Sleep No More (21 page)

“What did you do?”

“I tried to sit in that waiting room, this sterile room full of women—only two guys there besides me—and I started to lose it. I couldn’t believe I was there, or what was about to happen to Mallory. I got into the elevator, rode down ten floors to the ground, and walked out into the daylight. That’s when I first realized that terrible things happened in the light of day. That things like the Holocaust happened while the sun was shining and people were having picnics. Anyway, there was a Burger King outside this building. I walked over there and ordered a cheeseburger, then sat there without eating it. I knew what Mallory was going through up there—the counselor had made sure of that—and I felt sick. I was growing up, I guess, learning that actions have real consequences.”

Penn listened like a patient priest, his eyes alert for the smallest clues to motivation. “Go on.”

“I was positive something terrible was going to happen. She was going to start hemorrhaging, maybe even die. There was this awful certainty in my gut that things were going to go very wrong.”

“Did they?”

“Not that day. When she came out, she was like a zombie. Literally in shock. The next day, she did start to hemorrhage. I took her to the ER in Oxford. They gave her six birth control pills, and it stopped the bleeding, but the whole experience was more than she could take. Everything went downhill from there.”

“How?”

“She was just never the same after that. But she didn’t react the way you would expect. I mean, when my wife lost a baby, she lost her sexual desire. But Mallory was the reverse. She became sexually ravenous. She constantly pushed the envelope, as though she were trying to use sex to banish whatever demons were in her head. She’d always been a little like that, but now it was scary. Do this to me. Do that. Hurt me. Rape me. Things I thought were demeaning, and I’m no prude when it comes to sex.”

Penn was nodding slowly. “And Eve resurrected some of this. What other changes did you notice?”

“Paranoia. She didn’t want me apart from her. If I left her for a few hours—even to go to class—she interrogated me endlessly. When I registered for the next semester, she asked who was in all my classes. She told me I couldn’t take two that I wanted, because of girls she knew who were going to be in them.”

“Did she ever get violent?”

“Yes. I’m talking clock you with a closed fist, and she was a strong girl. She’d try to claw my eyes out. The subtext of it all was, ‘You don’t really love me. You’re going to leave me the first chance you get.’ And this was the most beautiful woman in the state.”

“Her fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. When did the violence start?”

“Toward me? After the abortion. I don’t think I understood how deeply the maternal desire is embedded in the female psyche. Even in women you might think wouldn’t feel it so much—gung ho career women—it’s there. And in Mallory…I think terminating that pregnancy so violated her fundamental nature that it snapped something in her mind. She
loathed
herself for doing it. And she projected that hatred onto me.”

“I think you’re right. And obviously, you couldn’t stand that kind of pressure for long.”

“No. That’s when I lost all the weight. My grades went to hell. I felt like I was holding Mallory’s mind together by sheer force of will. I started talking to a girl in one of my classes, just from a desire for simple contact. It was such a relief, talking to a normal person. It was like coming out of a cave. And I knew then that I had to end it with Mallory.”

“Is this when she became suicidal?”

“How did you know she attempted suicide?”

“When I asked about the violence, you said, ‘Toward me?’ That told me she’d probably done violence to herself.”

“She tried with pills first,” Waters told him. “In my apartment, so I was almost certain to find her when I got back from class. I carried her to the ER again, and they pumped her stomach. That scared the shit out of me.”

“Which was exactly what she wanted.”

“Yes, but it didn’t stop me. She was smothering me. I had to get free. I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events after that, but the fights became unendurable. One night, she tried to run me over with my car. I jumped off a fifteen-foot embankment to avoid being hit.”

“Do you really think she would have hit you?”

“Absolutely. Looking back, I don’t think she would ever have killed her
self
. Deep down, she was too selfish for that. But me? No doubt about it. The same goes for any woman I was with. Mallory could have killed any of them under the right circumstances.”

“You sound like you have evidence of that.”

