Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Down below, like a big rat scurrying around in the dark, Ray was trying to find his way up.

  29

  Y our mother attacked me,” Leigh had said in that highway diner to Ray, earlier in the evening, after finishing a cup of strong, steaming hot coffee, “the night I left you. With a chisel.”

  Ray stood up. “Have you lost your mind? My mother-I don’t believe this.” The man in the next booth let his paper fall to the table and turned around.

  “Please. Ray. Sit down,” Kat whispered. She pulled him back into the booth beside her.

  “It’s outrageous. A damn lie! What are you trying to do to us, Leigh?”

  Leigh looked him in the eye. “I wish I could spare you this, but I can’t hide what happened any longer. You have to know. I’m sorry but I am telling the truth. She stabbed me in the stomach with a chisel.”

  She continued as if an inner propeller had started up and could not be stopped. “I ran upstairs and out of the house, holding my hand inside my shirt to stop the bleeding, to hold myself in one piece. Ray-I heard her coming behind me. I was so terrified. She’s strong when she wants to be, you know. I barely got inside the van, with the door shut, when I heard her whack the rear grille and I started up and drove like crazy. I didn’t know where.

  “Once I got to the freeway I looked down and saw my shirt was wet and my hand on the steering wheel was wet. I was bleeding, feeling a lot of pain, so I stopped and asked directions at a gas station.” She ran a hand through her hair. “What amazed me was how calm I felt then just being in my own car, as if I was out of danger. Funny, isn’t it? The guy directed me to an urgent care clinic. I had a towel over my stomach, so he couldn’t see anything, I guess, or maybe he would have offered to drive me or called an ambulance.

  “Anyway, they asked what happened, and I said I did it to myself, that I made furniture and had stumbled against a tool in my shop. I don’t know if they believed me, but what could they do about it? They sewed me up, gave me a shot, prescriptions, all that. The gash skimmed along the front of my stomach and if I had been facing another direction I would have taken a hit in my liver and probably would have died.”

  Ray’s face was screwed up like a child’s. “You can’t be saying my mother would do a thing like that.”

  “She did, Ray. She would have killed me. I’ve thought and thought about it.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Then I tried to think. I wanted to call you. I wanted your arms around me and the safety of our house, but we had fought-I thought you never wanted to see me again. And I felt like-like it would kill you to hear this. Look at you now!”

  Kat said, “Take it easy, Ray. Just listen for now, okay?”

  “I hate having to talk to you like this. I know how much you love her. I have rehearsed many ways of telling you over the past days, but I can’t make it easier.” She began to sob.

  “It’s okay,” Kat told her. She reached across the table to hold Leigh’s cold, trembling hand for a moment. “Just tell us what happened.”

  “Well, after the clinic, I-was still feeling very shocked and pretty battered. I needed to think and the cabin at Idyllwild seemed like a logical place to rest and take some painkillers. I drove up there and collapsed. The next day, even though I was still in some pain, I got worried you might think of the cabin and follow me there, so I moved on. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight, but I thought you didn’t love me anymore. I thought I had lost your trust forever. And still, I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had.”

  Ray said, “Leigh, you have it all wrong. Martin was right about one thing. I drove you away from me. Ever since you started talking about having a child-I got so scared. I drove you to him. You needed to be loved and I took my love away. And then I wanted to blame you for everything! I could see myself-hurting you back. Hurting you more.” Ray closed his eyes and shook his head. “I wanted you to go. I’m afraid you felt that.”

  She nodded. “That’s why you called your mother and told her about Martin and me. I can only imagine what you said. And she-she got so angry at the hurt I caused you, she wanted me to die.”

  “No! No! I didn’t call her! I wouldn’t do that! She didn’t know until Sunday!”

  “Are you sure?” Leigh said. “It’s all right, I don’t blame you.”

  “I didn’t! She didn’t know until after that night! You’re all messed up! None of this is true!”

