The Perfect View

By Carolyn Young

Mara is unaware that she is not the only one with the perfect view of her own life. Someone who has known her since the very beginning is watching her from across the lake. He has been hiding in the shadows around and behind her for years, even long before she moved into her beautiful house with her loving husband and his lovely daughter.

The watcher has witnessed all Mara has suffered over the years and every devastating mistake she has made, but he also knows why she made those mistakes. He even understands why she is sabotaging her perfect family, and why she pours wine down her own throat every night like water. And he knows she needs him to watch over her so that he’ll be ready to rescue her when the time comes.

Then the watcher sees the explosion that happens when Mara’s mind finally shatters, and when he comes out of hiding to save her, Mara is forced to come face to face with a beast from her childhood that has been dead for almost twenty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483422206

Book preview

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PROLOGUE

T he colors of the morning outside his window were vivid and alive. The grass was painted golden green by the fingers of the sun, and the sky blue water of the lake held floating pictures of white clouds shaped like racing rabbits and gingerbread men. The light breeze that drifted from the shore shimmered with mist and stirred the bold ivy that lived on the trunk of the thick oak tree that had leaves of the same gilded shade as the grass. It was an exquisite view, but Jack did not see it as he sat straight and tall on the hard, armless maple chair in his bedroom with his eye pressed to the long, black scope. He had been watching her today for indefinite hours as the time ticked rapidly by, unnoticed. She had been restless and active all morning in a spontaneous, random way like a caged animal, and every move that she made pushed Jack closer to the edge of his seat and heightened his awareness of the need to stay vigilant. He ignored the aching tendons in his neck that plagued him after sitting rigidly for so long with his body leaning awkwardly into the view, and he paid no mind to the stabbing cramps that traveled up and down his calves. He could find a more comfortable position if he tried, or a softer chair with cushions, but the pain was his sacrifice and his gift to her. After all these years and so many sins, he needed to suffer, just as she would want him to, and so day after day, year after year, he did just that and never left his post.

He was dressed neatly in pressed khaki pants and a starched white cotton shirt, his soft jaw was clean-shaven, and his dark hair with its thick threads of gray was combed smoothly back. He knew that he was far from handsome now, but he tried to look his best for her while on guard, even though she could not see him. His meticulous appearance and all of his actions, even the most trivial details, were driven by his need to be worthy of her in every way. He kept his tiny cottage spotless, his furniture dustless, his bed precisely made, and his bookshelves full of the classics that she had always loved and that Jack too, had read once in another life. He held doors open for old ladies, smiled at small children, picked up litter from sidewalks, and he never stole from anyone who could not afford it. It was essential that he do everything right this time and be better than before, so that someday he could present himself to her and tell her of his deeds of atonement. He was perpetually climbing his own ladder, rung by rung, to reach a new version of himself, determined to be the man that she needed and deserved because he understood now that no one else could ever grasp what she had suffered or be her cure, no matter how hard they tried. Someday she would need him and when the time came he would be ready to rescue her, and only then would she be able to forgive him.

He had waited and waited for this house, the only house that would do. It had been nothing more than a rundown shack when he found it, ill kept for many years and barely seven hundred square feet, but its location was perfect and he was determined to make it his own so that he could carry out his mission. He had approached the elderly owner, knocking on his door time and again for months, impatiently pressing him to sell and offering top dollar, but the old man would not budge. It was his family home and he’d lived in it for eighty-one years and was set on staying there for the rest of his days. You’ll just have to wait until I die, he had said that last time before he slammed the door in Jack’s face. Sadly, the very next morning the poor man had fallen down the basement steps, his body discovered a few days later by the concerned postman who noticed the full mailbox. The authorities found no signs of foul play, and concluded that it was nothing but an accidental fall by a weak old man on rickety stairs. Jack thought that it was a sad turn of events, but he knew that the man had lived a very long life and was obviously lonely and terribly unhappy, so his death was certainly best for everyone.

Jack had patiently waited for months while the man’s small estate went through probate, and then the house had gone to auction. Because of its dilapidated condition, the bidding had been minimal, and so Jack was able to purchase it at a price that was little more than the value of the waterfront land, and he paid on the spot with cash. It had depleted most of his bankroll and took some time and labor to make it livable, but now, at last, he could see everything he needed to see. Finally, he had his chance to make up for all the missed chances, and he was resolved to be clean, sober, and good in every way he knew how so that he would not waste this gift of fate, the house with the perfect view. He had been lurking in her shadows for many years, following her from city to city and home to home, watching her from cars, alleys, and even from behind trees, but finally here he could see clearly into the center of her life, and he would miss nothing this time. Her house was directly across the water from his, and it was close enough for him to see the blue of her eyes through his scope, but far enough away that she could never see him. He wasn’t sure she would know him after all these years anyway, since life’s tolls had made him thinner and smaller, and his gray face had deep lines and hollows that made it much older than its age.

