Praying for Sleep (51 page)

Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.

As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zinnias.

The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn't hear a single one of them.

Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister's arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.

The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They'd glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn't cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The house, for instance, had seen several howling tempests had never been damaged until tonight — and even then I'd taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.

Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, she supposed, meant he'd like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.

Epilogue

The blossoms of the floribunda are complicated.

This is a twentieth-century rose plant, and the one that Lis Atcheson now trimmed, a shockingly white Iceberg, was a hearty specimen that spilled in profusion into the entryway of her greenhouse. Visitors often admired the blossoms and if she was to enter it in competition she was confident that it would be a blue-ribbon rose.

Today, as she cut back the shoots, she wore a dress that was patterned in dark-green paisley, the shade of a lizard at midnight. The dress was appropriately somber but it wasn't black; she was on her way to a sentencing hearing, not a funeral.

Although the results would make her a widow of sorts, Lis was not in mourning.

Against his lawyer's recommendation Owen rejected a plea bargain — even after Dorothy turned state's witness in exchange for a manslaughter charge. Owen insisted that he could beat the rap by pleading insanity. An expert witness, a psychiatrist, took the stand and in a long-winded monologue characterized Owen as a pure sociopath. This diagnosis, however, apparently didn't have the same allure to juries that Michael's illness did. After a lengthy trial Owen was convicted of first-degree murder on the first ballot.

Last week Lis signed the contract to purchase Langdell's Nursery and that same day she gave notice to the high school; at the end of the spring semester her twelve-year bout as an English teacher would officially end.

Surprising her older sister, Portia had asked for the nursery's P&L statements and balance sheet, which she'd then shown to her current boyfriend — Eric or Edward, Lis couldn't recall. An investment banker, he'd seemed impressed with the company and recommended that Portia buy into the deal while she still could. The young woman had spent several days considering the proposition then waffled in a big way and declared that she wanted more time to think about it. She'd promised Lis an answer when she returned from the Caribbean, where she planned to spend February and March.

Portia had spent the night and would be accompanying Lis to the hearing today. Following Owen's arrest, the young woman had stayed for three weeks in the Ridgeton house, helping Lis clean and repair. But a week after the indictments were handed up, Lis decided that she wanted to be on her own again and insisted that her sister return to New York. At the train station Portia suddenly turned to her. "Listen, why don't you move into the co-op with me?" Lis was touched by the offer although it was clear that the majority of Portia's heart voted against it.

But the city was hardly for Lis and she declined.

Cranking closed the upper vanes of the greenhouse today, shutting out the winter air, Lis had this thought: We face death in many ways and most are hardly as dramatic as finding the ghosts of our dead ancestors in greenhouses or learning that it's your husband who's traveled miles to slice your thin throat as you lie drowsing in bed. Reflecting on these subtler confrontations with mortality, Lis thought of her sister and she understood that Portia wasn't being perverse or cruel all those long years of separation. Nothing so premeditated as that. There was a simpler point to her, escape from the family: she did what she had to.

Too many willow switches, too many lectures, too many still-as-death Sunday dinners.

And who knew? Maybe old man L'Auberget changed his tune after Lis's fateful swimming lesson, and climbed into the sack with Portia when she was twelve or thirteen. She, after all, was the pretty one.

There was a time when this thought would have been madness and seething heresy. But madness had since come to roost in Lis's own backyard and if the night of the storm — the delicate euphemism the sisters had settled upon — taught her anything it was that there are only real two heresies: lies and our willing acceptance of them.

Trenton Heck would also be at the hearing today. He had an interest in this case beyond justice. Before being removed as director of Marsden hospital by the Department of Mental Health, Dr. Ronald Adler had reneged on the reward Heck felt he was due. Adler's successor could find no moral, let alone legal, reason to pay over the money, which Adler apparently had no authority to pledge in the first place. And so with a certain reluctant desperation Heck sued Owen for shooting him in the back.

The insurance company wouldn't pay off for such malfeasance and Heck was horrified to find that suing Owen ultimately meant suing Lis. He immediately offered to withdraw the case but Lis told him that he more than anyone deserved to profit from this tragedy and over her exasperated lawyer's objections wrote him a check for far more than he asked.

There was, Lis understood, no reasonable connection between the two of them, Trenton Heck and herself, yet in some ways she felt they were stations along the same route, till, when he asked her out to dinner last week, she declined. It was true that he needed something in his life other a mobile home and a dog. But she doubted that it was her to provide whatever that might be. One person who wouldn't be at the hearing was Michael Hrubek.

On Thanksgiving, at the patient's shy request, Lis had paid him a visit at the Framington State Mental Health Facility, where he was once again under the care of Richard Kohler. Michael at first had been peeved that Lis, as an agent of God, refused to take his life in exchange for that of a nineteenth-century President. But he had apparently come to accept that saving her was part of a complicated spiritual bargain that only he understood and had acquiesced to remaining on this good earth for the time being.

Michael himself had an upcoming trial — for the murder of a fellow prisoner during his escape from Marsden. The evidence clearly suggested that the man's death was a suicide and the case was going forward only because Michael's escape made fools of the hospital and the police. Michael, his attorney assured Lis, would emerge from the trial not only innocent but with a better public image than that of the prosecutor, who, at least one editorial pointed out, ought to have better things to worry about than the death of Bobby Ray Callaghan, an institutionalized killer.

There were other charges too. Auto theft, breaking and entering, assault and the intentional confinement of two extremely unhappy Gunderson police officers in their squad-car trunk, one of them with an extremely painful broken wrist. Michael was admittedly the perpetrator. But he probably would serve no time in prison, the lawyer reported. All he need to do was tell the judge the truth — that he was simply evading Pinkerton agents pursuing him for Abraham Lincoln's assassination — and, bang, he'd be out of the lockup and back into his hospital room in no time.

Michael Hrubek was a good example of using history to your own advantage.

Lis now pulled on her coat and called to her sister that it was time to leave. They were taking two cars; after the hearing she was planning to spend an hour or two at Framington.

She'd been back to the hospital several times since Thanksgiving. She was still somewhat wary about seeing him. But she'd found that when sitting across from Michael, sometimes in the company of Richard Kohler, sometimes not, she got an indefinable pleasure from his company.

When she entered the room, he took her hand with a delicacy and awe that sometimes moved her nearly to tears. She would like to understand the immensely complex matrix of his emotions. She'd like to understand why he undertook his quest to save her, of all people, and why — even though it was rooted in madness — that journey touched her so.

But those were questions beyond Lis Atcheson, and she was content simply to sit with him in a lounge overlooking the snowy fields and drink coffee and soda from plastic cups while they talked about dairy cows or the state of American politics or insomnia — a problem, it seemed, they both suffered from.

With dancing eyes, Michael would listen carefully to what she had to say then lean forward, sometimes touching her arm for emphasis, and offer his thoughts — some of them illuminating, some preposterous, but always delivered as if he were speaking God's own truths.

And who's to say, Lis sometimes thought, that he isn't?