WIDOW

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Shadow grinned while she ate and listened to her friend, but one part of her attention wondered which drawer had held the knives, and which knife, if it wasn't taken for evidence, killed the former owner. Crazy. She shouldn't even be thinking such dark thoughts for they led her to think about violence in general, and her loss in particular.

  Trailing Scott to the den.

  Pleading for him to put the gun away.

  Watching him pull the trigger.

  “You're not listening!” Charlene reached over and drew away her plate. “I listened to that whole sick-sick story about the killing in the mansion and you won't even listen to me now. That's not fair, is it? Is that fair?”

  Shadow shook herself mentally, blinked, and smiled tentatively. “We both just tend to drift off, don't we? What a pair we make. Isn't it strange and wonderful?”

  Charlene grinned uncertainly and started up where she'd left off about what slobs her brothers and sisters were and how much responsibility she had caring for them when she was growing up. It never occurred to her that drifting off might not be wonderful at all, that the two of them were wounded creatures fighting for survival, and that the odds were against them holding onto reality for any measurable length of time . . .

  ~*~

  Charlene, a tall woman carrying twenty extra pounds around her forty-year-old waist and hips, jogged as easily around the house behind Shadow as any Olympic champion. She didn't even breathe hard or become flushed. Mainly, she thought, it was a trick of the mind, what the body went through. She knew how to turn off her mind from the event the body experienced so that she wasn't affected greatly by either exercise, heat, cold, even pain.

  Especially pain. She had known such physical and mental pain, that she had long ago learned how to escape. Now, as she pumped her legs and swung her long arms in the baggy sweater, pacing herself ten feet behind Shadow as they circled the brooding old brick mansion, Charlene went over her earlier thoughts when she had been sitting on the rug, Shadow's voice coming through to her from the stairway as through veils of thick gauze. She was . . .

  Alone. So alone. She thought she was alone, anyway, believed it fully. She was ten years old and her father had taken the other children to town. Charlene, the eldest, was supposed to clean house before they returned. Mother was dead. There were always too many chores to do and only Charlene to do them.

  Someone was coming to visit—one of Daddy's friends from the chemical plant, his only friend, the man he played dominoes with at the ice house in Houston on Friday nights and bowled with on Saturdays. Charlene was making the beds—the twins' bunks in one of the bedrooms at the back of the house—and she was perfectly content to do the work. She had never whined or pretended it was too much trouble for a ten-year-old to take on so many household duties. She rather liked the mindlessness of housework. She was one of those people destined to find joy where she could, and cleanliness and orderliness gave her a sense of satisfaction that provided her with little gifts of cheer and accomplishment throughout each day.

  She tucked the sheet beneath the thinly worn mattress. She squared the corners. She plumped the pillows in their cases and set them just so at the head of the bunks.

  She never knew he—that horrible man, that demon man—was coming. She was whistling beneath her breath—“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”—and he crept up behind her before she ever knew someone was in the house with her. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her off her feet, the pillow she had in her hands falling to the floor. She shrieked, trying to twist free, heart racing, her song cut off in mid-tune.

  “Hush now,” he said gruffly. “You wouldn't want your daddy to find out you lured me in here and took off all your clothes for me.”

  She recognized the voice as belonging to her father's friend who wasn't supposed to be there until dinner time. She had heard it on the telephone when he called and she had met him once at his car when he picked up her father for Saturday-night league bowling.

  “Leave me alone!” she screamed, but he clamped a hand over her mouth.

  From then on the painful memory blurred around the edges like a partially burned photograph. There was kicking. There were brutal hands searching her little body for all its crevices. There were tears squeezed silently out of her lids as he kept her mouth covered. She knew the taste of him. His hand, his penis. She knew the pain of him and his perspiring stench and his weight and his thickness that tore her and made her bleed.

  When he was done, he balled the stained sheets from her sister's bed, and pulled down the stairs to the attic in the hallway. He climbed up there and left the sheets. He warned her if she told, he'd kill her. And he'd kill her family. He'd kill everyone she knew.

  He left by the back door, and she thought she'd heard him chuckling to himself. She sat in the bathtub, the water running until it slopped over the sides, and still she wasn't clean and still she couldn't walk without wincing in pain. She cried until her daddy came home from the store and she told him.

  It took some time and buckets of tears, but he believed her. He was her daddy. He knew she didn't lie. He climbed like an old man with aching joints into the attic and found the bloodied sheets. He went with the policemen to his friend's home and watched them cuff and haul him to jail. During the trial, he tried to leap over the table to get at the rapist, to strangle him to death during her testimony, but they restrained him in time.

  The man was sentenced to nine years in prison. Just as he left the courtroom he winked at her and shouted, “Wait till I get out, sugar. You just wait.”

  So for nine years, even though they moved four times, and did not install a telephone, she dreamed that her rapist, her worst nightmare, was out of prison and creeping into her room where he would take her again just to make her suffer before he cut her throat. And the throats of her siblings and her father.