Jack went out only when his money or supplies were running low, and so he watched her almost all the hours of the day and was keenly aware of the small details of her life. Her house had been built to display the lake to its occupants through a triangular wall of windows that overlooked the water, and Jack could see freely into the wide, two story living area that had pale wood floors and a clean and simple décor. The space opened without barriers into a breakfast nook and a square, modern kitchen, and both were also almost completely visible through the abundant glass. The architect had designed the house to overflow with light and to have unobstructed water views from most angles on the first level, making it quite an accommodating blueprint for Jack’s requirements. Most of the rest of the interior of the house was obscured to him except for occasional glimpses of movement through bedroom windows, but it did not matter since the living room was her primary domain when she was at home alone, which now was more often than not. If the weather was adequate or better, though, she spent her time out back on the tiered deck that overlooked a stretch of grass leading to the pebbly lakeshore, and then Jack’s view of her was so perfect that he would hold his hand out in front of the scope as though to touch her.

She had always hated walls, preferring to live outside in open, sun-chalked spaces where the sky was her ceiling and the sounds were of nothing but breathing trees and murmuring winds. She felt a deep connection to every element of the earth, and though the landscape here in Ohio was not as spectacular as others that she had known, she still absorbed the land and water into her pores. He thrived on the bright days when she was outside and the sun danced on her golden skin as she sat in her teak chair with her long legs curled up under her, or stood leaning over the rail, gazing out at the constantly altering patterns of the water. Her hair was pecan colored and fell in straight lines down her back and over her shoulders, and the breeze made it stir like prairie grass. She was tall, almost five foot ten, but she looked young and fragile with long lines and sharp angles like a colt, and she was beautiful in a way that was raw and pure, even now. The unimaginable, incalculable wounds she had suffered should have taken that away, but her scars were not visible, at least not to anyone but him. Somehow, after all that she had endured, she was still alive and she still had a length of desire inside of her that was always reaching out toward some undefined prize that could make her clean and whole. For a while, Jack thought that she had found what she’d been looking for here, but the weight that she carried on her back had slowed her down once again, and her ghosts were catching up.

She had lived by the lake for over six years now with her husband and his child, and Jack had been in his house for over five, watching every step she took on this stretch of her rolling, winding, crooked path. When she had first drifted into this new life after coming out of her deliberate time of hiding from the last one, she had settled down to play a role that appeared contentedly ordinary, performing all the small details of a normal existence and spending every minute she could with the little girl after school and all summer long. Alone by day, she was quietly at ease, but with the child she glistened like wet glass and seemed even more buoyant and alive than she had been during the shiny beginning of her old life in Arizona. She had become a mother to the girl who was not her own, and in doing so she found an unfamiliar joy and a fresh purpose, but over these last few years as the child grew older, she had begun to sink into the deep places that lived inside her mind, little by little. Jack watched and recognized it by the slowing of her movements, the shrinking of her shape, and her wild eyes that looked inside and not out, but he could also see that she was resisting her fall. She sought distractions of all kinds to fill the empty hours, holding onto a rope and swinging through impulsive states of inert commotion, fighting desperately to keep from disappearing.

Now, most of the time, she did almost nothing at all but stare at the water or at blank walls until the stroke of four o’ clock came, and then she would open a bottle of wine to sip as she cooked dinner. It was always a slow, methodical process of chopping and stirring and marinating, so that by the time she sat down to eat at six with her husband and the child, the bottle would be almost empty, or sometimes gone and replaced with another. After dinner, the three of them would go their separate ways, but Jack would stay at his post even after the darkness filled the space between their houses. The lake and its distance gave a false perception of privacy, so their wall of windows had no blinds or curtains, and he watched her on a stage of lights every night as she sat staring at a book without reading, or at a television show without seeing. Then later when the others were asleep, she would wander the rooms in her lace nightgown, sipping her wine and looking at things that were not really there, but Jack understood that she was drowning the images that threatened to rise, one by one, in her glass.

No one else could ever know every layer of her the way Jack did, because she would never be able to retrieve all the lost and cluttered words of her story to tell it. She could not even see the muddled colors and imprecise contours of its pictures, though he knew they still lived somewhere deep in her mind, but Jack had every page, line, and illustration of the unfinished book sealed into his memory. He had been by her side and had lived it all with her from the very beginning, and so he recognized each shape within the cluster of shadows that followed her as she ran away again and again to find a fresh notebook on which to start her story over. She could never run fast enough or far enough, though, to escape the chasing, indelible demons that inevitably caught her each time and tainted her fresh, clean paper with their filth. Now, they had found her once again, and she was struggling to keep her pen in control and to hold the pages of her good life together while the wild things tore her apart.

Today was a bad day for her, and Jack felt her pain in his own hollow gut. He could see that her spinning eyes were overflowing with the surging reflections of all she had suffered, and with the undeniable knowledge that she no longer belonged in this life that had once seemed so promising. The prize that she sought had once again eluded her, and the restless animal in her bones was fighting the urge to bolt from her unlocked cage. Jack understood that her impulses would eventually win the war, but he could do nothing now but wait for the right time to lead her to a safe escape before the demons that crawled beneath her skin exploded and brought her house crashing down around her. This time he would be ready. This time he would save his little girl.

