The Riverhouse Read online

  Not that he wasn’t good. Shane was very good, and he knew it. It was just that, to him, the act of drawing and painting was like any other manual job; like laying bricks or digging a trench. He knew that art required skill and talent, but so did operating a bulldozer, and Shane approached it in much the same way. Like any other manual worker, he preferred to work a shift, putting in his time at the job site and then being done with it for the rest of the day. This meant that he’d never had to rely on the quirky vagaries of inspiration to get the job done.

  Unlike the starving artists back at T and C, Shane preferred to bypass the legendary artist’s muse, which could be fickle and temperamental and prone to long vacations. Instead, he relied on a sort of foreman in his head, one who had the blueprint for any given job and knew exactly where the marks needed to be. The foreman would call out the orders, and Shane’s hand would simply obey. Shane himself barely had to pay attention. He may have been a teensy bit jealous of the starving artists, with their auras of quirky eccentricity (which the rest of the world seemed to think of as the mark of the “true artiste”) but he didn’t envy the way they worked. For Shane, sitting around and waiting for inspiration to strike was both silly and unnecessary; he had long ago learned the way down to the well of creativity, and figured out how to dip out whatever he needed all by himself. For him, waiting on the muse was a sucker’s game.

  While the coffee percolated, he went to get dressed. Starving artists might be the kind to lurk around their apartments all day in their underwear, but Shane was too used to the routine. This would be his first shift in the cottage, but there was no reason things should be any different. The movers had been very thorough and Shane had officially unpacked his studio yesterday afternoon, setting up his easel, art board and work table exactly as it had been at his apartment. He’d decided on the little upstairs room with the canted ceiling on one side and the single window on the end, positioning the canvas so as to take full advantage of the morning light. In many ways, the new studio was even better than the big studio back in New York. Maybe, he mused, he should have done this years ago. It had never crossed his mind, of course, and if it hadn’t been for the lay-off, the divorce, and… well, everything else, it certainly never would have. As bad as all of that had been, at least it had led to this.

  He looked at his watch as he climbed onto the stool before the huge canvas. It was two minutes before eight. He was a little early, but that was fine. He set his coffee mug on the side table, in the little cleared space on the corner that wasn’t cluttered with paint tubes, brushes, magazines and CD cases, and looked up. The sign on the wall over his easel had come with him from his office back at Tristan and Crane. He’d hand-lettered it himself. It read:

  “I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.” – M. C. Escher.

  He read it as he rolled a brush head between his thumb and forefinger, absently shaping the bristles, and then he looked down at the canvas before him. It was only half finished. The top half showed a nearly photorealistic castle in the distance, blue with haze against an almost absurdly dramatic, stormy sky. There was supposed to be a forested foreground scene as well, full of huge, ancient trees—“loaded with personality” the art director had instructed—with a winding, curving path cutting through the middle. It was a matte painting, intended for use in a television movie that was currently being produced for TBS.

  Despite his skills, Shane was not particularly creative. He couldn’t invent. He could, however, mimic, and this had made him very good at finding resource material. There were magazine clippings and computer printouts taped all around the edge of the canvas, and dozens more tacked to the art board below the M. C. Escher quote. The images showed a dizzying variety of forest scenes, mountainous vistas, stormy clouds, tree close-ups, sprawling redwood canopies, and ancient castles. Shane had cobbled all of these elements together in the original sketch of the scene, and that sketch had been enough to get him the contract with the production studio in the first place—his first contract since being laid off from the agency early last year. Now, his original sketch was mounted on a smaller easel next to the canvas. Shane looked from the sketch to the various reference materials, connecting the elements in his head, and then began to paint.

