Roger wasn't happy (Veronica said)—almost the moment he agreed to come with me to the Cape, regret twisted his mouth. As he drove us up the Thruway and out the Mass Pike, he was silent. I knew he was trying, which in this instance meant not letting any one of the dozen complaints at the tip of his tongue escape. It meant keeping the car pointed east. I was so relieved to be on our way someplace else—to be crossing the Hudson, Albany a distant cluster of buildings to our left; to be in among the Berkshires, speeding along between old, rounded mountains; to be stopping at a rest area for a Big Mac, for God's sake—I was so relieved, not to mention nervous that Roger might take it on himself to abandon our plan and turn the car around, that I was willing to sit for almost three hundred miles in silence, whatever NPR station the radio could pick up chattering in the background.
That wasn't all I was nervous about, either. Roger's—what do you call it? His speech? His dramatic monologue? It was playing on repeat somewhere not too far from the front of my brain. I couldn't not think about it. I was trying not to worry about it—too much, anyway, especially the change in his voice at the end. Not that the stuff before that was terribly pleasant, but at least that made sense. Even without the weird voice that had sounded so hollow, so full of the space inside the house, I would have preferred not to have eavesdropped on Roger's composition process. Yes, from the moment I'd heard him deliver those words to Ted—inflict them on him, is the way I really think of it—I'd known that my husband contained depths I hadn't suspected, pits full of black, bubbling resentment, anger. I'd continued to think of his words as spontaneous, however, which was not unreasonable. After more than three decades in the classroom, Roger was a master of the extemporaneous speech. So long as I could think of Roger's words as a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing, I could live with it. Maybe not as well as I would have liked, but I could deal. To think that it had been this premeditated was unsettling, to say the least. Who wants to think that the person they love has it in them to intend such damage to someone else—to their child, for crying out tears—that they could plan it out so methodically? The image that kept occurring to me was of Roger, dressed not in his blue short-sleeved shirt and chinos, but in furs, sitting not in the driver's seat of a Jetta, but in a cave lit by a smoky fire. He's holding a piece of bone in his left hand, a sharpened stone in his right. As he repeats last night's monologue, he scrapes the stone across the bone, shaping it into a weapon, a knife suitable for driving into his son's soft belly. I did my best not to dwell on it.
Instead, I tried to think about the house we were going to. Although Addie had shown me pictures of the Cape House, and I'd told her I'd have to come out to it, I never had. I'd been to the Cape once, when I was nineteen. I drove out to Provincetown with the guy I was seeing at the time. We were on the verge of breaking up. The trip was one of those things you do when both of you know what's coming but are trying to resist it, one of those epic, empty gestures. On our way there, we got lost—the guy claimed he knew a shortcut that became a longcut, and by the time we arrived in P-town, the sun was on its way down and our tempers were frayed. We walked Commerce Street for an hour, then had an unpleasant dinner at the Lobster Pot. He had seen his first drag queen and been freaked out. I accused him of being intolerant. We spent our meal bickering over whether he was. Our conversation on the ride home alternated between further bickering and half-hearted attempts to plan our return trip, when we had more time and could rent a motel room. It was sad—sad and frustrating, because I could see this was a beautiful place, and I couldn't enjoy it.
Roger's associations with the Cape were more positive. He and Joanne had vacationed here several years in a row, after they were first married. They missed a year when Joanne was pregnant with Ted. When they inquired about renting their old apartment for the following summer, they learned that the artist who'd taken their place had already put down a deposit for the following year. Roger called about a couple of other rentals, but that was the year everything had been booked in advance. If the Cape wasn't available—which meant about a half-dozen apartments in P-town—they'd have to look elsewhere. Joanne's hairdresser suggested the South Jersey Shore, and that was how they found the spot they'd be vacationing in for the next half-dozen years, until they decided to take Ted to Disneyworld.
The Cape, for Roger, was P-town. It was occasional walks on the beach, but mostly lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties with friends. It was visiting gallery after gallery, sometimes accompanied by the artist whose work was on display, sometimes purchasing a painting for Joanne to hang in one of the house's guest rooms. It was going to hear critics and writers from The New York Review of Books and the Sunday Times Book Review. "We might as well have been in Manhattan," Roger said, which I'm sure is why Joanne enjoyed it. She taught him how to eat lobster. Is it any surprise that she had a knack for cracking open shells and digging out meat?
I don't think Roger and Joanne were ever at the Cape at the same time as Addie and Harlow. By the time the Howards started vacationing here, Roger and Joanne had moved on to the Jersey Shore. They returned to the Cape a handful of times, but only for long weekends. Friends of Joanne's rented a house in Hyannis, and they invited her and Roger to visit them. Neither Roger nor Joanne had been to the Cape House, before or after their split, and I have to admit, I was happy about that. If you're going to be with someone who was married before and lived in the same place you're living in now—especially someone who had a long marriage—then you have to accept that pretty much anywhere the two of you go, the two of them went first, and probably second, third, and fourth, besides. You tell yourself that it doesn't matter whom he was with before; it's a question of who's there now. You let him talk about what the two of them did here or there in the past, because that's part of his life and you want to know about his life. You tell yourself that you're making new, better memories in these places, that you're claiming them for the two of you, now. It's the price you pay—and if it seems like you keep paying it, what can you do?
But it means that, when you discover something the two of them didn't do together, whatever it is, right off the bat, it's even sweeter. One time, back when we were sharing the apartment—pre-confrontation with Ted—I convinced Roger that we should go mini-golfing. He hadn't been with Joanne. She wasn't interested in it. The night turned into kind of a joke. Roger is fiercely competitive, even about things like mini-golf, which, I'm afraid, he was terrible at. He kept hitting the ball too hard, ricocheting it off the obstacles, bouncing it onto the other greens. The worse he played, the angrier he got; the angrier he got, the worse he played. To make matters worse, mini-golf is one of the few sports in which I excel. To put it mildly, I was kicking his ass. On top of this, when we were about halfway through the course, it started raining, a sudden, torrential thunderstorm—I mean, there was hail coming down, these pea-sized ice pellets that really stung, not to mention absolutely soaking rain and lightning striking all around us—us with our metal clubs. The entire course cleared in about two seconds, except for—you guessed it—Roger, who refused to leave until the game was completed. First I'm screaming at him to get out of the rain, doesn't he realize how dangerous this is, then I'm playing, too. It was like, Well, fine, if you want to electrocute yourself, then I'll electrocute myself, too. How do you like that? There the two of us were, water streaming into our eyes, hair and clothes plastered to our bodies, shivering madly, and would we stop the game? Not till the last hole, and, for the record, I won. On the ride home, Roger was so furious he refused to talk to me. When I stopped at the diner and ran in for two hot chocolates to go, he wouldn't drink his—so I did, which made his mouth fall open first in astonishment, then laughter. What a night.
The point is, for as soaked as we were—for as much danger as we'd been in—for all that my plan for a pleasant hour or two had gone horribly off-track—for all of that and more besides, that night was ours. We didn't have to share it any way, shape, or form with Joanne. I'm sure there are more of those nights than I realize. I know there are ones that are less melodramatic. After that experience, Roger refused to play mini-golf with me again. But if I treasure our meal at the Canal House, I treasure that game, too, because it was ours.
I was hoping we'd make more of those memories at the Cape House, which I guess we did; although most of what happened—well, Joanne would be welcome to it, let's put it that way. The drive—can I just say I love the drive out here? I love how, as you get closer to the Cape itself, the trees are all shorter—from the wind off the ocean, I suppose—and through them you can see cranberry bogs every now and again, and then you're at the Bourne Bridge, crossing over the channel, and if it's a sunny day, the water below dazzles. The bridge—funny, how sometimes landscapes can be so blatantly symbolic—once you're over it, I'm always surprised at how long it takes you to get out here. You think, I'm here, I'm on the Cape, and you forget that you still have to drive all the way out to the elbow and keep going. It's all right, though. In places, you can see the ocean, or the bay, and you can smell the salt water. You see these houses with weatherworn shingles, whose yards are basically sand—there's sand everywhere, the farther out you drive. I know, I know. You drove here, too, you saw all of this, already. I suppose Route 6 isn't all that different from any other local highway. There are the same restaurants, stores, strip malls—except that, out here, all the restaurants advertise fresh seafood, and the stores sell Cape Cod hats and t-shirts and knickknacks, and the strip malls are just a little less tacky. Yes, I'm romanticizing. When it comes to this place, I'm a total tourist. To anyone who lives here, I'm sure there are plenty of places on 6 that make them cringe. But the sight of all of it was enough to make Roger's monologue, and my image of him scraping the sharp edge of a rock up a piece of bone, recede. Did I mention there's a mini-golf course? Have you seen it?
We passed the mini-golf course, and Roger, whose last words had been uttered when we'd stopped for an early lunch two hours before, said, "No."
It took me a moment to realize he'd spoken. I'd been lost in the scenery. I said, "I beg your pardon?"
"I saw you gazing fondly at that miniature golf course," he said.
"What? I wasn't—" I was confused, until I understood he was trying to be funny. "Oh come on," I said, "one game."
"Never."
"I'll let you win."
"My dear," Roger said, "I do not require anyone to 'let' me win. I am fully capable of winning on my own."
"That's not what I remember."
"My march to victory the last time we played was interrupted by the weather."
"Seems to me it was more of a crawl than a march."
"The insolence of youth. Golf isn't a natural sport, anyway."
"Oh? What sport is?"
"Baseball."
"Baseball?"
"Baseball," Roger said. "It is the noblest game."
"Right. That's why they've found all those pre-historic baseball sites, because it's part of our DNA."
"Exactly. Our ancestors used to play their Neanderthal cousins. It is the true reason for the disappearance of the Neanderthal: poor pitching and catching skills. They were murder with the bat, though, when they could see past their tremendous brows." He lowered his, and stuck out his jaw.
I laughed. "Is this your new career? Baseball anthropologist?"
Roger nodded. "I am the only one of my kind. I follow the course of the world's greatest game up and down history's corridors. I consider the Trojan War, where mighty Achilles struck out noble Hector in the bottom of the seventh with three men on and two out. I reconstruct Charles Martel's homerun against the Moors. I map the trajectory of the pop-fly Alexander Hamilton caught, for which Aaron Burr shot him."
"Wait a minute," I said. "I thought you Dickensians played cricket."
"Perish the thought," Roger said. "Cricket is only a ruse invented to hide our proficiency at baseball."
"Which is why half the world plays it."
"It was a successful invention."
That was how it was the rest of the way to Wellfleet and Addie and Harlow's, this weird banter about baseball and world history that included Roger's abbreviated account of Dickens's career as a shortstop. It was funny. He improvised a few stanzas of "Cheney at the Bat." It was light, his effort at resuming conversation, but not about anything important. By the time we were turning off 6, we were discussing dinner plans. I wanted to go into P-town, to the Lobster Pot. Roger wanted to order in from Gutsy Bender's. Have I mentioned what a fan of junk food that man was? If it came in a disposable container and doubled your cholesterol, Roger adored it.
First, though, was the Cape House. Do I have to tell you what a relief this place was, after Belvedere House? Sure, it isn't nearly as impressive on the outside, but when impressive means Chock Full of Weirdness, plain is just fine. We'd arrived at the perfect time. The house was glowing with early afternoon light. We brought our bags up to the master bedroom, then explored the rest of the place. Roger was impressed. He didn't say anything, but I could read it on his face, which made me happy—happier, since I was already pretty pleased at the thought of us way out here, almost at the end of the Cape. To be honest, the house could have looked like anything, inside and out, as long as it let us escape. That it was so nice was a bonus.
For dinner, we settled on driving into Wellfleet, where we had drinks and dinner at the Bomb Shelter. Have you been there? They seated us on the front porch, so we could eat looking out on the bay. There was enough of a breeze to keep the air free of mosquitoes, and we had a leisurely meal while the sun dipped down to the water, painting the sky gaudy behind it. Our conversation continued light. Being on the Cape reminded me of The Bostonians, which Roger didn't care for and which led us to a mild debate about the virtues of Henry James. Roger condemned him for striving too hard for subtlety; I defended his effort to get at the nuances of perception. The argument was a far cry from those we'd had in the early days. Those had been the verbal equivalent of full-scale combat; this was more of a chess match. After dinner, we walked across the road to the beach, where we took off our shoes and socks—well, Roger did; I was wearing sandals—and went for a barefoot stroll.
The walk lasted longer than I expected. We weren't back at the house till twenty to midnight. I switched on the TV, and, in the process of searching for The Tonight Show, clicked on a black-and-white film that made Roger leap forward and say, "Stop here!" The local public television station was showing David Lean's version of Oliver Twist. I had stumbled onto it close enough to the beginning to allow us to watch the rest. Roger was delighted. There have been plenty of adaptations of Dickens, some better than others—although there's no version of a Dickens novel that's half as bad as that version of The Scarlet Letter Demi Moore did a few years ago; I'm just saying—there have been a lot of Dickens movies, but this one had all kinds of personal significance for him. Not only was it a brilliant work by a brilliant director, he'd first seen the film as a grad student leaning towards Dickens, but unsure about following that inclination. Oliver Twist had been playing in a revival in a local theater. Roger went to see it, loved it, and felt like he'd been given a sign to pursue his desire. Of course, it didn't hurt that he had a chance to work with a leading Victorianist, either. Running across it was a reminder of a happier time. Between watching the movie and raiding the kitchen cupboards for snacks when it was done, we were up until after two.
That night, I couldn't sleep. I lay awake beside Roger, waiting to see if he would continue sleepwalking. Although I hoped the new location would be enough to keep him in bed, I wasn't counting on it. Nor was I confident in his ability to navigate unfamiliar terrain. If he did rise, I didn't know if he'd have a speech to deliver, either the same one as last night or something new, even more damning. The night was warm. We'd left the bedroom windows up. I listened to the ocean breeze rustling the trees. I did my best not to look at the clock, whose red numbers showed that what had felt like at least a half-hour had been five minutes. I should've switched on the light and sat up reading, but I was afraid to do anything that would disturb Roger. I wasn't sure what his sleepwalking here would signify. That I'd been wrong about leaving the house, I guess. When he stirred—at three, a glance at the clock confirmed—I held my breath, wondering which direction he'd head, if I could catch him before he tripped down the stairs, if I could stand hearing what he'd have to say. But his stirring was no more than him turning over in his sleep, after which he was still again. Despite the relief that rushed through me—if nothing else, I'd finally be able to get a decent night's sleep—my eyes didn't close for another half-hour. I wanted to be sure that Roger's schedule hadn't been thrown off, and he'd be up for his nightly walk a little later. Now that I seemed able to draw a line between his sleepwalking and Belvedere House, I needed to figure out what that meant. Granted, the line was dotted. Roger would have to sleep peacefully every night we were here before I could make it a solid one. This night—he had insisted on driving today—we hadn't discussed it; he'd just kept driving and, when I'd asked him if he was okay, had nodded his head—the point is, his failure to leave the bed tonight could have had as much to do with exhaustion as anything.
My relief at the prospect of a full night's sleep had been premature. For the rest of our time at the Cape House—we stayed from Tuesday to Saturday—I kept myself up until three every night. I slept in later than usual—most mornings it was ten or ten-thirty before I dragged myself downstairs—but I knew that Roger had maintained his waking time of six, and I was reluctant to leave him alone with his thoughts for too long. He'd brought his copy of Our Mutual Friend, which he said he hadn't read straight through for several years and which he claimed he spent the hours before I woke rereading. Every morning I found him on the big couch in the living room, the novel open in his hands. You could chalk it up to paranoia on my part—although, what is it they say? Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you? Seriously—there was no point to us traveling all this distance only to have Roger sit brooding about Ted. I couldn't control Roger's thoughts, but I could give him other things to think about. Who knows? Maybe I could've slept until noon every day and Roger would have been fine. But I was more afraid than I wanted to admit that, the one morning I indulged myself and stayed in bed, I'd come down to find Roger in the midst of laying out another tabletop model. For that reason, I was coffeed, showered, and out the door with him by eleven at the latest.
We spent a lot of time at the beach. It was our first stop after leaving the house each day. We took an hour to walk up and down it, past families whose parents lay out in the sun tanning or reading a novel while their children ran back and forth to the ocean, sloshing plastic pails of water for the sandcastles they were building. We passed couples young and old—their children future gleams or past memories—reclining on beach chairs, studying the ocean out of sunglasses. We met other walkers, some of them with dogs that raced around the sand, kicking it up in gritty sprays, then dashed into the waves for a quick swim before trotting out, shaking themselves off, and starting the whole thing over again. We exchanged nods and hellos with solitary fishermen, their poles dug into the sand like spears, the lines running taut and barely visible to the waves.
Whether we walked at high tide or low or whatever they call it in-between, we were accompanied by the sound of the waves, the noise the ocean makes as it dissolves itself onto the land, which I sometimes imagined as the old man of the sea clearing his throat: harrumph. It's a sound that can be loud one minute—so much it startles you—and soft—almost intimate—the next. I would try to figure out the rhythm of it, but although I was sure I could hear a pattern to the waves, I couldn't formalize it. A constant breeze blew in with the waves, and that made even the hottest days—we had one overcast day while we were there—more bearable.
Depending on what time we arrived at the beach, we would step over pieces of driftwood, clumps of black seaweed jumping with sandfleas, fragments of crabs that the gulls had made meals of. The gulls themselves came and went overhead, sometimes hovering in the wind, the way they do, so that they look like kites, hanging there. Between their cries, floating bright and ragged on the air, and the hiss of the ocean as it fell back into itself—and the smell, that salt-water smell that you can miss, until the wind shifts and there it is, as full and rich in your nostrils as the sight of the ocean blue to the horizon—it was like a recipe for the complete beach experience. In a setting like that, the events of the last almost-year, from Roger's curse to Ted's death to all the weirdness—well, you couldn't escape them, but it was easier to tell yourself that they were in the past and have a chance of believing it.
Once our walk was done, we were off someplace else, which usually meant Provincetown, although on the Friday I convinced Roger to drive down to Wood's Hole so we could take the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. We'd spent a long weekend on the Vineyard at the beginning of spring—I think I mentioned it last night. We had gone there that month after Roger agreed to the leave of absence. It had happy memories for us, which was why I told Roger I wanted to see it again. As it turned out—
That's rushing ahead. First came our excursions into P-town. I insisted we do all the touristy things, like climbing the Pilgrim Monument. Roger had never done that. Can you believe it? He'd vacationed here for years in a row. He couldn't avoid seeing the monument—I mean, there's nothing half as tall around—but it was like those New Yorkers who live all their lives in sight of the Statue of Liberty and don't ever visit it. I couldn't believe Joanne hadn't wanted to climb it. True, she's hardly athletic, but you would think her blood would have glowed even bluer at the prospect of a Pilgrim Monument. Oh well, that left it for us. Roger raced up the stairs—all that walking and jogging—I struggled to keep up and quickly fell behind. When I reached the top, he was standing with his back to me, surveying P-town spread out below him, its streets full of cars, its harbor full of boats, the bay shining in the afternoon sun. I was reminded of how he gazed down at his model of the street in Kabul, and what I had tried to leave three hundred miles away was right beside us again.
Sometimes before we played tourists, sometimes after, we had lunch. Actually, it was pretty much always before. The day we climbed the Pilgrim Monument was the only time we ate after, which was a mistake. By the time we walked out of there, my legs were shaking, I was so hungry. We lunched at a different restaurant each day, the same with dinner. I ate a lot of seafood, a lot of fish, a lot of shrimp, some lobster. Roger stuck with chicken and occasionally steak, which I could not understand. Here we were, right beside the ocean—in some case, literally dining on top of it. If you're not going to eat fish here, then where? How much fresher do you want, right? He refused to discuss it: he ordered what he ordered and that was that.
Lunch finished, off we went to tourist. I had it half in mind to look up Viola Belvedere, then, but her phone number's unlisted, and although I asked about her at every gallery we stopped in, no one knew who she was. I wasn't especially disappointed. I would address her letter once we were back in Huguenot. Still, P-town isn't that big, and it was strange to think that, as we strolled its streets, we could have been passing in front of her house. She could have been an old woman we stepped off the sidewalk to walk around. We contented ourselves with more normal touristing, after which it was time for a snack, which tended to be the same thing every day, a double scoop of Ben & Jerry's. Do you know that, before we got together, Roger had never had Ben & Jerry's? For introducing him to that alone, he should have married me.
Cones in hand, we strolled P-town, window-shopping Commerce Street—ducking into a store if something caught our eye—or wandering the rest of the place. Every other house in P-town seems to be a B&B, doesn't it? We'd turn from this street to that, the day's heat melting the different flavors of our ice creams into new blends, banana-chocolate-chunk-chocolate-fudge-brownie, and depending on where we were, Roger would gesture at a house and, between licks of his ice-cream cone, tell me that it was where he'd spent an evening arguing the merits of Rossetti's painting with the art critic for the Village Voice.
Our ice creams done, the last piece of cone crunched, sticky fingers wiped with soggy napkins, we made our way back to Commerce Street for more window-shopping. We spent this part of our day browsing the aisles of Marine Salvage. After considering the assortment at the front of the store—the windchimes, the surplus airline flatware, the rubber lobsters, the keychains—we'd drift further in, to the racks of clothes. They have all those military uniforms there, you know? Most of them aren't American. They're from Russia, Germany, and Britain. I can't imagine how they got it all. We tried some of it on, the hats and helmets, mostly. Roger was more convincing as an officer in the Russian navy than you would have thought. I wanted to buy him the hat, but he refused. In the midst of the uniforms, there's other stuff, too, canteens in leather pouches and shovels that fold up into themselves. While Roger moved on to the back of the store, I raked through boxes of the canteens and shovels.
Our second night there, I found a gas mask—with post-9/11 concerns about bio- and chemical-terrorism, no longer a quaint antique. I turned it over in my hands, but couldn't bring myself to put my face into it, even for fun. It was too claustrophobic. The light played across its empty eyepieces, and I thought of Ted. I didn't know if he'd had to wear one of these in Afghanistan. I didn't think so, but he'd probably had to train with one, because as a member of Special Forces he would've had to be prepared for everything. They look so alien, gas masks. You may tell yourself they're shaped like the faces of elephants, but no elephant ever looked like these things. They're the cubist nightmare of an elephant. People put them on and become different. In a back room in my mind, Roger said, "I disown you; I cast you from me." The mask was made from a rubbery material—maybe it was rubber—that was warm and soft to the touch. It felt uncomfortably close to skin, as if I were holding someone's face. I dropped the gas mask on top of a pile of gray German helmets and hurried off to find Roger.
When we returned to Marine Salvage the following day, however, I lingered at the front of the store only long enough to convince myself I didn't intend to head straight back to that stack of gray helmets. I hadn't given the mask much thought—not that I had let myself be aware of, anyway. A couple of times later that evening, I'd recalled the feel of its material with a little shudder, but that was hardly worth mentioning. It wasn't until we were walking up Commerce once again that I was seized by this compulsion to rush into the store and find the gas mask. It was the kind of change in your internal weather that catches you by surprise and before you know what's happening has turned you in a new direction. I tried to resist it, forcing myself to stand at a bin full of brightly colored plastic telescopes, but it swept me into the store with hurricane force. As a rule, I'm not a compulsive person. Prior to everything I've been telling you about, I could practically count on one hand the number of times I'd been overtaken by this kind of impulse. Lately, though, it seemed I'd been acting increasingly at the behest of motives that were unclear to me. My recent attempt at getting pregnant had been a relatively benign manifestation of this trend, my need to escape Belvedere House another example. This, though: Why should I be possessed by the urge to see a surplus gas mask, to hold it in my hands again? If the force of my compulsion was frightening, its object was bizarre enough to take the edge off my fear. I found the pile of helmets, the same height as yesterday, but no gas mask. I pawed through the helmets, which tumbled and rolled against one another, colliding with a dull, plastic crack. I thrust my hand into the midst of them, and felt the mask's snout in my palm. Clearing away helmets with my other hand, I freed the gas mask, holding it up to the light.
And do you know what? The moment it was in my hands, the same weirdness I'd experienced last night at the thing's appearance—accompanied by the revulsion I'd felt at touching it—overcame me, and, almost as soon as I had it out, I was dropping it back in with the helmets and heading to the front of the store as quickly as I could. My feet carried me outside at just under a run. Roger was another ten minutes picking through racks of t-shirts, plenty of time for me to ask myself what was going on. I had no idea. When Roger emerged onto the street, I told him I was ready for dinner and asked how he felt about returning to Wellfleet to try Aesop's Tables. "What," he asked, "no Lobster Pot?"
"We ate there last night."
"True, but I believe I heard you say that you would not need to dine anyplace else, now."
"Can we just go?" I said. All at once, it was too much effort to keep up the light and witty banter. I wanted out of Provincetown, away from Marine Salvage and its gas mask, and that was that.
"Of course we can," Roger said. "Sweetie, what's wrong?"
"Nothing," I said, "low blood sugar, I guess." Because, really, how could I tell him I'd been freaked out by surplus military equipment?
The gas mask was at the forefront of my thoughts during the ride to Wellfleet and our meal at Aesop's Tables. Have you eaten there? Isn't it good? It reminds me a little of the Canal House, mostly because they're both old houses—I think I read that Aesop's used to belong to a sea-captain, or something like that. We were seated in the back room, and the first thing I did was order a glass of white wine. Between the wine and the meal that followed, I relaxed enough for casual conversation not to take a concerted effort. After we'd paid the check, we went for a walk, toward the bay. There was a house for sale, this big white colonial thing that was a B&B. Roger paused. "What do you think?" he asked, "Should we take it, relocate here, abandon academia for the lives of innkeepers?" His tone was light as ever, but an undercurrent of seriousness startled me out of my gas mask meditations. I opened my mouth to say something that would prolong his musing. What came out was, "And leave Belvedere House?"
I meant to ask him if he was serious, but my words ran away from my intentions. Roger turned to me, and I could see that he'd taken my question as a reproach, that implied in it he'd heard, "And abandon your son—again?" I said, "Roger," trying to add that that wasn't what I'd meant, but he sighed and said, "You're right, of course. There are responsibilities at home—I have duties that cannot be shirked. It was only the moment's whim."
I swear, I could have kicked myself. Why couldn't I have said, "Yes"? How complicated is that? All the way back to the car, I kept trying to think of ways to revive the subject, but by the time Roger was unlocking my door, the moment had passed. Frustrated as I was by my inability to say the right thing—or my ability to say exactly the wrong thing—I felt a faint stir of hope. The jury was out on the long-term effects of my strategy of separating us from Belvedere House, but in the short-term, Roger's sleepwalking had abated and he was joking about moving up here. Yes, I could be clutching at straws, but these seemed good signs.
I, on the other hand, was obsessed with army gear. As I lay awake on sleepwalking watch that night, it occurred to me that while coming to the Cape might have been a good idea for Roger, the change of scenery hadn't worked any wonders for me. Yes, I couldn't sense the house anymore. The feeling had steadily drained away the further we'd driven. But I was uncomfortably aware of where the sensation had been. It was like when an especially deep cut is healing, and it itches deep under your skin, where you can't scratch it. If those feelings had receded, they'd been replaced by other things, by my fixation on this gas mask.
Roger breathing steadily, the house quiet, I pictured the mask, the flat disks of its eyes, the round canister dangling below them, the assortment of straps at its rear. It was olive green, except for the straps, which were black. Despite what I'm sure must have been the dozens of people who'd handled it, its lenses were clean enough for you to see yourself reflected in them. I lay in bed listening to the ocean breeze rustling the trees, trying to understand the urge that had driven me back inside Marine Salvage. I knew that the gas mask reminded me of Ted, but you have to admit, it's a pretty strange object to fixate on. A camouflage jacket, a regimental patch, even the kind of knife he'd carried—any of the things I'd seen in the photos of Ted I'd hung around the house would have made more sense. Branches whispered. Roger snorted once, twice, made a sound that might have been a word, might have been a cough, and resumed his sleep. I was near the edges of unconsciousness, myself, and probably would have slipped across the border had it not been for the gas mask, which I knew was waiting on the other side. What role it was going to play, I wasn't sure, only that it wouldn't be pleasant. The anticipation of encountering it in a place where I had even less control than I did in the waking world kept me on this side of sleep.
Three o'clock came and went. Roger stirred, but only to turn over. Fatigue and unease were waging a battle in me, fatigue pulling my eyelids down, unease pushing them back up. It wasn't going to be long until unease gave in and left me to my nightmares, which I was almost tired enough to accept as the cost of sleep. Then, in one of those intuitive leaps that are so sudden you're halfway to accepting them before you've thought about whether they make any sense in the first place, I realized that I had fixated on the mask because that was what Ted looked like, now. Not literally—it was more a kind of analogue for the changes death had made to him. He had become something like this—something other. Even as the more rational part of my brain was throwing up its hands and saying, "Wait a minute! How do you know this? Since when have you had any contact with Ted?" I was back in the land of the completely awake, chased from sleep by the conviction that this grotesque mask was like a shadow cast by Ted's true face.
However irrational—a-rational—that belief was, I was immediately and totally convinced of it. Dawn was paling the sky. I pushed myself out of bed and went downstairs, where I made a bitterly strong pot of coffee that I drank while watching an old John Wayne movie on PBS, Red River.
By the time the credits were rolling, the sun had crested the horizon and was shouting light into the house. From the kitchen, I heard a mug thunk on the counter, the coffee pot rattle. Roger must have come down while I was engrossed in the end of the movie and made straight for the caffeine. Upstairs, the bathroom door closed. I sat up on the couch. For the briefest of instants, that feeling I had in Belvedere House, that almost-sensation I thought I'd left in another state, flickered on like a candle teased into flame just long enough to be blown out. There was—it was different from what I experienced in the other house. There was no awareness of the Cape House as such. To be honest, there wasn't much of anything except—except in the kitchen, where I could sense—nothing, really—it was as if I could tell that someone had been there, but wasn't anymore. I stood, and walked into the dining room, expecting to see a steaming cup of coffee sitting beside the coffee maker.
The counter was bare. I heard Roger's feet padding down the stairs, and decided that this was the day we were going back to Martha's Vineyard. Obviously, the Cape House was not remote enough to let us escape the weirdness that had invaded our lives in Huguenot. We'd never made any good memories here, so there was nothing in place to keep the bad stuff out. The Vineyard, though—from one end to the other, the island was crowded with echoes of the four days we'd spent there seeing the sights, shopping the shops, sampling the restaurants. To my sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated brain, it seemed like a haven, one I was prepared to spend the rest of our vacation on if it offered me peace. By the time Roger reached the bottom of the stairs, my arguments were ready. He took some convincing. Coffee in hand, he heard my request that we drive to Wood's Hole this morning so that we could take the ferry to the Vineyard in time for lunch. When I was finished, he said, "Why go to Martha's Vineyard? We've barely arrived here."
"We have," I said, "but we're not going to be here for very long, and how often are we this close to the Vineyard?" I was talking too fast; I couldn't help myself.
"But we've just been, the other month."
"I know, and wasn't it wonderful?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then doesn't it make sense for us to go back there?" It didn't—not really. We had been recently enough, and there was plenty to do around us, for Roger to have an argument, but I didn't let him realize that. The debate wasn't done—hadn't gone much further than what I've told you—and I was hustling him back upstairs, telling him he had a half-hour to be showered, shaved, dressed, and ready to go. To speed things up, I would use the downstairs shower. All the way down Route 6, Roger questioned why we were doing this, not angrily, but in the tone of someone who finds himself carried along by forces beyond his control. I answered him with variations on the same response. We'd had such a great time on the Vineyard before, how could we not visit it when it was so near?
Once we'd arrived in Wood's Hole, Roger had accepted that, impromptu as it was, this was how we were going to be spending the rest of our day. Should the Vineyard feel more congenial, I wasn't sure how I was going to convince him to stay there tonight. I could try to delay us enough that we'd miss the last ferry, but that would be an uphill fight. Roger was one of those people who knows where you have to be when, and plots out the shortest route there and when you'll have to leave if you want to arrive ten minutes early. I could fake illness, but if I didn't time it properly that could land me on the ferry even sooner. I might have more luck telling him I wanted to spend the night there and that was that. Especially if the B&B we'd stayed in the last time had a vacancy, I might be able to pass it off as more romantic impulsiveness.
The B&B, when we came to it, was booked solid, but by then the only thing that could have kept me on that island was a major storm cutting off ferry service, and even then, I probably would have insisted we hire an intrepid fisherman to get us away from here as quickly as possible, whatever the risks. Needless to say, the day had not turned out as I'd planned.
While we were waiting to board the ferry, a heavy fog rolled in off the water. One minute, Roger and I were gazing out over the harbor; the next, it was gone, whited out. Daytime fog is strange, different from the fog you encounter at night. Maybe it's the conditioning of hundreds of horror movies, but nighttime fog is inherently creepy. It makes what you see even darker, more threatening, and of course it's the perfect substance to write all your fears onto. But—because of those same movies—it's like a special effect, you know? You half-expect your headlights to pick out a massive vat of dry-ice steaming off to one side of the road. Daytime fog is grayer than the nighttime stuff; although I guess that's because of the time it's out. It does the same thing: fades what's near, obscures what's far, but to a different effect. Daytime fog turns what's around you into a giant stage set, setting off what you can see as so many props, reducing the rest to folds of gray backdrop. Standing in this kind of fog—especially when it's as thick as this stuff was; I swear, this may have been the thickest fog I've ever been in—I always feel like I'm seeing through to how the world really is, although I'm not sure what that state is. All the world's a stage? Sort of, but not really.
The fog filled the distance to the Vineyard. We were out of sight of the mainland while we were still in the harbor, and we didn't see the island until we were docking at it. In between, we hardly seemed to be going anywhere. If you paid attention, you could feel the ship moving up and down on the water; if you stood outside, a strong wind fluttered your hair and tugged at your clothes; if you looked over the side, you saw the sea foaming away from the hull—but it all seemed curiously static. Gulls came and went out of the fog, as if pieces of it had broken off, swooping in to keep pace with the ferry, then veering away. A few passengers stood at the rail and threw food to them. Our previous trip, the day had been overcast and dim but clear. We'd watched the mainland sink into the ocean behind, the Vineyard rise from the water ahead. Roger and I had sat on deck, squinting out across the pewter waves at the various boats sharing the ocean with us, sailboats with their sails up and full of wind, speedboats skipping over the waves, trawlers chugging out to their fishing grounds. Now, we sat in the galley, nursing cups of coffee.
Despite the fog, I was relieved to be on our way somewhere safe—relieved and excited, enough so that I could've done without any more coffee. I let Roger buy me a cup because there was no harm in being sure, and because it gave him something to do. Since we'd climbed the ramp up to the ferry, he hadn't spoken. I asked him what was on his mind, he said, "Nothing," and I couldn't decide if nothing meant nothing, or something masquerading as nothing.
When the captain announced that we'd be docking shortly, Roger and I abandoned our table and returned to the deck, where we stood straining to see anything. Through the soles of my shoes, I felt the ferry slowing, even as I heard its engine changing pitch. There were dark shapes to the side—poles, pilings, the pier. With a last lurch that had me grabbing for the rail, the ferry came to a halt and we were at Martha's Vineyard. The fog was heavier here. Crossing the gangplank to the pier, I couldn't see the water slapping the pilings below, while the pier itself dissolved into grayness a short distance ahead of us. I had been sure I'd have no trouble finding my way around the island once we arrived—on our last trip, I'd had the lay of the land by the end of our first day there, and I could still visualize the Vineyard's towns and roads and how they intersected. But the fog confused everything.
You know how it is in dense fog. You can't see any landmarks, all the distances are off—longer or shorter than they should be. The end of the pier seemed to take forever to reach. For a moment, I was afraid I was leading us in the wrong direction. When we reached the road and found a bus letting out passengers, we hurried on board without asking the driver his destination. I hoped it was Oak Bluffs, which was where we'd spent most of our previous visit and which is the next town over from where the ferry docks. Even if the bus was headed in the opposite direction, I didn't care. The road loops around the island. We'd get where we were going.
