Ariel

by Lawrence Block

  She went into the kitchen. All three pilot lights were out. For a moment she worried that it might be dangerous to light a match, but the burners themselves were shut off, and how much gas could escape from the pilot lights? Not much, she was sure. David had said so. She was just extremely sensitive to the odor.

  She lit the pilots, opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, smoked two of them in the living room. Why, she wondered, had the woman in the shawl appeared after all this time? What did it mean?

  She crushed out her cigarette, mounted the stairs, winced at the sound they made underfoot. The house was listed for sale now, according to David, but so far nothing had happened. There’d been not a single call, no one coming around to be shown through the place.

  And when that happened, she thought suddenly, would she take them through Caleb’s room? How would she explain a nursery with no baby in it?

  Ariel’s light was on. She noticed it when she reached the top of the stairs, a sliver of light beneath the child’s door at the end of the hall. Had it been on before? She hadn’t noticed one way or the other.

  Why was the child awake? It was the middle of the night. She started down the hall, slowed, stopped.

  She turned instead to the bathroom, where she took two little blue tablets from the Valium bottle. She gazed at them for a moment, the two of them an inch apart in the palm of her hand. Without having swallowed them she could already anticipate how they would smooth things out inside her.

  She filled a glass with water, swallowed the pills.

  In the hallway, she glanced once again at Ariel’s door and the light that was visible beneath it. The light seemed to flicker, as if it were not an electric light at all but a gas flame, or perhaps the flame of a candle.

  Maybe the Valium was already at work, she thought, distorting her perceptions. She took a hesitant step toward Ariel’s room, then changed her mind. No need for a confrontation with the child, not at this hour, not after what she’d been through already. Let her stay up all night if she wanted. Just so Roberta got some rest herself.

  She returned to her room, settled herself beneath the covers. Her sense of smell, she decided, was especially acute tonight. The gas in the kitchen had been far more pungent than usual, and now the alcoholic perspiration that David gave off was stronger than she remembered it. Perhaps it was a heightened sensitivity of hers that made her see the woman in the shawl on this particular night.

  She lay back, closed her eyes. A couple of thoughts began to move into her consciousness, but the Valium took hold quickly and she slid away from them.

  She awoke in the morning with what felt like a hangover. Her breakfast was coffee and cigarettes, an excessive amount of each, and they set her nerves on edge. She went to the medicine cabinet, hesitated, then took a Valium. What the hell, they were medicine. Otherwise why would Gintzler have prescribed them for her?

  Around ten-thirty she called Jeff at his office. He wasn’t in and she declined to leave a message. She called again at eleven and a third time at eleven-thirty, and each time his secretary assured her that he was out. The third time she said, “This is Mrs. Jardell. I’m sure he’ll talk to me.”

  “But he’s not in, Mrs. Jardell,” the woman said. “He may be in shortly, or he’ll probably call in for his messages. Shall I have him call you?”

  “Please.”

  She had no appetite for lunch but forced herself to make a cheese sandwich and managed to eat a little more than half of it. She drank some more coffee, smoked several cigarettes, and swallowed another Valium on her way out the door.

  It was cold out, and the wind had an edge to it. She drew her car coat around her and walked purposefully south and east. At the Battery, she walked through the little park and stood with her arms propped on the railing, looking out over the water. She was alone. There was no one fishing from the shore, only a few scattered persons on the park benches. A few hundred yards out on the water, a cruise boat carried passengers taking a tour of the harbor.

  It was restful at the railing, restful looking out over the water. Here, away from the house, she could dismiss the pools of anxiety that floated on the edge of consciousness. She didn’t have to let herself be aware of them. Instead she could relax in the Valium’s embrace, going with the flow, letting herself relax. Sometimes she would feel her mind beginning to drift, and at those times it was necessary to drag herself abruptly away from those areas that didn’t bear thinking about. Each time she made herself return to the peace of the harbor view like a meditator returning to his mantra, embracing it with something like relief.

  When she turned from the harbor view, her eyes fastened on a black woman seated on a bench halfway across the park. She was leaning way forward, trying to feed something to an apprehensive squirrel. At first Roberta thought it was the woman she’d talked to before Caleb’s death, the woman who had spoken so knowingly of haunts.

  She wanted to avoid her entirely, then realized she’d come here hoping to encounter the woman. She made her way toward the bench, only to discover when she’d come within fifty yards of the woman that she was someone else altogether, a stranger, years younger and a good deal taller and more robust than the woman to whom she had spoken.

  She turned from the woman and headed home.

  At four o’clock she finally reached Jeff. She had called on returning to the house, thinking he might have tried her in her absence, but his secretary reported she had not heard from him. When she did reach him, he was short with her, almost brusque. She tried to tell him about the woman’s appearance in her bedroom and he didn’t seem to be paying much attention.

  “I was hoping to see you today,” she said.

  “I was tied up. Running around all over the place.”

  “Maybe tomorrow—”

  “I don’t think so, Bobbie.”