  It was better today, but not great. Progress has been slow lately, and this was slightly worrisome to Shane. The problem wasn’t that the inspiration wasn’t there, of course; that wasn’t the kind of artist Shane was. Instead, the problem simply seemed to be one of focus. The foreman in his head still told his hand where the marks were supposed to go, filling up the white and bringing the image to life, but for some reason he had gotten a little lazy about the schedule. Shane would find himself getting bogged down in the details, spending far too much time on minutiae and forgetting the overall scene. He’d lean gradually closer and closer to the canvas until the brush was barely inches in front of his eyes, teasing out some tiny, insignificant detail that wouldn’t even be visible in the final film.

  He’d been working on the painting for almost two weeks, back in the old apartment, and it was due for delivery to the production studio in Los Angeles in four days. Normally, he’d have been easily finished by now, the painting leaning in the corner and drying while he milked the deadline, reading paperback novels and playing Sudoku on his computer. Instead, it looked like he’d barely be done in time, and he’d had to start mixing his oils with an alkyd gel so the paint would dry soon enough to ship. It worried him, partly because he needed this contract, needed to prove to himself and his clients that he could still produce, even outside of the world of Tristan and Crane. But it also worried him because it made him feel like he wasn’t in control of the art anymore. After all, he wasn’t like the starving artists, the ones who wore black and had coke for lunch and sat around moping while the muse flitted around like an unfaithful lover, refusing to land and put out. Shane was used to going down to the well of creativity and sending down his bucket all by himself, drawing up whatever he needed, dismissing the muse for the fickle whore that she is.

  Now, for the first time in his adult life, Shane found himself nagging at the foreman in his mind, reminding him that there was a deadline to meet, and that he couldn’t afford to fritter around on a tree root or a butterfly or some damned bluebird on a branch that no one was ever going to see. Maybe the foreman was just out of practice. If so, Shane couldn’t blame him. Before this project, he hadn’t painted anything for months. Probably, the foreman in his mind had been off on vacation during those months, getting tan and lazy somewhere, and was just now getting back into the swing of things. Shane hoped that was all there was to it. He strongly preferred the foreman in his mind to the muse. After all, anthropomorphic visualizations aside, the foreman in his mind was really just Shane himself. He could control the foreman, make him do the work. The muse, however, was different. She was her own, and she was capricious. Screw her, Shane thought as he painted, and not for the first time. Screw the muse and the paintbrush she rode in on.

  Metaphorically, of course.

  He caught himself focusing in on a boulder by the path, spending way too much time sponging on a layer of moss, dark forest green on the bottom, bright lime green on the top, where the sun was hitting it. He sat back, blinking and shaking his head. How much time had he wasted on that? He refused to look at his watch. Instead, he reached for his coffee, took a sip, and then grimaced. It was stone cold.

  Damn.

  Two o’clock came and Shane clumped downstairs for some late lunch. Steph had always told him that he needed to take a snack with him when he went to paint. “Take a banana or a muffin,” she’d say. “Quit starving yourself. You’re telling your body to pack on the fat, like a bear getting ready to hibernate.” Sometimes Shane did bring a snack with him, but once the shift started, he’d forget all about it. For whatever reason, the foreman in his head allowed the occasional sip of coffee, but never any snack breaks. As a result, once the mental wh
istle blew promptly at two o’clock, Shane always found himself ravenously hungry, ready to eat whatever was in sight. Today was no different.

  He slapped together a ham sandwich and ate it standing by the sliding back door, looking out over the patio and the river below.

  It was a grand view indeed, even if the Missouri wasn’t going to win any Most-Beautiful-River-of-the-Year awards. It was still swollen high in its banks, nearly opaque with mud. It looked thick enough to walk on, and the effect was only increased by the amount of flotsam slogging along on the slow current. Uprooted logs and broken branches of all sizes mingled with a colorful variety of trash and debris, all greedily collected by the river during its most recent flood.

  It had been a big year for floods in the Missouri river valley, but the people who lived there had grown accustomed to just rolling with it. Shane had always marveled at the attitude of the locals toward the river, at their shrugging resilience in the face of such a huge and unpredictable neighbor. Much like them, though, he had recently endured his own fairly devastating flood, albeit a uniquely personal one. In the aftermath, just like everybody else, he’d simply had to suck it up, muck out all the stinking mud, decide what was salvageable from his old life, and try to move on.

