When the movie was over, I stared at the credits, delaying and delaying. I had six or seven beers rolling around in me, but felt sober. The day was shot. Night was here and I didn’t see a way out. I was too buzzed to get behind the wheel. Maybe tomorrow morning would be the better time to confront her. It was going to be a long night, the kind where I slept on the couch. Well, there was the television. I had more movies. I sat up to go use the bathroom and the doorbell rang. It was a modern doorbell, more of a muted gong, a sort of thrum deep in the house. For a moment I didn’t even know what it was, then it gonged again.
I set my empty beer bottle on the floor and walked around the kitchen, through the front hall, into the foyer. The porch light was off but the foyer light was on, creating a glare on my side of the front window. I could not see anything outside, so I stood behind the door for a moment, wondering who would ring the doorbell at almost nine thirty.
Oh, of course. The police.
I looked through the peephole. The view was fish-eyed and no one was standing on the porch. There were no police cars on the street or in the driveway. Maybe the gong wasn’t the doorbell. I turned and headed back toward the hall. I turned right into the bathroom.
Bam . . . bam . . . bam.
Someone knocked on the door three times, using the side of their fist by the sound of it, with a deliberate pause in between each strike. All right. So, it was either someone short or someone had walked away and gone around the garage right before I looked through the peephole, then came back and tried again.
I walked back to the door and looked through the peephole again. Same empty porch. Same empty street. This was sort of not funny now.
I opened the door. I checked the end of the driveway. The front yard. The street. No people. I leaned to the right and flicked on the porch light. It did not reveal anything. I was closing the door when something twinkled in my peripheral vision, down low on the concrete step. I shoved the door aside and stepped out.
Annette did not have a welcome mat, or even a real porch, just the bare concrete step some four feet by four feet. At the approximate center of it was a white chalk circle the diameter of a basketball. In the center was a tight formation of marbles in the shape of a V with a stem growing out of the center. Seven of the marbles were black and the one at the base was white. I stepped around it and viewed it from the other side, and realized it was not a V with a stem growing out of it.
It was an arrow, pointing at the house.
I looked up quickly, scanning the yard again. I walked down the step, along the walk, into the driveway. I checked the side of the house, the gate with the courtyard and pool behind it. I went the other way around and checked the side yard where the grass was dying and only three or four dead young trees separated ours from the undeveloped dirt lot next door. Nothing and no one. If it had been kids, they were hiding now.
I walked back to the front porch and picked up the white marble. It was heavy, about the size of a grape. I tossed it in my palm a couple times, then lobbed it at the door. It made a hollow whock noise that bore no resemblance to the knocking I had heard a few minutes ago, and fell to the foyer tile and rolled down the hall a bit. I went in and started to shut the door behind me, then stopped. Something about leaving the marbles on the porch bothered me, so I went back out and scooped the others up and carried them inside. On the way to the kitchen, I bent and added the white one to the others in my palm. I set them on the kitchen counter, in a row between the tiles, watching them for a minute while nursing another beer.
Marbles. An arrow. Inside a circle.
If it was supposed to mean something, the meaning was lost on me.
Kids. God damn kids.
I set my beer down and went upstairs to check on Annette.
The bedroom door was ajar and the room was hot with evening sun that had not vented despite the late hour. A weak glare from a distant street light cut through the vertical blinds, striping the bed and her shape under the covers with dull orange light. I went to her side and sat on the bed. Her face was dotted with sweat. Her eyes were partially open but she did not blink or do anything to suggest she knew I was in the room.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You all right?’
She did not respond. I moved up against the bed and wiggled her wrist. Her arm felt like a stick floating in a sleeve of gelatin. I put my hand on her forehead. I expected her to be feverish but her skin was cool, almost cold.
She’s emotionally exhausted. Let her sleep.
Stacey had been emotionally exhausted, too, near the end. Those last few months before the accident, during that cold distance that was our way of fighting. She had been spending more and more time out of the house, even when I was home between gigs. When I confronted her and said she was changing, that I knew something was wrong, she denied it and said she was just ‘emotionally exhausted’, as if emotions were a finite resource.
What does that mean? I had asked her. I hated the phrase. It’s a child’s excuse. Emotionally exhausted is what celebrities tell the media when they are too strung out to perform. Ghost had used the same line every couple of years, walking off stage or canceling the last leg of his tour.
‘You wonder why I’m not prancing around, happy to see you?’ Stacey had responded, a deadness in her voice. She was not even arguing, merely reciting something. ‘Maybe it has nothing to do with you. Since when is my whole life about you and Ghost?’
‘What’s Ghost got to do with anything?’ I said. ‘You’re never here, even when you’re here. I don’t know where you go. What do you want me to do?’
‘Leave me alone,’ the sullen teenager replied without moving her eyes from the television. ‘Think you can do that?’
‘No. I can’t. I love you and I want to know what the fuck is wrong here.’