  “Wait,” Kat said. “Keep your voice down, Ray. Sssh. Ray, think about the shirt we found.”

  Ray put his face in his hands.

  “Leigh, go back, just explain again. You left the Topanga house. Why would you drive to Whittier?”

  “I was going to my parents’ house,” Leigh said. “But just as I got to town I saw Esmé’s inhaler lying there on the car seat, you know, the one she needs for her asthma. I saw that and thought, oh, damn. She’s running out.”

  “She used one while I was there on Sunday. Must have been the same one,” Ray said.

  Kat asked, “But why did you have the inhaler, Leigh?”

  “Esmé called the house on Friday morning, but Ray had gone in to work early, so I got the call. Her local pharmacy had run out and wouldn’t get any until Monday. She asked me to ask Ray to pick it up in L.A. and bring it on Sunday, during our regular dinner. I offered to bring it over instead.

  “I just thought I’d drop it off. It was only a few more miles, and then I’d go stay with my folks. I got to Close Street, but I couldn’t raise her. She didn’t answer the door, so I went in the kitchen because I know she leaves that door unlocked sometimes when she takes out the trash. I called out-getting more worried. Then I saw the basement door open.”

  “She keeps it locked.”

  “Right. I thought maybe she had an asthma attack down there, or slipped down those steep steps. So I went in and ran down the stairs. It was so weird.” She paused, narrowing her eyes, remembering.

  “What, Leigh?” Kat said.

  “Well, I came down fast. She whirled around, and there was an instant there when I’d swear she was deciding this was exactly the right thing to do, then she stabbed me with the chisel. I dropped the inhaler, which was still in my hand in a bag, and I stumbled back up the steps. She followed me, but I guess the situation got her worked up. I could hear her wheezing, trying to catch me.”

  Ray had kept his hurt, shocked eyes on Leigh. “A chisel?” he interrupted. “Why would she be in the basement with a chisel?”

  “I don’t know,” Leigh answered. “Trying to get something open? Do you know what she keeps down there? I mean, it looked empty to me.”

  “Working on the pipes?” Ray said. “You know, the sink was leaking upstairs. Probably the water had drizzled down there. I warned her about that. It could weaken the walls or even flood the place.”

  “Old people have a lot of problems that might change their personalities,” Kat said, straining for a reasonable explanation.

  “She really did this to you? Really?”

  Leigh broke down again. “It’s true.”

  “She isn’t old. She isn’t senile or crazy,” Ray said. “My mother knows how to control herself. Oh, she sure does. But hang on. That was true up to a few days ago. But she has been drinking over the past few days, a lot I think, like binge drinking, and it started very suddenly. Was she drunk?”

  “She was stone cold sober,” Leigh said.

  “Do you think she-is she taking drugs? Methamphetamine? Cocaine? PCP?” Kat said.

  “My first thought was, yeah, she’s on something. She ran toward me like a ghastly character in a movie. I could almost hear the music.”

  “She hates drugs,” Ray said. “She hates having to use the inhaler sometimes for her asthma. She won’t even take an aspirin.”

  Kat bit her lip and looked at him. He was back with them, but the expression on his face was so sad she could hardly stand it.

  “Ray,” she said, “your mother must have known
about your fight with Leigh. It’s the only explanation for her attack on Leigh, and it’s wild enough.”

  “I didn’t call her, Leigh,” Ray said. “I swear to you, I didn’t.”

  Kat said, “Could she have been-eavesdropping at your house?”

  “But I drove straight to Whittier like a bat out of hell and there she was,” Leigh said. “She couldn’t have beat me.” She looked at the table. “Then why? She must be mentally ill. But-”

  “I ate dinner with her that Sunday, after you had been gone two days. She was just like always. She seemed sorry you had left.”

  Leigh said, “I suppose I should have gone to my dad. But imagine. He would have had your mother arrested. I was so confused. I-I didn’t want to hurt you any more.”

  Ray took it in.

