I take another shower—this time, in the small, cramped bathroom of the cottage—and then fix myself a simple supper: a frozen pizza heated in the toaster oven and a half-pint of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. I feel like I deserve it.
By the time I’m finished with everything, it’s after nine o’clock. I turn out all the lights except for the lamp on my nightstand. I get into the big white bed with my phone and put on a Hallmark movie called Winter Love. I have a hard time focusing, though. I can’t tell if maybe I’ve seen it before, or maybe the story is just identical to a dozen other Hallmark movies. Also, it’s a little stuffy inside the cottage, so I stand up and open the curtains.
There’s a large window next to the front door, and a smaller window over my bed, and at night I keep them open to generate a cross-breeze. The ceiling fan spins in slow, lazy circles. Outside in the woods, the crickets are chirping, and sometimes I’ll hear small animals pacing through the forest, soft footsteps padding over dead leaves.
I get back into bed and start the movie again. Every minute or so, a moth smacks against my window screens, drawn to the light. There’s a tap-tap-tapping on the wall behind my bed but I know it’s just a branch; there are trees growing close on three sides of the cottage and they scrape at the walls every time the wind picks up. I glance at the door and make sure it’s locked, and it is, but it’s a very flimsy lock, nothing that would stop a determined intruder.
And then I hear the sound, a sort of high-frequency humming, like a mosquito flying too close to my ear. I wave it off, but after a few seconds it’s back again, a gray speck flitting around my peripheral vision, always just out of reach. And I think back to the doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and the research experiment that didn’t actually happen.
And it’s the first night I feel like someone might be watching me.
5
My weekends are pretty quiet. Caroline and Ted will often plan a family activity—they’ll drive to the shore for a Beach Day, or they’ll take Teddy to a museum in the city. And they always invite me along but I never go, because I don’t want to intrude on their family time. Instead I’ll just putter around my cottage, trying to keep busy, because idle hands invite temptation, etc. On Saturday night, while millions of young people across America are drinking and flirting and laughing and making love, I’m kneeling in front of my toilet with a spray bottle of Clorox bleach, scrubbing the grout on my bathroom floor. Sundays aren’t much better. I’ve sampled all the local churches, but so far nothing’s clicking. I’m always the youngest person by twenty years, and I hate the way the other parishioners stare at me, like I’m some kind of zoological oddity.
Sometimes I’m tempted to go back on social media, to reactivate my accounts with Instagram and Facebook, but all my NA counselors have warned me to steer clear. They say these sites carry addiction risks of their own, that they wreak havoc on a young person’s self-esteem. So I try to keep busy with simple, real-world pleasures: running, cooking, taking a walk.
But I’m always happiest when the weekend is over and I can finally go back to work. Monday morning, I arrive at the main house and find Teddy down under the kitchen table, playing with plastic farm animals.
“Hey there, Teddy Bear! How are you?”
He holds up a plastic cow and mooooos.
“No kidding, you turned into a cow? Well, I guess I’m cow-sitting today! How exciting!”
Caroline darts through the kitchen, clutching her car keys and cell phone and several folders stuffed with papers. She asks if I can join her in the foyer for a minute. Once we’re a safe distance from Teddy she explains that he wet his bed and his sheets are in the washing machine. “Would you mind moving them into the dryer when they’re done? I already put new ones on his bed.”
“Sure. Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. Just embarrassed. It’s been happening a lot lately. The stress of the move.” She grabs her satchel from the hall closet and slings it over her shoulder. “Just don’t mention that I said anything. He doesn’t want you to know.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“Thank you, Mallory. You’re a lifesaver!”
* * *
Teddy’s favorite morning activity is exploring the “Enchanted Forest” at the edge of his family’s property. The trees form a dense canopy over our heads, so even on the warmest days it’s cooler in the woods. The trails are unmarked and unlabeled so we’ve invented our own names for them. Yellow Brick Road is the flat, hard-packed route that starts behind my cottage and runs parallel to all the houses on Edgewood Street. We follow it to a large gray boulder called Dragon’s Egg and then veer off onto Dragon’s Pass, a smaller trail that twists through a dense thicket of sticker bushes. We have to walk single file, with our hands outstretched, to keep from getting scratched. This path brings us down a valley to the Royal River （a fetid and slow-moving creek, barely waist deep） and Mossy Bridge, a long rotting tree trunk spanning the banks, covered with algae and weird mushrooms. We tiptoe across the log and follow the trail to the Giant Beanstalk—the tallest tree in the forest, with branches that touch the sky.