The Open Curtain

by Brian Evenson

  She nodded. Rudd was holding his hand out to her. “In the hospital room, right?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “My mother doesn’t like you,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.”

  She nodded.

  “You look like your father,” he said. “At least like the picture of him they showed me.”

  Not knowing what to say, Lyndi said, “Thank you. About my father, I mean.”

  “You have a way home?” the detective asked.

  “Scooter,” said Rudd.

  “It’s snowy,” said the detective. “Probably iced over.”

  “I can give him a ride if he’d like,” said Lyndi. “You can pick the scooter up in the morning.”

  He looked at her, then shrugged.

  On the way through the parking lot, walking slightly behind him, she kept expecting to see before him, through the snow, her dead father, her dead family. What does it mean? she asked herself, that coming behind Rudd now comes not the killer, as she had thought in that other parking lot might happen, but myself?

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked once she had started the car.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No plans.”

  “You don’t have any other family?”

  “Not around here.”

  He leaned over and smiled. “Maybe I’ll try to visit you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “After all, you visited me.”

  She smiled. “O.K.,” she said. “Drop by.”

  That was the start of it. Her doorbell rang early Christmas morning, waking her from where, again, she had fallen asleep on the couch. She stumbled to the door and opened it and there he was, bundled up so that only his eyes were showing, a present in one hand.

  “No tree?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t see the point.”

  She opened the gift—a metal box of Almond Roca, something her father had loved but that always stuck to her teeth.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I wish I had something for you.”

  He smiled and ducked his head.

  She got him a glass of orange juice, left him watching a parade on TV while she went upstairs, showered, put on jeans and a blouse. When she came downstairs, he described some of the floats she had missed, and they sat together on the couch, watching. After a while she got up and went into the kitchen, came back with two bowls of Corn Chex, a jug of milk.

  They sat beside each other, crunching.

  “You ever make that party mix?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “My mom used to, though.”

  “Not my mom,” he said. “But I had it this one time somewhere.”

  She went back into the kitchen, returned with the Chex box. There was a recipe for the mix on the side. Soon they were both in the kitchen, her mother’s largest glass bowl out, mixing what was left of the cereal with butter and salt.

  The phone rang and she went into the other room to get it. It was her aunt, first wishing her Merry Christmas and then berating her for not having come to California. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lyndi said.

  “And then the neighbor?” her aunt was saying. “You know Mrs. Miller, not a neighbor exactly, but down the street, the colostomy woman?”

  It was the latest installment in her aunt’s life of grief and pain. Lyndi nodded and offered noncommittal sounds as the story droned along—Mrs. Miller and her colostomy bag and her swinging, cradle-robbing lifestyle, which seemed to consist, as far as Lyndi could tell, of her aunt having seen Mrs. Miller once give her paperboy a kiss on the cheek. “But, heavens, could you believe it,” said her aunt, she had looked out the window, early this morning and there was Mrs. Miller, “bright as day and twice as ugly”—or as her aunt said it, “hugly”—“on the front steps, wearing hardly more than a bathrobe—”

  “Aunt Debby,” said Lyndi. “I have to go.”

  Her aunt fell silent. Lyndi stayed listening to the static. “Aunt Debby?” said Lyndi.

  “Well,” said her aunt icily. “If that’s the way you’re going to be, I suppose there’s hardly any point in trying to bring you any Christmas cheer.”

  “Aunt, it’s not that,” said Lyndi.

  “You have to want to heal,” her aunt said. “But if you want to go through life with a gaping hole where your heart should be, far be it from me to—”

  “—I have guests over,” said Lyndi. “That’s all.”

  Again the line was silent. On TV, Lyndi could see the parade winding down. She heard Rudd still rumbling about in the kitchen.

  “Guests?” her aunt said in a tiny voice.

  “Guest, really,” she said. “A boy I know.”

  “Lyndi, you’re dating and you haven’t told me?”

  “No,” said Lyndi. It’s not that exactly. It’s just—”

  “Would your mother approve?”

  “Approve?”

  “How old is this boy?”

  “About my age.”

  “How much older? Some rapacious college senior, I suppose?”

  “A few months younger, actually.”

  “You need a chaperone, Lyndi,” said her aunt, finding her strength of voice once again. “You’re clearly too young to be inviting teenage boys over for Christmas, and he’s certainly too young to be accepting invitations from an older woman.”

  “We’re not even dating,” she said. “I hardly know him and I’m not looking for a boyfriend and, besides, he’s shy.”

  “It hardly matters,” her aunt said. “Every husband I had, I found by not looking. The shy ones are the worst. Now you get off this phone and hustle that boy out of the house this instant.”

  She hung up the telephone. She felt exhausted, drained. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face, accidentally got some down the front of her blouse. She looked at her face in the mirror: it was her, she was fine, she didn’t look that upset.

  In the kitchen, Rudd had taken the Party Mix out of the oven, had put it on the stovetop. He was picking through, eating all the Corn Chex.

