The lucidity of the writing shocked and fascinated Eli. Tom Watowski didn’t sound particularly raving in the way he would have expected a lunatic to come off, though he was clearly a man suffering from delusions. Something in Eli, the half-dormant writer, perhaps, if such a thing existed, was fascinated. The room, the house, the cabin, the bizarre neighbor, it was all so different from anything he’d ever encountered before.

He stood up, wanting to stretch his legs. Stooping to retrieve the cold leftover cup of coffee from the floor, he tried it for the first time, wincing at its stale taste. It was well past 2pm. Bright sunlight flooded in through the window, missing the boards piled up below it. He wondered if Nadine had been the one to remove them. Probably. The light hitting the floor held something though, a loose, formerly crumpled piece of yellow paper that had fallen off the bed. He stooped to pick it up. A short paragraph was scrawled on it. The handwriting was the same as the notebook’s, but much harder to decipher.

'I know it’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. Leave me alone! Why won’t it leave me alone? When does it end? Why choose me? How do I kill something that isn’t real? It must be real. How do I kill it? How do I kill it? I’m not going back there. I’m not going back.'   

Back where? The cabin? There were more loose pieces left on the bed, and he grabbed another at random.

'I didn’t hit Tiffany. That’s not what happened. What happened is that I came home and we argued. She accused me, said I wasn’t a good father to Sydney. She said I didn’t care, and I answered her, I shouted. Yes, I shouted, I regretted that, and I apologized for it the next morning. But I didn’t ever touch her. I shoved the chair hard against kitchen table, I went upstairs, that’s all. It took an hour for me calm down. Nothing else happened. After that it was a long weekend because 'she hardly acknowledged my presence. So of course I went out again to drink.'

Another note, this one jotted on the back of an electric bill:

'It wasn’t really in my room. It wasn’t there. I hate to think about it. It wasn’t here.'

Eli turned the paper over, perusing the bill without really reading it. He set it aside and picked up another paper, smaller, torn jaggedly at some point from a large notepad.

'So strange it's at my sixth birthday party. I hardly remember any specific birthday, but this one was bad. The only thing I really remember about it, crying in front of some kids packed in our living room, not really my friends, just that my mom wanted it crowded. I shouted something and it made another kid cry and his mom took him and they left our house. Mom grabbed my wrist afterward. I cried. It’s just standing there behind one of the other kids, like it’s staring at me. It has no eyes.'

At this, Eli looked up at the lilic bush in the window, a little unnerved. He decided to return to the loose papers later. He peeked out into the hallway with the vague sense that he was intruding. A bathroom and tiny spare bedroom (without a bed) completed the hallway. He was quickly drawn back to the chaos of the living room. He examined the mess more carefully, trying to make sense of it’s randomness. It was as much a problem of dispersion as volume. He deduced that the emptied liquor bottles spread throughout (mostly Jameson), had been tossed carelessly toward the middle, often overshooting in the direction of the couch or back windows. At some point, someone had used the couch and coffee table as a base to sort through a mass of printed out papers, which fanned out from the center cushion. Stepping on and over debris, he sat down, imagining the scene. Moving a saucer aside, he picked up one of the papers. It was a news article from the 1970s about a suicide, retrieved, according to the header, from an online archive. The man had used a shotgun on himself. He was originally from Marquette. 

Eli found more news articles, all covering accidents, natural deaths, suicides or murders, and on top of those, obituaries, lots and lots of obituaries. Any reported death remotely connected with the Upper Peninsula seemed to be fair game for as far back as records could go. There were historical accounts of and from Jesuit missionaries, information and background about the Ojibwe tribe, and more. It was the epicenter of an obsession. Eli was in midst of reading an Ojibwe myth about a malevolent winter spirit called Windigo (it didn’t seem to apply at all to the description of the creature given by Tom Watowski), when Nadine’s car pulled into the driveway. He put down the page and leaned forward to glimpse her as she opened the front door. Not noticing him sitting there, she headed towards the hallway.

“Right here.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”

“Have you read this stuff?”

“Some of it.”

“It’s quite the collection.”

“It is. It’s hard to believe he had it in him to focus on anything, given the house.” She gestured at the floor.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I’d really like to try to get through the journal he left. Obviously, I don’t believe the crazy parts, but it’s interesting. Do you mind if I bring the notebooks in the car?” Eli didn’t want to admit outright that he saw it as potential grist for some future novelistic endeavor. So he told himself. She didn’t seem overly sensitive about it, in any case.

