As he made change for Jenna’s money, Jenna opened the brochure. Inside was a hand-drawn map of the town with little numbers that corresponded to descriptions below. Number one: Mount Dewey.
“Is Mount Dewey nice?” Jenna asked.
The young man looked up at her. He seemed annoyed.
“What do you consider nice?”
“Nature. Trees. Flowers.”
“Oh, that,” the pierced kid said. “Well, if that’s what you want, I guess it’s nice.”
“How long of a walk is it?”
The cashier shrugged. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Where do I go?”
The young man pointed to the map.
“The first street to your left and up the hill. There’s a sign. Follow the path.”
“So you recommend it?”
The pierced kid smirked.
“For you? Yeah, I recommend it.”
Jenna took her water and the map.
“Well, thanks very much for your help.”
Jenna left the store and turned left. She looked down at the brochure again and wondered whether or not she should make the hike up Mount Dewey. It might be too much of a hassle. Tromping through the woods. Maybe she’d save it for later. Or maybe she’d save it for never. She could always get on the next ferry out of Wrangell. She had done what she’d set out to do: she’d seen her grandmother’s house. So what’s left? A hike? That might remind her too much of Bobby. She was still feeling a little uneasy about being so close to Thunder Bay.
“You were in the Ellis house?”
Jenna looked up and gasped. The man with the wagon was two feet away, staring at her.
“Oh, my.” Jenna laughed, trying to recover her composure. “You startled me.”
“You were in the Ellis house?” the man asked again.
Jenna smiled even though inside she was bristling. Who was this guy and why did he want to know? But she didn’t tell him to bugger off, even though that was her initial reaction. Wrangell is a small town. People probably make it their business to know other people’s business. Play the game.
“Yes, I was. I believe I saw you—”
“What were you doing there?”
“I, uh . . .” What should she say? Should she lie? “I’m Mary Ellis’s granddaughter. I went to look around.”
The man nodded thoughtfully.
“You gonna reopen it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you here to reopen the house?” he repeated slowly, as if Jenna were deaf.
“Oh, no. I just wanted to see it, to remember her, you know.”
The man lifted his wagon off the sidewalk and onto the street.
“Because it’s not sound. I’d be careful about climbing around in that house. The whole place could come down.”
The man started down the street.
“Thank you,” Jenna called after him. “Thanks for your concern, but I won’t be going back there.” He was getting farther away. “I’ve seen enough, thanks.” But he had stopped paying attention to her long before.
She turned and walked up the street in the opposite direction. Maybe a hike up Mount Dewey would be good after all. She couldn’t let this town scare her away. She had just gotten here, after all. She looked up at the sky. The clouds were lifting and it was getting more cheerful out. A nice hike would be fun. It would clear her head. Get her back in touch with wilderness. Besides, the exercise would do her good.
Chapter 18
FROM THE ROCK ON WHICH SHE SAT, JENNA COULD SEE THE whole town and a great deal of Wrangell Island, which stretched out toward the horizon. Against the sky in the distance, like a painting on a powder blue wall, huge mounds of white mountaintops were humped together like giants buried in the snow. And for a moment, Jenna lost herself in the scenery and relaxed, which was why she was there, or so she thought. The reason for her trip was to take time out from her daily life and reorganize herself. To get her thoughts together, to figure out what was really going on. At least that was part of it. Jenna knew there was more, but she didn’t want to think about that yet. There were other things. Going to Alaska for the first time since Bobby died. Things like that. Those things would have to take care of themselves. Or they would have to be taken care of by a professional at a later time, in the comfort of Judith’s office.
