Stranglehold (11 page)

She doubted it.

There were nights he'd come home with liquor on his breath and she always stayed clear of him then. His flash point, once seemingly nonexistent, was steadily growing lower and lower. He had never struck her in anger but that didn't mean she felt he was incapable of it. And his temper could be formidable. When he was angry and arguing he had a way of
stalking
her, moving toward her and then away and then forward again, each time getting closer to her, back and forth, until he was shouting right into her face.

There were times she considered leaving him.

She could do it. She hadn't much savings of her own but she could always dust off her nursing job again. They might be scraping a little but she could get by.

Then just before Christmas of '93 her mother died. The woman had been shoveling snow in the driveway, impatient with waiting for the overdue hired snowplow. The heart attack was swift, sudden and unexpected.

All three of them drove to Wolfeboro.

She was a basket case by the time they got there and her sister Barbara, who was living over in Hanover now, wasn't a whole lot better. They had never even
considered
their mother dying. Sixty-two wasn't old. And sixty-two-year-olds didn't come more vigorous than Kerry McCloud. After their father died she'd turned most of her backyard into a garden, grew her own vegetables and herbs and berries there, canned the vegetables and berries and gave them away. She worked on fundraisers for two charity groups, the public library, and the local Democratic Party. She held down a part-time job she didn't need in a bookstore just to be around the latest in hardcover fiction. She had bridge nights and a women's group for single widows. The only thing she didn't do was date.

And everyone knew the reason for that.

Just as everyone knew that Kerry McCloud had a drink or two every evening and slept, not in her marriage bed, but on the couch in the living room.

But Lydia and her sister were stunned at the loss. She found herself staring blankly at walls and remembering conversations and events as though they were being played out in front of her directly on those walls like a screen into her mother's history. A bookmark in an unfinished book, her mother's name on the daily junk mail which still arrived, a roaster left in the freezer—all were enough to undo her, to reach out to her unexpectedly and move her to sudden tears.

Robert, who was almost seven by then, had loved his grandma too, and despite the toys and books and games he'd brought with him could not seem to pry himself away from the adults and the spectacle of their grief. She doubted it was good for him. But it was harder to tell him to go out and play or banish him to another room while they were arranging for the funeral or on the phone with friends and relatives than it was to simply accept his presence, seeming always on the verge of tears himself—especially when she or Barb or both were going at it.

The real surprise was Arthur.

Not that he took charge—she almost would have expected him to take charge in some ways—but the surprise was the apparent grace, tact and dignity that he brought to the occasion. More often than not it was he who got the phone when it rang, fielding dozens of well-meaning but impossibly intrusive calls, telling the story over and over, how paramedics had rushed to the scene but failed to revive her,
at least it was fast, yes
, how there was no history of heart disease and no, none in the family history either.

To these calls and others of a more mundane nature—the sheer brain-numbing business of dealing with a death in the family—Arthur brought a kind of calm, a serious yet unsentimental style that relieved the burden on both sisters. There was to be no viewing. They both thought it barbaric. So that with Barbara divorced—she'd been more than right on that one, Barb's wedding
had
been the happiest day of her marriage—Arthur was the only man around most of the time all the way up until the funeral, and he was as gentle and generous with his hugs and time, his patience and consolation, with Barb as he was with Lydia.

The night before the funeral he and Lydia made love, the first time they'd done so in weeks. Arthur was never more tender and loving. Not even before they were married. And Lydia surprised herself with her ferocious hunger for him. She later remembered feeling for a moment that it was as though he was the earth, the land, and she was tying in a rushing wind, and she clung to him.

The day of the funeral she stood graveside amid thirty-five uncles, aunts, cousins and friends from all over New England, Robert to her left and Barb to her right, with Arthur standing behind them, one hand on each woman's shoulder. And she was grateful that he was including her sister this way because her sister was so alone.

At the reception it was his parents who were the last guests to leave. She thought that his mother Ruth looked like a scrawnier and tougher bird than ever but that Harry was becoming a shadow. Uncomfortable in his too-big suit now that he'd lost all that weight and even more uncomfortable being at the funeral of someone he barely knew. While his wife was all restless energy, taking over the kitchen from Lydia and Barb and somehow managing to make them feel like outsiders in the house they'd grown up in. She appreciated the help but was glad to see them go.

It had been unpleasant to discover that their mother had taken out a second mortgage on the house shortly after their father died. Apparently he hadn't left her as well provided for as she'd always pretended. Arthur arranged for its disposal with an agent. The agent said that Barbara and Lydia would each probably realize fifteen thousand dollars on the place. It wasn't much, but then Barbara was a single teacher with no children and wasn't strapped for money.

