The Uninvited (18 page)

S
HE WAS ALONE.
It was what Cramer had hoped for, dreamed of. In the four days he had off from Sunday through Wednesday, he saw Jay come and go but never stay the night. Who knows what had gone on the last eight days, but Cramer was full of hope. Mimi and Jay never held hands or kissed, as far as he could see. They were friends, just friends, he told himself, and almost managed to believe it. Cramer loved to listen to them talk—so quick and funny. He wished he could talk to a girl that way. He’d had girlfriends, sure, but no one like Mimi.

She would go for a run in the morning up the Valentine. She was gone forty minutes or so.
She is running right by my place,
he thought. And he was glad she wouldn’t see the little yellow house up on its knoll above the creek. He had told his mother he would bring a girl home to meet her, but he would never take Mimi there.

One morning there was a heavy dew, and Cramer boldly drew a message on the windshield of the Mini Cooper:

I
MIMI

She was late getting started that morning, and by the time she waded across the snye and put her Nikes on, the sun had more or less obliterated the message he had left her. She patted the car as she passed by and spoke to it—called it Ms. Cooper.

Look closer,
he said under his breath, knowing that his message would not be entirely gone, would still be there, if she would only look.

The next morning he broke in.

The lock on the storm door surprised him at first but didn’t hold him back. The wood was punk; the screws in the hinges pulled away without too much effort. He needed to get inside. He needed to be sure about something. And, yes—yes! Mimi seemed to have taken over the bedroom downstairs; Jay’s mattress was up in the loft. Cramer wanted to shout his joy out loud but held it in.

He opened her laptop, a Mac PowerBook G4. There was no password. The desktop on the G4 was some picture from an old black-and-white movie: a guy with ridiculously curly hair and a funny face, wearing a baggy suit and playing the harp. There were too many icons on the screen. Cramer wanted to clean it up for her—such a waste of memory. He opened a folder called Screenplay. He opened something called Ideas. He checked her e-mail: a lot of messages from Jamila, the girl in the photograph. There wasn’t time to read anything now—he couldn’t concentrate. And anyway, all he was looking for were boys’ names, some boy’s name repeated too many times. There were two or three guys she chatted with, but nothing in the contents of those e-mails to indicate they were anything more than friends.

He checked iPhoto. There was a large library but no boys there, either, except the Asian guy in the documentary. Cramer didn’t think there was anything between them.

He checked iTunes, scrolled down a list of band names he had never heard of. He glanced out the window. He would see her coming from here; the way was clear. He clicked on a couple of tunes. He wanted to hear what she heard, like what she liked. He sat there for a few moments listening, noting the name of a group that was okay, though it wasn’t the kind of stuff he listened to. He would Google the band at the shop—get to know their stuff. He didn’t listen to much music, but he could learn. He toyed with the idea of leaving her a note on the screen, then he reeled himself in.
Get serious, Cramer!
This was
not
the same as leaving surprises for Jay. He closed down the computer, made sure it was sitting exactly as he had found it, then rubbed the brushed silver top clean with the tail of his T-shirt to remove his fingerprints. He was sweating like a pig.

He checked the window again, checked his watch. There was still time and he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t ever want to leave.

He wanted to leave something for her, a gift! There was a place he knew where there were wildflowers. He would leave her a bouquet on the little table in the kitchen.

No. Get a grip.

He checked out the bathroom, lovingly picked up her toothbrush, her hairbrush, a tube of lip gloss. He held everything to his nose, breathing her in. With his eyes closed, he could smell the same spicy scent that was on everything in her suitcase. It was so beautiful it made him swear under his breath and then bite down hard on his tongue for letting such a word escape him, here of all places. As if the swear word might linger in the air like a bad smell.

Tonight he started work again. There might be an afternoon or two he could get out here, but his nights were not his own for another eight days. How could he stand it?

He opened his eyes suddenly. Why hadn’t he thought of this before! He looked through all the clutter of cosmetics on the little shelf below the mirror and arrayed across the water tank of the toilet, but there was no bottle of perfume. He hurried back to her bedroom again and on his knees searched through her suitcase. And there it was. A squat brown bottle of perfume with beveled shoulders and an elaborate bronze-colored stopper. It was called Trouble. He opened the top and breathed in so deeply that the potency made him cough, made him dizzy. He wiped his eyes. He took the tail of his T-shirt and dabbed some of her perfume on it, then put the stopper back in the bottle. He was putting the bottle back in her suitcase when he heard the kitchen door open and close.

He dove for the hidey-hole, reaching up and pulling the top down as quietly as he could. There had been no time to put the perfume exactly where he had found it. Would she notice? He didn’t think so. She wasn’t very tidy.

He heard her enter the room and realized that the scent of the perfume would be strong. Would she notice it? He crawled up the tunnel to be safe. If she opened the trapdoor, she wouldn’t see him, unless she actually jumped down inside. The thought of her doing that made his heart beat so hard against his chest he was sure she would hear. He crouched there, scarcely breathing. He couldn’t leave through the storm door without making too much noise, so he waited, listening. He heard a thump and another thump. Her running shoes. She was stripping after her run. He closed his eyes tightly, seeing her in his mind’s eye. And he felt as though he might not be strong enough to hold himself together at all. She was humming, out of tune. Then he heard her leave the room, and in a moment he heard the sound of the shower. He turned to leave, and as he crawled up the tunnel to the door, he was shaking like a leaf.

Mavis was outside when he arrived home, out in the bedraggled patch of weeds near the kitchen, which had once been a vegetable garden. As he crossed the yard toward the house, he wondered if she was going to do something with it.

