by Gloria Dank
“So Irma’s up and about,” Snooky said. He ran one finger down Sarah’s delicate profile. Her red hair was spread out over the pillow, catching the afternoon light in glints of flame. She was gazing contentedly up at the ceiling. Sarah, he had discovered, was freckled all over, her skin a pale apricot, her body sinewy and strong.
“Yes. I think that visit from the Grunwalds helped to revive her. Got her back in fighting trim, she said. Her heart’s much better, and she seems to have more energy.”
“Good.”
“Irma’s very strong mentally. I know she doesn’t seem that way, but she is. All she needs is a challenge to get her going.”
“Uh-huh.” Snooky was not interested in Irma’s mental strength. He played thoughtfully with Sarah’s hair.
“How are things out at the cabin?”
Snooky shrugged. “Bernard’s even more irritable than usual, if possible. He can’t seem to get Bobby’s death out of his mind.”
“Really?” She crossed her arms behind her head. “That’s funny. To me it seems like it never happened. I mean, like that whole episode with Bobby and Aunt Irma never happened. Life is just going on as usual.”
“Uh-huh. Sarah, I was wondering … you never heard anything about—well, about any other woman that Bobby was involved with, did you?”
Sarah looked startled. “Another woman? No, nothing. Have you … what have you heard?”
“Just wondering. You don’t think that anyone else in your family knew about anything like that, do you?”
“No,” she said positively. “I’m sure they didn’t. News like that would get around. Nobody here can keep a secret. Are you sure about this, Snooky?”
“No, no. It’s just an idea … an idea that Bernard and I had. He wondered if Bobby could have been interested in somebody else.”
“I don’t think so. He always seemed very devoted to Aunt Irma.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, something else has been on my mind. How would you like to come out to the cabin and stay with me for a couple of days? Irma doesn’t need you as much now, and we never get any time together alone.”
“What about Maya and Bernard?”
“They wouldn’t mind. They’re my guests, anyway. It’s my cabin, remember?”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Don’t be ridiculous. They’d be delighted. You’re one of the first girlfriends I’ve ever had that they both liked.”
“Well, in that case, I accept. I’d love to get out of the house for a while, if you’re certain I’d be welcome.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Snooky, leaning back on the pillow and gathering her into his arms.
That evening, he cornered Maya over the dishes and said worriedly, “My?”
“Mmmhmmm?”
“Do you think it’d be okay if Sarah came out here to stay with me for a couple of days?”
Maya gave him an amused glance. “Of course it would. Why are you asking me?”
“You’re sure you wouldn’t mind?”
“Don’t be stupid, Snooky. What you do is your own business. You’re an adult, aren’t you?”
“I know that. I know that, My. I’m just asking.”
“Well, it’s fine with me. I like Sarah. She’s different from your other girlfriends. She seems normal. Ask Bernard about it if you have some kind of problem. I guarantee you he won’t care one way or the other. As long as his meals get served on time, Bernard can ignore pretty much everything else.”
“Okay.”
The conversation with Bernard was short and to the point.
“Bernard?”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to ask you a question.”
Bernard leaned back from his typing table and regarded his brother-in-law wearily. “Yes?”
“Would it bother you if Sarah came to stay with us for a while?”
Bernard raised his eyebrows. “Here?”
“Yes.”
“In the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“With you?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No, it wouldn’t bother you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why would it bother me?” Bernard said irritably. “You’re bothering me much more right now by interrupting my work, for instance. Is this conversation over?”
“It is on my side.”
“Then good-bye, Snooky.”
“Good-bye.”
“Has Bernard ever considered becoming a therapist?” Snooky asked his sister later that evening. “He’s so empathetic, you know. I just wondered.”
Maya was correcting a copy of her latest article. She had her reading glasses on and was huddled next to a lamp. “Bernard is empathetic, in his own way. Did he mind about Sarah?”
“No.”
