Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

It was Mimi. She was in the yellow sundress she’d been wearing in the documentary on her JVC. One of the thin straps hung across her arm. Her feet were bare, her arms heavy with colorful bangles. She was alone. And Cramer allowed himself to believe she had known he was there. She had sensed his presence, sensed the power of his attraction to her. He had wished her outside and she had come. It was a sign. His luck was turning.

She walked away from the house, down the lawn-down toward him-punching in a number on her cell phone. Cramer held his breath, pressed himself against the trunk of the tree.

“I got your message,” she said, so near, it was almost as if she were talking to him, as if she knew he was the one who had scribbled his sentiments on the dewy windshield of her car.

“Yes, all the messages,” she said, her voice testy.

He hoped it wasn’t him she was talking to, not like that.

“No… No, you listen to me for a change.”

But the person on the other end of the line didn’t seem to want to listen. Cramer dared to look. She was three or four meters away, hunched over her phone, her free hand covering her other ear, the better to concentrate. Her hair concealed her face.

“Yes,” she said. “I hear you. I hear you loud and clear!”

She grumbled. “So? So? You were worried. Fine. You wanted to know I’d arrived safely. Fine. I get it. Thanks. But you know what, Lazar? That might have been genuinely touching if you had phoned just the once and left a message. But you phoned twenty times, and you know what occurred to me? I’ll tell you. It occurred to me that you weren’t phoning to see if I was okay, Lazar. You were phoning because you were not okay. Because-”

But she didn’t get any further. And as Cramer watched, her body stiffened.

“There is no way,” she said. She laughed but there wasn’t any humor in it. “There is no fucking way!”

Cramer pressed his head against the rough bark. He could imagine a voice at the other end of the line pleading with her, desperate.

“Listen, I’ll tell you why I haven’t phoned, if you want to know.”

But, apparently, Lazar didn’t want to know. And when Cramer looked again, Mimi was holding the phone away from her face, staring at it with her mouth hanging open. Then she brought the receiver back to her ear.

“Enough, already!” she shouted, stamping her foot on the sandy ground. “You say you can’t get over me. But that’s not it at all. What you can’t get over is yourself. ”

There was silence then. The music at the house stopped pounding, the snye stopped gurgling, the birds stopped singing, the insects stopped buzzing. All Cramer could hear was the pulse in his head. Peering out again from his hiding place, he saw Mimi shake her head back and forth. When she finally spoke again, there was no passion left in her voice, only what sounded to Cramer like resignation.

“I tried to do it right,” she said. “I really tried.”

She listened, rolled her eyes, sighed, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Yes. Yes.” There was another pause and then she said “yes” one last time before closing the phone without a good-bye.

She stood, her shoulders drooping, staring down toward the snye. She looked so little and so weary. Cramer was west of her, downwind, and he could almost- almost — smell her. He wanted so much to walk over to her now and take her in his arms. He wouldn’t have to say anything-he wouldn’t need any clever speech. He would hold her, and she would realize that he meant her no harm, that he would look after her, that she was loved. The idea took hold of him. It was as if this was meant to happen, he told himself. He was a neighbor, after all. He could pretend he had just arrived there and seen her in distress. Was it so farfetched?

But then he heard the back door open and shut, and Iris appeared and headed down the lawn toward Mimi, who turned to greet her, though she said nothing.

“Nice dodge on doing the dishes,” said Iris.

Mimi laughed. “Yeah, well, I’d rather have been doing dishes.”

Iris touched her arm. “Did you do the deed?”

Mimi shrugged. “Sort of. He says he needs closure. So I said why don’t you closure yourself in a mine somewhere.”

“Really?”

“No.” Mimi sniffed. “I said he could call again.”

“Ah.” Iris looked disappointed. “So it’s not quite over.”

Then Mimi smiled devilishly. “I said he could call again. However, I’m getting a new SIM card today. ”

“You are so bad, girl.”

Mimi nodded, but her smile slipped. “I needed to know, Iris. Where he was at. Whether he was dealing with this.”

“And he isn’t?”

Mimi shook her head. “I don’t know how I never saw it, but the man is a total wack job.” Her voice broke a little as she spoke.

And Iris took Mimi in her arms and rocked her back and forth. “You still want to come with us?”

“Uh-huh,” said Mimi, pulling away from the embrace at last. “How soon can we go? Like how about an hour ago?”

“Fine with me. It looks to me like you need a megadose of lying on a raft, soaking up the sun.”

Mimi laughed. “Well, a megadose of something.”

She laughed and the two of them headed back toward the house.

Twenty minutes later, they left, the three of them. Mimi was carrying a backpack. It looked to Cramer as if they were going to be gone for quite a while. They drove off in the Camry, and as soon as the car was out of sight, Cramer headed toward the house. He hadn’t gone but a few feet when he heard a loud snap behind him. He spun around and looked toward the snye. His eyes scanned the underbrush. Someone was there. He walked slowly down to the stream, his ears peeled. Nothing. A deer maybe. A rotten branch falling? He waited a full ten minutes before he headed up to the house.

They had gone to Iris’s cottage on Saturday. Mimi had tried to beg off initially, but Iris had insisted.

“Are you sure?” Mimi looked from one to the other, but her gaze ended up on Jay. He could tell she wanted his blessing-he could see it in her eyes. He nodded and was quick about it. She was sharp and any delay would give him away. She would think he didn’t want her along and she’d be wrong.

“Hey, if I want you to buzz off, I’ll give you a quarter,” he said.

“It’ll cost more than that, bud.”

The bantering didn’t quite fool him, and soon enough she changed her mind. “You know, on second thought, I’m really on a roll with this new scene I’m writing. I think I’ll pass.”

So Jay got down on his knees and wrapped his long arms around her legs and pleaded until she just about fell over and agreed to come. Everyone was laughing. The happy trio. But she looked at him funny, all the same, as if she knew there was something up. She was right, but he wasn’t sure himself what was up. He and Iris didn’t desperately need to be alone. They wouldn’t be, anyway, at her parents’ cottage. It was Mimi alone that he was worried about. The house at the snye was secure; he had to believe that. It was Mimi he was worried about. She had been alone a lot lately. Maybe too much.

Jay had seen a movie about the composer Gustav Mahler. The opening shot was of a lake in the mountains somewhere: a dock, a boathouse, and early morning mist swirling on the water. Quiet. The camera dollied in on the boathouse, and suddenly the whole place exploded. He found himself thinking about that as he and Mimi waded back across the snye bright and early Monday morning. They’d had a good time, but halfway through the weekend, he had started worrying about the house. The girls had called him on it.

“First you want me to come along because you’re worried about leaving me alone,” said Mimi. “Then you wish you’d left me there because you’re worried about the house.”