We lucked out. Oak Bluffs was the next stop. In town, the fog was slightly less dense. Looking up Main Street was like looking through sheets of gauze hung one behind the other. The closest shops and restaurants were reasonably clear; the ones a little farther away were washed out, like a painting someone had smeared a brush full of white across; the buildings beyond that were faint geometry. Roger wanted to have lunch. I wanted to ride the carousel.
Do you know about the carousel? I'm pretty sure it's on the national register of historic landmarks or something. We'd discovered it on our last trip. I'd read about it in a guidebook. I hadn't realized how elaborate it was, with all the hand-carved and -painted horses, and the arm they lower so you can grab for the brass ring as you swing by. I'd never done that before, never been on a carousel that had one of those long cartridges full of hand-sized rings. To be honest, I hadn't known they existed. I hadn't gotten the brass ring. There were these kids, teenagers, who could slide out four or five rings at a time. Video game reflexes, right? One of them got the ring almost every time, except for when a tourist who shouted in Spanish took it. I didn't care. I mean, I would have liked to find out what prize the brass ring brought you, but being on the carousel was enough. I'd dragged Roger to it at least once a day for the four days we were on the Vineyard, except for Saturday, when I went twice.
Yes, I am a big fan of carousels. My dad used to take me on them at every opportunity. Like every little girl, I'd wanted a pony, which there was no way for my parents to afford. Apparently, I was pretty insistent. Not only did I ask for a pony for my birthday, Christmas, and Easter—in the months between, I'd draw elaborate pictures of me and my pony-to-be that I'd magnet to the refrigerator. I invented lengthy adventures for the two of us that I'd spend all of dinner narrating to my parents. I asked my mom to make me a list of everything I'd have to do to insure Santa brought me a pony this December. (Which, may I say, she took full advantage of, year after year.) I was a girl on a mission. That my pony continuously failed to appear did nothing to diminish my resolve. For a while, I think my parents were worried about me. To compensate for my lack of a flesh-and-blood pony, they bought me all kinds of toy ones, from tiny porcelain horses to a stuffed animal that was practically big enough to ride. With the amount of money they spent on fake ponies, I'm sure they could have afforded a real one.
Anyway, the other thing Mom and Dad did was find carousels for me to ride and then let me stay on them till I was so dizzy I almost fell off my wooden horse. Mostly, this meant visiting all the county fairs within a two-hour radius of our house, but they also took me to theme parks like Great Adventure and the Great Escape. I have to give them credit. I can't imagine it was any fun for them to drive two, two and a half, sometimes three hours so I could ride a wooden horse into nausea. The benefits of being an only child, I guess. And you know that, as soon as my stomach had settled, I was ready for another thirty or forty circuits. I wouldn't say I outgrew my pony obsession so much as other things occupied my attention. Every now and again, if circumstances allowed, I would indulge it, go horseback riding, or spend the day at the races in Saratoga—or ride the carousel on Martha's Vineyard.
When we'd first walked into the big barnlike building that houses the carousel, I'd been delighted. Roger had been amused by my enthusiasm; then a bit befuddled by my insistence that we return the following day; then more than a little annoyed when I compared him accompanying me to this carousel to my father taking me to past ones. I thought it was funny; he could be prickly about things like that. So much for Freud.
Roger's experience with carousels had been limited. His parents hadn't taken him to any when he was a child. Joanne hadn't liked them—there's a shock; although, with that face, she'd have fit right in. Ted had wanted rides with more action, roller coasters, bumper cars—apparently, he and Roger had never missed a chance to drive undersized cars into one another. How's that for blatant symbolism? If Roger didn't fully appreciate the carousel, he was willing to stand holding my jacket as I rode a wooden horse up and down to the strains of calliope music. On the car ride down from Wellfleet earlier that morning, he had said, "I assume we will be returning to the carousel," and do you know, with everything that was going on, my fixation on the gas mask, I had forgotten about it?
The carousel was in full-spin as we entered the building, the horses climbing their poles; the riders holding those poles, or the reins if they trusted their balance, or nothing at all if they were trying to be daring; the air vibrating with the shrieks of teenagers and one small child protesting his parents' decision to take him on this scary contraption, all laid over a merry pipe-organ melody. Considering the weather, the line was shorter than I expected. When the carousel slowed to a stop and its riders dismounted, I was in the next group to be admitted. There was this one horse I was looking for, a white horse stretched out in full gallop, his head lowered, his mouth open as if panting with the effort of keeping ahead of everyone else. His mane was real hair—at least, it felt real when I ran my hand over it, which I did, the way you might greet a real horse. His tail was the same. The detail was remarkable. Each and every muscle, the edges of his hooves, even his teeth had been carved with a thoroughness that itself was a relic of a bygone era. His saddle and reins were purple and gold, freshly painted. As I swung myself up onto him, I pulled my hair out of the ponytail I'd threaded it into during the drive to Wood's Hole and shook it loose. I looked for Roger, who waved when he saw me searching for him. I waved back.
A few last-minute stragglers hurried through the gate and up onto the carousel. My horse was on the outer rim. Its companion on the inner rim was almost identical, a white horse in full gallop, except that it was tossing its head to its left, towards its mate. There was a girl seated on it, six or seven at a guess, wearing a jean-jacket and jeans, her hair long and red. She was like a snapshot of myself at that age. I'd had the same outfit, although my jacket had had a pair of large, cartoonish daisies sewn onto its shoulders. She was staring straight ahead, with this deadly serious expression on her face. I knew what she was thinking. When I used to sit waiting for the carousel to heave forward, I'd put myself behind the starting gate at one of the big races, the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont, the Preakness. I would gaze at the next horse on the carousel, trying to see beyond it, to a dirt track and a bandstand full of excited racing fans wearing their Sunday best. As the calliope started, I would strain to hear the starting buzzer. I never maintained the illusion for very long, but when it worked, I saw the gates burst open, felt my horse leap out onto the track, his hooves spraying dirt. That was what the girl beside me was after, so I didn't say hello to her, which I would have if she'd been snapping her gum, or playing with her horse's reins.
Instead, I contented myself with studying the carousel, surveying the other horses—none of which was as nice as mine; although there were a pair of roans ahead that were all right. The inside of the ride—that enormous cylinder that sits at the center of the carousel and houses the engine; I don't know what it's called, the hub?—it was decorated with mirrors. They were long, rectangular, framed with what was supposed to be gold. It was hard to see yourself in them—the building was full of pale light let in by the windows at the tops of its walls; to supplement that, whoever was in charge had switched on the lights; and the combined glare made the mirrors look as if they were full of fog. I could see the girl next to me in it, but I wasn't much more than a blur behind her. Behind me—
I couldn't say what I saw reflected there, because the moment I jerked my head around to look for its original, the carousel came to life. The pipe organ blared, the ring of horses surged forward. My nerves flared, and the carousel was at the edge of my skin, close—closer than Belvedere House usually was. I was so surprised, so caught off-guard, I had to grab my horse's mounting pole to keep from tumbling off. I glanced back across to the mirror, but all it showed now were the red-headed girl and me, reduced to Impressionist approximations by the light washing across the air. My awareness of the carousel stuttered, stopped. I righted myself, releasing the pole so I could take the reins. I had been startled by the shape looming over my reflection, but I was tired, very tired, and so prone to seeing things. There was no reason for my heart to be hammering, my palms slick on the reins. No doubt, all the coffee I'd drunk was making me jumpy. Here was the arm that dispensed the rings being lowered into place; I could make a try on this swing past. Standing in the stirrups, I angled to the left, raised my arm, and—
And almost fell off the horse as my balance deserted me. I was perched on my horse as it climbed its pole, hand outstretched to seize at the end of the arm. Then it was if the carousel sped up. I lurched back and to the left, the carousel's floor tilting up to meet me, the ring arm impossibly high. The hand I'd extended flailed. My right hand grabbed for the pole as the horse descended it. I caught the pole and hauled myself up to it. There was time for me to think, What the hell was that? then the carousel spun even faster. The ride was gaining speed, but I was feeling that gain ten times as much as I should. I had all I could do to hold on to the pole and keep from flying off into space. I was the only one experiencing this. To my right, the red-haired girl crouched forward on her horse, her gaze never wavering from the fantasy unfolding before her. In front of and behind us, other riders laughed and mugged for companions' cameras and took rings from the arm. To my left, the interior of the carousel hall and its contents had become a luminous smear. The calliope music piped far away, as if it were playing from the next building over. Beneath me, I heard a steady snickering, as some part of the ride's undercarriage dragged around the floor. The ring arm sped past. Caught by the wind of the carousel's spin, my hair streamed out behind me. I stole a glance to my rear, to be sure no one was there. That no one was wasn't reassuring. I was sure I had just missed someone standing there, holding his ruined fingers up to the ends of my hair. Ted? Who else? I wanted to look again, but that first glance had brought the gallon of coffee I'd drunk churning to the back of my throat, and I had a good idea what a second look would cause. So I closed my eyes as the ring arm sped past for the who-knew-how-many-eth time and tried not to feel fingers fluttering the air behind me. Panic attack, I thought, you must be having a panic attack. I concentrated on trying to bring my heart, straining in my chest as if it were trying to tear itself free, down to mere heart attack level. Calm, I told myself, breathe. I opened my eyes. The red-haired girl's hair rode the wind like a banner. The ring arm sped past. Beneath me, the carousel snickered around its circuit. Everything beyond the carousel was a pale smudge. Calm, I thought. Breathe.
I looked at the red-haired girl, who had yet to break her stare. Whatever scenario she was racing through, she was maintaining the illusion much longer than I'd ever been able to. With her hair blown back by the wind, I could see the earring clinging to her left ear, a silver horse, standing with its head down, grazing. It wasn't big, and it looked like a clip-on, which was strange. These days, it seems like most girls have their ears pierced when they're about three days old. At the sight of that earring, I felt a stab of nostalgia so sharp it cut through my nausea and panic, for my own pair of silver horse earrings. They had been a present from Grandma for my First Communion. They were clip-on, slightly too big for my ears, but I put them on the moment I realized what they were, discarding the gold crosses my parents had given me earlier at the breakfast table. These horses had been galloping, their manes and tails rippling, their hooves close together as they drew their legs in. Until my ears were pierced, those earrings had been my favorite. I kept them at the top of my jewelry box, in their own drawer, and polished them ever time I wore them. After my ears were pierced, I tried to have the horse earrings converted, but the jeweler botched the job. The right one fell out the first time I wore them, to the mall with my friends, and despite my dad's best efforts, it was lost.
Pipe organs thundered, I jumped, and everything was normal again, the calliope, the inside of the building, the carousel—which was slowing, as the ride wound down. The ring arm swept past, and I reached up and took the ring from the end of it. It was plain, gray, oddly reassuring. On impulse, I leaned over to the red-haired girl and held it out to her. "Would you like this?"
Eyes full of annoyance, she said, "What for?" packing her question with all the scorn seven years old could muster.
Face already reddening, I shrugged. "I don't know." My hand wavered, withdrew.
Rolling her eyes, the girl blew her hair through pursed lips. The gesture surprised me. Not because I didn't understand it—I did. It compressed about half a dozen meanings into itself, including, "I am not a baby," and, "You are an adult and therefore incapable of doing anything right." What startled me was that this had been my gesture, the one I took pride in having invented, developed, and perfected. For a moment, I almost said, "Who taught you that?" but I caught myself before my mouth was more than half-open. No doubt, the roll-of-the-eyes and weary sigh had been combined long before hours of practice brought me to them. No doubt, kids would be employing them when people were living on Mars. "Sorry," I said to the girl, who was already dismounting her horse as the carousel eased to a stop. She didn't reply, didn't even spare me a second glance as she leapt off the carousel and joined the crowd exiting the ride.
I hurried to catch up. Whatever I'd just been through sent a thrill of vertigo through me as I stepped down. I staggered and would have fallen, but an old woman caught my arm. "Steady," she said.
"Thanks," I said, bracing myself against her. "All that motion. I guess it got to me."
"It does, honey," she said. "It does at that."
The exit to the carousel lets you circle around to join the line for another spin, or continue out of the building. Roger was waiting for me, which meant one time on the horse was going to have to be enough for me—as you can guess, not a problem. Hanging at the exit was a large plastic bucket with "RINGS" stenciled on it. As you passed, you dropped your losing ring into it. You know, I still don't know what prize the bronze ring gets you. I considered slipping my plain gray ring into my purse. I had kept the last ring I'd taken during our previous visit, as a souvenir—but I didn't want or need a reminder of this particular ride. I held the ring over the bucket and let it fall.
A small hand caught it. I looked up in time to see the back of the red-haired girl's denim jacket as she fled the building with her prize. A man bumped into me from behind. I apologized and moved to join Roger. "What was that about?" he asked, nodding after the girl.
"I have no idea," I said. "I offered her the ring on the carousel and she didn't want it."
"Strange are the ways of children."
We walked out into the fog. Roger wanted lunch, and despite the fact that the word alone made my stomach squeeze, I agreed. We made our way up Main Street to the Oak Bluffs Bistro—basically, a diner trying to pass itself off as more upmarket than its vinyl-seated booths and fake-wood tabletops confessed. Its plastic-coated menu did what it could to bolster the illusion, christening generic diner fare with idiosyncratic names intended to convince you that you were ordering something more exciting than the cheeseburger platter Roger selected, or my scrambled eggs and toast. When the waiter had left with our order, Roger said, "So. Was the carousel all that you remembered?"
I wanted to say, "All that, and a lot more besides." Instead, I asked, "Couldn't you tell?"
"No," Roger said. "I fear I was distracted."
"What do you mean?"
"Just as the ride was beginning, I heard someone call my name, twice. Not 'Roger,' but 'Roger Croydon,' so I assumed it was someone I knew. After all, how many Roger Croydons can there be? More than one, apparently, for I spent the next few minutes searching through the crowd for a familiar face, and found none. I was certain whoever had called to me was standing across the room. The voice sounded rather distant. In a space of that size, however, with everyone talking and the carousel's music playing, who can say for sure? The consequence was, I was occupied for the length of your ride. I did see you stumble on the way off, but that young woman caught you."
"Young woman? She looked pretty old to me."
"Why, she couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-one."
"Roger," I said, "she had a good ten years on you, minimum."
"Which qualifies her as very old, I am pleased to note. I assure you, my dear, she was a few years younger than you, which, I believe, makes her practically a child."
"The voice you heard," I said, "did it sound familiar?"
"Not particularly," Roger said, "although, as I've said, the acoustics of that building distort everything."
"Could you tell if it was male or female? Young or old?"
Roger smiled. "Why all this interest in crossed wires?"
"Could you?" My heart was racing again.
He shook his head. "If pressed, I might say that the voice was that of a young man, but I would in no way stand by that answer. It could as easily have been an old man, a young woman, an old woman. Why?"
"But you think it sounded like a young man?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't recognize it?"
"Yes, yes, a thousand times yes," Roger said, his exasperation only partially mock. "Is this some type of joke I'm supposed to have gotten by now?"
"It's not a joke," I said. "I don't know what—"
"Ted," Roger said, his eyes widening. "Oh my dear Lord, you think that was Ted calling to me. Why? Why were you asking if I saw you on the carousel? What happened there? Tell me," he said, his voice strident.
"Calm down," I said. "I'll tell you about the carousel, just calm down."
Our waiter had returned with Roger's Coke and my tea with lemon. He placed Roger's glass in front of him, fumbled with my cup and saucer. I reached up to help him, glancing at his face as I did. The next instant, I was on the other side of the booth, hands pressed over my eyes, screaming at the top of my lungs. Far away—I had to get as far away from him as I could. I scrambled on the seat, trying to push myself further into the corner. One of my feet slipped, connected with the waiter's knee. I heard him shout, the clatter and crash of the tray, tea-cup, saucer, spoon, and teapot as they slipped from his hands onto the table and floor. A wave of boiling water rolled off the table onto my leg, flaring fireworks of agony along it. "Veronica!" Roger said, reaching across the table for my hands. I slapped at him furiously, keeping my eyes squeezed shut. Something touched my leg. I kicked at it, hit nothing. All the while, I kept screaming, screaming my throat raw. Roger struggled to grab my shoulders, wrists, hands, anything, saying, "Veronica!" over and over, as if my name were some kind of magic charm. I fought him as if he were the devil himself, slapping and scratching and punching as I tried to compress myself into the smallest space possible.
You've probably guessed I saw Ted. You can understand how confronting my dead stepson would have been frightening, even terrifying—how I would have jumped, shrieked, tried to get away from him—but you can't understand the intensity of my reaction, the hysteria. You've also figured out that, whatever I saw, Roger didn't. When I threw myself screaming to the other side of my seat, he immediately looked at the waiter. All he saw was a skinny seventeen-year-old whose olive skin was a roadmap of acne. I saw Ted, yes, as he had been and as he'd become. It happened so fast I want to use one of those clichéd phrases like "in the blink of an eye," except even that seems too long. In film—in a movie reel, there are—what?—twenty-two frames a second? Something like that. Well, this happened in the space of maybe three frames.
Imagine the camera is focused on me as I lift my eyes to the waiter. Now freeze the film as you see what I see. The first frame shows Ted's face above the waiter's black t-shirt. It looks pretty much the same as it did the one and only time I met him, the way it does in the portraits hung around Belvedere House. The long, horsey features, the scar across the bridge of the nose, the eyelids slightly lowered. The skin is tanned, but gray underneath. It's an expressionless face: I want to say it's the face of a corpse; only, somehow, it's blanker—an active, as opposed to a passive, nothing written on it. Bad enough, you would think.
Advance a frame. That empty face has been replaced by—by something I can't describe. You remember I said the gas mask was an analogue for what Ted looked like now? Here was the original staring at me. Can you imagine something so—alien, so terrible, that the briefest glance at it overloads your brain? You can't, can you, because whatever you can visualize, you can find some way to accommodate, to deal with it. What I saw in that single frame was so far removed from my frame of reference that I can't completely remember it—even at the time, I couldn't see all of it, because I didn't understand what I was looking it. The eyes—the eyes were round and flat—oversized—like a pair of lenses that the skin around had been stretched to hold. They might have been glass. Roger and I were reflected in them. There were no lids. I saw that, too. The eyes were trapped open. The skin around them was—it was—I don't know—I think braided is the word I want. No, that isn't right. It was more—it was moving, okay? Not all of it, but parts, as if it were crawling over itself. The color—it was pale, like white with a blue light playing over it. There was black, too—black underneath the pale. That's the best I can do. The rest—the rest was worse, so bad it's starting to warp the frame showing it. You can see its center bubbling and thinning, as if someone were holding a match underneath it. Whatever the frame showed has already been distorted beyond recognition.
Flip ahead a frame, and you have a picture that looks as if it's been triple-exposed. There's the waiter's face, then there's Ted's human face, while behind the two of them, Ted's other face shows just enough of itself to freeze your blood. Roll forward one more frame, and you're back to the waiter's attempt to hide his boredom with his job. Too late, though: the damage has been done, my rational mind has blinked off, every last one of its fuses blown by whatever it was that burned a hole in that second frame. Older reflexes, the kind that would have sent you scrambling away from the saber-toothed tiger, took over, putting as much space as possible between me and the horror that had shown itself. Believe me, if we hadn't been seated at a booth—if we'd been at a table or the counter—I would have been out of that restaurant and halfway to the dock before the waiter had finished setting my tea on the table.
As it was, though, we were in a booth, and escape was impossible. Roger continued to try to catch hold of me until, fed up with being slapped and punched, he seized his glass of Coke and dashed its contents into my still-screaming face. Cold soda and ice cubes splashed my hands, face, neck. Coke sloshed in my mouth and I coughed. Ice cubes slipped under the neck of my blouse and ran freezing down my back. While I was coughing, Roger reached over to the booth behind us, grabbed the water glasses of the couple sitting there, and threw them over me, as well. Ice cubes rained like hail. Rusty-tasting water washed the Coke out of my mouth. For the second time that day, I came back to myself, though not in time to prevent Roger tossing a last glass of water at me. My hair and clothes dripping, my throat ragged, I opened my eyes to a chaotic scene. The booth's table and seats were wet, dotted with ice cubes sliding slowly towards the table's edge to join their fellows in the massive puddle on the floor. Plastic cups rolled on the table, clicking against the broken remains of my teacup and saucer. Roger stood at the end of my seat, empty cup in hand, watching me with one eye, searching for more cups of water with the other. Of course everyone in the diner was looking at us—at me, some with expressions of concern, a few with amusement or contempt, most with blunt curiosity. A youngish man with a beard and glasses had left wherever he was sitting to offer his assistance. He was about three feet behind Roger. The waiter was nowhere to be found; having limped off, I presume, to ice the leg I'd kicked. I held up a hand to Roger, saying, "Okay, okay. It's all right. It's all right."
Except it wasn't okay; it wasn't all right. It was anything but. Still holding my hand up, I leaned forward. Roger took my hand and helped me out of the booth. Ice cubes fell from me in droves, tinkling on the floor, as I stood. The rest of the diner continued watching me, waiting to see how whatever drama they'd found themselves unexpected spectators to was going to conclude. My nerves were jumping—my whole body was. What I'd undergone on the carousel had been disorienting. This had been pure shock, as if all of me, body, mind, and soul, had suffered a violent blow. Standing beside Roger as he asked me what had happened, I started shivering uncontrollably. Roger said, "Poor dear. All that cold water," and put his arm around me, drawing me to his warm—and dry—chest. Maybe the gallon of ice water that had been poured on me did have something to do with me shaking, but I doubt it. From the corner of my eye, I could see a man approaching, his belly straining his black t-shirt, his name tag declaring his rank assistant manager. I had no desire to stand there explaining the last five minutes to him. In the distance, I heard a siren, and knew that either the police or EMTs—or both—would be walking through the front door imminently. I had even less desire to deal with them; although my left leg was throbbing where the hot water had spilled on it. Slipping out from under Roger's arm, I said, "I can't do this," and fled the restaurant, pushing past the startled assistant manager on my way to the door.
I never asked Roger how he explained my screaming and kicking to that man, or to the police and/or EMTs—assuming they showed up, which I didn't ask him about, either. Walking rapidly, I went right out of the diner and up the street. Through the fog, I saw a clothes store three storefronts along. I turned in at it. The salesgirl reading the magazine behind the counter was college-age. When she saw me standing in the doorway, soaked and still shivering, she started, then left her place and hurried over to me. She was wearing a saffron pantsuit; her hair was piled on top of her head. "Oh my God," she said, "what happened to you?"
"Kids," I said. "A couple of kids ran into me—spilled their drinks all over me."
"And you need something to change into."
I nodded.
"No problem." She led me to a rack of blouses, which she sorted through until she came up with a white linen thing she held up for my inspection. "How's this?"
The part of my mind that decided such matters was still shorted out. The blouse was plain. I said, "Fine."
"Good." Holding the blouse, the salesgirl walked across the store to a rack of skirts. With her free hand, she selected a denim skirt. "What do you think?"
"Great."
"Great," she said. "There are changing rooms at the back of the store—but maybe you'd like to use the bathroom first, to clean up?"
"Yes."
"We're really not supposed to do this," the girl said, "my manager would flip if she ever found out, but look at you," she ran her gaze up and down me, and for the first time saw my leg, which already looked pretty bad. The skin was bright red and angry; clear blisters had raised themselves from it. Her eyes widened and she said, "Oh my God. Your leg."
"Yes," I said. "Coffee—one of the kids was carrying a cup of hot coffee."
The salesgirl's brows lowered. How many kids run around with cups of hot coffee? She said, "Do you need a doctor? Because I can—"
"I don't need a doctor," I said, forcing a smile onto my face. "It looks worse than it is."
"Well, aloe cream, then. There's a drugstore next door. Once you're finished in here, you should stop in there and get a bottle of aloe cream. I had a wicked sunburn last year, and my boyfriend used that stuff on it, and it completely cooled it down."
"Thanks. I will."
"Aloe cream. It's green, and comes in a clear plastic bottle."
"Green," I said.
"Uh huh." She nodded.
"Is the bathroom—"
"Oh my God, right," she said, "I'm so sorry. This way."
I followed her through a door at the store's rear, down a short corridor. "Thanks," I said when we reached the bathroom.
"Do you want to take the clothes in with you, and try them on in here?" the salesgirl asked. "I'm really not supposed to do this, either, but, in for a penny, in for a pound, right?"
"That's right," I said, taking the blouse and skirt from her. I had no idea what she was talking about. "I'll be a couple of minutes."
With the bathroom door closed and locked, I stood staring at the wall. The new clothes were in my hands, but trying them on seemed an impossibly elaborate task. I could see myself in the small mirror hung above the sink, hair wet and bedraggled, makeup smeared, skin drawn taut and pale. I looked like I'd seen a ghost, all right. One step at a time, I told myself, and hung the new clothes on the doorknob. I stripped off the wet clothes, and dried myself with about half the roll of paper towel mounted beside the sink. When I was reasonably dry, I washed my face and cleaned the ruined makeup off it. My hair was still damp, and sticky in places from the Coke, but the rest of me was dry and clean enough for me to reach for the new clothes.
They fit, which, considering the girl hadn't asked me my size, was pretty impressive. Or, it should have been. Buttoning the blouse, sliding the zipper up the side of the skirt, it was as if I were watching someone else performing these actions. I recognized that both blouse and skirt were well-made and only slightly overpriced, but this registered with me in the same way as the white walls of the bathroom, as one more thing to notice.
What was occupying my thoughts was keeping myself together, which was becoming more difficult with each passing moment. When I'd run out of the diner, I'd been driven and guided by instinct more than the consciousness Roger had splashed back into existence. That consciousness was a patchwork affair, a jury-rigged jumble of memory and idea barely up to the challenge of answering the salesgirl's questions, let alone of dealing in any way, shape, or form with what I'd seen. Really, I was doing what I could not to recall that face, because I had no doubt the mere memory of it would be more than sufficient to reduce my improvised self to rubble. Did I mention that I hadn't looked directly at the salesgirl once? I was terrified that I'd see Ted's face—his faces—staring back at me from above her jacket. I'm sure she took it as one more piece of the strangeness that was me.
There was a knock on the door. The salesgirl's muffled voice called, "Is everything okay in there?" I glanced at my watch. I couldn't say for sure, but I thought I'd been in that bathroom for something like half an hour. I unlocked the door and, eyes lowered, said, "Sorry. It took me a while to clean up."
"No problem," the girl said. "What do you think?"
I almost asked, "About what?" before I understood she was talking about the clothes. "I'm not sure," I said. I pointed to the mirror over the sink. "That's the only mirror."
"Oh, sure, right," she said. "Come back out front." I picked up my wet clothes and hurried after her. She stopped beside a full-length mirror and gestured to it. "Here you go."
As if my behavior hadn't been odd enough, when I stepped in front of the mirror, I kept my gaze to one side. I was afraid of seeing something other than myself staring back at me. I don't know why I even bothered. The salesgirl couldn't help but notice, but she spared me any questions. I guess she was used to dealing with eccentricity. I waited what seemed a reasonable time, then said, "This'll do," which was about the truest thing I could say.
"Are you sure," she asked, "because if you're not—"
"It's fine," I said, "honestly."
Once I'd paid for the new clothes and placed my old ones in a plastic bag, I ducked out of that store and into the drugstore next to it, where I picked up some aloe cream for my leg, as well as a Martha's Vineyard baseball cap and a pair of cheap sunglasses. Suitably disguised—I hoped—I left the drugstore at a stroll, trying to pretend I wasn't that woman who'd been screaming her head off a few doors down. I had no idea where Roger was: if he was still in the diner, trying to account for my actions and settle the damages; or if he had finished there and was searching for me. If all else failed, we would meet at the dock, but I didn't spend much time worrying over it.
Movement was my concern, not staying anywhere long enough to allow any further weirdness to envelop me. Although doing so aggravated my leg to no end, I walked up the street. I almost welcomed the pain as a distraction. Eyes on the sidewalk, I concentrated on avoiding seeing more than the feet and legs of the people I passed. Once, the fog unveiled a pair of army boots below green camouflage pants, and in my panic, I looked up—but the man I saw wasn't Ted. I hurried past him.
Inside, I was trying to keep on the move, as well, concentrating on not remembering what had held me in its gaze in the diner, those glass eyes torturing the skin around them. I was close to some great expression of emotion—screaming, crying, even laughing. Holding back that one memory set a host of others free, and I walked out of the street into memory—out of one memory, into another—
—The tile of the hospital room floor is cold on my cheek; I look up at Roger's hospital bed, looming mountainously high above me; another round of cramps grabs me like a great hand squeezing my insides out; warm blood that smells like pennies spills down my thighs—
—I enter Belvedere House's living room, which smells faintly of the lemon cleaner Dr. Sullivan and her family used in their final cleanup; the blinds are drawn, and glow white with the early afternoon sun; my arms, legs, neck—my whole body prickles, as if I've walked through an enormous cobweb—only I can feel the strands running off in all directions—
—Roger's face is a map of purple bruises; dried blood crusts the corners of his mouth; the faint odor of pepper spray clings to him; through swollen lips, he says, "I cast you from me"; spittle flecks his unshaven chin as he says, "May you not escape your failure"; each word bursts against my eardrums like thunder—
—His thumb and forefinger dimpling as they close on the lead soldier, Roger places it inside the space bordered by plastic buildings, third in line, just outside the circumference of the red chalk circle flaking on the tabletop; the light overhead and the light through the window send two tiny shadows out from the figure's base; the plastic pungence of bubblewrap stings my nostrils; Roger's hand hovers over the soldier; he exhales—
—The kettle whistles, I fill the white mug, watching the boiling water darken as the odor of instant coffee lifts into the air; the red numbers of the kitchen's clock radio read 4:15; the black coffee singes my lips as I stare out the apartment window into the early-morning dark where Roger walks—
—Grandma looks at me over her half-glasses and says, "Poor bunny; my poor, poor bunny. We must stay awake and see evil done just a little longer"; her voice sounds as if it is full of dirt, and she reeks of pine trees—
I shook my head—my grandmother had never said that to me. Ahead, the fog curled around a street sign. I turned right and followed the new street as shops gave way to houses. First a couple of contemporary places, studies in bland luxury, then a row of pastel A-frames, their eaves, doors, and shutters carved into lacy patterns like the icing on a cake. When the street I was on joined another, I saw more A-frames vanishing into the fog in all directions. I had found the gingerbread houses.
Do you know them? There are literally hundreds of houses that look like something from a children's story, all painted bright, cheery colors, all sporting intricate carving that does make them resemble enormous confections. Prior to our last trip here, I'd never heard of them. Roger had known about them, but not seen them. When the two of us found them—it was after my first ride on the carousel, and seeing house after house with its ornate decoration gave me the momentary illusion I'd fallen into one of the books I'd reread so obsessively as a girl, Little Women, or The Wizard of Oz. I had been delighted, Roger less so—he'd said, "It all seems so . . . New England Yankee," which I guess it was.
Now, wrapped in fog, the houses were less cheerful. I passed one whose front garden was full of white roses, their heads bobbing ever so slightly in a breeze I couldn't feel. I passed another whose front porch displayed a couple of wicker chairs, one of which held what I thought was an oversized burlap sack until it said, "Hello," and resolved itself into an old woman. I passed a house whose shutters were closed, its paint flaking off in large patches, its front yard bare. One after another, the houses appeared, variations on an architectural theme. Where previously the repetition had charmed me, today it seemed decadent, obsessive.
The street I was walking t-junctioned the road around the park where the old Methodist revivals had been held. I don't know the history in any depth—really, all I can tell you is that, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, this part of the island had been the site of Methodist revivals, some of them attended by thousands. At what I assume was the height of the revival craze, the Methodists had built this gigantic metal pavilion in the park across from me. It's enormous—I'm talking circus big top, here; it seats something like five hundred people—with open sides and stained-glass windows set high up in it. Even with the fog, I could see it lifting itself in the near distance, a huge presence, which, for reasons I didn't understand, had been painted black. It's like some kind of avant-garde cathedral. The gingerbread houses sprung up on the ground surrounding the site. I'm not sure what connection, if any, there was between the two. Probably none.
I crossed into the park. The ground dips in the middle, which makes the pavilion appear even taller as you approach. I was alone—although the fog hung pretty dense in and among the grass and trees—and when I climbed the far slope to the pavilion and looked into it, I saw that it was empty. The fog had found its way inside the metal tent, pooling at various points throughout. Even so, it was less thick in there. I could see rows of seats fanning up and out from the altar, amphitheater-style.
My leg felt as if someone had poured gasoline on it and added a match. I needed to stop walking, if only for ten minutes, and get the aloe cream on. Inside the tent, I'd at least be able to see anything coming towards me. The fire in my leg raging, I walked into the pavilion and all the way along one of the aisles to the altar. Once I was seated, I retrieved the bottle of aloe. When I slid my skirt up, I saw that the skin on top of my leg was crimson, crowded with blisters that oozed clear fluid. I squeezed a green stream of the aloe up and down the burn, gently spreading it across the angry skin, wincing and catching my breath as new agony bit my nerves. I followed that coat of aloe with a second one, by which time the first was starting to work, cooling my leg. Talk about blessed relief. When you're hurt like that, your whole body contracts around the wound. As the cream dulled the pain, it was as if all of me relaxed away from it. I wouldn't have minded a couple of gin and tonics to help the process along, but I was reasonably sure a Methodist tent was the last place you'd find a bar. Finished tending my leg, I replaced the bottle of aloe in its bag, wiping my hand clean on the blouse in there. I left my skirt up, letting cool air flow over it.
I'm not sure how much of my decision to enter and then to remain in the pavilion owed itself to the place's religious past. Yes, it had been site of prayer services, but I had no idea if it still was. Had I read that it was used for more secular activities these days, for concerts, lectures, readings? Maybe. I didn't know if Methodists consecrated these kinds of places, the way Catholics do when they build a church. I didn't know if such a thing would make the least difference to Ted—because while I was at or near the center of a continuing supernatural experience, it wasn't the supernatural you heard about at Sunday mass. To be honest—this is going to sound strange—what drew me to the pavilion and kept me there was that it reminded me of Belvedere House. Yes, the very place I'd been trying to escape. The resemblance was hard to pin down. Mostly, it lay in the way the two buildings gave this profound feeling of occupying space. Sitting on the altar, I felt—not safer, no, not protected—I felt calm, as if I didn't have to keep struggling so hard to keep myself functioning—as if I could catch my breath.
Wispy patches of fog congregated in the aisles, hovered over seats, drifted across the floor in front of me. Small clouds meandered around the inside of the roof, tinted by the weak light pushing through the stained-glass windows up there. The clouds almost seemed to circle the roof, which reminded me of the carousel I'd been on an hour ago. An hour. God, it might have been a month. The memory of the carousel brought with it the sensation of the ride spinning ever faster as I tried to maintain my seat on my horse. I put my hands out to either side of me to steady myself. Obviously, what I'd been through on the carousel was connected to the diner and therefore to everything else. In coming to the Vineyard, we—I hadn't gotten away from anything. In the space of sixty minutes, the island had gone from a haven to something approaching a trap. The feeling I'd had ever since this weirdness had erupted into our lives, the suspicion that there was more to it than Roger was letting on—that it was in some way sinister—had been confirmed. Ted was actively hostile, if not outright malevolent.
What I couldn't understand was, why me? Yes, I was the woman his father had left his mother for—I was sure that Ted wouldn't have seen that their marriage had been over for years before I came on the scene—but that was Roger's decision, not mine. He'd had the fight with Roger at the apartment, but that was hardly my fault. I'd been the one who pleaded the two of them out of anything more than a stern lecture by the judge. I'd called on September 11 to find out if Ted was okay. He was the one who'd hung up on me. Since his death, I'd put Roger's photos of Ted throughout the house. I'd left Ted's childhood room alone. I was not the one to blame, here. You couldn't say that Roger had been unaffected by Ted's death—not if you'd seen his office; not if you'd trailed around the house after him in the wee small hours of the morning—but everything he'd underwent had flowed from the inside out, from the guilt and regret choking his psyche. What I had been through came the opposite route, from the outside in, and it made no sense.
