Page 110 of Call Off the Dark

“That’s funny. You think you need to eat?”

“Huh?”

“Do you have an intestinal tract, Wade?” Helen stepped forward and pressed her hand to his torso. It felt solid, but she wasn’t fooled. “Or is this all air in here?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? All kinds of things, apparently. For one, the fact that you two just waltzed back through my front door uninvited. How long do you plan on coming around?”

Wade slammed his hands down on the table. “I’m tired of you acting crazy like this!”

Helen slammed her hands down on the table even harder and leaned toward Wade. “I can’t help it, Wade. Because I am crazy!”

Isaac softly touched her shoulder. “Helen?”

She reeled around and gave him a patronizing look. “What?”

“Just take a deep breath,” Isaac said.

“That’s rich,” Wade said. “My dead brother telling my crazy wife to calm down.”

Despite it all, Isaac’s touch and the sound of his voice did have a calming effect on her. She stepped away from the table to put distance between herself and both men.

Wade said, “I went all the way into town to get food, and I expect dinner to be ready in a half hour.”

A long moment passed. Then Helen smiled brightly. “Okay, honey.”

While the men cleaned themselves up, Helen slipped outside. Just as Wade had said, the truck wasn’t there. She walked at least fifty yards down the driveway to be sure he hadn’t parked it around the first bend, but it wasn’t there either.

She was in the middle of nowhere with two imaginary men, and the only way to leave was to walk alone miles in the dark. The last time she’d done that, wolves had attacked her.

She would have to plan an escape in the morning.

Helen went back inside.

Three steaming hot plates of white pasta sat on the kitchen counter. The room smelled of fresh garlic and cream and retribution. Helen was ready to put the finishing touch on her cooking.

Alone in the kitchen, she twisted the lid off the glass jar of the powdered antipsychotic medication and dumped it over two plates of pasta. It didn’t make much sense to drug phantom men, but maybe she could defeat them both inside her mind with human defenses, the way you beat monsters asleep in your nightmares with fighting and running and screaming. No matter what, she was leaving tomorrow one way or another, so she may as well use up the rest of the meds. She sprinkled the very last of the powder on the third plate, her own serving. She probably needed it most of all.

Isaac entered in clean clothes, and she vaguely registered that he was in Wade’s dark green plaid flannel shirt, which was her favorite. Isaac’s gaze fastened on hers as he approached, speaking in a soft tone. “I want to see you alone later.”

Helen picked up a plate of pasta and held it out to him. Isaac momentarily hesitated, then he reached for it with the same hands that had pinned her hips down the night before. She turned away, and Isaac brought his plate to the table.

Wade walked in then, his clothes clean too, a brown button-up shirt and khaki pants. For some inexplicable reason, these men had dressed for dinner. What kind of game were they playing now inside her head?

Wade came to her with a look of contrition on his face. “I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier.”

She nodded and handed him a plate.

During the meal, Helen found her eyes floating from Wade to Isaac, pondering how it was that she could have fallen down such a twisted rabbit hole and how she was going to get out of it. Both men were shoveling large bites of pasta in their mouths. She needed to eat too, but she just didn’t feel hungry. She hadn’t even lifted her fork yet.

She wondered what her family understood about her present state. Perhaps they thought that by living here alone with nature she might be able to heal her grief. Perhaps they thought she just needed time to let go of Tyler and return to the land of the living. But if they knew she’d lost her mind, she found it hard to believe they would have just left her out here by herself. Every time she called home, she’d tell her mother about the things Wade was doing. If Wade didn’t exist, wouldn’t that be alarming for her mother to hear? Surely, she wouldn’t just let Helen live here like that, enabling an array of delusions.

A disquieting feeling took hold. Something wasn’t adding up. There was something that she knew but wasn’t seeing. Her eyes drifted to the Edgar Allan Poe book, still sitting on the edge of the table.

Helen watched Wade lift another bite of food to his mouth. There was dirt etched into the contour of his cuticles. If you worked the trees, you could never get all the dirt off no matter how hard you scrubbed your hands.

She looked at Isaac’s hands. His fingernails were clean. Unnaturally so for someone who had been hitchhiking cross-country, then working in the forest multiple days in a row.