  For nine years, until she was nineteen years old, she woke screaming in the night. Her schoolwork suffered. She was put into the dummy classes and gained a lot of weight. Boys made fun of her, woofing like dogs when she passed them. Girls wouldn't befriend her. She started shuffling and keeping her head down so she wouldn't have to see the world mocking her.

  She was alone all the time. Alone.

  Just before the rapist's parole date, she had a psychotic episode that scared her father into calling an ambulance. She was completely insane, but she didn't know it until later when she woke up restrained by a straightjacket in Marion State.

  From her nineteenth year until her present fortieth one, Charlene Brewster recounted the rape scene in her dreams at least once a month, and sometimes during the day the dreams overtook her and left her paralyzed, unable to function. That was what had happened this morning while Shadow told her about the mansion's history.

  She wished she could change everything. Her mother's dying young, leaving her the head of the household. Her father's invitation to his friend for dinner that night. Her staying behind to clean while they left her to go shopping.

  But most of all she wished she could have had a weapon, any weapon, when she was attacked, so that she could have defended herself.

  Wishing didn't change the past. Wishing didn't keep her safe or provide her with peace. Even Marion State's best psychiatrists over the years couldn't do that.

  Her legs pumped and carried her through the sunshine where the wind blew back her mousy graying hair from wide cheekbones. Ahead of her Shadow pranced, calves rounded and strong in the Spandex pants she wore for running. Her black hair had a luster like that of a raven's wings in the burning light.

  Shadow didn't know. Charlene had never been able to tell anyone. If they already knew, the way the doctors at Marion did, she couldn't help it, but she never volunteered the facts of her soul's death on that ordinary day when she was ten.

  She knew it wasn't any worse a fate she'd suffered than Shadow. Or were there degrees of suffering, she wondered, that demanded some kind of extra payment in this life? Shad
ow's children, little boys, had had their brains blown out all over the floor. Her husband had stood right there and done something irrevocably evil and had made his wife witness to it.

  Tears welled up and dripped down Charlene's cheeks. They dried as she ran, her hands clenching and unclenching as she swung them at her sides.

  How were they supposed to live? How was she supposed to recover from the death of childhood and innocence? How was Shadow supposed to continue living as if she had never been a devoted mother and wife? Were there really people who were able to go on, unaffected and unmarred by life's ruthlessness? Why wasn't every last one of them a raving maniac, that's what she wanted to know. Was there a secret to successful coping that she had been born without?

  Shadow ran up the steps and beckoned for her to follow. She said, breathless and hanging over her knees, “I'm pooped. That's enough for today. C'mon, we'll get big glasses of ice water and sit around back by the bay.”

  Charlene, as compliant as a child, nodded her head, and jogged up the stairs into the mansion's cold interior.

  Whatever Shadow said. That's what she would do. She had to listen to someone, trust someone to tell her how to live through one hour after another. It was that or suicide and she wasn't quite ready—not yet—to employ that option.

  Ten

  Mitchell stumbled around the kitchen, Pavlov bending his lanky fawn body into half-circles barring passage.

  “Pavlov! Outta the way, boy.” But he stopped going for the coffee pot on the back of the stove, and leaned over to rub behind the dog's ears. Pavlov's tail-stub wagged like crazy and he made little whiny sounds of pleasure. “I'll feed you in a sec. Let me get some java going here so I can crack open my eyes.”

  When Mitchell straightened to reach for the pot, Pavlov flipped a complete circle in the air. All four feet off the floor. His tongue hung out, eyes upturned and pleading, tail wagging like a metronome. Mitchell looked at him again. Holding perfectly still, he said, “You want out?” He knew he did, he just loved seeing the dog flip in the air like a ballet star.

  Again Pavlov executed the perfect twirligig, four paws thumping the floor on landing. This meant yes. It might even mean yes, are you a moron? Then he curled again into that odd half circle, butt almost to head, that boxers were known to adopt when they are pleased to have a master's attention.

  “You squirrely mutt. Come on, then, go out and dig some holes so I can make my coffee in peace.”

  Pavlov ran to the back door, then sat on his haunches as he had been taught, waiting. Mitchell opened the door and the dog vanished out the crack like escaping steam. Holding open the door on the rising sun, Mitchell grinned watching the dog run in fast circles before pulling up short, turf flying, and scratching with his back paws like a bull. He lifted a leg over a dying rose bush and pissed. All the while he smiled at Mitchell as if to say, when I tell you I have to go out, I have to go OUT. Whatta you think, I'm kiddin'?

  The phone screamed, causing Mitchell to flinch. He left the door partially open so the dog could come in when he wanted, and warily lifted the receiver off the wall hook. “Yeah?”

  “Double trouble. Murder-suicide. Need you here, chop chop.”

  Mitchell's lieutenant spoke in code language. For some reason it always required a like response. You couldn't hold a decent English conversation with the guy. He wouldn't know a complete sentence if it slugged him in the back. “Just happen?”

  “Hour ago. Looks like murder-suicide. Could be something else. A hit. Contract. Ain't kosher, maybe.”

  “I'm on my way. Let me feed my dog.” And make my coffee.

