The Haunting of James Hastings (26 page)
Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
I ignored her.
‘James?’
‘What?’ I nearly shouted.
‘I didn’t slap him.’ She looked tired, sorry for making trouble.
I waited, staring into her flat, lifeless eye. The green was dead, the blue alive. One was stronger than the other.
‘Kids have accidents,’ she said. ‘Every day. People die every day.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘What does it mean? It means what if it hadn’t been me he ran into? What if he ran into a car? What if he ran into a ditch and fell on a broken bottle?’ Louder and louder. ‘What if he was playing with a knife and stabbed his brother in the neck? What if he found the gun and
blew his own god damn head off
!’
blew his own god damn head off
!’
‘You’re sick,’ I said. ‘You need help—’
‘He could have died!’ Annette shouted. Her entire face went red and the veins in her forehead pulsed. ‘He could be dead!
Dead!
Do you understand me?
Do you understand me?
’
Dead!
Do you understand me?
Do you understand me?
’
I could only stare at her, and that was difficult bordering on unbearable.
She got out of the car, slammed the door and went inside.
I sat in the garage for a while, looking at the BMX bike.
24
She wasn’t on the first floor. I waited a few minutes, running a sponge nonchalantly around the kitchen counters, humming nervously. I kept seeing that boy’s face. If I had not lifted him, he would have drowned in his own blood. And I could not escape the feeling that she had wanted him to die. That she had been pushing him to the edge.
In how many ways was I culpable? The store had my credit card info. The police would find my address, but not me. They wouldn’t know I was here. Except, dingdong, dumbass - you have a furniture delivery. They could be on their way right now. I almost hoped they were.
And I was guilty of riding along with her as she became a danger to others. This was a wake-up call. I needed stop her. I needed her to understand that her aggressive . . . assault, yes, it was an assault . . . was unconscionable. I would not allow it to happen again. And if she did not immediately agree to see a physician and a therapist, and acknowledge how awfully she had behaved, I would leave her. Tonight. Simple as that.
I went up the stairs. The master bedroom door was locked.
I knocked. ‘Annette, open the door.’
Silence.
‘Annette, we need to talk about this. The police are going to come sooner or later. I’ll talk to them if they come. I will tell them what happened. Do you hear me? You’re going to have to deal with this.’
If she stirred, she did so in silence.
‘I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,’ I said to the door. ‘We will talk about this. Otherwise I’m gone.’
I went downstairs and stood in the kitchen and chewed my nails. I drank a beer, and then a second beer. Gone to what? Where are you going to go? I went into the living room, hooked up the Blu-ray player and watched something starring fire.
When the movie was over, I stared at the credits, delaying and delaying. I had six or seven beers rolling around in me, but felt sober. The day was shot. Night was here and I didn’t see a way out. I was too buzzed to get behind the wheel. Maybe tomorrow morning would be the better time to confront her. It was going to be a long night, the kind where I slept on the couch. Well, there was the television. I had more movies. I sat up to go use the bathroom and the doorbell rang. It was a modern doorbell, more of a muted gong, a sort of thrum deep in the house. For a moment I didn’t even know what it was, then it gonged again.
I set my empty beer bottle on the floor and walked around the kitchen, through the front hall, into the foyer. The porch light was off but the foyer light was on, creating a glare on my side of the front window. I could not see anything outside, so I stood behind the door for a moment, wondering who would ring the doorbell at almost nine thirty.
Oh, of course. The police.
I looked through the peephole. The view was fish-eyed and no one was standing on the porch. There were no police cars on the street or in the driveway. Maybe the gong wasn’t the doorbell. I turned and headed back toward the hall. I turned right into the bathroom.
Bam . . . bam . . . bam.
Someone knocked on the door three times, using the side of their fist by the sound of it, with a deliberate pause in between each strike. All right. So, it was either someone short or someone had walked away and gone around the garage right before I looked through the peephole, then came back and tried again.
I walked back to the door and looked through the peephole again. Same empty porch. Same empty street. This was sort of not funny now.
I opened the door. I checked the end of the driveway. The front yard. The street. No people. I leaned to the right and flicked on the porch light. It did not reveal anything. I was closing the door when something twinkled in my peripheral vision, down low on the concrete step. I shoved the door aside and stepped out.
Annette did not have a welcome mat, or even a real porch, just the bare concrete step some four feet by four feet. At the approximate center of it was a white chalk circle the diameter of a basketball. In the center was a tight formation of marbles in the shape of a V with a stem growing out of the center. Seven of the marbles were black and the one at the base was white. I stepped around it and viewed it from the other side, and realized it was not a V with a stem growing out of it.
It was an arrow, pointing at the house.
I looked up quickly, scanning the yard again. I walked down the step, along the walk, into the driveway. I checked the side of the house, the gate with the courtyard and pool behind it. I went the other way around and checked the side yard where the grass was dying and only three or four dead young trees separated ours from the undeveloped dirt lot next door. Nothing and no one. If it had been kids, they were hiding now.
I walked back to the front porch and picked up the white marble. It was heavy, about the size of a grape. I tossed it in my palm a couple times, then lobbed it at the door. It made a hollow
whock
noise that bore no resemblance to the knocking I had heard a few minutes ago, and fell to the foyer tile and rolled down the hall a bit. I went in and started to shut the door behind me, then stopped. Something about leaving the marbles on the porch bothered me, so I went back out and scooped the others up and carried them inside. On the way to the kitchen, I bent and added the white one to the others in my palm. I set them on the kitchen counter, in a row between the tiles, watching them for a minute while nursing another beer.
whock
noise that bore no resemblance to the knocking I had heard a few minutes ago, and fell to the foyer tile and rolled down the hall a bit. I went in and started to shut the door behind me, then stopped. Something about leaving the marbles on the porch bothered me, so I went back out and scooped the others up and carried them inside. On the way to the kitchen, I bent and added the white one to the others in my palm. I set them on the kitchen counter, in a row between the tiles, watching them for a minute while nursing another beer.