Even if I'd misinterpreted Ted's actions, which I was sure I hadn't but which was possible, he was dangerous. Another look at his face—his true face, which I was still not-remembering—a second glimpse might be more than my mind could recover from. I had thought that distance was the answer, that in leaving Belvedere House behind, we'd leave Ted with it. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Whatever role the house had played in all of this, it was glaringly obvious that Ted wasn't tied to it. Almost the opposite—the farther away from it we went, the more dramatic his actions became. I could elect to follow Roger's lead, let Ted complete whatever plan he'd set in motion—but there was enough wrong with that course of action for me not to consider it seriously. I was pretty sure that Ted's plan was not focused on sentimental reconciliation. Given the amount of attention I'd received already, there seemed a distinct possibility that I was intended to suffer. Again, I could be mistaken. Roger might be Ted's intended target, but so far I was the one taking the fire, and there was a real possibility of me winding up as collateral damage.
Talking about all of this in this way—it makes it sound as if I were sitting there on the altar, calmly weighing my options, which was anything but the case. It was more tides—tidal waves of emotion rising and falling within me. Resentment gave way to confusion, which gave way to fear. If we couldn't escape Ted, then we had no choice but to return to Huguenot and deal with him. We—I, because I knew Roger wouldn't take part in anything that might jeopardize his fantasy. And dealing with Ted, how was I going to do that? Hire an exorcist? I didn't think you could hire one—it's not as if they advertise in the yellow pages—and didn't they deal with demons? It was my impression that the Church tried to be less Medieval about these sorts of things, and any request for an exorcism on my part was more likely to be met with a recommendation for counseling. I didn't think I'd have any more luck with other denominations. The ones that would take you seriously would be the same ones you wouldn't have any faith in. You could picture some variety of the televangelist stomping through Belvedere House in his powder-blue suit, one hand clutching his Bible, the other raised, his face red and sweating as he called out for the unclean spirit to depart in the name of Jesus, which he would pronounce, "Jeeeee—zuss," as if it were the correct answer to the big question at the end of a game show. No thank you. I would prefer not to.
That left trying to address the root cause of the problem, namely, Roger's curse. It was like some kind of Freudian nightmare, the all-powerful father condemns the rebellious son and his words are so powerful they follow the son into the afterlife. There's this Kafka story—the title slips my mind, but it's about a young man whose father tells him what a failure he is and passes a death-sentence on him, so the son goes and drowns himself in the river. We seemed to be dealing with the Hollywood version of that story, suitably expanded and adapted for an American audience. I still had trouble with the idea that a few words spoken in anger could have such profound consequences, so physical—metaphysical an effect. I mean, words don't mean anything, isn't that what we believe these days? They're just a self-contained, self-referential sign-system. You're a writer, maybe you think differently, but I doubt you believe language has magic power.
There was more fog inside the pavilion. It rolled down the stairs, flowed in among the seats, pooled along the floor in front of the altar. The interior of the tent was becoming less distinct. I heard the words of the curse tumbling one after the other. If there was a secret to understanding what was going on, it had to lie in the time between when the cops had dragged Roger and Ted out into the early-morning dark and when I'd seen them later that day.
I could picture Roger sitting in the holding cell at the Huguenot police station. His eyes still burn from the pepper spray. He's given up fighting the tears that wash down his face; although he continues to wipe his running nose every few minutes with a wad of toilet paper. It's been less than an hour since he and Ted were brought in, processed, and locked across the holding area from one another—but enough time has passed that he should have calmed down. He hasn't. His heart still pounds as if the cell doors might spring open any moment and set him and Ted loose for round two. With each breath he inhales, pain stabs his right side. He knows Ted has bruised or broken ribs there, but he's so high on adrenaline he doesn't care—his only concern is that he did some damage of his own. If Ted broke two of his ribs, he hopes he broke four of Ted's. His left hip and the left side of his back feel as if a sledgehammer pounded them, a sharp surface pain laid over a deeper ache—pretty much his entire body feels as if someone's taken a meat tenderizer to it with great enthusiasm.
Roger doesn't care, which is only partially due to the adrenaline. Most of his lack of caring is due to anger. He is enveloped in it. He has been angry before—with Ted, especially. All those previous occasions, however, every last one of them, have been different. No matter how angry Roger has felt, he's always restrained himself, always been careful to release just enough to make his displeasure known, and contained the rest. He's bottled it, the way his father told him to when he was eight years old, as if his anger were some kind of volatile gas frothing inside a glass jug. If Roger's life were a house, then the rooms marked "TED" are full of shelves, and those shelves are crowded with glass bottles stoppered against their own contents. This time, however, at the very moment Roger was trying to contain his anger, when he attempted to close the door on Ted and his grandstanding, he failed. Ted forced the door open, stepped inside, and Roger, whose hand had been poised over the latest bottle's neck, threw the cork away.
Twenty years of anger rose up in Roger in a mushroom cloud. This was anger unlike any he'd known before, and by God did it feel good. What a relief, finally, to be able to surrender to it, not to have to pretend that it's all right, Ted had his reasons, no doubt he was at fault, too—his rage swept over and through him, annihilating everything in its path, spilling out the tips of his fingers, the top of his head. When he holds his hands up in front of him, he can almost see it flickering there, a white-hot flame that dances and leaps from his skin and does not consume it. The marvelous thing about this anger is that it doesn't go away. It doesn't subside and leave him feeling empty and ashamed. With two decades of fuel stacked up, it could burn for a long time, and with this newest offense—this showing up at the front door at three in the morning, heaping abuse not only on him, but on his wife—Ted's stepmother—calling her a slut—and then raising his hand to him, to his father, who never, never, never lifted his hand to deliver any of the blows his son so richly deserved, not once—with this outrage, the flame streaming from Roger might burn for as long as he has left to live.
It was so hot, I could feel it, across the distance of months and miles. I had imagined Roger's activities plenty of times in the past—it's something I'm pretty good at. Maybe that means I should be a writer, too. It's hard to convey how vivid all this was—how real. I'd pictured detailed scenes before, but however elaborate they'd been, however absorbed in them I'd become, they were still internal; I was still watching them with my mind's eye. This—it was as if I were standing in the cell with Roger. I could smell the pepper spray clinging to him, the dried sweat underneath it. I could smell the pungent industrial cleaner that had been used to scrub down the cell, the reek of urine beneath that. I could hear Roger's labored breathing, the scrape of his sneakers on the floor. His thoughts—it wasn't that I could hear them, but—I knew what was burning in his mind, as if I could read the words written on him. I wasn't all the way there with him—the altar was solid and cool beneath me—but this was not your garden-variety daydream.
Whatever self-satisfaction Roger feels in embracing his anger—and he luxuriates in it; he rolls around in it; he dives deep beneath its surface and surfaces grinning—it's not enough. After they were shut in their separate cells, he and Ted continued to hurl abuse at each other, but it was of the four-letter variety, too familiar to be more than a placeholder for their sentiments. This hadn't stopped either of them from stringing those curse words together in varied and even inventive combinations—until one of the police officers leaned his head in and told them that if the two of them didn't knock it off, he was going to pepper spray them again, which shut them up. Staring across the corridor at Ted, who's lying down on his cell's metal bunk, his back to Roger, Roger hears the echo of their insults and thinks that those aren't really curses. They're simply words we've been told are inappropriate, so that saying or hearing them gives a small charge. They don't carry any weight, those words, they don't do anything more than momentarily offend the sensibilities. Let's face it, when was the last time anyone was really and truly offended by someone swearing? Certainly Ted's stream of obscenities has rolled off Roger's back, as he assumes his torrent of abuse rolled off Ted's. None of it hurt Ted, and right now, that's what Roger wants more than anything. That is what his anger requires, for him to wound his son in such a way that Ted won't be able to shrug it off.
If he were stronger, Roger might be able to count on breaking Ted's jaw. That would teach him to show up at his father's door at three in the morning, shooting off his mouth. He knows he doesn't have the strength, though, which makes his anger burn all the hotter. Physically speaking, in whatever terms you want—strength, speed, skill—Ted has the edge, for which Roger has suffered the consequences. The way things stand now, he is the one who'll take away the scars of their meeting, and this is intolerable.
Which brings Roger back to the curse, to words with meaning. If there's one area where Roger's superiority to Ted remains unchallenged, it's words. He can put together a lethal sentence as quickly and efficiently as Ted strips, cleans, and assembles his M4. God knows there's enough raw material lying around for him to use—although he has to be careful. If he speaks for too long, Ted's eyes will glaze over and he'll have lost him; or Ted will start in with his own list of complaints; or he'll laugh and walk away. What Roger has in mind must be delivered economically and forcefully. He has to hit Ted hard and fast, has to drive the knife in deep, twist it, and leave Ted to extract it from his bloody gut.
Roger's words from his last sleepwalk sounded in my ears. "Words with meaning. Sharp. Razored. Barbed, tipped with slow-acting poison. That's what you need." The image I'd had of him as we drove up to the Cape, the picture of Roger as some kind of caveman carving a crude knife, returned with even greater detail. He'd use a sharpened rock to shape the piece of bone in his hand into sharpness, then something finer—a needle of some kind, maybe bone, as well—to scratch symbols, the same figures tattooed up and down his arms, across his face, into it. Not only is he going to hurt Ted physically, he's going to wound his spirit, his soul, whatever you want to call it.
When he's finished, when he's sure that those eight sentences, those one hundred twenty-three words, are enough, are sufficient, Roger recites them quietly, his eyes closed. He's testing his weapon. Those first four sentences, they're the stab, the sharp blow in just above the navel. Wait a moment, then the next four, which are the twisting, first to the right, then the left, leaning on the grip with each twist. He can see Ted's eyes widening with shock. He can feel the hot blood running out over his fingers. Impatient for the moment to come, he's tempted to utter his sentences—his curse—then and there, to have as much time as possible to enjoy the spectacle of Ted's agony. He opens his mouth, hesitates. He can hear people moving around on the other side of the door to the holding area. How would it look if he started to deliver his carefully crafted condemnation, only to have it interrupted by some crewcut moron telling him to keep it down? He'd be ridiculous, a laughing-stock, and that he cannot risk. The right moment will present itself, he thinks, be patient.
With as much devotion as any monk praying the rosary, Roger repeats the curse to himself. That white-hot flame pours from the tips of his fingers, the top of his head. He sits turning the knife over and over in his fiery hands, the fire hardening the weapon, making it shine. Dawn breaks, sending red-gold light through the holding area's small, high windows. The air glows, the way it does when the sun puts in its first appearance, and Roger's heart leaps in anticipation. As it does, he feels a pain—a new pain—burst in his chest and race out along his left arm. The words of the curse tumble from his mind, scattered by a new thought: heart attack. That's impossible, he thinks, and, as if in response, the pain sags.
Good, he thinks, retrieving the curse, and then the pain announces itself a second time. It's as if a cinderblock has slammed against his chest. He gasps as the suddenness, the intensity of the pain pushes the cell away from him. He concentrates on the words, the one hundred twenty-three words, the eight sentences. While his left arm throbs and his chest presses in, Roger deliberately recites the curse, stubbornly ignoring the voice in his head telling him to call for help, for God's sake, there's a cop outside the door, the fire station is next door, they have an ambulance, call for help. "Not in front of the boy," he whispers through teeth soldered together by pain. He doesn't want to appear weak in front of Ted, doesn't want him to know he's scored such a substantial victory.
Sweat stands out on Roger's forehead. His teeth loosen and rattle as chill after chill runs through him. He clings to the curse, repeating it so quickly it's no longer separate words, just one long mass of sound punctuated by gasps as the pain drops a second cinderblock on him. If his eyes weren't already moist from the pepper spray, tears would have been squeezed out of them. As it is, his eyes send hot trails down his cheeks. The curse has lost much of its sense, has become half-words held together by almost words. Roger gazes up at the ceiling, panting, looks back down—
And sees something. His heart is in too much pain to jump, his lungs too tight to draw in breath, but his eyes widen. There, in the corner of his cell below the high window streaming light, where the shadows have retreated—there, he sees what might be another shadow, except that it seems thicker, denser. Through his tear-smeared vision, he has the impression of an eye, a great eye like a dark mirror. There's more, something like thick coils stacked one on top of the other. He has the sensation of vastness. He isn't seeing all of this—he can't see all of it. If the cinderblocks weren't crushing his chest, if his arm didn't feel as if it were caught in a vise, he would be terrified. The only fear the pain will allow, however, is of the distant, intellectual variety, the I-must-be-afraid-because-I-should-be-afraid kind that has no practical effect. Roger continues to recite the curse—the string of sound it's become. He stares at the thing in the shadows. It's as if the shadows are a kind of window—no, it's as if the thing itself is the window.
I saw it, too, saw and felt it. All over my body, my nerve endings flared, my skin shrieked, as if a blast of arctic air had poured over me. My leg trumpeted new pain. Even as I gripped the edge of the altar, digging both hands into it to reassure myself that this was not real—vision or hallucination, it was not happening—I was aware of the thing across the cell, felt its coils scraping against one another, as if my nerves ran out to it. Up to that point, I had viewed what was playing out in front of me as a kind of mind-movie, my unusually vivid imagination of a possible past. What I was experiencing now was no memory—it was present. It wasn't that I'd gone back in time—it was more that to see this thing in the past was to see it in the present, if that makes any sense. I'd thought that I was beyond being afraid—that my capacity for fear had been exhausted, tapped out—but terror jolted me. I no longer wanted this vision. Whatever insights it promised, I could live without. I stood—
And was standing in the cell. The pavilion had vanished. Frantic, I looked around. There was Ted in the cell across the hall, lying with his back to me. There was the door to the police station. "Help!" I screamed. "Help me!"
Nothing happened. Ted didn't leap off his bunk. No cop rushed through the door. I turned to Roger and reached out my hand to him. My fingers pressed against his shoulder, but he gave no sign he felt the contact. "Roger!" I shouted. "Roger!" He didn't hear me. He continued to stare at the shape in the shadows, one hand pressed to his chest. "Ted!" I shouted, "Ted! Can you hear me?" Ted stirred. I screamed his name again. He didn't respond.
All the while, there was the thing in the corner, watching me. When it was clear that neither Ted nor Roger could hear or see me—that, for all practical purposes, I was a ghost—I turned to look at it. In the act of turning, as I saw the thing out of the corner of my eye, I had a momentary impression of crazy geometry, impossible angles—and then it was gone, replaced by the great eye.
The thing speaks, its voice a whisper that seems to well up inside Roger, from someplace down deep in him, past the pain squatting on his chest. It isn't his voice—isn't any voice he's ever heard—but it's maddeningly familiar. I heard it crawling around the cell walls, and recognized it as the voice that had issued from Roger during his last sleepwalk at Belvedere House. It says, "You know what you are asking."
Roger understands it's talking about the curse. He nods. When this brings no response, he says, "Yes." If Ted hears him, he gives no sign.
"Much is required," the voice says. "What do you offer?"
"What is it you want?" Roger has to force each syllable out.
"Blood," the whisper says. "Pain."
"This," Roger says, raising his right hand from its place over his struggling heart, "here—you want pain, take it."
The voice inhales with what could be pleasure. The heavy coils shift with a sound like concrete scraping on concrete. The eye bobs ever so slightly. "Sweet," the voice sighs, "but not enough."
Black spots dance at the edge of Roger's vision. His head is light. He thinks, What am I doing? My son—what am I doing? What is all this? Despite the pain wracking his body, the distant fear at the thing on the other side of the cell, the anger is there to answer in its voice like the roar of a burning house. "Retribution," it says. Roger nods, yes, of course, and says, "Anything—take whatever you need. Whatever you need."
The door to the holding area clangs open, more light floods in ahead of the police officer bringing Roger and Ted their nominal breakfasts. In an instant, the shadows, and what they held, are gone, washed away by sunlight.
There I was, back under the pavilion, standing in front of the altar. When I saw the fog hanging heavy before me, the rows of seats barely visible through it, my legs almost deserted me. I thought I was going over on my ass, then I caught myself. My knees would not stop shaking, so I stood in place and concentrated on maintaining my balance. Although I had escaped the vision, I wasn't free of it. I knew what happened next—it was there in my memory, a parting gift from the thing in the shadows. I had had enough of this story, of all of it—to say I was sick of it was an understatement—but even as I was gauging how nauseated it made me, I was watching this particular chapter play itself out.
With the shadows' departure, the pain in Roger's chest leaves, as well. He hasn't realized how hard he's been bracing himself against it until it isn't there. Then it's like yanking away a support from a sagging wall. He collapses onto his bunk. The police officer, who's given Ted his cup of instant coffee and shrinkwrapped donut, turns in time to see Roger slump backwards. "Hey," he says, "you okay in there?" Roger doesn't answer, so the cop says, "Hey—hey grandpa. You all right?"
The "grandpa" does the trick, spurring Roger up onto his elbows. "I am fine, thank you," he says. His mouth is dry. Behind the cop, Ted doesn't look at him.
Roger accepts the undersized cup of bitter coffee and the donut that's already started to melt in the cop's hand, smearing chocolate across its plastic wrapper. As he eats the kind of breakfast he hasn't enjoyed since he was an undergraduate, he stares over at Ted, who has finished his meal and is seated on his bunk, gazing up at the ceiling, very deliberately ignoring his father. Roger is aware of the space in his chest that the pain occupied. He can't believe it's actually gone, and he entertains the momentary thought that it didn't vanish, it crescendoed, stopping his heart, and what he's living now is some kind of last-minute fantasy his brain has conjured to protect itself from its own incipient end. A fantasy that includes chocolate all over my fingers? he thinks.
Wiping his hands on his bunk, he realizes what the voice he heard reminded him of: the house—he has the crazy notion that if the house could talk, that's what it would sound like. How bizarre. Already, he's writing off the thing in the shadows as a delusion brought on by the agony overloading his system, by his need for revenge. Of course, he doesn't think of what he has planned for Ted—he reviews the one hundred twenty-three words; yes, he still has them all—he doesn't see it as revenge. He tells himself it's justice, just desserts held back for years, for decades too long. His sudden brush with his mortality has not put things into perspective for Roger. If anything, it's sharpened his desire to wound Ted, to hurt him while he still can.
All through the morning that follows, Roger keeps his words, his weapon, close to him and waits for the opportunity to present itself. It isn't there when the cop returns to take him and Ted—handcuffed—from the holding cell through the station to the village hall and the courtroom. It isn't there when I stand up and deliver my defense of father and son. It isn't there while the judge lectures him and Ted. By the time Roger is walking with me out into the parking lot, he's starting to wonder if the moment is going to come at all, if maybe it showed itself and he missed it.
He and I are halfway to the car when he sees Ted walking towards him. Ted, whose face, he's pleased to note, shows a few bruises itself, and whose anger has eased into something else, into what might be grudging respect. Ted's guard is down. He is perfectly vulnerable. Roger pretends he doesn't notice him and continues toward the car. He feels Ted's hand grip his shoulder. He hears Ted say, "Wait," in that tone Roger still recognizes, the one that means, Okay, I screwed up. His chance is here. Roger says, "Take your hand off me," in a voice intended to stun Ted, a voice so harsh it almost surprises him. Ted's hand flies off Roger, who drives his weapon home.
My legs calm enough for me to risk moving, I took three halting steps to the altar and leaned against it. I looked toward the entrances to the pavilion—where the entrances were supposed to be. In the fog, they were little more than white patches in a sea of whiteness.
For the fifteen or twenty seconds Roger takes to speak, the three of us stand there as if we're having some kind of civilized discussion. Anyone watching us might think Roger is commenting on the weather—well, maybe not, since he's looking away from Ted as he talks to him—but any onlooker would in no way suspect what's being unleashed. To get at the emotional register of what Roger is doing, you have to reconfigure the scene. You have to picture it all in terms of actions. When Ted grasps Roger's arm, Roger's free hand catches Ted's arm. The knife—that piece of sharpened bone, etched around with strange symbols—is in Roger's hand before either Ted or I can react. I'm raising my arm, opening my mouth to protest, when Roger stabs me in the belly, in the place where what could be our child floats in darkness. Even as I feel the knife, icicle cold, Roger has withdrawn it and turned it on himself, driving its bloody point into his chest, off-center so as to miss the breastbone. His grip on Ted slackens as he grunts with the pain, but there's no danger of Ted escaping. He's frozen with disbelief. As Roger tears the knife from himself, he pivots, pulling Ted to him while he brings the knife in and up. Ted's reflexes finally kick in, but it's too late. The knife is in him, Roger putting all his weight behind it and twisting it, first to the right, then the left, then releasing it. One hand fumbling for the blade buried in his gut, the other clutching Roger's arm, Ted drops to his knees. He never looks at Roger as he topples to the side. Swaying like a drunk, Roger gazes down at his son, a triumphant smile writing itself on his face—and collapses, falling in on himself like a building that's been demolished. This leaves me to lower myself to the ground carefully, and lay my head down. From above, the three of us make up the sides of a bloody triangle.
I know, I know. Described this way, it's like the climax to an Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Oceans of blood, everybody dies, all you need is for Fortinbras to walk in and clean things up. In some ways, though, an over-the-top scenario like this gets at what was really happening in the parking lot that morning better than repeating what Roger said. At the risk of sounding perverse, I almost wish that my blood-soaked scene had been what happened. Right from the start, all of us would have understood what was going on—assuming any of us survived, that is.
What I saw in the fog was—you want a word like revelation for it. Most of it was subtle, a matter of degrees of understanding. Obviously, Roger had been angry at Ted—I hadn't appreciated the extent of that anger. It was hard not to think about those stories he'd told me about his childhood, those anecdotes so full of rage. Roger hadn't traveled all that far from that bitter little boy. That was why he'd shared those memories with me—he'd been trying to account for his actions to himself. However successful he'd been at putting his pact with the thing in the shadows out of his mind in the short term, in the long term, he'd been unable to escape it. He'd been trying to explain why he'd done what he'd done to all of us, to Ted, to me, to himself. He'd been trying to explain why he'd given our child away.
Because he had. In promising the thing that disclosed itself to him in his cell whatever it wanted, he'd allowed it to rip my womb open. My hand strayed over my belly. I didn't require any supernatural agency to be back in that hospital room, the floor cold against my cheek, my nostrils full of the smell of blood. The fog inside the pavilion had thickened, to the point the roof was lost above me, the entrances obscured. Really, the only thing I could see clearly was the first couple of rows of chairs in front of me, and even they were looking kind of faint. Fog had crept onto the altar with me, was eddying around my hips, spilling itself over the edge of the altar down to the floor in gray slow-motion. The feeling I'd had during my vision of Roger's deal with the thing in the corner had subsided, but my nerves still prickled. Fog flowed over my legs, climbed my chest and arms. The rows of chairs were vague rectangles. I had no desire to stay there, but I had even less to wander around. There was the practical concern of not being able to see where I was going, and the less practical one of what I might meet. What am I talking about? Given the circumstances, worrying about what was lurking in the fog was every bit as practical as worrying about tripping up the stairs.
Of course, whatever might be prowling the fog could also find its way to me, if I remained in one place. Hadn't I wanted to keep on the move? Well, yes, I had, but movement now seemed impossible. I was paralyzed—not literally, it was more that moving—that the idea of moving was too much, you know? I realized, yes, that if something lunged at me out of the fog, I would play the terrified heroine and run screaming up the aisle, no doubt falling several times on the way. Until that happened, however, until Ted or whatever that thing in Roger's cell had been found me, I was incapable of rousing myself from my spot on the altar. No matter that the chairs had been wiped away. No matter that, when I held my hands up, they looked washed-out, spectral. I closed my eyes for relief from all the whiteness. For a moment, it was as if I were back in Belvedere House. Not that there was any strange sensation, no. What I felt was much less tangible than that. It was a—sureness that, were I to open my eyes, I'd be looking out the living room windows onto Founders Street.
When the hand closed on my arm, I wasn't surprised. I'd expected to be, but what I thought was, Of course. Then Roger's voice said, "Veronica."
I opened my eyes, and there he was, one hand clasped on my arm to prevent me running away from him again. I could see him clearly. The fog was much less thick than it had seemed. His face was a study in concern, eyebrows slightly raised, eyes searching, lips open. "Honey," he said, "are you all right?"
In all fairness, what else could he have said? All the same, I nearly burst out laughing. The man who had made a pact with I-didn't-know-what, had traded the life of one child so he could have revenge on the other, had condemned that other child to some variety of hell—this man, to whom I was married, was asking me if I was all right? He added, "Everything is fine, now, honey. I'm here, and everything is fine," and it was almost too much to bear. The sight of him standing there, inclined slightly toward me—I wasn't frightened of him—maybe I should have been, but I was more frightened for him—for us.
That, and angry, deeply, deeply angry. My left arm, the one he wasn't holding, thrummed, and it was all I could do to keep it from leaping out and hitting him. I don't mean like I had in the diner, those frantic, convulsive slaps. I mean a roundhouse that would've snapped his head back. The accelerated course in sheer terror that had held me in its grip since the diner—since the carousel ride—was incinerated by the phosphorous burn that surged through me. The desire to hit him not once, but over and over again, to punch him, slap him, kick him, to bruise and break and bloody him, swept over me. I wanted to shout at him, tell him what a complete idiot he'd been, ask him if he had any idea what he'd done, what his little stunt in the cell had cost us, was costing us? At the very least, I wanted to tell him to take his damned hand off me.
"Veronica?" Roger said, and I knew I wasn't going to yell at him, wasn't going to hit him. Part of it was the concern I heard in his voice; part of it was that I needed him to help me get off this island. I said, "I'm here, Roger."
"Thank God," he said, releasing my arm so he could take me into a hug. I submitted, even managed to pat his back. "I was so worried," he said as he held me. "One minute, we were talking, the next, you were gone. I didn't know what had happened. I searched up and down that street for you. I went in every store. No one could tell me where you'd gone. I remembered the cottages, how much you'd admired them, and decided to check them. I almost ignored this place. Even when I looked in it, I could barely see you, with the fog."
"You found me."
"Are you all right?" Roger asked, holding me at arm's length and surveying me. "These aren't the same clothes—"
"I bought new ones," I said. "The others were soaked."
"Honey—you must understand—I did that—I had to—"
"It's fine, Roger. Let's get out of here."
We did. Within the hour, my great escape to Martha's Vineyard was at an end, and we were on the ferry back to Wood's Hole. On our way to the bus stop, we passed a plain, two-storey house, white with black trim, set at the other end of a brick walk bordered by bright yellow and purple wildflowers. Something about it tickled my memory, but I was more interested in departing the island as quickly as possible than in lingering over quaint houses. Roger was the one to stop. "What is it?" I said. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he said. "Don't you recognize where we are?"
"No," I said, then I did. "Oh." This was the B&B we'd stayed in during our last, happier visit.
"Shall we see if they have a room?"
"What?" I turned to him. He wasn't joking—given the day's events, he couldn't have been thinking very clearly, but he was serious. If I said I wanted to stay here tonight, he was willing. My schemes for remaining on the island recurred to me, and for the second time that afternoon, black laughter bubbled at the back of my throat. Roger would stay here tonight because he thought there was a chance he would encounter Ted. He hadn't said a word about it to me during our walk out of the pavilion, through the maze of gingerbread houses, and back toward the bus stop, but you could practically see the idea floating over his skull. Although he didn't know the specifics of what I'd been through, he had no doubt it was connected to Ted.
Fortunately for me, the sign at the near end of the front walk was hung with a NO VACANCY sign. I pointed this out to Roger, whose face fell, only to pick up almost immediately as he said, "If you'd like to stay someplace else—"
"I wouldn't," I said. "I'd like to go home—to Wellfleet."
There were maybe two seconds during which I watched Roger debate with himself. Was it worth insisting that we stay here? I was ready to go home without him if it came to that. I had my own car keys, and I was the one with the keys to the Cape House. Let him stay on the island as long as he liked. At the end of the two seconds, he grinned apologetically and said, "Of course."
As the ferry was pulling away from the Vineyard, Roger gazed at the island—or the spot where the island was; the fog lay as heavy as before—and murmured too quietly for me to hear. We were back in the galley, a cup of tea in front of me, a can of Coke in front of him.
"What?" I asked.
"Just thinking," he said, "remembering a few lines from Tennyson."
"Oh?" I hate Tennyson. Talk about a gorgeous poet with no mind.
"Yes, the end of 'Ulysses.' I assume you've read it."
"I'm familiar with it."
"At the very end, when the aged Ulysses is trying to rally his followers for one final sail into the unknown, he holds out hope of what they might encounter on their voyage. He says,
"'It may be the gulfs will wash us down;
"'It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
"'And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.'"
Roger shrugged. "That's all."
That wasn't all. It was a code, and it wasn't very hard to break. Roger was afraid we'd just set sail from the Happy Isle, that we were leaving great Achilles wandering the mist. He was asking for reassurance, for me to reach across the table, grasp his hand, and tell him that it was all right. Instead, I said, "I can't understand how you can stand Tennyson. My God. Talk about sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Whatever Roger's other concerns, he was not about to let such a blatant attack on one of his favorite poets go unanswered. I had counted on this. I wanted an argument. We occupied ourselves with a fairly heated one for the remainder of the boat ride, Roger summoning examples of Tennyson's depth and brilliance, me countering that they were shallow and contrived. What a relief, to have an outlet for the hostility churning inside me. I didn't really want to argue with him about Tennyson—so he liked a lousy poet, so what?—I wanted to argue about what he'd done in that holding cell. Only, I didn't want to argue with him about that. What I mean is, however mad at him I was, however much pleasure it would have provided to scream at him in the short term, in the long term, I needed to talk to Roger about what he'd done, which I wouldn't be able to if we fought about it now. So instead, we debated the merits and defects of a second-rate poet.
The argument was pretty much over by the time we were driving up 6 to Wellfleet. Roger had lapsed into silent outrage, which was fine by me. My anger temporarily appeased, I had a mostly quiet ride to turn over what had happened on the Vineyard. I thought about the shape I'd glimpsed in the carousel mirror. Ted, yes—he'd been the cause of whatever I'd been through on the carousel, that—disorientation. Why, though? For that matter, why had he shown himself to me at the diner? (Not that I was thinking about what I'd seen, no.) To scare me? Mission accomplished, in spades. Certainly, the day's events might mean nothing more than their effects on me; although they seemed a bit elaborate if fright were Ted's only goal. What about the thing in Roger's cell? The thing whose voice had seemed to come from someplace deep within him, and which was so reminiscent of the house, the thing that had offered to fulfill his curse in exchange for, what had it said? "Blood and pain."
We were almost at the Orleans traffic circle. I told Roger to turn off into Orleans. "What for?" he asked.
"I want to stop at the liquor store."
He grunted, and steered to the right.
At the liquor store, I bought a bottle of red wine, two bottles of single-malt Scotch, and a bottle of soda water. Scotch was Roger's drink, not mine: too medicine-y. If I planned to talk to him, I was going to need to loosen his tongue, and I figured a couple of Scotch-and-sodas, on top of the wine we'd drink with dinner, would help him along.
For the remainder of the drive to Wellfleet, the thing in the corner occupied me. The moment I'd seen it in my—what was I going to call that experience? A vision? A vision of the most intense kind. The instant I'd noticed it among the shadows, my nerves had jolted. Did this mean the thing was the house? Or was it like the house—or the house like it? It seemed too much of a stretch for it not to be connected to the house, so—was it the source of the weirdness we'd been through? Where had it come from? I had a momentary image of a group of the college students who'd rented the house in the sixties playing with a Ouija board, opening a door that should have been kept closed, throwing a switch that shouldn't have been thrown.
No. There was Thomas Belvedere and his "Dark Feast" paintings, which I was more certain than ever recorded the strangeness he'd undergone during his summer in the house. Viola Belvedere's letter hinted as much. Whatever was wrong with the house reached back at least to him, and possibly beyond—which, when you came right down to it, wasn't anything I didn't already know. When you're facing these kinds of problems, though, any sense you can find in them feels like a victory.
The house had been—haunted? Off? Let's say off. The house had been off for at least a half century. Not everyone who lived there had experienced anything. Dr. Sullivan and her family hadn't reported a single out of the usual occurrence. For that matter, neither had Roger, Joanne, and Ted for the decades they'd lived there. Did that mean the house was intermittently off? That it was following some kind of occult schedule, a giant alarm clock, set to ring every fifty years—which begged the question, who'd set it?
The turnoff for the Cape House was ahead. Roger took the driveway faster than usual—his way of showing he was still annoyed—slaloming up and around it, gravel pinging off the car. When I didn't respond, he must have taken it as my way of saying I could play this game, too, but honestly, I was thinking about the house. As he brought the car to a stop, I turned to him and said, "There are steaks in the fridge. Do you feel like grilling them?"
"I suppose I could," Roger said, doing his best to feign disinterest. He couldn't fool me, though. I saw the secret thrill that ran through him at the mention of the word "grill." If there's one gender stereotype I abide by, it's this: allow a man to apply fire to raw meat, and he'll be happy as a clam. It must make guys feel like great strong hunters, roasting the mastodon steaks over the campfire. Talk about atavism.
While Roger poured fresh charcoal onto the grill and soaked it in lighter fluid—it didn't matter that the charcoal was the pre-soaked kind; Roger wasn't satisfied unless there was a distinct chance of him burning his eyebrows off—while he started the grill and prepared the steaks, rubbing them with a combination of cracked pepper, dry mustard, and crushed garlic, I set the table and threw together a salad. The salad done, I opened the bottle of red wine and poured a sizable glass of it for Roger, a more modest portion for myself. I wanted a bigger glass—I would have been happy to skip the meal and go directly to the alcohol—but I needed my head reasonably clear. I passed Roger's wine to him when he came back inside in search of the fork and tongs. He took it outside, where he rested it on the backyard table beside the plate with the steaks while he waited for the towering inferno to subside and the coals to heat.
I brought my glass through to the living room, where I stood looking out the front windows at the cemetery. The wine was strong, sharp, and it snapped your tongue as it went down. What you'd call an acquired taste, I guess, although I appreciated its roughness. You had a house that was malignant—or that had a malignancy. Could houses get sick? Not literally—I'm talking more metaphorically—metaphysically, even. Could a house turn against itself? Or could it attract the notice of some kind of—disease? Tumor? The thing in the corner had asked for blood and pain. How much pain had the house seen while Roger and Joanne—and Ted—had lived there? Nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Roger and Joanne's marriage had known the normal peaks and valleys, as had their relationship with Ted. But then things had started to sour. Joanne had her affair with the anthropology professor. Ted submerged into teenage angst and rebellion. Roger grew isolated from the two of them. All the relationships under that roof had decayed. None of it unusual—lots of families endure much worse—except that here, in Belvedere House, it had fed something, what might have been the house itself, or might have been hanging around the house like a dog lurking under the table, hoping for scraps.
I drank more of the wine—gulped it—and my eyes stung. I walked back into the kitchen, where I could watch Roger, glass in one hand, turning the steaks over on the grill. He splashed some of his wine over the meat; fire jumped to taste it. Why would this thing reveal itself to Roger? Because he had stumbled onto something that promised it a meal to make what it had been dining on so far seem like—it would be like going from eating dog-food to a seven-course meal at the Canal House. Yes, I mean the curse. Roger had—he'd signed Ted over to the thing. I didn't know if he'd known that's what he was doing—however much he wanted revenge on Ted, I wasn't sure it went all this way, to wanting to consign him to a pocket hell. Did this mean the thing had my child, as well? How could I know? I had no doubt the miscarriage had been part of the price Roger had paid for cursing Ted, but without the malediction being extended to cover that child, could the thing take it, as well? Hard to imagine that what had been little more than a collection of cells could have satisfied this thing's appetite, but who knew?
Roger jabbed the fork into one of the steaks and held it up for inspection. Almost, but not quite. He returned it to the grill and, as he did, caught me looking at him. He raised his glass—his attempt at a cease-fire, if not an apology—and without thinking, I repeated the gesture, which brought a smile from him. My glass was already empty. I hadn't been aware of finishing it. If I didn't take it easy, I was going to be asleep before the end of the meal. I rinsed it and settled on water for the time being.
