Folly

by Laurie R. King

  It was in the middle of January, five weeks after the accident, that Rae first began to feel the presence of the Watchers. They came at night, picking at the edges of the grim blanket that smothered her mind, small, niggling twitches that could have been life returning to deadened limbs, but which felt more like the threat of a further descent into lifelessness. A sound from the deck that, mere weeks before, would not have had her looking up from her book now drove her to the light switches, off for all the inside lights, on for the outside floods. Nothing was there, just the trees pressing up against the railing, the branches of the winter-dull garden moving gently in a breeze. Nothing there, but still Rae began to retreat into the upper rooms, or to the storage spaces that had no windows. After a few days, she went around with a staple gun and fastened bedsheets to all the uncurtained windows—which, it being a house without neighbors, was virtually every one. This transformed her house into a place simultaneously of refuge and of enclosure, a hiding place and a jail.

  Rae started to walk. She would leave the house each morning, trudge her mile-long driveway and several more miles of lightly used public road to the small country market, where she would buy a paper and a desultory selection of groceries. Some days, when she was feeling too ill, she would occupy the bench at the bus stop for most of the day; on others she would wander on, far afield, miles and miles of mindless walking, watching the approach of each car and wondering calmly if this would be the one whose wheels she flung herself under. She could not have said, afterward, where she had been, but always she would return home before darkness fell, pick at some tasteless food, and take out the newspaper she had bought, clipping all the articles about disasters. A drug-related killing. A multicar pileup in the fog. A woman arrested for locking her child in the closet for two years. A massive earthquake in some dry and distant country. Disaster, catastrophe, death, disorder. She began to keep lists: the places struck down, the names and ages of the victims, the cars sought in the hit-and-runs. Lists of words that occurred in the articles, in descriptions of the victims and their assailants, even in adjacent articles, as if the words held some hidden meaning she might understand if she took sufficient care, as if the world might reveal meaning if she paid sufficient attention.

  All the while, Rae’s own internal Watcher was fully aware that she looked a sight. Unkempt and often inappropriately dressed, she could not summon the energy to care. Friends came and buzzed in her ears with worried offers of driving her to the supermarket or the doctor’s; her lawyer came with papers, as if the transfer of Alan’s possessions to her mattered; Tamara arrived to tidy the house (although when she attempted to clear out Alan’s closet, Rae drove her off in a rare summoning of fury). Nurses, doctors, lawyers, Alan’s colleagues—all called or left messages on the machine until Rae just stopped answering.

  In the evenings, behind her stapled-up barriers, she sat at Alan’s desk or in the beat-up leather chair that bore the clear imprint of his shoulders along its back. The last book he had been reading lay on the table next to the arm, and she read and reread the pages where the bookmark lodged, troubled mightily that she did not know at which precise spot he had stopped reading. The page before the bookmark, so that he might start here afresh? Or halfway through the left-hand page where a section break occurred? Or even all the way to the bottom of the right? Oh, why couldn’t he have put the bookmark in at a new chapter? she raged. And why didn’t she know him well enough to guess? If she scrutinized the words closely enough, maybe she could feel which words his eyes had passed over, and which remained unread …

  At night Rae curled up in Bella’s bed, where the pillow still smelled faintly of peanut butter and crayons and lemonade, or so she imagined, if she buried her face deeply enough into it. In the morning she put on clothes (baggy sweaters that would go over the cast; mismatched socks) and pushed her spoon around a bowl of cold cereal, staring at the floral and geometrical fabric prints over the windows and trying to convince herself that there was nothing on the other side of them, that if she pulled one aside she wouldn’t see a stranger’s face looking back at her. The anxiety usually hit before she finished her cereal, cramping her belly and making her pace up and down, hands clenched or wringing each other, until she could bear it no longer and burst out the door to hurry down the gravel drive toward the road.

  Once her feet hit the tarmac, the feeling of Watchers would begin to fade. She would sink back into a dull, apathetic state, not caring much about anything or anyone, so long as she could keep moving.