“I told you.”
“I know you did.”
“When will she be coming?”
“Tomorrow night, I think.”
“Good.”
“Does Bernard listen to you when you talk?” Snooky asked plaintively. “Just wondering.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t understand it. I don’t get it, My. How could he be such different things to different people?”
Maya, absorbed in her article, did not reply. Snooky sighed and picked up the dog.
“It’s just you and me, Misty. Nobody else around here pays any attention to us. They don’t care what we do.”
Misty, hanging in midair, regarded him placidly.
“Misty has very beautiful eyes. Have you ever noticed that, My?”
Maya nodded absently.
“Her eyes remind me of Bernard’s. Sort of a deep, soulful brown.”
Maya thoughtfully corrected a mistake with a large red pencil.
“I’m going to go out back and shoot myself,” Snooky said, unwinding from his chair. “So long, Maya.”
Maya brushed back a wisp of hair from her face. “So long, Snooky,” she said kindly. Snooky sighed again and went into the kitchen to work on a lemon meringue pie he was preparing for the next day.
The next evening, after Sarah had arrived, they all gathered around the fireplace after dinner. There was a storm blowing up outside, and the wind whipped around the cabin, howling in through the cracks. Snooky, sprawled on the floor, stared in fascination at the leaping flames. Sometimes, if he looked hard enough, he could see fire lizards, eagles whose wings were ablaze, armies of tiny men moving jerkily through flaming fields. Around him everyone was quiet, lulled by the enormous meal and the heat. Sometimes, Snooky felt, if he tried hard enough, he could see the past or even the future. Sarah, lying next to him, leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair was the same color as the flames. He put an arm around her and held her close.
“This is how life should be lived,” he said. “Roughing it in the wild, close to nature, close to our roots.”
“This is life on the edge, all right,” remarked Maya.
“I don’t understand why I’ve never moved out into the wilderness before. I feel as though I’ve found myself.”
“You’re difficult to locate,” Maya said dryly. “Sometimes your true self is out in the wilds, sometimes it’s living in the big city. It changes so often.”
“That’s not true, Maya.”
“It is true. You’re a wanderer, Snooks—a free spirit.”
Bernard, from his seat on the couch, snorted derisively.
Snooky gave himself up to contemplation of the flame shapes that were forming in the depths of the fire. The little marching men were clearer now, banners waving, legs moving rapidly as the flames fled upward into the blackened chimney. The fire eagle spread its wings and soared upward, vanishing with a pop. Faces appeared and disappeared, loved faces from his past, swimming before him in a reddened haze of memory. His head drooped gradually. He was nearly asleep when he heard Maya say, her voice rich with amusement,
“There he goes
. He used to hypnotize himself every winter night in front of the fire when we were growing up. It would scare William to death. He’d go into a kind of trance, and have trouble waking up. I think he’s psychic. I bet he could channel spirits if he wanted to.”
Bernard glanced around at the darkened cabin. Their shadows were leaping monstrously on the far walls. “Don’t mention spirits, Maya. Not here. Not at night.”
“Oh, Bernard.”
“I mean it.”
“Bernard lived in a haunted house when he was little,” Maya explained to Sarah. “The spirit of his great-aunt went wailing up and down the stairs. And there was another one in the kitchen who used to rattle the pots and pans. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”
Bernard said sourly, “Yes.”
“Tell Sarah about it. It’s fascinating.”
“No. It’s nothing.”
“Oh, please tell,” said Sarah, sitting up and linking her arms around her knees. “Please.”
“No.”
“It was his great-aunt Sadie,” Maya said. “She left her house to Bernard’s father, who was her favorite nephew. Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Bernard lived in it while he was growing up. It was a big old rambling place, with the wind blowing in through the cracks, and on winter nights like tonight his father used to tell his mother that he could hear his aunt Sadie roaming up and down the stairs. Bernard’s parents would laugh about it, but poor Bernard would be frightened to death. He was only a little boy at the time. Sometimes his father would say that he could hear Sadie’s mother—that was his grandmother—in the kitchen, cooking up a storm, the way she used to when she was alive. Poor Bernard would lie in bed night after night, listening to the stairs creak and thinking he heard the pots and pans rattling in the kitchen.”
