Sleep With The Lights On

by Maggie Shayne

  “Playing tricks on the formerly blind girl, are you, Amy? Thinking I don’t know a dog from a potbellied pig?”

  “She’s an English bulldog,” Amy said, hunkering down to scratch its fat little head. “Aren’t you, Myrtle? Yeah, you’re just a pretty little boodog, aren’t you?”

  Myrtle closed her eyes, sucking up the affection like a sponge.

  “Did you just say ‘boodog’?” I asked.

  “She needs us, Rache. She’s old.”

  “She smells it.” The dog’s earlier emission was wafting to my nose now, and I waved a hand in front of my face and tried to blink back tears.

  “And she’s blind.”

  I looked down again. I didn’t notice the smell anymore, and I was pretty sure that was because she’d sort of skewered my heart with that last revelation. “That’s not even close to fair, Amy.”

  “Look, if you don’t want her, fine. Just let her stay until I can find someone else to take her. Please? She won’t last a day in the pound.”

  The dog hit me in the shin with one forepaw.

  “I should fucking fire you for this,” I told Amy, struggling to hold on to my bitchiness and not reveal that my insides were melting like ice cream in the sun. “Fine. Fine, one week. You find this dog a home in one week.” No way in hell is anyone else getting this dog in a week. “Got it?”

  She smiled at me, and I realized I hadn’t been close to understanding what a “shit-eating grin” looked like until right then. Bitch knew me too well.

  * * *

  Amy left. Myrtle did not. Amy had efficiently left a royalty check’s worth of dog supplies in the garage. I had no idea where they’d been before, but they were all over the place now.

  I decided not to let this momentary digression distract me from doing exactly what I had planned to do. I walked through my house, taking it in visually, loving it more than I ever had before but making a mental list of things I wanted to change. To brighten up. To decorate differently, or decorate at all. My bedroom and office were all but barren.

  I did all of this with the tired old dog plodding along beside me. I’d tried doing it alone, but once everyone was gone, and the house silent, and I shut the garage door on the beast, she took to howling like a Halloween sound track. So we wound up making the rounds together. She walked with her side touching my leg, so she wouldn’t lose track of me.

  I understood that. Being in a new place without being able to see it, you liked some kind of touch. I usually inspected new places by staying close to the walls to get the layout, so I did that with her, circling each room, letting her feel all the boundaries and locate all the doorways.

  When we finished our tour of the house, which seemed to meet with the dog’s approval, we went outside and walked around the wrought-iron-fenced yard. Five acres of it, with woods, a stream, lush green grass. I knew the dog must be tired, but she never slowed, never complained, just plodded along beside me, tongue lolling.

  When the sun started to set over the reservoir I sat down in the grass and just watched it. Myrtle plopped down, too, and without even asking first, she lowered her big head onto my lap, her sightless brown eyes falling closed.

  The sun was a giant orange-yellow ball, and as it sank, I saw a bald eagle soar right in front of it. “Wow,” I whispered.

  I realized I was stroking the dog’s head when she released an enormous sigh. I think she was smiling. It was a perfectly serene moment. It was my last serene moment, now that I think back on it.

  * * *

  Five hours later, give or take, the first nightmare came. I was standing in a dark room, and there was something sticky all over my face, and I felt...alive. More alive than I had ever felt. My pulse was pounding, and every cell, every nerve ending, seemed to tingle with delicious sensations of arousal and pleasure. Like a full body orgasm. I was breathing fast and couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

  But that stickiness...

  I wiped at my cheek with one hand, pulled it away to look. Red. Blood.

  The pleasure tingles started to change into shivers of fear as I looked down at my body and saw more of it. I was covered in it.

  I staggered backward, trying to wipe the stuff off and realizing there was a hammer in my other hand. And it, too, wore a sticky red coating. I dropped it, but it took its time pulling free from my palm, then landing on the floor with a clear, heavy thud.

  Turning in a slow circle, I tried to figure out where I was, what was happening to me. There was just enough light in the room to let me see the dead man on the floor. His head was broken like a melon dropped from a roof, his hair so matted with blood and bone and brain that I couldn’t even tell what color it was. His face was more hamburger than human.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but instead of screaming I spoke, and I don’t even know who I was talking to. “I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to. Make it go away, make it go, make it go! I’d rather be blind!”

  And then I was awake.

  I sat up in bed, blinking, but everything was dark. For one horrifying moment I thought my terrified wish had been granted and I’d gone blind again.

  No. I didn’t mean it. With all my heart, I didn’t mean it!

  A sob got stuck in my throat, and I pressed a hand to my chest to try to catch the panic that was trying to gallop away with me.

  And then a wet nose touched my cheek. It had the same effect as when the hero slapped the hysterical heroine in one those old movies from back when that was a good enough excuse to hit a woman. I snapped out of it.

  I wasn’t blind.

  I could sort of see Myrtle, standing beside the bed, hind legs on the floor, front ones on the mattress as she stretched to reach me. The gleam of her eyes and the shape of her head were clear in my darkened bedroom. I stroked her and leaned over to fumble for the lamp, snapped it on and went limp with relief when light filled the room and the room filled my eyes.

