WIDOW (14 page)

When he finished, slathered in their sweat, he slid off her and onto the floor, onto his knees. His head was buried in the mattress, his hands clenched over his scalp. He wept while she patted him, smoothing his hair down with her palm, shushing him the way she might a baby.

Exhausted, he stood and left the room for Sherilee's bathroom next to the kitchen, where he showered a long time. Tears, sweat, illusion and sickness all washed down the drain.

Dressed again, hair combed neatly, he met her in the hall by the front door. He handed over a hundred-dollar bill. She opened the door and he vanished down the steps into the night.

On Saturday nights he slept the sleep of the dead and the grateful. He never once woke on a Saturday night wondering if his mother needed him, if she were still breathing, if she might have died while he wasn't watching.

Not until morning did he wake, refreshed, ready to face another predictable week of torment.

 

Twelve

 

Charlene Brewster wandered through the rooms of the Shoreville Mansion, committing the pattern to heart. The house was as large as a dormitory or a detention center—the way Shadow had thought of it—and there were three floors to cover, a host of rooms to invade and memorize on the mental map Charlene drew painstakingly in her mind. She could not feel secure until she knew where every hall led, what every door opened upon.

It was just past dark. A sea fog had drifted in from the restless bay over the small back sloping lawn, and now it shrouded the mansion, sheeting every window with gray gossamer that shifted if you stood and watched it touch and withdraw from the window pane like a blind phantom. There was a chill on the place that came through the marble floors into Charlene's cornflower-blue slippers as she moved as quietly as possible through the house opening doors, standing to stare and remember, closing doors, and moving on.

Once, on the ground floor, while glancing around a room with French doors (all barred—every bit of glass in the house was barred), she thought as she turned away to leave that she saw a movement outside that was human in origin, not a waving aside of the prevalent fog. She paused and looked back over her shoulder as quickly as she could, straining her neck muscles. But no one was there, just the curtain of gray that coated all the great exterior of the house. She shook her head, admonishing herself for getting spooked for no good reason, and carried on, coasting along the cold white-and-black-tiled floors to another part of the house.

In the middle section of the mansion there had been built an open area, the windows rising for two stories until the ceiling curved overhead into huge squares of green glass to block the sun. A catwalk twelve feet from the bottom floor cut through this section, connecting the front of the house with the back. On either side of the railed concrete walkway, which resounded with her footsteps as she crossed, was the realization of dreams that someone must once have had (the dead man who had locked in the boys?), dreams an architect might have thought nightmarish to build.

To her left, Charlene glanced down at the brick-lined patio surrounding an Olympic-sized swimming pool shaped like a kidney. It had water in it, but neither she nor Shadow had yet taken a swim. The water was too cold, and they did not know how to operate the heater, or how to clean the pool if it became nasty. She could hear the drone of the water pumps, and a chlorine scent that made her nose wrinkle infiltrated the air along this section of the catwalk. Around the pool sat gaily colored chaise longues and deck chairs.

Charlene suddenly thought she heard the laughter and splashing of young boys—dozens of them —and the brave, reckless yell of a diver cannonballing from the highest of the diving boards. But she knew it was not so, it was her errant imagination, the way the movement she'd caught in the glass of the room with the French doors had been.

To Charlene's right was a maze of waist-high brick planters intended for an atrium garden. But they were empty now, the dead dirt still packed tight in the metal containers that lined the inside of the brick flowerboxes. Charlene knew she should descend and walk the mazes, discover their patterns, find her way in and out of them, but that was one part of the house she really disliked. She could not make herself approach it. She tried to see it alive, with plants, and flower blooms, and hanging vines weeping moisture from the pool on the other side of the catwalk, but all she could see were the zigs and zags of the walkways, and the chilling emptiness of the planters.

