Somehow she made it to nightfall. She took another sedative and buried herself in the covers. After a while, in a semi-drowse, she climbed out of bed and brought down the shoe box she kept on a high shelf in her closet. In the light of the bedside lamp, she rummaged through the items in the box until she found what she was after.
Then she leaned against the headboard and smiled.
They'd had these pics taken in one of those four-for-a-dollar photo booths in the downtown Zeller's. Horsing around, Kelly had hiked her T-shirt over her head in one of them, exposing her unholstered boobs, and the expression on Peter's face was one of lecherous and delighted surprise. In another Peter was doing his infamous Jack Nicholson impersonation, complete with A-frame eyebrows and leering, toothy grin. Kelly was doing what she always did when Peter pulled that face, cracking up like a loony. She recalled the feverish embarrassment she'd felt when the store detective jerked the curtain aside, an instant after her delighted squeal and a heartbeat before the next shot had flashed. Twin expressions of juvenile surprise adorned the next shot, the two of them goggling up at the detective, Kelly trying frantically to tuck in her T-shirt, Peter's eyes swallowing his face. In the last of the four they were locked in a tender embrace, as oblivious of the flash glare as they might have been of a sudden nuclear attack.
Kelly felt the tears coming.
Always the tears.
Leaving the light on, she sank under the covers and let the pill do its work. Sleep came grudgingly.
And brought dreams. . .
Peter was playing for her. She sat beside him on the piano bench, a girl of seventeen and still a virgin, so much in love it hurt (a deep, moist ache in that part of her which longed to know him), but their first episode of lovemaking was still weeks away, and she had to content herself with his nearness and the pledge that seemed inherent in his music. I love you, Kelly, the chords seemed to say. I will always love you.
Oh, what a splendid day that had been. Spring had triumphed over winter, and now there were buds unfurling, crocuses blooming, and children splashing gaily in the snowmelt. Sam and Leona were away for the weekend—Leona had tried to drag Peter along, as always twisting the screws of guilt, but Kelly had managed to talk him out of it—visiting Leona's brother in Toronto, and she and Peter were left alone.
She dreamed of that day now.
Seated beside him on the piano bench, one hand perched on the firmness of his upper thigh, she watched the knowing pass of his fingers over the keys. Spring sunlight beamed through the big bay window in whose belly the piano stood, and smoldered in the blondness of his hair. She could even smell him.
Old Spice.
Now his hands left the keys and he faced her, his breathing labored in the sudden, ominous silence. His nostrils flared and the pupils of his eyes grew wide, obliterating the irises with black. His hand covered hers and pressed it to his crotch, which bulged enormously under her touch. He grinned and his teeth were yellow.
"Peter," Kelly mumbled, both fearful and aroused. "Peter, this isn't right."
And what she meant was that this wasn't the way that day had gone, but also that the way he was touching her was wrong; he had never been forceful or rough. In the dream she tried to tell him that—but he jammed his mouth over hers, ramming his tongue down her throat like a rapist's thick penis. With his free hand he laid hold of her hair, while with the other he ground her open palm against his groin. A confounding blend of passion and revulsion gripped her now, and she half fought, half responded.
With an ease that was frightening, Peter lifted her onto the piano lid. Sliding her away, he hiked up her skirt and jerked her panties down to her ankles. Without hesitation, he drove three rigid fingers into her middle. She cried out in pain—
And awoke. Something deep inside of her tugged. . .
And then the tears came, hot and bitter, squeezed free on sobs that shook her to the core.
Two weeks later, on the sixteenth, Marti dragged Kelly out for some shopping. It was the first day of the Christmas break, and Marti was almost delirious with the Yuletide spirit. Her relationship with her male counterpart at Chelmsford Secondary was progressing famously, and she thought he might pop the question on the Eve. It was for these reasons that Marti was running on high octane on this snowy afternoon and failed to notice Kelly's sullen, distracted state. They were sitting at a table on the busy New Sudbury Shopping Center concourse, sipping pop and nibbling french fries, when suddenly Kelly burst into tears.