  And keep moving she did. She must have put on twenty miles a day during the end of January, rain and shine, up and down the roads with her hands thrust into her jacket pockets, her eyes on the pavement in front of her feet, a quart of milk sloshing beside the newspaper in the green knapsack. Fortunately, it was a mild patch of winter weather, even for California, and only twice did she get truly drenched. But the rain seemed to interfere with the Watchers, because as she splashed up her long, empty drive on those wet days, the back of her neck did not prickle so ominously and the skin of her arms felt merely cold and clammy, without the crawling feeling that usually started up at the first curve in the road. Well worth the discomfort of being soaked to the skin, even if it meant the cast on her arm went spongy for days.

  It was just bad luck that on the second of these drenchings the propane tank ran empty less than an hour after she reached the sanctuary of the house. She had neglected to phone for a delivery, or to unlock the gate for the truck. Now her only heat was the open fireplace. She used the last logs before midnight, leaving her the options of venturing outside to the woodpile or going to bed. She did eye the wooden furniture, but in the end took to her blankets.

  She awoke to full sunlight, a scratchy throat, and the sound of footsteps walking across her deck. No knock came, no voice, and the sound was not repeated. Cold terror trickled into Rae’s veins. Long minutes passed with a whimpering deep inside, until finally she fumbled for the telephone with trembling hands and whispered to the emergency dispatcher that she had an intruder.

  The sheriff’s deputy took forever to arrive. Red-faced from the stiff climb up the drive from the locked gate, he kept one eye on Rae the whole time he checked the house for intruders; whether he was more taken aback by her appearance or the state of her house would have been hard to say.

  He found nothing, and eventually walked off down the hill, shaking his head.

  In the week that followed, Rae called 911 twice more, each time with the same result, or lack of result. The third time the sheriff himself, Sam Escobar, strode up the road, walked briskly through her chaotic house, sat her down for a long talk, and left with a spare key to the gate in his pocket. She did not call again, not even when the Watchers took to scratching at her windows with twigs and rattling her doorknobs.

  So she huddled into the sofa in front of her fireplace, concentrating fiercely on her newspaper disasters and her lists of related words and events until she could bear the noises no longer. Then she drew a pillow over her head to muffle the scratches and rattles, and she lay through the night, listening to the whispers that rose and fell just below the threshold of her hearing.

  Rae’s own internal Watcher was aware that her behavior was irrational. As if it were studying a stranger, a woman curled up in the dark and spending long midnight hours poring over endless lists, her inner eye knew there were neither whispered conversations nor heavy-footed Watchers outside of her head, as it was also faintly aware that before too long something would have to be done. However, the truth was, Rae found the unjustifiable terrors strangely comforting. Focusing on them, she had no energy left to think about the impossibility of life without Alan and Bella. Imaginary enemies were infinitely easier to face than real ones.

  It seemed, looking back, that this period in her life went on for years. In fact, the downward spiral lasted for just under three weeks, from the funeral to Rae’s readmission to the hospital intensive care unit, feverish from a low-grade pneumonia, a
rebroken left forearm, a lot of superficial cuts and bruises, and a nasty infection in her left shoulder where what they thought was a bone chip was creating havoc.

  The downward spiral’s end came abruptly, from two more or less simultaneous directions.

  Only many months later did it occur to her that she was an unlikely candidate for rape. Sheriff Escobar’s response to that tentatively offered observation, that some animals would rape anything that moved, only served to confirm how unappealing she was at the time: gaunt to the point of collapse, ill-washed, shiny-eyed with fever, racked with a cough, dressed in Alan’s baggy clothing, and wearing a backpack oozing the remains of a dozen broken eggs.

  Late in the afternoon on the first Tuesday in February, as Rae stepped off the public road to slip through her gate, a big black pickup truck with oversized tires drove up behind her and braked in a rain of gravel. Two stocky young men hopped easily down from the cab, leaving both doors wide open, and strode confidently toward her, joking with each other and looming larger and larger, and only breaking into a run when she turned to flee in slow motion up the drive.

