Voices in the Dark (37 page)

Mrs. Gunner ran a nervous hand through her tainted white hair, her scalp shining through. “You have a child, you’re never sure what you’re gonna get. Could be a monster.”

Isabel drew on the cigarette, illuminating her stretched-tight face while deepening the bullet-hole eyes. “My Mary was late in my life. I didn’t want her, you know. I should’ve dropped her on her head.”

“My Paul is a duplicate of his father.”

“Mary was every bit her father, no real stuff to him. He kept a rope in his closet for when he could get up the nerve. It was Mary who found him.”

Mrs. Gunner put a hand to her nose. Mr. Skully blessed her when she sneezed. A crumpled tissue came out of her fist. She had a lingering chest cold and a ragged cough like the rattle of broken glass inside a thermos. Several moments passed, and Mr. Skully mumbled out another song and singer.

Isabel, no longer smoking, dropped back on the bed and extended her legs, intact and shapely. “One of these days,” she said, “genetic engineering will ensure perfect lovers, ideal fathers, and wonderful children.”

Mrs. Gunner closed her eyes. Mr. Skully half lifted his cane and smiled. His teeth had the gleam of nickel. “I was one of each,” he said.

Isabel spoke in a drifting voice of the poet Lowell, the only man, she said, with whom she had been musical when struck, sonorous when brought about. Her head sought more of the pillow. “The affair ran its course too fast. We both knew it would. He went back to his other life and I to mine.”

Mrs Gunner nodded off into a dream and woke a few minutes later with her conviction strengthened that other worlds meandered, beyond the grave. Without opening her eyes, she said, “I’m not afraid of pushing off, don’t think for a minute I am. My granddaughter awaits me. I just spoke to her.”

“He was too morose, he got on my nerves,” Isabel said from the pillow, her legs stretched to their limits. “I told him to straighten up and fly right.”

“Lowell?” Mr. Skully asked.

“My husband.”

“ ‘Honeysuckle Rose,’ Lena Home,” he said quietly, awash in memories. Haltingly, with strain, he rose from the chair, abandoned his cane, and tottered into the shadows, where he lost his bearings. “Where are you?”

Mrs. Gunner had a coughing spell and thumped her chest, after which she needed many moments to regain her breath. The air in the room was close, heavy, active, touched with sounds of drama. Her ears told her what her eyes could not manage. “I know what you’re doing,” she said through congestion.

Mr. Skully pulled out and ejected three small drops of semen on the sunken surface of Isabel’s abdomen. Then, still triggered, he fell away and lay with his face in collapse. Rising slowly, Isabel fixed her robe, raked her hair back, and lit a cigarette.

“He’s not dead, is he?” Mrs. Gunner asked roughly.

The cigarette threw a spark. Isabel advanced from the shadows and sat on the fat armrest of Mrs. Gunner’s chair. Holding the cigarette in one hand, she blew on the other. She had broken a nail, the finger defanged. Both women were conscious of the hour, of the darkness outside, of the man sleeping like a baby on the bed. Isabel stroked her friend’s shoulder.

“We did our best, didn’t we, Hilda?”

“Our best? I never had the opportunity to know what my best is.”

For more than a minute they existed in separate silences like two actors deprived of applause, the curtain dropping, the audience frozen. An ash fell.

“What did you say to her, Hilda?”

“Say to who?”

“Your granddaughter.”

“I told her not to be afraid. Nana’s coming.”

This edition published by
Prologue Books
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.prologuebooks.com

Copyright © 1994 by Andrew Coburn
All rights reserved.

Cover Images ©123rf/Engin Korkmaz, Jeremy Baumann, Viktoriya Sukhanova, Roman Sotola

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4507-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4507-8