Darling (25 page)

—But I’ll be back tomorrow night.

And the night after that,

and the night after that.

Now that I know the way

nothing can keep me from coming back to you—

He pulled her fingers to his lips and kissed each of them, one by one. “How did you...?”

He could feel the smile stretch across his face.

—Your mother showed me—

“My mother?”

—Mmm-hmm.

She came to take a look at you all grown up,

and then showed me the way—

He started crying again, thinking of his mother and the dream he had had about the rocking chair. Had it really not been a dream?

Allison pulled herself tighter to him.

—She loves you and she’s very proud of you—

“Yeah?”

—Of course—

This time the emotions were too much for him and he couldn’t stop crying. They were strange tears, tears of joy at Allison’s presence, but also tears pulled from a well carved inside of him by the deepest of grief, tears that he had trapped away for so long that it seemed there was no stopping them now that they had found a way out. He cried himself to sleep in her arms.

In the morning he rolled over expecting to find her there, but she was gone. It had only been a dream, he told himself. His pillows were damp from crying, and he thought he could still smell her, but he shook his head. just a dream.

The hole inside of him grew deeper. Why was his mind so cruel to him? Hadn’t he suffered enough?

He fought hard to get out of bed but couldn’t. His limbs were so heavy, and his mind so cloudy. But mostly what kept him in bed was the deep desire to just fade away. He couldn’t face anything today. He felt like something had been carved out from deep inside of him, some vital thing stolen away leaving the same cold hollow that he had worked so hard to fill after Allison had died.

He grabbed his cell and called in sick to work. He saw that he had a
MISSED CALL
alert and a voicemail, but couldn’t bear to check it. It was likely Eileen and she was the last person he could face right now. What would he tell her? And, worse yet, there was the feeling that he had been betraying Allison’s memory by being with her.

Those old feelings were what had kept him from dating for so long and he hated that they had returned. Was he losing his mind? Is that what all of the hallucinations and paranoia had been lately? It made sense. Between work, preparing for school, and early wrestling practice he had been burning the candle at both ends. It was just a matter of time before the wax melted away and the wick turned to ash.

He should just go back to sleep, he reasoned. Hamlet’s line drifted through his head:
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Allison might still be in his dreams, waiting for him.

As he sunk back down into oblivion, that preceding line of Hamlet’s came to him:
To die, to sleep no more.

* * *

“This way.” The man climbed into the elevator and pressed a button. Carletta followed him.

She had never been much for small talk. She appreciated men who just wanted to get off. What the hell did she have to talk about, anyway? She was forty-three years old, at least thirty pounds overweight, and her liver was already failing from how much she drank. She had one child in the grave and two more sitting alone in front of her TV right now. The boys’ father was supposedly on his way over to feed them but was more than likely passed out at his cousin’s again, a pipe in one hand and his child support money slipping from the other. She had lived on the same block of government housing in Lawnsdale her entire life, shuffling from her mother to her mother’s pimp to a never-ending series of abusive men. Lately she had been horribly tired, and her dark skin had grown pale and bruised, leaving her worried that she’d caught something. Did anyone want to hear about all of this shit? No, they didn’t. So she just did her thing, usually in the back seat of a car, took her money, and left.

As the elevator shook its way upward, she waited for him to start talking. The talkers usually only wanted to talk about themselves, thank-God-almighty, but still asked questions, mostly to be polite. A few were lonely, paying more for the company and the sense of being with someone than for anything sexual. She wondered which one he was. She settled on the lonely type. Why else pay her five times her going rate to bring her way out here into the boondocks?

She almost didn’t take it, but a girl in her position could not afford to turn down that kind of money. She had stayed off the hard stuff, thank-God-almighty, but whiskey and weed still cost her as much as her rent. That was also assuming that she and her kids were fed. She marveled sometimes at how little the three of them ate, and yet how fat they all were. Little Clarence hadn’t been, but he had spent most of his time outside playing ball. That was exactly what he had been doing when his heart stopped on him. One in a million chance, the doctors said. You’d have a better chance of winning the lottery, they said.

She had never won the lottery, that was for damn sure.

The elevator slowed to a stop without him saying a word and she was thankful. When the doors opened, she stepped out into a windowless room. A cold breeze hacked the warmth from her. She wished she had worn long sleeves, but it had been so hot out when she left. Why was it so cold here?

A single light, the yellow caged type she had seen her father use in the garage when he worked on his truck, hang in a corner. The man pulled it down and began doing something to the wall. When her eyes adjusted to the room she could see it wasn’t a wall at all, just a sheet of dirty white canvas. He pulled it down to reveal a series of boards placed up to prevent trespassing. He rolled the canvas up and tucked it under one arm. A tug here and there removed loose boards and he crouched low through the newly created hole.

She watched his light travel on the other side of the boards. He coughed once and said, “You coming?”

She ducked under the boards.

He sat on an old, beat-up couch in front of an open window. He unrolled the canvas onto the floor in front of him. He patted the cushion next to him and clouds of dust flew into the air. It scratched her eyes and smelled ancient.

She sat next to him and stared out the window. At this time of night it looked like a sea of black swam out there. A single lamp cut through the dark like a lighthouse, guiding her eyes like a lost ship to an abandoned supermarket.

The light behind her shifted and she heard a zipper working. She swished her tongue around her mouth, trying to work up enough saliva to do what he paid her for. She turned to him, but he was leaning over the arm of the couch. The light had been placed on the floor, cutting harsh shadows all around. She could see that his pants were still zipped and wondered what she had heard.

He spun around and something flew at her forehead.