  Cats with a mouse, lions with a rabbit. They seemed to be on her in two huge steps, the nightmare panting of their breath sweeping up behind her, their boisterous shouts terrifying in their merriment, and then the carnal rut of sweat and cigarettes filled her nostrils as they pounced, iron fingers yanking her off her feet, leaving a row of black circles in the skin of her shoulders and arm, the first of many. They stank of aggression and they laughed at Rae’s feeble efforts.

  She fought them wildly, squirming and hitting out in desperate, futile silence. The only sound to escape her was one brief cry when the dark-haired attacker broke her cast as he yanked away her knapsack. Their hands were all over her, wrenching and pinching and brutal; hitting them felt like slapping the sides of the redwood trees that stood quietly nearby. Only one of her blows connected with any force: The blond staggered back, clutching his nose, but struggle as she might, the brown-haired one’s arms held her fast. Then the blond was back, angry now, coarse laughter turned to foul curses. Hard fingers tore at her shirt, two arms locked around her from behind to keep her from flinging herself away, a hand, shockingly cold, thrust into the loose waistband of her jeans. She kicked out hard and the hand drew back, but only for a moment, to return with a brutal slap that snapped her head to the side. Half stunned, with the blond man’s jaw buried in her neck and his voice murmuring monotonous obscenities while the other one half-carried her toward the bend in the road, she felt the hand come back to insinuate itself between soft belly skin and fabric.

  And then a shout, which Rae heard only later, in memory, or in a construct of imagination. All she knew at the time was that the hands in front stopped tearing at her clothes, and then she was flying through the air, arms spread wide, to land with a crash in the bushes.

  Joseph Ayala, on his way home from work, dropped into the middle of Rae’s assault like an angel on a golden chariot, with a squeal of rubber and a furious blare of the horn of his beat-up Chevy pickup. Thirty seconds later and Rae and her pursuers would have been out of sight, but Joseph glanced up the dirt road as he passed, saw his recently bereaved neighbor struggling against two young men, and rolled down his window to shout, “I’m calling the cops, right now!” He held up a compact black shape to his ear to illustrate his threat. The two young men hesitated, then decided to cut their losses. The taller of the two threw her bodily off the road, and they ran back down the hill for their truck. Ayala hastily slapped his own vehicle into gear and retreated on up the road a bit, but Rae’s attackers did not pursue him, merely gunned the shiny black truck and accelerated away in the other direction toward the main road.

  Rae, tearing herself out of the brambles, looked up to see a man laboring up the road toward her, a black leather wallet held incongruously in his hand. She snatched together her torn, bloody clothing, grabbed her dripping knapsack, and fled. Her appalled neighbor slowed to a halt and watched her disappear. Then he ran back to his truck and drove fast for home and a real telephone, to phone 911 and gabble about the crime he had witnessed.

  In the meantime, earlier that same day, Rae’s doctor had called Tamara to say that two appointments had been missed—was Rae all right? When she could not get Rae on the phone, Tamara, disgruntled and dutiful on the surface but queasy underneath with a lifetime of experience, picked up Petra from school and drove down to her mother’s house, letting herself in the gate a scant ten minutes after the sheriff and paramedics had done the same. Tamara pulled through the last grove of redwoods to find three official vehicles in her mother’s normally deserted forecourt, and a lot of people in uniforms.

  In a panic, she rushed in, Petra on her heels. Both of them stopped, aghast, at the sight that met their eyes.

  Sheriff Sam Escobar, six feet of broad muscle and tan uniform, was squatting down at one end of a sofa littered deep with scraps of paper, his hand held cautiously out as if to a panicked animal. Which was precisely what Rae Newborn was just then, a beaten, bloody, stinking, half-naked animal in pain, too terrified of assailants both real and imagined to do more than cower in the dark corner between the wall and the sofa, surrounded by a blizzard of her scribbled lists, hidden from the outer world by the bizarrely colorful bedsheets, whimpering in the back of her throat. The paramedics were looking at their watches, the deputy was fingering the lockstrap on his gun nervously, and Rae was hunched up into a ball, one eye on the man in the tan uniform as if judging when to bite his hand.