  She pulled up her shirt and lifted her body a little. “Look.”

  Three angry red welts with stitch marks, about four inches long, scored through her pale skin just above the navel.

  “Jesus,” Ray said. He touched his wife’s skin and Kat could see any remaining doubt had melted away.

  “You poor thing,” Kat told Leigh, staring at it. Then a second wave of feeling overtook her, sadness for Ray.

  In finding his wife, had he lost his mother?

  Leigh pulled down her shirt, dropping back into her seat. For a few moments nobody spoke.

  “We need to talk to her. Let’s go to Whittier,” Ray said.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Kat said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “We should just call the police,” Leigh said imperatively. “I’m not afraid of her, with the two of you with me, and I want to know why she did this to me. But we need to stay safe.”

  “She attacked Leigh,” Kat said. “She’s violent.”

  “She would never hurt me,” Ray said, so decisively his tone would brook no further disagreement. “Leigh, I want you to go home with Kat. I’ll drop you both in Hermosa and then go talk to her. I’ll pick you up afterwards.”

  “It’s more than sixty miles to Hermosa,” Leigh calculated, “and then at least forty-five minutes getting back to Whittier. You’ll be so tired. In no shape to talk to her.”

  After a few more minutes of wrangling, they decided to call Rappaport. They got his voicemail and left a message.

  “ Whittier ’s on the way,” Ray said. “I’m going.”

  “Then we’ll wait in the car for you if that’s the way you want it. I swear we will let you work it out yourself,” Kat promised, thinking, Holy shit, if anyone ever needed backup! They could not let him go there alone.

  “Let’s go,” Leigh said.

  They went outside to the car and got inside, Ray in the driver’s seat, Leigh beside him, and Kat in the back. Then Kat and Leigh waited and waited. He didn’t start the car. “I need to say something, Leigh. You know, I used to hear about people having breakdowns and it had no meaning for me. Then, this year, it happened. You started talking about children, remember?”

  Leigh nodded.

  “Well, I got afraid. I never had a father. No role model. And I knew my parents had divorced. Although my mother never talked about him, I understood he was off-limits for a reason, probably something pretty ugly. I suspected that made me a bad bet.”

  “Ray, we can talk about this later.”

  “No. Because here’s the bad news. It turns out-at least, from what I’ve found out in this kind of compulsive genealogical research I’ve been doing”-he laughed slightly-“I was right. My father was a vicious thug. He stalked my mother for years. He’s the reason we ran like scared bunnies for all those years.”

  “How do you know that, Ray?” Leigh asked.

  He told her and Kat about the keys, about the houses, and, finally, about the tapes.

  “Why did your mother make recordings like that?” Kat asked, “and then leave them hidden in these houses?”

  “I have a theory. She was afraid of this guy catching up with her. If she thought he might hurt or even kill her-or me-she might have wanted those tapes to get the police after him, like some kind of evidence.”

  “But they were hidden.”

  “If she had been killed, and her home was searched, they could have found them easily.”

  Leigh frowned with concern. “So you found out about your father. Nobody has easy parents, Ray. Some are worse than others, but that doesn’t mean-”

  “I’ve been thinking so much about how you can cripple yourself,” he went on doggedly, “obsessing on whys and feeling permanently bruised by things that have happened in life that you can’t change. Since you left, I’ve understood love so much better. It’s like”-he struggled for words-“a house with walls that change color, shape, position every day, a place that’s so full of life it never stops changing. I want to tell you-I’m not afraid of that anymore.” For a long moment, they stared at each other, then melted into an embrace, a surrender to each other that made Kat’s breath catch.

  When they finally pulled apart and straightened up, Ray started the car and rolled up the road.

  30

  Esmé, loitering at the cellar door, hung back. She heard her son, the love of her life, down there. She wished he of all people understood.

  Opening the door to the cellar, the light off, she began to creep down, her hand finding its way down the rail.

