The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  Problem was, she’d disappeared.

  Overnight I picked up the habit of walking around the neighborhood, circling back and passing her house four or five times a day. I didn’t see her for three days, but the walks seemed to revive me. My legs were embarrassingly stiff and tired after the first two of these outings, but my head began to clear. I had been drinking less since her arrival. I shaved my beard. Got back on the Grape-Nuts. Cleaned the house. Looked out the window every half-hour.

  On the fourth or fifth day after Annette’s shower injury, I returned from a good two-mile stroll to see the sun setting on a forest-green convertible Mustang parked in front of Mr Ennis’s house, its black rag top down. It was a ’69, I could tell from the raised and rusting haunches. I don’t know how I knew it was her car, but I did. Maybe that first night I had glimpsed something rebellious and shambling underneath her veneer. Maybe it was a lucky guess, but it proved correct when she waved at me from the steps of my front porch. She stood, her hands in her back pockets, smiling.

  I halted on the sidewalk and almost screamed. Her hair was blonde. Not lighter in the sunlight. White blonde, platinum blonde, snowbird blonde, neck-breaking blonde.

  It’s nicer this way.

  13

  ‘Where you been, stranger?’ she said. Then she noticed my expression. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I walked toward her slowly. ‘Your hair.’

  ‘Yep,’ she said, doing a little shampoo commercial flip. ‘Can’t even see the cut now, can you?’

  ‘I hardly recognized you.’ With her blonde hair, her rusty freckles seemed . . . wrong.

  ‘You should have seen the bruise. Ugh, the purple under my hair, I might as well have taped a magnifying glass to my head. And it was time for a change anyway. I hated my hair.’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ I said. Pretty fucking strange. ‘I thought maybe you were in a coma by now.’

  ‘Aw, you’re sweet,’ she said. ‘I must have given you quite a scare.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  She squinted as if she couldn’t quite see me. ‘I slipped. I barely ate that day. Probably just fainted. It’s really not a big deal.’

  ‘I keep thinking about what you said, though. “Don’t let the red rabbit get me.” Like you were scared of the paintings.’

  She smiled. ‘Really? I don’t remember any rabbits. Maybe you can show me later and we’ll see if anything comes back to me.’

  I knew she had seen something. She just didn’t want to discuss it. I tried to think of a way to frame what was going to be, no matter how I framed it, an accusation.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she said. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘No, everything is not all right.’

  Annette crossed her arms over her chest.

  ‘My maid quit, after finding a pair of my wife’s shoes in the house.’ I waited, got no reaction. ‘Euvaldo Gomez seems to think—’

  ‘Oh!’ Annette lunged forward and took me by the arm. ‘Hold that thought. Can we talk about this over dinner? I got some shrimp at the market and left it soaking. I wanted to do something to make up for the other night. Do you have dinner plans, or is this too weird?’ Her eyes took on a vacant glaze. ‘You don’t owe me anything, ’ she added, her jubilation gone. ‘I’m such an idiot.’

  ‘No, no it’s fine, but . . .’ Her hair threw me off again. Why not black? Black hair would cover a wound better than blonde, wouldn’t it?

  ‘Around eight? I want to hear all about whatever’s going on.’ She was already twirling away. ‘Oh, I bought a good bottle of Scotch, for after!’

  I wanted to rush across the lawn and take her by the arm and ask her what she had been doing hanging around my house, what she saw in my bathroom that made her fall down, if she owned a shovel. I wanted to shake her and ask her if she had ever seen a photo of Stacey. But she was already gone.

  Instead I went inside and crawled onto the couch and rested my arm over my eyes. Maybe I should start drinking again. Sobriety is screwing up my perceptions.

  She acted as if we had already put the wreckage behind us, or at least made one hell of a start. The first encounter, the one that ended in sex, could still be written off as a freak turn of events. But I knew that if I accepted this dinner I would be guilty of encouraging more than friendship. Dinner could only escalate things.

  Is that really what she wants? Is that what I want? A romantic involvement made possible by our dead spouses? I’m sure history is littered with such death-born entanglements, but Annette wasn’t a Boleyn girl and this wasn’t the Ming Dynasty. This was my life.

  Shouldn’t there be a period of plutonic comforting, walks in the park, coffee-shop conversations? A consultation of friends and family, the tribal elders? Shouldn’t we be taking this more seriously? True, I had been lonely for a year. You’re young, Bergen had said. You’ve served your time. But what had the last year of her life been like? The last thirty days? How could she jump into this?

  We didn’t have to have sex tonight. We could talk, just have dinner. Dinner was okay, wasn’t it? What’s that dating service called? It’s Just Lunch! Yes, and it was just hair color. No, I shouldn’t go see her. And yet I had to know if she had been in my house - before we ever met.