Jenna laughed to herself. She knew her psychiatrist would come into play at some point. She wondered what Judith would say about all of this. The whole thing. Leaving her husband. Going to Alaska. Being constantly afraid of sounds in strange houses and of taking showers alone. She’d have something to say, no doubt. If there was one thing about Judith, it was that she always had plenty to say about any subject. Freudians. They think they know everything. Judith was okay, though. At least she was harmless. All she wanted to do was talk about dreams or tell Jenna how to fix her life. Which was, Jenna always thought, contrary to the psychiatrists’ manifesto of not participating in the lives of their patients. Judith wanted to participate. She wanted to offer solutions, to get in there and roll up her sleeves and get dirty. Of course, all of her solutions were half-assed. But that’s probably why she was the only psychiatrist Jenna ever liked. She was wrong all the time. When Jenna left her office, she could think of all the ways she wasn’t as bad as Judith thought she was. When Jenna went to that other guy, Fassbinder, he had her so confused with his twisted logic she was ready to sign herself into a mental institution right away. He was generous with the pill count, though. She had to give him that. But when he started going on about Prozac, Jenna knew she had to move on. Narcotics are one thing. But that mind-altering crap is definitely crap. Prozac, NutraSweet, you name it. Anything that fools your brain into thinking white is black or sour is sweet is bad. Downers are downers, but Prozac is forever.
Jenna found Fassbinder because she was hard up for drugs. Can you imagine? She had been seeing a therapist, a psychologist, who was really nice, but she couldn’t help thinking of him as Bob Newhart. He even looked like Bob Newhart. And she didn’t understand why, if he went to all that school to learn to talk to people about their problems, he didn’t just become a doctor so he could prescribe drugs.
One day, Jenna told her therapist she was having trouble sleeping. She kept waking up at one in the morning and going into Bobby’s empty room. She knew Robert was getting angry with her, so she asked if there was some kind of sleeping pill she could take. Instead of a prescription, she got a speech about a glass of warm milk being the best sedative. Finally, Jenna convinced her therapist that over-the-counter remedies were not going to cut it. So he sent her off to a psychopharmacologist.
The psychopharmacologist prescribed her ten Valiums. Two milligrams. No refills. Like it was some kind of controlled substance, or something. Like people might get addicted to it or something. She went back to him to get more and she asked him if he could give her a larger quantity, since it was kind of a hassle for her to get all the way to his office (he was about ten minutes away), and he said no. He said he would give her only ten at a time so she wouldn’t develop a habit.
Well, Jenna happened to mention this to her girlfriend Kim, and Kim laughed. She said, “Two milligrams?” and tossed Jenna a little brown bottle with about five hundred ten-milligram pills in it. And Jenna thought, Why am I always the last one to know about drugs? I never even smoked pot until I was in college. It’s like I’m never around the right element. Or the wrong element. Whichever way you want to look at it. Kim told her that she should start seeing a psychiatrist. One who understood. And that was how she met Fassbinder.
Fassbinder was funny. Jenna went to see him and it was like he knew the whole charade. One of the first things he asked was if Jenna was having any trouble sleeping. Hello? Of course, she told him yes, and he wrote out a big prescription for Valium.
Jenna fell in love with Valium more because of how they look than what they do. Well, that’s not a hundred percent true, but they are cute. A little V cut out, looking like one of tho
se candy bracelets she used to get as a kid. Three pretty colors. White as chalk, white as can be. Yellow like a lemon, fresh from a tree. Blue like the sky above you and me. You want to string them together and wear them around your neck. I’m proud to wear my Valium necklace.
And the magic of a Valium and a nice glass of Chardonnay is something Jenna still gets a craving for now and again to this day. Still, after hundreds and thousands of hours of therapy that have brainwashed her into believing (and she does believe) that mixing Valium and wine is bad (bad, girl, bad), still, she sometimes looks upon those days of instant gratification as something lost. Lost innocence or lost guilt, she doesn’t know which. But lost, definitely. And far away, to be sure.
Fassbinder gave her what she wanted. Category IV Controlled Substance. He doled them out as if they were a reward for good behavior. Jenna knew that Fassbinder was a real pig, but he had something she wanted and she had something he wanted and they both knew what was up and they both played the game. He wanted someone to talk dirty to him. He wanted to be stimulated by a session. He wanted to hear dirty dreams. He wanted to know how often and in what ways Robert and Jenna made love. Jenna recognized that this was a messed-up thing, mind you. She had real problems. She had lost her only child, and she was a basket case. She needed therapy, not some head game with a quack. But she didn’t believe. She didn’t believe in the power of therapy. She didn’t believe in anything, to be honest. She had lost her religion, and she had no Virgil to lead her to the light. She was going straight to hell, and she was stumbling a lot on her way down.