CHAPTER 1

M ara was dimly awake and sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor, but she could not quite force her weighted eyes to open completely. Her lids were swollen like rain clouds, and the nightmares that had passed only minutes before were covered by a thick fog, though still close to the surface. She rose abstractedly onto her unsteady legs and made her way across the room to her dresser, but when she reached it she could not remember why she had come. She stood for a moment, staring down at the walnut drawers, and then she blinked her eyes hard and fast and pushed up on her forehead with her hands, trying to lift herself out of the layers of haze. Water. She needed water. She went through the double doors into the bathroom where Ben was already in the shower, filled the cup by the sink and drank it like a shot. Then she wiped a circular patch of fog from the mirror with her hand and looked into the round frame at her image. She was pale and her eyes were dark and retreating, but other than that she looked no different than any other morning. There was no swelling or sagging of her skin, and her irises were not covered by a film or muck of any kind. It was nothing but her usual face, the one that she saw every day, and it was clear and without scars. Her defects and diseases were all inside and not visible in her reflection.

She splashed intensely cold water on her face to shock herself back into the skin she saw and out of the one she perceived, but it had little effect. All her parts felt disconnected and her head ached, and yet somehow her body still functioned, so she slowly dressed in vague clothes and began to drift through the morning routine in her usual reclusive cloud. She quietly brewed the coffee, prepared the eggs and toast, assembled Annie’s lunch and duffel bag for her summer day camp, and took a package of halibut fillets out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. When the breakfast that Mara did not eat was over, she stiffly accepted Ben’s tentative kiss on the cheek and said goodbye to both of them with a forged smile as they left together, and then she went to the front door to watch the silver Lexus wind down the driveway through the trees. As she stood in the threshold, she suddenly imagined herself as Mrs. Cleaver wearing a white ruffled apron and sending sparkling stars into the air with her shiny smile, while her arm waved slowly back and forth like one of those mechanical characters that lived in the store windows at Christmas time. Then the car disappeared around the bend, and the odd picture blurred and dissolved into the green breeze as she closed the door and turned to lean tediously against it. She was alone now and her tense performance as the image in the mirror, a fictitiously normal wife, was over, but her body remained as stiff as her imaginary aqua-netted Cleaver hair. The characters and the audience were gone, and yet still, nothing about her felt normal at all.

She laughed, and it was a ringing echo in the silent foyer. Normal was such an utterly intangible concept to her that she could not begin to know how to achieve it. This home and this life that she had ventured into seven years ago certainly appeared upon shallow examination to be the embodiment of normal, and that was precisely what it would be if a worthy person lived within its clean and balanced form, but Mara’s weight had shifted that balance. She had been a fool to think she could exist here authentically, transforming herself into a shape that would fit, rather than pretending not to be a flawed and dirty creature that had invaded this pristine world. She had worked so hard at her role, though, and for a while she had deceived them into believing that she belonged. She had abandoned all her old lives with her body and her mind, never looking back, camouflaging her wounds under the layers of her new character.

In the beginning, Mara had lived the whole part, determined to become the unbroken person that she pretended to be, the one Ben had chosen to share his perfect, ordinary life. She had settled effortlessly into the role of stepmother and wife, but then somehow the mother part had transformed into something lovely and almost real. Being a mother even became consuming enough to overshadow the other parts of the life that were not so simple for Mara - the truffle-scented country club dinners, the chafing dish office parties, and the agonizing PTA meetings where she could not even hide behind glass shields of wine. She despised all of those functions, knowing that although she could speak the proper language and wear the appropriate clothes, she would always be an outsider masquerading as a member of circles that belonged to others.

Those things had been necessary parts of the role, though, and so she had played the character just well enough to fool all the polished, conventional, faithful people into believing she was one of them, carefully hiding the demons that, if revealed, would breathe fire and send the people screaming for the cover of their picket-fenced homes. It had been an arduous task to mingle and speak and laugh while pretending not to listen for the voices inside that might rise to whisper the truth about her, but she suffered through the hours because she knew that when they were over, she would go home to Annie. Back then she had even hoped that someday she would be able to absorb the Mara that she was portraying into her pores, so that she would have nothing left to hide and no voices left to fear. She performed every obligatory act, moving boldly ahead on what she thought was the right path toward the bright, open spaces where real, ordinary people lived, and it had all seemed so promising.

She could not distinctly remember the moment when she had lost her way, drifting off her course and sliding back toward the perpetually deepening crevasses of lost time that she had thought were empty and far behind. At first, after she had chosen to rise from her dark isolation to slip cautiously into a life with Ben and Annie, her course had become straight and clear with intermittent stretches of radiant color. Being Ben’s wife was as safe and steady as walking on a narrow, firm band of wet sand on the beach, and with Annie, Mara floated through soft moments that were as bright as blazing pomegranate sunsets over silver waves. Somewhere, though, at that indistinct moment she could never recall, the water disappeared, and she began to have nightmares of climbing uphill through dry sand, but she did not know what they meant. Slowly, her view had shifted until she was outside her skin, looking back into her own faint and trailing shadows, but still she could see nothing but lines and pale colors. It was not until she heard the loud whispers of those vague and distant voices that she knew that the monsters still lived.