  They poured the mix back into the bowl and carried it out to the couch, sat watching It’s a Wonderful Life. A couple she barely knew came to her door with a plate of fudge, a note on it reading, Happy Holidays, in your time of grief.“Thank you,” said Lyndi. “Thank you very much.” The woman was trying to peer around her for a better look at Rudd. She kept it up until Lyndi, thanking her a third time, shut the door in her face.

  After a few hours she made him some lunch. They talked about nothing, or nothing much. He was just out of high school, he said; he hadn’t realized she was in college. They were nearly the same age, she said, so what did it matter? Her aunt called back to leave a vague but dire warning that filled up the answering machine tape. This was a vulnerable time, her aunt said, among other things, and the world was full of wolves.

  “Your aunt seems a little bit unusual,” Rudd suggested, but not unkindly.

  She nodded, laughed. She got out Monopoly and they played through most of the afternoon. When it began to get dark outside, she went out to the garage freezer, looked through it until she found a honey-baked ham. She defrosted it in the microwave, began heating it up in the oven, made some mashed potatoes as well. They were lumpy, and there was not enough salt. “These are good potatoes,” he said, and then told her how they had probably glazed the ham with a blowtorch.

  Then dinner was over and he was awkwardly washing the dishes in the sink like dishes were something he had never washed before. She dumped the rest of the ham into the garbage and scraped the last of the mashed potatoes into the garbage as well. He was at the door, zipping his coat up to the neck, zipperhead glinting below his scar.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “Can I visit you again?”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  He gave her a hug so awkward and crushing that it was clear his experience with women was entirely theoretical. And then, suddenly,
he was out the door, gone.

  5

  Later she could not remember how things became serious. There had been Christmas together and then she had seen him a few more times, and then he had fought with his mother and had shown up distraught, kissing her for the first time. And then suddenly he was living in her house without either of them really having talked it over. Both of them were chaste still and sleeping in separate rooms, but clearly on the way somewhere neither her aunt nor his mother nor the Church would approve of. By that time, trying to puzzle out how it had all happened, it seemed too late to turn back.

  Besides, she was not sure she wanted to turn back. Left from her days in the hospital was the residual sense of connection to him, though in the first few weeks of living with him she realized she knew him hardly at all. There was an oddness to him, strange ticks, a tendency to lie about things that couldn’t possibly matter, even at times a certain transient coldness she quickly began to classify as his moods. There were whole days she never saw him, days he spent completely out of the house or locked in the room he’d claimed, her sister’s old room. Days too when she found him in the utility room staring at the clippings of the murders.

  “Do you want me to take those down?” she asked, but he shook his head.

  Other days, he was charming, sweet. He would make dinner with her, sit on the couch with her, take her tentatively in his arms and embrace her, but it never went further than a few awkward kisses. She wondered if there was something wrong with him, sexually. But he seemed normal enough in other ways. Maybe he was simply chaste. As a Mormon, she tried to convince herself, that was something she could admire and respect. Perhaps he was just saving himself for marriage.

  They were mostly cordial to one another, polite even, even if at times he was a little abrupt. A few days after he moved in, she gave him a key to the front door, working it off a ring kept in her father’s dresser drawer. He began to come and go at will, sometimes waking her when he came stumbling past the couch at three or four in the morning smelling of smoke or dirt, never explaining. After the first few times of not questioning him about it, she felt her chance to speak had passed. Instead she tried to train herself to wake up right after Letterman, go up to her own bed before he came in. It was easier sleeping in her own bed once someone else was living in the house.

  “Do you miss your mother?” she asked him, a few weeks after he had moved in, both of them sitting on the couch.

  “No,” he said simply.

  She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. They sat watching TV. “I miss mine,” she finally said.

  He turned the channel. “I might miss mine if she were dead,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say. She felt vaguely hurt but tried to push it out of her mind.

  “What about your father?” she asked, and watched a strange, frightened look come over his face.

  On TV: a small man and a tall man. The tall man was lumbering into things, slowly and ponderously. The small man kept darting through the tall man’s legs and punching him in the stomach. There was a laugh track going. Does he qualify as a midget or a dwarf? she wondered. The small man was wearing a padded suit and a mask, so she couldn’t say for certain.

  She was doing homework for one of the two classes she was taking, her papers spread out across the desk, when he came in, dragging his backpack along the floor, abandoning it next to the couch.

  “Good day at school?” she asked.

  But he didn’t seem to hear. Shrugging off his coat, he went into the kitchen.

  “Rudd?”

  She could hear him moving about, the refrigerator door opening and closing. She got up and went into the kitchen herself.

  “Can’t you hear me?” she asked.

  “What,” he said flatly, without turning around.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

  She put up her hands and went out, confused. She sat down again with her homework, tried to go through it. She watched him come out again, pick up his backpack, shuffle down the hall.

  She listened for the sound of his door opening and closing, heard nothing. She finished her homework and then sat at the table, staring at her pen, turning it slowly about in her hands. Finally she got up and went down the hall herself.

