After the Night (4 page)

At nine-thirty she heard Amos driving up, his old truck clanking and backfiring. She went to unlatch the screen and let him in. The stink of whiskey came in with him, a purulent, greenish yellow stench.

He stumbled over the threshold, and righted himself.

"Where’s your ma?" he growled, in the ugly mean tone he always used when he was drinking, which was most of the time.

"She went out a couple of hours ago."

He lurched toward the table, the uneven floor making his steps that much more perilous. "Damn bitch," he muttered. "Ain’t never here. Always out shakin’ her ass at her fancy rich boyfriend. Ain’t never here to fix my supper. How’s a man supposed to eat?" he suddenly roared, hitting the table with his fist.

"Supper’s ready, Pa," Faith said quietly, hoping the uproar didn’t wake Scottie. "I’ll fix you a plate."

"Don’t want anything to eat," he said, as she had expected. When he was drinking, he never wanted food, just more
booze.

"Is there anythin’ in this damn house to drink?" He staggered to his feet and began opening cabinet doors, slamming them when they didn’t reveal what he wanted.

Faith moved quickly. "There’s a bottle in the boys’ bedroom. I’ll get it." She didn’t want Amos stumbling around in there, cussing and probably puking, and waking Scottie. She darted into the dark little room and blindly searched under Nick’s cot until her hand brushed against cool glass. Dragging the bottle out, she carried it back into the kitchen. It was only about one quarter full, but anything would pacify Pa. She twisted the cap off and handed the bottle to Amos.

"Here, Pa."

"Good girl," he said, brightening as he tipped the bottle to his mouth. "You’re a good girl, Faith, not a whore like your ma and sister."

"Don’t talk like that about them," she protested, unable to listen. Knowing it was one thing, but talking about it was another. It wasn’t as if Pa had any room to throw stones.

"I’ll say what I damn well please!" Amos flared. "Don’t sass me, girl, or I’ll belt you one."

"I wasn’t sassing you, Pa." She kept her voice calm, but prudently moved out of reach. If he couldn’t reach her, he couldn’t hit her. He was likely to throw something, but she was quick and his missiles seldom struck her.

"Fine kids she gave me," he sneered. "Russ and Nick are the only two I can stomach. Jodie’s a whore like her ma, you’re a prissy smart-ass, and the last one’s a goddamn idiot."

Keeping her head turned away so he couldn’t see the tears that burned her eyes, Faith sat down on the ragged, sagging couch and began folding the laundry she’d done that day. It would never do to let Amos see that he’d hurt her. If he ever scented blood, he moved in for the kill, and the drunker he was, the more vicious he became. The best thing to do was ignore him. Like all drunks, he was easily distracted, and she figured he’d soon be passed out anyway.

She didn’t know why it hurt. She had long since ceased to have any feelings for Amos, not even fear. There was certainly nothing there to love, the man he had been long since destroyed in countless bottles of whiskey. If he had ever shown any promise, it had been gone by the time she’d been born, but somehow she thought he had always been pretty much as he was now. He was simply the type of person who always blamed others for his problems rather than doing something to correct them.

Sometimes, when he was sober, Faith thought she could see why Renee had once been attracted to him. Amos was a little over average height, with a wiry body that had never gone to fat. His hair was still dark, if thinning on top, and he could even be called a good-looking man – when he was sober. Drunk, as he was now, unshaven and with his hair mussed and hanging in dirty strings, his eyes red and rheumy with alcohol, his face bloated, there was nothing the least attractive about him. His clothes were dirty and stained, and he stank to high heaven. Judging by the sourness of his smell, he had already puked at least once, and the stains on the front of his pants meant that he hadn’t been as careful as he should have been when he’d peed.

He finished off the bottle in silence, then belched loudly. "Gotta piss," he announced, staggering to his feet and heading toward the front door.