  She hesitated, unable to leave it at that. “I need you,” she said. “I’m having a tough time right now, Jeff. I feel as though I’m cracking up. I’m holding myself together with little blue pills and I have a feeling there’s a point when they stop working.”

  “I’ll try to call you.”

  “Can’t we see each other?”

  “Listen, I can’t make plans,” he snapped. “How do I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow? I might be dead tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We could all be dead tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe we’d be better off.”

  She was left holding a dead phone in her hand, shaking her head in wonder. He had never said anything remotely like that before. Nor had she ever felt the way she was feeling lately.

  She felt all shaky inside.

  Was it time for a pill? You were supposed to wait four hours. Had it been four hours? Not that the pills could have little Swiss watches ticking away inside of them. Four hours was the standard medical interval, wasn’t it? Four hours, two hundred forty minutes, fourteen thousand four hundred seconds—there was nothing magical, was there, about that particular span of time?

  She laughed at her own rationalization. And went upstairs to take a Valium.

  The pill grabbed hold almost immediately, as if the mere act of swallowing it engendered a psychological easing of tension even before the tablet could dissolve and enter the bloodstream. With its assistance, Roberta was able to concentrate on preparing dinner. While it was cooking Ariel came home, carrying her horrible flute, and David arrived moments later. For once Roberta was glad to see them, glad for company in the house.

  The meal went well enough, she thought. She and David had a drink before dinner. You weren’t supposed to drink when you were taking Valium, she knew, but she didn’t think one would hurt. It did make her the slightest bit woozy, but its effects had vanished by the time dinner was over.

  Afterward she cleared the table, did the dishes. Now a few hours of television, she thought, and you’ll have gotten through another day, and that’s not so bad, is it? She could just take them one at a time, and next week perhaps
she’d start seeing Gintzler again. Or maybe not. Maybe she didn’t need therapy.

  She couldn’t concentrate on the television.

  Twice she got up, walked to the closed door of David’s study. Both times she made herself turn and walk back to the television set.

  The third time she knocked briskly, then opened the door. He was sitting like some sort of English gentleman with his pipe and his brandy and his book. He frowned at her, and she saw that his eyes were already slightly glazed. He was drunk, she thought.

  “What?” he said. “What do you want?”

  Drunk. No time for a conversation, least of all a heavy conversation. Say something trivial, she told herself. Something about trouble with the car, something that won’t lead anywhere, and then go back to the television set and numb yourself out until it’s time for bed.

  Instead she said, “Could you come in the other room for a minute? I think we should talk.”

  Ariel started the tape recorder, picked up her flute to play along with the track she had recorded earlier. She put the flute to her lips and waited, but instead of playing she merely sat and listened to the music. After a few moments she set her flute aside.

  It had been a funny day. For some reason Erskine had been getting on her nerves, and she didn’t think it was anything he did. It was just her nerves.

  On the way to his house after school, she had seen Jeffrey Channing three times. The first time Erskine didn’t see him. The car passed them without slowing down, and she just got a glimpse of him behind the wheel before he was out of sight. Another time his car crossed an intersection as they were approaching it, and it was Erskine who pointed it out, reading the license number as the car disappeared from view. The third time, Channing drove slowly past them when they were on Erskine’s block. Erskine said, “Don’t look but it’s him again,” and of course she looked, and her eyes locked with his but only for a moment because although he was driving very slowly he was still going faster than they were.

  Several times that afternoon they looked out of Erskine’s third-floor window, and once she thought she saw his car parked directly across the street, but it was already growing dark by then and it was hard to be sure. And on the way home she kept looking nervously around, trying to spot him, but she was unsuccessful.

  She kept wanting to tell Erskine the thought that had come to her, that Jeffrey Channing might be her father. But she was afraid he would think she was demented. And she was having more and more trouble deciding how she felt about the man. If he was her father she wished he would stop playing tag in his car and come right out and talk to her, and if he wasn’t her father she wished he would disappear altogether, because then he was either working for Roberta or was some free-lance pervert and she didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

  The other thing that bothered her was Veronica. Veronica still hadn’t come to school, and somebody said something about her being in the hospital for tests. Something about her blood, and maybe it was nothing, but on television programs whenever anybody went into the hospital for routine blood tests you knew they were going to die of leukemia or something equally horrible before the hour was out. And if she and Erskine hadn’t had that stupid conversation about killing people she’d just be vaguely sorry for Veronica, if indeed there was something seriously wrong with her, but they had had that conversation, and the two people they mentioned were Graham and Veronica, and Graham had a ruptured spleen and Veronica had whatever she had, and it was creepy.

  Really creepy.

  She drifted to the music, reached for her flute, put it aside without sounding a note. She glanced at the portrait, then heard something that made her tune down the volume on the tape recorder.

  Roberta and David. In conversation, their voices raised to an unusual level.

  She turned the music up again, deciding to ignore them. But something made her go to her door and open it. She could hear them a little better now. She hesitated, then walked silently to the staircase and went down halfway, seating herself on a step.

  She heard Roberta insist that they have the conversation some other time, that David was drunk. She heard David say loudly that he wasn’t drunk, that no one could blame him for drinking anyway.

