He walked in, as if invited. “I needed to see you,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Lorena was sure she was dreaming. Who was this guy? He looked different somehow. His cheeks, the bones still prominent, were more filled in. His eyes brighter, the orange flecks more solid than the green. Even the way he stood was somehow different. How can I know this from seeing him a few times? “Why would you need to see me? You don’t even – I don’t even know who you are.” Liar, her body said. Even if she didn’t know, her body did. It stood at attention; every muscle seeming to call out to him.
She wasn’t sure how it happened, but the two of them became tangled. It didn’t matter that her mouth was full of fuzz, that she smelled like a sickbed. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know him, his name or who he was. She was not altogether convinced she wasn’t dreaming. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. His lips were firmer than in her fantasies. Warm and smooth like his hands, his hips. It didn’t matter that the wooden floor was hard and dirty, because he was hard and clean, smelling faintly of red licorice, tasting of lemon. She took him inside of her, blocking out thoughts of AIDS and herpes and unwanted pregnancy. Nothing could happen to her here. This was bliss, a dream.
When she grew tired and sore, she opened her mouth to tell him, to ask him to take a break, but he covered her in kisses, her traitorous body responding. She was unable to speak, her throat too dry. Her stomach sent sharp, shooting pains through her body in rhythm with his thrusts. He would not stop.
She gave up and lay under him, limp as a rag doll. Arms and legs too weak to move, stomach clenching and unclenching. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out, just the exhalation of old, stale breath. She prayed in her mind for help, for an end. For it to stop for good. She fought to keep her eyes closed, from looking into his eyes. They were pits of darkness, ready to swallow her up.
She fell asleep or passed out, and woke as he dressed and left the room. She crawled into bed, shivering, and pulled the blankets up over her. She felt skeletal, as if her flesh was just a thin cover for brittle bone. A glimpse in the mirror showed her a husk of her former self. Lorena rolled over on her side and looked out the window, trying to remember how she had gotten here. Her breath was shallow, coming in gasps as if she had run a long race. She looked out the window at the people walking by, some well-dressed, others casual, everyone with some apparent place to go. But not her. Lorena lay and stared out the window knowing he was gone, had left her to rot, but too tired, and oddly satisfied, to care.
She noticed, as she looked for one last glimpse of him, hoping that he would do her the honour of looking into her window one last time, that he had left a white rose on the windowsill.
•••
Gina Flores lives on a beach in Texas with her husband, a 90-pound lapdog, and a cat. She writes stories to stay sane and teaches at a university to pay the bills.
Victorians
By James S. Dorr
The first thing I remembered of my early childhood was the fog. I must have been only five years old when I left the house that I had been born in – beyond that, my mind was still pretty much blank – and I would not have returned even now, more than thirty years later, except that I had finally married. Her name was “Amelia” and I had met her in Chicago, but now I traveled home alone. I had determined to open the house first and, only after it had been restored to a liveable condition, to send for my bride.
I crested a hill. Just as the road hooked down toward the river, and to the town I would find across it, I caught my first glimpse of the house my father had been born into – the house he had died in and that my mother had fled from just after, never to come back. That, at least, was what they had told me after I had been taken away, to another state, to be raised by a cousin on my mother’s side.
The fog, a persistent feature of autumn during those first years of my life, had always been thickest nearest the river. Above it, however, under a pale late-afternoon sun, I could just make out the eight-sided top of the great central tower – the Queen Anne tower that dominated so many Victorian homes of its age – as well as the tips of three of the highest pinnacled chimneys.
Memory came back in driblets and pieces. I knew that, when I approached the next day to take possession, I would recognize below them the sharply peaked hip roof, broken at angles by the main gables that clutched the tower within the ell they formed at their crossing. The tower itself, with its latticed, oval, stained glass windows, would soar a full story over even the tallest of these, a clear rise of nearly seventy feet from its base to the scale-shingled dome that crowned it.
Memories continued to come back unbidden. I followed the road down a series of switchbacks, until the top of the double lane iron bridge I knew I would find loomed out from an ever increasing fog. By now, I had lost sight of my parents’ home altogether, but in my mind, I could hear the voice of a young attorney reading a will.
The will specified that the house would be mine, but only after I had gotten married. The young attorney, a Stephen Larabie – really no more than a clerk at the time – explained to me what my older cousin protested seemed an unusual provision. “Your father,” the lawyer said, “fully expects you not to marry until you’ve tasted somewhat of the world, just as he did. But, at the same time, you must eventually take on the obligations of manhood, as well as its pleasures, and settle down. The house, that you will not obtain until you do so, is intended to be a reminder.”
My cousin who, in that I was a minor, had been court-appointed to speak for my interests, had laughed at that. “You mean young Joseph” – he gestured toward me – “is being told that he has permission to sow his wild oats when he gets a bit older, but, until he’s grown out of such urges, to stay out of town. In other words, not to keep out of trouble, but just out of scandal.”
The lawyer cleared his throat. “Something like that, yes. I doubt you knew Joseph’s father well – as you do know, he was always reclusive and rarely visited even immediate family members after his own marriage – but he, like his house, was quite Victorian in his nature.”
