Ambleside

FICTION

by Josh Emmons

The light switch didn’t work and Sarah couldn’t see if anything blocked the passageway in front of them. At the end of a day that had begun far away in the middle of the night, she needed a quick cold shower and long spellbound sleep. Tom found the overhead bulb and screwed it in tighter, to no effect.
“The ceiling’s really low,” he said.
“Is that bad?”
“We might get light from the town if we open the window drapes. If we can find them.”
“Why would Mark turn off the electricity?”
Sarah let her backpack slide to the floor and pulled at her damp muslin shirt. The air felt like it hadn’t moved around in months, although Mark the owner had said the house would be freshly cleaned when they arrived. She was about to say, Let’s just walk slow and feel the ground ahead, when a noise burst into the pitch so sharply she covered her ears and fell against an invisible wall. Acid colors bloomed in the dark.
Tom reached for the tiny fire alarm that flashed red at half-second intervals, couldn’t flip the latch to release its plastic cover, and then hit it with his fist.
“Let’s get out of here!” she shouted.
He banged on the device with a thick history of the Civil War he’d read in between naps all day on a train and plane and bus, retaining little, and she heard him answer as though far away, “What?”
“Let’s get out of here!”
“Almost—have—it!”
The noise stopped and the colors faded away.
He said, “They make alarms extra loud now because everyone takes sleeping pills,” and reached for his wife’s hand, but she was already wandering blindly down the hall.

A few months earlier Tom had seen a home exchange ad online for a two-bedroom house within walking distance of Ambleside’s historic Market Square, forwarded it to Sarah at work, and brought up the subject at dinner.

- You want to swap apartments with a stranger? she said.
- So we don’t have to pay for a rental. People do it all the time.
- Where is it?
- On a lake in northwest England, this great little town in the hills where William Wordsworth ran the post office for twenty years.
- I’ve never heard of it.

It had been a week since Sarah’s fifth in vitro fertilization failed, when she’d spent a slow-motion hour in a coffee shop bathroom with her eyes closed as the cramps subsided and another strand of hope snapped, after which her reproductive endocrinologist said that since the fertility drugs were so disruptive—Sarah cried easily and often stayed home from work because her bedspread felt like a lead apron she couldn’t throw off—it might be time to discontinue them. Two days later Tom said they should go away and put all this behind them. Forget the collapse of a dream by escaping its rubble. She said, I guess so. At first they talked about a trip to Greece, but a mole on his arm was changing shape and color, and he worried that the Mediterranean sun could turn it cancerous. He was thirty-two years old and had grown up in a sunny part of the country, and melanoma took 48,000 lives a year.

- Really? She examined the bindi-sized mark on the inside of his right forearm. It looks normal.
- See the edges are uneven and those dark specks of brown at the center.
- Uh-huh, it’s just that northern England might be nice but I don’t swoon at the thought.
- He rolled down his shirt sleeve. Swoon is setting the bar high.

After locating the breaker box and switching on the electricity, they entered a living room familiar from pictures Mark had posted, but in worse shape. The gingham couch was threadbare at its corners, the vinyl recliner stiff and cracked, the bookshelves scarred by nicks and gashes and encrusted strips of masking tape, the Moroccan rug a faded mosaic of pink tetragons. In the room’s corner a well-stocked wet bar had serving wings propped at an eighty-five-degree angle on either side. The place might have been elegant once, but now it was a dump.
Sarah said, “So we shouldn’t feel as bad about Alan,” Alan being their diabetic cat whose pee and insulin smell had survived the commercial-grade air freshener they used before leaving.
Tom crossed to the wet bar while she slumped onto the couch fiddling with a knot in her shoelaces. He pulled the stopper off a glass decanter.
“You’re having a drink?” she said.
“My hand hurts from hitting that alarm, and I forgot aspirins.” He swirled the bottle. “This looks like water.”
She gave up on her shoelaces and said, “I could fall asleep right here,” and leaned back against the faint paisley print of the couch. “It’s so hot it’s like we’re in the tropics and have malaria. Or what’s the worse thing, dengue fever.”
He poured a full glass and tasted it. “Did you do this?”
“Hmm?” She turned and stared vacantly as he gulped down its contents and then refilled the glass.

In May they learned that the Ambleside they were going to was not in England, but instead sat on a lonely stretch of a Great Lake facing the inner emptiness of Canada.