  He ran water into the dented aluminum percolator, dumped lots of Folger's grounds into the leaning basket, and switched the gas burner on high. On the counter was a bag of powdered-sugar donuts. He ate half a dozen while waiting for the coffee to perk. He glanced out the window over the sink at Pavlov digging holes to China. The back yard looked like an archeological dig. But Pavlov loved it so much. You couldn't kill the few delights an animal discovered.

  Gulping the coffee—so hot it scorched his vocal cords—Mitchell carried a cup with him as he dressed in the bedroom. Pavlov had let himself in again so that now he trailed behind every step Mitchell made. He was a pest and ingratiating as hell, licking a hand here, butting a leg there, but he was the best boxer Mitchell thought he'd ever owned. And one helluva watchdog, too. The house had never been burglarized. That said a lot for a house so exposed, empty overgrown lots on each side, crack dealers down on the corner.

  In the kitchen again, fully dressed except for his shoes, Mitchell shut and locked the wide-open back door, dumped a couple of coffee cans of dog food into Pavlov's tray, changed his water, and refilled his own cup with coffee from the stove. In the living room he slipped on soft leather Italian loafers, his one outrageous big-ticket vanity, and made for the door.

  Pavlov sat in the middle of the room and threw back his thickly muscled neck to let out a howl.

  “Hey, you think I don't miss you, too?” Mitchell rushed over to rub the dog's neck once more before breaking from the house, coffee slopping over his hand and burning his knuckles on the way to his car.

  “God, I love that dog,” he said, shaking his head in astonishment.

  Pavlov came from a litter of twelve, and he was the runt. Long-legged, black mask, not much white (which made him far less than show quality, not that Mitchell cared), he had done that flipping in the air trick one time, just two months old then, and stole Mitchell's heart.

  “He's kind of skinny,” he said to the professional dog breeder. “And look at those legs. He looks like a race horse instead of a dog.”

  “Well, he'll fatten up. And grow into the legs. I can let you have him for four hundred since he's the last one to go. He's smart. He learned that jump trick on his own.”

  The gangly puppy grinned and butted Mitchell's leg and Mitchell pulled out his checkbook. How often could you find a puppy with a smile? And who was going to buy him, skinny legs and all, if Mitchell didn't?

  Life in the house was never the same again. Although Mitchell had owned boxers before, none of them tore up the place like Pavlov. Then again, the dog made a good excuse for the sloppy rooms when company came calling—what little company Mitchell allowed. He could always say my dog did this. He's a scoundrel.

  Which was the God's honest truth. Pavlov had a thing about pillows. He mangled them when left alone, dragging them through rooms and tossing them into the air until they shredded. He pawed his tray until the dog food splattered all over the kitchen floor. He slopped water everywhere and often drank from the toilet when running low. He hated the mailman so that each day he heard the mailbox slot clanging on the porch, he tried to tear down the front door. There were deep scars in the wood where he'd tried to rake and gnaw his way through. If he ever made it the mailman was dead meat.

  What with buying new pillows all the time, cleaning up behind Pavlov, and having to replace the front door, Mitchell figured having this dog had cost him plenty of money and aggravation, but all Pavlov had to do was twitch his lean muscular body in a flying pirouette and all was forgiven. Mitchell knew he'd grieve forever when this dog died one day. It had occurred to him that God made dogs to teach people how to love and let go. Dogs never lived as long as man; they came, captured your love, and one day when you least expected catastrophe, they lay down and died, breaking your fucking heart.

  Mitchell hurried into the bullpen, slipped past two detectives stuffing themselves with tacos that were going to rot their guts this early in the morning, and confronted Lieutenant Tom Epstein on his way to the john. Epstein reached into a stained jacket pocket and handed over an address written on a yellow Post-it note. “Here,” he said, still walking so that Mitchell had to follow. “Cleanup's half through. Hurry so they can finish. I've already sent Donaldson over.”

  Donaldson. Mitchell wished Epstein had paired him on this new case with one of the other detectives. Donaldson had an attitude. He thought his
shit didn't stink. “Why contract?” Mitchell asked, trying to get a handle on this thing so he wouldn't be walking into the situation blind.

  “Looks like murder-suicide. Wife, husband. Hubby, though, he's holding the pistol.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In the wrong hand.”

  “Yeah?” Now it was making sense.

  Epstein paused with one palm on the men's room door. “Sister showed up. Got hysterical. Said hubby was right-handed.”

  “The gun's in his left,” Mitchell supplied, way ahead of the story.

  “See you. I got gas.” Epstein opened the door and disappeared.

  On the way out one of the taco-eating detectives offered an extra one to Mitchell, holding it like a cracker smeared with caviar. “Want soma this?”

  “You think I care to die? Not on Wednesday.” Mitchell moved on past, the scent of fried meat, taco seasoning, and hot sauce in his nostrils. Then what he'd said hit him. Wednesday. Christ, he was having lunch downtown with Patty. He'd almost forgotten. How was he going to make it if he got hung up with a murder-suicide?