Polly looked at them, and they looked back through her. “I don’t know,” she said to the girl. “I don’t know what they are doing.”
“Probably waiting to kill something,” the girl said darkly.
Polly fled.
23
The story of the tarot reading, as Polly told it over dinner, was funny and silly, the scary parts exaggerated for comic effect. Emma and Gracie took up the tale and predicted even direr events.
Their laughter was torture, eating was torture. Peas, bread, even the mashed potatoes stuck in Marshall’s throat. He worked to get them down. A snake swallowing, swallowing, swallowing a rat down the length of its body. A rat in his throat, not clawing, not fighting, but alive; he could feel it swell against his esophagus as if it struggled to breathe.
“Don’t.”
Marshall had spoken aloud. Conversation around the table stopped. Three sets of eyes looked at him: Emma, Gracie, Polly. They’d been a family for only a few months. It had started after they got back from Venice. It had come into the house. Now, somehow, it was reaching out, touching Polly. “Jesus, no,” he murmured.
“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity,” Gracie said. “I read that somewhere.”
“Uh oh,” Emma joined in. “Tell us if you start hearing voices.”
“
Especially
in dog language. Who was that guy whose dog told him to kill people?”
“Sam,” Emma said.
“Son of Sam,” Marshall corrected. Too abrupt. Too loud. Startled into silence, Emma, Gracie, and Polly stared at him.
“Neither Sam, nor his son, nor his son’s dog are welcome at our dinner table,” Polly said, shooing away the unpleasant silence with the ease of a born hostess. With the tip of the serving spoon, she scooped up three peas and put them on her younger daughter’s plate. “I am so sorry, darlin’, but I believe I inflicted more of these on your sister, and one does strive to be fair with one’s offspring.”
Normalcy reinstated for at least the three of them, she asked Marshall, “Don’t what, sugar?”
“Don’t mind me,” he said and tried for a smile. It must have passed muster. The girls looked relieved. “I’ve got a little indigestion is all.”
“If it was my cookin’, I’ll make it up to you. The kitchen isn’t my best room.” Polly batted her eyes at him, a fluttering of the lashes that was both sexy and satiric.
Caught in the universe of her eyes, Marshall pushed at the darkness in his mind hard enough that it brought jagged lightning to his peripheral vision. First harbinger of a migraine.
It was happening again.
Nothing happened,
Marshall silently shouted down the voice in his head.
A slip. A bad dream.
He loved the girls nearly as much as he did their mother, and he had planned to adopt them. They were so beautiful. Emma was lithe and olive skinned; Gracie was blonder, broader of smile and wider of eyes. Her birthday was in two weeks.
Polly wanted to get her a kitten.
A flash of memory showed him Tippity, the Chihuahua, with ice around its tiny jaws.
Did people outgrow that kind of thing? Was there a statute of limitations on human misery? BTK, Bind, Torture, Kill. Wichita. Coming forward after so long. But Dennis Rader wasn’t repentant. He wanted credit for his work.
“I’ve got some work to do,” Marshall said abruptly and stood up. Memory lightning-flashed again. This time it brought a faint ghostly virga. He needed an Imitrex and quickly. Polly looked concerned but said nothing. Gracie and Emma were still young enough to accept that all stepdaddies came and went with sudden sweats on their foreheads, rocky clenches in the muscle of their jaws. One day they would realize they’d been cheated out of a normal papa.
If they lived long enough.
Fear—or a migraine—clawed the back of his neck so sharp and mean he half-thought if he looked in a mirror, he’d see a monster with scales and talons attached to his back, its fangs buried in the base of his skull. Walking straight, keeping errant words and sighs tight within him, he left the dining room and made his way up the stairs toward his office.
A spectral hand pressed hard on the back of his neck. Marshall squeezed his eyes tightly closed, his face scrunching up like a child’s.
Like it was yesterday. Like it was now. Like it had never stopped happening. Pressing one palm to his forehead and the other to the back of his head to keep his brain from smashing out through his skull, he stopped on the landing.
