The Glory Hand (2 page)

Though their faces couldn't have been more than a few inches apart, it seemed as if they were approaching each other from a great distance, and Cassie felt as cautious, as tentative, as when she had been about to dip her hand in the water where the
scorpaena
glowed. No matter how carefully you held the luminous substance in your hand, it would slip through your fingers, a shimmer you could catch for only one moment in your life.

It took her a long time to reach Todd. Then suddenly her lips brushed against his. She wondered fleetingly if she had expected music (all right, maybe not violins), the kind of corny stuff that the movies and the books (even the good ones)"had promised. But it wasn't like that, her first kiss.

Instead of music she heard a scream.

She opened her eyes. Todd's were still closed, his lips pressed against hers. He hadn't heard a thing.

Don't blow it.

The scream - what
sounded
like a scream - it must have been a gull wheeling in the sky (at
night!)
or the rusty squeal of the weather-cock on the roof (but there's no wind).

Why didn't Todd hear it?

If you stop now, he'll think you're chickening out.

She pulled away from him. 'Can we go out on the boat tomorrow? I mean, I'm not leaving until evening.'

He didn't let go of her waist. 'What about your mom?'

'We can do it before she gets up. I finish practicing at eight.'

'Eight down on the beach,' he said, leaning closer to kiss her again.

She pulled away from him and ran towards the door. The scream - it must have been an echo of her panic at being alone with him, she thought, for it faded as soon as she closed the door behind her.

The house was silent, but something was wrong. The house . . . like Todd, it seemed strangely unfamiliar in the dark. The darkened cut-crystal chandelier in the foyer seemed to hang down from the ceiling at an angle that defied the law of gravity, and the framed tintypes of her mother's ancestors, dressed in morning coats and taffeta dresses, tilted on the wall beside the staircase, as if the house were starting to list with age. As Cassie walked over the hooked rug, the floorboards groaned underfoot, like the deck of a ship on choppy seas.

Something glimmered in the dining room: two candles in silver sconces on the polished oak table. The tapers had burned down to stumps, and teardrops of wax spattered the wood, so that the high-vaulted room smelled like a church. The table was set for two, with gilt-edged Wedgwood china and Waterford crystal, and on the sideboard were silver platters holding an elaborate dinner that she had seen her mother preparing that day: boneless chicken breasts stuffed with tarragon from their herb garden, a salad of local vegetables, and a tart made with blackberry jam she and her mother had put up the summer before.
All of it,
she thought uneasily,
for you.

She had promised that she would be home for dinner. How could she have forgotten? A dinner that had seemed so important to her mother, their last chance for some private time together, she had told Cassie, before they had to return to the hectic public life of a Senator's wife and a Senator's daughter.

And yet hadn't every dinner that her mother had prepared on the island in the past week been as elaborate? It had almost seemed to Cassie that her mother had been trying to keep her away from Todd and Robin by bribing her with food. Cassie had responded by eating only yogurt and drinking Tab, saying that professional dancers - she wanted more than anything to be one - had to be thin. But her strict diet had really been to resist what felt like her mother's attempt to control her.

On her mother's plate was a single slice of chicken, untouched.

You told her you'd be home and when you didn't show, she couldn't eat.

Cassie picked up the meat with her fingers, but she felt no hunger. She felt guilt and only guilt, clinging to her, as clammy as her hair, wet with the salt smell of the sea.

A wine cork lay beside the plate, but there was no bottle on the table. The thought of her mother going upstairs to her bedroom when she hadn't come home, to drink alone, sickened Cassie. Had the
National Enquirer
been correct when it had printed its malicious 'scoop' not long ago:
Ann Broyles
vs
the Bottle
? Was that the real reason why her mother had been avoiding the public eye in the last few months? Why she had chosen to come out to Nantucket during spring vacation with Cassie, instead of following her husband on the political circuit that might edge him closer to a shot at the Presidency?

Cassie thought of adding the cork to the collection her mother kept lined up on the windowsill in the kitchen, mementos of the family dinners they had shared at Cliffs Edge over the years. But as she pushed through the swinging kitchen door, she threw the cork into the waste-basket instead, and slid the platter of chicken into the refrigerator.

Another scream.

This time it wasn't the cry of a gull or the screech of the weather vane rusting above the widow's walk. This time the cry Cassie heard wasn't an echo in her mind. It came from inside the house. Upstairs. And what had begun as a single shriek dissolved into a cacophony of voices.

She rushed over to a Currier and Ives print on the wall near the stove and pulled aside the frame. The tin mouth of the dumbwaiter shaft yawned open behind it, the dumbwaiter that hadn't been used since the rats had gnawed the pulley ropes years before. Cassie tore through a veil of cobwebs and leaned inside.

The noise that echoed off the tin walls - it sounded like voices on a record played at the wrong speed, racing with an urgency she couldn't understand. When rats scurried up the walls of the dumbwaiter shaft, their squeals might
sound
like voices, she thought.

But this wasn't rats. It was a woman's voice that echoed down the shaft. Her mother's voice.

Why did that startle her so? Her mother was the only person in the house, wasn't she? But she never raised her voice. Not at Cassie. Not at her husband - even when his Irish temper exploded. Ann Broyles kept her anger locked inside her, expressing it only in the brooding paintings at her easel on the second-floor landing. No, Cassie thought, her mother never shrieked like that.

And the words . . . Cassie could hear a few that bled through: '. . .
Bitch. . . you fucking bitch . .
.'It was her mother's voice, but her mother never talked like that.

Someone's up there . . .