I knew how much of what I was thinking was supposition, and of the craziest kind. It made sense, though. It gathered what had happened and arranged it into a coherent pattern. During my conversation with Dr. Hawkins, she'd said, "We're all continuously trying to invent a narrative that will account for our lives." At the time, her statement had struck me as one more platitude, but in the weeks since, it had stuck with me. It's at the root of psychoanalysis, isn't it? Instead of calling it "the talking cure," we should call it "the storytelling cure." Dickens tries to come to terms with his childhood traumas, his adult ambivalences, by writing about them over and over. Hawthorne tries to clarify his Puritan legacy to himself in story after story. Whenever something happens to you—something too much—you create a story to deal with it, to define if not contain it. I had done exactly that—it's just, where most people's stories are written by Anne Tyler, mine was by Anne Rice.
Not that it was a perfect story. There were all kinds of things it couldn't account for—or hadn't yet, if I wanted to be optimistic. A lot—enough of what I'd been through didn't fit my explanation especially well. Ted revealing himself at the Vineyard diner—okay, I could believe that had been done to torment me. My sensations inside Belvedere House, though, my view of that nighttime landscape outside the kitchen window? Granted, they'd been strange, confusing. I supposed you could say they'd caused me sufficient discomfort to provide the thing in the corner a snack, but that didn't seem their intention—if they'd had an intention, if they hadn't been random occurrences. I didn't need my story to explain Roger's sleepwalking—I'd already known he had guilt to spare. It didn't explain the strange map he stared at during the second part of each sleepwalk, that combination of geography, history, and physics with Ted's old shaving mirror winking at its center.
Most importantly, the narrative I'd arrived at didn't tell me why I should be the one having all the weirdness visited on her, while Roger got off scot-free. There was no doubt that, on some level, he was horrified at what he'd done. He'd have to be. Maybe that was enough for the thing. Although you would have thought that letting Roger see what he'd done to Ted would have increased his suffering that much more, made the thing's meal that much richer. Yes, there was the vision Roger claimed to have had of the figure wandering the corridor—the figure he himself had assumed was Ted. That was pretty bad, I supposed, but nothing like my up-close-and-personal view of Ted. Was this the thing's way of rewarding Roger for having pronounced the curse? It seemed unlikely, to say the least.
The sliding door rasped, and Roger said, "Dinner is served." I went to the fridge for the salad, tossing my water in the sink on the way. Roger poured me a fresh glass of wine when I sat down. I raised it and said, "To Tennyson."
Roger smirked and said, "To the impudence of youth."
He'd grilled the steaks medium, a little rarer than I liked, a little more done than he did. Despite that, they were tasty, and the salad was a crisp, green complement to them. As we ate, we made small talk about the Cape House. Roger finished his second glass of wine. I poured him number three. A flush was already creeping up his cheeks. "What about you?" he asked, pointing at my glass, still mostly full, with his fork.
"Don't worry about me."
By dinner's end, Roger had drunk four and half glasses of wine to my two. His face was rosy, but his speech was clear and coherent. He was desperate to ask me about the Vineyard, but had decided it was better to wait. I'm sure he was afraid of provoking another freak-out, and no Coke at hand. We cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, filling the air with more mindless chatter, and I reached to the top of the fridge for the bag containing the two bottles of Glenkinchie. Roger hadn't known I'd bought them, and his eyes widened as I withdrew first one, then the other. "What's this?" he asked, unable not to smile as he held the bottles up for inspection. "I thought you didn't care for Scotch?"
"After the day I've had," I said, "I need something with more fortitude than wine. I was hoping you could make the drinks?"
"With pleasure. Do we have any soda water?"
"In the fridge."
"Excellent," Roger said. "You've thought of everything."
Well, not everything, I thought while he searched for a pair of suitable glasses. I still don't know why your son is giving me the all-out, special-effects extravaganza, while the worst thing you have to worry about is thinking you hear someone call your name inside a crowded building. Roger uncorked the Scotch, twisted the cap off the soda water, and combined the two, favoring the liquor over the soda—to help me talk, I realized. Oh, irony. He passed me my drink, bubbles pushing their way through the honey-colored liquid, and said, "To what shall we drink?"
"We've already saluted Tennyson," I said, "any other poets you'd like to recognize?"
"Very funny."
I considered proposing a toast to the honesty that was essential to the success of our marriage, but I didn't think I could manage it without tipping my hand too early. Roger solved the problem by saying, "To a fine meal, expertly prepared all around." I tasted the drink. It was as astringent as ever—with the soda water added, it was like medicine-flavored soda. Nevertheless, I smiled as if the thirty dollars a bottle had been worth it.
"Shall we retire outside?" Roger asked. "I don't believe the mosquitoes are particularly bad as yet."
"That's fine," I said. "Why don't you grab the Scotch, and I'll take the soda, to save us having to come inside every five minutes."
"Inspired thinking." Roger grabbed the bottle by the neck and led the way out to the backyard table.
The evening was pleasant, the sun at the treetops, about to begin its final plunge, the air warm and smelling faintly of the ocean. We deposited the bottles on the picnic table and seated ourselves at it. Roger inhaled and said, "I have to admit, I love the sea air. There's something so invigorating about it, don't you think?"
"Mmm."
He drank from his glass. Here it comes, I thought. He said, "Before—just now, when I asked you about your selection of the Glenkinchie, you made reference to the day's events."
"I did."
"Yes. I don't want you to feel pressured in any way by what I'm going to ask you. If you don't want to speak about what you went through on the Vineyard—if you aren't ready, if you're never ready—there's absolutely no need for you to do so. However, should you—"
"I saw Ted."
Roger breathed in sharply. My words hung between us, almost visible. "You saw him?"
"Yes."
"Where? On the carousel? The diner?"
"Both. I had a glimpse of him standing behind me on the carousel—in one of the mirrors—and I saw him face-to-face in the diner. It was only for a second—less—but it was Ted."
"My God," Roger said. "I knew—I was certain something—that you'd seen." He finished his drink and poured a second from the Scotch bottle alone. When he'd drunk half of that, he coughed, and said, "Judging from your reaction to him, I take it the encounter was not pleasant."
"It wasn't."
"Can you talk about it?"
"He's—" I paused. "He's bad, Roger."
"What do you mean?"
"Ted is—he's different—changed."
"How so?"
"I can't describe it. I can't even remember it. I don't want to remember it. He isn't—he isn't something you could look at. I'm sorry—I don't know how to describe him."
"I don't understand. Is he disfigured? Is it his injuries?"
"No, not exactly—I mean, he's been injured—I'm pretty sure that's why he looks like—"
"Like what?"
"Like nothing human."
"Nothing—are you sure it was Ted?"
"Yes—I saw his—I saw what he used to look like first, then I saw him as he is now." I was struggling not to confront the memory head-on—even as I was realizing that part of it had already—not faded, exactly; it was more as if part of it hadn't taken, as if my mind hadn't been equipped to hold onto everything I'd seen—which didn't mean that what was left wasn't enough to start me screaming all over again.
"As he is now," Roger said. He was being deliberately obtuse.
"His eyes are glass," I said. "Glass, or something like glass. He can't close them. The skin around them is—stretched, tortured. He's being tortured—he's in torment." I swallowed some of my drink.
"No," Roger said.
"Yes."
"No, I am sorry, I understand you have undergone some type of disturbing experience today, but that was not Ted you saw. You are mistaken." His lips were trembling.
"Roger—"
"I need a walk," he said, springing up from his seat. He took the bottle of Scotch, ignored the soda water, and set off away from me at a brisk pace. My own glass still in hand, I stood and gave chase.
He circled the house and started up the driveway, almost falling when his foot struck a clump of sand that gave beneath him. Arms flailing, he caught himself in time and continued his trek. At the end of the driveway, he halted, turning his head from side to side long enough for me almost to catch up to him, then turned left into the cemetery. I called, "Roger—Roger, wait." His head jerked at the sound of his name, but he continued walking. He strode straight through the cemetery. When he reached the far side of it, he turned right and started walking around it. Like some kind of idiot, I followed him the entire time, despite the fact that, after one circuit of the graves, the burn on my leg was shouting with pain. I should have sat and waited for him, but I was afraid he'd leave the graveyard, head into the woods surrounding it, and I wouldn't be able to find him. We circled that cemetery three times, until Roger stopped, panting, and turned to wait for me. "That wasn't Ted," he said when I was standing next to him. "Not my boy."
"It's the curse," I said, breathing a bit heavily myself. "It's what you said to him the last time you saw him."
"What?"
"In the parking lot in front of Village Hall," I said, "you cursed Ted. You disowned him, remember? 'I disown you; I cast you from me.'"
"Don't be absurd," Roger said, but something flickered across his eyes.
"You cursed him," I said, "and it worked." Understanding rushed through me. "That's why he isn't haunting you—not directly. You cut your ties with him—you cut him off completely. He can't reach you—not like he can reach me—because you shut the door on him."
"This is ridiculous," Roger said. "Are you quite through?"
"Roger," I said, "I know what happened in the cell. I know about the deal you made."
Fear, shame, and anger hovered over Roger's face, already scarlet from the combination of alcohol and his circuits of the cemetery. "Deal?"
"With the thing in the corner. The eye in the shadows."
"I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to."
"It offered to make the curse you had come up with for Ted real, to make it work."
"Really?" Roger said. He tried to smile. The effect was hideous.
"You asked it what it wanted. It told you, 'Blood and pain.'"
He flinched at those three words, and any lingering doubts I might have had about what I'd seen were put to rest. He said, "So you're saying I made a pact with the devil during my time in the holding cell?"
"You made a deal with something," I said. "I don't know what."
"I see. And did I sign this agreement in blood, promise away my immortal soul?"
"You offered it the heart attack that had already started. That wasn't enough, so you offered it whatever else it wanted—anything, including the child I was carrying. Which it took. You offered it Ted for its amusement."
"Is that what this is about? You blame me for the miscarriage?"
"That isn't the point, Roger."
"Oh, I should say it is. It's obvious your losing the baby affected you more deeply than I was aware, in response to which you've invented a scenario that paints me as responsible for it. I had no idea you had been so traumatized."
"This isn't about me," I said. "It's about you in that jail cell trading away whatever it took for you to have your revenge."
"I had no idea your resentment of me ran this deep."
"Come off it," I said. "Are you telling me you didn't spend hours and hours coming up with that curse?"
"I planned my rebuke to Ted, yes. I was angry. This gave me a way to channel that anger. Should I not have been angry at him for showing up at our doorstep at three in the morning to yell at his father? Should I have thanked him for attacking me?"
"What about your heart attack? When did that begin?"
"I became convinced that I was in fact undergoing a heart attack during the time it took me to walk away from Ted to the car that following day."
"That was the first of it? There was nothing before?"
"I had some indication while I was in my cell, I admit, but I understand that's not uncommon."
"And what did you see while you were in the middle of your 'indication'?"
"Honestly," Roger said, "this is too much. I am not to blame here. I am not the villain. I'm trying to help Ted. If I had wanted to condemn him to some manner of eternal torment, why would I be working so hard to help him escape it?"
"Guilt," I said. "At some point—I don't know when; maybe when Ted was killed, maybe before, maybe after—you realized what you'd done and regretted it. Given the chance to make amends, you leapt at it."
"You've certainly thought this through. I presume my guilt is what has kept me from revealing any of this to you previously."
"Guilt and doubt. I'm guessing you've convinced yourself it was a hallucination brought on by the stress of what felt like a heart attack. Because if it were true, if you did strike a bargain with something to curse your son—well, what does that say about you?"
"How have you arrived at this—this story? Is it my sleepwalking? Have you decided that a change in my nightly routine must indicate a troubled conscience?"
"I saw it."
"What? What do you mean?"
"After I saw Ted—after I ran out of the restaurant, I ended up at the pavilion, where you found me. While I was there, I had—I had a vision. I saw you that night in the cell. I saw you start to have a heart attack, and I watched that thing—the eye—appear to you. It was right after sunrise."
Roger drank directly from the bottle this time, a slug that would have done any undergraduate proud. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "This is incredible. Let me see if I understand the situation. You undergo an obviously traumatic experience as we are eating—I refuse to believe that you saw Ted, but whatever it was, it was sufficiently severe to propel you out the front door and through the streets of Oak Bluffs. During this time—while you are in this state, you have a 'vision,' which portrays me as a villain and which you immediately accept at face value. Not once, from what you've indicated so far, does it occur to you that your vision might be less than accurate, that under the stress of the moment you would be as prone to invention as anyone."
"Why, Roger? Why would I make up something like this?"
"As I've said, it's obvious you hold me responsible for the miscarriage. Perhaps you believe my confrontation with Ted at the apartment placed too great a strain on you. Since we've returned to the house, you've suffered a couple of disturbing incidents. It's no secret you're under stress, Veronica. Why else are we here? Have you forgotten your collapse on the stairs? Apparently you've been closer to the breaking point than I was aware. Earlier today, you—you reached that point, and in its aftermath, put together a scenario that combines the events of the last few months into a coherent whole."
"So you can accept that your dead son is calling out to you from the bardo—you can even accept that he's reached out to me—but what I saw in the pavilion is a hallucination."
"It isn't true."
"I walked around in it. I was there. I tried to get out of it and I couldn't. I saw you on your bunk; I saw the thing in the corner—I felt it. The same way I can feel the house, I could feel it."
"Funny. I remember a great deal about the hours I spent in that cell—it being my first experience with incarceration—yet I don't recall seeing you there."
"I wasn't there—I mean, it was like I was invisible."
"I see. Or, I didn't, which I gather you would say proves your very point."
"All right. There's nothing I can say to convince you I saw this."
"I've no doubt you saw it. It simply did not happen."
"Same difference. I can't convince you, which is ironic, because why should I have to convince you of something you've done? Forget that. There's something you can do to show me I'm wrong."
"Which is?"
"Lift the curse. Rescind it; take it back; say you never meant it."
"I have expressed my regret at my words to Ted."
"That isn't the same thing as renouncing your words. You know that."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"If it's ridiculous, what's the big deal? Lift the curse."
"This is rapidly moving from the ridiculous to the offensive."
"Oh?"
"You cannot be serious."
"And yet I am."
"I do not need to humor you. You come to me with these baseless accusations—you accuse me of—what you accuse me of would be monstrous if it weren't so absurd."
"You're stalling," I said. "I'm your wife. Indulge me. If this'll help me with all the stress I've been under, shouldn't you do it immediately?"
"You're mocking me."
"Not at all. I'm giving you the chance to prove me wrong—I'm asking you to. All you have to do is break the curse. Take Ted back. Say you're father and son again. Lift his banishment."
Roger glared at me. His knuckles were white around the Scotch bottle. I was surprised it didn't break in his grip. He licked his lips. "No," he said, "no."
"No what?"
"I will not, as you put it, lift the curse. There was no curse. There were only words, spoken in anger—great anger, yes, but only words. To say that they meant any more than they did would be dishonest—and though I regret having expressed myself so harshly, I do not regret the emotion that prompted me to do so. My feelings were completely justified—however incensed he may have been by receiving the wedding announcement you sent, Ted had no business behaving the way he did. If I didn't raise him well enough to know that, common decency should have told him. Ted brought my words on himself."
"What about the thing in the cell? Did he bring that on himself?"
"There was no thing in the cell. There was only me and my anger."
"Why do you think he hasn't appeared to you? Why do you think I've been at the center of this?"
"You forget, I saw Ted through the living room window. And I believe you were correct when you implied that the voice I heard in the carousel hall was his. I'm sorry, but you are hardly the center of these events. Close to it, perhaps, but not as close as I am."
"Your sleepwalking?"
Roger swallowed. "I do not know why I have been sleepwalking," he said, holding up a hand to forestall my answer. "If I were the victim of a guilty conscience, as I'm sure you would suggest, why would that conscience have left me alone once we departed the house? Is it on vacation, too? No doubt there is some psychological cause. I am not above admitting the effect—the considerable effect Ted's death has had on me. That, combined with returning to the house in which I raised him, is likely the root of my nightly excursions."
"You don't believe that. I don't know what you believe, but that isn't it."
"Once again, you're mistaken."
I had run out of arguments. I stood there as Roger said, "It seems that this trip has done you more harm than good. I fear to open another can of worms, but I believe it would be best for you if we returned home sooner rather than later. Tomorrow?"
We could have stayed a couple more days—we had paid for the house—but, really, what was the point? "Whatever you want," I said, and turned and walked back to the house.
Roger didn't follow. In fact he didn't return to the house until almost midnight. I spent the hours between staring at the TV. PBS was showing a biography of Emily Dickinson I'd wanted to see for a while. Of course, it had to play when I had next to no interest in it. The conversation—confrontation with Roger was front and center in my mind. You know how it is after an argument. You replay it, listening to the other person's accusations and denials again and again, formulating the perfect response to them. That's what I do, anyway, what I did for hour after hour as nineteenth-century photographs were replaced by talking heads, who in turn gave way to footage of contemporary Amherst and its surroundings. I was so preoccupied with Roger's words—with his attempt to discount everything I'd had to say, to blame it all on my buried resentment toward him over the miscarriage—that I didn't hear most of what the documentary had to say. I recognized the rhythms of Dickinson's poetry at certain points, well-worn lines like, "Because I could not stop for Death," but the rest was a distant ebb and flow of sound.
I was angry with Roger. Not as angry as I'd been in the pavilion—that had been the fury that comes with revelation, with discovering that your husband has done something stupid and terrible that's caused the two of you tremendous pain and difficulty. The anger now was a slow burn at being lied to when you both know you've got him dead to rights. It was anger at him trying to change the subject, shift the blame for what he'd done onto me. It was complemented by another anger, this one directed inwards, because he'd almost succeeded. Not really—I knew what I'd seen, felt, on the Vineyard, all of it—but he'd managed to sow sufficient doubt for me to have to weed it out of my thoughts. Maybe I had resented him for the miscarriage, for not being available to take care of me while it was happening, and afterward—for having fought with Ted—maybe I had held the stress of watching the two of them trash the apartment secretly responsible for my losing the baby. What about the curse, though? I hadn't imagined that. What about Roger's sleepwalking, or his office, for crying out tears? If it was all in my head, why wouldn't he just lift the curse? In the morning, we would return to Belvedere House and whatever awaited us there. Do I have to add I had no doubt it was going to be bad? If blood and pain had started this, then the odds looked pretty good for blood and pain being necessary to end it.
On the TV, the actress who'd been chosen to read Dickinson's poetry said,
"Doom is the house without a door-
"'Tis entered from the sun-
"And then the ladder's thrown away,
"Because escape-is done—"
Change "sun" to "son," I thought, and you've got that right.
Roger didn't speak to me when he came in—still playing the part of the aggrieved innocent—he headed up to bed and was fast asleep by the time I decided to join him an hour later. I don't know what I was expecting that night. After everything I'd been through earlier in the day, not to mention the creeping weirdness of the days before, you would have thought I was entitled to a break. What I deserved, however, had very little to do with what actually happened to me. That had been one of the lessons of this whole drama. The more I was subject to, it seemed, the more not only could but would happen. So when Charlie Rose had been replaced by a film, The Haunting, and I decided to go upstairs because I was too tired to follow the plot, I anticipated—I don't know, Ted putting in another appearance in all his tortured glory, maybe letting me see him for longer this time, maybe reaching out and touching me with a hand wrapped in razor wire. Essentially alone in the house, the voices from the TV somehow small and echoing at the same time, I wasn't especially nervous, nor was I as I climbed into bed. I wasn't beyond fear; I wouldn't say that—every time I'd thought I was as frightened as I could be, I'd learned there was worse to come. It was more a case of being too worn out to be afraid of being afraid, if that makes sense. My mind was in better shape than it had been immediately after the wrecking ball that was Ted's true appearance had crashed into it. The various angers that had inhabited me had done a lot to repair the surface, prop up walls, repair holes, throw a tarp over the roof. Having my thoughts struck and repaired had evicted a lot of lesser concerns, like worrying about worrying. They'd return soon enough, no doubt, once the walls had been reinforced and the windows replaced, but for the time being, I was unconcerned—almost ready—for whatever the next stage of strangeness was to be.
Naturally, nothing happened. The night was quiet and peaceful. I fell asleep pretty much the second my head hit the pillow, and slept a dreamless six hours, until the sound of Roger packing wakened me. I sat up in bed and he said, "Did I wake you? I'm sorry. I thought we should get an early start." You know, I was so well-rested, so happy at being well-rested, that I bit off the nasty reply at the tip of my tongue, threw back the covers, and went downstairs for breakfast.
It was the same the following night. The drive back from the Cape had been uneventful—Roger drove the entire way, and we rode pretty much in silence. Déjà vu. Roger vibrated with tension. After the relative calm of the last few days, the stress was pouring off him in heavy waves. When I glanced over at him, I was sure I'd see him tapping his hands on the steering wheel, chewing his lip, bobbing his knee, anything to release the energy thrumming along his nerves. Instead, his hands were steady, his mouth closed, his legs calm. I thought about asking him if he were nervous, but I knew he'd offer me some kind of lie like, "Why? There's nothing for me to be nervous about."
Once we turned from 90 to 87, my sensation of Belvedere House returned—had been with me for some time, gradually rising in volume. By the time we were turning off the Thruway for Huguenot, the skin on my arms and legs was rigid, as if Roger had turned the air-conditioner on full-blast. Rather than taking the back way, down Soldier, to the house, Roger drove along Main Street. This took us past the turn-off for the college, past Pete's and Prospero's Books—why am I telling you this? You live there. Up the street from Prospero's, I saw Village Hall and almost jumped. I half-expected a sign of what had occurred there to be visible. I don't know what, a heavy black cloud hanging over the place, something like that.
If the sight of Village Hall startled me, then I'm not sure what reaction you'd expect me to have seeing Belvedere House spread across the windshield—a gasp, or a massive shudder—nausea, even. Although this was the place that was responsible for transforming Roger's curse from empty invective to loaded weapon—or the home of whatever was responsible—the only emotion I felt as Roger pulled the car into the driveway was vague relief. How's that for perverse? Better the devil you know, I guess.
After Roger unloaded the suitcases and carried them up to the bedroom, he vanished upstairs into his office. I contemplated pursuing him, cornering him and resuming my quest to persuade him to lift his curse, but the chances of me succeeding seemed slim at best. Slim—how about nonexistent? I hadn't arrived at any better arguments since our cemetery showdown last night. My most effective line of attack continued to be, If I'm wrong, prove it to me, break the curse, which hadn't been that effective.
Instead of going up after Roger, I left the suitcases where he'd laid them on the bed and went downstairs and back out. We'd left the Cape before ten, and even with a brief stop for lunch, were back in Huguenot by three. I took the car to the post office to pick up our mail. No doubt Roger would sequester himself in his office for the rest of the day and most of the night, besides, making up for lost time. At some point, if he hadn't done so, I'd shuffle through our collection of take-out menus, decide which one sounded most appealing—or least unappealing—and call in an order that I'd probably go pick up myself. Later on, I'd channel-surf for a couple of hours before bed. Later still, no doubt I'd be up following Roger around the house. It doesn't take very long for whatever rut you thought you had escaped to reassert itself, does it?
On impulse, on my way back to Belvedere House, I kept driving, along Founders to Addie and Harlow's. I wasn't sure if they'd be in. I've never been able to remember Addie's schedule at the library, and if she wasn't working, there was a good chance she and Harlow would've gone out. Luck was with me. They were home, and on the pretense of returning the key to the Cape House, I spent the rest of the day with them. When she saw me, Addie said, "You're home early." She didn't argue with me when I said that Roger had been impatient to resume one of his projects—true enough—but she looked concerned all the time we were together. They invited me to join them for dinner—they were planning a trip to a Vietnamese place next to Penrose—and I'm not sure whether they thought it was strange that I accepted. I mean, here I was, back ahead of schedule from a vacation with my husband, agreeing to go out to dinner without him. Addie offered to call and invite Roger. I told her not to bother. He was already engrossed in his work, I said, I'd bring him something from the restaurant.
Unusual or not, they went along with it, and the three of us had a very pleasant meal at the Green House, which was the ground floor of a large house located a couple of blocks over from Penrose. Throughout the ride to and from Poughkeepsie, and the meal itself, Addie wanted to talk about Roger's and my trip, which was a little tricky. She would say things like, "Oh, you went to Marine Salvage? Isn't it great?" and I would force my mouth into a smile and say, "They have so much stuff in there."
The trickiest moment of the evening came when Harlow asked, "And Roger? How was he?" I was in the middle of drinking from the beer I'd ordered, and I almost choked on it. Once I'd brought my coughing fit under control, I said, "Sorry—went down the wrong way. Roger? Roger is—he's coping. There's a lot for him to work through, still; I guess he's doing his best." I'm sure they knew I was lying. My reasons must have seemed mysterious, but they respected whatever was compelling me.
I came home that night tipsy from three bottles of beer and two sizable after-dinner cognacs. I wouldn't say I was drunk—not by the time I said good night to Addie and Harlow and drove the quarter-mile home—but I'm glad I didn't have to drive any further, and I'm glad it was along a quiet street. That would've been just what I needed, my own trip to the Village of Huguenot jail. Maybe I could've made an unholy deal, too.
The alcohol meant that I went straight to bed, and that I stayed there even when the mattress shifted deep in the night as Roger rose to resume his sleepwalking. It also meant that I was greeted the next morning with a stabbing headache and a tongue wrapped in gauze. Roger was already in his office. I heard his footsteps overhead as I was brushing my teeth. I wandered downstairs and put on a fresh pot of strong coffee. The prospect of breakfast made the dinner I'd enjoyed so much the night before threaten to put in a second, less pleasant appearance. Coffee brewed, I filled a large mug with it and stirred in a generous helping of maple syrup. I know it sounds gross, but it's the only hangover cure that's ever worked for me.
If Roger had picked up where he'd left off, then so would I. Fresh cup of maple coffee in hand, I climbed the stairs to the library, detouring to the bathroom for a couple of ibuprofen. Shortly thereafter, I was online, Googling Rudolph de Castries.
There were something like thirteen thousand hits for the guy. The official homepage was at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. I started with that. Whoever designed the site had a flair for the baroque that bordered the outright tacky. The background was this sulfurous yellow, while the name—"Locimancy"—and menu options were deep purple. There was a quotation from de Castries in the same, overripe purple: "All things are alive as we make them live," as well as a black-and-white photo of him. Either the site designer had deliberately reversed the picture's colors, or they'd posted a negative. The photo showed de Castries from about the waist up, seated and apparently talking to someone off-camera. He was wearing an oversized white—which is to say, black jacket over a loose white shirt, but you could tell he was tall and skinny from the way the clothes sagged on him. His hands were surprisingly short, not what you would expect for an artist. The right one was reaching into his jacket pocket; the left was held up—I couldn't tell whether to make a point, or support the cigarette burning in it. His dark hair was long for 1947, the date a subscript gave the picture. There was nothing remarkable about his face. It was young, nose long and bulbous, cheekbones high and flat, eyes dark. There was a kind of merriment in the way the eyes narrowed, the corners of the mouth lifted.
The homepage was bordered by what I took to be stylized roses—also too purple—until I focused on one and saw it was a hybrid, a cross between a rose and a human skull. Look at it one way, it's a flower; look at it another, it's a skull. Very nice; very subtle.
The remainder of the morning, I spent navigating the website. Tackiness aside, it was fairly complete. I read de Castries's biography. I ran through pictures of him and his associates. I looked at selected examples of his art. I clicked on links to short essays he'd written on painting. I skimmed the single interview he'd given, to an art critic from the Village Voice. As I read, I jotted notes on a legal pad. At some point, I leaned over and switched on the printer. I printed de Castries's most famous painting, Locimancy, as well as the short essays—all of which shared the painting's title, with "#1" or "#2" to distinguish them—and the interview. When I was finished, I went back and printed the biography, too. Satisfied I'd seen everything the site had to offer, I bookmarked it, logged off, and shut down the computer. I closed my eyes, leaned back in the chair, and exhaled.
The cup of maple coffee was long finished, and hadn't done much good anyway, so I left the library for a shower. Standing with the hot water beating on my neck—another headache remedy—I sifted through the dozens of screens still glowing in front of my mind's eye. I didn't know what I was doing—not really—how any of this was supposed to help Roger and me. It was as much about following a hunch—if not pursuing an obsession. I'd suspected Thomas Belvedere was connected to the house's weirdness, and now I'd not only substantiated that suspicion, I had a chance to work out the details of it. Or so I told myself. To be honest—I don't know if you've ever done this, but when you're in the middle of some big project—for you, I guess it would be a story or a novel—have you ever just stopped where you are and started working on something else? You tell yourself it's related, and maybe it is, but it's not what you should be doing. Maybe you need a break—maybe you've hit a wall—maybe it's sheer perversity. I think—I think there was more perversity to what I was doing than there should have been—as much a feeling of "I'll do whatever I want," as anything.
Which meant that I had spent the morning learning about a guy who'd been born in 1930 in San Francisco to a family with a reputation for artists and eccentrics. Rudolph's father and his siblings had been a varied crew. Daddy had been a sculptor who'd had limited success with his original creations before deciding to reinvent himself as an archaeologist so he could sell his knock-offs of famous Medieval pieces more convincingly. He made a killing at it, was even invited to give a lecture on the Cathedral of Chartres to a private gentlemen's club, but was eventually caught by the police after an irate collector discovered he'd been duped. The story had made the front pages of the San Francisco papers, prompting Rudolph's mother to take what money remained in the bank account and flee to a second cousin's in Greenwich Village. If Daddy de Castries hadn't been bad enough, Uncle Theo and Aunt Marguerite had been into magic. Theo had written an unreadable book whose title I can't remember. Mega- something. Apparently, he'd enjoyed playing the part of a sorcerer. As for Aunt Marguerite, she'd become a warlock. Not a witch, she said, witches and warlocks were two completely different things. She was linked to a number of second- and third-tier Hollywood stars, male and female, and was rumored to have consulted with at least one of the city's mayors. If I'd wanted a topic for a novel, some kind of sprawling, multi-generational triple-decker with heavily satiric overtones, I couldn't have asked for a better one. I wasn't planning on novel-writing anytime in the near future, however. Had Uncle Theo or Aunt Marguerite been among the living, I would have considered calling them for advice, but they were long since in their graves—under mysterious circumstances, needless to say.
Shower finished, I toweled myself dry and went to the bedroom in search of clothes. We'd fallen behind in the laundry, lately. I say we, but I mean Roger, since that was one of his duties. After some searching, I located a pair of jeans and an old concert t-shirt that weren't too wrinkled. My headache lingered, though the combination of ibuprofen and hot shower had forced it to retreat to a more tolerable distance. I wandered downstairs to make lunch, which consisted of popping the top on a can of Campbell's Chunky Beef Soup. Over soup and a couple of pieces of only-slightly-stale bread, I tried to organize what I'd learned about Rudolph de Castries himself.
He'd grown up in Greenwich Village, spending time in the company of the artists his mother and her second-cousin associated with. Mommy, it appeared, continued to have a thing for the artists, despite several disastrous relationships. She tended to be drawn to men whose proclivities led in a more or less straight line to jail. Rudolph's schooling had been erratic, complicated by early alcoholism—the result, it seemed, of too many secret drinks snuck him at this or that party. By the time he was thirteen, he was skipping school for days at a time. Within a couple of years, it was weeks at a time, and when he turned sixteen it was good riddance. In a sense, that was as exciting as his life ever got. You could say he struggled with his alcoholism, but it was more a case of him struggling to find the money to buy the next bottle. Even that wasn't much of a drama. Momma de Castries kept him in cash, except for the times they argued and didn't speak to one another for months. Then Rudolph took whatever work was available, most of it menial. No excitement on that front, either. He was a conscientious employee who was able to hold his craving for a drink in check until the end of his shift. When he was twenty-five, he collapsed on his way home from a friend's gallery opening. By the time anyone stopped to see what was wrong with him, he was dead. The autopsy would deliver the verdict: his liver had disintegrated. He was buried in Queens, given a simple headstone that his admirers would replace with a more elaborate monument two decades later. His mother lived to attend that ceremony, which featured readings by a couple of poets and a talk by an art historian from Columbia, but her life wasn't very happy. Apparently, when she died the month after, hit by a city bus, there were witnesses who claimed she'd deliberately stepped out in front of it.
That had been the short, unhappy life of Rudolph de Castries. It had been redeemed by one thing and one thing only, his art. From the time he'd been a child—before he could write, he could draw, and draw well. The artists who attended his mother's parties tended to patronize him at first, until they registered the intensity in his brown eyes, after which most of them left him alone. A few gave him advice, pointers on how to improve his pictures. He drew incessantly, in pencil and crayon. His small bedroom was wallpapered with his latest efforts, which he'd tear down and replace every couple of months. Not many of those drawings have survived—Rudolph threw the ones he'd stripped from his walls out with the trash—but those that have are striking. Some critic or another described them as Hieronymus Bosch's ideas executed by Michelangelo. The pages were packed full of the elaborate imagery you find in Bosch, but it was rendered with the weight, the solidity, you associate with Michelangelo. One of the visitors to the de Castries residence gave Rudolph five dollars for his pick of the drawings. Rudolph used that to buy a basic set of oil paints and a couple of brushes and began to experiment.
Left to his own devices, Rudolph might have become an interesting enough painter—his early work plays with deliberate flatness in a way that manages to evoke Rousseau and still be its own thing. The subject matter was bizarre as ever. No one's sure how or when Rudolph first encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights, but there's no doubting the impression it made on him. From the ages of, say, fifteen to nineteen, as he's running through these different styles like Picasso on fast-forward, Bosch is never far—it's as if he's elaborating that one painting. What Rudolph was doing was sufficiently far outside the mainstream of American painting for there to be no danger of him becoming rich and famous from it. At the same time, it was done with enough talent and originality that he was able to place individual pieces in small shows, and sell one now and again.
I've seen the early paintings—there are a couple hanging in MoMA, and maybe a half-dozen others scattered throughout the Manhattan galleries. I like them even less than Belvedere's stuff. There's no doubt the man who painted them was gifted—the detail in them is remarkable—but most of them resemble covers to bad science fiction novels—Attack of the Dragonfly People; The Ant-Man vs. The Hummingbird Woman. They feel like technical exercises. It's as if, here was this talent waiting for its subject matter.
Rudolph found that subject matter when he was twenty. That was when a copy of the book his Uncle Theo had written came into his possession. I've tried to track it down, but it's notoriously difficult to lay your hands on. Theo had it privately printed, and only a hundred copies at that, so it's one of those books you read about instead of read. From what I can tell, it's something of a cult classic. I'm surprised no one's tried to reissue it. Anyway, based on what people who've read the book have said, Theo's book has to do with cities. He had this idea that, once a city reaches a certain size, it comes to life. I don't mean metaphorically; I mean, they achieve consciousness. He uses all this bizarre math to show how this happens. Apparently, the size and shape of the buildings play into it. So does where they're placed in relation to one another. After a city becomes aware, it seeks to manifest that consciousness, which Theo claimed it does through a variety of avatars—apparently, he catalogued a dozen different shapes in which a city can express itself, each more bizarre than the last.
Theo's book captivated Rudolph's imagination. His friends and acquaintances grew used to the sight of him tucked away in a corner, his uncle's book open on his lap, him studying it intently. Theo had had the volume printed and bound on the cheap, and it wasn't long before Rudolph's copy was falling apart. He taped the covers together with some kind of heavy-duty builder's tape, and wound the whole thing around with twine and rubber bands. When it came to who could look at the book, Rudolph was extremely guarded. Once the book was falling apart, this was easy enough to understand, but even before that, he would snap it closed whenever anyone approached. One person—a woman he tried to seduce after he'd emptied a couple of bottles of wine at a party—convinced him to let her have a peek—I can't imagine what she must have been wearing to make him agree, but agree he did. She said the pages he opened to were a mess. The margins were crammed full of Rudolph's handwriting and drawings. He had circled words and phrases in the text and drawn lines between them, as if he were constructing his own text within his uncle's. This woman said that, when she reached out to touch the book, Rudolph slammed it shut and stormed out of the party without another word. Seduction over.