  Shane had contemplated suicide, and more than once. Not because he was depressed (or so he truly believed) but because he was just so tired. Dr. Taylor had helped—probably more than Shane was willing to admit—but it had been a near thing. Moving on was such damn hard work. He’d thought that he’d had his life all put together, patted down and comfortable by the ripe old age of thirty-three. It hadn’t been a particularly exciting life, but it had been his, and it had looked more or less the way he’d always hoped it would. He’d had a decent job doing what he liked to do, a good-looking and fairly pleasant wife, a nice apartment just across the river in New Jersey, and a new Saab that was still, on the day that everything had begun to go neatly to hell, smelling a bit like it had just rolled off the lot.

  Less than a year later, he had none of those things anymore, not even the Saab with its persistent new car smell. All he had left was the vacation cottage and his art, and even the art was, at the moment, a little shaky. It had been a long journey, a terrible, devastating flood, but Shane consoled himself in the knowledge that, at long last, the worst was finally over. Such things only happened once in a lifetime, and at least his was now behind him. By comparison, whatever rages the river below might have in store for him seemed fairly manageable.

  He finished his sandwich and walked into the bedroom to change into shorts and a tee shirt. Now that his shift was over, he’d decided to go for a bike ride.

  The sun was a high, bright diamond by the time Shane rolled his bike out of the little wooden shed attached to the side of the cottage. It was September, and even though there was a tang of autumn in the air, it was still almost stiflingly hot in the river valley. Tom, the cottage’s big gray cat, jumped off the tiny front porch, tail up, and padded over toward Shane, purring audibly. Shane had never thought of Tom as his and Steph’s cat, since they really didn’t do much to take care of him. He’d always just show up when they came to stay, and they would occasionally feed him or put out a saucer of milk.

  “Why do you want to call him Tom?” Steph had asked when they’d first encountered the big gray cat, as they’d sat petting him on the back patio.

  Shane had shrugged. “It just fits him, don’t you think? Tom-cat. Tom and Jerry.”

  “I’d give him a girl’s name,” she replied, watching the cat stretch and spread its claws. “I can’t help it. When I was a little girl, I thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Some things just stick.”

  Shane had thought it both silly and a little cute.

  Shane squatted and petted Tom on his big, bullet-shaped head. In response, Tom pressed his head and back up into Shane’s hand, rubbing against his leg and purring like an outboard motor. There were a few burs buried in the fur on Tom’s flank. Steph used to brush them out when they’d come, and Tom would always patiently endure it, but it was a lost cause. He was an outdoor cat; for him, burs were a way of life. As Shane squatted, he glanced aside, into the tiny window that peeked into the cottage’s cramped basement. There was only one light inside, a bare bulb hung from ancient black wiring, and it was on. Shane shook his head a little.

  “Whaddaya say, Tom?” he said, still peering through the dirty basement window. “Looks like Smithy knows we’re here, huh?”

  Tom purred even louder and twined sinuously around Shane’s legs, arching his back luxuriously. Smithy was a pet name that Steph had come up with, the first time they had vacationed in the cottage. The real estate agent, a woman in her fifties, with square eyeglasses and very short blonde hair, had told them that the cottage was rumored to be haunted. She’d apparently found the idea rather charming. It was Steph’s idea to give the alleged ghost a name, and they had officially christened him “Smithy”, after the man that had taken care of Steph’s parents’ summer home when she’d been a kid.

  “If he’s going to live here when we’re gone, he can at least earn his keep,” she’d said. “He can be the caretaker.” Later, whenever something would go missing—a sock in the wash or a set of keys—or whenever one of them forgot to lock the cabin door, it would be blamed on the elusive Smithy. It wasn’t until their second year vacationing in the cottage that Smithy had taken on any sort of reality. The cottage did indeed seem to have the sorts of quirks and idiosyncrasies that would lead people to call it haunted. The basement light would be found on more often than not, even when Shane knew he’d turned it off the night before. Same for the light in the upstairs bedroom, the room that was now his studio. The toilet would even flush sometimes, all by itself, although never while Stephanie or Shane were in the bathroom. “Smithy’s using the john again,” Steph would say, a little wigged out but not really frightened.