  His door was closed. She knocked but had no answer. So she opened it, looked in. She uttered his name, inflecting the syllable upward, before realizing the room was empty.

  Closing the door, she continued down the hall.

  He was there, in the utility room, in front of the washer and dryer, staring at the clippings.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He turned his head toward her, slowly, face slack, eyes dim. “Lael,” he said. “What happened to Lael?”

  “No,” the detective said. “I’m sorry. No such person. No Lael Korth and no Lael anyone else for that matter.”

  “In Springville,” Rudd said. “In the middle of town. I’ve been to his house.”

  The detective turned to her. “Does the name mean anything to you?” he asked.

  Lyndi shook her head. The detective looked back to him and shrugged.

  “But—” said Rudd.

  “There’s a Lyle Korth, roughly your age, lives in Springville. Mother by the name of Anne Korth. We contacted him. Says he doesn’t know you, doesn’t think he’s ever met you. That’s the best we can do.”

  “But his name is Lael,” Rudd insisted.

  “Then why didn’t you mention it before?” asked the detective. “Where is this coming from?”

  It went on like that, Rudd insisting there was a Lael Korth and that it was Lael Korth who had been with him the night of the murders—that was the real last thing he remembered, he said now: Lael’s face beside his own, darkness coming on. Threading his fingers over his belly, the detective leaned back in his chair. He had been on a scooter with Lael, Rudd said, and then suddenly not on the scooter at all and instead both of them pushing their way up the slope, in the canyon somewhere, his breath coming hard, and something in his …

  “What?” asked the detective.

  “Nothing,” said Rudd. “There was nothing. I’m starting to make things up.”

  “In his hand, you mean? What was he holding?”

  “I was wrong,” said Rudd. “That part I was wrong about.”

  “And his name?” said the detective. “Were you wrong about his name as well?”

  Rudd shook his head. The detective got up to shake Rudd’s hand and said thank you, he’d look into it, Rudd was right to come to him, but information like this, what was he to do?

  In the car, Lyndi didn’t know what to think. Rudd was beside her, looking ill and still going on about Lael, claiming now that Lael was in fact his half-brother, that they had that connection, that nobody had ever understood him except for Lael.

  “Perhaps your mother would know where he is,” she said.

  No, he claimed, that was just it. Lael was his father’s child, from a second wife, a secret wife—he had only learned of it himself by accident. There was no point in going to his mother.

  “Surely,” she said, “there’s someone or something else you could—”

  No, no, no, he said, his voice impatient. Lael had his own life in Springville but he hadn’t been part of it, just as Rudd had had his own life in Provo and Lael hadn’t been part of that either. If the situation were reversed, Lael wouldn’t know who to ask either. Rudd who? people would probably say to him; there’s no such person.

  “Your name’s not Rudd?” she asked.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “Rudd Elling Theurer. But if you called my mother now and asked to speak to her son she’d say ‘Son? I have no son.’”

  “Because you’re living with me.”

  “She might do it even if I were still living at home,” he said.

  They drove a while and then she said, just to make conversation, “I didn’t know your mi
ddle name was Elling.”

  “I don’t have a middle name,” he said, his face white with surprise. “And it’s certainly not Elling.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said nothing of the kind,” he said. “Rudd Theurer, plain and simple.”

  She dropped him off at the house. He climbed out and tottered toward the door. He had said it, she thought. Elling. She had heard it plain as day. What point was there saying it if it weren’t true? And, if it were true, what point trying to hide it? It was just a name. Do I hate him or love him? she asked herself. Do I know him well enough to do one or the other? No, she thought. And then, He needs someone to take care of him.

  She backed out of the driveway and down the street, down past the church and the Baileys’ brick house, then more houses and the Roberts’ field and the second church, the one set back from the road, and Rock Canyon Elementary with the roadrunner on the marquee. There were kids playing on the playground. PTA MEET thurs ˥, the marquee said, the “7” actually an upside-down “L.” She reached the end of the street, turned left past the Missionary Training Center and the temple, on down Ninth East, past Allen’s Grocery, Closed Sundays blinking on their sign, down past the university to Center street, and then past that too, the road curving toward the cemetery. Then left, out to the state highway, toward Springville.

  The small house was on Third, a few blocks east of Main. It stood on a corner, red brick with peeling white trim, small and square. Built, she guessed, sometime in the forties. The door itself was odd, a grayish green more like primer than finish paint, flecked with yellow from a paint that either had been over it and was nearly scraped away or underneath it and was now wearing through.

  She rang the doorbell. The plastic, cracked from exposure, scratched against the pad of her thumb.

  Inside, a chime struck flatly like a battery somewhere was worn down. Some sort of song, impossible to say what it was.

  She waited, was hooking her hair over her ears when the door opened.

  A boy in his teens, blond and large, his skin pale, eyes green.

  “You want my mother, I’m guessing,” he said, and gestured back into the house.