As was lunch. I left the dishes in the sink and headed back to the library. I couldn't bear the thought of a staring at myself in the monitor for the rest of the afternoon, so I scooped up the pile of print-outs and took them to the couch.
Rudolph had always been productive. Under the influence of Theo's book, he exploded, tossing off completed paintings like there was no tomorrow. One critic said it was as if Rudolph knew he wasn't long for this world, and was trying to fit a lifetime's worth of work into a few years. Had he lived to be sixty, this still would have been a lot. Much of it's the same. In painting after painting, Rudolph illustrates his uncle's central conceit, going from the southern tip of Manhattan to the northern in the process. There are about a hundred of these paintings. They're executed in the same, quasi-abstract geometric style, some a little more abstract, some a little more concrete. They're sufficiently detailed for you to identify each painting's subject, and they're sufficiently stylized for you to pick up on the underlying shapes structuring each piece. There is something impressive about Rudolph's desire to show Theo's ideas playing out up and down the island—at least in theory. In reality, it's painting after painting of this building, then that building, then another building, all of them bleeding a gray-white fog that coalesces into cryptic shapes—Theo's city-avatars. One critic speculated that, if you were to place all of these canvases side by side, you'd see a vast shape—the soul of the city—forming out of them.
Once he had completed this series, Rudolph began moving in other directions; specifically, he started to write. One of his acquaintances stapled together a bunch of mimeographed pages every other week or so that he called Dionysia: An Expression of Culture and tried to charge people a dime for. Rudolph gave him these short, one-to-two-page essays full of typos that the guy pretty much printed as is. The first one had the title "Locimancy," which I don't think is especially good Greek but which was supposed to mean "place magic." Eighteen more followed, all with the same name—the editor was the one who added a number to each to distinguish it from the previous essay. Rudolph was not what you would call a gifted prose-stylist. All that missed school came back to haunt him. He writes what we used to call "Engfish," that kind of English college freshmen tend to use when they're trying to sound smart enough for the rhetorical situation. He's positively eighteenth century in his use of capital letters. Not to mention, what he's trying to express sounds, by and large, insane.
He spends the first couple of essays rehashing his uncle's book. Having laid out the basics of Theo's thought, Rudolph then spends three essays pointing out the flaws in those ideas. For him, there are two problems with Theo's book. One, it thinks too big. It doesn't realize that there's no need, as Rudolph puts it, "to lift our Eyes so High to witness such Grand Processes." Two, it scants artists, especially in their role as "Midwifes" of the Grand Process. Essays six through eighteen are a kind of speculative crash-course in how the artist can "Quicken" a place. They're a mix of circular logic and impossible mathematical formulae. The sentences say things like, "As they Give of themselfs to the Work, therefore shall the Work Give them back Themselfs." The math literally does not add up. I read someone who said that it's as if Rudolph is using the math symbols we know to express his own set of concepts, but my first impression was, the equations were the equivalent of Rudolph's style, attempts to make him seem smarter than he was. After all, who was going to call him on it? How many artists can do math? Or sorcery, for that matter?
The last essay in the series is half-finished, or so the theory goes—it's even less coherent than the others. It's a warning about the ideas he's just outlined that seems to be trying to make the previous essays appear more important by stressing how dangerous they are. At the same time, Rudolph can't resist bragging about how there are places that demonstrate the truth of everything he's said and more. He warns his readers to avoid "the Crooked House" in Red Hook, and cautions against waiting alone at the Eighty-second Street subway platform.
No one knows whether Thomas Belvedere read any or all of Rudolph's essays, but I'm willing to bet that, if Rudolph didn't send him copies with his letters, then the letters themselves expounded his ideas. What Belvedere did see was the first of Rudolph's paintings to come out of these essays, a piece Rudolph also called Locimancy. I gather the canvas is pretty big, about six feet high by eight long. On it, he painted a cross-section of the apartment he and his mother shared with her second-cousin, rearranging the space slightly so that the living room sits at the center of the picture. At the center of the center, there's a man, Rudolph's copy of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man—you know, the naked man with his arms and legs stretched out one way inside a circle, the other inside a square. Rudolph includes the circle and square with his copy, which is pretty faithful, except for the face, which he's replaced with his own. The figure is too big for the apartment; proportionally, he's a giant. Rudolph maintains the parchment color of da Vinci's drawing, inside the circle and square, so that you're looking at this reasonably cheerful mid-twentieth-century interior with a faded-yellow heart. The effect—it's as if Rudolph painted around da Vinci's original. There's one other change he makes to da Vinci. Where the figure's eyes and genitals should be, there are three black holes, as if he'd cut those sections out of the canvas.
If you were willing to stretch the point, you could argue for similarities between a painting like this and what Magritte and Dali were doing, but Rudolph had almost nothing in common with the figures who were already dominating American art, Pollock and de Kooning, Motherwell. The only reason—well, not the only reason, but the principle reason Locimancy was included in the show where Belvedere first saw it was that the gallery owner had a thing for Rudolph's mother. Most of the contemporary reviews fail to mention the picture at all. The couple that do, dismiss it as an inexplicable lapse on the part of the organizer.
All of which made it more interesting that Belvedere should have been so taken with the painting. With the exception of Rudolph de Castries's work, Thomas Belvedere's interests and influences are fairly conventional. He'd been infatuated with Picasso, only to reject him as too facile, unwilling to pursue any one style far enough to produce anything truly profound—the quality he claimed to find in Pollock's gigantic swirls. You get the impression, though, that Belvedere admired the quality more than he did the pieces he claimed to find them in. At heart, I think, he was uncomfortable with how far away from the figural Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists strayed. In Rudolph's work, Belvedere must have seen not so much an answer, but the means to an answer.
Nor did it hurt that, once Belvedere was in regular correspondence with Rudolph, Rudolph was advising him to leave the wife and kids who had become more of a burden than Belvedere had anticipated. There's nothing like being told exactly what you want to hear to cement a friendship, is there? If you believed Viola, though, there was more to it than that. Something about Rudolph's ideas spoke to Belvedere. I guessed it was his artist-as-shaman bit—most artists are suckers for that kind of line. I also guessed that, over the summer Belvedere had spent in Huguenot, he had done his best to put Rudolph's ideas into practice.
He would have learned how to do so in the sixth "Locimancy" essay, most of which is taken up with a diagram that sort of resembles the star you put on top of a Christmas tree—there are all these irregular points constructed in precise ratios to one another. Line A is two-thirds longer than Line B, which is three-fifths Line C, and so on. You graph this design onto the space you want to awaken—maybe I should say "into" the place. You work out all the necessary dimensions, then perform a number of gestures at each of the star's points. There's an order you're supposed to follow—first point 13, then point 3, etc.—and you're supposed to complete the ritual within twelve hours. At the end, you go to your easel—strategically positioned, of course—pick up your brush, and start painting. The gestures that are required at each of the star's thirty-one points—sip from a glass of red wine, bow to the left, the right, the earth, the heavens—were simple and repetitious enough to have the feel of the sacred. I could believe that, having gone through the entire process, you would approach your canvas like a priest approaching his altar.
The problem with Rudolph's design is that there's no baseline. Although he tells you what relation the parts of his star must have to one another, he never specifies its proportions relative to the place it's supposed to be awakening. Do you construct it in one room, or do you use the entire building, or do you need the space around the building, too? It's completely self-referential. The "True Artist" will know what to do with the tools Rudolph has given him—which struck me as so much ass-covering. Thomas Belvedere lucked out—either that, or he was a True Artist.
My headache, which had kept its distance for the better part of the afternoon, finally surrendered around the time I heard Roger pass the library on his way downstairs to order dinner. Funny—there was a time when the prospect of being able to order out for your meal every night would have struck me as the lap of luxury. Now, the prospect of another assortment of aluminum-foil dishes and white cardboard boxes seemed almost unbearably depressing. I left the library and hurried after Roger, but he was gone. He'd taken the car and gone to place his order in person. For a moment, I considered returning to the second floor to read more about Rudolph, then decided I had had enough of his over-heated prose for the time being. Instead, I poured myself a glass of white wine and went outside to sit on the front step and drink it.
The evening was hot, the air tropically humid. Walking out the front door was like walking into a cloud of steam. As I passed through the doorway, there was another sensation—as if the doorway had been stretched tight with some kind of gauze. It was like when you're out walking and you blunder into a spiderweb. I brushed my arms, neck. There was nothing on them. The feeling that there was, however, that there was something all over me, persisted. More weirdness, I thought, terrific. The sensation wasn't as bad as it sounds—not quite—the heat and humidity definitely had the edge—but it wasn't pleasant, either. If I'd been claustrophobic, this would have been worse. As it was, I was mostly annoyed. No doubt the experience would cease the moment I walked back into the house, but I had come out here to sit and enjoy my drink, and by God, that was what I intended to do. I plopped myself down and raised the glass to my lips. I could still taste the wine, at least.
There was one last wrinkle to Rudolph de Castries's story, and as the sweat raised itself through what now felt like a film all over me, I considered it. At the very end, about a month before he dropped dead, Rudolph made a series of strange—but given his theories, potentially significant—remarks. Most of them were to random strangers met at this or that party; although a couple were to a guy he was working with at a laundry. Only one was recorded reasonably soon after he spoke it—the young woman to whom Rudolph said, "Mirrors hold more than reflections. There are corners in them around which we do not—we dare not—see," recorded his remark in a letter to a friend the same night, so her report is considered fairly accurate. None of the others saw the light of day for almost another two decades, when the first biography was being researched, and questions remain about their authenticity. That said, apparently Rudolph told several people that he had not understood his own ideas. His co-worker from the laundry claimed Rudolph spent weeks talking about hidden folds and creases that concealed "relentless depths." That was Rudolph's word, the co-worker said, "relentless." It sounded pretty Freudian to me, and I was half-inclined to believe the critic who'd speculated that Rudolph's remarks hinted at an illicit relationship with his mother's second cousin. Other critics didn't give the statements nearly as much credence. Some wrote them off as essentially invented; while those who did accept them dismissed them as the products of a brain severely damaged by alcohol.
It was those corners, those folds and creases and their depths, that concerned me as I drank my wine. Assuming you could believe the reports, in the weeks leading up to his death, Rudolph had learned something about his ideas. For reasons unknown, he'd seen them in a different light, understood new implications to them. If he'd been speaking metaphorically, that could have been the significance of the corners and creases, tropes for his own blindspots to his theories. The question I was interested in was, What if he hadn't been talking in code? What if what you saw was what you got?
I found it hard to answer that question, however, because the sensation of something clinging to my skin was worsening. It had crept up on me as I was thinking. It was as if I were wrapped in fine plastic, my sweat pooling under it, my fingers cupping the wineglass through it. The feeling extended to my mouth—the tang of the wine seemed mixed with another taste, as if my teeth and tongue were coated with an oily film—even my eyes saw the lawn and street as if through a pair of dirty contacts. Everything had acquired a slight haze. Although I'd already done so without result, I wiped my hand on my arm, almost expecting to watch a layer of something like cling-film tear and come off on my fingers. Nothing. I could breathe, hear—though air and sound seemed delayed, as if they were coming from farther away.
The house—my awareness of the house, the thousand threads that wove my nerves into its walls and windows, had changed. Instead of that sense of the house just beyond the edges of my skin, now it seemed to press against me.
Not panicking was taking more of an effort. Everything in front of me, grass, trees, road, the house across the road, was surrounded by haze—a kind of mist shot through with rainbow streaks—the way things are when you're trying to see through a window that hasn't been cleaned properly. My skin was growing hot—hotter, as if the substance coating it were heating. Breathing was harder. The air seemed thick, almost liquid. Wineglass in hand, I struggled to my feet and walked down the front steps and out across the yard.
I know. Why did I go that way? Why not turn around and run back inside? I don't know. That was just the direction my feet took me. No, that isn't right. It was more a case of when I stood, I had a momentary impression of—of weight, of tremendous heaviness on the other side of the membrane—inside the house. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before, and standing on the front step seemed like standing much too close to it.
By the time I'd put fifty feet between myself and the front steps, I was sucking in air like an asthmatic in the middle of a bad attack. My skin was roasting, as if a great heat-lamp had been focused on me. And the haze—the haze had become clouds of color washing over the scene in front of me. The effect was most pronounced around the house, from which rivers, waterfalls, geysers of color streamed out. Scraps of rainbow chased one another up the walls, over the doors, across the windows. There was something else on the windows—there and gone so fast the only way to see it was to remember and slow down the memory. There, on the front parlor windows, Roger's face had been frozen in anger, the way it had been when he'd cursed Ted. There, on the living room windows, had been Ted, in Afghan dress, carrying his rifle, walking down a dark street. The windows to the library had shown streets I didn't recognize, what might have been desert landscapes. The third-floor windows—I couldn't remember—my eyes traveled up the house, trying to catch another glimpse, and I saw the mountains.
Towering over the house, the yard, steep, grooved slopes rising to stark crests—I'm not much good at estimating heights, but these things were huge. They weren't like the Ridge. These were more like the Catskills, enormous stone pyramids worn down by the millennia. With all the color loose in the air, it was hard to tell their exact shade, but I thought it was sand-colored, tawny. They were—you know how it is with mountains. They're there. They hold their space the way nothing else does—well, maybe the ocean. The late-afternoon sun cast shadows left to right across their slopes, highlighting the snow dusting their summits. I didn't forget to breathe, but for a long moment, that ever-more-difficult process was far away. I could feel them—not the same way I could the house—these were too much for one person to take in like that—but enough to know that they were alive. Or something—they were full of energy, humming with it like great dynamos. Whether they were mountains that were living, or something else that appeared as mountains, I couldn't say, but my apprehension that they were more than rock was completely wonderful and utterly terrifying. It was the feeling I'd had on that long-ago whale watch with my dad, only magnified ten times, fifty times. I couldn't run from them—where was there to run from things like this? I half-felt I should fall down and hide my head in reverence.
A car door slammed. The special-effects show I was the center of stopped—blinked out like a popped bubble. The rainbow haze, the images on the windows, the heat baking my skin, the air too thick to breathe—not to mention the root cause of all of them, the invisible film coating me—fled, exorcised by the sharp clap of metal meeting metal. I bent over, gulping air. When I straightened, Roger was striding across the lawn to me, his expression a struggle between concern and annoyance. I tried to speak, but was too busy taking air in to spare any for explanations. The mountains were still there. Only long enough for me to verify that, yes, they were sand-colored, and then I was staring at the empty sky. Roger said, "What? What is it?"
"I—"
"You what? Are you all right?"
I shook my head side to side.
"What's wrong?"
The best I could do was shake my head again.
"You've seen something, haven't you?" He might have been accusing me of a particularly distasteful crime.
I nodded.
"Another vision of Ted? Of what you think is Ted?"
I shook my head. "No," I said. "Mountains. I saw mountains."
"Mountains?" Roger said. "What mountains? What did they look like?"
"Tall," I said, "sandy. There," I added, pointing to sky behind the house.
"Like the Himalayas?"
"I don't know," I said, "I guess."
Roger gestured toward the line of Frenchman's Mountain. "Not like that?"
"Definitely not."
"My God," he said, "I think you've seen something."
"Do you?" I said, finally finding my voice. "What was it that clued you in? Was it when I said I'd seen something, or was it that part about me seeing something?"
"I mean something important," Roger said. "Come inside—I'll show you." He turned and strode toward the house, ignoring the car and our dinner in his haste. I followed more slowly, stopping at the car to retrieve the brown paper bag on the front passenger seat. Funny, the things that seem important to you. Inside, I deposited the take-out on one of the tables in the hallway and trailed upstairs.
Roger was in his office, standing over the futon to the left. Do you know, for all the times I'd stood outside this room during the wee small hours, I hadn't seen it during the day for weeks? When I'd been here in the a.m., I'd been too occupied watching Roger study his strange map to attend to the rest of the office. It wasn't substantially different from before—the changes I noticed were by and large ones of degree. The bookcases and walls were hung with more maps, more points on which were connected to one another by pieces of thread. Roger had started using different-colored thread. I couldn't tell what each color signified. The tabletop model had gained an extra layer of buildings on all sides, as well as a new group of figures meant to be attackers. There were pictures scattered around it, three-by-fives that appeared to be of Kabul—a few showed American troops in close-up.
"Here," Roger said, ducking his head under a thread as he advanced holding an oversized book out to me. It was open to a two-page spread of mountains. I took the book from him and studied the image. "That was what you saw," he said.
"Could be." I wasn't sure. The photograph showed a cluster of mountains that looked approximately like what I'd seen filling the sky—same worn outline, same grooves carved into the sides, same dull yellow color—but there was something missing from it.
"Those are the Asmai Mountains," Roger said. "From the spot where Ted was killed, they are visible in the distance—if you look straight down the street on which his patrol was traveling, you can see them."
The sensation of life—of energy—that was what the photo lacked. "So you think this is a message from Ted?"
"I 'think' nothing. It can be nothing else."
"Maybe," I said, handing the book back to him. "I wonder why you didn't see them."
"I wasn't here," Roger said, returning the book to a pile on the futon. "Obviously, there was only a certain time at which Ted could communicate with us, and when that moment arrived, he had to send his communiqué, regardless of who was there to receive it."
"You mean, even if it was only me."
"I didn't—"
"Never mind," I said. "I find it interesting that you're willing to believe me on this, but you won't believe any of what really matters."
"It isn't that I don't believe you saw something in the restaurant," Roger said, "I don't agree with your interpretation of what you saw. I'm sure it isn't right. It can't be. Don't you see? What you've just seen proves that Ted isn't a monster—that he's continuing to reach out to us."
"That wasn't exactly what I had in mind," I said. "For what it's worth, whatever I saw out there proves nothing one way or the other—except maybe that Ted was involved in it." I held up my hand to block his reply. "What I meant was, you have no problem crediting my viewing mountains on the other side of the globe, but you can't accept that I saw you making your deal in the police cell."
"This again? My Faustian bargain? What will it take for you to abandon this nonsense?"
"Your admitting to it would be nice," I said, "but I'm willing to settle for you lifting the curse."
He crossed his arms. "I have told you already, I am not going to do that. It is a matter of principle. I refuse to validate your representation of me as some type of fiend."
"Even if it saves your son?"
"It will not save Ted. Its sole purpose is my humiliation." Roger pushed past me out of the room. "If you will excuse me, I am going down to dinner."
I went to call after him that I'd brought it in, then thought better of it. If he didn't notice the bag sitting on the hall table, let him search the car for it. Picturing the confusion on his face as he felt under the seats gave me more pleasure than it should have.
I wanted a look at the photos around the model. They were sprinkled with a fine layer of dirt—no doubt taken from or near the place where Ted had died. There were maybe two-dozen pictures, about half of which were of Kabul—including six that showed the square where the ambush had occurred. Judging from the scorch marks and bullet holes decorating the buildings, the photos post-dated the attack. The last picture in the series showed a shallow depression at its center; it took me a second to pick up on the charred ground and process that this was it, this was the spot where Ted had been torn apart by the RPG. Do you know, despite what I'd seen within the last hour, the picture of that scoop out of the earth, that burnt emptiness, was more deeply shocking than any of it? It was like, here was the thing itself—here was death in all its brute simplicity. Roger had lined up that picture, I saw, with the spot on the model where the figures of Ted and the old man jostled for space with the grenade fragment inside the red circle.
The remaining pictures were of young men I was reasonably sure were other members of Ted's squad. Unlike the photos of the city, which appeared to have been taken all on the same day, the shots of the soldiers went back months. Some guys were in full dress uniform, others in fatigues, still others dressed as Afghans. I didn't know any of their faces. I wondered if Roger did, if he'd recognized them from his and Joanne's visits to Ted's bases. Whether he knew them or not, I was certain that, were I to flip over any of the pictures, I'd find not only their names, but every last bit of information about them and their relationship to Ted that Roger had been able to cram into the space.
On my way out of the office, I paused at the photo of the place where Ted's life had come to an end. Here was the blank spot at the center of things. Without it, the square was just a square, the soldiers just soldiers. With it, the square became a site of loss, the soldiers a company of the grieving.
I also paused to study Roger's doorway map, more crowded with notations than ever. The newer ones were so small it was difficult to read them, but roughly half appeared to be notes on the history of the place. These went back several hundred years, but Roger had employed a personal shorthand that rendered everything except the dates impossible to decipher. The other half of the new notes looked like astrological symbols. I'd never paid much attention to those kinds of things, but I was pretty sure I recognized the symbols for the moon and the crab, Cancer, as parts of short, apparently nonsensical equations. I thought I'd seen this kind of math on more elaborate horoscopes—they had something to do with the positions of the planets—or the stars—or both. The shorthand history and the astrological calculations had been written in gold ink. The center of the map, that white circle with Ted's old mirror inside it, remained pristine.
As I walked down the stairs to join Roger, an unpleasant comparison occurred to me: Roger's doorway map reminded me of Rudolph de Castries's misshapen star design. The comparison wasn't exact—the second I made it, I was aware of all the things they didn't have in common. Rudolph's design was meant to be realized in three-dimensional space; Roger's appeared confined to the page. Rudolph employed a definite, if irregular, shape; although there was that circle at the center of Roger's map, what appeared to be the point of it, the endless accumulation of detail, didn't seem arranged in any pattern. Rudolph's star was intended to establish certain points at which you would perform further actions; Roger's map was an end in and of itself.
Somehow, though, those differences didn't seem as pronounced as I wanted them to. What was more important—more significant—was the way they both tried to shape space, to identify and delimit the edges of certain events. I don't know. Phrased this way, the similarity sounds as if it was more about me than it was about them. I was reasonably sure Roger hadn't been studying the writings of Rudolph de Castries. If he had, he'd have produced a different map. I'd already asked him about the map; he'd already explained its purpose—and admitted to not understanding why he'd glued Ted's old mirror to the map. If I were to ask him about the latest information he'd added, I knew he would attribute it to his ongoing desire to understand the circumstances of Ted's death in all possible dimensions, including their relation to such larger contexts as the square's history and the position of the heavens.
That last one, though—I mean, it was at least evidence that Roger's obsession was running way out of hand. As if the rest of it hadn't been. I know. In the interest of fairness, I asked him about it over the take-out he'd ordered from the diner. He gave me the answer I'd anticipated, in pretty much the exact words. He was suspicious. Now that I had revealed what I'd see him do—excuse me, what I thought I'd seen him do—everything I said had to be examined for hidden meaning. He ended his explanation with, "What makes you ask?"
"Just curious," I said. "You have to admit, astrology isn't the first reference point you'd choose."
"It wasn't." Touché.
"How did you start?"
"Why?"
"For God's sake, Roger, stop acting like I'm the bad cop and you're the suspect. I'm asking because I want to know. If you don't want to tell me, then say so."
He was silent, chewing his Monte Cristo. Then he said, "I could not find an adequate map. As you will have noticed, you can order a great variety of maps, including satellite pictures. But I could not locate a map that showed me the site where Ted's patrol had been ambushed in sufficient detail, so I decided I would have to draft my own. I began with the location where he had died, and worked outward from there. After I had established the locations and dimensions of the square's buildings, the map still felt—incomplete, full of large, vacant spaces. I suppose you might say my decision to use those spaces to record the specifics of Ted's death was motivated as much by aesthetics—or something approximating aesthetics—as anything.
"Having listed the facts I had, there was still too much white space visible. If I thought about the event mathematically, however, there was plenty left to write. I switched inks and began listing those facts. Along the way, I learned a few more details about what you might call the written side of things and added them. Once I was finished with the math, there was less blank paper to see; less, but still too much. Especially inside the circle I had drawn around the spot where Ted had died—the first thing I had done once I'd established the spot's exact coordinates. All manner of information crowded the circle's circumference, but from the start I would not intrude on it.
"Finally, I recalled Ted's old shaving mirror. I sought it out and added it to the map. For a few days, I was so pleased with my decision that I left the map alone. I attempted to ignore the map, focused on reading and sending off inquiries via snail- and e-mail. No matter how much work I did, however, how tired I was at the end of the day, the map drew my attention to itself—those white patches seemed as large as ice-fields. I started to cast around for other information, turning first to the square's history—what I should call its deep history, as opposed to the more recent events I'd explored—and second to its astrology—as I've said, not in the interest of fortune telling, but as another way to fix what happened to Ted.
"And yes, before you diagnose, I am well aware that Freud would view my activity as the most elaborate kind of sublimation. Because an action can be interpreted one way, though, does not mean it must be. While such was not my conscious intent, I believe I may have been constructing what the Tibetans call a spirit map."
Here we were with the Tibetans again. "Which is?"
"A chart of the course a spirit takes when it exits this world and enters the bardo. Its purpose is to project the spirit's path as best as possible, in order to guide the prayers of those left behind."
"What's next?"
"What do you mean?"
"For your spirit map. You've approached Ted's death in terms of immediate and longer-term history, of science and superstition. What's next?"
"As yet, I'm uncertain. I have not exhausted either the square's history or its astrological dimensions."
I nodded. "What are you praying for?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You said the purpose of a spirit map is to help direct the prayers of the bereaved. I'm curious as to what this map has told you."
"I don't think about it in those terms—not exactly. I don't engage in formal prayers—I suppose you might say I view my work as my prayer. You know the goal of that work: to see Ted at peace."
"And you won't consider—"
"No," Roger said. "I don't know why you insist on returning to this subject." He stood and carried his dishes to the sink.
"Because I think it'll help," I said to his back.
"You're wrong."
"How do you know? What do you have to lose by trying?"
"It's not a question of what I have to lose. It's what I have to gain, which is nothing." He finished rinsing his dishes, set them on the dishrack, and turned to leave. He said, "Must you continue to raise this topic at every chance you get? Can't you give me some peace?" Before I could reply, he left the kitchen.
Talk about touching a nerve. Melodramatic exits were becoming Roger's specialty. He couldn't see it was a case of methinks the lady doth protest too much. There was a possibility I was mistaken, but with every angry denial, Roger solidified my belief that I was onto something big.
Unfortunately, it was a big something I had no idea what to do with. I mean, I couldn't very well lift the curse for Roger—I was pretty sure the marriage bond didn't extend that far. Each time I raised the possibility of his doing so seemed to push Roger that much further in the opposite direction. I carried my dishes to the sink and, when I was done with them, walked into the living room.
There was more for me to read about Rudolph de Castries, if I chose. There were at least ten possibly relevant articles online. I didn't choose, though. I had had my fill of the bizarre for one day. I clicked on the TV, and there was the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter just beginning. Have I mentioned how much I hate that film? I'm sure I must've. I swear, you and I could not have made more of a hash of that novel if we'd tried. You would think that a novel that's lasted a hundred and fifty years might have something going for it, but, oh no, not when it comes to Hollywood! Sorry. I could rant like this for hours. What a waste! What a waste of a great cast! All that money—wasted! If I wanted a distraction, I could ask for no better, and with Roger safely out of earshot, I was free to yell at the screen all I wanted. I set the remote on the couch beside me, and settled in for two hours of travesty.
During that time, as I was watching Demi strip naked yet again—as if her body could make us forget the compete lack of anything resembling a coherent script—and Robert Duvall off among the Indians—because someone had seen Dances with Wolves one too many times—I'm not sure whether I was aware of the house. In retrospect, it seems I must have been. Things were accelerating—I didn't know it sitting there on the couch, but Roger and I had less than twenty-four hours before our drama played itself out. The fat lady wasn't on stage yet, but she was practicing her scales in the wings. For as engaged as I was with the film—and that was pretty engaged; you know how involved you can become with something you actively despise—I must have registered the house's shifting. How could I not have?
The subtle changes I had sensed during my swoon the previous week had become more overt. The places where I had felt the house thinning were now thinned, opening directly onto the long tunnels I'd sensed on the other side of them. What was more, the rest of the house was also thinning. I mean, every last wall was yielding itself to an opening, to another of the tunnels that felt as if they'd been made of emptiness. It was as if, on the level where this stuff made its impression, the house as house was being replaced by the house as conjunction, as crossroads for all these long, blank corridors—if you'd tried to draw what was happening, you'd have come up with some kind of cubist conglomeration of tubes running in and out of one another. The house around me had converged with the house I'd seen when I lost the baby, all those doorways. No matter how incensed I was, yet again, by the battle between the Puritans and the Indians, I must have felt the house disappearing around me.
Rising from the couch, however, as the credits rolled, all I was interested in was going to bed. No surprise—the day's excitement had left me drained. There was a second when I thought I might have felt something—when my connection to the house might have flashed across my skin, and those cold corridors rippled over me—but, if the shiver I gave wasn't the result of fatigue, its cause was nowhere near as intense as what I'd been through that afternoon—really, as my normal awareness of the house—so I chalked it up to exhaustion. I closed up shop downstairs, and headed to bed, the movie's ending, which subverts everything the book stands for, burning in my mind. I wondered if anyone had written an article responding to the film—scratch that, I wondered how many articles had been written in response to the film. I pushed open the bedroom door, and to my surprise found Roger already there, in bed and fast asleep, snoring quietly. One day back from the Cape, and our routine had reasserted itself so strongly I had been expecting to be long unconscious before Roger slipped into bed beside me. Our continuing argument notwithstanding, I was less unhappy to find him here than I would have expected.
Had anyone asked, I would have said I hadn't the slightest intention of leaving the bed for Roger's nightly sleepwalk. I hadn't the night before, and he'd been fine. I needed rest, and although the sight of him under the covers had given my heart an unexpectedly pleasant lift, I was still pretty pissed at him. When the mattress shifted at three, however, and I swam up out of my dreams, my anger was slow to follow. It didn't catch up with me until I had pursued Roger down the stairs and out the front door.
Summer night or not, it was cold. The damp grass shocked my feet, and I wished I'd taken a sweatshirt with me. The breath steamed from my mouth. My teeth chattered. This is what you get, my anger told me as it arrived. You could be warm in bed right now.
I could have been, but my curiosity had awakened, too, and for the time being, it hurried me after Roger. He was striding around the house to my left, taking big, exaggerated steps like a kid playing at being an adult. He completed three and a quarter circuits of the house, counterclockwise, at a pace just short of a run, then stood, panting white clouds. As I approached him, I saw his face shining with sweat. He was shivering, too. The air was colder still; although I was warm from having played Roger's version of ring-around-the-house, I could feel the heat emptying from the air. Grass crunched under my feet, brittle with—yes—frost. Roger was staring intently at the stretch of lawn behind the house. It's a relatively narrow strip that ends in a line of tall, skinny pine trees. I wasn't sure what we were doing here, what this spot's connection to Ted was. I supposed the two of them could have practiced throwing or batting the baseball here. With the house's enormous south lawn available to them, though, it was hard to see why they would've chosen this place. I tried to follow Roger's gaze. Nothing.
I did a double take. Nothing was right. He was looking into solid blackness. Where you should have been able to see the silhouettes of a dozen pine trees, the distant lights of cars moving along 32 winking among their branches, there was unbroken dark. At first, I assumed it was because of the hour. There must be a lull in traffic; the businesses along the road must be closed. Including the all-night gas station? That wasn't right. There should have been some light visible. But no—about five yards from Roger and me, the lawn was truncated by blackness like denser night. That was the source of the cold. The grass nearest it wasn't frosted; it was frozen, locked in ice. The line of dark reached straight up from the ground. I craned my head back, and I couldn't see the stars in that part of the sky. It was as if someone had hung a giant curtain behind the house. I'd been more scared this afternoon, laboring to breathe through whatever had covered my mouth, and the mountains looming over the house had been more starkly impressive, overpowering—all the same, facing such pure blackness was unnerving. I don't know how you feel about being in the dark—I mean total darkness, the absolute absence of light. I guess some people are okay with it, but the mere thought of it makes my heart race, the back of my neck prickle. I drew closer to Roger.
Without taking his eyes off the black curtain, he said, "There it is."
No reply came to me. Roger didn't wait for one. He said, "It's something, isn't it?"
I couldn't help myself. I said, "What is it?"
He didn't answer right away, and I assumed he hadn't heard me. I could feel the darkness, out beyond the edges of my senses, the way you'd feel a feather flutter by the air it sent toward your skin. My impression of it as a curtain had been on target. It was huge, but it was also thin, so thin it was barely there. There was something beyond—a space like another room in the house—
"It's mine," Roger said.
"What?"
"Me."
"You're yours?" Why does dream logic have to sound like an old Abbot and Costello routine?
"It's mine."
"Oh," I said, "you mean this." I don't know why I pointed.
"Me."
"It's yours and it's you."
"Where's my boy?"
"Ted?"
"We're supposed to work on his slider." He paused. "He never comes to see me, anymore."
I didn't know where the conversation, such as it was, had just gone. I said, "Ted?"
He turned to me. His gaze was blind. "Do you know my boy?"
"Not really."
"He used to be so good." Roger sighed. "We used to have such a time together. Not anymore." He shook his head.
"What happened to him?"
"He died."
On impulse, I asked, "How did he die?"
"I locked him away. Threw away the key, as they say. Then he died."
"And he's still locked away?"
Roger didn't answer. I looked away from him, and the darkness moved, belled forward and fell back on itself as if a breeze had passed along it. In that movement, I thought I saw a shape—I couldn't tell if it was on the blackness, or behind it. It was—I dropped my eyes as fear made my stomach clench. It was Ted—no mistaking him.
Roger shrugged. "I have to assume. He won't tell me anything. He won't speak to me at all."
The briefest glance I could manage showed Ted more definite. I wanted to flee, run back inside, but my legs wouldn't do what I told them. Through chattering teeth, I said, "Roger, Ted—"
Suddenly, Roger was shouting. "Where is he? What have you done with him? Where is my little boy? Where is my little boy? Where is my little boy?"
I thought he'd wake himself. He didn't. I lurched forward, grabbed his arms, and shook him. "Roger!" I said. "Wake up, Roger, wake up. It's just a dream. It's just a dream."
There was a long moment during which he continued shouting, "Where is my little boy?" I threw my arms around him, repeating, "It's just a dream; it's just a dream." His body was electric. I was afraid he'd keep shouting till my ears bled—that, or one of the neighbors called the cops. Then, in mid-yell, his voice fell off and he relaxed against me. I kept on with my "It's just a dream," until I heard him saying, "Veronica? What? Are we outside?"
"You were sleepwalking," I said into his chest.
"I was—why are you holding onto me? What happened?"
"You were upset."
"Upset—over what?"
"Ted."
He tensed. "What about Ted?"
"Never mind."
"What do you mean? What about Ted? What was I so upset about?"
"Roger," I said, "you don't want to know."
Taking me by the shoulders, he pushed me away. Still holding onto me, he said, "I want to know."
I glanced at the place where the black curtain had hung. Of course, it was gone. The fear that had transfixed me was gone, too, elbowed aside by anger. "Why?" I said. "So you can throw up your hands, tell me it isn't true, and run back inside? So you can tell me I don't know what I'm talking about? Forget it, Roger." I pulled free of him and started back around the house.
He caught up to me inside the front door. "Veronica."
"I'm going to bed," I said. "It's ridiculously late."
"Don't," he said. "Don't be so angry with me. I'm only trying—"
"I don't know what you're trying to do," I said, spinning to face him. "You certainly aren't trying to find a way out of this for any of us. You hide up there on the third floor all day, and you know what's wrong—you know what's behind all this—and you know what you have to do, too. But you don't—you wait. Why? Because you're embarrassed—you don't want to admit that you did anything so terrible, so despicable. Well here's a newsflash, Roger: I already know. I already know the depths to which you sunk. There's no point in trying to hide it from me, because I saw it—I saw it firsthand. Which means the only person you're trying to deceive is yourself."
"Wait—"
"Do you want to know what you said to me outside? Do you really? You said that you locked Ted away and threw away the key. What do you suppose that means? You're the esteemed literary critic—you're the one with all the books and articles—how do you interpret that statement? What's its symbolic content?"
"I cannot talk to you when you're like this," Roger said.
"Whatever." This time, I was the one who stormed off.