Impulsively, Cassie grabbed a carving knife from the counter and pushed open the kitchen door into the hall. A garbled torrent of curses rang down the stairwell. She rushed up the stairs, the planking, warped from generations of footsteps, complaining underfoot. On the second-floor landing a grandfather clock chimed once, her startled face reflected in the swinging pendulum. She clutched the knife more tightly, raising it high, ready to . . . attack? She had no idea who ... or
what. .
. was the enemy.

When she reached the third-floor landing the shrill, onesided argument ended. The house was filled with a leaden silence, pierced only by the tick of the grandfather clock. She had expected to see a sliver of light beneath her mother's door, as thin as the knife blade in her hand. Instead, darkness.

Someone's in there with her. He heard you coming. He's waiting.

She hesitated to touch the old brass knob shaped like a lion's paw, as if it were charged with a powerful electric shock. Outside the leaded window at the end of the hall a foghorn moaned, and a light on a ship's mast bobbed across the horizon, like the North Star veering off-course.

She grabbed the knob and turned it. The corroded latch resisted stubbornly. She threw all her weight against the door. Grudgingly it creaked open.

Gauze curtains flailed in the breeze from the open window, catching the moonlight, and it looked for a moment as though the glowing
scorpaena
from the sea had filtered inside the bedroom. Reflections from the waves cast green flames across the oriental carpet, a warning to Cassie that something was terribly wrong. Her mother never pulled open the curtains that faced the sea, much less opened the window to admit the roar of the surf . . . and the Chill.

But tonight the window was open. Tonight, after so many years of being locked out of the room, the surf growled like an intruder.

'Mother?'

She was lying naked on the four-poster bed, a white sheet pulled tightly over her, her hair spread out on the pillow, deep as the night sea. Cassie scanned the room for a trace of movement in the shadows.

'I heard screaming.'

Ann's face glistened with sweat, and she lay so still that Cassie feared she must be dead.

'Mom?'

In her haste to reach her, Cassie bumped into the dressing table, knocking a hairbrush to the floor. The way her mother's eyes snapped open at the sound told Cassie that she had only been pretending to sleep.

'What are you doing?' Ann sat up quickly, the glint of the knifeblade reflected in her eyes.

Cassie lowered the knife, but didn't let go of it. 'I heard voices.'

Voices?' The parental tone made Cassie feel childish to be holding the knife, childish to have barged in at all. 'You didn't hear anything.'

Cassie didn't believe her - she
had
heard something - but she let her mother take the knife from her and lay it on the bedstand.

'Cassie . . .' The anger in Ann's voice vanished mysteriously and was replaced by an emotion that Cassie found harder to identify, a tenderness mingled with . . . 'You'd better get to bed, honey.' She beckoned for Cassie to hand her the quilted bathrobe at the foot of the bed, and slipped it on, stifling a shiver. It struck Cassie that she hadn't seen her mother naked since she was a child, not since before that night on the
Pandora.
Ann had gone to great lengths to hide the scars from the burns, as if she felt that the Chill -the other scar from that night - had caused her daughter enough pain.

Ann seemed surprised that the window was open and stood up to close it. Even at forty, even after what the tragedy on the
Pandora
had done to her, she still carried herself like a dancer, Cassie thought as she watched her glide towards the window in a single smooth movement. Before Ann pulled the curtain shut, Cassie glanced around the room. In the moonlight she could make out the emerald-green curve of a wine bottle on the bedstand.

So that was it, Cassie thought sadly: the screams . . . the curses . . . her mother had been shouting out in lonely, drunken rage at the darkness. If only she hadn't forgotten about dinner, Cassie thought ... if only she hadn't snuck out with Todd, her mother wouldn't have taken the bottle up to her room, and all the strar.ge and terrifying anger wouldn't have spewed out.

it's late. Go to bed,' Ann said.

Cassie hesitated, i love you.' It was what her mother had always said to
her
at bedtime. Why did Cassie feel compelled to say it tonight?

Ann reached out and embraced her, held her so tightly that Cassie could feel her breath against her hair - no words, but a gentle rush of air that spoke to her. Her mother was clutching her, she thought, the way a frightened child clutches a doll. On her breath, Cassie expected to smell the sweet, familiar bouquet of wine. It would have explained everything.

But there was no hint of it. The wine bottle on the bedstand . . . Cassie took a good look at it: it was full.

Ann released her with a wisp of a smile. 'Sleep tight.'

Reluctantly, Cassie let go, and left the room. But as she started down the stairs, she felt a queasiness in the pit of her stomach, and looked back over her shoulder. Her mother had picked up the silver hairbrush that had been knocked off the dressing table, the Art Nouveau antique that had been her grandmother's. She brushed her hair in fitful strokes, her long black tresses crackling with electricity, sparks cutting blue question marks in the dark.

Chapter 2

Cassie could force what had happened last night out of her mind, but not out of her muscles. Her arms and legs ached as if she had fallen down that flight of stairs, instead of running down them, when she had left her mother's room. She pulled the purple leg-warmers up over her knees and started the record of
Swan Lake
again. Resting her foot on the
barre,
she leaned over her thigh and stretched until it hurt.

She stared at herself in the mirrors that lined the walls of the high-ceilinged room, but not with her usual eye to form. Her arms spread wide, her back arched, she gazed at her face, hoping that by studying it, she would somehow be able to decipher her feelings. It was too dark to see. She had pulled open the velvet drapes her mother insisted on keeping shut to block out the view of the sea, but outside a curtain of clouds stifled the first light of morning. All Cassie could make out was her slender, hesitant shadow in the mirror.

She bent her legs slowly in a series of plies in each of the five positions, then did three pirouettes towards the center of the room, snapping her head around so that she didn't lose her image in the mirror, and ending with her arms curved overhead, her left foot on the parquet floor firmly in front of her right. She wasn't dizzy - she never got dizzy when she danced - but the troublesome thoughts lingered, like the salt smell which clung to her hair from last night.