So before Jenna went to her first session, Kim said to her, “He’s going to tell you to sit anywhere. Pick the couch.”
“Great. I’m not going to have to sleep with him, am I?”
“No, no, he just likes it when girls are . . . uh . . . amenable to treatment, that’s all.”
Well, sure enough, when Jenna got there, Fassbinder told her to sit anywhere, and she saw that it was a test. There was a straight-backed chair in front of the desk, a La-Z-Boy recliner near a bookcase, a love seat against one wall, and a Barcelona chaise on another.
When Jenna saw all of that, Herr Fassbinder clicked like a light switch. I mean, come on. Mies van der Rohe. The Bauhaus. It all made sense.
She wore tank tops and short skirts. He liked it if she took her shoes off, but only if she was wearing socks. He preferred her hair up, off her neck. And, get this, he loved it if she drank a lot of water and had to pee during the hour. That was the most repulsive thing. He would always say, “Please, please, use my private toilet, make yourself comfortable.” He would stand at the door and get a hard-on listening to Jenna pee. She could see it poking through his three-season wool slacks. It was foul. (Someone should report that guy. Oh, right, Jenna remembered, she already did.) Jenna despised herself for allowing it to happen. But he had the V pills. He had the magic. Herr Fassbinder and Kendall Jackson were her masters. She was their slave. She did anything for them. She stole away in the dark nights to be with them both. She hid wine behind the cooking pots. She decanted into apple juice bottles. She was a pathetic cliché. Eugene O’Neill’s mother, listening to the foghorn drone on. That’s the image she had of herself. Long Day’s Journey into Night, when she did the monologue at some stupid theater competition in high school, the monologue from the end, when Mary is high on morphine, floating around the stage talking about how beautiful her hands used to be. That’s who Jenna was.
Jenna heard a rustling behind her in the woods and she turned toward it. Was someone there? She strained her eyes, squinting, trying to pick up some motion. Her father taught her the correct way to look for the enemy in the woods: look for motion, not for a body. Don’t focus. Scan and let your eye catch the movement. She was too afraid to get off her rock and investigate. She probably would have found a raccoon or a bird or something. But the woods were too creepy. The trees reminded her of the trees in The Wizard of Oz. The spooky ones that talked and grabbed people.
Seeing nothing, she returned her gaze to the town below. Pretty far below, actually. It was a forty-five-minute hike up Mount Dewey, not fifteen minutes like the Amazing Human Pincushion had said. She could feel the burn of blisters on her feet from hiking in her relatively new, unbroken-in boots. Forty-five minutes. Running, that would take how long? If you walk four miles an hour, that would make it three miles up the hill. So, if you run ten miles an hour . . . It’s downhill, though. Twelve miles an hour. It would take a fourth of an hour to go three miles. Shave off some more time because you probably didn’t do four miles an hour up the hill. She could be safe pretty quickly.
A twig cracked loudly in the woods behind her and made her jump. It was a serious crack. A heavy crack. Not an animal crack. A person crack. The sound of a killer taking one step sideways to get a better view through the bushes. A twig giving way under a Timberland boot. An image flashed through Jenna’s mind of a hairy lumberjack, red curly chest hair growing upward until it meets the red curly hair on his face that’s growing downward. Suspenders holding up his grimy jeans. A red flannel shirt. And a big knife with the serrations on the top, like the kind you see hunters use. The kind that can hack through bone. She’s in the clearing sitting on a rock, so he can’t hurt her. It’s as if there’s a force field or something around the clearing. He’s in the woods, stalking around, waiting for Jenna to venture into his territory so he can do what he wants with her. But what does he want? Sex? Blood? Would she let him rape her to save her life? What if she let him rape her and he killed her anyway? What would the point have been? When you’re a hostage and you know they’re going to kill you, why don’t you run? You may not get away, but if you don’t run, you’ll definitely not get away. I know why you don’t run. Because there’s always the hope that the person who is holding you hostage will come around and let you go. There is a chance, you believe, that the lumberjack with the knife will break down and say, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Go on, get out of here.” And that chance doesn’t exist except in movies. But you want to believe in the goodness of humankind, so you hold on to that hope right until that knife tears open your jugular vein and your life is spilling out into the dirt at your feet. There is no pain involved. You’re looking at your assassin, completely bewildered. Why, why, why? And you think to yourself, damn, he killed me anyway, there is no goodness in mankind, as you sink to the ground, growing weary of pumping all this blood out of your body. And you sleep the sleep of dead trees, an organic being drained of life, a fresh compost pile waiting for the rot to return you to your ancestors.