“Want a hand?” he asked.

She turned and he saw that she was smoking. She didn’t usually smoke except when Waylin was around. He looked but there was no truck.

“I was thinking of cooking up some of this madder,” she said, kicking lazily at a knee-high weed that had overrun the garden where she was standing. “You can make a good dye from it, I hear.”

Her meaning was not lost on Cramer.

“Course, I’d need some medium to actually make it into paint,” she said. She was going to go on, but she suddenly screwed up her nose. “What the heck is that?”

Cramer backed off. He stunk of Trouble. “I’ve got to change,” he said.

“What are you up to?” she called after him, but he headed into the house and up the stairs. He shoved the reeking T-shirt in the back of his closet. Then he headed to the shower, where he scrubbed himself so hard he was sure he was losing a layer of skin.

He dried himself off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and opened the bathroom door. Mavis was there, leaning against the wall across from the bathroom door.

“My, my, what an odor,” she said.

He headed ­toward his room, with her marching right behind him.

“Who is she, Cramer? Come on.” Her voice was teasing. “Don’t keep me in the dark, sunshine.”

“There isn’t anyone,” he said. And he closed his door on her. She knocked. Christ, why wouldn’t she leave him alone!

“I’m getting dressed!” he said.

“Well, when you get dressed, come on downstairs. I want to talk.”

“Mom, it’s not—”

But she cut him off. “I want to
show
you something,” she said. “If you’re not too busy.”

He took his time. Tried to think of what he was going to say, how he could explain away the scent. What was it she wanted him to see? Shit. He checked under his mattress. The picture of Mimi was still there, so it wasn’t that.

The first floor of the house was just the one room really, with the wide, deep porch converted into Mavis’s studio. Mavis was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs when he finally emerged from his lair. She turned toward the room, expectantly awaiting his attention. She glanced back at him and then again at the room.

Her paintings. She had put her paintings on display around the place. There were nine or ten of them, sitting on chairs, leaning against the window jamb, the latest—he supposed—sitting on the easel. He relaxed. She just wanted his opinion.

“Oh,” he said. “Wow. Great.”

“Really?” she said. “Are they
really
great?”

He looked again. Sometimes she needed more encouragement. He understood that. He had learned how to talk to her—learned from
The Artist’s Path.
There was a quote there about the spark of uniqueness that is carried through you into action, and under no circumstances must one ever try to block it. This was called the quickening. It was scary sometimes. When Mavis was painting, her eyes flashed with a different kind of energy—good energy, like a car running clean, like a computer humming. And when she was happily tired, the light in her eyes was a soft thing you could come close to. But when the quickening arose, you paid attention and responded to ­every need, every whim.

“Well?”

He looked hard at the paintings, feeling her agitation growing—almost smelling it. Made it hard to think straight. There was that first one, which was so rich—writhing with energy. There were a couple more like that—bursting with colors, the line work strong. But as he scanned the little show, it was as if the lights were dimmer everywhere else in the room. Each canvas was duller, as if its battery was running low. There were more shades than tints. Less pure color. He could see that, but could he afford to say it?

There was a quote in
The Artist’s Path.
“My vanity wants your lies but they are poison to my soul.”

“Well?” said Mavis. She was rubbing her hands together nervously. They were spotted with paint. Blotched with paint she had not bothered to clean away.

“Some of them are real good,” he said, reluctant to limit his praise but afraid of lying to her.

“Oh,” she said, her voice tense. “But just some of them?”

He could feel himself being drawn into the trap. But there was no way to avoid it. He swallowed hard. “Some are … darker?”

“Darker? And what else?”

He hated it when she did this. She was like the worst teacher in the world, fishing for an answer he didn’t have, an answer she wasn’t going to like if he found it.

“There just seems to be more, you know, like, spirit in the … in those…” He pointed weakly toward the first painting and the other two that shared its intensity.

“Ahhh,” she said. “Very perceptive.” Then she grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the picture on the easel. The paint was still wet in patches. Just finished—if it was finished. He had no idea. It wasn’t anything. Just a mass of conflicting patches of color, subdued color: browns mainly and grays. A yellow seam livened up the canvas, but it was thin; he could see the canvas through it. Looked as if someone had pissed on it. He sure wasn’t going to tell her that. He glanced at the worktable and saw the wreckage of paint tubes and plastic jars, empty, lying on their sides.

Her point was pretty obvious.

“What about this one?” she said, her voice as thin as the stream of yellow on the canvas.

“You’re out of paint,” he said, tired of the game she was playing.

“Very good!” she said, and started clapping. “Three cheers for the art critic.”

“Mom,” he said softly, but it was no use.

“Congratulations to the boy too busy with his little smelly
games
to help his mother when she needs him the most.”

“I’ve been trying—”

“His mother who is working her fingers to the bone to find her way back to the good place where the art happens and the
success
happens and the
happiness
happens.”

“I will get you the money, honest, I—”

“Oh, good. When? When I’m dead?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Dead? You don’t want me to say ‘dead’?”

He tried to leave but she held on to him, dug her fingernails into the flesh of his forearm until he winced.

“I
will
die, you know,” she said, her voice tremulous. “Cramer—
this
is what makes it possible to live.” She threw out her arm to indicate the meager handful of paintings displayed around the room. “Without it, I’ll just rot away. That what you want?”

“No.”

“Because I’m this close,” she said.
“This close!”

He peeled her hand away from his arm. “Stop it,” he said.