“You’re right,” Annie says, trying desperately to placate her. “I know. I realize that now.”
“Now is too late for you. Jesus is very angry. Turn right onto 20. Go down to the interstate. We’re going north.”
The highway is open. Annie thinks of pulling over somewhere, but there are few stops on this road, a bleak rural landscape. Lydia smokes continuously, and the smell of it makes Annie sick to her stomach. She is acutely aware of her pregnancy, every inch of her body expressing life.
“Where are we going?” Talking is better than silence.
“To pay someone a visit.”
“But it’s snowing. The road is very slippery.”
“This person is worth the effort. I think you’ll want to see him. Unfortunately, he’s not himself these days. He’s been in a bit of an accident.”
“What did you say?”
“There’s nothing to worry about. He’s recovering nicely. I’m taking very good care of him.”
The words suddenly unscramble in her head. She’s talking about Michael. He’s alive.
79
THE WORLD LOOKS DIFFERENT from the backseat, Lydia thinks, holding a handkerchief up to her bleeding nose. Surreal. The way the trees hunker and shimmy. She used to get nosebleeds as a child, she remembers. Her hands filling up with her own blood. It was scary at the time. But not anymore. Now she’s a grown woman. She’s not afraid of things like that.
No need to feel any pain now, she thinks, the pills blossoming inside her like little buds. Pretty little flowers. No need to feel anything.
She pushes the gun a little harder into the back of Annie’s neck. “Turn down that lane. See that house? Park over there. We’ll go in the front.”
It is amazing to Lydia how much power a gun has. It’s a mental thing, what Reverend Tim used to call the Fear Factor. The little movie of premonition the person experiences when they’ve got a gun at the back of their neck.
“Get out of the car. We’re going in.”
They walk through the snow, up the front steps, and into the house. The doctor’s wife blanches as she reacts to the smell of the trash. I wasn’t expecting company. “Upstairs. Hurry up.” Annie Knowles hesitates at the bottom of the stairs. Lydia nudges her hard with the gun, urging her up to the second floor, into her father’s room. “Sit over in that chair. Put on those handcuffs.”
Annie pants as if she is trying to formulate a question. Lydia indulges in her terror like a form of entertainment. “W-where is he?” Annie finally stutters. “Is he here in this house?”
“Did I tell you to talk? What were your instructions, Mrs. Knowles?”
“I . . . I can’t remember.”
“I told you to put those on.” Annie takes up the handcuffs reluctantly. “What—you’ve never played with handcuffs before? I’m shocked. It’s one of Simon’s favorite little games.” Annie opens her mouth a little. “Tell me this, Mrs. Knowles, are you ready to be shot?”
“N-no . . . please.”
Lydia’s tongue swells up on account of the pills, an unfortunate side effect. She imagines that her voice sounds funny, like a record playing at the wrong speed. Just for fun, she aims the gun at Annie and cocks it. Scrambling, Annie puts on the handcuffs. She sits there, demure as a schoolgirl, her wrists joined in her lap.
“I can do anything I want now,” Lydia says. She puts the gun back into her apron pocket. Then she gets the roll of duct tape that she purchased for the occasion and wraps Annie Knowles up like a mummy while Annie whimpers and sweats and bawls like a baby. In no mood for it, Lydia threads the tape through her mouth to shut her up. “Now look,” she says. “We both know that once something like this happens there’s no going back. The fact that my husband made you pregnant is the biggest insult of all. When for years, years, we tried and nothing happened. And now you, you. Do you know how much that hurts, Mrs. Knowles? Do you have any idea the pain I’m in?”
She walks to the window and looks out.
“I admit that I’ve had problems with sex. And my husband, well, you weren’t the first. From time to time he’d sleep with a student. Nothing serious. But you. You’re different, aren’t you? You’re like a disease, that’s what. You’re a fucking plague.”
Disgusted now, Lydia gets down real close to her. “Don’t think you’re having that baby.”
80
AT DAWN, Simon drives over to Annie’s house. It’s dark. The door is locked and nobody answers. He checks the garage; her car is there. With growing agitation, he runs around to the sliding doors on the deck. They, too, are locked. He tells himself that her parents came and got her but it doesn’t sit well and he has the intolerable instinct that Lydia has done something to Annie. Something awful.
In a fury of desperation, he rips his own house apart, trying to find something that might reveal where Lydia is. After an hour or two of searching, he discovers a receipt in the pocket of a sweater, from a hardware store in Amsterdam, New York, a town near Vanderkill, where his wife grew up. Later that afternoon he hears a car pulling up outside and hurries to the window, hoping it’s Lydia, only to see the mailman in his little white jeep.