“It’s not a problem,” she said, checking her phone. “Actually, I looked at the hours for Enterprise. They’re closed already. Can you believe that? They close early on weekdays. All the car rental places are linked to the airport. I think there’s one that’s open, but I don’t know if it’s the best option or not. We shouldn’t have stopped. It’s my fault.” Her lower lip was yet again half protruding as she bit the other corner of it, probably nervous that he’d be as upset about this as he’d been about the state of the cabin that morning. On the contrary, he felt oddly buoyant.

“Well,” he said lightly, “I guess I’m out of luck.”

She smiled. “Don’t fret, you can stay the night here. If you don’t mind the accommodations, that is. We can go there first thing in the morning.”

“That sounds good.”

“You take the bed tonight. I’ll try to create a little space this afternoon so I can sleep on the couch. It’s all needs to be cleaned up at some point.”

“Please, I don’t want to put you out. I’ll take the couch tonight. I’d rather not sleep in there, anyway.” This was partially true, though he couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it was the slide bolts on the door and the dismantled boards. 

“Whichever is fine, I don’t mind it. We’ll have to go out for dinner, though. The kitchen is bare. Nothing but canned corn right now. There’s a few restaurants we can choose from.”

He pushed himself up, not quite knowing how to ask her what he wanted to ask. It was all very personal, after all. He didn’t want to offend her, or lose access to the notebooks.

“Do you remember that day your dad mentioned, where he talks about hitting your brother?”

“No. I was too young. I can’t recall any occasion where he did anything like that, either. I asked Syd about it yesterday, but, I don’t know, he doesn’t like to talk about it, I guess. Neither of us were very close to dad, to be honest, especially as we got older.” She looked a little uncomfortable admitting this to him, as if she were confessing something shameful. He suddenly wondered if her openness and willingness to share her father’s writings wasn’t a manifestation of guilt. The idea that he was somehow meant to judge, to excuse or condemn, made the entire situation feel fraught. He hardly knew her. It was too much. But his curiosity kept him from pulling away just then.

“You said he sounded different shortly before his death. Did he ever mention any of this stuff? Prior, I mean, to that change?

“Not to me. Apparently he’s been thinking about it for several years. The notebooks explain that. A couple weeks before he killed himself, he called me. He sounded, like I said, different. I just don’t understand why he didn’t try to get real help.” The tears started. “It was me. I should have done something. They say there’s always signs, right? Before a suicide? I should have driven up and checked on him. He’s been up here so long, it’s easy to take for granted that everything is fixed, that it’s always going to be the same.”

Eli was saved the awkward decision of whether or not to comfort her physically (a pat the shoulder? A hug?) by the difficult terrain separating them.

“It’s ok, really. It sounds like he had some serious issues. It’s hard to know what to do, I get that.” He didn’t say more, though he felt the swelling of what he ought to say. It’s not as though Eli didn’t have his own tragedy to contend with, and this might have been the appropriate time for him to share it. It might have been a comfort for her to know that he was no stranger to unjustified guilt. He’d been in the car twelve years ago when his parents were killed, still only a kid, only twelve years old, and had always felt utterly alone with the ugly fact of it. As the sole survivor (thrown, against all odds, through the windshield and to safety), he’d spent years of his life going over it: the pain of never being able to recall what his parents had been talking about; the fogginess of the days and weeks that followed as he recovered; and the ever shrinking horizon of that strange other-country of normalcy, a place from before his mother’s mother became his guardian.

To her credit, his grandmother sent him to a therapist for a solid year after the accident. But the therapist hadn’t exactly been a gifted empath, and when money got tight, he was more than happy not to spend another Saturday afternoon with a statuesque woman who was more interested in filling the time than with tangible help. Besides, talking about it didn’t change it. Ignoring it, on the other hand, hadn’t helped either, especially when it came to his academic struggles, anxiety attacks, and the overall problem of social isolation. Eventually, it was exercise that brought him stability, a steady job, and a girlfriend. But even his relationship with Margret, hard won, physically, hadn’t come by admitting any of the profound shame he’d experienced as a teenager. Of course he’d mentioned the crash itself to Margret, but more than the crash, it was the fallout that had caused the lasting damage.

He waited as Nadine wiped away her tears, smiling through them.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep crying like this, honestly.”

He spent the intervening two hours before dinner in the bedroom, reading and allowing her the space to start in on cleaning up the living room (Nadine insisted on doing it herself so that she could organize things, though she admitted that most of it was bound for the dump). 

Resuming his perch, he continued reading.