When that knowledge had come, her body and mind felt heavier, and it became more and more difficult to rise in the morning, as though she was being held in her tangled sleep by unfinished dreams. Once awake, her extremities shuddered with precarious disquiet, but she forged persistently ahead through the hours and days, trying to keep up with the moments. As time went on, though, she fell further behind and felt herself turning inside as though she were living under her skin in the dark places and sinking deeper. It was like a gradual implosion of her conscious mind, and she had been resisting it now for months in a secret battle that was quiet on her surface but profoundly loud within. Longer than months, Mara. Much longer. No one else heard the cacophony of voices that she ignored as she tried to stay attached to now with her weakening grip, but she could feel the slow and steady collapse of her solid ground pulling her under to where there was nothing to hold. Caving in, falling through a tunnel of shrouded images. The actual walls and objects and colors around her were still distinct and solid, but they were moving further away, and she was only distantly aware of her own body as she traveled. You are transparent. Reality had become a painting, a moment in time she could see from her murky existence in some other place, outside of the frame.

Mara heard a sound that was nothing more than the scratching of a branch against the downspout, but it was enough to launch her back to the surface. She clenched her fists, digging her fingernails into the flesh of her palms to let the pain remind her of her solid form, and then she forced a conscious breath and pushed away from the door. She moved slowly across the living room, planting her bare feet firmly onto the pale wood floor with each step, and then she paused by the back windows that overlooked the lake. The water was a pane of silver stained glass in the golden June air, but she glanced at it only for an instant, afraid that if she stayed, she would fall into the view. Stay here, Mara. The lake might change color.

She turned and looked around with hazy eyes, seeking tasks to occupy her, and she found the normal things and slipped back into the routine of the morning, once again a mechanical figure performing in front of her own window. She cleared the breakfast table, put the dishes into the dishwasher, cleaned the counters and floors, and then cleaned them again. She was a blur of strange, puttering motion as she fought to keep her mind from drifting away from the mundane work that her hands accomplished, and yet still, her own voice continued to speak. Why? Why is the bottom rising? She shook away the words, unable to answer or explore why the irretrievable dreams that had always invaded her nights were once again out of her control and overflowing from the darkness to creep into her days.

She began to pace as she let her mind settle somewhere in the middle to consider the visible layers of her life. The pattern of her days had altered in clear and ambiguous ways over the last few years, and she no longer knew how to fill her hollow moments with enough weight to hold down the things that haunted her. Her time with Annie used make the hours come alive, and gave her the substance and the purpose she needed to shield her from the whispers that called her worthless, and for those first few fleeting years, Mara had almost believed that the hushed voices were wrong. That time had not been so very long ago, but it seemed far away and small like the earth from a plane, and Mara was unrecognizable to herself in the memory of the other life she had lived in this house. As Annie had grown, her need for Mara had gradually faded, or perhaps evolved into a kind that Mara could not comprehend, and now the little girl who was no longer little lived her busy thirteen year old life independently, rarely even coming home before dinner. Mara still wanted to be her mother, but she could not find her way back to Annie without turning back time, because they both had become something that the other did not understand, and Mara’s new shape was untouchable. It had to be untouchable and held at a safe distance, so that Mara’s disease could not reach the innocent girl, and the protective but cumbersome gap between them was growing wider every day.

The afternoon hours that used to be their time together echoed louder and louder with lost sound. Alone almost every day, time passed slowly as Mara did little of consequence, frittering the moments away and waiting restlessly until four o’clock when it was time to start dinner with her Chardonnay as company. Then, when her little family that no longer felt like hers arrived, they would eat together in a cloud of unbalanced silence. Last night had been no different, and after dessert Annie had retreated to the solitude of her room. Ben went to his den to work, and Mara had settled into the stiff white cushions of the sofa to hide in a book, but the pages were nothing but clusters of gray. Discord had begun to rumble in her nerve endings and she looked around the room, knowing that she had to find a diversion to keep the turbulence from rising. Her eyes passed the door to the den, and for an insignificant speck of time she considered seeking the company of her husband, but the thought sprinted quickly away. With the smallest signal from her he would come, but if he did, he might see through her cracks.

She had glanced at the clock and saw that it was only eight, so she scanned the room again, her eyes passing the dark window and landing on the corner desk that held the laptop, full of countless distractions, but she had not touched a computer in a very long time. The infinite, snarled jungle that was the internet intimidated her, and the feel of her fingers on the keys reminded her of the work that she loved but could no longer do. She was a writer in various journalistic genres, and her words had once been a route of escape for her from the inside out, but now it was impossible to sort through the rubble of her confusion to form rational sentences. She turned her eyes quickly away from the computer as glimpses of things lost made her rumbling anxiety louder, and in desperation she turned on the television to a ridiculous reality show about people living isolated in a house and plotting against each other. She let herself become obliviously absorbed in its lack of substance, but soon became fascinated by the simple language and the absolute mediocrity of the people. She wished that she could live in their uncluttered minds, and began to imagine herself inside their transparent world in a house full of cameras. Suddenly she realized that she was shaking with hysterical laughter, and it continued until Ben came out of the den.

His presence pulled her suddenly back into her body, and she was still quivering but no longer laughing as he came over and gazed down at her with the benevolent, open face that had once captured her attention, but that now seemed unfamiliar. He stood there, tall and strong, firmly blocking her view of the television and holding out a coaxing hand. Please come to bed. He looked warm and inviting, and her actual skin wanted to dissolve into his, but her conceptual armor was too hard and could not be touched. You can’t let him see inside. Keep the gap. She shook her head and whispered I’ll be up when the show is over, but they both knew that her words were not true. He clearly sensed the growing barriers that she was hammering into the ground around her, though not the why, and he also understood after all these years that if he asked, she would be silent. He would never know what she really was behind her walls, because she could never release the sound of her voice that was screaming inside, but could never be loud enough to reach out. I have to protect you from what I am! You can’t see! Stay back! No, please save me!