Then she got up and calmly walked out of the house, got in her car and drove off to wherever she was going that day. Back to her friends, off to see her new boyfriend (less likely, but it had crossed my mind) or maybe just to sit in another yoga class where she could feel independent and spiritual.
Three days later I found the pills. I was looking for a cigarette lighter in her purse, not snooping. All right. I was snooping. But it was her purse, not her diary or Fort Knox, and I was her husband. I think it’s fair to say that when your spouse becomes a zombie in the skin of the person you married, purses, wallets, cellphone records, dry-cleaning pockets, and, yes, email become communal property. Is this not part of the reason we get married in the first place - to have someone there to catch us when we start to fall?
Annette was still sleeping. I looked at her chest, trying to gauge the regularity or irregularity of her breathing. Was this her way of grieving? I didn’t think catatonia was a natural symptom of losing your husband. Was it drugs for her, too? Torqued chemistry, à la bipolar disorder? Dissociative personality disorder? Demons lodged deep, math teacher named Chester?
Don’t let Annette fall. Don’t let her be like Stacey.
What if it’s too late? What if she’s already like Stacey? And what if there’s no ‘like’ about it?
I didn’t find a lighter or a book of matches in Stacey’s purse that day. Just a bottle of Tylenol PM, the orange DayQuil capsules, some valium, Percocet, Lamicta, Ambien, Xanax, and a few others that weren’t even in bottles, just rolling around at the bottom with the lint like newer, more entertaining flavors of Tic Tacs. Two of the prescriptions were in Stacey’s name. One was in the name of Rowina Daniels, her kleptomaniac friend from North Carolina. The others were blank, the labels peeled off.
Is my wife depressed? I had wondered.
And then, how long?
And then, is this what depression looks like, or are we dealing with something of a greater magnitude here? Has she been diagnosed? Someone had written two of the scrips for her. But what about the rest? Was she in counseling? Do doctors really think two, three, five kinds of pills are the answer to our problems? I knew she took Ambien now and then to help her sleep. If
it’s a legitimate health issue, why is she being so secretive?
And god damn it, what’s so difficult about telling your husband, ‘I don’t feel so hot and I don’t know why. Will you help me figure out what’s going on?’
The fact that he’s never home when you’re feeling strong enough to ask for help. How about that?
I looked down at Annette, pale, shivering Annette in the bedroom. Was I attracted to unstable women? Or was this a coincidence? Half the country is on one prescription or another, I consoled myself. It’s not her fault. Modern life is a nasty stretch to serve. We take antidepressants and anti-anxiety and anti-feeling human pills the way we used to take vitamins and cigarettes and martini lunches. We take one pill to wake us up and another to put us down. A simple cup of coffee and a walk after dinner have become Red Bull and vodka. We take a pill to relax so we can cross off five hundred things on our To Do list, most of which are meaningless. We take fuckpills, but do we really need to provoke and then tame an erection that lasts four hours? If we are not trying to feel more more more, we’re doing everything we can to feel nothing at all. Flatly happy or just god damned sad aren’t allowed any more. In the pursuit of a pain-free emotional life, we’re sanding the edges off the human experience, and we’ll keep on doing it until we wake up one day and realize life has become one monotonous swim in a kiddie-safe pool filled with hand sanitizer.
Your addiction is your excuse, baby. Buck up.
Yes, have another beer, James. Go sleep in another motel and spank it to more internet porn so you don’t have to deal with a complex human being, you numb, hypocritical asshole.
Annette. She could be suicidal. Have you considered that? What if you leave, just bail and go back to your happy life in West Adams, pretend you never met her, and then wake up next week to Detective Bergen knocking on your door? Hiya, James. That friend of yours, the kooky neighbor? Yeah, killed herself. She went Lucy on us. Way to string another woman along. You really know how to help a woman in need, Hastings. You know what you are? A jerk-off. Another jerk-off in a city of millions.
And that was what it came down to for me, right then. As messed up as this woman was, she had come to me for help. She had lost her husband. Our fates were intertwined. She had come to me for help and I had let her in. What kind of man would I have been if I just wished her the best of luck and walked out the door?
‘Annette? Can you hear me?’
She did not respond.
I closed my eyes and summoned something. In the silence, here on the hot second floor where my thoughts were hazy and her condition teased me, impossible things seemed possible. I leaned closer and spoke very quietly.
‘Stacey?’
No change of expression. She merely continued to sweat.
‘Is that you? Can you hear me, Stace? Are you trying to tell me something?’
The facial muscles under her left cheek began to twitch. Just three or four quick flutters, as if someone were pulling an invisible thread attached below her eye. Then it stopped and she was still. Her breathing was slow. This was insane but I had to try it. I had to know. I leaned in until I was less than six inches from her face.
‘Stacey,’ I whispered. ‘Stacey. I’m here, love. Open your eyes. I’m right here.’