  “Okay, good. Good. It’s all good. It was just a dream.”

  My bedroom was just the way I’d left it. Soothing green walls—keep. Ivory curtains and woodwork—keep. Not a single picture on a single wall—big change needed. The circular dog bed lay on the plush green carpet to my left. One of Myrtle’s toys, a yellow teddy bear with one arm missing and white fluff sticking out of its shoulder socket, was lying in it.

  But Myrtle was still standing with her paws on my mattress.

  “Yeah, okay. Why not?” I got up, moved around behind her, linked my arms around her middle and picked her up, grunting as I did. “Not a lightweight, are you, Myrt?”

  Snarf, said Myrtle.

  I got her into the bed, then climbed back in myself. She padded around until she found a spot she liked—as close to me as possible—and dropped. Myrtle didn’t lay down. Myrtle collapsed.

  I sighed. “So what the hell was that about, do you think?” I asked her.

  She opened her sightless eyes and looked back at me as if to say, You’re asking me? I’m just a dog.

  I’d never had a nightmare like that in my life. It had been vivid. Real. And the feelings running through me in that dream had been majorly fucked up. Way out of line with anything I would ever have felt. I had never equated blood and sex. Not even in fantasy. Sadism was not my thing. I didn’t have a dominatrix bone in my body. So what the hell was up with the sensations of sexual pleasure and all that blood?

  “All right, well, I’ve been through a lot this week. Hit by a car, got my eyesight back and Tommy’s still missing and—”

  I flashed back to the man on the floor in my dream, the obvious question popping into my head. Could it have been my brother? Was I having some kind of psychic vision about what had happened to Tommy?

  I sat up again, my eyes shifting rapidly side to side as I searched my brain for the memory, for any clue. What clothes was the guy wearing? What did he look like?

  Blood and hamburger.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  “Simple, stupid. Stress, a major phys
ical change, every sense in my body undergoing a radical new state of being, and I’m still worried to hell and gone about Tommy. Maybe even feeling guilty that we were celebrating tonight while he was—”

  Blood and hamburger.

  “What do you say we leave the light on for the rest of the night, huh, Myrt?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  But even then, I didn’t go back to sleep.

  * * *

  Mason stood between his two nephews at Glenwood Cemetery. Joshua had tugged and pulled at his necktie so much it was hanging loose and crooked, and kept shifting from one foot to the other, pausing in between to tug at the seat of his pants. He’d already taken off his jacket, and Mason thought if his mother hadn’t been standing there, he would have shucked the tie, the pants and the shoes, too, and gone running off in his shorts.

  He intended to see to it the kid did just that once this part was over.

  This part, frankly, sucked.

  At least Josh seemed...normal. If there was a normal after a kid lost his dad. Mason had been twenty-nine when he’d lost his own, three years ago, and he still felt off his game.

  That had been different, though. His dad had been sick for over a year. Pancreatic cancer was a bitch of a way to go. Had he known ahead of time, Mason would have stockpiled the morphine himself for his father. But no one had warned them how bad it would be. Those hospice nurses—they’d been so good in so many ways. Let Dad die at home where he wanted to be. But still, why don’t they tell the family to stockpile the morphine? To play the pain up before it got too bad and keep asking for more? They could have gotten it at that point. No one worries about addiction when you’re dying. It’s not like you’re going to have to get clean later on and suffer through withdrawal. All anyone wants is for you to be comfortable. Until it gets to the point where no amount of morphine can make you comfortable and instead it makes you crazy, with the nightmares and the hallucinations and the notion that the drugs are poison and everyone’s trying to get rid of you, maybe because that’s what they should be doing.

  The thing was to stockpile the morphine before it got that bad. Then give it to them all at once when it gets too horrible to bear. It would have been merciful.

  That had been, Mason realized, the first time he’d ever considered that doing something illegal might be justified. The day he’d watched his brother blow himself away had been the second—and that time he’d actually acted on the thought.

  Jeremy sniffed. The sound jerked Mason out of his dark thoughts, and he looked over at his sixteen-year-old nephew. Built like a scarecrow. He’d grown a couple of inches over the summer, let his hair grow out. It was brown, curly. He attempted the comb-it-all-forward look currently the rage, but it curled at the ends in a flip that ruined the effect.

  Jeremy was not doing well. He looked like a zombie.

  Marie was a blond-haired blue-eyed rock, standing between her son Josh and mother-in-law, Angela. She had an arm around Josh, more to get him to stop fidgeting than to comfort him, but still. The other hand rested atop her baby bump. Her eyes were wet and a little puffy, but she’d done her hair and makeup, and she was holding it together in spades. For the boys, he figured. He and Marie had not always seen eye to eye, but he thought she was a hell of a mother. His nephews were lucky to have her.

  His own mother, Angela, was standing there looking blank. She was medicated. He could tell. She had one of those doctors that only the wealthy or well-connected could afford, the kind who would pretty much prescribe whatever she asked for and look the other way when her usage seemed to be getting over the top.