He heard the silence of all that she did not speak, nodded in surrender, and then leaned over to kiss her lightly on the forehead as she stared at the horizon on the wall. He paused, then brushed her hair back from her face to look at her until her eyes moved to his, and seconds ticked by as she gazed up at him with her lips parted as though to speak, then closed. Ben’s heavy breath filled the room as he paused again, touched his cheek to her hair, then moved away and went quietly up the stairs. He disappeared from her consciousness as her eyes again found the television, and she let it take her away from the waves of sickness and silent moans that were swirling in her gut and threatening to rise. She stared straight ahead, trying to cease all sensation, and as the moments passed she could no longer see or hear, but she could smell. Cotton candy and grass. Wet grass. Then all motion inside and outside her body stopped and her eyelids became heavy, wet blankets, but she knew that she would not sleep.

One show passed, and then another, perhaps more, but to her it was nothing but disjointed movement and sound, and then at a random point in time, she turned off the noise. It was after eleven, and she knew that Ben and Annie were asleep, so she was alone. She went upstairs to wash her face and to change, floating over the steps without feet and vaguely wondering when she had stopped tucking Annie in at bedtime, but she could not recall. She stepped quietly past the bed where Ben snored softly and went into the bathroom to put on her lace nightgown, and then stood over the sink with the warm water running and studied her disconnected face in the mirror. She was bewildered by its smoothness. After all the wretched lives she had lived in her thirty seven years, and with all the scars that lurked and twisted beneath her skin, her features should be tangled in a web of jagged lines like a map. Instead, somehow, her face was fresh and clean and unmarked like a blank page. She could find no flaws until she looked into her eyes that were like wide tunnels of glass, dazed and panicked like those of an animal being hunted by a nameless enemy.

Then she saw that the animal was preparing to run for its life, and she turned quickly away to flee from her own image. Are you going to run away again, Mara? She bolted quietly down the stairs, through the living room, and down the steps to the basement wine cellar where she randomly chose a bottle of red, and then she went back to the kitchen where she opened it with her shaking hands on the island, noting indifferently as she poured that it was an expensive Bordeaux. She took her full glass and the bottle to the living room and stood by the windows, taking long sips and leaning her head against the cool panes of glass as she stared out at the scattered strands of steaming, shivering moonlight on the summer water. The wine was warm as it coursed through her body, and she relaxed and imagined that she was the smooth lake and that the wine was evaporating into a garnet colored fog that would lay over her like a blanket. Then something in the picture began to tremble and rise and she erased it in panic. Don’t go near the red water. She drained her glass to drown her unknowable fear, and the fog faded as she poured more.

She roamed through the rest of the bottle, moving her body just for the sake of moving, circling through the maze of furniture, going outside into the darkness to pace the deck and then wandering back in to escape the thick, liquid air. At first the alcohol was soothing, and she drifted up to an easy plane where the obscurity below was irrelevant, and she laughed at arbitrary details that crossed the path of her thoughts, danced with no music, and felt like a girl in a pretty lace dress. When the bottle was three quarters empty, however, she began to descend from the high ground, and her course became erratic so she drank faster, knowing what came next and needing it to pass in a blur. Her mind turned into a twisted, melting candle and she could see shapes in the wax, glimpses of faces and colors, and then the smells again began to seep through her cracks. Popcorn and morning sand. It was time to let the candle turn into shapeless liquid, so she downed the bottle, threw it away, got a Chardonnay from the refrigerator and drank just enough. Then she stumbled upstairs to go to sleep so that in the morning she would no longer remember where her intoxicated mind had tried to make her go.

Now, in the empty and sober light of day, she was surrounded by walls of space, but the images she had tried to drown the night before were floating and creeping around her edges. She could not hide from them, so instead she was darting and dodging out of their reach by staying in constant motion, although she had run out of mundane tasks, and her body was tired and dehydrated. She began to pace with her hands clasped behind her back, muttering to herself and hearing the insanity of the sound, but not caring because the noise covered the other voices and kept a thin layer of reality within her loose grasp. She rambled for a bit, and then her words found an imprecise pattern and she tried to reason with herself. Come on, Mara. Take control and do something. Anything. Level your mind. Keep it quiet. It’s gone, and it can’t come back. None of it. There is only now, and the rest is blank, blank, blank. You’re fine. Today is today, and you’re okay. That should be a song, right? The sound of her voice drifted to her ears through thick smoke, but she kept going. Come on, sunshine, you can do it. I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. She sang the words in a low, fluid melody. We belong. We belong to the light. We belong to the thunder. She laughed a bubbling, ridiculous sound that stopped on a staccato beat. I do belong here. She spoke firmly, knowing that it was a lie.