Faith’s movements were measured, her hands never faltering as she listened to the stream of urine spattering in front of the step, for everyone else who came in that night to
tramp into the house. She would mop the floor first thing In the morning.

Amos weaved back into the house. He hadn’t zipped his pants, she noticed, but at least his sex wasn’t exposed.

"Goin’ to bed," he said, making his way toward the back room. Faith watched him stumble and right himself by bracing his hand on the doorframe. He didn’t undress, but fell across the bed as he was. When Renee came home and found Amos lying across the bed in his filthy clothes, she would raise hell and wake everyone in the house.

Within minutes, Amos’s heavy snoring was echoing through the cramped shack.

Faith immediately got up and went into the lean-to that had been built onto the back of the shack, which she shared with Jodie. Only Amos and Renee had an honest-to-goodness bed; all the rest of them had cots. She turned on the light, the single bare bulb glaring, and quickly changed into her nightgown. Then she pulled her book out from under the mattress. Now that Scottie was in bed and Amos passed out drunk, she would likely have a couple of peaceful hours before anyone else came home. Amos was always the first one home, but then he always got started first.

She had learned not to hesitate when an opportunity for enjoyment presented itself, but to seize each moment. There were too few of them in her life for her to allow any to pass untasted. She loved books, and read anything that came to hand. There was something magical in the way words could be strung together and a whole new world fashioned by the arrangement. While reading she could leave this crowded shack far behind, and go to worlds filled with excitement and beauty and love. When she was reading, she was someone else in her mind, someone worthwhile, rather than one of the trashy Devlins.

She had learned not to read in front of Pa or the boys, though. The least they did was make fun of her. Any one of them, in one of their meaner moods, was likely to snatch the book from her and throw it in the fire, or into the toilet, and laugh uproariously as if her frantic efforts to save it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Renee would grumble about her wasting her time reading instead of doing her
chores, but she wouldn’t do anything to the book. Jodie made fun of her sometimes, but in a careless, impatient way. She couldn’t understand for the life of her why Faith would rather stick her nose in a book than go out to have some fun.

These precious moments alone, when she could read in peace, were the highlight of Faith’s day, unless she had happened to see Gray. Sometimes she thought that if she couldn’t read, just for a few minutes, she would go crazy and start screaming, and not be able to stop. But no matter what Pa did, no matter what she overheard someone say about her family, no matter what Russ and Nicky had been up to or how weak Scottie seemed, if she could open a book, she would lose herself in the pages.

Tonight she had more than a few minutes free for reading, for losing herself in the pages
of Rebecca.
She settled on her cot and pulled out the candle that she kept under her bed. She lit the candle, positioned it just so, balanced on a crate to the right of the cot, and scooted so that her back was braced against the wall. The light from the candle, small as it was, was enough to offset the back glare of the light bulb and allow her to read without straining her eyes too much. One of these days, she promised herself, she would get a lamp. She imagined it, a real reading lamp that gave off soft, bright light. And she would have one of those wedge-shaped pillows to lean against.

One of these days.

It was almost midnight when she gave up the battle against her heavy eyelids. She hated to stop reading, not wanting to waste any of this time to herself, but she was so sleepy, she couldn’t make sense of the words any longer, and wasting the words seemed a lot worse than wasting the time. Sighing, she got up and returned the book to its hiding place, then turned out the light. She crawled between the threadbare sheets, the frame of the cot squeaking under her weight, and blew out the candle.

Perversely, in the sudden darkness, sleep wouldn’t come. She shifted restlessly on the thin cot, drifting in a half daydream, half doze, reliving the strained, shadowed romance in the book she’d been reading. She knew instantly when Russ and Nicky drove up, close to one o’clock. They
staggered into the house, making no effort to be quiet, laughing uproariously at something their drinking buddies had done that night. Both of them were still underage, but a little thing like a law had never gotten in the way whenever a Devlin wanted to do something. The boys couldn’t go to roadhouses, but there were plenty of other ways they could get booze, and they knew them all. Sometimes they stole it, sometimes they paid other people to buy it for them, in which case they had stolen the money. Neither of them had a job, part-time or otherwise, because no one would hire them. It was well known the Devlin boys would steal you blind.