She moved on, her slippers making dry little pittypat sounds on the catwalk, and beyond the pool, glancing over at the barred windows there, she thought again she saw a figure mistily brushing up against the glass then withdrawing into the cocoon of fog that licked at the house. She stopped. She took a step to the rail and placed both hands on it, holding tightly, squinting and watching to see a reappearance of the figure. It was a man, she knew that much. A woman would not have such wide shoulders or wear a dark coat and a floppy wide-brimmed hat.

“What do you want?” she called out, and her voice echoed high up to the green panels of roof glass where it left behind an echo in her ears.

The figure did not appear twice so she hurried to the other side of the catwalk, but now she was beginning to shake, and she was sure she heard the voices of the children who had attended the parties around the pool area so long ago. They laughed . . .

at her?

. . . at nothing, and their bare feet slapped against wet brick, making sounds like firecrackers popping; they joshed one another and pushed and teased and splashed the water. They lived again, doing what they had done in this house on those nights of revelry that constituted the past.

Oh God, voices were coming back, surrounding her, and Charlene had to cover her ears with the heels of her hands; she had to close her eyes against this invasion, fighting to keep it away.

She had not always heard voices. They had started up in the past ten years or so, tormenting her, breaking down the borders of reality so that she was confused, incapable of understanding where she was and what she was doing. Doctors at Marion State did nothing to alleviate this torture beyond giving her medication that dulled her senses and made her dream while awake. They said the Thorazane would help, but it hadn't. She wasn't a proper schizophrenic, she supposed, or so they had told her.

“Stop it.” She whispered, startling herself, but she had to plead with the sounds she could still hear even though her ears were sealed shut with the thick flesh of her hands. “Please, stop it.”

She turned and ran the rest of the way across the catwalk, rushed down one open side where the pool was at her left. She found a doorway and hurried through it. She found herself in an empty room that might never have been used for anything, by anyone. It had one entrance and exit, and at the end of it windows faced the bay. She couldn't see the water for the fog. Everywhere the fog. And that lurker within it, the one who had caused the voices to come.

She turned back, flew past the catwalk, to the opening into the big back section of the mansion. Here was another living area, one that provided a view of the bay on sunny days. The furniture here was not as good as that in the formal living room at the front of the house. The long sofa was covered in a brown plaid weave and there were worn spots on the armrests and two of the flattened cushions. There was a wicker rocker facing the windows, the sunflower-patterned seat pad ripped and mildewed; a maple coffee table, legs scarred; two extra tables too tall for the sofa, one holding a squat aqua-colored lamp with a stained shade the color of smoke.

Charlene shivered, memorizing the dimensions, the placement of the furniture. She rushed through the remaining rooms—two baths, one full, one a half-bath with toilet and sink; another kitchen, but one not nearly as set up or roomy as the one on the other side of the house—the refrigerator was white and old, but still running, she could hear the compressor humming; the stove was a countertop affair; no oven; a table painted black, two uncomfortable chairs pushed beneath it. There were two more empty rooms, like the first she'd entered, meant to be bedrooms, she suspected. One faced the bay, as had the first one, the other was on the side of the house facing the back driveway and the weedy field beyond.

She wanted across the catwalk and away from this empty section of the mansion, but she dreaded the walk across the big open space, and the fog at the windows, and the chance of seeing the coated, hatted figure sliding along the outside again. She drew a deep breath, like a runner readying for the sprint, and, gripping the catwalk's railing on each side of her, she took off at a dead run for the other side. Safe, safe, safe, she repeated to herself as she ran, thinking if she whispered it furiously enough and long enough it would be true, that nothing could harm her. Above her magical incantation the boys' laughter rang out as loud and clear as bells in a Sunday-morning village, and she ducked her chin to her chest as she skittered across the vast openness, speaking louder and louder until she was shouting, SAFE, SAFE, SAFE, SAFE . . . !

Out of breath, wrapped in her baggy sweater, trembling with relief, she came out onto the marble landing overlooking the front entrance and curving stairway. Ahead of her was a flicker of the man at the front door, trying the door knob. She saw him silhouetted in the panels of pebbled, leaded glass. The hat brim was angled down to obscure his face.