  She heard Roberta protest that the child would hear. She heard David reply that the child had a name, that the child’s name was Ariel, and that a decent mother would call her child by name. Besides, he added, Ariel wouldn’t hear anything. She was playing her flute, and couldn’t Roberta hear it?

  They were both silent for a moment, and Ariel listened to the tape of her music. You could hear it clearly.

  Then she heard Roberta say that she could hear the music, all right, if you wanted to call it music. And then there was a long exchange that she couldn’t follow, and then she lost interest and thought of returning to her room, and then abruptly David was shouting again, accusing Roberta of having an affair with … Jeff Channing.

  Ariel was stunned. She tried to listen to what was said next but her head was reeling and she had trouble taking it all in. There was a lot said, a lot shouted, but the one thing that stayed with her was David’s accusation. Roberta and Channing, Roberta and Channing—her head was spinning with it.

  Then he wasn’t her father. He was Roberta’s lover. But maybe he was both, maybe he had started sleeping with Roberta after he had tracked down the Jardells and found they adopted his daughter. Maybe …

  The possibilities suggested themselves infinitely. She stood up, felt dizzy for a moment, then managed to turn and make her way silently up the stairs. Roberta and David continued their argument below her but she was no longer able to pay them any attention.

  If he was her father, why did David think he was sleeping with Roberta?

  If he was Roberta’s lover, why was he following Ariel?

  She couldn’t begin to make sense of it.

  The argument left Roberta drained, exhausted. It ended inconclusively, of course, with David returning to his study while she stationed herself in front of the television set and waited for him to go upstairs to bed. When he finally did she gave him time to pass out, then made herself watch another reel or two of the late movie. She was tired, could have fallen asleep at any time after the argument, but the longer she stayed awake the greater the chance of sleeping uninterrupted until dawn.

  Just for insurance, she took an extra Valium before retiring.

  And woke up in the middle of the night in spite of everything. Woke from a sound sleep, woke with no warning, and saw the woman in the corner of the room.

  Her features were a little more sharply drawn this night, as they had been on her second appearance before Caleb’s death. And she was carrying something, and just before she vanished she turned toward Roberta, and the object she was holding flashed. Roberta couldn’t tell what it was, only that it flickered brightly at her.

  Then the woman was gone.

  Roberta felt herself drawn back into sleep. She was tired, had awakened incompletely, and still had the drug circulating in her bloodstream. She wanted to lie down and drift off.

  Something made her get out of bed. She walked to Caleb’s room and stood outside the closed door. Her hand was reaching for the doorknob when she glanced to her left and saw the sliver of light underneath Ariel’s door.

  She strode the length of the hallway, flung the door open. Ariel was sitting stark naked on the edge of her bed, her hands folded in her lap. A candle was burning on her night table below the portrait she’d dragged down from the attic.

  The child seemed to be in a trance. It took her a long moment to react. Then she recoiled, folding her arms in front of her little breasts, shrinking away from Roberta.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Roberta said. “What’s the matter with you? What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What’s this crap with a candle?”

  “I—”

  “And you’re naked. You’ll freeze, Ariel.
What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Put out that candle. Get some pajamas on and go to sleep. Do you hear me?”

  The child stared at her. She looked helpless and confused, Roberta thought, and for a moment the impulse came to reach out to her, to hold her and hug her and tell her everything would be all right. But she couldn’t do it and the moment passed.

  “Put out that candle,” she said. She swept out of the room, drawing the door shut after her. On the way back to her own room she paused just long enough to take a pill. Just one pill this time.

  TWENTY

  Six years earlier there had been a rash of break-ins in Charleston Heights and environs. Somewhere in its course Elaine Channing had become nervous about being home alone at night, and Jeff had decided she ought to have a gun around the house. He didn’t suppose she’d be very likely to use it, but felt it might give her a feeling of security.

  The gun he’d bought was a .25-caliber automatic, nickel- plated, a tiny gun that could slip easily into a pocket or evening bag without causing a bulge. Elaine had refused to have anything to do with it, and it had stayed ever since, fully loaded, in the bottom left-hand drawer of the leather-topped kneehole desk in the living room, along with the original box of shells and a spare clip. The drawer was locked to keep the gun out of the children’s hands—Greta had been only three when it was purchased—and the key in turn was kept in the center drawer, in a little box with postage stamps and paper clips.

  That morning Jeff was drawn to the gun like iron filings to a magnet. There was no conscious thought involved. He rose, showered, ate a good breakfast, and the next thing he knew he was unlocking the bottom drawer, scooping up the little gun and dropping it into his jacket pocket. He stowed the spare clip in another pocket, closed the drawer then opened it again and retrieved the box of shells, placing it in his briefcase.

  He drove to work and was at his desk by nine. He went through a stack of letters, glanced over his list of calls. None of it made any sense.

  After a while he drew the gun from his pocket, turning it over and over in his hands. Funny how he’d taken it from the desk without even thinking about it, as if he’d been led to it by some force or will stronger than his own.