Her pacing paused in front of the fireplace, and she steadied herself with a trembling hand on the mantle as she studied her surroundings. All of the objects in this room were symbols of the flawless life that Mara had attempted to build into her own, and she had selected and arranged each piece in perfect order. From the outside looking in, this was a home from the pages of a magazine with a tasteful palette and comfortable patterns fashioned for a utopian suburban existence. Mara, Mara, you know you don’t fit. You never did. You never could. Suddenly she understood how fragile it all was as the room began to wobble before her eyes, and she imagined the sight and sound of the heavy art glass vase on the end table falling and smashing to the floor. None of these elegant possessions had ever really belonged to her, nor had the house itself, though Mara had been the one to discover it after the wedding. She had found it by chance, and when she took Ben to see it on a sunny winter afternoon, he had loved it too, but it had not mattered. He would have bought any house that she wanted to make her happy.

It was all so far away now, the memory of walking through the door for the first time on that January day that was blanketed with fresh diamond snow under a thick, cornflower sky. The high ceilings and open spaces of the house were congruent to the new sense of latitude she had found with Ben, so it had immediately enticed her, and she had admired the clean lines and angles of the tall, vanilla walls. She had instantly imagined a clear layout of all the things that would fill the rooms, and now every piece of furniture and art had a specific location and purpose, exactly as she had planned it that day. She was not an artist, but somehow her vision for the design had appeared as naturally as morning, and it was sculpted around the most fundamental, organic, and central element of the house. Sunlight. Its transparent radiance dominated and intensified every corner, fold, texture, and color of every room and exerted its power through the abundant windows, unchallenged. Darkness could not be found in this house during the day, but shadows had gradually emerged in places where they should not exist, and they were her own.

Mara forced her legs to take her to the middle of the living room, and she turned in a circle, feeling as though her body was spinning on a tilted axis, and her surroundings became an unfamiliar design that she no longer recalled creating. She was an intruder in someone else’s house, and she had to run before the real owner came home and exposed her. Thief! She had stolen all of this from some other nameless, faceless woman that Ben should have chosen, who deserved what he offered and who would have fit into the frame of the painting of this perfect, ordinary corner of the world. Mara had pretended to be the missing part of their picture, and they had all twisted and strained to squeeze her in like a square into a circle, and even though they knew now that she did not belong, they had not yet pushed her out. She was so goddamned lucky to be here that she should wake up every morning and want to scream with joy. Instead she just wanted to scream. This house was a chasm of years from where she had begun, and from her untraceable and unrecorded route. This life was the best kind of life, and yet she could not, no matter how hard she tried, feel that this was the place where she should stay.

She was on a cliff without balance on the verge of tumbling backwards into conquering tunnels full of raveled time. Run, get out! Her feet carried her body toward the door. No, you can’t go. She found the staircase instead. Keep going. She stumbled up, higher and higher, until she found footing and direction, and then she was standing at the threshold of the room at the end of the hall without recollection of her time or path from the top of the steps. Annie’s room. It was alive, breathing its own iridescent air and speaking of the weightless beginning of a new story, and the thick stacks of pages yet to be written. Mara inhaled deeply, wanting to absorb the promise of the room into her lungs as medicine to give her strength. Annie was her daughter, even if they did not share common blood, and Mara had to find a way back to her to at least be a close portrayal of an adequate mother. You don’t know how, Mara. How would you know? Above all, though, Mara did not want to become a weight that Annie would carry with her throughout her life. Surrender to the shadows, Mara. You can rest there, alone. No more running. She closed her eyes, and leaned against the doorframe. No, I won’t go. She had to let Annie stay free of weight, and that was her reason to stay. This time, for the first time, she could not run.

How, Mara? How will you live when the covers are lifting? She was made of a thin fabric of skin, full of gaping holes where flesh had been torn out by the demons before she had submerged them, one by one, in her liquid hollows. For as long as she could remember, even throughout her indistinct childhood, she had been on a quest to seal the holes, and to replace the good parts that had vanished with the bad, now forever buried in lost volumes of time. At every stop on her crooked road she had searched for the undefined shapes that would make her solid and complete, but her cracks had only grown wider, and so she could do nothing but bandage her untreated wounds. Don’t let the demons bleed through. She thought she had been healed once before, all those endless dusky miles ago when she and Michael were married, and for a few glistening years she believed that she had won and that she was once again whole. They had loved one another wildly under the nurturing shadows of the mountains in Arizona, but then fate had attacked once and then again, slashing her fragile layers of control into sharp and scattered fragments. Her instinct to flee had been powerful, but she had held on, fighting a weak battle until she lost and sank below the surface, and then impulse had taken control of her body and forced her to smash her glistening life into pieces. She ran from the ruins.

From there, Mara had blindly taken a long, shallow path to a new city, prepared to hide in corners forever, but after months of seclusion she had opened her door to go out where the sun still rose, just for a moment, and Ben had appeared. He was genuine and strong like a support beam to keep her from crashing, and he had a child, six year old Annie, who was a golden prize that Mara did not deserve, but who was so captivatingly close that she had finally, hesitantly, and fearfully reached for her. Mara had entered their sparkling world, and for those first lovely years she had lived in a silent and safely confined box of time. As each day passed, she had begun to feel a cautious victory, imagining once again that she was restored and that the demons had been suffocated in the concrete tomb she had built. But they had survived. Furtively and slowly the whispers had emerged, slithering invisibly around her perimeter, taunting her and telling her irrefutably that she had not found what she was looking for after all. She could do nothing but smother their words with whatever was at hand, because if peace was not here, then it was nowhere, and there was nowhere to run. Here was as close as she would ever come, so she had to keep the ghosts sealed inside and find a way to bear the pounding.

