Low Red Moon (27 page)

“Isn’t she dead yet?” Aldous asks, and one of the other voices laughs at him.

Everything my mother knew, left for me in a hole in a wall. All her careful knots and loose threads…

The face gazing back at her from the mirror above the bathroom sink, skin scorched lobster pink just like the old man said, her eyes starting to swell shut, and she dabs more of the ointment on her cheeks. Never mind the pain, the pain is just her due, it’s the inconvenience that matters. Running out of time because everything that flies and scampers and crawls through the night has been set against her, because Deacon Silvey is starting to suspect, even if he never believes. Because she should have killed the girl named Sadie in the park and left her body hanging from a tree. Should have strewn her in messy, gaudy shreds across the dry grass, and there never would have been a fire. A fat blister at the corner of Narcissa’s mouth bursts and that much more of her leaks out; dead skin and new, raw flesh exposed to the air, and she reaches for another Band-Aid.

“You’re not going to be very damn inconspicuous anymore,” her grandfather says from his seat on the toilet behind her.

“When was I ever?”

“Oh, you ain’t never been half so different as you’d like to think,” he replies. “It’s almost eat you up alive, too, living inside that ordinary hide of yours. Now, you should have seen your grandmother—”

“I will, one day.”

“How do you expect to live without a house? Where do you think you’re gonna sleep?” and the mirror is only the night sky above the burning house. A shrieking cyclone of sparks and smoke swirling up to meet the moon, the low red moon hung on meat-hook spurs against a velvet sky. Her mother’s eye, that moon, and Madam Terpsichore’s cruel, dismissing glare, and Narcissa turns her back on it. Better if there’s only the sea, the pure, pale beam of a lighthouse somewhere to the north, winking on and off, off and on, sweeping out across the waves. Better if Aldous had caught her unawares, had cut her throat and carried the body down to the hungry things waiting in the tunnels beneath the house.

“No more time for dreams, child,” he says. “You started this business. Tonight you gotta finish it, one way or another.”

Narcissa sits down in the sand and the snow and tries hard to ignore him, watching the lighthouse, the bobbing masthead beacon of a fishing boat a long way off. Nothing
she
began, this business, as he said, so that’s a goddamned lie. The life she was dragged into from her mother’s womb, squalling and helpless to turn back, the life that has followed her soul across a century of madness and monstrosity; no more than a consequence, inevitable as death, the thing she has become, no more or less than she ever might have been.

“Don’t you try to fool yourself like that, Narcissa,” and that’s either Aldous speaking, or Madam Terpsichore or one of the murdered voices woven deep into her bones. “There might be strings and there might be knots, but it’s nothing you couldn’t have cut or untangled, if that’s the way you wanted to go. Be a killer if you want, if that’s all you got left inside, but don’t pretend you never had a choice otherwise.”

She opens her eyes again, because there’s nothing left to say, nothing left to dream, and the pain sings her awake and spreads the night out before her like a butchery.

Chance hangs up the telephone and then stands at the kitchen counter, staring at it, the sleek black plastic shell and orderly buttons with all their numbers and letters printed in white. Her mouth is dry, and she can still hear Deacon’s voice inside her head.

“So where the hell is he?” Alice asks from the sofa behind her, and Chance turns around and forces a crooked smile.

“A bar,” she says, and Alice curses and goes back to watching the television, even though the sound’s turned all the way down.

“He isn’t drinking. At least he says he isn’t drinking.”

“Of course he does.”

“He didn’t sound drunk. He just sounded scared,” and that makes Alice look up again, fresh worry to take some of the edge off the anger in her eyes. “He’s asking the police to send someone over,” Chance says.

“Why don’t you just pack a bag and we could—”

“No, Alice, he says I’m safer here. He says the police will send someone and not to be afraid.”

Alice drums her thick fingertips on the back of the sofa and shakes her head. “Safe from what?” she asks. “Afraid of what?”

“Would you like some tea? I think I’m going to make myself a cup of tea.”

“Will you please stop pretending that you don’t hear me whenever I ask a question?”

Chance takes the teakettle off a back burner and begins filling it with water from the tap. “I’m not pretending I didn’t hear you. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“Well, you could start by telling me what it was that Deacon called to tell you not to be afraid of.”

Chance sets the full kettle down in the sink and shuts off the water. “It’s not that simple,” she says. “Most of it wouldn’t even make sense.”

“Try me.”

Chance picks up the kettle, pours out some of the water, because she’s filled it much too full, and then puts it back on the stove.

“I can see that you’re scared. I know you want someone to talk to,” Alice says. “Why did you call me over here if you didn’t?”

“I needed some company, that’s all. It’s been a really strange day, and I didn’t want to be alone.”

“While your husband is off doing god only knows what—”

“Alice, you’re not my mother, okay? Stop acting like you are.”

Alice Sprinkle glares at her a moment, then makes a disgusted, huffing noise and goes back to watching the silent television. Chance gets a Red Zinger tea bag down from the cabinet and holds it under her nose, breathing in the flowery sweet scents of hibiscus and rose hips, licorice and lemon grass. Smells to soothe her shot nerves, a fleeting hint of something normal, and she wants to tell Alice everything she knows or thinks she knows, everything she suspects. But she can’t begin to imagine the words she would need, and it would only turn into an argument she couldn’t win.
This is how Deacon feels when he needs to talk to me,
she thinks and quickly pushes the thought away, goes to the dishwasher for her grandfather’s old white coffee mug.

“Is he selling drugs?” Alice asks.

“No, he’s not selling drugs.”

“Yeah, I suppose that would be a little too much like work.”

Chance realizes that she forgot to turn on the stovetop and sets the burner on high. In a few seconds, the drops of water on the bottom of the kettle have begun to sizzle and steam, and she drops the tea bag into the white cup.