- How did this happen? Sarah asked.
- Mark lied to us.
- If you live in Paris, Texas, you can’t say that your apartment is on the Seine above a little bakery.
- I know, it’s messed up.
- We’ve made arrangements, and it’s too late to find another place.
- I’ll write him an angry letter and get us out of the deal.
- He won’t care about a letter. If you misrepresent something this big, you’re beyond shame.

But Tom disagreed about the power and reach of shame, and in preparing his email he reread Mark Josephson’s original ad post and pored over their correspondence for deceptive language. There was none. Mark had spelled “color” without a “u” and not used any Anglicisms, no lorries, flats, jumpers, or gits. The mistake was Tom’s alone. Shame engulfed him.
So instead of dwelling on this with Sarah and letting her say he’d been careless while working things out with Mark, and maybe drunk, Tom read about the English Ambleside and told her how miserable it was in the summer. They were lucky not to have to walk its ankle-twisting cobblestone streets eating overpriced paninis, surrounded by bicyclists and families up from London to gawk at what passed in that small, overdeveloped country for nature. Sarah’s eyes widened. Ambleside wasn’t the quaint village of Wordsworth’s day anymore, he said, a bunch of mossy stone cottages and Tudor houses inhabited by gentleman farmers and Waterloo widows. Now it swarmed with tourists making impossible the very solitude they’d come for, a critical mass of people in a place whose appeal depended on there not being a critical mass of people. Tom and Sarah didn’t want to be a part of that. If they couldn’t go to Greece—mentioning that country at this point was risky, but to venture nothing was to gain nothing—they should visit an unknown part of America. Forget the British Ambleside and its disappearing charms.
Sarah wanted to say that really they should forget the whole trip. Not take off work for so long, not arrange for Alan to be kenneled, and not go someplace where they’d know no one and have nothing to do and wonder what had possessed them to vacation there. She was thinking clearly. So she couldn’t have kids of her own. Lots of women couldn’t. Mother Teresa had been childless, and so had the first Queen Elizabeth and Jane Austen and Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday, even Eva Perón. She told a friend about the home-swap fiasco, but instead of sympathizing the friend said that a long, unexciting holiday with no museums or crowded beaches or sacred places to visit sounded nice. Relaxing. Truer in spirit to a real vacation, which came from the Latin vacare, which meant “to be unoccupied.” Sarah said, Thanks, but you don’t have to make me feel better. And yet she liked feeling better, and when the friend sent her an article the next day about the quirkiest towns in America, where Ambleside got an honorable mention because of its legendary lake beast, a Loch Ness Monster-style creature called Thally, she decided that it might be what she and Tom needed after all.

“You think I had the gin replaced with water?” Sarah asked. “In someone’s house I’ve never been to—that’s ridiculous.”
At the party where they’d met in college thirteen years earlier, when they were twenty-one, Tom told her that he was a recovering alcoholic. Sarah thought, Not another one, and would’ve made an excuse to go to the bathroom but the line was twelve people long. Tom had green eyes and a swimmer’s broad shoulders, and was attractive from certain angles. He’d gotten tired of doing dumb half-remembered things every night and in the morning feeling and looking like an island castaway, so he’d gone to rehab in Oregon the previous summer. People here, he said, indicating the fugue-state kids holding red keg cups, had a narrow and self-destructive idea of fun. Someday they’d realize and regret this, but by then it would be too late to undo the damage they’d done to themselves. Sarah’s head bobbed to bolero dance music coming from skinny black speakers in the corner that fanned up and out like cobras. She’d drunk a lot already and slept with a stranger and slipped into a depression curable only by bed or cocaine, neither of which would be possible until the girls who’d given her a ride to the party returned from wherever they’d gone, and she thought that Tom might be right. As he talked about the tragedy of kids betraying themselves and betraying others—her boyfriend of six months was visiting his parents in Maryland that weekend—kids careening toward a crash, she saw her own fate clearly.
Tom pulled together a set of heavy red velvet curtains with gold tassel trim and said, “So you didn’t ask Mark to do it in an email?”
Sarah folded her arms and felt the tiny lump under her left armpit that a doctor had said was a harmless collagen deposit. Her email to Mark, which she hadn’t mentioned to Tom, had been innocent, although secret, and there was no reason, other than that secret communication from a woman in a relationship to a man was a little suspicious, not to point out that she hadn’t written anything inappropriate, just an apology for Alan’s smells and a note about the oven controls.
“That’s a paranoid question,” she said.
Tom grinned either from satisfaction that he’d caught but not yet exposed her half-lie, or relief that he’d been wrong about her and Mark.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said.
“I’m not tired anymore.” Tom’s eyes were red and he pulled at his bristly chin, the black and white stubble staticky from ten feet away. “I’ve crossed a threshold.”
She stood and stretched and tugged down the tee-shirt riding up over her pearl-studded belly button, and a cuckoo clock with stenciled numbers and a Czech phrase running along its bottom ticked loudly, like a time bomb counting down to the beginning.