“I do.” Waters looked at his watch. “Jesus, I’ve talked for over an hour and I haven’t told you anything yet. She tried to kill me twice, herself four or five times. She attacked a girl I was riding in the car with in Jackson. She almost killed a girlfriend of mine in Alaska, and that was the year she won Miss Mississippi. She even got pregnant again, on purpose.” Waters heard hysteria in his voice, but he couldn’t seem to control it. “All this is so mixed up in my mind…her insanity, the secrets I’ve kept, the things Eve said—”

“John?” Penn dropped the foam basketball and came around the desk and squatted by Waters’s chair. “Hey. Take it easy.” Penn waited a moment. “I have a theory. But you haven’t told me enough yet to be sure about it. I need to know everything you know, and now’s the time for you to tell me. After today, we could be talking to each other at the jail.”

His casual mention of this reality shook Waters to the core of his being.

“I don’t think that will happen,” Penn went on, “but we have to be realistic. The odds of carrying on an affair like you and Eve did without anyone knowing about it are very small. Even if it only lasted two weeks. Someone always knows. Lovers confide in friends. Neighbors are nosy. It’s almost inevitable.”

“So what do I do?”

Penn got up and went back to his seat. “I need you to give me the basics of the other stuff you mentioned. You said Mallory tried to kill you again after the time with the car?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I had a hunting rifle in my apartment, a Winchester thirty-thirty. During one of her ‘You’re going to leave me’ fits, she got hold of it and threatened to kill herself. I figured the best thing to do was walk out of the room. Remove her audience, you know? She ran after me, held the barrel below her chin, and got her finger inside the trigger guard. I was more worried about her killing herself by accident than by design, so I grabbed the barrel and we fought for the gun. She screamed that she’d kill me if I didn’t let her kill herself. I let go and yelled, ‘Go on and do it, then!’ She stuck the barrel under her chin and went for the trigger. I grabbed the rifle again, and this time it wound up jammed into my side. I saw something happen in her eyes, a kind of crazy triumph, and then she yanked the trigger. I felt that pull all the way into my bones.”

“It wasn’t loaded?”

“It
was
loaded. The lever had gotten half cocked in the struggle, so when she pulled the trigger, the action wouldn’t operate. That’s the only time I ever hit her. When I realized she’d meant to kill me, I backhanded her across the face. She laughed. She
wanted
me to hit her.” Waters’s mouth was dry. “God, it was so twisted by then.”

“What about the thing in Alaska?” Penn asked. “She almost killed a girl?”

“You remember I worked the pipeline in the summers. I had a French-Canadian girlfriend named Marie. Mallory flew up and followed us for a few days before I even knew she was there. She put sugar in Marie’s gas tank and stranded her in a blizzard. It was a miracle she was saved. Mallory barely got out of the state without being arrested. Alaska tried to extradite her, but her father pulled some juice in Jackson and got that quashed.”

“Jesus. And you said Mallory got pregnant a second time. Was that by you?”

“Yes.”

“Before or after she was Miss Mississippi?”

“Just after she gave up the crown.”

Penn shook his head in amazement. “God, the things that stay hidden in small towns. The women in Natchez would snap their garters if they heard this. How did the next pregnancy happen? I thought you were trying to leave her.”

“I was. I spent most of the year she was Miss Mississippi trying to stay away from her. Her duties made it a little easier, but she spent a lot of terrible nights alone in hotel rooms. I talked her through a lot of them on the phone. But eventually the bad episodes got farther apart, and she came to realize I wasn’t going back to her.

“After she gave up her crown, she took a job in Dallas at one of the TV stations. Some political big shot had arranged it for her. Well, she didn’t have a car. Since she had completely alienated her parents by this time, I agreed to drive her the three hours down to the New Orleans airport. She told me she was scheduled to fly out at seven p.m., so I got her there at five-thirty. That’s when I found out her plane had left at five. She said she’d made a mistake, but that was bullshit. I should have made her show me the tickets. There was no flight to Dallas until the next morning.”

“You spent the night together?”