  As for himself, he was a wreck, too. And not just because he kept expecting the whole mess to blow up in his face at any second. Someone would find out what Eric had done—and what Mason had done to cover it up. It had to happen. That was hell to deal with on top of mourning the brother he’d thought he had, while trying to make sense out of the one he now knew had been real. The two images didn’t mesh. Yes, Eric had been fucked up for most of his life, but Mason had always seen him more as the victim of some screwy personality disorder—social anxiety or whatever—than as a criminal.

  Murderer, he corrected.

  Serial killer, he corrected again.

  No matter how often he adjusted the label in his mind, he couldn’t seem to make it stick. His memory of his brother kept going straight back to “poor, mixed-up Eric, he’s so awkward with people, so painfully shy, so uncomfortable in his own body.”

  Yeah, the family was a mess. Of them all, he figured Josh was doing the best.

  The priest finished up, noting that there would be a gathering at Angela’s home afterward, and that they were all welcome to stop by and pay their respects.

  Mason knew it was part of the whole ritual of parting, but he honestly didn’t know if he could get through it. People began to wander up to the five of them, offering hugs, handshakes, platitudes. And there would be more of the same into the evening, he knew, at his mother’s brick Georgian with its perfectly manicured lawn in Binghamton’s upscale suburb of Endwell. Uncomfortable people with empty words and filled casserole dishes.

  Turning, he looked at the boys. “You guys wanna ride back with me instead of in the limo?”

  Jeremy looked at his mother, then turned back and shook his head no, though Mason could tell he wanted to say yes. “We’d better stick with Mom.”

  “Good man. I’ll be right behind you, then, okay?”

  “I’d like to ride with you, Mason,” Angela said, and she closed a hand on his upper arm, digging in with her nails, though he didn’t think she meant to. “If you don’t mind.”

  He was surprised how much his mother was leaning on him. She weighed next to nothing, and yet her hand on his arm seemed to be holding most of that weight up. It was alarming enough that he rearranged her, sliding his arm around her shoulders, and helped her down the grassy slope to the dirt track where several cars were lined up as their owners climbed back inside.

  Marie and the boys slid into their limo, Marie having to turn her back to the open door and lower herself in carefully. She was going to have that little girl in a few months. Mason thought about that, about her and the boys having something joyful to take the place of the pain and grieving. And then he thought more. His brother was a serial killer. Was it genetic? Eric being adopted, his own forebears were a mystery. But could the gene be alive, even now, in one of the boys, or in the baby on the way?

  The limo pulled away. He watched it go, then finally opened the passenger door of his car for his mother. She got in, he closed it and went around, got in his own side. As he pulled away, she blinked her glassy eyes and said, “You’ll need to make even more effort than before with Marie and the boys, you know.”

  He nodded. “They’ll need me. I know, Mother.”

  “Eric was our link to them. We can’t let Marie start pulling them away from us.”

  “She would never do that.”

  “She’s angry. I know you don’t see that, but I do. I’m a woman. I was his mother. She blames me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  She was quiet for a moment. He pulled out of the cemetery, onto the road. It was a beautiful day, too beautiful to spend it among the dead.

  “You’re a policeman, Mason. I never wanted that for you, never understood why you wanted it—but it’s what you are. I expect you to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

  He glanced sideways at her and didn’t bother going into the old argument. He’d decided to be a cop when his best friend’s kid brother had been murdered by his babysitter. “To the bottom of what, Mother?”

  She shot him a How can you ask me that? look. “This,” she said. Then she shook her head hard. “He didn’t just shoot himself. He couldn’t have. Not my Eric.”

  He started to speak, then pressed his lips together to keep the words inside. His mother knew the circumstances of his brother’s death. He didn’t need to tell her a
gain that he’d walked in on the suicide-in-progress. She knew. She’d insisted on reading the reports. She’d been high on prescriptions ever since.

  “Mother, you know he did.”

  “I know, I know, I—” She fluttered a hand in the air. “I mean there had to be a reason. I’ve been asking Marie about things—their finances and so on—and she says they’re fine, but I know better. Honestly, if it had become that bad, why wouldn’t he just have asked...?” Her voice trailed off as she slowly shook her head. “Maybe he borrowed from the...the wrong people.”

  “He didn’t borrow. Their finances were fine. Marie didn’t lie to you.”

  “Drugs, then.” She said it almost hopefully. “Maybe he was on some sort of drugs that—”

  “He wasn’t on drugs, Mother.” Ironically, she was, but prescriptions, as she so often reminded him, were not really drugs. They were drugs, but not, you know, drugs.

  Mason took a breath. She wasn’t going to let go of this. “Eric had...problems. You know that.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not problems. He was a quiet boy. Scared. But that’s natural, of course. Six years old, coming to a new country, a whole new family, learning a new language. We don’t even know what happened to his birth family in Russia.” She lowered her head again. “We never asked him, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe if we’d asked him.”

  “I asked him once. He said he didn’t remember anything from before he was adopted.”

  She seemed to mull on that for a while. “We didn’t think we could have children, you know. When you came along not even a year later it was like a miracle.”

  “I know, Mom.” He’d heard the story a thousand times.