Returning to Plymouth two days later they were tuned to a Concord call-in talk show on the radio. The subject was a recent statewide rash of serial murders. Young girls, mostly, some not yet in their teens. People complaining about police inactivity, demanding that something be done. An expert in criminal psychology was discussing what type of person the killer might be, speculating on his motives, his personality, his childhood.

At first she barely listened. Not until the show's second guest, a state police lieutenant, began talking about the more personal side of it, about what parents and children should know in order to avoid becoming victims of this kind of thing.

"I hate that stuff," Arthur said.

"What do you mean? Why?"

"They try to make you feel as though if you do this or you do that, if you just take these precautions, you're safe. When you're not safe. You're never safe. Not from some people."

They listened a moment longer and then he changed the station.

It was only much later that she realized what he'd said to her and why.

Fall 1994

Robert dreamed that he was at the swimming pool and that the concrete was hot beneath his feet, burning hot, so that instead of sliding in or using the ladders, he jumped right in as fast as he could, even though jumping was against the rules.

For some reason there was no lifeguard that day to bother him anyhow.

He surfaced and saw that not only were there no lifeguards there were no other kids in the water either. And no adults. He had the pool all to himself. He wondered where everyone had got to, if there was maybe a parade or something and he was missing something, because there wasn't even anybody sitting
around
the pool like there usually was and here it was a nice sunny day. But then he just started swimming and was feeling pretty good in there.

He was best at swimming underwater so he did that, went almost the width of the pool crosswise before he had to come up for air so he decided to try it the long way and see how far he got. But he must have had his breathing wrong or something because he needed air way sooner than he thought he would and when his head cleared the water he saw that he wasn't in a pool anymore but in the middle of a lake with trees and bushes all around.

That was when he saw the snakes.

Three of them, black, right behind him, swimming right for him, he could see their heads sticking up pointed at him and the fast side-to-side motion of their bodies skimming the surface of the dirty black water under the suddenly darkening sky.

"Help!" he yelled but there wasn't anybody around and then he remembered that, sure, the lifeguard was off duty. He turned and started kicking his feet and pounding at the water swimming as fast as he could toward shore but the snakes were coming faster, he knew it, he could
feel
it, they were moving faster than he'd ever known any other living thing to move before like living torpedoes, and he knew he couldn't make it, thinking over and over
go away, go away, please go away
and praying that he'd been wrong, that the snakes weren't really coming for
him
, not for him, that maybe he'd been mistaken and they were going somewhere else and didn't like to bite kids his age and just
seemed
to be going in his direction so he turned to check that out, his one and only hope, and saw them inches from his feet and ready to bite, their snow-white mouths open wide and their needle-sharp fangs glinting, dripping thick venom in the sun, and he screamed and woke himself just in time. And he found he was still screaming into the wet writhing darkness of the room when his mom came in and grabbed him, held him—and he realized from the way the bed felt under him that he'd done that thing again.

Something was happening to Robert.

She could see it, his teacher Mrs.
Youngjohn
could see it, Arthur could see it. Even Ruth was commenting.

He'd begun stammering for one thing.

She'd stand by watching helplessly as he struggled to get some word out, his lips pursed tight together as though the word had somehow got trapped inside him fully formed, and then likely as not when he finally managed to pry it out of him it dropped out twice, uncontrolled, in rapid succession. His eyes would be blinking all the while, the muscles around them completely engaged in the effort.

She could count on nightmares awakening him two or three times a week.

And suddenly he was getting clumsy. Robert had more scraped elbows and knees these days than any kid she'd ever seen. He'd be running around and he'd trip over his own two feet. He'd topple off his bike. Drop things. Walk into banisters. The summer before she had been highly aware of the bruises on his legs, to the point that she hated to see him put on a pair of shorts for fear that somebody out there somewhere was going to take one look at him and accuse her and Arthur of child abuse. It happened.

He scalded himself one morning stepping into a too-hot shower. She was downstairs ironing. She heard him scream and ran upstairs and saw him standing sobbing on the bath mat, dripping wet, his right foot, leg, thigh, and the right side of his butt splotched lobster-red. She reached into the medicine cabinet for the antiseptic spray and covered him with the stuff.

"It's going to be all right," she kept saying, hugging his chest. Robert just kept crying.

Finally the spray had its effect and he calmed down. She took him by the hand and led him into his bedroom and laid him on his left side on top of the cool, fresh sheets.

"Just stay here awhile," she said. "Don't try to get dressed."

Then she went looking in his drawers for something big and loose for him to wear,
pyjamas
or something. Everything looked too tight so she went to her own bedroom and took a pair of Arthur's.

He looked at her and laughed when he saw what she was carrying.

"
Those're
Daddy's
," he said.

"That's the point," she said. "They'll be nice and big on you."

"They'll fall down!"

"Let 'em."

He laughed again and then went suddenly serious on her.

"Daddy says pain's all in your head," he said.

"Does not."

"Does too. That's what he said to me, anyhow."