A tall glass appeared on the table in front of Dolan.
— There’s your soda, the waiter said.
Up close, you could see how short he was. A kid with a comb-over. Dolan pulled a long spoon from the glass and sucked the whipping cream off it.
— Cherry and everything.
— You’re a paying customer.
— You got good ears.
— So how about the paying part?
Dolan opened his jacket. The waiter took a half-step back. He had brown shoes on that didn’t match his pants, with a lace-up. Dolan peeled a dollar bill off a fold and laid it neatly on the table. He turned to Heike.
— I expect these gentlemen want to close up.
The waiter hadn’t moved.
— But you didn’t finish your soda, pops.
The cook stood up from his meal and pushed the empty plate toward the kitchen side of the counter. Dolan made a move toward the end of the bench, and the waiter grabbed up the money and moved off in a hurry.
Heike wrapped the figurine back in its paper. Dolan stood up to leave.
— What’s with the doll?
He plucked the maraschino off the top of the soda and offered it to her. She put the cherry in her mouth and sucked on it a moment, then pulled it out again by the stem.
— The doll is for you.
— I don’t know if it’ll match my decor.
— Not for your decor. The doll is a story I will tell you.
— Your ghost story.
— Yes. But only if you are very nice to me. She tucked it back into her purse.
— I’m always nice, Dolan said.
Heike snapped the purse closed.
— Eric says it’s my fault. He says I lost him. Me. She said this without looking up. How’s that for twisting the knife?
Dolan put a hand out to help her up, but she didn’t notice and stood up on her own.
— I stole it, she said. The doll. From a little house where no one lives. An empty house.
— You’ve got a hell of a thing for abandoned houses.
— Only one. The same place I wanted you to see that night. Only it was too dark.
— Why’d you take it?
— I took it, and then later I went back again with Daniel. To that house. I can’t explain why. She stopped. No. That’s not true. I went back because I felt something there. I felt like the house . . . I don’t know. Like it should be seen.
The waiter had crossed the floor and was standing in the entrance, holding the door open. He cleared his throat.
— Time, lady.
— How’d you get here, anyway? Dolan said.
— Arden.
— Of course.
— I thought if I came all the way to Auburn you couldn’t possibly turn me down.
Then:
— You really don’t remember Arden? She brought me to your house that first time. When I met you in the greenhouse.
— I remember the greenhouse.
They passed through the doorway, and there was the thunk of the deadbolt behind them. Through the glass, the waiter turned away and moved back toward the counter. His shoes were cheap, and from here Heike could see that one sole was hanging half loose. It flapped a little as he walked. She watched him draw himself a beer.
Dolan was already a few steps away and backtracked to where she was standing.
— I meant, why’d you take it just now? Why bring it along?
She turned away from the door. Inside the diner she’d felt light-headed, unreal in the brightness and the music from the coin machine, Dolan’s pinging argument with the waiter. The parking lot was unpaved and smelled of loose earth, and the air felt almost damp enough to be called mist. Too warm to be mist: steam, then. The clouds held it down around her, the night heat and the stillness pressing into her shoulders, the back of her skull. There was a pulse to the silence, and she realized Dolan was speaking, had spoken to her.
She looked down for Daniel, to take his hand, a habitual thing.
— I keep thinking he is right here, she said. Just here beside me. I can feel him, his little shoulder, his hand against my leg.
A kind of tinnitus.
— What kind of person could do this?
Heike looked around for the car. She held both the purse and the notebook close to her chest, behind crossed arms. Dolan held her elbow to guide her.
He opened the door for her, and she slid into the front seat. The top was up. She was glad of it: the wetness of the night air pricked at her bare legs, a few spitting raindrops. Inside the car, the air was close, but at least there was no rain. She had shoes on, but her feet were grey to the ankles: the adventure in the bush with Eric’s car. Dolan shut the door and walked around to the other side and got in.
— Your place or mine?
She looked at him, and it was like she’d had a knock to the head and was slowly coming around. He was trying to bring her back and kept trying:
— No? And here I thought you were interested in a nightcap.
— I think you’re drunk already, she said.
— I’m perfectly sane.
— That’s not the same thing.
Dolan turned the key in the ignition, and the car lit up. There was no radio at that hour. Ahead of them the traffic signal went dark, then blinked red.
She pulled out the figurine in its wrapping and tucked it between her knees and held it there for safekeeping, then changed her mind and put it away again, and reached the purse over the back of the seat and let it fall to the floor behind them. Her wrists felt hot and swollen, and she touched the insides of them together, massaging them lightly, artery to artery. There were no other cars on the road. Dolan didn’t talk now but pulled a pack of Lucky Strike from inside his jacket and lit one as he drove. He offered the box to Heike, but she just looked out the window and shook her head.
Dolan lit a second cigarette, and a third. She was quiet. They were close to where he lived now. He flicked the wipers on and they streaked back and forth across the horizon. The housekeeper would be asleep when they got there. This was not the same as going to a man’s house for a party.
The mechanical sweep of the wipers as the rain picked up, the rubber-on-glass throbbing, shh-wump, shh-wump. She closed her eyes.
