she asked, positioning her right ear against his mouth.
“I said ‘he’s looking at us,’ ” he whispered back.
Allie felt her body stiffen involuntarily. “
Who’s
looking at us?” she asked, feeling a little unnerved. Okay,
a lot
unnerved. The movie about the boy who could see dead people came to mind, but Wyatt had never exhibited any such gift. At least, not to her knowledge. She fought down a little shiver of dread.
“Wyatt,
who’s
looking at us?” she asked again. But he only shook his head and wrapped his arms more tightly around her.
She willed herself to be calm.
Nobody is looking at us,
she told herself.
We’re all alone here. In more ways than one.
So she forced herself to look at the cabin’s living room again.
Really
look at it. And this time her eyes came to rest, almost immediately, on the antlered buck’s head hanging above the fireplace.
Of course,
she thought, with a shaky exhale. Wyatt had never seen anything like that before. It
would
be frightening to him.
“Wyatt,” she asked softly. “Are you afraid of the buck’s head over the fireplace?” He nodded his head emphatically but still didn’t look up.
“Oh, honey, don’t be afraid,” Allie said, snuggling him closer. “It’s not real. I mean, it
was
real. But it’s not alive anymore. My grandfather, your great-grandfather, brought it back from a hunting trip,” she explained. “It’s been hanging there since before you were born. Since before
I
was born.” She admitted, “I didn’t really notice it when I was a child. I guess because I was used to it. But I can see why it might be a little frightening to you.”
Unlike her, of course, Wyatt hadn’t been raised in a family of hunters and fishermen. His exposure to wildlife, in fact, had been limited to the fireflies and frogs he’d caught in their backyard in suburban Minneapolis.
With some effort, Wyatt lifted his head up. He shot the buck’s head a quick look. But once again he squeezed his eyes shut and buried his face in her neck.
She tried a different tack. “Wyatt, it’s like a stuffed animal,” she explained. “Only bigger. But it’s nothing to be afraid of. I promise you. It can’t hurt you.”
Wyatt cupped his hands around her right ear and whispered directly into it. “But he’s staring at us.”
Allie glanced at the buck’s head again. Maybe it was the angle she was looking at it from. Or a trick of the light. But it did, in fact, appear to be staring at them. She sighed inwardly. This was one difficulty she hadn’t anticipated.
She felt a flash of annoyance. Not at Wyatt. At the taxidermist responsible for the buck’s head. Did he have to make the buck look so realistic? And so . . . so
fierce
? That buck did not look at all pleased to be hanging up there. In fact, he looked downright angry.
No question about it,
she thought.
He will have to go.
“Wyatt, I’ll take him down tomorrow,” Allie announced decisively. “But until then, can you just not look at him?”
Wyatt lifted his head again and looked at her doubtfully. “I’ll try,” he said. “But, Mom,” he whispered, stealing a sideways glance at him, “where’s the rest of him? That’s just his head.”