“I hated that house,” said Bernard grimly. “When I was ten, my parents sold it and moved to a modern development. It was the happiest day of my life. I never had any trouble sleeping after that. For all I know, Aunt Sadie and her mother are still in the old house, cooking and walking the stairs.”
“That’s a poignant story, Bernard,” said Snooky, sitting up.
Maya gave him an amused look. “So you’re awake now, Snooks? Any psychic dreams this time? Can you read our fortunes?”
“Nothing psychic this time, My. Just images. Fire lizards, eagles, things like that.” He fell silent, brooding.
“William used to hate when you did that.”
“William hated when I did anything.”
“William is afraid of anything he doesn’t understand,” said Maya. “The supernatural. Trances. Ghosts. Snooky.”
“William has a very limited imagination. The only thing he truly understands is money. How to handle it, what to do with it, how to make lots of it.”
“You never learned that last bit,” said Maya.
“No. I never did.”
The wind roared outside, and the windows rattled. Bernard glanced about uneasily. “I’m going to bed, Maya. Wake me when the storm is over.”
“Good night, darling.”
“Good night.”
Much later, in the small hours of the night, Bernard awoke with a creeping feeling of fear. He lay unmoving, straining his ears to listen, his eyes open and staring in the darkness, his nerves on fire. There was something that had awakened him … a bumping noise of some kind … somewhere in the cabin!
Visions of his great-aunt Sadie as he had imagined her in his childhood, her image drawn from a small black-and-white Victorian photograph that his father had kept lovingly enshrined in the family album, floated in front of his mind’s eye. Her stubborn jaw, pug nose, protuberant eyes and graying hair, which was parted in the middle and swept unforgivingly backwards to an unseen locus on the back of her head—all the features that used to haunt his nights when he was small—came back to him vividly. The fact that her eye was kindly and her face, however ugly, had a gentle look to it, had not made an impression on his boyhood mind at all. To him she was the monster of his dreams, sweeping up and down the stairs, bumping into the furniture, wailing his name through the night: “Bernard … Bernard, come to me … Bernard!” And her nightmare mother, cooking up a storm in the kitchen—to Bernard’s childhood mind, this inadvertent phrase of his father’s meant that his great-grandmother was cooking up a real storm, busily mixing up thunderclouds, stirring the cauldron with lightning bolts, boiling up rain. He always saw her with her white head surrounded by black rumbling clouds and mist, cackling wildly as she mixed up a hell’s brew of a storm, stirring the broth with broken tree trunks, adding a touch of fog and mist, seasoning it all with thunderclaps. To this day, a fierce thunderstorm evoked images in his mind of his great-grandmother bent over a black kettle that raged and boiled as the lightning bolts crackled their eerie path to the ground.
He lay still, breathing loudly and nervously. All at once there was a tremendous thump against the wall of his bedroom. The walls shuddered and creaked. Bernard gasped. From somewhere in the cabin came a faint groan. Bernard broke out in a cold sweat. He put out a trembling hand and touched Maya’s shoulder, partly to make sure she was still alive, partly to awaken her.
“Maya?” he breathed.
She rolled over in her sleep. “Mmmmpththmph?”
“Maya, wake up. Wake up.”
“Mmmhththktph?”
“Wake up!”
She opened a drowsy eye. “Whatsit? Whatsmatter?”
“Maya … do you hear that?”
Suddenly the thump came again, louder than before. There was a faint, strangled cry from somewhere else in the cabin. The walls shuddered, then were still.
“Maya,” Bernard said, barely breathing, “Maya … what is that?”