“You mean that he was a hypocrite, don’t you?” my cousin asked.
I remember now that the lawyer had glanced in my direction to see if I had understood anything of what he and my cousin were saying, but I had already begun to play with his pens and inkwell.
“Some people claimed that of him, yes. At least, that he might, at times, have followed a double standard.” He cleared his throat a second time. “In any event,” he said as he stood up, having come to the end of his papers and seemingly anxious to usher us out, “the will specifies that this firm will keep the house in trust until Joseph is ready.”
And now I was ready, by my father’s will. The firm, now owned by Stephen Larabie, had apparently kept an eye on my own various comings and goings, as well as the house. And so, three days after Amelia and I had returned from our honeymoon, I received the telegram that had brought me back to this place, at best still scarcely half-recollected, that yet had so overshadowed my first years.
So ran my thoughts now as I reached the bridge and, turning my lights on low, carefully picked my way across it. Fortunately, the fog seemed less thick on the river’s town side and, even though it was starting to get dark, I found the hotel I had made reservations at with surprisingly little trouble. Since I was tired from a full day’s drive, I checked into my room, and showered and changed first, then decided to have a couple of drinks and something to eat in the small restaurant I had earlier spotted just off the lobby.
When I sat down, the hostess smiled at me. Somehow, I found that I couldn’t help thinking how much the opposite, and yet, in terms of the abstract of beauty, how much the same she was as Amelia. Where, for example, my own wife was blonde and her figure slender, the restaurant hostess was every bit as buxom and dark. Where Amelia was quiet, the hostess appeared, as other customers came to be seated, almost too vivacious. And afterward, when she winked at me while I took out my card
to pay the bill, I learned that even her name was much like my wife’s, and yet unlike it, as well.
Her name was “Anise”.
When I returned to my room later on, I placed my wife’s picture on the dresser and went to sleep quickly. The first thing next morning, I looked up Attorney Larabie’s office. As soon as I strode in through the door, I was struck by how quickly my mind recalled the tiniest details of my visit, some thirty years past, down to and including the stain on the wood floor where I had dropped one of the young lawyer’s pens. The man who confronted me now, however, must have been fifty-five or sixty.
“Mr. Parrish?” he said, extending his hand. “Mr. Joseph Parrish?”
I nodded and accepted his handshake.
“Are you Stephen Larabie? I got your telegram ....”
“Yes,” he said, before I could add more. Still gripping my hand, he pulled me over to a table and sat me down, then produced a thick sheaf of papers. “Couple of things I’ll need you to sign first,” he continued. “That’ll most likely take up the whole morning, so, unless you have some objection, I thought we might have a quick lunch after that and then take a look at the house together.”
I nodded, wondering somewhat distractedly if lunch would be at the hotel restaurant and, if so, if the hostess, Anise, would be on duty for that meal, as well. I shook the thought away and, soon enough, became lost in contracts and deeds, instead. Lunch, in fact, turned out to be a quick affair at a hamburger place just outside of town, on the way to the bridge. And then, as river fog started to thin, giving some hope of a clear if not wholly sun-filled afternoon, we found ourselves on the steep and winding road up the cliff on the other side.
Larabie turned to me while I was driving. “How much do you remember of your father?” he asked. “Or, for that matter, of your mother?”
“Very little,” I had to confess. I searched my memory and nothing came, yet I had the feeling that if I just waited – waited until I was inside the house that they had lived in ....
“You do know, at least, that your father was murdered?”Larabie paused, reacting, perhaps, to what I imagined was my blank expression. I had no such memory.
“That’s what the police said, in any event,” he finally continued, after some seconds. I did remember that when, with my cousin, I had been in his office before, the younger Larabie had struck me as being every bit as taciturn about giving out excessive information.
“Did they catch the man who did it?” I asked. Again, attempt to recall as I might, I had no memory – at least not yet – and hence no real feeling one way or the other. But I was beginning to have a foreboding.
“Figured it was probably a drifter,” Larabie answered, his voice sounding thoughtful. “A lot of people were moving from town to town in those days – mostly farmers who’d been foreclosed on. Big farms forcing out smaller holdings. And you’ve got to realize that this was a small town. People generally disliked sharing local troubles with outsiders. So, the police just poked around a little outside the house – set up a few roadblocks – but they never did catch him.”
“M-my mother wasn’t murdered, too, was she?” It had suddenly occurred to me what he might have been trying to hint at and, while I didn’t really remember her any more than I did my father, the thought of my mother’s death by violence somehow was shocking.
“Oh no,” he said quickly. “In fact it was her who phoned the police. Figured she must have been out when it happened and had you with her, but came home just after. Sort of a lucky reversal for her, though, that that’s the way it worked out.” He hesitated for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“It was your father who usually went out while she and you were the ones left behind.” He hesitated, again, then frowned. “I may as well tell you; your father was somewhat of a ladies’ man. Good-looking man even in his late thirties, just like you, and everyone knew it – except maybe her. Used to be a whorehouse where the hotel is now and some said he spent more time in that than he did in his own house.”