  I had a few hours to kill before dinner. I decided to locate the missing gun. I would have to return it to Hermes. Having the Glock in the house only made me feel like there was a little black cloud following me around, waiting for me to get drunk again so a lightning bolt could blow my brains all over the walls. I looked around the first-floor rooms before remembering I had dropped it in the ballroom.

  The house was cut with afternoon sunlight. As I mounted the stairs, every corner in the hall shut off another pane of light streaming through another window, and by the time I got to the ballroom’s double doors I was standing in quiet shadows.

  I pushed the doors open and strode in as if I owned the place, which of course I did, and flipped on the lights. Why hadn’t we hired a contractor to install a few skylights in the ballroom? Three slits in the roof would have striped the room in warm light, and at night the view of the stars would have been a nice touch. But the sconces and overhead chandelier with its eight-candle flame bulbs lighted the room adequately, and my new-found sobriety helped me see the space for what it was: a hipster couple’s attempt to impress their friends and recreate a past era they never lived through in the first place. The ballroom no longer felt ominous or musty. The evil presence I had sensed had been ventilated. Expelled for good, I hoped. Now it was just a big room with some second-hand couches along the walls and a pretty cool bar at the back.

  The gun was not on the floor.

  I looked under the couches and the settee and end tables. I checked the shelves behind the bar and the drawers underneath it. No Glock. This is the problem with big houses. Even when you live alone, it’s too easy to leave something in a room on the other side, far from where you spend the bulk of your time.

  I shut the doors behind me, and made a complete circle of the second story - or four left turns, actually, since the hallway is one big rectangle. I glanced into the spare bedrooms and the small bathroom as I went. One nice thing about owning a big house - there’s plenty of room to spread out when your spouse can’t sleep. Sometimes Stacey would toss and turn, and tear herself out of bed at four in the morning, exasperated by her insomnia and my utter lack thereof. She never admitted it, but I know it angered her to see me snooze through the night while she obsessed over petty grievances with one of her friends, resented my next trip or simply emerged from the balm of her last Ambien too soon.

  She liked the small guest bedroom in the corner, the one with the tiny trundle bed and baby-sized rocking chair - items that would never be used by a Little Lord Hastings and which I now found too depressing to be creepy. Whenever I woke early to discover she was not in bed with me, I almost always found her in this tiny corner room with Henry, our beagle, who now lived somewhere in Burbank with a girl o
f ten who probably pulled his ears and let him sleep in her bed. Waking alone on such mornings, I used to stop and stare at my wife and her dog, curled into a ball with his butthole aimed at her face, and I would wonder why she never slept so soundly with me. Another question I probably should have stayed in therapy to answer.

  The child’s rocking chair was not empty.

  I stared at the large teddy bear and tried to remember which one of us bought it, when and where. No, this was not a slip of the memory. I wouldn’t have forgotten this bear. He was fat and rough with a sharp snout, modeled after a black bear, not the cuddly type you find in toy stores. His glass eyes were beady and brown, his fur paws padded with real leather and - my favorite feature - his claws were not little nubs of felt, but honest-to-god talons. Made of plastic, yes, but they were hard, and marbled like they had dirt in the grooves underneath. Two inches long, sharp enough to put an eye out. This ‘toy’ could maul Paddington in two or three quick strokes, yanking his stuffing out like Stove-Top before taking a big shit in that yellow hat.

  Lovely. Just the thing to prop up in the crib with the mewling nipper.

  He must have been expensive, I realized. He was a serious bear, the kind some energy consultant father might bring home to his son when he returned from Ukraine. I crouched in front of him. The bear wore a plaid collar with a gold tag attached to a small brass ring. The tag was engraved. It said

  Kenneth B. Bear

  Nope. Total blank. If Stacey had bought it, I would have noticed it at some point during the past twelve months. I guessed B was for black, but whose idea was it to name a stuffed animal Kenneth? It sort of fit his humorless expression, but still.

  ‘Where did you come from, Kenneth?’ I said, flicking his hard black nose.

  Kenneth did not answer. My fingernail hurt. The gun wasn’t here. I shut the door. My temper flared again. Someone was taunting me and I didn’t care for it.

  The closet and dresser in the master bedroom yielded no firearms.

  The gun was not upstairs, nor - let’s start facing facts, James - in the house at all. Either I had left it in the car (unlikely) or someone had stolen it (possible; not pleasant to dwell on). Then again, maybe Annette had taken it away when I fled, just in case I blew up at her. She might have hidden it to protect me from myself. One more thing to ask her, and, while I was at it, I decided to take the bear with me. I backtracked to the corner room and picked Kenneth up by the ear. He was heavy, so I hefted him under one arm.