Flash of white. Sharp pain. Fingers in her hair. Around her belt. She was hefted from the couch, slammed onto the floor. Pain traveled from her skull down her spine and into her limbs.

Her mouth flooded and she spat blood onto the ground. What was happening? Her mind refused to sort it out. She moaned, tried to work up a scream, but couldn’t. She heard the tearing sound of duct tape and then felt its stickiness shoved against her mouth and around her hair. She coughed blood against it, choked a little, swallowed it.

The tape went around her wrists. Her ankles were left free.

Was this some kind of rape fantasy? No wonder he paid so much.

He rolled her over onto her back.

Any hope that this was simply a pervert’s idea of a good time fled when she saw the knife. The dull light from the garage lamp hit the blade and stabbed into her eyes, telling her in one shining moment how this was going to end.

Adrenaline fired through her and she tried again to scream, but the tape did too good of a job at muffling her. She bucked. Tried to kick to her feet.

His boot came down on her knee with a sickening crunch. Sharp explosion of agony. Tears. Whimpers. Blood fell in her eyes, burning, mixing with the snot and tears to form a red slime across the tape.

He mounted her, pressed her weight into the rough canvas. His free hand found her throat, gripped it like a vice, held her head firm against the ground.

He looked out the window. Nodded as if answering someone. Turned back to her.

The knife crawled into her abdomen. The pressure gave way to searing pain as the skin parted. She screamed underneath the tape again. The knife twisted. Warm blood escaped down her side, soaked the canvas under her.

He pulled the knife out and placed it beside her. His fingers found the hole, wormed their way inside at an excruciating pace. He sat back. His hand retreated from her throat. She gasped for air.

He punched her hard, breaking her nose. Her entire body pulsed with hurt.

He grabbed a tire iron, slid it into an open black bag. Was that the zipper she’d heard?

She closed her eyes and tried to think, but something else thrust into her wound.

The pain was too much and she blacked out.

When she came to everything was black. She was horrendously cold and the rough texture of the canvas pressed tight all around her. The world moved up and down as the life leaked from her side and it took her a moment to realize she was being carried.

Terror flooded through her and she began to squirm. She shifted one way, then another, before coming down hard onto the ground. She blacked out again.

The final time she came to, the canvas was being unwrapped from around her. She stared up at the broken fluorescent tubes that ran like stripes across the ceiling. The ceiling ended in an awning and the stars twinkled in the sky past it.

The mechanical whisper of opening doors was followed by a low
whoosh
like a sharp breath inhaled in excitement. She realized the tape had been removed from her mouth and wrists. Before she could act, hands gripped her like snakes.

“Darling,” the man said and rolled her over twice onto cold tile.

The doors slammed shut behind her.

She was finally able to scream.

PART THREE

OCTOBER

“When I speak

My lips feel cold—

The autumn wind.”

—Basho

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape
—
the loneliness of it, the dead feeling... Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”

—Andrew Wyeth

The evening was cold. The air had chilled and a blistering wind brought small drops of icy rain with it. Raynham Place weathered all of this from atop the hill like a giant tombstone—unyielding, immovable, implacable. Dim lights shone from its windows, and the inhabitants fought against the hum of fear that coursed through the backs of their minds. Fear and something else, something they couldn’t identify. Part of it was a strong curiosity to wander into the basement, into the woods, into the abandoned supermarket that rested behind it. The rest of it was darker and ran deeper. It was blind rage and cold, unreasoning anger. It was dangerous, compulsive lust. It was jealousy, and loathing, and despair. Above all it was madness, and it thrummed through the building like the subtle movement of electricity behind the walls, bleeding out here and there through outlets and light fixtures and pores in the plaster, filling the individual apartments like a noxious gas that starts at the floor and builds upward on itself until the entire room is poison.

In Apartment 112, Cody Tate sat in front of his television.

Some reality show was on, another of the myriad
American Idol
clones, but he wasn’t paying it any attention. He was dialing his girlfriend’s cell phone over and over again, his nerves feeling rawer and rawer with every call. She wasn’t answering. Why wasn’t she answering? Was that fucking whore out with another guy? Again? They were supposed to have gotten past all that. He stood and paced back and forth, the thumb of his left hand hovering over the redial button. The thumb of his right hand thumbed the top of the small knife hanging on his pocket, expressing an unconscious desire that vibrated from the very walls.

In 315, Sharon Newman sat on the edge of her toilet, the porcelain cold against her naked skin. She leaned foward, her forearms resting against her thighs, as she rocked back and forth. The tears came heavier than they had in a year, heavier than they had come even the day of Daniel’s funeral. She thought she was getting used to being alone, getting used to living her life as a widow, getting used to shoving the memory of her husband deep down inside her mind, but she was wrong. She didn’t know where the memories came from tonight, or why they were so vivid. She didn’t know why she could suddenly smell his musk and taste his lips and feel the scruff on his chin. She bawled like she hadn’t bawled since she was a small child and the emptiness inside of her was heavy. It grew and grew, filling her in a cold way that only emptiness can, building pressure inside of her that was so horrible, so unbearable, that she had no choice but to let it out. The large steak knife sat on the sink next to her for just that reason, to let the pressure out. When it was out everything would be better again.

Colleen Peters and her little brother Barry were playing Monopoly in 226, waiting for their parents to come home. Neither of them knew that their father had dropped their mother’s body, bloody from a hundred tiny wounds, into a pond and was on his way to Chicago. He had an old girlfriend there. She filled his every thought and his twelve-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son couldn’t be further from his mind.