"My God, Kelly, what is it?"
But Kelly could only shake her head. Ignoring the inquisitive stares of passersby, Marti positioned her chair next to Kelly's and hugged her until the worst of the deluge had passed. Then she led her out to the car. Snow sifted down from a white sky in merry little flakes, and the air was pleasantly mild. While her aging Firebird warmed up, Marti turned to Kelly and tried again.
"What's up, Kel? You and Will have a run-in?'
Kelly released a short, acid chuckle. "You're way behind on the news," she said, sniffling tike a child. "I haven't seen Will in weeks. . . and no, he didn't dump me, if that's what you're thinking." It was. "I dumped him."
"And now you're sorry," Marti ventured.
Kelly sighed and faced the windshield, cold in spite of the already toasty heater. Though Marti was her dearest friend, it was Christmastime and Marti was a Christmas freak; she loved every tinsel-flecked minute of it, from these mad shopping sprees to dressing the tree to loitering beneath the nearest sprig of mistletoe. Moreover, she was in love and contemplating wedlock, a circumstance that to Kelly had always seemed about as likely as global nuclear disarmament. Marti was vibrant, happy, and alive. And in the face of all that, wouldn't it be dreadfully unfair of Kelly to unload all of this crap onto her?
Kelly decided that it would. Besides, over the past few months she and Marti had been. . . drifting apart. If there was any blame to be laid for this regrettable situation, it belonged as much to Kelly as it did to Marti.
But it was a blameless situation, and Kelly knew it. People changed. Times changed.
Come on, Wheeler, tell the truth, to yourself if nobody else. Nothing has changed between you and Marti. She still loves you madly and you still love her. You just don't want to admit that your life is turning to mud. You don't want her to think that you're losing your mind. . . and aren't you?
The answer was an unqualified yes. How else could she explain the turmoil of the past two weeks? How would any half-competent psychiatrist explain it? At first glance, it all seemed remarkably straightforward, even in the apparent absence of a precipitating cause. All these years of suppressed emotion were finally leaking to the surface, eroding the structure of a life which, in reality, was more fabrication than real. You didn't have to be a student of Freud to figure that much out.
But wasn't "leaking" too mild a word? Because all of that poison or suppressed emotion or whatever you wanted to call it was exploding to the surface, geysering out in a pillar of molten pain. And it was no catharsis. There was nothing healthy in any of this. With each passing night her mind threw up some new and twisted mutation, some new distortion of the past. It had reached the point where she either spent her nights trying to stay awake or drugged herself so heavily that in the morning her dreams were banished from memory.
In her waking life she thought of Will often. There had been maybe a hundred times over the past two weeks when in the backwash of the previous night's dreams her resolve had gone to tatters and she had picked up the phone and dialed his number. But she'd always slammed it back down again before the wire-hiss had turned to ringing. The one time she did let it ring, there had been no answer. At work, she'd thought defeatedly, and deemed it a sign from the gods. She didn't think she could have spoken to him anyway. She'd only wanted to hear his voice.
Yes, she thought of Will often. But she never dreamed of him. Peter dominated her dreams now, as he had all those years ago. She had dreamed of him when he was whole and their future still
lay shiningly ahead of them. And she'd dreamed of him later, after the accident, when his image had turned a nightmarish yellow. But with time he'd withdrawn from her dreams, dropping back sporadically to leave tears on her pillow, but for the most part keeping away.
But now. . .
Since that night with Will—a night that still chilled her in its convoluted reality—Peter had. . . come back.
Back to her dreams.
At first it had been good, within the context of dreaming at least, as fond wishes warmly fulfilled. She'd felt so close to him in those dreams, bonded in every sense, at one with him in a way that only dreams could allow. He filled up her ache, like gold in a hollowed tooth.