  Ray squirmed into the pitch-black. Kat had shoved a small flashlight into his hand. Its aura cast dim shadows on the walls.

  At the door, at the top of the stairs, he heard something.

  Mom, he thought.

  Rather than worry about her, he shone his light around. He noted the cobwebs, the living spiders, the dank wetness of a space that needed, according to his architect-sensibility, a dry atmosphere.

  “Mom?” he said, stepping into the space.

  Her voice came from very close by, inches away from him, like a scent on the wind. He felt her touch his cheek.

  “Right here.”

  “Mom?” He heard her step in even closer. He heard his own throbbing heart and thought he heard hers, too.

  “So you broke in.”

  “You locked me out. Took my key. You weren’t going to open the front door. I need to talk to you, Mom.”

  She said, “I hoped Leigh would never come back. I thought, if she doesn’t come back, we’re okay. We can go on as always.”

  “I love her, Mom. I want her home.”

  “I know you love Leigh. But I’m mad at her.”

  “Her friend, Kat, got me going. She had her own reasons for looking for Leigh, nothing to do with you or me, but I’m glad she helped me find her.”

  “Same outcome. Leigh’s out there on my doorstep. So’s her friend, Kat. They are up there waiting. Meantime, what should I do? That’s a big question.”

  “You hurt Leigh, Mom, stabbed her with a chisel, for God’s sake. You almost-”

  “I did my best.” Esmé’s laugh was dry, crackling. She had stepped back into the darkness. “I was hoping she died. But no such luck. I never had any.”

  “You’ve been drinking. I can smell it.”

  “I’m not that drunk. Not so drunk I don’t see you break into my house just like she did.”

  “We have to figure out how to help you, Mom.” The dark made it hard to do anything. “Why won’t the light go on?”

  “On your own you would never have gone after her. You would have let her go, because I taught you that, Ray, how to let go of things and people. How to move on, adapt to new circumstances. It took a lot of guts, living the way we did.”

  “She’s my wife. It’s different. I never wanted to let her go.”

  “Every single time we moved I reminded you that I was your rock. The two of us made a good family. We never needed anybody else.”

  Ray’s flashlight landed on something. “The bricks are loose.”

  He fingered it, and the crude mortar peeled up like an onion. “I told you, it’s crap. Not a professional job.”

  “Don’t mes
s with the wall, Ray,” his mother said. “This is my house. My life.”

  “This is a real problem here, the bricks. This has to be repaired right away,” he said. He knew it was an incongruous thing to say, but he couldn’t help it. He felt so comfortable in the role of a man who knew how to solve construction problems.

  His mother laughed again. He shined the flashlight on her face and heard her laughter, saw her terrible smile. He saw a glint in her hand. “What’s that you’ve got?”

  “Oh well,” she said. “The time has come, I suppose.”

  “What am I missing?”

  “You have all the keys you need,” Esmé said.

  “Where’s the friggin’ light?” Ray shouted. “What is this?” He had been fiddling with the wall. A brick came loose, then another. “Some kind of opening.” He reached inside.

  “You do not have the right to come here and invade my past.”

  Ray moved the light down. He saw a big knife glinting. One of her sharp ones.

  That night, Ray, twelve years old, had slept in the small room at the back of the house. Esmé had decorated it in blues and greens with an athletic theme because at that age he followed a number of national teams. He would watch games on Saturdays and Sundays, just like Henry had done years ago, genetically programmed to enjoy watching men bat balls, run around, and get knocked down.

  Esmé had stayed up a little late watching her favorite sitcoms, savoring her time alone.

  Curled up on the sofa, hot tea in hand, she had watched television, following the shenanigans of a group of unbelievable characters, reveling in the rewarding ending. She turned the tube off then, stretched, and carried her drink into the kitchen. She didn’t like facing litter in the morning. She liked it all put away.

  Right when she was opening the dishwasher, she heard it, a car door closing, not slamming, but closing carefully.

  Alerted, she crept toward the front door and peered through the window beside it.