“Is it one of those silly hipster girls he used to—”

“Alice, can you cut it out for five minutes? You’re not doing anything to make me feel better.”

“You
have
told him that you’re pregnant, right?” and this time Chance decides it’s better to ignore her, not taking the bait, and she stares instead at the calendar thumbtacked to the kitchen wall. A Christmas gift from Deacon, something he found at the bookstore or ordered online, a color photograph of a different trilobite for every month of the year. October’s bug is a spiny odontopleuroid named
Dicranurus monstrosus
from the Devonian of Africa, bizarre little beast even for a trilobite, its recurved occipital spines coiled like tiny ram’s horns. Chance glances past the blocky string of days towards the end of the month, Halloween, then flips the page over to November, and there’s Sunday the fourth circled in red Magic Marker, her due date.

“This is why I don’t have cable,” Alice says. “Sixty-seven channels of nothing worth watching.”

“There’s usually a movie,” Chance replies, counting off the days in her head, less than two weeks left between her and that red circle. “Try AMC or TCM.”

“What the fuck does Birmingham need with
two
golf channels? Hell, what does it need with one?”

“You see that?” Chance whispers to her belly, whispering so Alice won’t hear her. “Time’s getting short, butter bean.”

“I had to play golf in high school. God, what a stupid game.”

“Try the National Geographic Channel,” Chance suggests, sick of hearing Alice bitch about golf. “There’s usually something worth watching on it.”

Alice presses buttons on the remote, and “It’s something Egyptian,” she says. “The Sphinx, I think.”

“Egypt’s not so bad.”

“Why don’t you come in here and sit down?” Alice asks her. “You’ve got to be exhausted.”

“I’m waiting for the water to boil. If I sit down now, I’ll just have to get up again in a few minutes.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll get it for you.”

“I’d rather do it for myself.”

“Fine. Have it your way,” and Alice turns up the volume on the television. The narrator is busy describing the effects of acidic pollution on the 4,500-year-old structure, crumbling limestone and hopeful proposals for restoration.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt,” Alice says.

“Isn’t Alabama hot enough for you, you have to want to go all the way to Africa?”

On the stove, the teakettle has begun to make small crackling and popping sounds as the metal heats up and expands, and Chance watches the red-orange glow of the burner instead of the television screen. Wishing that Deacon were home, that she hadn’t started the stupid, pointless argument with him at the hospital, wishing she could think of anything but the way he sounded on the phone.
Don’t be afraid,
he said.
It’ll be over soon, all of this crazy shit, and, Chance, you have nothing at all to be afraid of, I swear. Nothing in the world,
but the murmur and hum of the bar in the background to underscore and undermine his every word, the clattering, muttering voice of all her doubts. No longer even certain what to call that fear, or where it begins and ends, and the trip to Atlanta seems like a century ago. That ordinary day of perfectly ordinary worries and wonders, all her anxiety and misgivings occupied by her pregnancy, the welfare of her fossils, the wording on an exhibit banner.

But it wasn’t
really
an ordinary day, was it?
she thinks and walks over to the kitchen window. The streets are dark and deserted, and there’s no sign of police cars anywhere. Any fall night in this city, except Alice Sprinkle is on her sofa and Deacon’s gone and she’s here waiting for policemen to come and keep her safe from a killer.

“I think I have to go to the bathroom,” she says out loud, and Alice looks up from the television.

“Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“No, I’m fine. Watch the kettle for me.”

“Yeah,” Alice says, “if you’re really sure there’s nothing wrong.”

“No, I just have to take a piss,” and Chance doesn’t wait around for Alice to start asking for all the gory details, heads down the long hallway to the bathroom. Behind her, someone on television is speculating on the fate of the Sphinx’s missing nose. The bathroom door is standing partway open, and she can see her reflection in the wide mirror above the counter and the sink, her bloated silhouette, and it’d probably be depressing and disorienting if she were a little less afraid.

I swear I’ll be home as soon as I can,
Deacon said.

Miles to go before I sleep,
Chance thinks, some part of her brain running on autopilot, dredging up useless, unconscious flecks of memory; she stops at the bathroom door and reaches inside to flip the light switch. Her fingers touch something damp and sticky, and she jerks them back, but there’s nothing on her hand, no stain, no unclean smudge, and she stands there staring at her fingertips for a moment.

“Just be cool, baby,” she whispers, trying to make the words sound exactly the way that Deacon would make them sound. “You’re all wound up and starting to freak yourself out.” But she doesn’t sound much like Deacon, and Chance wipes her hand on her overalls and reaches into the bathroom again. This time there’s only the plastic switch and switch plate.

“Silly goose,” she says, and that’s her grandfather’s voice inside her head, Joe Matthews scolding her for being afraid of thunder or the sound of pecan branches scraping against the window of her attic bedroom. She flips the switch and clean white light floods the bathroom, washes the forest-green walls, the colorful Mucha prints hanging on her left.

“Silly goose,” she says again, because it felt good the first time, and she smiles at herself in the big mirror. Chance steps into the bathroom and eases the door shut behind her, closing out the noise from the television. She starts unbuttoning the bib of her overalls, but stops after only one button.

And miles to go before I sleep…

In the mirror, the door and the bathroom walls behind her have completely vanished, and in their place there’s a wide gray sky spread like a million mockingbird wings pinned above a narrow beach and a stormy sea. She can even smell the salt breeze and the faint, unpleasant odor of dead fish. Her heart like something small and frantic, caged in flesh and wanting out, and Chance takes a deep breath and turns around very slowly. But there’s only the door, the dark green walls, everything exactly as it ought to be.