Her sight returned as she drifted back into her skin and stepped over the threshold into the pastel room that was a simple and honest sketch of the life of a young girl. Stuffed animals were balanced in tedious heaps in two corners, posters of a nameless boy band hung on the pale pink walls, and rubber bracelets and bottles of glittery nail polish were strewn along the top of the long white dresser. Mara stretched out next to a stiff doll with long dark braids on the ruffled yellow bed, and lay flat on her back looking up at the ceiling that was covered with transparent green stars. For a moment, she saw a small white room and felt the shapes of her own life at thirteen threatening to appear, but that time was never allowed to leave the cave where it lived, and so she rolled her thoughts back by years and found her mother. In between long, hollow spaces of memory, Mara still possessed a few, crumpled images of her, and she clung to them like pictures saved from a fire. She had been only eight when her mother had died, and it was a year that now consisted of little more than ashes, but she could still see her mother’s long, fluid brown hair, and she could still hear the sound of her words. Keep going Mara. You’ll be fine. Just keep going. Those words were always with Mara, and she held them in her tightly fisted hand for strength and as proof that her mother loved her, and Mara had kept going through every horrible year. What about her. What stopped her. Who stopped her. Look at it. Look into the pit.

Mara turned onto her side away from the smoking year, and she stared into the eyes of the doll as she thought of another time with her mother that was farther away and unclouded. Mara had been five or so, and the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table making Valentines with colored paper and glitter and markers that smelled like fruit. Her mother’s hair had been pulled back into a pony tail with a thick, brown barrette, and she was cutting the paper and biting her lip in concentration as she tried to make the heart perfectly symmetrical. When her mother was finished, her face had gleamed like pink patent leather as she held it proudly in the air, and Mara had giggled delightedly and declared that she had made the best heart that had ever existed in all of space and time. They had laughed together, and her mother had reached out to touch Mara’s cheek with fingers that were as soft as rose petals, and then they sat in silence for long, colorful minutes, grinning and making silly faces at each other. Mara could feel the curve of her own lips now as she watched the old movie play in her head, until suddenly a shadow appeared, and their pink skin turned to dark gray. He stood over them, looming with his huge frame and snarling face, and the vague memory of his shape made her panic return, and she rolled quickly off of the yellow bed and ran down the stairs like terrified prey, shouting to herself until darkness covered the shadows. Keep going, Mara! Run!

She took long, fragmented breaths as she stood in her grand kitchen of cherry, steel, and granite that was so different from the shabby vinyl and whiteboard one in which the Valentines had been made. Remember the ugly old house, Mara? But now her new house was echoing with wild, indistinct noise, and so she began to pound her fist on the counter, letting the pain bring her back to the silent moment, only stopping when no other sensation but the petals on her cheek remained. She reached her bruised hand up to feel the lingering sensation, and she suddenly knew that her own touch could never have been as soft as roses, but she was certain that Annie’s real mother’s hands had been as gentle as the first falling snowflakes of winter. You should never have touched her with your tainted hands. You knew what you were. Mara shuddered and rocked back and forth with the urge to flee, to find another empty corner of the world in which to hide and be cleansed of the dead layers of skin that had grown as armor, and be free, just for a while. Rest, Mara. You’ll be able to rest. She looked out the window and saw nothing but blue. I can’t. She held onto thin ropes in the air.

Go to the blue. She stumbled to the back door and went outside and was only vaguely aware of the sensation of the dense, baked air that immediately encircled her. She gripped the rail, forgetting to breathe as she stared desperately at the water, begging its rhythms to soothe her and to untwist her mind. A hint of breeze touched her hair, and she took a remembered breath and raised her hands to her cheeks that felt like cold leather, but the touch brought back the awareness of her body and time. Think of today, only today. She just had to survive this one day, and then she would survive tomorrow, and then the next day, because this was a good life and she had to stay. She thought of Ben, the impossibly good man who had given this life to her. This morning as she stood at the stove, she had sensed him standing behind her, and he put his hands on her waist and his face to her neck, but her body had thickened as she fought the violent urge to push away his touch. A part of her wanted nothing more than to throw down her walls to let him in so he would take her weight with his body and hold her up, but she knew it was too late, and instead she gave him an indifference that he did not deserve. She had become so remote that sometimes when he spoke to her she barely heard his words, and so now he rarely offered more than his presence, knowing that she would only come to him in her own time, or not at all.