With a disturbing clatter, the mail drops through the slot in the front door and scatters across the floor.
Simon picks it up and mindlessly flips through it, noting that they’ve sent the card for his retrospective. It’s a four-by-six postcard with a picture of one of his paintings on it. The one he’d taken Annie to see in New York. The one called Her Father’s House.
81
BOUND TO THE CHAIR, Annie scrutinizes the room. The bed with its bare mattress. The dresser with a picture frame on top. Stuck in the mirror above it is a yellowed snapshot of a woman. Annie somehow knows that the woman is Lydia’s dead mother. Annie swallows some more glue from the tape. She does not think she can go much longer without something to drink. The late sun glints off a tiny gold key on the windowsill.
Downstairs, the front door opens and Lydia slams out. Annie hears the car starting up. Now the house is silent. She uses the time to try to get free, but there is no getting out of the tape. The little key will have to wait. Using her hips and legs she gallops the chair across the room. It makes a lot of noise. And then she hears Michael’s voice.
“Hello!”
He is down in the cellar.
Her heart beats wildly. She desperately wants to answer him, to call out and tell him she’s here, she’s right upstairs, but the tape is too tight and her mouth cannot move. She grunts as loud as she can, but she knows he can’t hear her. Frustrated, she continues her clumsy gallop until she reaches the door. There is an old-fashioned skeleton keyhole and she peers through it, seeing a narrow hallway and the stairs. Lifting her chin, she sets it down on the top of the knob and tries to make it twist. She attempts this for a while, shifting the position of her chin, pushing the hollow of her cheek into the knob in an effort to make it budge, but she is sweating too hard to get a grip.
“Hello!” he shouts. “I hear you! Who are you?”
She beats her forehead into the door in response.
Silence for a moment.
“If it’s someone I know make two beats.”
With her head, she makes two beats on the door.
“Where do I know you from? From work?”
She stays quiet.
“Celina James?”
Again she stays quiet.
“You a cop?”
Silence.
For a minute he says nothing, and then he shouts, “Annie?”
Two beats on the door.
“Annie?”
Two beats on the door.
82
THE NARROW ROADS that wind through Vanderkill are slick with ice. It’s almost dark, and the temperature has dropped. Simon shivers, remembering his first visit up here. The ramshackle bungalows. The barren fields. At last he comes upon the dirt lane that leads to her father’s house, but he does not turn into it. Instead, he drives into a neighbor’s cornfield, ma
neuvering the car through a maze of yellow stalks, deep into its very center. On foot, he runs down the dirt lane. At its narrow end, the old house appears. It is like being inside a dream, he thinks, a fragmented journey into his past.
The place looks deserted. He does not see Lydia’s car. Disheartened, he climbs onto the porch and peers into the front windows. The curtains have been drawn, but through a narrow slit in the center he can see inside. Garbage bags line the hall. He tries the door and finds it locked. No matter, he has a key.
During the many days of the doctor’s incarceration, the key had been hanging among all the other lost keys of his life on a rack above the washing machine.
He uses it now to open the door and steps inside, instantly encountering the foul odor of garbage. The memory of Lydia’s dead father comes back to him. He breaks into a sweat. He glances into the kitchen, noting the empty soup cans in the sink, a dead mouse in one of them. Simon picks up a carving knife, realizing that he is more than prepared to use it.
“Lydia?” he calls out. The silence taunts him. “Lydia, you come out here!”
A thump on the floor upstairs. Simon takes the stairs two at a time and searches the empty rooms, fighting off the ghosts of his memories. In the old man’s room he finds Annie. The sight of her bound up like that makes him crazy and he fiercely cuts her free. He pulls her into his arms and she cries with joy. He holds her there tightly, breathing her in. “Annie.” Just her name in his mouth makes him weep. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into her hair.
Annie cries, holding up her cuffed writsts. “The key’s over there.”
“Are you all right? Did she hurt you?”
She shakes her head, tears rolling freely down her cheeks. “She’s got Michael. He’s downstairs.”
“We’re going to get him out of there.”
He takes her hand and they start down the stairs. A car roars up the lane. Through the window he sees Lydia’s Mercedes. His wife gets out of the car and slams the door, her hair a wild jagged mess. She is wearing an old red coat and he can see her apron sticking out from under it. In her hand she has a gun.
“In here.” Simon shuffles Annie into the pantry in the kitchen. He holds her tight and still, uncertain of what to do next. He can see that his wife has gone completely mad.
Through a crack in the pantry door he watches Lydia enter the kitchen, her keys crashing on the counter. She flashes to and fro, swept up in her jangling quest. Her movements are abrupt, as if she has drunk some diabolical magic potion. He knows there will be no stopping her.
