Blood Red (2 page)

She moves out of the room, into the
hallway.

Something isn’t right.

The rest of the house lies in humid shadow,
awaiting the day. She pads into the middle of the main room and
looks about. The room is filled with shadowed corners still,
seemingly full of silent riddles. What appears to be something
crouched becomes, upon examination, a folded magazine. What at
first seems the glint of a rolling eye becomes the lazy, reflected
glint of silverware under the indistinct glow coming from the
curtained front window. The stuff of night terrors, fading with the
light of dawn.

God, her head hurts. She gently shakes
herself away from these weird perceptions, not letting them bother
her. She tells herself not to let another alcohol-hazed nightmare
follow her into the day.

Then there’s a sound from the hallway, more
than someone shifting in sleep. Some kind of crunching sound.
Rachel frowns, staring over her shoulder down the dark hallway.

She turns and starts toward the bedroom her
dad shares with Susanna. At the threshold, Rachel peeks through the
half-open doorway and sees her stepmother asleep—sees her slack
face, sees sunlight from the bedroom windows pinlighting her cheek
with a faint, glowing redness. She also sees with a little shock
that Susanna is naked under the sheets, her body barely concealed.
With some envy, she notices the heft of the large left breast and
the tanned expanse of thigh. Rachel has always reluctantly admitted
that Susanna is a beautiful, well-rounded woman, but Jesus, what a
fucking bitch.

Sorry, Dad.

Rachel turns away, slightly embarrassed about
the unintended bedroom peek. Not that Susanna ever missed an
opportunity to flaunt her body.

Anyway, her dad isn’t there. He must be at
work, or out for a walk.

Rachel tries to shake herself further from
her hangover. She steps through the hallway carefully, not wanting
to wake Susanna, and when she reaches the kitchen she bounces a
bit, enjoying the icy tingle of the kitchen’s tile floor, beginning
to feel herself energized. She goes to the refrigerator, avoids
looking at the door shelves, which hold a portion of Susanna’s
unending supply of red wines. Instead, Rachel roots around in the
crisper drawer at the bottom of the fridge.

She brings a cold apple to the front room,
plants herself in Susanna’s favorite rocking chair, and takes a
bite, leaning her head back and trying to lose herself in the lazy
movement of the chair. In the quiet of the big room, she breathes
deeply around her mouthful of fruit, then closes her eyes,
chewing.

A peal of thunder shakes the house, jarring
her.

“What the—” she says out loud, then lets
loose a nervous laugh. “Okay.”

She remembers the dying thunder from earlier
and understands why everything seems weird. Morning thunderstorms
in Colorado are rare, but not totally surprising. Anything’s
possible with Colorado weather, her dad always says. Rachel’s mom
used to say that, too.

She continues to chew her apple, letting
herself go contemplative.

Rachel’s mother loved Colorado weather, the
unpredictability of it all. It was one of the things that drew her
to the mountainous state from the dreary, smoggy sameness of
California a decade ago. She used to like to sit in this room, too,
before this chair was in the house, before anyone else was awake,
and look out onto the new day through the big picture window,
watching new snow blanketing the world or early summer heat making
her roses recoil in their beds. Rachel’s mom appreciated solitude,
loved simply relaxing here in silence before anyone else in the
house stirred. Or even while everyone else was still at work or
school. Rachel remembers occasionally wandering into the room from
the garage to find her mom dozing in the purple light of sunset
angling in from the foothills.

Those fond memories too often merge with the
more recent recollections of her resting in the traumatic aftermath
of a chemotherapy session.

Rachel understands the appreciation of
solitude. She gets it. She’s an only child. She too likes when
everything lies unruffled and calm like this, as if nothing in the
world has yet awakened. She likes to watch the day come alive
gradually around her, even likes the way her dad’s light
snores—absent this morning—give a peaceful echo to the long, drowsy
shadows.

She doesn’t have opportunities to do that
like she used to. This morning is an oddity, but she’ll take what
she can get.

She finishes her apple slowly.

Finally, she opens her eyes, lets loose a
tiny sigh. She glances back again toward the bedroom.