For a moment she was back in Eric’s office. He was slumped in his chair, and she backed away from him, only this time his eyes were open, watching her go. She tried to pull the door shut between them, but something held it back. Eric rose out of the chair and began to push toward her, heavily, as though he were coming through water. She pulled and pulled at the door, but it would not shut and she abandoned it, running down the hall to the front entrance. She turned to look into the armoire drawer, but this time it was empty, and she realized she already had the little figurine tight in her fingers. As she laid a hand on the front screen to push it open, the voice came again. So close. As though the girl, Tessa, were right next to her, could whisper in her ear. She turned back and Eric was gone. Now it was the girl coming down the hall behind her, her body shimmering as though she’d just burst out of the pond into bright sun. Her lips curled back, teeth bared and shining as a dog’s.
The flush of her own pulse woke Heike suddenly, a searing pain at her temples. She held her hands crossed in her lap, her fingernails digging hard enough into her palms to leave marks.
Dolan had turned south down the lake while she slept. There were boats in the water, moored and waiting like big-eyed animals. She pressed her wrists against each other again, and it was as though she were applying a tourniquet. Like some part of her was throbbing out, beat by beat, and she had to stop the bleeding. He pulled the car around the side of the house and killed the motor.
The girl’s voice still resonating in her mind, I remember, I remember you.
THERE WAS A TRAY of sandwiches under a glass cake dome on the table in the back kitchen. Left by the housekeeper, Heike supposed, but Dolan clutched his heart when she said this and swore that
he had made them just for her.
— Cucumber sandwiches? Or tuna and mayonnaise?
— Liverwurst, he said. That’s almost the same thing.
Heike clutched her own heart. He had a few brown beers in the icebox, and they drank them cold out of the bottle. Heike said she couldn’t possibly eat liverwurst sandwiches for breakfast and Dolan assured her that what they were eating was supper, or maybe lunch.
— Right now I’d say you need some sleep.
— All I’ve done is sleep, Heike said. Sleep and sleep and sleep. For years.
She took her bottle to the window and stood there, looking out. The faint glow from a string of patio lanterns along the rail of the back veranda, somewhere off to the left of where she stood, provided a smudge of grey light: the outline of a few garden hedges, the rosebushes nearest the windows. Farther back, the lawn sank into darkness. Heike pressed a hand against her belly, fingers stretched out. Daniel’s face as she had left him, tucked into bed, a thumb resting against his lips.
She could see the kitchen sink in periphery, and the edge of the table, and she remembered the cook, Mickey, sleeping there while the guests played cards on the lawn. For a moment she felt she’d made a terrible mistake. It was still the night of the clambake, she hadn’t returned home, Daniel wasn’t missing: a blip, a kind of anxious daydream. So afraid of what Eric might do that she’d made this all up and lived out her nightmare wandering around alone in a strange house. It was suddenly brighter in the room. She felt for a moment as though she were waking up.
She turned back to the kitchen but found it empty, the beer bottle warming in her hand. No cook or kitchen crew. Just Dolan at the table, sitting back, one ankle crossed over a knee.
— I think I might go mad, Heike said.
He’d pulled out a pair of reading glasses. There was a stack of mail in his lap, and he set it on the table.
— We won’t let that happen.
Heike stood there with her hand still pressed against her belly. The hand was holding her together. It was keeping her from spilling out, from doubling over, from screaming. Everything stayed quiet and inside. Where her hand was, there was only a hole.
The hum of the refrigerator started up. Dolan put the glasses on.
She stepped forward and plucked them away and folded them.
— You’re crippling an old man.
— Not so old.
She set the glasses gently on the sandwich tray.
— So you say.
— There’s no one else here?
— Worried?
He went to stand up, but she laid on a hand on his shoulder and he stayed where he was. She picked her skirt up and straddled him, the skirt swishing all around. His arms hung loose at his sides, and she wished he would take hold of her somehow, her waist, press the flat of his hand into her back and draw her in. The hole at her centre an icy thing, expanding out.
— It’s like I woke up in a nightmare, Heike said. But there’s no monster. Only emptiness.
She set her hands against his chest. He picked a leaf out of her hair.
— Tell me you were climbing trees.
— I was climbing trees.
— But really.
There was a pause. She could see their reflection in the window glass, blanched in the hard light.
— I want to feel something else, she said. I need to feel something besides this.
He began to pick at the buttons on her dress. When he was done, Heike slid it down off her shoulders and it fell to her waist. Her hair had fallen away from its pins for good and she brushed it back, away from her neck, and pushed at the straps of her bra until they slipped loose, down toward her elbows. Dolan ran a finger along the lace trim and then tugged the band until it gave, the hook pulling the eye out of its stitching.
The kitchen light shone down from overhead and made her skin glow, pale and bright. He did not touch her but his hands hovered between them, palms out, as though it were a holdup.
— What do we do now?
She pushed his hands down flat against her thighs and he leaned in and put his mouth on her collarbone, her shoulder. His hands were cold from holding the cold beer bottle and his mouth was cold from drinking it and when she kissed him she saw that her own mouth was just as cold and it felt good and clean and hard to kiss him like that, with the rain outside and the July warm night. She cupped her own breast and pushed closer.