  Evening was setting in. The hallway was darker than when I came up just a few minutes ago. My footsteps seemed too loud in the hallway. All the doors were closed and this irritated me. So many useless rooms. Why did I stay? Who needed this house? It was absurd. Half a dozen paces from the front stairway, the air behind me whooshed and someone slapped me on the back. Kenneth tumbled to the floor and I stumbled after him. My right hand shot out to the wall for support and my feet landed hard, close together. The sting radiated from the center of my back, the crack of flesh against flesh still movie-slap-loud in my ears.

  I tottered, surprised and angry as I turned, instantly reduced to a bully’s victim in the elementary school hallway, filled with an anger that was replaced by a quickening, immense fear. There was no one standing behind me and no footsteps echoed in the silence that lingered.

  ‘Oh, god damn you.’ My voice was meek, and once again I hated the sound of it, not least of all because I didn’t know who I was talking to.

  I tried to rub my back but could not reach the spot. A wide patch of my skin was still stinging. I entered the bathroom and flicked on the light, which seemed to come to life slower than usual, a delay I attributed to the energy-saver fluorescent bulb. I glanced at the rabbit paintings on my way to the basin. They were the same as always. Plain, uncaring, flat and annoying in their dumb insignificance.

  I twisted, I turned. I used Stacey’s handheld mirror to get the angles right as the bathroom seemed to drop twenty degrees. With the proper positioning of mirrors, my shirt pulled up to my shoulders, my neck stiff and my heart rate climbing, at last my pale skin revealed the unmistakable pink shape of a woman’s hand.

  14

  When she opened the door and saw me standing there with the Kenneth bear, she simply looked at it with a trace of a smile, then looked up at me expecting an explanation, which I did not offer.

  ‘Is that a gift?’

  I half threw the bear at her and it bounced off her knees and fell on the porch between us. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Oh!’ She started, then looked at me like I was crazy. ‘Hello?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Why do I feel like I’m missing something?’ she said.

  ‘Come on. Enough.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it?’

  ‘About a giant stuffed bear?’

  I threw my hands out - well?

  ‘James? What? I don’t understand.’

  I told her where I found it, but I left out the part where someone or something slapped me on the back. ‘Is there something you need to tell me?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t do that.’ She seemed hurt by the accusation. ‘Do you want to come inside or . . .’

  ‘Look, have you been in my house or not? Because Euvaldo Gomez saw someone in my house. A woman.’

  ‘You think it was me.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘You said you were watching me.’

  Annette rolled her eyes in frustration. ‘I was checking out the neighborhood. I toured the house, walked around the property. I might have strayed into your yard. I like to know who my neighbors are and this isn’t exactly Westwood, is it?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘If I really wanted to break into your house, why would I tell you I was watching you first?’

  ‘He’s pretty observant, Annette. Anyone else, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But Euvaldo is sharp. And then I thought about the night we met, how you walked in and just sort of announced yourself . . .’

  Annette took my hands and pulled me toward her. ‘I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. I told you that, though, right? The first night. I said that I had been trying to decide if I should contact you.’

  ‘Right, and I appreciate your honesty.’

  She released my hands. ‘But you’re still wondering if I was in your house. Planting teddy bears. Running a game. That’s what you think?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘I lost my husband, James. I’m not really in the mood for games. I don’t know who Euvaldo saw in your house before we met, but it wasn’t me.’

  We had a little stand-off. I blinked first. ‘Must have been a misunderstanding, then.’

  She sighed. ‘So, are you still coming in for dinner, or was this just an interrogation?’

  I felt sufficiently foolish. She looked at the bear, then back at me. She laughed. ‘Oh, James. A bear?’

  I left the bear on the porch and went inside.

  ‘Well, don’t leave him outside. He looks expensive.’

  ‘He’s mean, is what he is.’

  Over dinner I kept staring at her eyebrows. They were blonde too, and thicker than I remembered. Had she done them before dinner, or had I been too stunned to notice earlier? What else had she dyed blonde, and did I really want to know?

  All she did was pink some shrimp in a skillet with butter, cayenne and the juice of two lemons before dumping the contents into a larger pot where she tossed it all with fresh linguini, but the result turned me bow-legged. I hardly touched the salad and bread, and limited myself to one glass of the spicy red wine she poured with the meal.

  ‘What are these little bits of grass?’ I said.

  ‘Chives. I found them growing in the backyard. You like them?’

  ‘Uuuuhhh.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. I’m easily impressed.’

  ‘I think that was a compliment,’ she said.

  An
nette wore leather clogs, faded jeans and a blouse that might have been spun from green cotton candy. The top only made her freckles darker, their background whiter. Radiant is not a word I use to describe most women, but she really did seem to be glowing.

  ‘So how was the rest of your week?’ she said.

  I had decided to lay the rest on her. ‘Someone buried my wife’s shoes in my backyard. When, I don’t know, but that same someone, or maybe someone else, went ahead and dug them back up.’

  Annette’s eyes went wide. ‘Really? My God, why?’

  ‘Don’t know.’