Sarah woke up the next morning to a message on her phone from Tom saying he’d gone to town for groceries. She took a shower and was unpacking in the bedroom, thinking, I should call the florist for the Grossman wedding, make sure they got the nasturtium change, naked except for a towel on her head, with a pair of generous cotton underwear in one hand and a silk thong in the other, when she saw a man in the window staring at her. He was around thirty and had scraggly brown hair and a matching beard. She threw a shoe that cracked but didn’t smash the window, then put on a dress and ran outside.
Two years before, in a parking garage next to her office building, someone had grabbed her from behind and pulled her into his car. It was one brute undertow of unseen force. He told her to shut up even though she hadn’t made a sound. While he ripped open her blouse and squeezed her breasts and jockeyed between her legs, clawing at buttons and zippers and a double-buckle belt, she found her pepper spray and brought it up activated to his face. The man screamed a canine whelp and she kneed him in the groin and scrambled out the door, where she saw her boss, Helen, thirty feet away, frowning at her phone.
“Are you okay?” asked a woman in pleated shorts sitting on the porch swing next door.
Sarah’s hair fell in wet tangles past her chin. “Did you see just someone run away? A guy was at my bedroom window a second ago.”
“Oh god, there’s a pervert around here?”
“Perverts are everywhere.”
The woman and Sarah walked along the side of the house over overgrown grass, past a raised garden bed with wildflowers and sugar snap peas rippling through ragweed, to the fractured window where the man had stood, and examined the shoe tread in the dirt beneath it. A pattern of meaningless code. The woman clucked her tongue and murmured, “Look at that.”
Sarah had pressed charges against the parking garage guy and seen him get three years in prison for attempted rape while on probation for larceny and aggravated assault. She’d started the court proceedings thinking that such an outcome would give her a sense of closure and well-being, because a crime would be punished and future victims protected, but by their end she knew that this sense was illusory. The body memory of what had happened wouldn’t go away just because someone went to prison—a black man whose rap sheet and foster home childhood and illiteracy and drug habit and cool response to his sentence were cause for sympathy and white liberal guilt-cum-woe that the system, whatever that was, remained so broken in this day and age—and she emerged from the ordeal no better off than if she’d done nothing.
The woman, whose name was Monique, called the police. Ten minutes later an officer showed up on a bright white bicycle to explain that drifters passed through Ambleside in the summer, and that the police tried to monitor them. It might not lead to anything, but Sarah could come to the police station later to work with a sketch artist and look through mugshots.
After he left Sarah invited Monique in for a glass of water. Mark’s house was not like Monique had imagined it: no electronics or free weights or empty pizza boxes. Who had a full 1888 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica? Venetian glass wall pendants? Cherry armoire with silver letter-opener and empty inkwell? Like he’d bought everything at an estate sale in 1930. Sarah thought about the events from two years ago and this morning, and whether there was a proper response to being violated, something besides vengeance and sadness and repression. And could she and Tom get out of Ambleside fast enough?
Monique picked up the letter opener and pressed her thumb against its tip. “I’m glad you’re here for a month,” she said. “I don’t have any girlfriends on the block because half of the houses are in foreclosure, and the other half is old guys. Just a high number of retired bachelors who either keep to themselves or actually hit on you. When Mark moved in last year I got excited because he’s our age, but I never see him. And I’m on my porch all the time. Do you like yoga?”
There was a rustling at the front door, and Tom came in with a bag of groceries. “Company!” he said.
Sarah felt for a bug on the back of her neck, but there was nothing there.