He dug his teeth in so that she gasped. She had one hand wrapped around the back of his head; with the other, she fumbled for his belt. Her skirt was in the way. Her skirt was everywhere, light and gauzy and tangling up in her fingers, and she started to laugh but it came out like a kind of crying. He slipped his hand into her waistband and the button broke loose but even that wasn’t fast enough and she gripped it herself, tearing the fabric away in a long strip, the dress falling back onto the floor and her hands on him now, guiding him in, the awful brightness of the ceiling light and the shadow of them moving on the kitchen table and in the window, their reflection, pastel and glossy against the black.
WHEN THE SUN WAS COMING UP, he poured a bath and she sat on the edge of it and drained the water out and scrubbed her dirty feet first under the running tap, then plugged it up again. She lay back and showed him how you can use a bar of soap to blow bubbles from the palm of your hand. The housekeeper arrived, either from an outbuilding or her own house or a room somewhere; Heike didn’t know and didn’t see her, but there was hot coffee. Dolan brought it to her on a tray.
She counted the corners of the room before she slept. This is a way to have a wish granted. His bedsheets were the colour of oyster shells.
13.
Tell me about him.
— Eric?
They hadn’t closed the curtains. The rain that had begun in the early hours came down in a soft sheet now, marking off the boundaries of the house. The house its own country.
— Not Eric. Who cares about Eric?
She’d been dozing, half bound in the bed linen, her feet and legs sticking out. Now she drew them high under the covers and hugged her knees in.
— Daniel, then.
When she said the name, something cold needled through her and made it hurt to breathe. As a child she’d had pneumonia, the bacteria edging its way between membranes until every breath was a blade in her back. Pleurisy, the doctor had said. (A lady doctor from the university; her son lived in the apartment above. She drew the fluid out with a long, hollow syringe, and Heike’s mother held her still.)
Now Heike’s gaze sharpened, but she didn’t turn to him; she stayed on her back to quell the ache. She’d hardly slept at all, but had lain quiet and let her breath come in the little huffs she associated with sleep. Once or twice her hand had drifted to the side of the bed, as though the empty tumblers she’d lined up in a neat row on her own nightstand at home might be there—the tumblers with their powdery residue, along the rim or pooled to one corner of the bottom of the glass—the tonic she’d poured out into the carpet. Her mind coming back to them in a repetitive way, not unlike dreaming. She’d heard at some point a noise, some kind of banging, and her body tensed, imagining Eric at the front door. Beating his way past the maid to get in, Eric’s heavy step on the stairs. But the sound only the backfire of a neighbour’s car motor; this time, at least. She let her breath soften again into the sheets. A few hours of stillness as good as sleep, almost.
The rain outside was constant and thin, near invisible. She kept her eyes on the window. There was a single steady, fat drip from above the frame. A crack in the eave.
He was asking her about Daniel.
— What do you want to know?
— Anything. Draw me a picture.
She could feel that he wanted to hold her hand; or rather, he wanted her to want to hold his. To reach for him. She laid her hands flat on her own belly and rubbed at her hipbones.
— He is like other small boys, she said. Dirty. Warm. Curious: he has always his hands everywhere, look
ing to see what’s here, what’s there. Sometimes tired. Sometimes angry. She let her head tilt back and stopped talking and counted the corners of the room quietly to herself, and then again. There were six. Then, revising: Not angry, she said. Tired. Maybe sulking, a little bit. Her cheeks lifted. Hungry! Always hungry.
— You didn’t have brothers.
— No.
— You’ll find you go through a lot of sandwiches.
— More liverwurst, yeah?
Heike let her gaze fall away from the window, but she didn’t look at him or even down at her own body, focusing instead on some point in the tangle of bedclothes, as though they were a puzzle to be solved. She played with the sheet, loosening it where it was wound too tightly around her waist.
— At night, when we are sleeping, he curls right here. She lay a hand softly against her breastbone and turned on her side to face Dolan. And his little hair. His hair is always just a bit damp — from sleeping so warm, close in together. And he smells of soap, and sweet milk. His breath.
She was quiet then and lay on one side with her arm tucked under her head like a pillow. Her hand wrapped the back of her own skull, and she felt herself rocking slightly. Her jaw was tight.
Dolan pushed back against the headboard and reached for his cigarettes.
— I’ll light my own, Heike said. He shook the box at her, and she picked her favourite. She put her hand out for his lighter and let her tongue run along the seam of the cigarette, quick, before sparking the flame.
— How do you speak to him?
She exhaled a little curl of smoke.
— What do you mean?
— In English or German?
— The two together.
— Both?
— German when we are alone. Or when I tell him stories. Or when I sing. But some English, too.
— Tell me a story.
— In German? I think you won’t understand it.
— Tell me your best story. Dani’s favourite.
She looked away.
— I don’t keep track. Every story can be built a hundred ways. All you need are the bricks: a castle, a dark wood, a beautiful child. A clever little animal.
Hysteria Page 19