Annette’s breath trickled in and out. Nothing changed.
Something in the room smelled bad. There was a new odor, subtly biting and alkaline. It was so familiar but out of place that it took another minute for me to classify - my mind leaping back to Henry’s puppyhood and stained carpets - as urine. I stood up and rubbed my mouth.
Oh, I see. This is real. She is very sick now.
I reached forward and peeled the bedding back, down to her knees, and then bit my hand to keep from screaming.
25
The large wet spot that had spread around her bottom was not what made me bite my knuckles until my eyes watered. I was staring at her skin. Annette was wearing only a ribbed tank top and a pair of blue cotton panties. The rest of her was bare and pale. No, pale is inadequate. The skin covering her legs, arms, neck and everywhere else visible to me then was alabaster.
Like so many redheads, Annette had hundreds of freckles. I had gotten so used to them I no longer noticed them. But now their absence stood out in one great negative space. Her freckles were not faded or pale against the paler epidermis. She had no freckles. The very pigment that had once set them off against her already light skin had vanished as if she had spent the last twenty-four hours soaking in a tank of Clorox.
Her cheeks were the only part of her to retain any sort of color, and there she maintained only the slightest pink, but, yes, now that I studied her face, I could swear that this too was fading. I stood above her for unknowable minutes and tried to comprehend what illness could have such an effect. She had the skin of a corpse that had been floating in a lake for a week without the gaseous bloating, and yet she breathed. She was alive.
A crawling fear, one I did not know existed, slowly but inexorably claimed me. It was the fear of a child cursed with adult knowledge, discovering some terrible truth before he is mature enough to cope with it. I had nothing to compare it to. Not even finding Stacey dead in the alley behind our home, which had been a horror but not a fear. I did not know what this meant, what it was. My mind groped for reason and reference but found neither. I stood with it and it rearranged me. I was powerless and alone with an awful secret, the secret of her changing.
She’s dying. Call for help. Call an ambulance.
Annette’s eyelids went up in one smooth motion. Her eyes did not move to me. She only stared straight ahead, unblinking, her pupils reduced to pinhead specks. Blue. Both eyes were blue now. Her lips parted and I retreated another pace from the bed.
‘He’s here,’ she said in a voice too quiet and soft for me to identify as her own. I waited, but nothing followed and another minute passed.
‘What?’ I prompted.
‘He’s in the house again.’
This sentence, and the ones that followed, seemed to form over a period of minutes.
‘He’s in the bedroom with her,’ she said. ‘Wearing the red suit. So red . . . it’s almost wet. His skin burns. It shines with the blood from the boys and girls.’
‘No one is going to hurt you,’ I said.
Her chest rose and fell between the words. She displayed no sign of agitation.
‘He won’t stop until he eats every part. Every part of me.’
‘Who?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Who is he?’
Her eyelids came down and went back up. Her breathing accelerated, the little gusts now audible. Her head rotated on the pillow and her eyes found me. My legs began to shake. I could not control them.
‘And then he’s going to get the boy, too.’
I licked my lips. ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
‘Her son.’ Her eyes shimmered. ‘Oh, Aaron . . .’
The bicycle. In the garage. It belonged to a boy. She had a son named Aaron and she was talking about herself in the third person now. Who did she think she was then? Who was this white form on the bed?
‘Who are you?’ I said.
She sat up in the bed and hissed, reaching for me. ‘Sssss-staaaayyy . . .’
I ran from the room, slamming the door behind me. I ran down the stairs and stumbled out the front door, into the night that had fallen.
26
I don’t know at what hour I stepped out, only that it was now true night. I ran to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned right and kept running until it became obvious that she was not following me and my lungs were burning. I settled into a brisk pace and walked for an hour. I moved through the development unseen, or at least undisturbed. The windows of every home I passed were dark. I saw few cars, all of them parked, and no people walking their dogs or otherwise stretching their legs. I followed the sidewalks and at some point crossed a field of grass I did not know was a park until I almost ran into the cold, abandoned bars of playground equipment. I
sat at the bottom of a slide and made trails in the sand with my shoes.
I hadn’t thought about the Mustang when I ran out the front door, and now I couldn’t bring myself to go back, not even to the garage. She might be walking around the house now, looking for me. She might be standing in the living room, at the window, stiff behind a curtain like a department store mannequin, waiting for me to return.
Oh, Aaron.
I did not know anyone named Aaron, and I didn’t want to. I was not going back there, not tonight, perhaps ever.
Sheltering Palms was too deep in the desert to have bus service. I did not have my cellphone to call a cab. I considered walking out, down the road, into Palm Desert or whatever the nearest town was, but I knew it was miles away and I was tired. I did not want to speak to police or medics. I did not want to deal with their questions. I wanted to be alone, somewhere warm, in a soft bed. Everything I had witnessed collected into some vague cloud, the knowledge that something was wrong and that I had caused it.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 19