He could smell the past, shit-sharp in his nostrils. The odor gagged him, and the spasm tore through his head with the force of a band saw.
His wife, the girls—he saw them superimposed over the images in his mind, and cried out.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?” Polly called from the room below in the voice he so loved he sometimes pretended he didn’t hear so she would say things a second time. He who, with the exception of his brother, had never loved at all since he was a kid, now loved too much.
Danny knew that would trigger it. He’d done everything to stop the marriage but stand up during the does-anyone-know-why-this-couple part of the service and volunteer the truth.
“Sweetheart?”
“I’m okay,” Marshall managed to call back. Forcing his eyes open, he again started up the stairs. Faintly, from the depths of the dark places in his mind, he heard sirens, felt the hands of police and EMTs, still cold from the outside, lifting as he writhed and twisted in fear and pain
.
He was going crazy.
No. He’d always been crazy; he just made himself believe he’d left it behind. Now, crazy was coming back to get him.
Concentrating on moving and not thinking and the pain, he succeeded in muting the movie in his head, but he couldn’t stop it. Black and white and blood-red, the familiar frames clicked behind his eyes.
In the upstairs bathroom, he fumbled a pill bottle from the medicine cabinet. Feminine clutter avalanched into the sink, razor and blades making a noise that cut as sharp as tempered steel. He stopped and stared at Polly’s Lady Schick and the packet of blades.
Death held an allure; he’d admitted that to himself a long time ago. But suicide was death without honor, a way for a coward to avoid his debts. Before Marshall had become an architect, he didn’t have much to be proud of in his life, but he had taken pride in the fact that he took what was dealt him without whining or shirking.
The razor in the sink, pink and thick-handled, Polly’s razor, made him think that maybe death was the better part of valor. He pushed the thought away, opened the envelope Danny had given him, shook two pills into his hand, added an Imitrex, and washed them all down with water from the tooth glass.
Thank God for Danny and drugs.
He replaced the bottle, closed the door of the medicine cabinet, and stared into the sink to avoid the face in the mirror.
A kitten. Why in God’s name did she want to get Gracie a kitten? If he’d stuck a Chihuahua in the freezer what would he do with a cat? Deep-fry it?
Jesus.
Vertigo caught him on the crest of a wave, and he held onto the sink to keep from falling. The razor was between his hands, the mirror waiting for him to look into it. Turning, he half fell into the upstairs hall.
Seventeen more steps and he’d be at his office. Despite what he’d told Polly, he hadn’t come upstairs to work; he’d not come for the drugs, though he wished he’d dared to take twice as many.
Marshall had to come upstairs because he had to see.
Leaning into the psychic wind, he pushed forward two more staggering steps. Outside the master bedroom the mental storm reached gale force. Holding onto the door frame, he tried to overcome the need to go in. Three times this evening he’d made the pilgrimage through the stairwell’s nightmares to this room to see if it had reappeared. He didn’t know whether this time would be a relief or further proof that he should get to know his wife’s razor more intimately.
Maybe he’d imagined it in the first place; maybe it had never been there at all. A fourth time was killing him; his head was imploding behind his right eye. A fourth time was beyond careful, beyond compulsion. It was not normal.
Normal was something he knew about. His life had been a case study in normal. Normal didn’t live in a garbage heap; nor did it obsess about minutia. Normal wore clean clothes but did not panic if a stain or a spill marred the fabric. Normal shook hands for one point seven seconds.
Normal did not look repeatedly for something that wasn’t there because he, himself, had taken it away. That was the hitch. He’d taken it back to the basement and hung it on the two nails driven into a beam for that purpose.
As if from a distance, he watched himself cross the carpet to the bed, saw himself staring down at the coverlet. His doppelganger fell to its knees, reached down, and folded the bed skirt neatly up onto the mattress.
With a suddenness that snatched the breath from his lungs, Marshall slammed back into his body, a body kneeling in prayer to a dead or indifferent God.
