***
Chloe watched Jeff walk to the barn. Each footfall resembled more and more the stride of a relieved man. He was relaxed out of her presence. That was very much how she saw him leaving her: relaxing away gradually. There would be no sudden departure or grand goodbye. He would slip away before she knew to scream “Don’t leave!”
She held an old photo in her hands, one of the bunch she had found in the crooked drawer in the bedroom. There was Lana Pruitt smiling by a large pool with friends and costars. It was a faded version of what it had once been, yellowed by time and neglect. The images on it were vanishing in a slow magic trick. Lana’s face was fainter than the rest, as if someone had touched it repeatedly. Caressed it even. Soon the faces would disappear completely. The bugs and invisible forces of time would eat all the images away as if they had never existed. Transformed from matter to energy. Chloe had heard that once. Everything was matter and energy and fluctuated back and forth that way forever. The Great Indecision of the universe.
Chloe squeezed the edges of the photograph. Things had a way of ripping themselves from your grip just when you think you’ve got a firm grasp on them. That, she had discovered, was how the world worked. Everything was a tease.
She left the unpacking (there were only a few dishes and framed photographs to find a place for) and walked to the front of the cottage. The rooms still smelled of other people, of stale time, but Chloe was certain that would dissipate.
“God help me if this cottage smells like an old museum forever,” she whispered. “God help me.”
On the porch, she sat down on the one lonely chair. It wasn’t very comfortable and felt near collapse, but it would do for now. They’d get a porch swing in time. There was enough room for that at least.
Her fingers glided over the photograph of Lana Pruitt even as her thoughts danced elsewhere, swirling around the night before. Jeff hadn’t stirred when the wind howled and things creaked from inside the house. He’d been awake. She knew that. She’d been with him long enough to be familiar with his quirks. Waking breath and sleeping breath sounded distinctly different. She wondered if her own breathing betrayed her. Could he hear the slight tremor in each of her nighttime breaths?
She had tried to shake the ‘feelings’ off. But now she felt something else: certainty. They were being watched, the both of them. The cottage was doing the watching, she supposed. She did not feel welcome here. Once in the night, she even thought she saw a silhouette in the doorway. She blinked and it was gone. But still, that feeling of otherness in the room had happened too much in the cottage for her to pass off as paranoia. And then, as if sent from somewhere in the air around her, she had heard
This will never go away.
She did not get much sleep after that.
The wind was picking up off the sea. The daylight was at least some comfort. Light chased away shadows and secrets, had them scurrying to darker corners until twilight. She cradled herself in her sweater, an old college thing that had always brought her solace. But sometimes everything seemed useless against this chill. She couldn’t say it was a new chill. It had been between her and Jeff for the past year. But it seemed more formed at the cottage. As if brought more fully to life. Gestating a physicality.
Jeff had found out Chloe had been with another man, some random hookup with a customer on a tour she was leading. Jeff was not on that tour with her. She was drunk and the guy was flirting. One thing led to another, and another led to sex in a tent. He’d reminded her of Jeff, this guy, but she could never remember his name. That was how unimportant he was to her.
Her guilt clawed at her from the inside. Before Jeff found out, Chloe had gone and taken care of the mishap growing inside of her. She couldn’t cover it up and say it was Jeff’s child. He was unable to give her children due to a trait passed down from his father. That was always a sore point with him. And if Chloe were to admit that she had been with another man…
Jeff should have been none the wiser. An abortion was the only thing to do, so she did it. But something had gone wrong. An infection due to the procedure exposed the whole affair. All the lies and deceit. The wrong choices. Even if she hadn’t admitted to cheating, which was impossible given the circumstances, she could see Jeff’s eyes. The image he held of her was changed forever. That was when the chill started. That was when it began to feel like an icy wind around her at all times, and the way that chill sounded… it sounded much like the wind from the sea as she sat on the porch in the uncomfortable chair. She hugged herself tighter, bending the old photograph in her hand as it curled into a fist.
“If only I had your willpower, Jeff,” she said. “If only I had your determination.”
She rose from the chair and walked to the edge of the porch. Her eyes followed the slant of the hill up to the big house. There was the wind-whipped frenzy of cloth from the top of the house, from the widow’s walk. Lana was standing there, most likely looking seaward for her lost husband.
“He’s never coming back, Lana,” Chloe said.
How long had the movie star been alone? It had been years since she had acted in anything. Decades. When did the fans stop showing up looking for her? Or did they even know where to look? When had Lana given up on the world and decided that only a few acres would ever be witness to her years passing?
Chloe looked at the photograph in her hand. “Where’s your husband? Why did he leave you?” Perhaps their stories were more similar than Chloe thought.
A violent wind ripped the photograph from her and took it over the cliff and out to sea. Chloe hadn’t even the chance to reach for it before it was beyond her grasp.
***
They had met on an adventure tour through the Italian Alps. Chloe had taken the job when she was offered it by her mother to get away from the weight of expectation her family placed on her. She was seeking levity. Jeff was seeking the same, only his family was now lame and scattered. His father was dead, his mother was in a coma, and his brother Ethan had been a ward of the state. Nobody expected Jeff to take care of Ethan. Nobody expected it, so he didn’t. He took his inheritance money and did some grand adventuring while he still had the time and health to do it. Little did he know it would become his career.
Chloe had been immediately drawn to him. The other eight people in the group were as good as invisible. The moment they met was defined by the sound of the airport terminal where she picked the group up in Italy. Jeff gave her a sly, flirtatious smile and they connected right there over the noise of American tourists and Italian customs officials. She remembered his name. She didn’t even have to repeat it to herself as she had with the others on the tour.