  Once, according to the same real estate agent, a local radio station had held a Halloween contest nearby, getting people to stay in the old manor house next door, which was reputed to be even more haunted than the cottage. The truth was that both the cottage and the manor house had once been part of the same complex. There was a story connected to the property, but all Shane was able to remember of it was that the manor house and cottage had once belonged to a relatively famous artist and his wife. It had seemed comfortably fitting to him. After all, he was an artist, too, even if he wasn’t particularly famous.

  Thinking that, and dismissing the troublesome but harmless Smithy, Shane stood up, brushed gray cat hairs off his hands, and straddled his bike. If Steph had been there, she’d have told him to remember his helmet. He hated wearing a bike helmet, but he usually would when she asked him to. It always annoyed him a little when she nagged him about it, but he sort of missed it now, nonetheless. Her nagging had meant she cared. He considered wearing the bike helmet this time, for old time’s sake, but decided against it. This was a do-over. Steph was gone, and nobody cared if he wore his bike helmet or not, least of all him. He sighed and paused, looking over the cottage that was now, at least for the foreseeable future, his permanent home.

  Everything about the cottage was sort of pleasantly miniature. There was a miniature porch that wrapped around the northwest corner, facing the driveway, a miniature flagstone patio in the back that overlooked the river far below, and even a miniature crooked chimney that climbed up the north side, in the shade of an elderly eighty-foot pine. The cottage itself was mostly made of stone with a cedar shingled roof, thick with moss. It had always looked to Shane like something a Hobbit might live in, sans the round door. It was perched on a rocky bluff that brooded over a bend in the river, surrounded on three sides by trees, and accessed only by a long gravel driveway. As Shane began his ride, pedaling down into the shaded valley of the driveway, he saw mud caked onto the weeds on both sides, dulling it and matting it down. It was possible that he could get stuck here sometime, he thought, hemmed in by floodwaters ev
en if his cottage remained high and dry. It was something to keep in mind for next year, when the spring rains started up again.

  Trees crowded the driveway on both sides, still and limp in the humidity. Shane was sweating freely by the time he came to the paved bike trail that crossed his driveway, almost in sight of Valley Road. He slowed and turned left, heading away from Simpson Park and in the general direction of Bastion Falls. He’d probably not ride all the way into town today, but he could if he wanted to. The bike path meandered and wove through the woods, curving back and forth between the river and Valley Road, and eventually merging with the road where it entered the town, at the gate of the floodwall.

  Riding bike was the only form of exercise Shane enjoyed. Stephanie had loved to exercise. She had been a runner and a swimmer. She had been into yoga and Pilates and whatever else new work-out was being offered at the YMCA three times a week. She had been addicted to endorphins. As a joke, Shane had even had that phrase printed on a tee shirt for her—ADDICTED TO ENDORPHINS!—in huge block letters on a blue background, and had given the shirt to her for Christmas five years ago. She’d laughed out loud, because she’d known it was true, and had worn the shirt regularly to her workouts. Shane had been absurdly proud of that. The tee shirt had been meant as a joke, a sort of a booby prize (so to speak, hah-hah), but she had truly loved it, wearing it until it had gotten thin and faded, finally relegated to nightshirt status.

  When she divorced him and moved out, she’d left the tee shirt. Shane had found it neatly folded in the bottom drawer of her old dresser, sitting all by itself in the back corner, like a forgotten relic. He’d taken it out and sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at it on his lap. The letters were still perfectly legible, even though he couldn’t see all of them because of how it was folded. It read: ICTED TO END. It didn’t make any sense, but then again, maybe it did. Maybe it made all the sense in the world.