  “Mother?” Tamara gasped. “Oh my God, Mother, not again!”

  Rae gave a single sob, a sound of loss and relief, and tried to unfold her stiff limbs from their fetal curl. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but it was not to the sheriff, nor even to her daughter. “I’m sorry,” she told Petra, over and over. The child’s frightened face cut through it all—fever, terror, madness, pain: everything—and all Rae could think of was that her granddaughter should never have seen her like this. And so, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Situational psychosis” was a phrase whose source Rae could no longer remember, but one which she found infinitely reassuring, an acknowledgment that even the strongest mind could give way following a series of blows, blows carefully calibrated and delivered by Fate. Even if she had not been the world’s most securely balanced woman before, even if she had gone through periods of grim depression and compulsive behavior and attempts at suicide, even if she had known panic attacks long before they had a name, it did not mean she was always and irrevocably crazy. It just meant that she had a weakness, no more of a moral flaw than her mother’s bad knee or her uncle’s trick back.

  Situational psychosis. Clinical depression. Nervous breakdown. Shell shock—all names for the neurological fault line that gives way under severe pressure, a shattering, devastating internal earthquake that leaves raw and gaping scars across the lives of everyone in the vicinity. This time when Rae was taken into the hospital, there was no overlooking the patient’s deeper problem. This second time in the ICU, the nurses were watchful, omnipresent, and meticulous about never leaving sharp objects near her bed. This time, once the antibiotics had done their work on her lungs, when the arm was reset with a plate on the bone and the cast replaced, when the fragment of Alan’s front tooth had been taken from her abscessed shoulder and most of the gravel from her hands and knees, she was transferred not to an open ward, but to a locked one. It was there, ironically enough, that some weeks later Rae managed to pull her wits together enough to make her third suicide attempt. Unlike the earlier two, this time she was by no means halfhearted. She wanted seriously to be dead, and she went about it with a determination every bit as grim and narrow-focused as her world had become. Only because of a fluke bed check was she caught before the blood loss became too great.

  That was rock bottom. After that, she gave up. The soothing, mindless routine of the hospital took over; gradually, it began to do its work. Rae’s surroundings became a
place of asylum, not just a madhouse. Swaddled tightly in the security of having absolutely no choices, seesawed by drugs, and seared by shock therapy, she found that in spite of herself, the scope of her vision began slowly to expand. The inescapably dreary hopelessness of the universe thinned a fraction, Rae’s field of awareness spread to include things outside her own uncomfortable skin, and then one day she suddenly became aware of the smell of popcorn being prepared in the staff room. She didn’t even care much for popcorn, but the odor drifted down the institutional halls like an angel choir. Then came Dr. Roberta Hunt, bearing the first glimmer at the end of the tunnel, lighting up the long road home.

  Only, home was a place now shut up and silent, the furniture draped with sheets against the dust (the same sheets she’d stapled up to the windows, in fact). Or was home now this island, two broken stone towers at the base of a hill that was trying to bury them?

  The question really only mattered if the six bullets remained in their neat pyramidal arrangement on the corner of her desk. The definition of home would hardly matter to a dead woman.

  Most of the night Rae sat at her desk, picking up the bullets and playing with them, caressing the gun’s worn rosewood stock with her thumb, loading and unloading the chambers. Most of the night she listened to the low exhalation of the kerosene lamp and the shifting conversation of the two horned owls, torn between peaceful oblivion and the look it would bring onto Petra’s face. Toward morning, undecided still, Rae lay her head down on the journal. How different the arrangement of bullets look from this perspective, she thought. After a while her eyelids fluttered closed. Toward morning the lamp faded, and died.