Well, girls, that ain’t the case with me. Rick-rack-ree, kick ’em in the knee. Rick-rack-rass, kick ’em in the . . . other knee! Before she could think of a reason to stop herself, and with the element of surprise as her advantage, Jenna sat up and leapt to the ground in one smooth movement. She spotted the path in the woods and sprinted toward it. In twelve to fifteen minutes she’d be safely in town.
It was a good plan, honest. But since she had been lying on her back for a long time and then suddenly jumped up and started running, all the blood in her body rushed away from her brain and made her dizzy. The earth spun around the entrance to the woods and she pitched forward onto the ground, scraping her palms trying to keep her face from breaking her fall. So much for the element of surprise. She composed herself, got up, and ran again, this time making it to the tree line and beginning her gauntlet.
Jenna looked behind her as she ran and couldn’t see anyone following her. But she could hear something. She could hear two sets of footsteps and only one of them was hers. See, she thought she was being paranoid. She thought she was only imagining someone hiding in the bushes. It was all kind of a joke. What do you do when your paranoid fantasies become real? You get the hell out of there.
Jenna was totally freaked out and she was putting up a good run. Sticker bushes or no sticker bushes, she plowed through the underbrush without hesitation. And she was suddenly a little concerned about why she was r
unning through sticker bushes. The path that she had taken up to the top of Mount Dewey was clear. She looked around as she ran and she didn’t recognize the woods at all. She slowed down, listening intently for the footsteps. She didn’t hear anything, so she stopped, panting. Her legs were screaming in pain. She looked at them and saw long bloody scratches, blood dripping down her calves and soaking into her socks. But there was no time for that. She looked back up the hill she had sprinted down and all was quiet.
It was kind of pretty, now that she took a moment to look at it. Tall trees, mostly pines and cedars, joining together into a canopy high above her head. Seedlings growing upward, hoping to grasp enough sunlight to continue to grow. The air was full of the pungent smell of pine needles. The mossy ground under her feet felt spongy and soft. Roots jutted out from the base of the trees like long, narrow feet, tangling together and stepping on each other’s toes. As Jenna looked around, she felt as if she were under a giant tent. It was hushed, and the chirping of the few birds under the canopy carried like in a library.
Then she saw it. It was little, about the size of a child, dark and covered with hair, standing behind a tree staring at her. She had no idea what kind of animal it was. It was standing on two legs, and it looked almost human, but it was small and furry.
Suddenly, it scrambled up the tree, and it looked as if it was shrinking in size. It must have been perspective, but Jenna really thought it was getting smaller. It got up about thirty feet or so, stopped, and looked down. Then, as quickly as it stopped, it scrambled up a little more and leapt away from the tree. It was a squirrel of some sort. A giant, humanoid flying squirrel. And it flew through the air until it landed on the tree right above Jenna’s head.
As much as Jenna loved field biology and the study of giant flying squirrel species in Alaska, she thought, screw this, squirrels are carnivores. She saw the path off to the right, so she sprinted toward it. She tasted blood in her throat and she knew it was that feeling when you’ve overworked yourself. There were no more sticker bushes, but she had no idea where she was. There was nothing familiar about the woods. She was completely lost, running from some weird animal in a tree.