“Be professional,” she reminded herself. “Don’t show favoritism.”
“I’m going to date her,” Jeff told one of the other tourists. “Then I’m going to marry her.”
It was at a small eatery three days into the trip that the direct route for their lives together was laid out. The eatery was next door to the hostel where they had stayed the night before. Jeff woke up early and went in to get something to snack on. He was the only one of those on the tour yet awake. Chloe sat at a table, looking over the day’s itinerary and looking beautiful. Her dark hair was swept back from her face with a clip, and the combination of such concentration and beauty was irresistible to the men of the village. They began to circle her table, flirting boisterously without fear of derision. Jeff, like those men, was taken by her beauty as well, but flirted less obviously. He was concerned that she was attracting so much attention, but by the look on her face, he was certain she could handle the situation. She had probably handled similar situations all her life.
There were five men around her table. She did not look too flustered by them. A woman like her was used to such advances. But then the crowd began to grow. In fact, it doubled. Chloe could not see out of the group of swarthy Italians. Jeff could not see in through them. They were getting louder and their language more offensive. They were playfully yet forcefully tugging at one another and laughing, slapping backs and smearing words. Chloe was anxious and began to look around desperately for some escape.
It was then, as if offering a rope or a ladder, she saw Jeff extend his hand into the group. She took it and he pulled her up and out, much to the contempt of the Italians.
“Thanks,” she said. “I could have gotten out of that myself, you know.”
“How would you have managed that?”
“I’m one hell of a climber.”
Down the Well
Chloe soon regretted taking so much time off from work as well. The days were stretching out cold and silent, like cracks in the ice. The shadows of the night were the darkest she had ever known. And what few words Jeff had spoken to her did not amount to more than a paragraph. She walked through the cottage in a lonely self-embrace that was becoming a perpetual thing. The air of the cottage was chilled no matter how much wood was put in the fireplace. Jeff had chopped up the planks of wood left in the barn with more passion than she had seen from him in some time. Not all the wood stacked in the barn had rotted through, and it should have been enough to satisfy the small cottage. But the fire demanded more, licking each piece to ash with a deep, flamed tongue.
Chloe had gone into Wicker to curb her boredom but found nothing of interest there. The people were eerily pleasant, but she was just one of a number of faces in the quaint seaside community. The town seemed to have repopulated itself since she and Jeff had first come through. There was certainly more vigor to it, like it had awakened from a slumber. A few of the townsfolk asked her how she liked living in the cottage. None of them referred to Lana other than calling her “the old movie star” or “the actress.” Behind their pleasant smiles, Chloe wondered if she saw the hint of mystery or even something more sinister. They were trying to figure her out.
“I could never live in a place like that,” said Odette when she saw Chloe in her store again. Chloe guessed the quiet, larger-framed woman next to her was her sister, Alma. She stood back against a shelf of cigarettes with her hands folded in front of her as Odette chatted with Chloe at the register. Alma was a bloated replica of Odette, though she did not smile as much. She, it seemed, was for added atmosphere only. Not conversation.
Chloe regarded the sisters with curiosity. “Why not? What’s wrong with the cottage?”
Alma shuffled ever so slightly behind Odette, and as if this was the cue to reel back in something cast too far, Odette said, “It… it’s cold. It’s so cold up on that hill.”
And while that was the bitter truth, Chloe tossed the conversation around in her head after she left the store until it sounded more menacing than it had been. How would
she
know how cold the cottage was? And that shuffle Alma had done behind Odette… What was that?
That was two days gone, and while Chloe was once again suffering the pangs of boredom, she did not care to head back into Wicker. At last, tired of waiting around the cottage for Jeff to say more than three words to her, Chloe put on her jacket and headed up the hill to the big house. Perhaps she could make friends with the old movie star.
“Wouldn’t that be something to tell the grandkids?”
(The thought nearly stopped her in her tracks. One has to have children to have grandkids. And that was an impossibility. At least in biological terms. They could always adopt. Jeff’s brother, Ethan, had adopted a baby, after all.)
The winds were fierce as she made her way past the trees and farther up the road. She tried to make out a face in every window of the big house or a silhouette up on the widow’s walk, but there was never anything there. Chloe didn’t suspect Lana was somewhere hidden behind a curtain and watching her come up the hill. Lana didn’t seem the type to hide from individuals, despite her living situation hiding from society.
Chloe knocked, but there was no answer. The doorbell no longer worked. The porch creaked and moaned as she discreetly looked in the windows and called out for the actress. The rooms inside were dark, and she could barely see past the shadows. There were books in one of the rooms, though. She saw rows and stacks of large and cumbersome books. They looked too old to be of much use now. Who had time to turn pages when all one had to do was click Next on their reading device? Books were the leftover crumbs of a slower age.
The garden, overgrown yet still majestic, drew Chloe over from the porch. She walked beneath the old dead vines on the trellis and past the crumbling sculptures. Like the photographs she had found in the cottage, the garden looked ready to fade away completely. There were even tinges of the same browns and yellows. The paths were still apparent and in some use, though wild and weedy. There was a stone seat covered in a dried mossy cloak of some dead growth, directly across from a stone child angel. One of the wings had fallen from the sweet cherub and now lay on the ground at its feet. That had happened many years ago as evidenced by the density of the weeds and vines around it. Chloe sat down to study the angel more, but her eyes were drawn to the area just beside it. The angel was off center and not directly across from the seat as it should have been. It shared the bench sitter’s attention with air.
Chloe stepped forward and brushed back the overgrowth beside the angel, beneath which was a creek stone. Not a word or design was written on it, yet it existed in its place for some reason. The wind howled around the house.