Rachel’s mom has been dead for five years,
and Rachel still can’t believe how comprehensively things have
changed. She sometimes feels that she missed out on the few
wonderful years that, under normal circumstances, would surely have
bridged her childhood and early adulthood. Those two years during
which all her friends seemed to grow and thrive? Rachel saw that
time flit by in a period of restlessness and quiet sorrow.

Damn it, why did every quiet moment in this
house conjure thoughts like these?

Too often, and with no small amount of
survivor guilt, Rachel recalls the days and weeks that followed her
mother’s death, and the way she and her dad tried to cope with the
gargantuan empty space in the house. The black hole in their lives.
She still misses her mom terribly, but Rachel is proud of the way
the two of them faced the loss together and came out stronger and
closer than they were before.

Then her dad introduced her to Susanna, this
energetic young woman he worked with. The first time Rachel met her
was at his office on the south end of town, at a Christmas party,
and she noticed with a tinge of jealous foreboding the playful look
that passed between her father and this woman, who couldn’t have
been more than ten years Rachel’s senior. That goddamn party took
place almost two and a half years ago now. And her father hasn’t
been the same since.

Maybe Tony’s right,
she thinks.
Maybe I just miss my dad.

“Ugh,” Rachel says to the empty room.

At that moment, there’s another rumble of
thunder, much farther away. Rachel listens to its soft growl, glad
the morning storm is already moving away.

She’s still glancing in the direction of her
stepmother, back there in the dark master bedroom, and there’s a
weight of resigned melancholy in the glance. She’s all too
conscious of the emotion, so she closes her eyes, pushes it away,
and tries to enjoy the last of her solitude.

But something isn’t right.

Rachel’s initial sense upon waking, that
something bitter, something
wrong
, has touched this
morning—it hasn’t left her, despite her attempts to deny it. She
leans forward and sets the apple core on the coffee table. She
stands in the center of the front room—her hangover headache
returning with a slight but persistent throb—and studies her
surroundings again.

What’s wrong with this picture?

She has the feeling that whatever is
bothering her is right in front of her. And yet everything seems in
its place; nothing seems to be missing. She stands there in her
flimsy nightgown, unmoving, waiting for something to occur to her.
Yes, Dad is gone, but he probably just left early for some weekend
work. That’s nothing new. No, this is something else.

She begins walking back toward her dad’s
bedroom, which still lies in relative darkness.

Susanna ...

She arrives at the threshold and peeks around
the door at her. Susanna is lying on her back now, her head turned
away from Rachel. The sheets are tangled hopelessly around her
naked legs, leaving her upper body completely exposed. There
doesn’t seem to be any movement at all in the room.

That’s when Rachel sees the glow arcing off
Susanna’s cheek.

She mistook the illumination earlier for
sunlight. But it’s not that; it can’t be, right? It’s storming
outside. Rachel frowns, staring at the tiny, crimson illumination.
Where is it coming from? What is its source? Head still, her gaze
darts around Susanna’s body in a jerkily widening ellipse.

Nothing. There’s no light anywhere in this
room, except on the side of her stepmother’s face.

“Uh,” she says out loud, then raps softly on
the doorjamb. “Hello?” She gets no response, so she knocks harder.
Nothing.

Feeling her heartbeat in her throat, Rachel
approaches Susanna. She leans over, suddenly weak in the legs, and
anchors herself with one hand upon the cool sheets. She peers
closely at Susanna’s face.

“Susanna?” she whispers, frowning.

The muted light is emanating from low on her
cheekbone, above her closed mouth. Red-tinted—like a black
light—the luminescence seems to burn through her, as if originating
deep inside her, back behind and above her innermost molars. It
radiates from somewhere underneath Susanna’s surface, like the
light from a flashlight behind the flesh of a palm.

Rachel pulls back and sees the way the light
spreads itself in an almost imperceptible glow. The ceiling is a
soft shade of crimson in the dark room.

She discovers that she’s trembling. She
shifts position, and her elbow gives. She collapses next to
Susanna, jostling the bed, and a groan escapes her stepmother’s
lips. The red illumination on her cheek stays precisely in place,
but now Rachel can see it softly escaping her nostrils and slightly
parted mouth.