Marbles. An arrow. Inside a circle.
If it was supposed to mean something, the meaning was lost on me.
Kids. God damn kids.
I set my beer down and went upstairs to check on Annette.
The bedroom door was ajar and the room was hot with evening sun that had not vented despite the late hour. A weak glare from a distant street light cut through the vertical blinds, striping the bed and her shape under the covers with dull orange light. I went to her side and sat on the bed. Her face was dotted with sweat. Her eyes were partially open but she did not blink or do anything to suggest she knew I was in the room.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You all right?’
She did not respond. I moved up against the bed and wiggled her wrist. Her arm felt like a stick floating in a sleeve of gelatin. I put my hand on her forehead. I expected her to be feverish but her skin was cool, almost cold.
She’s emotionally exhausted. Let her sleep.
Stacey had been emotionally exhausted, too, near the end. Those last few months before the accident, during that cold distance that was our way of fighting. She had been spending more and more time out of the house, even when I was home between gigs. When I confronted her and said she was changing, that I knew something was wrong, she denied it and said she was just ‘emotionally exhausted’, as if emotions were a finite resource.
What does that mean? I had asked her. I hated the phrase. It’s a child’s excuse. Emotionally exhausted is what celebrities tell the media when they are too strung out to perform. Ghost had used the same line every couple of years, walking off stage or canceling the last leg of his tour.
‘You wonder why I’m not prancing around, happy to see you?’ Stacey had responded, a deadness in her voice. She was not even arguing, merely reciting something. ‘Maybe it has nothing to do with you. Since when is my whole life about you and Ghost?’
‘What’s Ghost got to do with anything?’ I said. ‘You’re never here, even when you’re here. I don’t know where you go. What do you want me to do?’
‘Leave me alone,’ the sullen teenager replied without moving her eyes from the television. ‘Think you can do that?’
‘No. I can’t. I love you and I want to know what the fuck is wrong here.’
Then she got up and calmly walked out of the house, got in her car and drove off to wherever she was going that day. Back to her friends, off to see her new boyfriend (less likely, but it had crossed my mind) or maybe just to sit in another yoga class where she could feel independent and spiritual.
Three days later I found the pills. I was looking for a cigarette lighter in her purse, not snooping. All right. I was snooping. But it was her purse, not her diary or Fort Knox, and I was her husband. I think it’s fair to say that when your spouse becomes a zombie in the skin of the person you married, purses, wallets, cellphone records, dry-cleaning pockets, and, yes, email become communal property. Is this not part of the reason we get married in the first place - to have someone there to catch us when we start to fall?
Annette was still sleeping. I looked at her chest, trying to gauge the regularity or irregularity of her breathing. Was this her way of grieving? I didn’t think catatonia was a natural symptom of losing your husband. Was it drugs for her, too? Torqued chemistry, à la bipolar disorder? Dissociative personality disorder? Demons lodged deep, math teacher named Chester?
Don’t let Annette fall. Don’t let her be like Stacey.
What if it’s too late? What if she’s already like Stacey? And what if there’s no ‘like’ about it?
I didn’t find a lighter or a book of matches in Stacey’s purse that day. Just a bottle of Tylenol PM, the orange DayQuil capsules, some valium, Percocet, Lamicta, Ambien, Xanax, and a few others that weren’t even in bottles, just rolling around at the bottom with the lint like newer, more entertaining flavors of Tic Tacs. Two of the prescriptions were in Stacey’s name. One was in the name of Rowina Daniels, her kleptomaniac friend from North Carolina. The others were blank, the labels peeled off.
Is my wife depressed?
I had wondered.
I had wondered.
And then,
how long?
how long?
And then,
is this what depression looks like, or are we dealing with something of a greater magnitude here? Has she been diagnosed?
Someone had written two of the scrips for her.
But what about the rest? Was she in counseling? Do doctors really think two, three, five kinds of pills are the answer to our problems?
I knew she took Ambien now and then to help her sleep.
If it’s a legitimate health issue, why is she being so secretive?
is this what depression looks like, or are we dealing with something of a greater magnitude here? Has she been diagnosed?
Someone had written two of the scrips for her.
But what about the rest? Was she in counseling? Do doctors really think two, three, five kinds of pills are the answer to our problems?
I knew she took Ambien now and then to help her sleep.
If it’s a legitimate health issue, why is she being so secretive?
And god damn it, what’s so difficult about telling your husband, ‘I don’t feel so hot and I don’t know why. Will you help me figure out what’s going on?’
The fact that he’s never home when you’re feeling strong enough to ask for help. How about that?
I looked down at Annette, pale, shivering Annette in the bedroom. Was I attracted to unstable women? Or was this a coincidence? Half the country is on one prescription or another, I consoled myself. It’s not her fault. Modern life is a nasty stretch to serve. We take antidepressants and anti-anxiety and anti-feeling human pills the way we used to take vitamins and cigarettes and martini lunches. We take one pill to wake us up and another to put us down. A simple cup of coffee and a walk after dinner have become Red Bull and vodka. We take a pill to relax so we can cross off five hundred things on our To Do list, most of which are meaningless. We take fuckpills, but do we really need to provoke and then tame an erection that lasts four hours? If we are not trying to feel more more more, we’re doing everything we can to feel nothing at all. Flatly happy or just god damned sad aren’t allowed any more. In the pursuit of a pain-free emotional life, we’re sanding the edges off the human experience, and we’ll keep on doing it until we wake up one day and realize life has become one monotonous swim in a kiddie-safe pool filled with hand sanitizer.
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