“Really?” I asked. I was about to ask him more when we reached the crest of the hill we were climbing. The road widened and, just at that moment, a ray of sun burst through the clouds overhead. The house could now be seen suddenly rising, dominating the next ridge over, in all its flamboyant, old-fashioned splendor.
As we approached, it loomed higher and higher, the light glinting off the gingerbread scrollwork that framed the huge front third-story gable. I pulled up into its curving driveway, got out of the car and let my eyes wander – below the trim of the gable, in shadow, the arch of a balcony pointed yet higher to the great tower, half-impaled by the slant to its right, and the cast-iron finialed crest of the main hip roof behind it. And yet above that, thrust to the sky, the three major chimneys – the tallest one crowned with a wired, glass-balled spire that was meant to catch lightning, my new memory prompted – added their own bursting streaks of colour. An almost blood-coloured patterned-brick red, when the sun struck full on it, that, in the jumbled gray and white of friezes and rails of the building below them, was matched alone by the stained-glass red of the tower’s downward-spiraling ovals.
I walked, as if in a dream, to the house – apparently long-repressed memories came back of the tower windows lighting a second and third-story staircase before it curved backward up into the attic. Others of diamond-panes in the front parlour. I scarcely noticed Larabie’s presence until we stood on the broad front veranda.
“You’ll notice we kept the property up for you, Mr. Parrish,” the lawyer said. “Painted it most recently only last summer, in fact.” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket, along with a large, old-fashioned iron key. “You’ll notice we nailed up the lower-floor windows with furring strips – this far from town, why take any chances? – but, once we’re inside, the smaller fireplaces you’ll see sealed off were boarded up in your grandfather’s time. After they put in the central gas heating.”
I nodded dumbly. Yes. I remembered. One of the lesser, back-left chimneys went down to the basement. I watched as he twisted the key in the door, only half-noticing that it opened with hardly a squeak. I smelled the fresh oil – they had, apparently, kept up the inside as well as the outside – not just of hinges, but of the darkly polished woodwork that surrounded us as we stepped into the shallow, box-like reception hall.
“Just a moment, now, Mr. Parrish.” Larabie spoke in almost a whisper. He handed me the first of the keys then produced a second. He twisted it in a smaller lock, across from the entrance we had just come through, then pushed back the double sliding doors that opened the wall to the huge, oak-paneled, main staircase hall.
“Your mother went with this house, Mr. Parrish,” Larabie said, as he stood aside to let me look. To try to remember. Second only in size to the large formal dining room, the hall, with its stairs angling up to the right and around the back wall, was the dominant feature of the first floor. “Your mother was frail, white-skinned and slender, with pale-blonde hair,” the attorney continued. “There were times when she would descend, the white of her clothes standing out, as well, from the dark wood around her, and look the perfect Victorian lady. Times when I’d come here on legal business ....”
I nodded. I saw. I remembered my mother on that staircase, saw in her now, in retrospect, the thin, almost-sickly Romantic ideal that would have held sway, not so much in her time here, but generations before when the house had been first constructed. I longed now to climb the stairs – now I remembered how she would pause at the corner landing, letting me dash to her so we could go to the main hall together. But first, I had to know something more.
I turned to Larabie.
“You told me, just before we came to the top of the cliff, that my father was murdered. But not my mother ....”
“No, Mr. Parrish. She was the one who called the police – I think I may have said that, already – but, when they arrived here, they came through the sliding doors, just as we did, and the only person they fou
nd in the hall was you. You told them your mother had gone away. That was all you would tell them. But when they asked you about your father, you pointed, silently, to the rear archway that leads to the kitchen.”
More memory came back – the memory of blood. Of wanting to forget what I ....
“Under the circumstances,” I heard the attorney continue, as if at a distance, “no one blamed your mother. For leaving you that way. She must have been so horribly frightened – and she did keep her wits about her long enough to make sure help came. She had always been such a frail woman ....”
Incongruously, I thought of my wife, then – fragile and pale. The bride I would send for who, people might say, would fit comfortably in with this house, as well. Then – stark contrast – of yet another detail I suddenly found I remembered. My father had been murdered in the kitchen, had almost staggered out past the pantry, past the back stairs and into the service hall, when he had fallen.
An axe in his back.
I must have begun to look Victorian-pale, myself. I felt the attorney’s hand on my shoulder. Now I remembered the men in uniform, blood being cleaned up in the kitchen later by neighbours, my own panic at missing my mother. My wondering when I would see her come down the main staircase again.
“Mr. Parrish?” Larabie’s voice was very low. “Mr. Parrish – perhaps you’d like to come out for some fresh air?”
I shook my head slowly. “No,” I answered. “Everything does look in order, however, so why don’t you wait outside if you’d like to. I just want do a little exploring on my own, to get an idea of how much work it’ll take before Amelia – before Mrs. Parrish and I can move in.”
Larabie nodded. “Upstairs, you’ll find we pretty much left everything alone. May be dusty, though. Didn’t even put dropcloths down much above the second floor.”
“I think you’ve done an excellent job with what I’ve seen so far,” I assured him. I took a deep breath then looked at my wristwatch and glanced toward the front door. “I shouldn’t be any more than an hour ....”
Candle in the Attic Window Page 11