I wasn't expecting Roger to return to bed. I was reasonably sure I'd hear him pass the door on his way up to his office. It's never too early to indulge your obsessions, right? Five minutes after I turned off the light, though, the door opened. Roger came into the room and settled beside me. Trying to make a point, I knew, which woke the anger that had decided to call it a night right up again. Who knew if Roger was going to sleep? There was no way I was, and how much do you want to bet that was his intention?
If sleep wasn't for me, however, I wasn't going to leave the bed. I could lie here quietly as long as Roger could—longer, with the anger fueling me. The delights of marriage. You know, years ago—I must have been about thirteen—I asked my mother and father what they thought the secret of a successful marriage was. I can't remember why; I think it was for a school project. Anyway, I put the question to the two of them over dinner one night. Right away, Dad said, "Compromise—then give in and do what your mother wants," which made her purse her lips and say, "Honestly."
Mom took longer to respond. When she did, she said, "Don't go to bed angry with one another. No matter how long it takes, stay up and work it out." Dad grunted in surprise and said, "I change my mind. What your mother just said." Lying next to Roger—who either ceased pretending to sleep or had developed a remarkable ability to mimic a snore—I thought about that advice. In the beginning, Roger and I had never gone to bed angry—I mean, there were a few times we hadn't exactly been speaking to one another, but that had been over things like the relative merits of Norman Mailer. Not that those debates weren't important—because they are; I hate people who say, It's all just words, what does it matter?—but compared to what we were in the midst of now, the pros and cons of Ancient Evenings seemed a tad less weighty. The past couple of days—if we went to sleep at the same time, we were as likely as not to be in the middle of an argument—of what I supposed was The Argument. Granted, my parents had done their fair share of going to bed angry—you could tell because one or the other of them slept on the living room couch—to be honest, after they'd had a particularly bitter argument, I used to think it was a race—surreptitious, of course—to see who could make it to the couch first. Mom's advice sounded great, but was sometimes hard to practice.
However nasty the fights between Mom and Dad, though, I'd never felt the same gap between them that yawned between Roger and me. I suppose you could say that I wouldn't have been aware of that kind of distance between my parents—I was too young—but we were pretty tightly knit, even after I morphed into the teenager from hell, and I picked up on a lot. There are moments in every marriage—every relationship—where you realize you aren't going to be able to come to agreement on something; you're going to have to try to move past whatever it is. But this—I didn't know what I—we were going to do about this.
My anger hadn't abated, but fatigue was stealing over me, anyway. At least I'd managed to fake sleep longer than Roger had. I saw that curtain of night in my mind's eye, saw the grass frozen into white angles in front of it. Beyond it, there had been—what? Space—like an enormous room—an auditorium on whose stage a production is about to commence. What play? A cross between A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, or maybe King Lear. Or Night of the Living Dead. The principle actor—well, I would be happy to miss his debut. The thing was—for all that this space had appeared across the yard from the house, the sensation I'd had was that it was another part of it. It was like—this isn't right, not exactly, but it was like that science experiment they have you do when you're a kid, when you put a pencil in a glass of water to study the angle of refraction. What had been on the other side of that blackness had been the house—or part of the house—refracted.
When I consider that I fell asleep after one of that day's events, let alone all of them, it's hard to credit. Show me a giant wall of blackness now, or sudden mountains looming over the house, or let me feel as if I'm coated in some kind of film, and I'd be up for a day, maybe two—I guarantee it. It sounds glib to say you can get used to anything, but let's face it, you can—and what I'd seen and felt that day hadn't been the worst. One moment, I was floating on top of sleep; the next, I was diving down into it.
It's difficult to convey just how normal the following day was. The calm before the storm, you could say—although the weather had been pretty rough already. The eye of the hurricane, then. When we should have been preparing for more wind and rain, we decided to go to the beach, so to speak. That isn't quite true. Throughout that day, I was aware of how still everything was. It was like one of those cheesy old movies where the explorers are going through the jungle, and one of them says, "I don't like it. It's quiet. Too quiet." I wouldn't go so far as to say I had a bad feeling about the silence—it was more a case of, I wasn't sure how to read it. By the time late afternoon rolled around and nothing had happened—I'd been in and out the house a couple of times, once to go to the post office and once to run to Shop Rite, and hadn't seen, heard, smelt, or felt anything even slightly unusual—by the time I was starting to plan dinner, the day's quiet had made me hope—not a lot—that maybe we might have reached the other side of everything. It was a hope that died almost immediately after its birth. Too much had gone on—too much had been set in motion for it all to come to a halt just like that.
In between my excursions, I'd found myself face to face, so to speak, with one of the photos of Ted I'd hung throughout the house—what seemed like a decade ago. It was in the laundry room, where I'd gone in an effort to make a dent in the mountain of dirty clothes heaped on the floor there. If I waited for Roger to get around to it, I'd be naked, and pretty soon at that, so I'd done my best to separate whites from colors and set the washer going. I hadn't brought a book to read while the machine chugged away, nor was there a magazine in easy reach. As I'd killed time debating whether I wanted to run up to the second floor, or go through to the living room and the delights of midday TV, I stumbled across the photograph.
I'd forgotten I'd placed it here. At the sight of it, I sucked in my breath and drew back, blushing as if I'd been discovered spying. The picture was familiar. It was the one of Ted in Afghan dress, looking like the men he was supposed to be fighting, a book—Bleak House—open in his hands. Why I'd selected the laundry room for this photo, instead of, say, the wall outside Roger's office, was a mystery. I leaned in closer to study the picture—carefully, as if I didn't want to disturb it. Ted's face wore the concentrated expression of someone laboring over a difficult, but not unrewarding, task. How hard had reading Dickens been for him? Had he finished the book? The question hadn't occurred to me before. How would you find out the answer to such a thing? Would any of his friends know? Considering that photograph, studying it, it was possible to think of Ted as not unlike one of the returning students you get in Comp 1 or 2 sometimes—someone with a good ten or fifteen years on the average college freshman—someone who'd gone out to see what the world had to offer and now was ready for college. You had to admire someone trying to broaden his horizons—especially by reading Dickens, for God's sake. What had he written on the other side? "Even here, I can't escape this guy."
But as the washer had gurgled and churned, I'd heard Roger saying, "Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg." He might as well have been standing in the laundry room with me. "And when you die, may you know fitting torment." Another voice had accompanied his: that of the thing in the corner—the house—that house that Roger had built, so to speak. "Blood and pain," it whispered, and the words had slithered around the room. Turning away from the picture, I'd departed the laundry room for the idiot comforts of the TV.
Blood and pain, I heard as I stood in the kitchen hours later. They were the kinds of things you sealed covenants with, weren't they? Wasn't that what the priest said during mass, during the consecration: "This is My blood, the blood of the new covenant"? You drank that blood, and you were included in the pact. Pain was part of the deal; there was no blood without pain. The pain authenticated the blood.
Roger spent the day in his office. We passed each other at breakfast, and at lunch, with the bare minimum of conversation—in fact, I don't think we said anything at all during breakfast. On some abstract level, I wasn't happy about that but, really, what was there to say? We were like a pair of actors who can't stop repeating a scene. "Lift your curse." "No!" Exit Roger.
If all of this were a movie, and me its director, this would be the moment where I'd have me reflecting on my marriage. I'd probably have Roger doing so, as well. You'd have a shot of me opening kitchen cabinets and sifting through them, followed by a shot of Roger, picking up a book from his desk and opening it—very symbolic actions—then there would be some kind of scene from earlier in the film—just a snippet, shown slightly out-of-focus to make it clear this is a memory—a mutual memory. I imagine I'd choose the first class I had with him. Why not begin at the beginning, right? From there, we'd alternate among those three locations, the action in each advancing a little more each time. Now I'm running water into a pot, Roger's writing on a legal pad, and we're in bed together. Did I mention there's a song playing on the soundtrack? Of course there is. Something slow, full of anguish, regret, and possibly a string section. If I wanted to be artsy, I'd choose an aria from some opera or another—but you have to expect the studio heads would insist on something more commercially viable. Fine. I'm sure Bryan Adams would be available. By this time, the song would be nearing its guitar solo. I would be slicing tomatoes, Roger would be staring at a map, and the two of us would be standing in front of the judge, holding hands as we recite our vows. There's time for one more set of images, maybe two. You'd show me—first turning off the burner and removing the pot from the stove, then standing looking out the kitchen window, arms crossed, forlorn. Roger would put down his pen, raise his glasses, and we'd see him looking out his office window, arms crossed, forlorn. Parallelism, you understand. As for the memories, the Greatest Hits of Veronica and Roger, Volume 1, what would the last two be? Would you want them to be ambiguous—me watching Roger sleep in his hospital bed; the two of us in the car returning from the Cape—or would you prefer to keep them relatively happy—the waiter setting our main courses in front of us at the Canal House; the two of us walking on the beach? Marriage as a three-minute montage—you want to remind the audience of the good times the protagonists have shared, set them up so that what's coming next has real impact.
None of that would've been inappropriate. All of it happened—we had had good times together—great times together. There were moments I was as happy with Roger as I've ever been, and given the right set of circumstances, I might have indulged in just such a mental movie of our relationship. Except—well, except for everything else, for the other movie advertised on my inner marquee. This one's title was Roger Croydon: The Dark Side—a bit over the top, but essentially on target. I don't have to tell you what scenes it showed.
When you're in a relationship—at first, you can't believe how much you have in common, right? You find similarities all over the place, no matter how much of a stretch they seem to anyone else. He likes the Yankees and you're from New York? It must be fate. That doesn't last for too long. At some point, you start to notice the differences. If you're lucky, either those differences are minor enough to be insignificant—lovable quirks—or they complement each other—the whole "opposites attract" thing. If you're unlucky, those differences become glaring and irreconcilable. What started with you noticing the other person likes to put butter on the bread for their tunafish sandwich ends with one or the other of you packing your things in cardboard boxes you got from the liquor store. When you're fifteen and your boyfriend turns out to be an alien, it's rough. Your world is over; how will you ever love again; blah-blah-blah. When you're twenty-six and you've seen beneath the mask your sixty-five-year-old husband puts on so he can look at himself in the mirror each day, it's a combination of completely depressing and terrifying. I'd known there was a lot to Roger when we got together. He'd been around for longer than I had—a lot longer—and nobody's perfect. But there had been a connection there. I had felt it. We had been inevitable. A consecration of its own, remember? Of course, inevitable doesn't mean eternal, and as I boiled water for the spaghetti that would accompany the vegetable sauce simmering on the stove, I had the sickening thought that maybe I'd—we'd made too much of all this. Maybe Roger and I had never been meant to have anything more than a fling. We might've been together for a couple of years, even, but when all was said and done, we'd been supposed to go our separate ways. If that were the case—
No, I thought, I got pregnant—there was the baby—our baby. And what happened to that child? my inner devil's advocate asked. Your husband sacrificed it to guarantee his revenge on his older son. Quite the candidate for Father of the Year, wouldn't you say?
So why did I stay? Why didn't I pick up my purse and car keys and drive as far away from that house as fast as I could? I mean, that's the question you always ask in these kinds of stories, isn't it? Sooner or later, you say, "Why didn't she leave? Why didn't she get out while she could?" In the film, that's why you have that montage of happy memories—to justify the decision to stay. "Oh, look, she still loves him." As importantly, "He still loves her," so she's making the right decision. I did love Roger—despite everything, the feeling refused to die—but that emotion wasn't foremost in my mind. I wouldn't call what was duty, but it wasn't that far removed from it, sort of a, "You made your bed," sentiment.
Maybe watching that wretched adaptation of The Scarlet Letter the previous night had stirred the idea; although I doubt it. It's one of the things I've always responded to most strongly in Hawthorne's novel, Hester Prynne's refusal to evade the consequences of her decision. She made a choice, and she will accept whatever comes as a result of it. She could run away, she knows that, but that would be dishonest. Speaking as a feminist, I find it one of the most frustrating things about Hester's character. "No," I want to say, "what are you doing? Don't you realize that by doing this you're only propping up a corrupt system? You can leave—go!" But she doesn't go—it's as if, through staying, she owns what happened. I don't want to sound as if I thought, "Gee, I'll be just like Hester." It's more a case of using her example to describe a similar impulse within myself. I'd like to say I stood in the front door with my keys in hand, or even that I made it as far as backing the car out of the driveway. Those would have been more dramatic, wouldn't they? And they'd make it appear I'd struggled more to avoid what was coming next. I didn't, though. Keys and purse remained where they were on the hall table. Instead, I drained the pasta, plated it, and ladled the sauce over it.
As for Roger, I'm not a hundred percent certain, but I'd be willing to bet he spent his day attending to the map by the door. Although the nine sheets of paper that composed it were overcrowded with his handwriting, with letters, numbers, and occult symbols in blue, black, red, green, purple, and gold ink, he would have been unable to see anything but the few remaining white patches—to you or me, barely noticeable; to him, vast empty spaces, ice-fields stretching to the horizon. There was still more research to be done, more facts to be collected. His most recent acquisitions, he'd read three times already. The books he'd had longer he'd half-memorized. He didn't read them so much any more as let his eyes drift across the pages, on the lookout for information—facts, connections—that might have eluded him. The clock was ticking; I was seeing the Asmai Mountains over the house; Ted was near.
What a relief it must have been when a new fact caught his gaze. He must have run to the doorway with it burning in his mind, like a prophet taking dictation from God. Once the detail had been recorded, he would have stood back and admired his work, happy that that much more of the paper's unforgiving whiteness had been occluded. Did his eyes stray to the circle at the center of his construction? To the silver window of the mirror glued there? I imagine him doing his best not to look at it and being unable not to catch a glimpse of his reflection. Did he see anything else in there? In the strip of office shining in the center of the map, did he see a figure standing as if across the room from him? Did he turn, his son's name on his lips?
Shortly after I finished my dinner and put Roger's in the oven to keep warm, the phone rang. I wasn't expecting anyone to call, although I felt a surge of hope that maybe Addie was calling to invite me out for another meal with her and Harlow. She wasn't. I picked up the phone, and heard my mother saying, "Veronica? It's me. It's Mom."
Talk about the last person on earth you would have expected. I mean, since our little chat after my wedding, I literally had not heard from her once. Encounters with the supernatural included, there have been few times in my life I've been speechless. This was one of them.
"Hello?" Mom called. "Is anybody there? Veronica? Are you there?"
"Mom," I said. "Hello."
"You are there," she said. "I was afraid I'd dialed the wrong number—I hate when I do that."
"No," I said, "you dialed the right number."
"I know it's been a long time since we talked," Mom said. "You haven't called me at all—but before you jump down my throat, let me say that I haven't called you, either. I know that. The telephone works both ways. The last time we spoke—I've been very upset about the way that went. You said some very hurtful things to me, when I was only expressing my opinion, which I think I have a right to do as your mother. But I didn't call to argue. All that is past, now, so let's try to put it there. How are you doing?"
"I'm hanging in there," I said, because, really, I hadn't heard from this woman in years, and I'm supposed to open up to her, forget everything she said?
"And—Donald? Your husband—what is his name? I assume you're still married."
"Roger. And yes, we're still married."
"Roger, that's right," she said, as if she hadn't remembered it all along. "He's well?"
"More or less," I said. "To tell you the truth, he's been having kind of a rough time recently."
"Oh? Why is that? His health?"
"His son. He died not that long ago."
She inhaled sharply. "I'm very sorry to hear that. What was it, drugs?"
"A rocket-propelled grenade," I said. "He was in the Army. He was killed in Afghanistan."
"How terrible. Were you close?"
"Not really. But it's done a number on Roger."
"Of course, of course. I can't think of anything worse than losing your child. However much you fuss and fight, you never stop loving them. Please tell him I'm very sorry."
"I will."
"Has he spoken to anyone about it?"
"Just me."
"No one professional?"
"No."
"Encourage him to. After your father died, I was a wreck, I don't mind saying. You weren't any help. You were busy with your own grieving, I know. For a little while, I felt like I was losing my mind. You have no idea how bad it was. At times, I just wanted to join your father. Fortunately, I went to see Father Gennaro and he put me in touch with a very nice nun who did grief counseling. I don't have her number, but I can give you her name."
"That's okay. If he goes, we'll probably use someone local."
"Of course. How about you?"
"I'm coping."
"It must be difficult for you. I've never known anyone in exactly the same situation—we did have a friend who married a widow, but they were both young and her children were young. I'm sure you haven't known what to say. How could you? Do any of your friends have children, yet? You're not pregnant, are you? I assume you would have called me if I'd had a grandchild."
I was this close to telling her about the miscarriage. The information trembled on the tip of my tongue, razor-sharp. I swallowed my phrasing and substituted, "Not yet."
"Are you planning to have children? With your husband's age—how old is he?"
"Sixty-five."
"I thought he was closer to sixty. In that case—well, you need to take that into account. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's no easy job raising a child, let me tell you. You want to be sure you're going to have all the help you can get, for as long as you can get it."
"We're not thinking about it right now."
"It's nice to be a young mother—I was with you, and that let me stay in touch with you much better than a lot of older women."
"How's California?" I asked.
"Very nice. The weather is gorgeous, naturally, although it isn't always perfect. It's very expensive, you won't be surprised to hear that, but I'm fortunate that your father left me very well provided for. Between the death benefit from his job and the life insurance policies, I'm—let's just say I can afford to live out here. I do some work with Aunt Shirley—actually, I've become quite involved in the business. I'm basically her partner; although neither of us puts it that way. The job's given me enough money to take some wonderful vacations. Last year, Bob and I went to Hawaii, and the year before that—"
"Wait a minute. Who's Bob?"
"Bob—what?"
"You just said you went to Hawaii with someone named Bob."
"Did I?"
"Yes, you did. Bob who?"
"Bob Foyle. He's—someone I met. Through your aunt."
"And you're seeing him? What am I saying? You went to Hawaii with him. Of course you're seeing him."
"Bob has been very good to me. He's a travel agent—"
"Thus the trip."
"Is there a problem with me seeing someone? Is there a problem with me being happy?"
"Are you going to marry him?"
"No. I've been married once, and while I loved your father dearly, once was enough. Bob agrees with me—he's divorced—actually, he's been married twice; as he says, 'Two times too many.'"
"You're living together, aren't you?" Talk about things you'd never expect to say to your mother.
"I don't see that that's any business of yours."
"Which is tantamount to an admission. Oh my God."
"It's not as if we could get married, even if we wanted to. Bob's looked into it, and he could have his first marriage annulled—he was very young—but the Church won't do anything about the second. And I refuse to be married in a civil ceremony. How tacky."
Thanks, Mom. "So you decided you'd just move in together."
"I don't know what you're getting so upset about, Veronica. Everybody does it, these days. It's the way of the world."
"Is that what you'd tell Dad?"
"As long as I don't marry anyone else, I don't think your father will care."
I laughed. "It's funny. I used to worry that Dad would have been disappointed in me, in the choices I'd made. After this, though—"
"Oh, he would have been."
"Excuse me?"
"Well, he would have. He used to have such high hopes for you—we both did. He had no doubt you'd make something of yourself. After the two of you had had one of your arguments, he would say things like, 'She'll make a fine lawyer.' I assume you haven't gotten your doctorate, since you haven't mentioned it. No man you brought home would have been good enough for your father—no daughter's choice ever satisfies her father—but someone old enough to be your grandfather? Someone with a full-grown son? I mean, you know what you are to him."
"I cannot believe you're saying this to me."
"I'm only telling you what your father would have thought. I knew the man for twenty years. I think I have a pretty good idea what his views were. He would not have approved of you and—Roger. In fact, he would have been very disappointed."
"This is incredible."
"Don't kill the messenger."
"I have to go," I said, hating the quaver in my voice.
"It's not my fault."
"I'll talk to you later," I said, and hung up.
I was expecting it to ring the next moment, my mother's angry voice reaching across the country to me. I stood with my hand hovering above the receiver, unable to decide whether I'd answer it or just pick it up and let it drop. The kitchen shimmered, then fractured as tears flooded my eyes. I hated that my mother could get to me like this, that she knew exactly the right button to push. Of course my dad wouldn't have approved of Roger—not in the abstract, anyway—but he would have come around once they'd had a chance to meet one another, spend some time together, maybe go to a baseball game. I had been Daddy's little girl, true, and there was no doubt he'd wanted what he thought was best for me—but he had also been a pragmatist, and I was reasonably sure that, once he'd seen how serious Roger and I were, he would have decided that, like it or not, this was the way things were going to be and he'd have to accept them.
I wiped my eyes, tasting salt in the back of my throat. I knew what this was really about—this was Mom feeling insecure about Bob the boyfriend and trying to distract attention—and at the prospect of Bob, a fresh wave of tears spilled down my cheeks. I didn't begrudge my mother her happiness—really, I didn't. Dad had been gone a long time, and there was nothing wrong with her finding someone new. Although there was no one who could replace my father—warts and all—that didn't mean I wasn't prepared to give whomever Mom picked a chance. It was just—a guy who'd been divorced twice? Once, and it's like, Who knows who was at fault? Look at Roger and Joanne. Twice, though, and you start to wonder. Why does this keep happening to this guy, i.e. what's wrong with him? How did he convince my mother, the woman who told me that sex was a sacred gift from God that could only be enjoyed fully within the bonds of marriage—how did this guy, this travel agent, seduce my mother into shacking up with him? Yes, after about seventeen, when I had my first serious boyfriend, I decided Mom's ideas about sex were positively Medieval, but that didn't mean I wanted her to come to the same conclusion.
The floor creaked behind me. Roger stood there, looking puzzled. My hand was still stretched over the phone. "Are you trying to make someone call you?" he asked.
"More like the opposite," I said, dropping my arm.
"I thought I heard the phone ring."
"You did. It was my mother."
"That was unexpected—wasn't it?"
"And how," I said, sniffling.
"She upset you—obviously."
"It's stupid. She called to tell me about her new, live-in boyfriend, Bob the twice-divorced travel agent." I laughed. "When you say it out loud, it sounds kind of funny."
"Is this her first boyfriend since your father died?"
"The first she's moved in with. The first she's told me she moved in with. I don't know. There were other guys she went out with, before she moved to Santa Barbara. None of them was serious. At least, I don't think any of them was serious. It used to annoy me that she wasn't more connected to the guys she was dating. I complained to my friends that it was like living with a fourteen-year-old flirt. Irony sucks, you know?"
Roger nodded. "That it does. Safely confined to the pages of novels, it's an interesting rhetorical device; encountered loose in the real world, it's a beast with steel claws and mirrors for eyes."
"Hey—that's pretty good."
"Thank you—now if only I could remember it."
"The perils of age."
"The insolence of youth."
"Do you want some dinner?" I asked. "There's a plate warm in the oven."
"That was why I came down in the first place. The odors of your cooking reached all the way to the third floor and drew me down from my lonely garret."
"Get yourself something to drink—there's beer in the fridge if you want it—and I'll grab the plate. Do you want bread?"
"No thanks. Is there salad?"
"There is. All we have for dressing is blue cheese, though."
"That'll do just fine."
My mother's call had given us a fresh topic for conversation. Seated at the kitchen table, Roger with his dinner, me with a glass of wine, we batted her words back and forth, speculating on the situation that had given rise to them as if she were a character in a novel. Roger's eyebrows lifted when I told him what she'd said about my father.
"Do you think she's right?" he asked.
"Yes and no."
"A balanced answer."
"He would have been—concerned," I said. "He would have worried about both our motivations, especially yours. He wouldn't have been very comfortable with me as the object of desire of an older man."
"Especially one closer in age to him."
"Yeah. He would have talked to me—he would have done his best to talk me out of being with you."
"Would he have succeeded?"
"No."
"That's a relief to hear."
"There would have been some kind of falling out. Maybe we wouldn't have spoken for a while. In the end, though, he would have come around. What about you?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Your father, I mean—or maybe your mother. What would they have thought of you marrying me?"
"Hmm," he said. "Do you know, I've never once asked myself that question."
"Because you know what the answer would be, and you don't want to think about it?"
"Oh, I don't know. Joanne would have offended their sensibilities much more than you. They weren't as concerned with the North-South divide as some. Mother wasn't at all; Father—every now and then, when he'd gotten good and drunk, Father would ramble on about the damn Yankees and how they were responsible for—basically for everything that was wrong with the world today. If only folks were more like him and his, things wouldn't be in such an awful mess. I remember once—not long before his death, he went on this same ramble and, when he reached the part about people being more like him, I said, 'What? You mean drunk?' It was a good line, one that had occurred to me years prior and that I had finally gained the daring to use. His hand darted out and slapped me so hard I fell off my chair. He caught me on the side of the head—for about a week, my left ear rang from the blow.
"But I digress. Drunk, Father would have found Joanne a damn Yankee bitch who thought her piss was Perrier and her turds caviar (one of his favorite sayings). Sober, he would have been profoundly uncomfortable around her. Mother—I remember my mother as always indulging me. While I have no doubt that Mother would have done her best with Joanne, she would have been acutely aware of the class difference, which would not have been helped in the slightest by Joanne herself, who would have been constitutionally unable not to patronize my parents."
"I'm glad we can talk about your ex-wife so much."
"I'm merely settling myself into their viewpoints. Where I grew up, there certainly were marriages where a substantial age difference existed between spouses. The majority of those were because the man in question's first wife had died, in general leaving him with one or more children in need of a mother. Since his age also meant he had accumulated some share of material goods, he had more to offer than the difficulties of raising someone else's resentful children. There was security to be had. I have the impression that these matches were tolerated quite well.
"There were cases, though—one or two—where the man in question abandoned his still-undeceased wife in favor of a younger woman. In one instance, the man lived with his infatuation for a year, then returned home. In the other, he divorced his former love and married the new one. Both men were regarded as damned fools/damned old men, with the 'damned' intended to be not only disparaging, but in some measure descriptive. They had surrendered to their lust, you see. This is not to say that the rest of the community was any purer. There was more than one child who looked nothing like its legal father. But these men had made a show of themselves—shown everyone else, I suppose, their own secret passions. That second couple—the ones that married—they were together almost fifty years, till he was ninety and she seventy, and by most reports quite happy, yet he never stopped being that damned old man.
"All of which is by way of saying that my parents' initial reaction would most likely have been shock and horror at their son's behaving like a damned old man, leaving behind a wife of thirty years for a younger woman—and a student of his, at that. If they could have kept the news from family and friends, I have no doubt they would. These days, everyone is more understanding than they used to be, but their appetite for scandal remains undiminished. Who doesn't love to see the mighty brought low, a big college professor acting like a goat in a pepper patch? The public implications of my decisions—the consequences for them—would have been foremost in their minds."
"And I would be, what? The siren whose song caused you to toss yourself onto the rocks?"
"Possibly. Probably—although they would have felt more comfortable blaming me. To them, I would have appeared some type of academic Don Juan, seducing pretty students willy-nilly."
"Willy-nilly?"
"It's a colloquialism. Perfectly acceptable in this kind of discourse."
"If you say so."
"My best guess is, the two of them would have treated you with formality so complete as to be absolutely freezing. You would have been an object of horror and fascination to them—especially Father, whose talk when he was in his cups would have been full of clumsy innuendoes and poor puns. God, I can almost hear him, now. We'd take them out to eat. He already would have had a few at the house, and when it was time to order and I chose something like chicken breast, he'd leer at the waitress and say, 'Ey-yeah, my boy's always enjoyed his breast—always liked it young and tender.'"
"Yikes."
"To say the least."
"So that would have been that."
"Pretty much. We would have been only too happy to watch them go; they would have been only too happy to leave. They would have found me—I almost said, 'a monster,' which isn't exactly true, but isn't that far from the truth, either. I can hear my mother saying, 'This is not how you were raised,' and while few if any parents counsel their children to avoid middle-age affairs and divorces, in a sense she would have been right. I—I stepped outside the bounds of what my parents knew. I behaved in ways that would have been alien and alienating to them. You might say I revealed hidden depths to them, but these would not have been depths they wanted to witness."
"What about the baby?"
"The baby?"
"The baby I—I lost. What if I hadn't miscarried? Would that have helped?"
Roger looked up at the ceiling. "Maybe. Since it was the reason for our actual marriage, I'm sure it would have added to the scandal—initially, at least. Mother was fond of babies, though. Even Father was a sentimentalist when it came to diapers and lullabies. He was worse when he was drunk. He'd want to hold any baby within a fifty-foot radius and talk nonsense to it. Slurred nonsense. Since he was both extremely assertive and not particularly coordinated after five or ten beers, he was a major source of anxiety to anyone with newborns at family parties. He dropped my cousin, Arthur."
"God."
"Arthur was fine—frightened, but fine. His father, Uncle Edwin, was so incensed he took a swing at Father that was clumsy enough for even Father to avoid. In return, he broke Uncle Edwin's nose."
"What a nightmare."
"Family gatherings were ever an adventure."
"We wouldn't have let him near our baby."
"How would we have stopped him?"
"Given the baby to your mom?"
"Maybe."
"You said she knew how to handle him."
"What I mostly meant by that was, when he hit her, she hit back, hard."
"Oh. Not much fun for a baby."
"No. Who knows? Maybe the old man would've dried out. If he'd lived long enough, maybe he would have followed Rick into rehab—I say followed, because there is no way he would have done such a thing himself. It would have taken something like my younger brother's constant pestering—which he can do; he can be very persistent—to convince him to lay aside the bottle. Maybe he and my mother would have mellowed with time. I can't picture them ever attending any kind of couples therapy. It's the problem with the dead. Not only do they remain as they were, they remain as they were to you. No matter what you may learn about them after they're gone—no matter how much you may come to understand them intellectually—emotionally, they will always be the same."
"I'm not so sure," I said. "I feel differently about my father now than I did when he died."
"No, you don't," Roger said. "You think you do, but what you feel now is what you felt all along. What you experienced when he died was the aberration."
"I'm reasonably sure I know my own feelings."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
"Fine, fine. I should be getting back upstairs. Always more to be done."
"Always."
"This has been nice, though. It's been nice not to argue for a little while, to talk."
I stood as he cleared his plate and carried it to the sink. My wine was long gone. I contemplated a refill, decided against it. As Roger went to exit the kitchen, I said, "Roger?"
He stopped. "Yes?"
"Why can't you see Ted?"
His face was instantly furious. "Why—what are you saying? Why can't you leave this alone?"
I held up my hands. "I'm not trying to be confrontational. Honestly, I'm not. I just want to know why it's been me."
"That was not Ted you saw."
"Okay, say for a moment it wasn't. It was, but maybe you're right. What about all the other stuff? Why me? Why not you?"
His eyes would have burned through metal. When he spoke, it was as if he were strangling. "I don't know," he said, and left.
So much for us talking again. Yes, I'd been reasonably sure he'd react this way, but hope springs eternal and all that. A civilized conversation, and I was ready to believe we could discuss what really mattered. In retrospect, I know that Roger must have felt like I was continually setting him up, constructing these increasingly elaborate dialogues that always ended in the same place. That I was right didn't help, either.
When the kitchen was clean, I decided to skip TV for a change. Instead, I went up to the library, switched on the computer, and logged online. Since he'd told me about the circumstances of its creation, the compulsion that kept him adding to it, Roger's doorway map had been on my mind. It was the heart of his days, and I suspected it lay near the heart of everything, all the weirdness. How, I couldn't say. Roger had called it a spirit map, a name he'd said he'd borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism. I called up Google, typed in "spirit map," and hit Enter.
Sifting through the 17,000 or so responses that popped up took some time. I didn't want a guide to Scottish distilleries. Nor did I want the eight steps for enhancing my spirituality. Arlington High's cheerleading homepage was right out. I entered new terms, refined the search, but the only effect adding "Tibetan," "Buddhism," or "Tibetan Buddhism" had was to summon links to sites about Tibet, Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism. Thinking that perhaps spirit maps didn't rate their own site—or that Roger had confused the terminology and it went by some other name—I clicked on the Tibetan Buddhism pages and skimmed them. It wasn't the most exciting way to spend an evening. A lot of the art the sites displayed was beautiful, strange and striking, but I'd never been particularly interested in comparative theology.
I found descriptions of the bardo, about which Roger had been broadly accurate. I also read about The Book of the Dead, the Lord of the Dead with his black and white pebbles and mirror of karma, and the six realms of the Wheel of Life. I wouldn't say I became an expert on the ins and outs of Tibetan Buddhism, but I learned enough to know that spirit maps were not among its paraphernalia. I mean, if you wanted to stretch a metaphor, you could say that The Book of the Dead was itself a sort of general spirit map, since it described the stages of the bardo and how to navigate them, but if you wanted the kind of individualized guide Roger had discussed, you had to turn elsewhere. Either he'd been mistaken, or he'd lied.
It was a strange thing to lie about, though; you have to admit. Inclined as I'd become to suspect Roger, I couldn't understand why he'd feel the need to deceive me about the origins of the spirit map. Unless, I supposed, there were no deeper origins—the map was just something he'd dreamed up and his reference to the Buddhists was an attempt to disguise how completely personal it was. Or, if he were embarrassed about its source—which seemed unlikely to the point of absurd—until I Googled "spirit map" one last time and, on a hunch, added "Dickens."
What came up was a link to a site called The Occult Dickens, which was in fact the manuscript of a book this guy—Christopher Graves, self-described independent scholar—had been unable to find a publisher for. So he'd posted all three hundred and fifty pages of the thing online. Briefly put, the book was a survey of Dickens's interest in the occult and how it informed his fiction. Not, in and of itself, an unpromising topic—to be honest, it struck me as a lot more interesting than the latest effort at relating Bleak House to the tax laws of the day. What had cost Graves a publisher, I was sure, was his insistence at the outset on the validity of nineteenth-century spiritualism, which transformed a well-researched study into a lengthy tract, and took Dickens's novels from stories about things seen to arguments about things unseen.
Anyway, there was a search box for the manuscript, so I entered "spirit map." The page that appeared was titled, "Dickens, Collins, and the 'Spirit Map.'" I scrolled down. The story came from a couple of Wilkie Collins's letters. Apparently, Collins had visited Dickens while Dickens and his family were staying in Paris. (I'm not sure why the Dickenses were in France in the first place; Graves didn't say.) During their time together, Collins and Dickens went for walks around the city, and, on one of them, while they were basically window-shopping, they came upon a bookstore. Collins was excited because he found all these books about French crimes—a kind of true crime collection that he snatched up and I gather used in some of his fiction.
Dickens picked up an oversized volume that Collins said looked on the verge of collapsing into dust at any moment. The expression on Dickens's face when he touched its covers was one of distaste—Collins noticed and asked him what was wrong; Dickens replied that whatever the book had been bound with had a particularly greasy feel to it. He was ready to replace it unread, then changed his mind and flipped it open. Apparently, it was a treatise on witchcraft. Intrigued, Dickens paged through it, stopping every now and again to read a passage to Collins, who was equally fascinated. He encouraged Dickens to buy it, but Dickens dismissed the idea—although, Collins thought, he was tempted.
During this time, Collins and Dickens started planning to collaborate on a play, The Frozen Deep, about a polar expedition. Before settling on that plot, they kicked around a few others, including at least one of which drew its inspiration from that unnamed book. It would concern a father whose vanity and selfishness had caused a rift between him and his son, after which his estranged son had been killed in the Crimea. Desperate with grief, the father turns to a mysterious woman—possibly a gypsy—who promises to put him in contact with his son. This woman would employ a spirit map, Dickens said, which the book he'd leafed through had described as a way to lead the dead back to this world from the next. The man would have a daughter—or a niece—who would urge him not to follow this course. There might be a suitor for the daughter/niece who would do something heroic. Collins was intrigued—he saw the possibility for some nice ghostly effects—but, in the end, the two of them couldn't arrive at a satisfactory ending for the story. The one they liked the best involved having the father descend into madness and the daughter burn the spirit map, but Collins was inclined to make the mysterious gypsy a con artist who'd prayed on the father's grief, while Dickens thought the gypsy should have some kind of connection to the family—possibly another daughter the father had never acknowledged, or the son's wife. After what Collins said was a pleasant evening bandying about possibilities, the two men passed on the story in favor of one about an Arctic expedition.