"OF Poss," Nicky was giggling. "Boooooom!"

It was enough to send Russ into drunken whoops. From the incoherent fragments she heard, evidently "Or Poss," whoever that was, had been scared by something that had made a loud booming noise. The boys seemed to think it was hilarious, but they probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

They woke Scottie, and she heard him grunting, but he didn’t cry, so she remained in bed. She wouldn’t have liked traipsing into the boys’ bedroom in her nightgown – in fact, she would have gone cold with dread – but she would have done it if they’d scared Scottie and made him cry. But Nicky said, "Shaddup and go back to sleep," and Scottie was quiet again. After a few minutes, they were all asleep, the chorus of snores rising and falling in the darkness.

Half an hour later, Jodie came home. She was quiet, or at least tried to be, tiptoeing through the shack with her shoes in hand. The stench of beer and sex came with her, all yellow and red and brown in a noxious swirl. She didn’t bother to undress but flopped down on her cot and heaved a deep sigh, almost like a purr.

"You awake, Faithie?" she asked after a moment, her voice slurred.

"Yeah."

"Thought you were. You should’ve come with me. Had fun, lots of fun." The last sentence was deep with sensuality. "You don’t know what you’re missin’, Faithie."

"Then I don’t miss it, do I?" Faith whispered, and Jodie giggled.

Faith dozed lightly, listening for Renee’s car so she would know everyone was safely home. Twice she came awake with a start, wondering if Renee had managed to come in without waking her, and got up to look out the window to see if her car was there. It wasn’t.

Renee didn’t come home at all that night.

Three

"Daddy didn’t come home last night."

Monica’s face was tight with misery as she stood at the window of the dining room. Gray continued eating his breakfast; there wasn’t much that could curb his appetite. So that was why Monica was up so early, since she usually didn’t crawl out of bed until ten or later. What did she do, wait up until Guy came home? He wondered with a sigh what Monica thought he could do about their father’s hours; send him to bed without supper? He couldn’t remember when Guy hadn’t had women on the side, though Renee Devlin had certainly had a lot more staying power than the rest of them.

His mother, Noelle, didn’t care where Guy spent his nights, so long as it wasn’t with her, and simply pretended that her husband’s affairs didn’t exist. Because Noelle didn’t care, Gray didn’t either. It would have been different if Noelle had been distressed, but that was far from the case. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Guy; Gray supposed she did, in her fashion. But Noelle intensely disliked sex, disliked being touched, even casually. For Guy to have a mistress was the best solution all around. He didn’t mistreat Noelle, and though he never bothered to hide his affairs, her position as his wife was safe. It was a very Old World arrangement that
his parents had, and one that Gray knew he wouldn’t like at all when he finally decided to get married, but it suited both of them fine.

Monica hadn’t ever been able to see that, however. She was painfully protective of Noelle, relating to her in a way that Gray never could, imagining that Noelle was humiliated and hurt by Guy’s affairs. At the same time, Monica adored Guy, and was never happier than when he was paying attention to her. She had a picture in her mind of how families should be, close-knit and loving, always supporting each other, with the parents devoted to each other, and she had been trying her entire life to make her own family match that picture.

"Does Mother know?" he asked calmly, and refrained from asking if Monica really thought Noelle would care even if she did know. He sometimes felt sorry for Monica, but he also loved her, and didn’t deliberately try to hurt her.

Monica shook her head. "She isn’t up yet."

"Then why worry about it? By the time she gets up, when he comes in she’ll just think he’s already gone somewhere this morning."

"But he’s been out with
her!"
Monica whirled to face him, her dark eyes swimming with tears. "That Devlin woman."