Walking downtown earlier, Tom had passed lawn signs for three mayoral candidates that said “Join the Robeson Revolution” and “Demar for a Better Tomorrow” and “Powell: The People’s Choice,” with American flags planted beside them, like every house was a moon landing. To his right a dome-shaped island rose out of the lake, sometimes hidden behind buildings but always emerging in the same spot on the horizon, as if keeping abreast of him.
The commercial hub of the town, Market Square, had a splash fountain, wooden gazebo, azalea garden, and obelisk honoring a naval victory over the British. Stores lined three of its sides; the fourth opened onto the lake. Tom went into a coffee shop and flipped through a rack of postcards. The barista told him that the Thally cards were on sale, three for two.
“Thally’s the lake beast?” said Tom, picking up a drawing of a bug-eyed, nub-headed creature smiling under a cheerful yellow sun.
“The lady who did them illustrated a children’s book about him called ‘Thally Goes to Town!’ We sell copies next to the travel mugs.”
Tom got a coffee and crossed the street to the Square, where a jazz trumpeter told him during a break where to get a good sandwich and took his request for Miles Davis’s “Move.” On Tom’s way back to the house he stopped at a market and petted a golden retriever whose owner, a beautiful young woman in a broad-rimmed straw hat, said that Mr. Amablé only let nice people near him, and the air lost some of its humidity, and he thought Ambleside one of the happier mistakes he and Sarah had ever made.

“We’ve got to leave.” Sarah was arranging her clothes into piles next to an open clam shell suitcase. Her hair had dried with a zigzag part down the middle of her head.
Tom said, “You’re sure it was a man in the window and not an optical illusion or—or a cloud.”
“A cloud?”
“Mark has our apartment until August first. We have nowhere to go.”
“We can stay in a hotel.”
“For a whole month would be crazily expensive.”
“We’ll put it on credit cards, and you’re going to get a job soon. Or we can ask to stay with Carlos and Abbie in their huge basement.”
“Let’s wait until we’re less emotional before making any big decisions.”
“You think you’re being emotional? This is a creepy little town and I can’t stay.”
“But you haven’t even seen it, whereas I just walked around and met some great people. On the Square there’s open grass where you could paint that big island in the lake that looks like a gumdrop.”
“I don’t feel safe here.”
Tom said, “No place is totally safe. There are perverts everywhere.”
Sarah looked at him with sudden affection, and was about to relent when he said, “All right, let’s catch a late bus.”
But the online schedule showed that the next departure wasn’t until morning, so they settled down in front of the TV. On a local cable access station four people sat at a round table talking about Ambleside’s finances. One of Sarah’s big projects at work, the Grossman wedding, was about to start at the Rosemont Hotel, and she fought the urge to call her fill-in, Jacqueline, for a report. Jacqueline would be busy and Sarah shouldn’t micromanage from afar. Tom opened a can of fried onions. Alan liked fried onions more than his cat food but less than white cheddar popcorn, and because he was going blind in one eye he could no longer gauge the distance from the window sill above the kitchen sink to the top of the refrigerator. Thalassa Island was beside the point, said the only woman at the round table, since Ambleside had such deep budget problems that state regulators needed to take over. It had happened in Camden, New Jersey. A man across from her said that Ambleside was not Camden. “This is riveting,” said Tom. “Let’s change the channel.” Sarah wondered when would it become more merciful to put Alan to sleep than keep him alive. Okay, said the woman, people didn’t huddle around burning cars in the winter, but there was precedent for state intervention when towns got in serious trouble. Sarah popped half an Ambien and Tom switched channels to a sitcom about a cranky housepainter. Bob Grossman, who was paying for his daughter’s wedding, had hated Sarah’s reception schedule. Cake after the first dance, that’s nuts, he’d said, and give ten minutes for the groomsman’s speech, not fifteen. Fifteen minutes turns into twenty and everyone’s squirming to go to the john. When Sarah rescued Alan from the Humane Society, she learned he’d been abused as a kitten. People abused kittens. . . . Somehow the cranky housepainter got a job painting this Russian Mafioso’s villa in San Diego. Bob Grossman believed in both the carrot and the stick, so that if the wedding of his only child went well Sarah could expect a big reward, but if not he’d make sure she was punished. Personal responsibility meant everything to Bob. The reproductive endocrinologist had said it would take three weeks for the drugs to leave Sarah’s system. That was sixteen weeks ago. Sarah’s eyes stung from the Ambien, and Tom’s lap beneath her feet was burning hot. The room by room color instructions for the villa were written in Russian, so the housepainter got a friend to translate them, but the friend’s Russian was bad and she wrote “hot pink” instead of “blue” for the master bedroom. When the Mafioso saw the hot pink and threatened to kill the housepainter, the friend said he should say that a rival Ukrainian mob boss had forced him at gunpoint to do it. To humiliate the Russian by showing the rise of Kiev over Moscow. The housepainter said, That idea’s so crazy it just might work. Sarah’s eyes were on fire; she closed them and the laugh track sounded like the fizz of champagne at a party where the music’s stopped for no reason.