was so bright I was blinded. I closed my eyes against it, but it was still there beneath my eyelids, still there pressing me up against the windowpane, a cold, hard surge that pushed my hips up onto the window ledge and spread my legs and poured into me … I grasped the window frame for balance and cut my hand on broken glass. I gasped and my mouth filled up with saltwater. I tried to push back but that only made the surge come again … and again, sucking me down into the riptide.
I’d heard somewhere that if you’re drowning you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness, like a lover carrying me to bed, down into the darkness where he lived.
SIX
T he sound of the moving truck in the driveway woke me up the next morning. I lay for a moment, sprawled in a tangle of sheets, trying to remember where I was. Hadn’t I drowned? But that was only a dream. As I scrambled into my discarded clothes from last night, though, I noticed the broken glass on the floor and a long jagged cut on my hand. I gingerly approached the window and saw that there among the broken glass was the metal wind chime. I stared at it for a moment, recalling the violence of my dream, but then a knock on the front door startled me out of my reverie. The sound of the wind chime hitting the window must have woken me up and I’d gone to the window to close it. That’s when I must have cut my hand. The wind and the broken glass must have mixed in with my dream and created the rest out of all my pent-up longing for the return of my shadow lover. That was the only explanation, I told myself hurrying down the stairs, the only one that made sense.
It didn’t take long for the two men and two women from Green Move (the eco-friendly moving company run by Annie’s partner, Maxine) to unpack the contents of my Inwood apartment and the boxes from my storage unit. When they finished, the house still looked empty. I invited them to share the basket of sandwiches that had arrived courtesy of Deena’s Deli (“We’re Deli-ghted you’re our new neighbor!!!”). We sat on the front porch enjoying the cool breeze that came out of the woods.
“The summers are great up here,” one of the women told me. “My partner and I have a place in Margaretville about forty minutes east. But the winters …”
The woman, whose name was Yvonne, proceeded to tell me about a couple who’d moved up here year-round and gone a little stir crazy, but then, she assured me, they’d always had “issues.” I laughed off the idea that I was worried about going stir crazy in the country and they all agreed that it was different because I was teaching at the college. When they left the house felt quiet and even emptier than before they had come with my meager belongings.
Before I could wonder if the first sign of going stir crazy was having strange erotic dreams, I threw myself into unpacking, figuring that the surest way to ward off melancholy was to make the house feel like my home. I hung framed prints and photographs in the library and parlor and unpacked my mismatched collection of mugs and dishes into the built-in china cabinets. It would be fun, I told myself, to find odds and ends in antiques stores to fill the house up.
After dinner—a pizza delivered courtesy of Mama Esta’s Pizzeria and a bottle of Shiraz from a local vineyard—I took a long-overdue soak in the claw-foot tub, pouring in the rose-scented bath oil that had come in a welcome basket from a store called Res Botanica (“May your new home be sweet!”). Then I put on a loose nightshirt and started unpacking my files and office supplies into the desk in the tower office while sipping a glass of wine. It was fun opening up all the little desk drawers. In addition to the robin’s egg I had found the first day I saw the house, I found a glossy black seedpod shaped like a horned goat’s head, a china doll’s head with one
I’d heard somewhere that if you’re drowning you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness, like a lover carrying me to bed, down into the darkness where he lived.
SIX
T he sound of the moving truck in the driveway woke me up the next morning. I lay for a moment, sprawled in a tangle of sheets, trying to remember where I was. Hadn’t I drowned? But that was only a dream. As I scrambled into my discarded clothes from last night, though, I noticed the broken glass on the floor and a long jagged cut on my hand. I gingerly approached the window and saw that there among the broken glass was the metal wind chime. I stared at it for a moment, recalling the violence of my dream, but then a knock on the front door startled me out of my reverie. The sound of the wind chime hitting the window must have woken me up and I’d gone to the window to close it. That’s when I must have cut my hand. The wind and the broken glass must have mixed in with my dream and created the rest out of all my pent-up longing for the return of my shadow lover. That was the only explanation, I told myself hurrying down the stairs, the only one that made sense.
It didn’t take long for the two men and two women from Green Move (the eco-friendly moving company run by Annie’s partner, Maxine) to unpack the contents of my Inwood apartment and the boxes from my storage unit. When they finished, the house still looked empty. I invited them to share the basket of sandwiches that had arrived courtesy of Deena’s Deli (“We’re Deli-ghted you’re our new neighbor!!!”). We sat on the front porch enjoying the cool breeze that came out of the woods.
“The summers are great up here,” one of the women told me. “My partner and I have a place in Margaretville about forty minutes east. But the winters …”
The woman, whose name was Yvonne, proceeded to tell me about a couple who’d moved up here year-round and gone a little stir crazy, but then, she assured me, they’d always had “issues.” I laughed off the idea that I was worried about going stir crazy in the country and they all agreed that it was different because I was teaching at the college. When they left the house felt quiet and even emptier than before they had come with my meager belongings.
Before I could wonder if the first sign of going stir crazy was having strange erotic dreams, I threw myself into unpacking, figuring that the surest way to ward off melancholy was to make the house feel like my home. I hung framed prints and photographs in the library and parlor and unpacked my mismatched collection of mugs and dishes into the built-in china cabinets. It would be fun, I told myself, to find odds and ends in antiques stores to fill the house up.
After dinner—a pizza delivered courtesy of Mama Esta’s Pizzeria and a bottle of Shiraz from a local vineyard—I took a long-overdue soak in the claw-foot tub, pouring in the rose-scented bath oil that had come in a welcome basket from a store called Res Botanica (“May your new home be sweet!”). Then I put on a loose nightshirt and started unpacking my files and office supplies into the desk in the tower office while sipping a glass of wine. It was fun opening up all the little desk drawers. In addition to the robin’s egg I had found the first day I saw the house, I found a glossy black seedpod shaped like a horned goat’s head, a china doll’s head with one
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