She caught and held her breath, old fears returning to paralyze her where she stood.

She watched the gold burnished knob twist an inch one way and then the other, and she caught the scream in her throat before it escaped. The knob stilled, the man disappeared, or never was, she didn't know. She had no way of knowing if she was truly in danger or conjuring it. She had lost the capacity to tell the difference so long ago. It was hell never to know when things might be real or imagined, true hell so much worse than the one preachers talked about from pulpits.

An inner voice—calm and in control—told her to drop to her knees, to crawl beneath the banister railing, to try hiding from view. It would not work, though she obeyed the voice. The chandelier a story above her shone down yellow and bright and revealing.

She crawled this way until she reached her room, and did not come to her feet again until she made it to the drapes hanging to one side of her double, ceiling-to-floor windows. She caught at the drawstring, yanking closed the drapes with a rattling swish. She stood, watching them sway, then hang silently, rebuking her.

She sat on the side of her bed, breathing noisily through her open mouth. Had there been someone outside, peeking in at her? Did she just imagine it? Was he at the door just then, trying the brass knob, skating away into the fog when he found it locked? Was it the rapist who had stolen half her mind?

But no one could get inside. This was a fortress, locked and barred, and secure. Safe. She wouldn't be caught again doing a house chore, taken from behind, astonished to find a hand over her mouth.

Yet the house was too large and empty, full of boys at a party, diving and swimming and involved in horseplay. It was shadowed and dark, lost in a fog so thick it was worse than a somber winter night. That was not safety. That held no security.

Don't think about it.

She wouldn't. She didn't have to. No one could make her afraid if she didn't allow it. Instead, she could go over the map in her head and lay out the rooms, the halls, the closets, the cubbyholes, the exits and entrances, the six-car underground garage that sat empty beneath the back of the house, the immense ballroom, two kitchens, a massive dining room, the men's and women's bathrooms near the pool—with six toilet stalls and six showers in each—the bars, those wonderful bars, all those black wrought-iron bars that covered the entire three stories. The only place she had not investigated, besides the atrium maze, because she couldn't force herself inside, was the dark, muggy, earth-smelling passage beneath the brick catwalk. She'd never go in there. It was too much like a tomb, claustrophobic, never-ending. It was some kind of passage on that floor connecting the two sections of the mansion the way the catwalk connected it on the upper floor. Who could go in there, though? How could anyone walk down a concrete passageway where spiders and roaches and rats and maybe even snakes might slither?

She glanced at the bedside clock she'd brought from the hospital, a wind-up Big Ben she carried with her everywhere. It was eight o'clock. Shadow had been gone an hour. She wouldn't be back until the middle of the morning, three or four a.m. Until then Charlene had to make do. She had to keep the voices out of her head, and the stranger at the windows out of the house. That was—she counted on her fingers—seven or eight hours before she could relax.

She would have to stay busy. When Shadow worked, Charlene worked. It was an arrangement she thought only fair. And she did have to keep herself sane when she was alone—that was the hardest time, and the most difficult thing to do. It had been easier in the state hospital. There were other women to keep her company, life stories to listen to and recall, people who needed her to care for them, to talk to them.

On the streets, before knowing Shadow, Charlene had suffered the worst of all. No one would listen to her. No one! Not even the bums and street people who seemed to listen to one another, at least. They called her crazy lady and shooed her away. Her life was in constant peril, ever veering out of control. She imagined every person she saw whispered at her back, every glance her way one of hatred, every man who came as close as three feet a sexual menace.

She smiled now, thinking of what good fortune she was enjoying. Shadow did listen. Shadow never made fun of her or told her to shut up and go away. She even, on occasion, held conversations with her, just as if she were real and worthy of attention. Shadow brought her take-out food some nights. She let her run with her, and exercise with her on the living room rug. She complimented her cooking, though Charlene knew it was really not that good, and she admired how she kept the house so clean, so shining—“like jewels in a crown,” that's what Shadow told her, that she made everything sparkly and new the way it once might have been.