Taking a lungful of air as if he was about to free-dive forty feet, he bent double and looked under the bed.
Nothing.
Shoe boxes, hat boxes.
Nothing.
With exaggerated care, he folded the bed skirt back into place and smoothed the bedspread. Then he laid his head on his fists, thumbs hard in the corners of his eyes to keep the tears from beginning.
24
The Woman in Red
, she thought as she leaned across the tiny bathroom sink to get closer to the mirror. The sink was black with use, and the mirror hazy from years of accumulated dust, hairspray, bath powder, and other bathroom effluvia. In a way, the filth was her friend; as footage shot through gauze, it softened the less pleasing aspects of her face. Blubber drowned the ravages of age, lard filling out wrinkles and rounding what would have been a sagging jaw line. Close in, just eyes and lips in focus, she occasionally even felt attractive.
Her left eye crossing slightly to accommodate close vision, she concentrated on her lipstick. Red. Always red. Tired of it after so many years and tubes, she’d tried other colors, but they’d looked wrong, as if her mouth belonged to some other woman.
“Fuck,” she whispered as the shaking of her hand smeared a red line nearly to her nose. “Darn,” she amended firmly. Mr. Marchand did not like the
F
word. He used to like it just fine, but a year, or two, or twenty ago, he had slapped her silly for using it in front of him. After that she never heard him say the word. It was like he’d gotten religion or culture or something. He didn’t have to slap her like he did. All he had to do was ask. Saying no to him had never been an option.
Not since that first night.
Remembering then was better than remembering now. Snow was drifting down from a low dark sky. The world was cold and quiet, not hot and hungry like Louisiana. Her mom and dad were at a prayer vigil for a deacon who had passed. Stillness, snow, and darkness swaddled the house. She was at the window on the second-floor landing looking into the next-door neighbor’s house.
Through snowflakes half as big as her fist falling through the halo of the street light, she watched his mother, wearing a flannel nightgown with matching robe and slippers, just like June Cleaver, kiss his brother on the cheek, then sit on the edge of the bed and sing to him.
He came into the doorway and watched them. She loved the way his hair waved, long in front and short over the ears. She loved his dark eyes, the four-square way he stood, feet shoulder-width apart, like he could take on the world. He was what her grandmother used to call an “old soul.”
Leaning against the window to be closer, she’d fallen asleep. Then, for no reason she could think of, she opened her eyes. It wasn’t like waking up; it was like already being awake, and suddenly, in a pitch-black theatre, the movie comes on.
He was right in front of her, walking down his dimly lit hallway toward her window. He stopped, looked right into her eyes, and smiled that slightly crooked smile that made her weak at the knees.
“Sssshh,” she heard herself hissing. The sound dragged her back to the mirror and the lipstick running up to her nose.
She needed a little something. A stiffener.
A glass of bourbon sat on the back of the commode in a space carved out by repetition. The rest of the toilet tank was obscured by a broken eye shadow container, hair pulled from brushes, two bottles of hairspray, a dirty washcloth, and assorted hair pins and tissues. The overflow hadn’t far to go. A pile had built up over time until the space between the side of the tank and the sink cabinet was full. Where the glass rested was an almost perfect circle in the mess delineated by old rings from the bottom of the tumbler.
Lifting it carefully, she pushed out her lips to do the least amount of damage to her makeup and took a sip. “Cocktail,” she said to chase away the word “booze” that clicked into her mind.
The bourbon was just to steady her hand; she didn’t want to get tipsy tonight. Fortified, she tried applying the lipstick again. Better. Not perfect, but better. At least most of the color was within shouting distance of her lip line. Since her lips were naturally thin, she colored outside of it anyway to make them look fuller. Admiring the effect, she shook a cigarette from a partially crushed pack of Dorals and lit it. “Shit.” The lipstick was okay, but she had another cigarette burning on the edge of the sink, adding its burn-and-nicotine footprint to half a dozen others. Pinching it up, she dropped it in the toilet and set the new one down in its place.