But since the day she'd visited the hospital—an abortive mission that had induced its own breed of nightmare—the tone of her dreams had undergone a vulgar transformation. Not infrequently over the past several nights she had awakened in a frenzy of masturbation, drenched with sweat and moaning Peter's name, her legs spiked back and her fingers buried deep in her vagina, Peter's presence so palpable inside her—and that was the operative word here, "inside," as if somehow he shared her skin—she wanted to scream with the sense of violation. Her orgasms came like cold dollops of ice cream dropped on her belly and then she turned on her side and wept, despising his intrusions and loathing herself and yet stricken by his passing from her shell. And slowly, some hateful part of her began to look forward to this carnal delirium, to actively seek it out.
And the dreams weren't the sum of it. There were other things, events more subtle and difficult to define. Like the feeling she got sometimes when she was alone and the wind was snuffling at the fireplace doors, the feeling—sudden and lacking any basis in reality—that there was someone right behind her, the skin-prickling sense that unseen hands reached out for her neck. When these phantom sensations came, she would whirl from whatever she was doing—on one near-disastrous occasion she'd been stirring pasta into boiling water and had knocked the pot to the floor, splashing her jeans and almost scalding the cat—and affrightedly scan the room, certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that someone had just darted out of the room. Then she would prowl the entire house, the Louisville Slugger she'd kept at her bedside in Kingston clasped murderously in her sweating hands.
But there was never anyone there.
There were subtle stirrings—pockets of electric air, sudden, intimate rushes—and throughout the house, objects seemed constantly. . . out of place. Though neat by nature, Kelly had never been one of those fussy housekeepers. When she vacuumed or dusted, she took no great pains to replace every plant or ornament precisely in its original place. Yet even with that she'd begun to get the unsettling sense that things had been shifted while she was out or asleep. A potted plant displaced three or four inches from its usual spot. The glasses in the cupboard rearranged. The boots in the rack slyly shifted. She would look at these things and in her increasingly agitated state be hard pressed to trust her own memory—and at the same time swoon with the awful certainty that someone had access to her home and was screwing with her mind, softening her up for the kill. God help her, it had even occurred to her that it might be Will, crazy with jealousy or rage. Jesus. Sweet, innocent Will.
Oh, yeah, she was losing her mind all right.
She turned in her seat and looked at Marti. In the silence, the defroster had cooked two oblong eyeholes in the windscreen.
"Forget it," Kelly said. "I just get a little nostalgic around Christmastime. You know how it is."
Marti started to protest, but she knew Kelly well enough to read the signal. When Kelly dismissed an issue out of hand like this, no matter how obvious it was that she was hurting, there was no point in trying to push her any further. It would all come out in due time.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Marti said, deciding to test the water just a little.
"Right as rain," Kelly answered, mustering a smile that felt like a muscle cramp. "Let's go find us some Christmas cheer."
"I'm here for you, babe," Marti said, touching Kelly's hand. "I don't want you to forget that."
"Thanks," Kelly said. "But I just need some time to think."
"Ten-four," Marti said, and clunked the Firebird into gear.
THREE
ON WICKED
WINGS
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Lockerby cab dropped Leona Gardner in front of the church. She paid her fare—part of it in quarters she'd pilfered from Sammy's piggy bank—then stepped out into the gentle snowfall. Fat flakes seesawed to the pavement like thistledown, and for a moment Leona was reminded of her girlhood, of the first time she'd taken a close look at snowflakes and marveled at their intricate shapes. In the orangey glow of a street lamp, she squinted at a giant flake that had settled on her coat sleeve, trying to snag the receding tail of that sweet memory. But her vision was blurry, and before she could focus on it the flake collapsed into a featureless droplet of water. Stalled on the steps, already five minutes late for mass, Leona realized that she'd forgotten having had a childhood. Her memory contained only misery.
She clopped up the long cement staircase, adding her boot prints to the hundreds of others in the light dusting of snow. Winded, she paused before the hand-carved doors and dug in her purse for her flask. One last puff to carry me through, she thought. Midnight mass was a long one, and the incense always made her feel ill.