To his astonishment, his wife began to laugh quietly. She rolled over and drew the coverlet up to her chin. “Bernard, sometimes you amaze me,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Darling,” she said drowsily, “please go back to sleep. It’s nothing. It’ll stop soon.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m psychic, like my brother. I guarantee it’ll stop. Now go back to sleep, sweetheart. It’s—” she sleepily checked the alarm clock, which glowed faintly in the darkness, “it’s four o’clock in the morning. Snooky will have us up at eight for breakfast. Go to sleep.”
“Maya,” whispered Bernard in agony, but she had already dozed off. He lay still, his body lathered in sweat, his ears straining for the slightest sound. There was another crash, and an eerie cry. He shuddered down to his bones. What if it wasn’t the ghost of Aunt Sadie … what if it was an intruder, slitting Snooky and Sarah’s throats, all as mere practice before he came after Maya and himself? How could Maya be so calm?
There was a muffled thump against the wall, followed by a stifled groan. Bernard lay still for a moment, then threw off the covers and padded nervously over to the wall, mincing across the room on cold feet. The wall shook as two bodies hurtled into it from the other side. There was the sound of muffled laughter, a few giggles and whispers, and then everything was still.
Bernard felt very, very grim. He padded back to bed, examined the clockface, its phosphorescent hands telling him it was 4:10 A.M., and switched on the reading lamp.
“Maya,” he said.
“Yes?”
“It’s four-ten in the morning.”
She rolled over and smiled at him sleepily. “I can’t help that, Bernard. They’re young and energetic. We were like that once, too. Remember? Now turn off the light, darling, and try to get some sleep. You’re going to be cranky all day tomorrow otherwise.”
“I’m going to be cranky, all right. I have something to be cranky about.”
There was a crash, and more muffled laughter from the other bedroom.
“Maya.”
“Yes, darling?”
“I want to go home. Now.”
There was more laughter, and now they could hear Sarah’s voice clearly, raised in a kind of gasp. “Oh, Snooky … hone
stly … I don’t think that’s possible—!” It ended in a gasp of laughter, and the muffled sound of his voice.
“I don’t think we can go home now, Bernard. It’s so early in the morning. I wouldn’t trust you to drive in the state you’re in.”
“What are they doing in there, Maya? Inhaling laughing gas?”
“Please go back to sleep.”
“I think they’re doing something illegal.” Bernard switched off the light and hunched down underneath the covers. Misty, in bed between the two of them, snored pleasantly, her sleep undisturbed by Snooky’s nocturnal activities. “I’m going to have a little talk with Snooky in the morning.”
“They’re young and in love, Bernard. Leave them alone. We’ve stayed up all night, too.”
“Not where someone could hear us.”
“I’m sure they don’t know. Good night, darling.”
“Good night.”
Bernard stayed up, plotting his revenge, until he finally dozed off around five.
Bernard, inventive as he was, and with all the time in the world to think about it, solved the problem neatly by the following evening. He got into bed, kissed his wife a loving good-night, turned out the lights and waited. Maya drifted off immediately, her hands tucked underneath the pillow, on her face the gentle, dreamy expression that Bernard loved. A shaft of moonlight slanted in through the curtains and picked out her features, making her look very pale and ethereal, the sharp bones in her cheeks heightened by shadows, her face as narrow and mysterious in sleep as an elf’s. Bernard waited. At last his patience was rewarded. There was a crash against the wall, and quiet snorts of laughter. Bernard threw off the covers, sat up in bed, and said at the top of his lungs,
“WHAT’S THAT, MAYA? WHAT’S THAT? DO YOU HEAR SOMETHING?”
Maya turned and murmured something in her sleep. “Leave m’lone. What? Hmmtphph?”
“MAYA, WAKE UP. I THINK YOUR BROTHER IS BEING KILLED. THERE’S A TERRIBLE NOISE FROM HIS ROOM.”