Having completed the anecdote, the book went on to discuss the importance of the spirit map to understanding Dickens's later fiction. I didn't bother with this part. What concerned me was the truth of the Collins story. I stood and walked to the bookshelves. Roger had three or four copies of Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, one here, one in his office, and at least one more at school, before I added the one I'd bought for his class. There was plenty about it he didn't care for, especially what he described as its "blatantly unnecessary concessions to postmodern self-indulgence," but for sheer volume of information on Dickens, he admitted, the Ackroyd was hard to beat. I slid the biography down and opened to the index. Five minutes, and I'd confirmed the outlines of the story. There was no doubt Roger knew it. The relevant paragraph in this particular copy had a penciled check beside it, and I was sure that, were I to open the copy in his office, I'd find the margins heavily annotated.
After receiving word of Ted's death, how long would it have taken Roger to remember Collins and Dickens's idea for their collaboration? Once the first, unbearable surge of grief had ebbed, how long before Roger recalled Dickens's plot about the father whose son is taken from him in war? The similarity to his situation was more than remarkable. It was downright uncanny, one of those times you feel yourself brushing up against powers and intentions far greater than your own. It isn't so much that life imitates art as it is that life and art converge on some third thing—I don't know what to call it.
However superficial it might be, Roger would have been stung by his resemblance to the father in the play. He'd always identified himself with Dickens's heroic young men, whether Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, or even Pip. It wasn't something he'd ever told me, but once I'd learned the circumstances of his early life—the nightmarish upbringing, the rise to better circumstances—I mean, you don't need much interpretive ability to realize that what Roger found in those heroes was himself, his story retold for him. He'd never had to identify with one of Dickens's failed fathers—now, as his life took on the shape of another of Dickens's plots, he was at best a Micawber, at worst a Krook or a Scrooge. Talk about pouring salt into your wounds. It must have seemed that even the writer he loved best had, in an obscure way, judged him and found him wanting.
The first time I'd stopped in at Roger's office at school, he'd declared, "The great writers are forever out ahead of us." He was pontificating, showing off. I didn't care. He said, "We are always catching up to them—always trying to catch up to them, because as soon as we are sure we have—the moment we have arrived at a reading that we are gospel-positive explains a novel once and for all—we realize that there is something else, something left over, something we could not bring under our critical control. In fact, there are several such somethings, each of them suitable to form the core of an entirely new interpretation of the text. Just when we are about to say that we have Dickens, he wriggles free from our grasp. I have written one reasonably long book about him; he has been a significant part of three of my other books; and thirty-five of my articles have addressed his work from various perspectives. You would think that so much writing would have exhausted Dickens for me. It has not. I continue to find new things to say about the work of a man I first read years before you were born. I have more to say about him, and he has more to say about me.
"Yes," Roger nodded, "about me. Dickens's novels—no less than any great literature—define us. They lend shape to the lives we inhabit and color our understanding of them. I am no critical solipsist, but I do believe that, in reading Dickens, we read ourselves."
I'd always admired that sentiment—admired and envied it, since I couldn't say I'd ever felt that way about any writer—even with the ones I admire the most, with Hawthorne and Dickinson, I've been aware of the distance between us, the gap in our sensibilities. However narrow that gap may draw, I've never been able to close it. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I'd want to. My life is mine, you know? But I couldn't help thinking it must be nice to so identify with a writer that his work is a kind of home to you. Until, that is, the walls start to shriek and the windows run with blood, and you find yourself in a completely different story than you'd anticipated.
Roger wouldn't have bothered researching the spirit map, not right away, at least. He had nothing but contempt for that kind of stuff—witchcraft, Ouija boards, séances, all deeply annoyed him. He dismissed them as exploiting the gullible. He would have done his best to put the idea from his thoughts. But as he walked the night hours away, his head brimming with memories of Ted and of his own father—as he stood at the edge of Belvedere House's lawn and watched those same memories spill across the house's windows—did he glimpse one more image on the living room window, what couldn't properly be called a memory but which had taken place nonetheless? What had he seen? Two men sitting beside a fire, talking? Both were bearded: the one's enormous, flourishing down his chest, over his tie; the other's an extended goatee that appeared to have sprung out of control. The one's hair was short, well-combed; the other's curling up and around his head. The one's eyes were mild, unremarkable; the other's large, liquid, expressive. Roger knew Dickens—and Collins—well enough to have heard their conversation. He would have winced at the description of the father's character as shrill, vain, and selfish. He would have wondered at the construction of what was essentially his situation. He would have listened attentively to Dickens's short-hand description of the sprit map and then—
The sun's final rays were flaring on the library's windows. The sky over Frenchman's Mountain was pink and red; the mountain itself a long silhouette fringed with fire. Squinting at the glare, I looked down on Founders Street. A couple—both of them in their fifties, I guessed—was walking hand in hand. As I watched, the woman pointed to Belvedere House and said something to which the man nodded. Tourists, probably up from the City for the day to visit the quaint town of Huguenot. Maybe one or both of them had attended SUNY. They were just about old enough to have lived in the house when it had been broken up into apartments. I fought the impulse to run downstairs and ask them if this was the case, if they knew anything about the house worth telling. Stupid. I had information. I had more information than I knew what to do with. Alcoholic painter-shamans; magic formulae for bringing houses to some kind of weird life; malevolent entities offering sinister deals; ghosts trapped who knew where by paternal curses; strange visions and sensations; and, to cap it all off, a spirit map. I wasn't living one horror story; I was the screaming heroine in a B-movie marathon. The sun dropped below the horizon. The couple continued on their way, toward the Reformed Church. What is it Freud says, about every action being overdetermined? Bingo.
Inspired—was that the right word?—by Dickens, Roger had constructed his own spirit map, built a pathway for Ted to travel. No—that was too cut-and-dried a way of putting what had happened, wasn't it? No doubt he'd told himself the same story he'd told me. He needed a better map. There might have been some truth to it, too. All the while he'd been drafting that map, though—What? Had he investigated the book with the greasy covers? It was possible; although hard to believe he could have obtained a copy without me knowing. Well, an original copy. Someone could have mailed him copies of the relevant pages in a regular envelope, or e-mailed them. He might have hit a dead-end in his research, but just knowing that such a thing had been proposed—I could imagine him speculating about it, asking himself how a spirit map would function, how it would lead the dead back from wherever they'd gone—or been sent. His logic wasn't hard to reconstruct: he'd disclosed most of it when he'd shown me the changes he'd made to his office—was that months ago? The place where Ted had died—the doorway through which he'd been forced out of this life—was the ideal place from which to try to bring him back into it. Going to Afghanistan, however, was out of the question, so you would need a substitute. The map was his re-creation of that space symbolically, supplemented by the tabletop model with its dirt and fragment. It was all the wildest wishing—except that Roger had made it here, in the heart of a space that was different—quickened. Before his last collapse, Rudolph de Castries had claimed he hadn't understood his own ideas. Was this what he hadn't realized, that a space changed by desire might respond to further desire?
But it was desire that wouldn't stand still, desire at odds with itself. At the center of everything, all the plots swirling around him, was Roger, unable not to hurt his son as badly as he could, and then unable to stop trying to reverse what he couldn't admit he'd done in the first place. As it was, he'd laid a path to a door he refused to open. Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.
Of course, I could be wrong. For all I knew, the house was behind this. Observing Roger's activities, it had intuited their purpose and done what it could to give the impression they were succeeding—but in such a way as to cause him—and me—maximum anguish. If this were the case, it had done a pretty good job.
I turned back to the library. That was enough research for today. I shut down the computer, switched off the light, and closed the door behind me. Instead of heading for the first floor, I walked down the hall the other way, to the bottom of the third-floor stairs. I didn't climb them. For the moment, I'd had my fill of confrontations with Roger, big and small. What I wanted was a look out the window there, in the direction of the mountains I'd seen yesterday. I wasn't expecting them to be there again, and they weren't. The sky was still light, empty of even the slightest cloud. It was more a case of me wanting to see the place where they'd been, as if that space had been altered by their occupying it, as if there was a trace I'd be able to see, or sense—an afterimage, so to speak. I stood in front of the window searching the sky—trying to see through it, to wherever those huge forms had come from.
Nothing. For a moment, I was sure they were almost there, just out of range of my vision, and then that certainty passed. I don't know what I would have done if they had revealed themselves. I guess I was staring at the sky as much to see them not appear, if that makes any sense. Mind-blowing as another glimpse of them would have been, I think I would have been happy, too—this mad kind of happiness.
When I finally abandoned the window, the hallway was darker, the consequence of my prolonged sky-gazing. A few feet in front of me, walls, floor, ceiling vanished. Blinking, I stepped forward, stopped. That sense of the house changed—reconfigured—no longer so much a house as the meeting point for dozens of corridors leading off to who knew where—lit up my nerves like lightning. Like a tank crashing into a mud hut, that level where the weirdness lived—the not-place that had been drawing ever closer—broke through into this one—into what you might call real life.
The sensation—imagine leaning against a wall and having it jerked away from you—now double that, triple it, multiply it by twenty, forty—as if you've been leaning on not just one, but every wall in the house and they've all been yanked away at the same time. Vertigo does not begin to do the experience justice. This was falling away from myself in every possible direction. That what I could see around me appeared exactly the same didn't help. It made what was happening worse, the dislocation more extreme. For want of a better term, I had been wired into the house, as if it were a giant spiderweb whose every vibration carried itself to me. In less time than it takes to describe, that web had been stretched distances too far to know the end of.
I swayed, staggered, and put out my hand to the nearest wall to steady myself. It was like touching the side of a glacier. I jerked my hand away, overbalanced in the other direction, and sat down hard. My hand had been shocked numb—I pressed it to my chest. The hallway was still dark. My eyes should have adjusted by now, and I understood that my other sense of the house was overlapping my vision. I was seeing the mouths of passages black as emptiness, black and freezing. The numbness in my hand was fading, replaced by pain. I wanted out of there. It was all I could do not to bolt in any direction, including right in front of me. I glanced behind me, to where I'd just been gazing out the window, and saw nothing. So much for fleeing upstairs to Roger. I screamed his name anyway, loud as I could, loud enough to guarantee he'd drop whatever he was doing and come running. "ROGER!" I screamed it again. "ROGER!" My voice sounded strange, as if, instead of bouncing around the inside of the hallway, it had fled long distances. I should have heard Roger's feet hurrying down the stairs. I did not. The only sound in that space was the breath rushing in and out of my mouth.
Then I did hear something, a trio of sounds, one right after the other, so close they might have been the same noise: bangbangbang. They seemed to come from miles away. A pause, and they repeated. The front door. Someone was knocking on the front door, pounding on it hard enough to rattle the glass. Absurdly, I almost called, "Just a minute." Just a minute what? I'm in the middle of a terrifying supernatural event?
Bangbangbang. With the third set of knocks, I realized that the scene around me hadn't changed, hadn't dissipated with the noise downstairs. Which meant that the sound wasn't separate from the terrifying supernatural event. It was part of it. I was on my feet, the hyper-vertigo, the pain licking my palm, put to one side as I focused on the front door. On the other level, the walls might have disappeared, but the doors held their places. It was strange, but I was less concerned with that strangeness than I was with the presence I could feel on the far side of that door, an absolute intensity, an inferno of heat—or cold; it didn't matter; either way, it would consume anything it came into contact with.
It was as if a figure—not just wreathed in flame, but made of flame, were standing on the porch. I had been in the presence of that same blast-furnace once before, in the diner on Martha's Vineyard. The other week, it had only been for a fraction of a second, and my mind had collapsed. Now, it was demanding admission, and even from this far away, my consciousness trembled. But it—Ted, say his name; it was Ted standing out there; Ted flaming with his father's curse and however much rage of his own; Ted crashing his tortured fist against the door. He was knocking—maybe that meant—
The doorknob clicked. We hadn't locked it. I was forever telling Roger we should, especially with living in one of the biggest houses in town—but he insisted there was no reason to. Huguenot wasn't that kind of place. From time to time, I at least locked the doorknob, if not the deadbolt, but not today. I doubt it would have mattered anyway. Creaking faintly on its hinges, the front door swung open and Ted stepped into the house. He'd knocked not to request, but to announce.
This wasn't the first time he'd been inside Belvedere House since he'd died—I'd been aware of him on a couple of occasions. It was, however, the first time he'd entered this deliberately—this theatrically—and when the house was in however you'd describe this state—dissolution? Everything was quiet. Ted was there, no mistaking it. I couldn't see him—thankfully—but I could feel him so strongly, it was as if I could, this ruined shape orbited by shrapnel. He was taking a look around, surveying the front hallway as if assessing the way I'd redecorated it. Although I was certain he could see me where I was, I held my breath, trying not to make a sound while a fresh surge of extreme vertigo tried to push me off my feet and my palm sang with pain. I knew it wouldn't work, yet when I heard the floorboards shifting as he walked towards the second-floor stairs, and then the sharp moans of the stairs as he climbed them, I almost fainted with terror. He wasn't in a hurry, but he wasn't taking his time, either.
This is it, I thought. The words chased each other around my brain. This is it this is it this is it. Ted had returned as he'd been unable to previously. What had started with his first visit to us was going to be completed by his second.
He was almost at the top of the stairs. My nerves shrieked at the proximity. I had to move. There was no way I wanted to be standing here when he arrived. Move! I told myself, Move! My feet stayed where they were. Ted's presence had overloaded the channels that should have carried messages from my brain to the rest of my body. Move! I thought, while, This is it, continued to play like an idiot mantra. One more stair to go—
I grabbed the doorknob to my left, pulled the door open, threw myself into the room beyond, and hauled the door closed behind me so hard it bounced open again, sending me racing frantically after it. Ted's footsteps hurried up the hall as I caught the door, swung it closed, and fumbled with the lock. It was one of those push-in ones, that you have to press forward and twist in order to secure, and as Ted drew nearer, I couldn't get the thing to catch. He was right on the other side of the door, his presence loud as a thunderstorm. The lock took, and I clasped my hands to my head. Ted's feelings roared against me, pain like a mouthful of razor blades, rage like a sea full of icebergs heaving into one another, and underneath them, an eagerness that was maybe the most powerful of the three, an anticipation sharp and jagged as broken glass. I crouched down, hands pressed against my temples as if to keep my head from flying apart. Scratch the "as if": with Ted that near, it was like standing next to a jet engine. You aren't sure what's going to get you first, the noise or the flame, but there's no doubt something will.
The door—I had to back away from the door, put what space I could between myself and Ted. I was sitting on the floor. I kicked against the door, pushing myself across the floor like a kid playing a game. I continued to retreat that way until the foot of the guest room bed caught me in the back. All the time, my eyes did not leave that door. In a way, it was—on the level where Ted existed, there were no walls. Whatever might appear to be standing to either side of the guest room's door; however solid its pale-blue surface might seem, there was nothing. Where there should have been drywall and wood beams and insulation and wiring, there were openings to nowhere, one to the right of the door, one to the left. None of the other walls were any more substantial. All that was reasonably solid was the door. The whole thing was like some kind of avant-garde theatrical set, the freestanding door with the bed on one side to represent a room. As far as I could tell as I climbed up onto the bed and kept moving backwards, there was literally nothing to keep Ted from going around either side of the door.
He didn't, though. For I don't know how long, he stood in the hallway, the absolute-zero burn of what he was, raging into the room. I'd closed the shutters, so to speak, locked the doors and windows, but the paint blistered and sloughed off; the wood charred and started to smoke; the glass clouded and bubbled. I was trapped. The guestroom was cut off from Ted's childhood room to my right, and the bathroom to my left. There was a decent-sized closet in here, but I had no desire to trap myself in a smaller, more confined and therefore more vulnerable space.
Ted banged on the door. I jumped and tried to squeeze myself into the corner the bed abutted. Ted hammered on the door. The wood leapt under his assault. At this rate, the door would give way in a minute, maybe less. I looked around desperately for a weapon, which was a laugh. How was I going to hit someone whose very appearance would blast what remained of my mind into oblivion? There was nothing, anyway. Even if I'd wanted to throw a blanket over him and run past him into the hall, the bed was bare.
The noise was deafening. The door groaned, leaned in toward me. Not now, I thought, not now. I've learned so much! That's how it goes in these kinds of narratives, isn't it? You gather the information, digest it, and use it to resolve the situation, i.e. defeat the monster. This was too soon. I needed another day or two to sift through what I'd learned and come up with a plan. I guess Ted had watched enough horror movies to want to pre-empt that plot. Either that, or I'd already had my chance with Roger, and what was happening was the result of my failure to fulfill the requirements for a happy ending by now.
The knocking stopped. I stayed where I was, positive that Ted was preparing for a final attack on the door that would splinter it into kindling. It was probably as close as I'd ever been to death—the most serious circumstance in which I'd found myself—but none of the thoughts you'd expect to rush to the fore were anywhere to be found. I'd always assumed I'd make a deathbed conversion—or re-conversion—to Catholicism. Say a quick Act of Contrition: Sorry, God, hope there's no hard feelings. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd planned my repentance, but that isn't too far from the truth.
With Ted about to burst into the room and do who knew what to me, however, last-minute reconciliation with the Almighty was the least of my concerns. To be frank, it wasn't really a concern at all. I was caught—suspended where I was, all my energies focused on the conflagration on the other side of the door. I wasn't even that concerned about what was going to happen to me. I knew it would be unimaginably horrible, Ted's revenge for whatever he thought my role in all this had been. I was in a state of almost complete anticipation.
As I was poised, I heard something, a new sound—Roger's voice, sounding as far away as Ted's knocking on the front door had. He was calling my name, a question mark at the end of it. "Is that you?" he said. "I thought I heard knocking." He was at the top of the third-floor stairs, which sent up their own chorus of groans as he started down them, still saying my name.
At his approach, Ted—faded. He didn't disappear. It was more as if he stepped around one of the new corners the house contained and concealed himself. The effect on me, on my nerves—you know what it's like on a hot, sunny day, when a cloud slips in front of the sun? If the air cools at all, it's only by a degree, but you welcome the respite from that constant downpour of light and heat all the same.
Roger's footsteps carried him past my door, my name dopplering as he went. He paused at the top of the stairs, shouted down them for me, waited, then returned along the hallway. On his way, he noticed the guest room door closed and paused. He tried the handle. Despite myself, my stomach squeezed. "Is anyone in there?" he asked. "Veronica? Is that you?" He thumped on the door. "Hello?"
"It's me," I said.
"Veronica?"
"Yes."
"What's the matter? Is something wrong?"
I didn't know how to answer that.
"Is everything all right?"
"No."
"No? Well—can you open the door?"
That was a good question. Maybe not the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, but good nonetheless. Ted was lurking nearby, much, much too close for any kind of comfort. On the other hand, so long as Roger was around, he appeared to need to keep his distance. The curse, for once working to my advantage. I didn't want to send Roger away any sooner than was absolutely necessary. "Hold on," I said.
"What is it?" Roger asked when he saw me.
"Ted."
Hope and suspicion flitted across his face. "What do you mean?"
"I mean Ted is here—in the house. He's very, very close."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because he just spent the last five minutes trying to break the door down. That was the banging you heard."
Roger frowned. "Why would Ted do that?"
"You tell me."
"Is this—did you see him?"
"No."
"Then what makes you so sure it's Ted?"
"I can feel him," I said. "Trust me, Roger, it's Ted. Who else would it be?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. Since you didn't actually see Ted, however—"
"For God's sake—what do you think, that some new ghost is going to stroll in, now? 'Oh, hey, I hear the haunting's good here.' Will you listen to yourself?"
"All right. What does he want?"
"To scare the crap out of me. How should I know?"
"And you think he's near?"
"It's not a matter of thinking, Roger. I know it."
"Where is he?"
"Close. He's just out of sight."
"Where?" Roger asked, throwing his hands out right and left. "Is he here? Or here?" He turned around. "Is he lurking behind me?" He looked up, down. "Is he on the ceiling? Under the floor?"
"It isn't like that." How to explain everything to him? "The house is different. It's changed—I think Ted has changed it. Things aren't as—solid as they used to be. There are new spaces in it, places where Ted can remove himself and watch us."
"You're asking me to take a lot on faith, Veronica."
This was ridiculous. "How can you say that, after everything that's happened to us? I've never lied to you. I've always been straight with you. What do you think, that was me hammering on the door? And then what? When I heard you coming, I hurried and locked myself in the guest room? What's the sense in that?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do. You do know. You don't want to admit it, but you do. You're such a coward. I never realized that before, but you are. You're the biggest coward I've ever met."
"Now wait one minute," Roger said, but I lost the rest of his sentence because Ted chose that moment to reappear. From whatever oblique angle he'd chosen to conceal himself, he walked out into the open, looming over Roger's shoulder. I had barely enough warning—my awareness of him spiking—to cover my face and twist away. As it was, the little I'd glimpsed—less than in the diner: the edge of a cheek threaded with what might have been barbed wire—was enough to set a flock of screams loose from my throat.
"Veronica!" Roger said. "What is it? What's wrong? What are you seeing?"
"Ted!" I screamed, hands pressed as tightly over my eyes as those of any six-year-old trying not to see the monster in the closet. "It's Ted!"
"Ted?" he said, as if this were the first he'd heard of the idea. "But—how can that be?"
This close to Ted, my mind was a shack in an earthquake. "Make him go away! For God's sake, make him leave! Please!"
"Ted?" Roger said, turning. "Is that you? Ted? Son?"
"He's right there! Can't you see him? Can't you see anything?"
"No," Roger said. "I—wait—at the other end of the hall—what? Hold on, I'm—Ted? Is that you?" Before I could tell him not to, Roger was running for the stairs to the first floor, shouting, "Ted?" as he went.
"Roger!" I yelled, "Don't leave me!"
There was no reply, only the clatter of his feet on the stairs, the diminishing sound of his calls.
I backpedaled into the guest room. Ted's presence roared around me. I struck a wall, something that jabbed me in the kidney—the closet door. Ted's feet scuffed on the threshold as he stepped into the room. Eyes still closed and covered with one hand, I fumbled for the doorknob with the other, struggling to resist the temptation that had raised itself—more a compulsion to drop my hand from my eyes, open them, and meet my fate. There was no way I was coming out of this. The best I was doing was delaying the inevitable. My arm trembled. An awful fascination, to look at Ted directly, to see him as he truly was, despite the consequences—almost because of the consequences—joined the temptation. He was no more than five steps away, moving with the pace of a man who has all the time in the world. When the closet door popped open, I forced myself inside. So much for avoiding the smaller, more confined, and therefore more vulnerable space. I grabbed the doorknob with both hands and braced my feet against the frame. What would it be like? a little voice asked somewhere in my head. What would it be like to surrender, to stop trying to prop up your mind and just let it crumble?
The door shuddered as Ted smashed into it. Apparently, he'd decided it would be more fun to break the door down than it would be to tear it open, which he could have done easily. I wasn't exactly Sheena, queen of the jungle. For the instant that we were both in contact with the door, I—my body—it was like being plunged into a vat of liquid nitrogen. The jolt was enough that my mind stopped. There was a stutter in the film, and then Ted was crashing into it again. Another stutter, and the doorknob almost yanked itself out of my hands. Stutter, and the door banged so hard it flung me back, through a curtain of dresses I'd hung in here until I could sort through them and decide which were going to the Salvation Army. Several of them dropped onto me, and as Ted struck the door and I heard mixed in with the Wham! the creak of wood starting to part from itself, I struggled to pull the dresses off me. My dinner churned at the back of my mouth. When Ted hit the door this time, the wood moaned. I freed myself from the last dress, hung onto the heavy coat hanger that had supported it, and scrambled for the back of the closet. If ever there was a time to discover the house had secret passageways, this was it. At least the closet was deeper than I'd remembered.
On the other side of the line of dresses, there was a pause. The doorknob turned, clicked, and light spilled into the closet. He'd tricked me, the son of a bitch had convinced me he was intent on bursting through the door so I'd keep my distance and all he had to do was reach for the handle. His silhouette filled the doorway, and I swear, even obscured by the light and the clothes, there was something about Ted—about his shape—that was so wrong, so fundamentally off, that the dinner I was already struggling to keep down came bubbling up out of my mouth in one long stream.
There was no time for wiping my mouth. Ted's outline shifted and he entered the closet. Before he'd completed that move, I was on my feet and running as fast as my legs would carry me in the opposite direction. By all rights, that should have slammed me into the back of the closet immediately. I should have knocked the wind out of myself and fallen to the floor, pretty much at Ted's feet. Instead, the closet kept going—went on and on, its walls forming the sides of a corridor down which I sprinted. Yes, part of me was thinking, This is impossible. How can this be happening? But it was too far removed from my feet pounding on the floor, arms pistoning, to have any effect.
There was light ahead, a single bulb set in the ceiling. By its dull glow, I saw that the walls had gone from the unfinished wood of the closet's interior to something like sheetrock. They'd been painted creamy white a long time ago. Huge patches had since fallen off and lay crumbled across the wooden floor. What remained was mapped by cracks. Where the walls were bare—what was underneath was dark. There was no time to stop and examine it. Ted was behind me, a storm nipping at my heels. I ran under the bulb and saw what looked like a door ahead.
A second later, I was through it. Or—not through it so much as caught in it. It was as if—it was like running into a more substantial version of the membrane that had coated me the day before—as if the air had turned to taffy. Everything slowed down. I was looking at a room I'd never seen before. It was a living room, but of a house substantially smaller than Belvedere House. Its walls were the same off-white as the stretch of corridor behind me, only slightly less riddled with cracks. To my left, sunlight streamed through a pair of dirty windows. Across from me, there was what looked like an old radio, a heavy brown box flanked by a pair of armchairs whose floral prints had seen better days, as had that on the loveseat under the windows. There was a sewing basket next to one of the chairs, and a bottle of amber liquid poorly concealed behind the other. To my right, an upright piano clustered with framed black-and-white photos stood on the near side of a doorway. The air was brown with unfiltered cigarette smoke. Through the doorway beside the piano, I heard voices—one voice, really, raised and shouting, "Don't you walk away from me, mister!"
From the other side of that doorway, Roger walked into the room. I was so surprised I said, "Roger!" before I knew what I was doing.
He didn't respond, and I saw that he had changed into different clothes. When I'd seen him ten minutes ago, he'd been wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and loafers; now, he was dressed in a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, black slacks, and black shoes. Head down, he crossed the room to the radio and began to fiddle with its dial.
Yelling, "Do you hear me? You do not walk away from me when I am talking to you!" Ted charged through the same doorway, rattling the photos on the piano as he passed.
I screamed and tried to turn, ready to take off back up the corridor at my back, but there, out of the corner of my eye, was a shape in the dimness—a figure that, even obscured, made me close my eyes and pull my head away. Ted was still behind me—but paused, caught in the same clogged air that held me. What was in front of me—
For one thing, there was nothing wrong with this Ted's appearance. His face was flushed, but it had been red the first time I'd seen him standing outside the apartment door. His speech was thick, his gait unsteady, but he appeared as alive and healthy as he ever had. His clothes were the mirror image of Roger's, except that his pants were held up by suspenders, and a badly knotted black tie flattened against his shirt. He caught Roger by the arm and spun him around so hard that Roger almost fell over. "Are you deaf?" Ted said. "Is there something wrong with your ears?"
Roger said, "I just came in to warm up the radio for you."
"Well, isn't that thoughtful?" Ted pushed Roger, who staggered backwards, his hip striking the corner of the radio. "If I want to listen to the Goddamned radio, I believe I am capable of switching it on myself."
Roger's head shot up, his mouth tight with pain, his eyes furious. Ted's shoulders registered his surprise. "Would you look at this?" he said. "That appears to be a spark of rebellion I see lighting up your face. Is that true? Am I watching you in the act of breaking the Fourth Commandment? Are you going against the word of God Himself? Do you not remember what the Bible says? Is that possible?" He punctuated each question by stabbing his index finger against Roger's chest. "Exodus chapter 20, verse 12: 'Honor thy father and mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.' What part of that don't you understand? Huh? What part? Huh? Huh?" The index finger stabbed like the needle of a sewing machine. Roger tried to cover his chest with his arms. Ted flung them away and continued jabbing him.
Before Ted could catch him, Roger ducked under his arms and ran to the doorway. Ted overbalanced, driving his finger into the radio with a crack. "Son of a bitch!" he shouted, drawing his hand to his chest and then waving it about like a flag. He wheeled to face Roger, who cringed where he was. "I cannot believe I have lived to see this day," Ted said, shaking his hand. "First you walk away from your father while he is talking to you, and then," he held up his hand, "you raise your fist against him."
"I didn't," Roger said.
"Is there no end?" Ted said, throwing back his head as if appealing to a sympathetic God for his answer. He brought his hands to his throat and began unknotting his tie, wincing when he moved his injured finger. Once the tie was loose, he threaded it out from under his collar and tossed it onto the closer armchair. Next he reached his hands to his shoulders, slid his thumbs under his suspenders, and eased them down, drawing his arms up through them as he did.
Roger was a study in terror, his face pale as china, his back hunched, his knees bent.
Ted finished pulling his shirt out of his pants and said, "I may not be able to make you respect me as a father—it's a sad, sad day, and Almighty God will hold you to account for breaking one of His Commandments, you can be sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hellfire waiting for you, and a whole host of devils waiting to try their pitchforks on you. No, I would not be surprised in the least. You may not respect me as a father, but you will respect me as a man. Even crippled by treachery, I reckon I can show you a thing or two. Come on, then. You think you're so much better than me—let's see."
Roger's hands were up, palms out. "Pa, I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything."
"It's too late for sorry," Ted said. "Sorry is a train that left the station a long time ago."
"No, Pa," Roger said, "no."
"No?" Ted said. "You're still contradicting me? Boy, the Devil has gotten into you and taken hold something powerful."
"Stop," Roger said. "That isn't what I meant. I'm sorry, Pa, truly."
Left hand curled into a fist, Ted strode toward Roger, who was crying, his cheeks shining with tears, his mouth open in anguish, his entire body trembling. He dropped to the floor as Ted drew near him, sheltering his head beneath his arms as if Ted were the atomic bomb he'd been warned about in school.
Standing over him, Ted said, "Well, what's this? It appears Satan isn't quite so big as all that. It appears Satan fears the wrath of a righteous man." He nudged Roger with his shoe. "Get up, Satan. Get up and take what's coming to you."
"I'm sorry, Pa," Roger sobbed. "Honest I am."
"I swear before the Throne of the Living God," Ted said, kicking Roger now, "if you don't stand on your own two feet like a man, I will kick the living shit out of you. Get up. I won't say it again."
Groaning with dread, Roger stood. "Sorry, Pa."
"Shut up," Ted said. "Boy, if you're going to act the part of the big man, you'd best be prepared to play the role to the bitter end." His left hand whipped up and around. Crack.
Roger's head rocked back, his legs wobbled, and he collapsed, his nose and mouth scarlet. Ted's right foot lashed out. Roger yelped as it connected with his left leg, high on the outside. Ted kicked him again, on the shin, again, in the stomach. Roger screamed. His face was wet with tears, snot, blood. His white shirt was decorated with red spots and splatters. "You might have done better than that," Ted said. "Still, I expect that's chased the Devil out of you for a time. Now you know, boy. You know what's waiting for you if you feel like wearing a man's clothes before you're ready for them. And that was with my good hand incapacitated. You think about that. You ponder what the old man might've done if he'd had the use of both his hands. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir," Roger mumbled through crushed lips.
At my back, Ted pushed forward through the thickened air like a swimmer forcing his way upstream. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my heart surged, my ears popped, and before I knew what I was doing I was running across the living room, the air around me once more fluid. The other Ted said to Roger, "Now get up and go wash your face." Despite my urgency, I gave both figures a wide berth. Neither spared a glance in my direction. My destination was the doorway behind them. I spared a last look at Roger—at this Roger—who scrambled to his feet, his nose obviously broken and leaking more blood, his face drawn with fear.
Then I was in the next room, for a second time caught on the threshold by what felt like an enormous sheet of clear plastic. In front of me was the dining room. Or, a kind of minimalist approximation of a dining room. Except for a tall lamp standing off to the right, the room was unlit. A card table occupied center-stage. Seated on folding chairs to either side of it, Roger and Ted faced each other. Three more folding chairs—all empty—crowded the table's far side. As they had been in the previous room, Roger and Ted were dressed alike, this time in workshirts, jeans, and boots. The card table was stacked with dishes and cutlery. I was—my head swam at the sight of the two of them. Obviously, I wasn't—well, I wasn't in Kansas, anymore, but I'd just left these two in the other room. If I hadn't felt Ted making his way towards me, striding against air that refused to yield for him as it had for me, I'd have ducked my head back out for another look.
There was no time. My nerves were trying to tear themselves out of my skin. It looked as if there was an opening in the wall across from me. I pushed, my ears popped, and I was through to the room. Circling the table, I hurried across the floor. Roger picked up the topmost plate from the pile and held it out to Ted, asking, "May I have some bread?" "Certainly," Ted replied, extending his right hand over the dish. One blink, his hand was empty, miming the act of passing a slice of bread. The next, it was full of a snake, coiling around Ted's wrist, twisting its head back and forth in the air, hissing at Roger—who stared calmly as it dropped from Ted's hand to his plate. The plate tilted as the snake slapped it; Roger had to maneuver to keep the snake from sliding off onto the table. I don't know much about reptiles, but this was not a garden snake. It was blue-black, its back covered in electric green loops. Once it was secure on Roger's plate, it wasted no time. It slid up his arm, raising its head as it went, and when it reached his shoulder, opened its mouth and drove its fangs into his head, behind his left eye. Roger didn't flinch, sitting calmly as the snake's venom pumped into him, the rest of it wrapping around his neck like a hideous scarf.
"Is that enough?" Ted asked.
"Plenty, thanks," Roger said, as a stream of blood escaped the snake's mouth and dribbled down his face.
I'd shouted when the snake appeared, a second time when it struck Roger. I do not like snakes, and the appearance of one sent me around the room that much faster. All the same, seeing it latched onto Roger like an oversized leech, I had to fight the urge to run over to him and try to pull it off. I think I already knew that it wasn't really Roger sitting at the table—or, it wasn't the Roger who'd chased down the stairs after Ted. This was Roger from years—decades ago. But that didn't make the sight of the four-foot snake looped around his neck any less horrifying.
Footsteps thumped on the floor to my rear. Ted was gaining. I ran the rest of the distance to the door, only to realize I'd been mistaken. There wasn't any opening here, just a black rectangle painted on the wall. In the half-light of the room, I'd mistaken part of the backdrop for an actual exit. Panic stabbed me. My hands shot out, racing over the wall in search of a way out. My left hand brushed the doorway, and it shifted, rippled. In a second, I had torn aside the heavy drape on which the black rectangle had been painted and run through it to the opening it concealed. Another hallway stretched in front of me, this one full of doors—some open, some closed—set on either side. Each door was flanked by a pair of tiny glass lamps in which candles danced weakly. I sprinted ahead, throwing the curtain back in hopes of tangling Ted.
There was a door—open, the room beyond lit—at the far end of the hall. I aimed for that. To my right, my left, doors flashed by. I caught scenes—pieces of scenes. Hand trembling madly, Roger held out a butter knife as Ted stalked toward him, murder in his eyes. Ted lay on an undersized bed, smoking a cigarette and looking bored while Roger sat on the end of the bed and read an invisible book out loud to him. One room—I wasn't sure, because it was too confusing, but I could have sworn I saw Roger standing in front of the homemade map in his office, two men looking over his shoulders—only, they were both Roger, too, except that one was wearing a baggy black coat over a loose white shirt, the other a blue morning coat over a gray vest and white shirt around whose high collar an oversized gray bowtie had been tied.