“We got a hotel in the Quarter. We went to dinner at Galatoire’s, and the waiter just had to tell us what a perfect couple we were. Mallory asked where in the Quarter we could go dancing. He said we were too nice for the Quarter. Go to the old Roosevelt Hotel, the Blue Room. So we did. What else were we going to do? Go back to the hotel and stare at each other? We danced to a piano and bass. It was poignant, because I really thought that was the end of it all, and I was proud of her for leaving. Soon we were the only two people left in the place. The pianist played ‘As Time Goes By,’ and Mallory reminded me how we saw
Casablanca
together at the Hoka in Oxford, and how the first person you see
Casablanca
with is supposed to be the person you’re going to marry, and…shit, you can guess the rest.”

“When did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“She called from Dallas six weeks later. I can’t even describe how I felt, the talks we had, but the bottom line was, I told her I couldn’t marry her. It would have been insane after all we’d been through. And she’d told me she was on the pill, for God’s sake, though I admit I was stupid to believe her.”

“Take it easy, John.”

“She agreed to have the abortion, but only if I would go out to Dallas and be with her. This will show you the real Mallory, Penn. She had no car out there, right? No way to get around, make arrangements. So what does she do? She sleeps with some poor college kid, then tells him he got her pregnant.”

“You’re kidding.”

“God’s truth. She told me this herself. So this kid hauls her around the city, doing whatever she needs done. Then she tells him he’s finished, that her brother is coming into town to be with her during the procedure.”

Penn took a Mont Blanc from a drawer and made a note on his desk pad. “I’m starting to understand your fear of her. Was that experience like the time in Memphis?”

“No. It wasn’t corporate sterile with five doctors and fifty girls waiting. It was a little house with two nurses and one old doctor. They brought me into the examining room as soon as the procedure was over, and they left me there. Mallory’s lying on a table, crying and shivering. I held her hand, but she wouldn’t look at me. So I look to my right, and there’s this damn stainless-steel machine. And inside that machine is what’s left of our baby. I know it without anybody telling me.
That’s where the vacuum hose hooks up. There’s the vent for the motor.
It was the most unnatural feeling I’d ever had in my life. That metal machine was absolutely against nature,
created
in opposition to nature. I’m not religious or anything, but I felt like the hose that had sucked up that fetus could suck up the entire world, that the whole universe could be sucked into the black maw of that vacuum pump. And when I realized that thing had been inside Mallory two times…I started to understand her insanity. And I started to cry. The whole situation was beyond belief. I feel like an asshole telling it to you now.”

Penn nodded. “Try to keep yourself in the present. Sum up the rest, if you can. From then until Mallory’s death.”

“She never got over it. Any of it. Ever. And I never got free of her. She dated other people, but it was all an act. Even after she got married and had kids, she never stopped trying to contact me. I eventually had to get a restraining order. She still found ways to threaten me. I would walk out of a store when I thought she was two hundred miles away, and there she’d be, waiting for me, looking at me with this haunted face.”

“What did she want from you?”

“I think she never really gave up on us having a child together. But the way she put it, she just wanted to be together, any way that I would. She tried to use sex that way. ‘Let’s go somewhere. I know you want me. We can do it in the car.’ I was in San Francisco once for a meeting, and she turned up there. How the hell did she know I’d be there? She must have been paying detectives to tell her everything about my life. All the time.”

“She may well have been. How much of this did you tell Lily?”

“As little as possible.”

“She knew Mallory was dangerous, though?”

“Yes. I told her it was a
Fatal Attraction
kind of thing. Everybody thinks they’ve had a similar experience, so it made Lily take it seriously, but not
too
seriously. You know? I told her that if Mallory ever suddenly appeared at the house, or came around her anywhere, she should call the police and get the hell away from her.”

Penn stretched his arms, then reached into a cooler and brought out two bottles of water. He handed one across the desk to Waters.

“I know it took a lot out of you to tell me all this.”

“It’s a relief to tell some of it, honestly.”

Penn took a long sip of water, then set his bottle aside. “John, do you think it was the abortion that caused all Mallory’s problems? Or was it something from much farther back?”