She puts the gun gently in her apron pocket, then empties the contents of a paper bag onto the floor: a tin of gasoline, a box of safety matches, and a plastic Baggie full of bullets.
83
FOR PRACTICAL REASONS, she has decided to shoot them both in the head and set the house on fire. With the house burned down, no one will ever know what has transpired here these past two weeks. It makes perfect sense and she wonders why it has taken her so long to come up with the idea.
All good things must come to an end, she thinks, reaching for a hammer.
The wood is old and dry and she has no trouble breaking it apart. She swings the hammer, savoring the exertion, making guttural sounds in her throat. Her strength is ethereal, goddesslike. The wood splinters and falls, a reckless pile on the kitchen floor. Good kindling, she thinks lightly, wildly anticipating what she has known all along. That it would never work out. That in the end, no matter what, he would have to die.
She breaks through the basement door, a vigorous birth, and kicks the splintered wood out of her way. Everything is going to be fine, she tells herself, slowly descending the stairs. She is in control. Calm. The doctor is lying on the mattress, turned away from her, despondent.
“I’ve had it with you,” she says softly. “You’ve caused me nothing but trouble.”
Darkness drifts throughout the room like smoke, sucking up the last of daylight. “Why did you bring her here?” he says, finally.
“Because it’s time for this to end.” She takes out her gun. “It could have worked out, but your wife went too far. She took advantage of the situation. I guess she doesn’t love you after all.”
“Kill me and let her go,” he blubbers pathetically, getting onto his knees. “Please. Just let Annie go.”
“You know I can’t do that.” She lifts up the gun, cocks it. Her hand trembles. “Stand up so I can aim better. I don’t want to see you suffering. It’s not that I don’t like you, Michael. The truth is I’m going to miss you.”
But what is that? The sound of a car. It pulls up outside and parks. A single door shuts.
Lydia freezes. The tiny hairs on her arms go stiff and prickly. Someone enters the house at the front door and she chides herself for being careless and leaving it unlocked. The irregular footsteps give him away as he limps across the wood floor. “Reverend Tim,” she whispers. “He’s come to kill me.”
It occurs to her that they’re trapped. There is no way out of the cellar, not even through the hatch, which is padlocked from the outside. “We’re stuck in here.”
“Hide,” Michael says. “Keep quiet.”
“Lydia?” Reverend Tim sings out in a voice one might use to call an animal. “I just want to talk. I know you’re here. There’s no need to hide, beauty. I understand how you feel. Come on out and we’ll have a good, long talk.”
Lydia’s heart spins like a top. She wishes they could talk. She wishes he could help her out of this, the way he used to help her, but now that’s not possible. The worst part is how much she loved him once. Yes, it was love. The best kind of love, pure and clean. And now he has come to kill her, and even though she deserves to die for all she’s done, she feels betrayed.
There is the sudden sound of a scuffling and then a sharp outcry of pain. Lydia wonders if he has stumbled over something. Something heavy falls to the floor.
“What was that?” she whispers to Michael. But he doesn’t answer her. She feels cold, terribly cold. Sweat drips down her face as they wait for what will come next. For several minutes it is silent, but then his footsteps resume across the squeaky kitchen floor. At the cellar door he hesitates, kicking the scraps of wood aside. Her head pounds. She can feel her feet pressing into the cold floor, but she does not think she will be able to move. Stuck, she realizes. Paralyzed with fear.
“Lydia?” his voice booms, “Lydia!”
The cellar is dark now, the inky moonless night a sign from Jesus that He is here with her, watching over her. Protecting her. Holding out His soft white hand for her. It won’t be long now, she thinks.
Michael stirs behind her, his breathing hard and jagged like an agitated dog. Her eyes return to the top of the stairs where the minister’s monstrous shape fills the doorway. She cannot make out his face but can hear him groping for the light switch, flipping it on and off again in vain. Cutting the wires had been a wise precaution and her heart flutters with pride. He begins his descent and she forces herself to move a little, stepping back an inch or two to prove she can do it. Sweat burns in her eyes, blurs her vision. She blinks. She remembers to breathe. A whining sound curls up out of her ear and she wonders if an insect has crawled down into it and gotten stuck. She wonders if an insect has set up housekeeping inside her ear. An insect or perhaps even a worm. A bloodsucker. Shuddering, she looks back up the stairs and watches him slowly sink down into this awful place, this tomb of despair. Clutching the wobbly banister, his hand squeals against the wood. He’s insane, she thinks. He will stop at nothing.
The Doctor's Wife Page 43