The room at the end of the hall was in front of me. I was so focused on finding the next door that it was all I could see—there, in the wall to the left, a varnished plank of wood whose doorknob had been polished to a brassy shine. I entered and crossed the space easily, my hand closing on that doorknob before the room's other contents registered. Or maybe I should say, its inhabitants. Two figures stood at the center of what was otherwise a plain box of a room. One I knew right away. Standing with her hand on the shoulder of a young girl was my grandma, looking exactly as she had when she'd babysat me when I was younger, green cardigan over a white mock-turtleneck, jeans, the plain white sneakers she called tennis shoes and I thought of as grandma-sneakers. The half-glasses she was constantly losing track of hung, as they always had, from a cheap chain around her neck. Her hair—she was a redhead, too, right up until she died; her hair never went yellow, the way it does for most redheads as they age—her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place with a dozen different hairpins and barrettes. Her face was the one part of her that was different, and that not by much. It was made-up—so far as I knew, not a day in her life went by that my grandma didn't at least wear lipstick, even if she was staying at home. It wasn't obviously disfigured or anything. No, it was that her face was drawn, pale, her features fighting a losing battle against great pain.
Seeing her stopped me where I was. For what couldn't have been more than one, maybe two seconds, but that felt like hours, everything else—the fear churning my gut, Ted's presence raging against my nerves, the feel of the house, (which I haven't said anything about)—all that was on hold. Seeing her stunned me—and it was her, not another trick. The air was heavy with Jean Naté, her favorite perfume, which she always wore too much of. What registered as shock was a knot of emotions, love, and grief, and fear, and something else, something like awe.
I barely noticed the girl on whose shoulder my grandmother's hand rested. She was little more than a head of red hair tied into a ponytail, denim jacket and jeans. Maybe six, maybe seven, but I wasn't especially interested. My tongue was flopping around my mouth like a fish out of water, trying to find something to say. "I love you." "I miss you." "Are you all right?" "What's happening?" "Help me"; all rushed through the door at the same moment and got stuck in it.
The hallway to the room echoed with Ted's slow-motion progress, his boots striking the floor like distant thunder. His presence was a firestorm, scorching my mind. No time. There was no time. My cheeks were wet with tears I hadn't realized I'd been crying.
My grandmother said, "Poor bunny. My poor, poor bunny. We must stay awake and see evil done just a little longer." Her voice was thick, as if she were speaking through a mouthful of dirt.
"What?"
"Poor bunny," she said. She tried to say something else. All that came out was a dry, choking sound.
"I don't understand," I said. "Please, what do you mean?"
Grandma's mouth opened and closed. Silence.
The girl in front of her stepped forward and opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue. Wet with saliva, an oversized ring shone on it. I knew who she was: the girl from the carousel, the one who'd spurned my gift of the ring I'd taken, only to swipe it from the air when I dropped it in the bucket. What was she doing here, with my grandmother?
Ted was about to enter the room. I said, "I love you," opened the door, and left them both.
I was back in the house—our house, Belvedere House. The door snicked behind me and I was standing in the second-floor hallway, outside Roger's and my bedroom. The hall was dark, though not as absolutely so as it had been when Ted appeared. I could glance to either side and see the windows there. This was simply night. Roger was here, chasing shadows downstairs. I moved to the top of the first-floor stairs and shouted his name.
No answer. I doubted he was—wherever I'd just been, but he could be outside. I started down the stairs, calling, "Roger!" as I went.
You could hardly call the six seconds or so it took me to reach the first floor a respite—I hadn't heard the bedroom door open yet, but was sure it would any moment—but it gave me the briefest of opportunities to catch my breath. I wouldn't say I collected my thoughts—those had been burned and scattered by Ted's constant proximity—and my emotions were still reeling from my encounter with Grandma and the little girl—yet the pause was sufficient for me to be aware—more aware of the house. Maybe I should say of the house's absence. Once I'd plunged down the corridor behind the guest room closet, my sensation of the house, already changed, had changed more, the end of the series of transformations that had taken it from a solid, stable structure to an increasingly temporary and unstable arrangement of space; then from that shimmering instability to little more than the locus of dozens of passageways to who knew where; and now, from that common meeting-point to something entirely different. Not an organization of space, or the conjunction of other, organized spaces—the house had lost all form, all pretensions to arrangement altogether. Fleeing through its hidden rooms, I had felt Belvedere House as a heaving sea washing against me, an Arctic ocean full of pieces of flaming wreckage. When I'd emerged back into the house proper, that feeling had come with me.
I hesitated at the foot of the stairs, called for Roger. Still no answer. I checked the front parlor, the living room. Empty, the two of them, except for the moonlight pouring in over the furniture. It was the kind of light you get with a full moon, that pale, silver illumination. I hadn't realized we were due another full moon so soon. Hadn't the moon just been full? Yes, yes, it had. While we were on the Cape—I remembered it hanging just over the pines the first or second night we'd arrived. It didn't stay at full for more than three days—certainly not this long. What was going on? Did I have time for this? Obviously, it was part of Ted's end-game. Ted seemed to be holding his place inside our room; although, with these final changes to the house, it was almost impossible to be sure where everything and everyone were in it. Taking a deep breath, I crossed to the living room windows.
After two steps, the temperature began to drop. Three, and my skin was rigid. Four, and I exhaled white clouds. Halfway across the room, the air was as cold as I'd ever known, the kind of cold you feel on a February day when the wind chill takes the mercury down to minus fifteen or twenty. My face was numb—my fingers, too. Each time I inhaled, it seared my lungs. By the time I was at the window, I couldn't feel the clothes on me. Tears welled up in my eyes, freezing on the lashes. Why keep going, right? Because it got colder—that meant there was something to see. Through tiny icicles, I gazed out windows thickened by frost.
The moon was full, casting light over the scene in front of me from high in the sky. The moon—there was something wrong with it, beyond its being full. The patterns on it—the dark areas that give the Man in the Moon his face—were different—rearranged into an image I couldn't distinguish but that hurt my eyes to look at. The landscape the moon shone on was dominated by a river, its near shore maybe ten yards from the house, its far side at least a mile away. I thought I could make out buildings on that other shore, but the river was bright as mercury—it caught the moonlight and flung it back up, clouding the air with white light like a fog. I could hear the river, rasping as it slid through its banks—like the biggest snake ever, miles long. In the far distance, blocking the sky under the moon, there might have been mountains, which might have shared the outline of the peaks that had towered over the house yesterday—
But it was too much. The cold was too intense for me to stay where I was a minute—a second more. I was shivering madly, every square inch of skin stiff, legs wobbling, teeth not even chattering—my jaw was clenched shut, my entire head shaking. Wherever—whatever this was a view of, I had to leave. Feet numb, I stumbled towards the door to the hall, crashing into the couch on the way. I caromed off it and stumbled out the door.
To find myself, not in the hall, but a new room. It wasn't much more than an oversized wood crate. Walls, ceiling, floor consisted of unfinished wood planks stacked, hung, and laid side by side. They were gray, weather-beaten, held in place by rusted nails and rife with splinters. From the ceiling, half a dozen primitive mobiles hung at the ends of as many lengths of frayed rope—each mobile a large metal hanger from which a trio of smaller ones dangled. From the smaller hangers, four or five figures swung from pieces of thread. The figures had been scissored from newspaper. Some were silhouettes of the moon, sun, and stars. Others were the shapes of adults and children. A few of the newspaper shapes appeared to have been cut on the lines of machine guns, knives, and—I swear—Belvedere House. There were no windows in the place, but beams of sunlight stole into the room through gaps between the planks. There were no doors, either, except the one that had admitted me here—which, a glance back showed, was now blocked by a badly fitted door that looked as if it formerly had opened on a better room. The space was hot, stifling with the smells of sawdust and rot—the reek of a dead deer left lying on the side of the road for days. Even as my still-aching stomach threatened to find more to bring up out of itself, the rest of me soaked in the heat like a sponge. The inside of this place might as well have been an oven someone had turned up to 450. In a matter of minutes, I'd be unable to stand it. After the living room, however, I could not only tolerate it, I was grateful for it.
A sound tickled my ear, so soft I barely picked it up. A voice—Roger's voice?—speaking in the whisper of a whisper. "Ted!"
The voice that answered was the air shattering itself into thunder, a 747 roaring directly overhead. "THIS IS ABOUT YOU LEAVING MY MOTHER FOR SOME TEENAGED SLUT. THIS IS ABOUT YOU BREAKING UP A THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR MARRIAGE SO YOU COULD GET YOUR DICK WET. THIS IS ABOUT YOU SPITTING IN THE FACE OF THE WOMAN WHO GAVE HER LIFE TO YOU."
Ted's voice seemed to come from everywhere, as if a ring of concert-sized speakers had been set around the outside of the room and the volume on every one turned all the way up. The room shook with the force of it. The mobiles swung wildly. The beams of sunlight trembled. Fine dust lifted from the walls. An assortment of insects—mostly centipedes and beetles—lost their grip on the ceiling and walls and rained down. I covered my ears, crouching as if making myself smaller would help. My ears were ringing, so I almost missed what the first voice said, "I didn't mean—"
Ted's voice cracked the air open. "ARE YOU DISHONORING YOUR FATHER? ARE YOU BREAKING ONE OF THE COMMANDMENTS THAT GOD HIMSELF CARVED IN FIRE?"
"Now wait just a minute—"
"RESPECT? LIKE THE RESPECT YOU AND YOUR WHORE SHOWED MY MOTHER?"
"Swear to God—"
"YOU THINK CAREFULLY, NOW. YOU THINK ABOUT WHETHER YOU WANT THE USE OF THOSE HANDS, HOW PRECIOUS BEING ABLE TO SEE OUT OF BOTH THOSE EYES IS TO YOU. YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT GIRL'S EVER GONNA WANT TO LOOK AT YOU SMILING THROUGH A MOUTH OF BROKEN TEETH. BECAUSE I'LL DO ALL THAT, BOY; AS SURE AS GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN AND THE DEVIL'S IN HIS HELL, I'LL DO ALL THAT AND MORE. IT'S MY RIGHT, AND I HAVE NO TROUBLE EXERCISING IT. IT'S YOUR DECISION. DO YOU WANT TO TAKE THOSE FEELINGS, PUT THEM IN A BOTTLE, AND PUT A CORK IN THAT BOTTLE, OR WOULD YOU RATHER GET DOWN TO BUSINESS?"
The room shuddered as if it were in the middle of an earthquake. The walls swayed and creaked. The mobiles danced and jangled against one another. Nails gave up their hold on the planks and popped free. A plank in the wall to my left came loose and tumbled to the floor. Sunlight poured through the gap.
Roger's voice said, "That is enough!"
"THIS IS ABOUT YOU BRINGING DISHONOR TO OUR FAMILY. I WILL BEAT YOU DOWN. THIS IS ABOUT YOU MAKING YOURSELF A LAUGHING STOCK. YOU WILL SHUT YOUR MOUTH, OR I WILL PUT YOUR FACE THROUGH THAT WALL."
"I didn't—"
"IT'S TOO LATE FOR SORRY. I WAS HAPPY TO LET YOU RUIN YOUR LIFE. BOY, THE DEVIL HAS GOTTEN INTO YOU AND TAKEN HOLD SOMETHING POWERFUL. BUT YOU COULDN'T LEAVE WELL-ENOUGH ALONE, COULD YOU?"
Another plank—this one in the wall across from me—tore itself free and flopped to the floor; I raised my hand against the sunlight that raged against my eyes. A pair of mobiles tangled together and plummeted from the ceiling like the metal abstraction of a bird. A third plank, also from the wall to my left, wrenched itself loose and joined its fellows below. As it separated from the wall, its nails tore away with such force that they flew across the room in all directions, including mine—I ducked and a nail struck my head anyway, hard enough to sting. It was past time for me to leave this place. I stood, managed the two steps to the misfit door—which was rocking from side to side—and had it open and was through before Ted's voice had completed its last crashing syllable.
For the third time, a hallway opened in front of me. My eyes, still sun-dazzled, took their time adjusting to the dimness. The strong, antiseptic smell of industrial cleaner—and, underneath it, the unlovely stink of urine—and another odor I couldn't name right away, something rich, metallic—pushed themselves into my nose and I sneezed. Roger's voice—was back. Only, it wasn't in my ear. It was ahead, down the corridor on the left. There were metal bars to either side of me and, for once, I knew where I was, the Huguenot holding cells. I walked forward, past empty cell after cell—more, I was sure, than made up the actual jail—Roger's voice becoming clearer as I proceeded. "This," I heard him saying. "Here—you want pain—take it."
There he was, his back to me, standing beside his bunk, facing the far corner of his cell. That corner—I had a hard time seeing it past Roger, but there was someone standing there, deep in the shadows. Roger swayed like a drunk. I saw his right hand raised—pressed over the heart that was dying in his chest, as he tried to fight it long enough to complete his deal. To the right, Ted slumbered on—
No, he didn't. I spared a glance in his direction, then, when I understood what I'd seen, did a double-take. While events in Roger's cell were playing out essentially as I'd seen them in the pavilion on the Vineyard, the scene across the hall was something out of a Renaissance painting of Hell. Ted was in there, but—where do I begin?
The cell was different. Instead of bare concrete and metal bars, its walls were tall bookcases, each of them hung with an assortment of maps. At the center of the room was a heavy table, to which Ted had been chained by the wrists and ankles. He was naked, and his chest—his chest, his hips, his thighs—they had been—I don't know what the technical term is—flayed, I guess. The skin hung off them in long, ragged strips that looked like bloody crepe paper. What had been exposed—red muscle, shockingly white bone—bore the marks of further abuse. In some places, cut back until you could see what lay wet and shining beneath it. In others, pierced by long, white needles that quivered as Ted—still alive—moved on the table. In a couple of spots, what should have been inside had been lifted outside. A gray-purple coil of what I realized was intestine had been heaped on Ted's belly and fixed there by a pair of the needles. One eyeball had been extracted from its socket and left on Ted's cheek, a needle inserted into the emptied cavity. This close, the smell I'd been unable to identify was obvious. It was the copper stench of the blood that ran from Ted's wounds in bright runnels, that had spattered the maps in Pollock loops and swirls. Ted's mouth opened and closed, but the needle fixed in his throat prevented anything more than a meaningless croak from escaping.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Ted wasn't alone. He was in there, too—I mean, there were two of him. Seated on the chair Roger kept at the table, dressed in the desert fatigues he'd had on the last time I'd seen him—alive—this other Ted rested his chin on his steepled fingers and stared at himself spread out on the table. They were—the two of them were Ted—or, not exactly—not like the Ted who was pursuing me through the house, the Ted whose rage burned somewhere too close. They weren't that—I don't know—intense—although the one who'd been tortured on the table wasn't too far from it—but they were more—say substantial than any of the other Teds I'd encountered so far.
Behind me, Roger said, "Anything—take whatever you need. Whatever you need."
I was close enough to see past him to the figure he was addressing. Standing in the shadows, his features frozen in a wide, idiot grin, Roger heard the promise he made to himself, nodded, and collapsed into a cloud of rubble and dust, like a skyscraper falling in on itself. Within that swirl of debris, I thought I saw something—a patch of skin covered in scales the size of my hand—but I wouldn't swear to it. Roger—the real Roger, the Roger who'd just struck the deal that would cost us all so much, everything—fell onto his bunk.
A hand touched my shoulder.
"Veronica?" I was on the floor, hands over my head, cursing myself for having been so distracted, before I realized who was standing behind—over me. "Roger?"
"Yes," he said, "it's me."
To be safe, I peeked at his feet. There were the frayed edges of his favorite jeans lying over the tops of his new loafers. I stood, Roger catching my arm as I did and helping me to steady myself. I must have looked—you can imagine: soaked in sweat from all the fleeing, my face with the thousand-yard stare of someone who's seen way too much. We were—I was no longer in the jail. It had been replaced by the front hallway. Moonlight burned on the windows. His hand still on my arm, Roger said, "What happened? What's happening?"
To my surprise, I could speak. "The end." Melodramatic, maybe, but otherwise true.
"I didn't find him," Roger said. "I kept thinking Ted was just ahead of me—that I had caught a glimpse of him going from the foot of the stairs to the parlor, then from the parlor to the dining room, and so on through the house. It was—it was as if we were back playing one of the games he'd loved when he was a child, a kind of hide-and-seek, the goal of which was for him to stay a little in front of me. He would laugh merrily as I chased him, until the suspense became too much, at which point he'd turn around and rush into my arms. This time, though, that didn't happen. The pursuit went on and on and on. I—you're going to think I've suffered a breakdown, but I followed him through rooms I've never seen. There wasn't time for me to stop and examine them, but I swear I ran through an art gallery—a room the size of the library that was hung with paintings. I don't know why this should sound any stranger than what I've told you already, but they were all the work of Thomas Belvedere. Another room was some kind of museum, full of glass cases and glassed-in tables I almost crashed into. I couldn't get a good look at their contents. It seems to me—I left my watch upstairs, but it seems to me that I was a long time doing this. Look—the moon's up."
My stomach dropped. A look out a front window confirmed the worst. There was that disfigured moon—higher in the sky, now—pouring its corpse light over the yard, which was no longer the yard. It had been replaced by thirty feet of rock and sand that ran to the shore of a vast river shining pewter-bright. Of course it was the same view I'd had from the living room window, except that I wasn't freezing to death seeing it.
"What is it?" Roger asked. "What's wrong?"
There was some kind of town or city on the far shore. I could make out rows of squat buildings—the light in the air prevented me distinguishing much more. Beyond the town—I still couldn't say for sure if the shapes bulking there were the same mountains that had stunned my eyes—was it yesterday?
"Veronica?"
I felt it, too, all of it. This was no adjunct to the house, no extra, oversized room—this was the house, was continuous with it. The change I'd sensed in the house—the move from form to formlessness, from structure to sea—whatever pretensions to landscape the view outside might have, it was that seething ocean given room to stretch out.
"Veronica," Roger said, grabbing my arm. "What is it? What do you see?"
Eyes straight ahead, I said, "What do you see?"
Roger squinted. "To be honest, not much. The moon seems particularly bright. Although—the yard looks darker. There are no lights on in anyone's house, are there? Is it that late?"
The sound of the river, that scraping, was louder, clearer. A wave passed up it in a way that made me think of flesh rippling. The impression that this was one segment of an enormous snake was stronger than ever; I swear, had it hauled itself up out of its bed and sought another course, I wouldn't have been that surprised. I would have lost my mind at the sight, but it wouldn't have surprised me. I said, "You mean, you don't see anything."
"Nothing," Roger said. "Should I?"
"I don't know."
"What do you see?"
"Everything's different."
"How so?"
"To start with, there's a river."
"A river?" Roger peered out the window.
"It's big—maybe a mile wide."
"And it's out there?" He pointed.
"Yes, and you can't see it, I know."
"It's just—a river—and one so big, at that—are there any houses?"
"I can't tell on this side, but there seems to be a town or city on the far shore."
"What do the buildings look like?"
"Buildings—I don't know. I'm not sure what you're asking. None of them is especially tall. It's hard to tell with the glare from the moon, but they look kind of blocky."
"Mountains," Roger said, "do you see any mountains?"
"I think so."
"Kabul," Roger breathed. "It's Kabul. It has to be." He turned to me. "Are you sure about all of this?"
"Why would I make it up?"
"That's not an answer."
"Yes, I'm sure," I said. "I'm not sure it's Kabul, but that's what I see."
"What else could it be?"
I didn't have an answer to that one.
Roger reached for the doorknob.
"Wait!" I said. "What are you doing?"
"Opening the door."
"That's not—you can't do that—we don't know what'll happen—"
Roger turned the knob and pulled the door. It swung open, admitting a breeze that smelled of dust and cordite. Nothing had changed. There was the river, the town, the mountains, the moon presiding over it all. I knew, then—I'd already thought, This is it, when Ted had entered the house, but this was really it. However this story was going to end, this was the stage on which it was going to do so.
"Well?" Roger asked.
I burst into tears.
Whatever he'd anticipated, it wasn't this. The expression on his face—a combination of arrogance, triumph, and fear—slid into confusion. "Veronica?"
"It's still there," I said. "Are you happy? It's still there."
"But—"
"Why can't you see it?" I said. "Why can't you see what's right there in front of you?"
"Veronica—"
"Don't you understand what this means?"
"Of course I do. It means my boy has come back to me. He's finally home."
"Goddamn you!" I shouted. "Why do you keep doing this? Why do you keep lying? Don't you get it, Roger? This is it. This is the end of the mess you made when you struck your deal with that thing in your cell. This is where your cursing of Ted has led you—us—all of us. Here—now—can't you drop the act?"
The confusion on Roger's face congealed into anger. "If this is, to borrow your phrasing, 'it,' I don't understand why you can't let go of this ridiculous obsession with making me confess to something that isn't true."
"Because I was there. I saw what you did. I saw you promising that thing whatever it wanted."
"That's irrelevant! What I may or may not have done in a moment of weakness has no bearing whatsoever on what's happening. Ted has returned to his father. That's what this is about."
"You can't believe that. You're too smart—I can't believe you don't understand what's really happening here. You have to know you're lying to yourself."
"I know nothing of the kind."
"Lift the curse, then. If that has nothing to do with this, lift it."
"No."
"Oh my God," I said, "I get it."
"Get what?"
"It's not that you're fooling yourself—you are, but not the way I thought. It isn't that simple. You don't want to lift the curse because you're afraid that it'll make Ted go away."
Roger's look of anger faltered. "That's not—"
"That's it. You don't care that he's suffering—you think that, as long as you keep him around, as long as he isn't gone, lost once and for all, there's a chance for, what? Some kind of reconciliation?"
Roger was silent.
"You can't see him, can't hear him, can't touch him—but I can. I'm there to assure you Ted's around. That's what you're up to in your office, isn't it? You've been looking for a way to make him visible to you. Maybe not at first—maybe you did believe he was in the bardo; maybe you were trying to help him exit it—that doesn't make any sense."
"That's because it isn't true," Roger said. "Once again, you're inventing a scenario in which I play the role of villain. How you do enjoy painting me the monster. Has it ever occurred to you to give me the benefit of the doubt?"
"You're not a monster. You're just like your father, that's all."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm sure he would have insisted he wasn't a monster, either. He would've quoted the Bible at me to justify breaking your nose, or tormenting you. 'Honor thy father and mother,' right? Especially thy father."
"Of all the things you have said to me—you could have said to me—this is by far the worst, the most hateful."
"Oh please. Don't try to take the moral high ground, here. You aren't the victim. You know it and I know it. But you have a chance to be something else, Roger—you've got a chance to lift this curse and be something your father never was—to be more than he was."
That almost did it. There was a long moment where I honestly thought I'd gotten through to him and we were going to get out of this. His face seemed to relax, as if he'd decided it was time to abandon this posturing and finally make things right. I could see him trying to arrive at the right set of sentences to break the curse. Then—that process ground to a halt. Whatever sentences he'd thrown together fell to the floor and shattered. His mouth tightened, and he said, "I am not my father. I will never be that man."
In the front yard—what had been the front yard—there was movement, down by the river. I glanced at it, turned away immediately. The air was too full of white light for me to distinguish him clearly, but it was Ted.
"What is it?" Roger asked.
Not looking in that direction, I pointed. "Ted."
"Ted, or what you've mistaken for him?"
"It's Ted. He's standing on this side of the river."
"How can you be sure?"
"I can feel him," I said, which was true. Ted was unmistakable, a beacon of cold fire. The stew of emotions that had assaulted me before was past the boil. His agony, his anger, most of all his eagerness, that overpowering desire, bubbled up and out of him. His desire, his greed, burst against me, and I understood what he wanted. Roger, of course. He wanted Roger to leave the house and come join him by the bank of the grinding river. I said, "He's waiting for you."
"He is?"
I nodded.
He licked his lips. "Out there—in the dark."
"Beside the river."
"You're certain."
Now was not the time for qualifications. "Yes."
Roger's forehead was shining with sweat. He grimaced and wiped it. His breathing had grown heavy. I assumed he was working himself up to stride out onto the front porch and across the yard. Judging from the sweat and the breathing, he did not find the prospect of doing so appealing. No surprise, there. Whatever he might say to me to save face, he knew what was waiting for him. I thought I would give him another five seconds before suggesting that he wouldn't have to do so if he lifted the curse. I wasn't sure what I'd do if he refused—which, let's face it, he was more likely to do than not. I couldn't see myself being able to keep him inside if he decided to brazen it out, but I did not want him going to Ted. While I was afraid that, in the end, there would be no other choice, I was holding out hope that the extremity of the situation would force him, at long last, to break the curse.
How surprised was I, then, when Roger said, "I can't." For a moment—a good two- or three-second moment—I literally could not process the words that had come out of his mouth. When I could, I said, "You what?"
"I can't do it," he said. "I can't go to Ted."
"Why not?"
"I—I don't know. I can't, that's all."
"All right," I said. "You know what this means?"
"What?"
"It's time to renounce the curse."
"No." He shook his head.
"Excuse me?" The anger—the fury that swept over me was unlike anything I'd known. It blew through me, this hurricane of resentment and rage that actually took my vision—for an instant, I was so angry it blinded me. Almost before I knew what I was doing, my fist lashed out and caught Roger next to the eye.
The blow took him completely by surprise. His head rocked with the force of it and he backed toward the doorway. He hadn't finished raising his hands and I'd hit him again, a punch in the mouth that scraped my knuckles and burst his lip. Hands up, he retreated onto the front stoop. I swung again, missed, struck his shoulder on the next try. I was—I swear, I've never been that angry at anyone. If I'd had a knife, I could have cut him to ribbons cheerfully.
Doing his best to bat my hands away, Roger backed toward the top of the stairs, talking all the way, his bloody lips asking me what I was doing, what was wrong, what was the meaning of this. The questions rolled off me. I was sick of talking, sick of endless dialogues that led nowhere, sick to death of trying to argue Roger into admitting the truth. This—the confusion scrawled on his face, his hands struggling to keep up with mine, the thud when my fist found his arms, his sides, his gut—was infinitely more satisfying. It was almost sexual; it was that visceral, that immediate.
I'd never—I want to say I could count the number of times I've hit someone on one hand, but even that's an overstatement. I could count them on one finger. In the fourth grade, I gave Katy Britten a black eye for calling me a slut. That was the extent of my combat-related experience. I've never been a fan of violence, never liked violent art, movies, TV shows, whatever. That wasn't all—if you'd asked me if I thought I'd be able to hit Roger, to hurt him, I'd have said absolutely not. I don't know why. The one fight I'd witnessed him in, he hadn't done especially well. It's just socialization, I guess. He's the man; you're the woman; he fights; you don't. To be fair, I don't think he was trying as hard as he might have—as he would've if he'd known how totally committed I was to hurting him. Fast—from start to finish, it was over so fast. Roger went to take another step away from me, and found nothing there—we'd reached the stairs. He threw his arms forward, trying to catch himself from falling, and I hit him in the chest. Still trying to find his footing, he tipped back and fell down the front stairs.
As falls went, it could have been worse. He landed on his ass and back; although I think his ass took most of his weight. A cloud of dust puffed up around him. He looked at me, his eyes wide, his mouth a bloody o. His lips were moving, speaking almost the last words my husband would say to me, and I was too busy exulting in the power coursing through my fists, my arms, to hear what they were. I think one of them was "Why?"—that would make sense, wouldn't it? He tried to wipe his mouth with the back of one hand, but only succeeded in smearing blood across his cheek. I saw the red on his face—and I saw it streaming from his freshly broken nose as he tried to avoid another kick from his father's polished shoe—I saw it leaking from the place where the snake had fastened itself to him—I saw it dried on his lips as they pronounced his curse on Ted—I saw it flush beneath his cheeks as he told the judge he would marry me. As quickly as it had swept me up, the wave of anger dropped me. Where I'd been strong, powerful, relentless, an Amazon taking my destiny in my own hands, now I was hollow, burnt-out, dizzy and sick at what I'd done.
From his position next to the river, Ted watched events unfold with keen interest. My rage had fled, and Ted was there, waiting for Roger to join him. What was the way out of this? There had to be one, right? Absurd as it sounds, part of me still hadn't abandoned the idea that something was going to save us. Either Roger would give in and break the curse, or I'd finally understand all the reading I'd done in the last few days and know how to defeat Ted. It wasn't too late, not yet—
Except that nothing was coming to me, nor was Roger any closer than he'd ever been to taking back the words he'd uttered months ago. Months? God—I had one of those seconds where it's like, you simultaneously think, But that happened yesterday, didn't it? and, Wasn't that ten years ago? Roger had been watching to find out if I intended to descend the stairs and continue attacking him, or if I was content to maintain the high ground. Since I hadn't charged down after him, he pulled himself to his feet, one eye on me in case I changed my mind. He held up his hands, both of them bloody from his efforts at cleaning his mouth, and let them fall to his sides. He said, "That was a bit excessive, don't you think?"
"Your son is waiting for you," I said. "If you turn around and walk in a straight line, you'll go right to him."
"Veronica—I told you, I can't."
"He's waiting for you."
"Honey, I can't do this. I'm sorry, but I can't."
"It's about ten yards."
"Dammit, Veronica, I said I'm staying right here."
"No, you're not," I said. "You're going to turn around and walk in a straight line to Ted."
"I will not."
"Goddamn you!" I shouted. "You will walk your Goddamn ass to your Goddamn son or I swear to Christ I will come down there and I will claw your eyes out. This is what it's come to, Roger. You're out of options. I'm out of options. You got what you wanted. Ted has come back to you. You own that. You drink your cup of blood. You accept what you wanted and go to him. Be a man, for God's sake."
Roger looked behind him. "It's dark. It's all dark."
"Walk in a straight line. He's there."
"I can't believe—you swear he's awful, yet you're willing to send me out to him like this."
"I didn't bring him here—I didn't make him what he is."
"So that's it? That's all there is?"
"Unless you want to lift the curse, yes, that's all."
He was about to reply. I didn't give him the chance. I spun on my heel, marched back inside, and slammed the door. I snapped all the locks; Roger would have no trouble hearing them. If he wanted in, I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep him out—it wouldn't be that hard to smash the window and reach through to release the locks. I was afraid he might try to do that, and I wasn't sure what I'd do if he did. Watching him standing at the foot of the stairs, watching me, because I couldn't follow my actions all the way through and walk away from the door, I was certain he'd call my bluff. At the very least, I assumed he'd hold his position.
He didn't. After I don't know how long of looking at me, Roger took a deep breath, said something he thought I'd be able to hear or read on his lips—I couldn't do either—and headed towards the river. He walked slowly, hesitantly, the way you do when you're moving through your house in the dark. I kept expecting each step forward to be his last, that he'd run back to the house as fast as he could. He didn't. Moving ever more slowly, he continued to advance, unseeing, toward Ted, who trembled with anticipation. The closer he drew to Ted, the harder it was to see him. The combination of light from the moon and river and wanting to keep my eyes from Ted made Roger less and less distinct.
How could I let him go, right? How could I stay where I was while my husband walked toward what had to be his death? Why didn't I end this, unlock the door and call out to him to stop, come back, we'd find another way through this? Because it was his decision. He had the choice between releasing Ted and going to meet him. The most I could do was force him to choose. I wish I could say that the tears were streaming down my face as he went, that I sobbed and whimpered, but mostly I was anxious, eager for this to be over. I had had enough. Enough of Roger's mania, enough of Ted's haunting me, enough of the whole sick and sad affair that my life had become. Peace—I was desperate for peace. I was thinking—praying, Let this do. Let this satisfy him. If it wasn't the ending I'd wanted, let it at least be an ending.
About two-thirds of the way to Ted, Roger stopped. My first thought was that his nerve had failed and he'd gone as far as he could. Ted would have to come the rest of the way to him. No, that wasn't it. Hard as it was to see Roger through this white glare, I was pretty sure something was different. The tilt of his head, the way he was carrying himself, changed, as if he could see part or all of what lay in front of him, as if he'd gone so far into this landscape that he couldn't help seeing it. There was no way to know how much of it was visible to him, but he didn't appear to notice Ted. Even if he'd managed not to collapse or run screaming in the opposite direction, he would have registered the sight of his son somehow. Roger bent down, dragged his fingers through the dust at his feet, and stared at his hand. He straightened up, wiped his hand on his jeans, and stared at the river. He took one step forward, then a second.
I couldn't watch—he was too close to Ted, who had flared like a bonfire doused in gasoline. Nerves in flames, I backed away from the door to the foot of the second-floor stairs. That was too close by far. I retreated up the stairs to the second-floor hall. My brain still felt as if it were burning inside my skull. I stumbled up the stairs to the third floor. That wasn't any better, nor was there much point in continuing to the attic. The entire house—what had been the house—was ablaze with Ted. My skin felt wreathed in fire—for the briefest instant, it was as if I were standing beside Ted when the RPG struck the ground and made him the heart of a momentary sun. Blue-white tongues of flame played across my fingers, and I realized that the sensation that was consuming my nerves was about to take the rest of me with them. My legs wouldn't carry me any further. Tongue too dry to cry out, I dropped to the floor. In some distant corner of my mind, I wondered if there would be anything left of me. My body shook as if I were having a seizure. Darkness rimmed my vision, consciousness fleeing for what promised to be the last time. There was time for me to hope I wouldn't end up in the same place as Ted, then nothing.
That nothing lasted until late the following morning. While I was wrapped in it, there were no dreams, no memories recycled into new configurations—only a distant pain that gradually drew closer. It was that pain—a feeling as if the entire inside of my body had been scraped raw—that finally brought me back to the house. Funny—my first thought wasn't relief at being alive, or wonder at what had occurred, or concern for Roger. The first priority to present itself was an urgent need to use the bathroom. Somehow, despite everything that had happened, I'd managed to avoid wetting myself, and now my bladder was demanding to be relieved from its duty. Not until I'd done the necessary did those other concerns announce themselves. Half-sure the desert landscape would remain to greet my eyes, I peered out the bathroom window. There was green, the lawn, with Founders and the neighbors in their familiar places. The sheer happiness and relief that slice of view brought me was replaced almost immediately by a thick, sinking dread. Roger? I thought.
He wasn't in any of the places I searched for him, inside the house or out. I knew he wouldn't be. Right from the start, before I'd been over the entire house from attic to basement twice, then driven to his office, then wandered around campus, then wandered around town, then tried to retrace the paths of his walks and runs—by which time the sun had lowered behind the mountains and I was fainting with hunger—from the second his name occurred to me, it was followed by an answer. Gone. That answer wanted to bring along a longer explanation, in which the words "your" and "fault" featured prominently, but I refused them admittance. After a stop at the diner for a plate of scrambled eggs and dry toast, I returned to Belvedere House in case Roger was waiting for me. He wasn't.
After I'd been through the house a third time, I called the police and told them my husband had gone out last night and not returned. The officer who spoke to me asked a couple of questions, then suggested I stop into the station and fill out a missing person's report. I took his advice, but before I did, I climbed the stairs to Roger's office.
I'm not sure what I was expecting to find. When I'd looked in here during my searches, something had struck me as off, though not in a way that seemed to have any bearing on the task at hand. Moving more slowly, now, I flipped on the light and entered the room. More maps than ever overlapped on the bookcases, the walls. The threads that connected them, however, had been severed, every last one, the ends hanging limply from the stickers Roger had used to secure them. The air was heavy with a sharp, oily smell, which came from the table, whose model was splashed with what had to be red—scarlet paint. How had I missed that before? The figures of the soldiers had been knocked over, the buildings thrown out of alignment, as if someone had taken hold of one end of the table and shaken it, produced a scale-model earthquake. Paint pooled heavily around each figure, streaked the buildings' walls. The soil Roger had sprinkled the table with lay in wet clumps. Most of the photos surrounding the model lay under a layer of bright red. I picked one up by the edge and wiped it against the edge of the table. The spot where Ted had been killed glared at me. I dropped it as if I'd been bitten.
The map at the door I studied the longest. Roger's writing had crowded out almost every bit of available space, but it was as if he'd thrown a bucket of water onto it: his script had run together into a gray mess, the paper warped and wavy beneath. Here and there, individual words and symbols had survived the deluge, half a sentence about trade routes converging in Kabul, a fraction—fifteen over negative seven—bracketed and followed by a minus, the astrological sign for Cancer, a backwards hook and a straight line that might have been Arabic. At the center of it, the narrow bar of Ted's shaving mirror, Roger's long-ago, failed birthday present—his attempt at carrying on paternal tradition. The mirror was dark. I bent to study it, and saw that the backing was charred, the glass scorched, as if a fire had erupted inside it, burning its reflections away.