“Susanna!” she calls loudly, almost directly
into her stepmother’s ear.

No response.

What the hell?

Tentatively, she brings her hand up. She
reaches over to Susanna’s face until her fingers are barely
illuminated by the strange glow. She can feel vague heat. Startled,
Rachel darts her hand back protectively against her own chest,
where she can feel the strong, rapid thump of her heart.

She takes a deep breath and reaches over
again, this time placing her palm directly against Susanna’s
cheek.

The same odd heat.

Suddenly her vision begins to blur, and she
takes her hand back. When focus doesn’t return, she whimpers
faintly, shaking her head.
No, no, no
, she cries inwardly,
blinking savagely and rubbing her eyes. Only slowly do her
surroundings regain their clarity.

And only then does Rachel discover what the
light has done to her hand.

She recoils from the first unclouded glimpse
of the pale skin, looks away from it as she pushes off the bed and
backs awkwardly out of the bedroom. Her hip makes jarring contact
with the back of the living-room sofa, and she stops moving,
staring back into the dark master bedroom at Susanna’s unmoving
shape, at the red illumination emanating from her cheek.

She pulls her glare back and lets her chin
fall to her chest. Then, reluctantly, she pulls her hand out in
front of her. Her palm is pale and dry, looking weathered,
sun-bleached. When she makes a light fist and her fingers move
across the palm, white flakes drift off it, falling silently to the
carpet. She brings up her other hand and clamps it to her mouth to
stifle her scream.

With effort, she staggers back toward
Susanna. She practically screams her name, her voice warbling. She
touches Susanna’s naked shoulder, shakes it. Her body moves loosely
back and forth in unconsciousness.

“Susanna, wake up!”

Nothing.

This is absurd! I mean, what the fuck is
happening?

Boldly, she moves close to her stepmother’s
side, gathers a fistful of cloth, and presses it lightly to the
luminescence. The glow is blotted out, and a strange emotion
bubbles up in Rachel, releases itself like a cough, and immediately
quiets when she chokes it down. She presses the cloth more
forcefully against Susanna’s cheek.

Rachel feels as if she’s not even inhabiting
her own body; she’s not in control of her actions. She pushes the
cloth still harder, angling the wad of sheets over Susanna’s mouth
and nose, pressing, pressing.

Go away!
she screams inwardly.

Susanna coughs and opens her eyes. Turned up
in their sockets, the eyes show only white. Rachel recoils,
scrambling away across the bed. Susanna’s mouth opens and a fine
mist of blood sprays out like a sneeze, dotting her own face and
the sheets beyond her head. The red glow seems to strobe almost
imperceptibly, and Susanna’s open mouth emits a long, hollow
sound.

“
Uuuuuuuhhh ... .”

Rachel, her breath caught somewhere deep in
her throat, reacts impulsively. She leans forward and presses the
cloth with still more determination against her stepmother’s face,
not knowing what to do or how to stop this thing. She brings up her
damaged hand to press still more forcefully, feeling that she might
never be able to stop whatever is happening, no matter how hard she
presses.

Abruptly, her hands feel enveloped in wet
heat.

Rachel screams, yanking away the sheets, and
Susanna’s mouth clacks shut. The red luminescence is completely
gone. Her stepmother’s body scissors across the bed, shuddering,
and Rachel rears back, looking away from Susanna’s bluntly revealed
genitals. She can’t help but turn back to watch Susanna’s entire
body convulse. She drops the clutch of sheets from her hand and
reaches for her stepmother’s arms.

“Susanna! Stop it!
Stop it!
”

Susanna goes abruptly still and rigid, her
legs half off the bed, her arms thrown above her head. She’s on her
stomach, her face straight down into the sheets.

Rachel stumbles away from Susanna and the
bed, numb. She takes in the scene. She can hear blood rushing in
her head, loud like a terrible flood. She can also hear that weird,
insistent keening noise coming from outside.

Susanna’s body is still, too still, in a way
that doesn’t suggest sleep. Her skin seems flat, dull. There is no
glisten, no movement. She’s not breathing.