Agitation was a hideous creature with long claws and triangle teeth, and it was tearing her body apart. She had to do something, anything, to keep her mind away from its path of impossible thoughts and the nightmares that lived at the end, but she was held fast by the view of reflected white clouds on the water that drifted like leaves. She slapped her hand against the rail, forced her eyes away from the liquid pictures, and let her gaze settle on the houses across the lake that were too small to see in detail, but at least were solid forms to which her mind could cling. They were quaint little bungalows and cape cods built seventy years ago or more, and they were much smaller than the larger custom contemporaries and A-frames on this side of the water, but they were full of history and character. Their own home sat on three acres and was protected on all sides by barriers of maples, evergreens, and the pebbled beach, and it was such a perfect retreat that they had sold Ben’s old fishing cabin up north years ago, since no normal person would want or need to escape from this house. From any perspective, the entire lakeshore was an envied and coveted community, and every house had its own private piece of green earth and a view that glistened and spoke in waves. Mara considered for a moment all of the neighbors around her that she did not know who were right now leading their ordinary lives, and she wished that she could drift into their bodies and become them so that she would be free of the madness that rioted within her own shadows. She imagined all those people as pristine, shiny characters in happy, clean stories that had no connection or similarity to her own.

Her restless limbs were trembling as she stared at the tiny house directly across the lake, and the shimmering air began to move in waves that were choppier than those on the water. The little house seemed to be moving too, somehow, but then her view became nothing but a dark, swimming cloud of smoke, and so she turned and went clumsily through the French doors and into the kitchen. She stopped to look at the wine rack on the counter for a moment, but then she shifted her eyes away. She did not drink in the morning, at least not any more. She glanced at her phone on the counter, but she had no one to call, so she turned and drifted across the room to the desk, sat down in front of the closed computer, and stared at the blank wall for a very long time until it was all that her mind perceived. There was no light or darkness, she had no shape or depth, and there was absolutely no sound. The voices slept.

CHAPTER 2

I t was a May evening seven years ago at the smoky beginning of another new life when Mara met Ben. It had been only five short months since she had made her way through the dark shadows back to Ohio after fleeing the life in Arizona that she had left smoldering like ruined earth after a wildfire. She had been drawn to a familiar landscape this time, an uncommon break from her usual pattern of escaping to unknown land, distant from all places she had passed through before. Columbus, where she had lived briefly years ago, had been a rare stop on her long course where no wreckage had been left behind, so at some indistinct point on the road away from Flagstaff, her instinct had mapped a path to a place that was loosely illustrated in her mind as soft, safe ground. The town where she had spent her murky childhood was only a three-hour drive away from her destination, but somehow that knowledge was only a fleeting, immaterial thought. She knew now that the arms of its ghosts were lurking no matter how far she traveled.

The day she left Arizona after her divorce, the sky had been covered with twisting clouds, a fittingly dark conclusion to a season of her life that had begun with a most magnificent and unprecedented light. She carried with her new weight that she would never shed, made of heavy blood and tissue from deep, fresh wounds and ancient, ragged scars that had been sliced open. Mara thought the end of her life with Michael had been the end of her, and that she was irreparably broken and would just drive until she disappeared into nowhere, a place that she knew existed because she had been to its edge before. This time she was certain she would reach the ledge and fall, but as the miles continued to move, her mind performed its mastery of elusion and saved her, holding her balanced on the thin line that separated her from the oblivion below. Moment by moment, as distance and time slipped away, the images faded into the dark gray place where all the others lived, and she locked them up tight, ignoring the voices that screamed to be set free. She kept going, and when she arrived at her destination they were only a hum, and so she quietly and mechanically set forth with the process of living, holding her senses tightly closed to keep the chaos within from being released.

She found an adequate apartment in a turn of the century building, a small space that had been remodeled in the early nineties with white cabinets, rustic oak floors, and sleek, bare light fixtures. The ceilings were high, exposed brick accented the living room, and a spiral steel staircase led to a loft bedroom. The walls had few windows, but she welcomed the armor of darkness. The rent was reasonable because of the soon to be up and coming nature of the area, and she was not deterred by the neighboring homes and buildings with their boarded windows and graphic graffiti since far more frightening things had lived in her world. She felt safe in her new home, and she stayed tucked in her small rooms for months, sheltered by walls of isolation.

Soon after moving in, Mara purchased a new computer with her savings so she could try to earn an intrusively necessary income by writing, her only marketable skill. She wanted to freelance, no matter how meager the money, since the idea of going to an office every day was inconceivable. Alone, she merely had to exist, but out there with other people, she had no idea who to be. Who or what she had become was too complex to understand and too hideous to be shown, and she lacked the energy to wear another costume and another face. If she were to play back the recording of her life, at least the visible and perceivable parts, she would see a succession of short films that had each starred a new version of her. Her truth and the real person behind her character were always perfectly hidden, or so she thought, and yet she could never quite fit into her role of the moment either. Only once, that last bright season. This time, though, she could not imagine creating a new role for a new story, nor did she think that she would ever have the strength to again, so she hid quietly in her dark apartment and in her small box of words.

Winter died slowly and spring appeared in its peek-a-boo Midwestern way, but she stayed within her walls, even when April came and called her name just before it floated away. May drifted in and most of it passed her by, until one afternoon its warm air began to beckon and then plead, and her rooms grew suddenly smaller. She was trying to meet a deadline for an article submission and had only a few edits left to go, but the yellow light from her small window was lifting her darkness and fogging her focus with its glare. Work had come slowly and she needed to get something published before all her funds vanished, but her eyes were blurring, her back ached, and her restlessness would not let her mind or body be still.

She stood and went to the window, considering what was outside. From her third floor unit, she observed the busy urban street below and the shabby storefronts across the way. It was a view that would be ugly to most, but to her, at that moment, it was considerably intriguing