Beyond the doors, organ music boomed in the cavernous nave, the voices of the choir rising in solemn harmony.
With a practiced twist, Leona uncapped the flask. A tip, a guzzle, another twist, and the flask disappeared again. Exhaling hot vapor, she composed her face, straightened her back, and entered Saint Joseph's Cathedral.
The caroling had barely begun, but some vestige of pride prevented Leona from entering the main body of the church. It was packed in there, and she could see herself being forced to march all the way up to the altar in search of a seat. After adjusting her hat—the same one she'd worn to her son's funeral, God rest his precious soul—she headed for the big wrought-iron candelabrum that stood just inside the left aisle entryway. The entire church was adorned with these flickering monuments, each of them presided over by a plaster-cast statue of an apostle or saint, which stood in a dusty alcove in the wall above. Through some secret irony, Leona had chosen Saint Peter's allocation of candles. Hands spread in blessing and welcome, the sober-faced saint huckstered coins in inanimate silence. Dutifully Leona rummaged in her purse for the last of Sammy's quarters. She deposited them, fifty cents' worth, in the strongbox, then lit a candle in her dead son's name. She knelt, muttered a Hail Mary, then shuffled to the north tower staircase. When the family was together, they had always sat in the balcony. The organist was up there, and Peter had insisted on sitting close to her, often paying more attention to her playing than to the incomprehensible phases of the mass.
Leona found a seat on the aisle about two-thirds of the way down. Catching a whiff of her, the woman she crowded in next to widened a disparaging eye, but Leona didn't notice. She unbuttoned her coat, let it droop off her shoulders, and reached for the hymnbook tucked into the rack in front of her. They were just starting "Away in a Manger," one of her favorites. She took up the chorus lustily, her voice gratingly off key.
"Skipping midnight mass?" Peter said as his brother wobbled into the room, his gray eyes barely visible over the stack of gifts he was lugging.
Sam snored. "The last time I went to midnight mass was the last time you went, remember?"
"Yeah, I remember," Peter said as Sam set the gifts on the foot of the bed. "The incense made you sick and you had to leave. In a hurry."
"That's right," Sam said, grinning in remembered embarrassment. "Just made it out the door before I blew mom's turkey all over the front step."
Sam held his breath, afraid Peter might clam up at his accidental mention of their mother and the evening would be spoiled before it had a chance to begin. But it seemed those days were over. Oddly, Sam felt little c
omfort in that. He took off his coat and pulled up a chair.
"Christ, yes," Peter said, taken up in the grisly reminiscence. "Amazing, isn't it, how ingrained us poor Catholic kids become with the fear of God. No way can a kid toss his cookies in God's holy condo and still expect a pass at the Pearly Gates. Shit, I can still see you thumping up that middle aisle with your hands clapped over your mouth and your cheeks puffed full of puke."
"Fuckin' A," Sam agreed, recalling the terrible sensation of impending eruption, the horror of trying to hold it all in. "'Member the spray? I geysered hours-old stuffing all over the last three rows."
"Can it," Peter said, laughing. "You're making me sick."
"You ever seen what cranberry sauce looks like the second time around? The way it kind of curdles—"
"Fuck off," Peter roared good-naturedly, "or I'll spit in your eye."
Mom's going to midnight mass, Sam came close to blurting. Whatever else she was, she was still their mother, and Sam felt they should at least be able to discuss her. She was a sick woman, an alcoholic, and sometimes Sam felt unable to cope with her on his own. In a way, Peter's "visits" had made her worse—for days after that séance she'd been practically certifiable—and Sam felt that his brother should share the responsibility, even if only with advice. Peter was nothing if not an intelligent, insightful human being.
But a dark look stole over Peter's face, as if he'd read his brother's thoughts, and Sam plowed ahead before the sudden tension could gain a foothold.
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