by Noel Hynd
Rebecca went back downstairs. The kids came down at quarter past the hour, giggling to each other. It was time for a downstairs story from a book, perhaps, but both Karen and Patrick seemed more concerned with some conspiratorial point between them.
“What’s going on, guys? “ Rebecca asked. Karen looked at Patrick.
“You ask,” Karen whispered.
Rebecca looked her children. Yes, indeed. There was a conspiracy. And a question. Something they wanted to know from Mom.
“Okay, guys,” Rebecca inquired. “Ask me what?” The kids giggled.
“Is Ronny good or bad?” Patrick asked.
“What?”
“Is Ronny good or bad?”
“Ronny who?”
“Ronny Sinbilt,” Karen said.
A wave of anxiety washed through Rebecca. “Not Ronny. Not again.” She thought she was rid of this.
“Why are we talking about Ronny again?’ Rebecca asked.
“Because he’s upstairs right now,” Karen said. What Rebecca felt, against her better judgment, was fear. Plain and simple.
“Listen guys,” she said, stifling a little tremor. “Will you do your mommy a big favor?’
She waited. They waited.
“Okay?” Rebecca asked. “A big favor. It bothers Mommy when you talk about Ronny. It bothers me because Daddy and I are the only ones in the house besides you. This is our home and no one else is here.”
“But…”
“Patrick!” Rebecca snapped, barely able to subdue her anger. “Ronny is your imaginary friend, right? So you have to remember that something that is in your imagination is not real.”
She had never quite seen a reaction like this from her son. He looked to his younger sister for help, but kept quiet. He looked as if he knew his mother were wrong, but didn’t want to disagree. Rebecca drew a breath, tried to dissipate the tension building within her, and told herself, reminded herself, that she was never ever to lose her temper with her children at times like this.
“Ronny’s real, Mommy,” Patrick said.
“He’s upstairs now,” Karen said. A second passed.
“No he’s not,” Rebecca answered. The kids didn’t disagree. Instead, they kept quiet. Rebecca thought about it.
“Okay,” she said, mounting up her courage, “he’s upstairs, right?” she asked.
Karen nodded. Then Patrick did, too.
“Where upstairs?”
“In his room,” Karen said.
“The ‘turret room’?” Patrick nodded.
“How do you know?”
“We saw him go in there.”
“Did he talk to you tonight?” Rebecca asked.
They shook their heads. Rebecca glanced upstairs. The second floor was completely quiet. Then a subtle creak. The landing at the top of the stairs was shadowy. Rebecca tightened up her courage just a little more.
“Okay,” she said softly. “I want to meet him. Show me.”
Patrick took one of her hands. Karen took the other. Her children led her to the stairs. They walked up the steps together. Rebecca felt her heart thumping hard in her chest. At the top of the steps, she hesitated. She pulled back her hands and wiped her sweating palms on her skirt.
“Okay,” she said. “Your mother can walk the rest of the way.”
She looked at the dark doorway to the turret room. The door was halfway open. There was some light from within, probably from outside. The house was quiet. She wished that Bill were home.
She walked to the room and stopped, trying not to appear frightened as she looked past the door. She was reminded of being a child, imagining a monster in the closet and being too scared to go over and open the closet door. She tried to remind herself how foolish those childhood fears had been. And yet she faced the same fears now.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Patrick asked. “Don’t you want to go in?”
She looked at her children. Four imploring eyes. And for a second she nearly screamed because in her mind, for a snap of time that had no measurement in real time, she was terrified by the mental image of the man in sunglasses from the parking lot standing behind the door of the turret room.
“Of course, I’ll go in,” she said.
She reached into the room quickly. There was a chill. Or so she thought. Or so she imagined. She flicked on the overhead light. With a foot, she shoved the door forward.
The door flew wide open. The light from the overhead bulb filled the turret room. Nothing. No Ronny. Just painting equipment in the middle of the floor.
“Your friend is gone,” Rebecca said. The kids looked around the room. They appeared disappointed. “And now it’s bedtime,” Rebecca said. The kids grumbled. Rebecca felt a huge wave of relief wash over her. “Come on,” she said. She turned the light off and stepped back. For good measure she pulled the door shut and closed it. So Ronny could stay put, she heard herself thinking.
“He’ll come back,” Karen said.
“Karen!” she snapped. “That’s enough! All right? And I don’t want to hear about this again!” The little girl looked crestfallen. She liked her new friend. “Come on, guys,” Rebecca said, practicing being chipper. “It’s bedtime, bedtime, bedtime. Let’s brush those fangs.”
She heard a low rumble of an engine. At first she thought it was an airplane. Then, to considerable relief, she realized it was Bill’s car.
Good, she thought. He could help her read a story. And she wouldn’t feel so alone in the house. Thank God he had come home when he had. Sometimes he really was remarkably dependable and did all the right things.
The kids brushed their teeth and pulled down their covers. Bill came in and announced that he’d had a good day with Jack McLaughlin. McLaughlin had a considerable amount of new business and plenty would be coming Bill’s way.
“Can you do a bedtime story for Patrick? I’ll do one for Karen,” she suggested.
He paused over a cold beer from the refrigerator.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Glad to. Sure.” They walked up the stairs together to put the kids to bed, reading bedtime stories to each.
Half an hour later, Rebecca said to her husband,
“I can’t tell you how much it upsets me.” The children were asleep. Bill and Rebecca sat together downstairs. “This whole thing with Ronny. It’s starting to get to me.”
“No one’s there, Becca,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. There is no one in this house except us, the family who pays the mortgage.”
“Then why does it bother me?” Her husband looked carefully at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s a little too much following, you know, what happened in Connecticut.” She thought about it for several seconds.
“Maybe,” she said with a sigh of exhaustion. “But that would explain it, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, it would,” he said. She shook her head.
“I’m tired of jumping at shadows. I’m tired of feeling funny in my own home.”
He put an arm around her.
“Why don’t you talk it out with the new doctor?” he said. “What’s his name?”
“Einhorn. Henry Einhorn.”
“Have you mentioned it to him yet?”
“No.”
“Can it do any harm?” Bill asked. More thought from Rebecca. Then a conclusion.
“No,” she said, “it probably cannot do any harm.” There was another creak upstairs. Her eyes rose to find the spot. The kids moving around? Or something else? The noise seemed to have come from a midpoint in the hall, not far from the door to the turret room. And why she found herself wondering with a sense of dread did those creaks always seem to come right after a mention of the presence in the house?
“I’ll mention it to Dr. Einhorn,” she said. “You’re right. It can’t hurt.”
When the Moores went upstairs to go to bed later that night, Rebecca froze. The door to the turret room was open again. She closed it and tried to tell herself that Patrick or Karen had t
iptoed over to peek into the room again.
That would have explained the open door. And it would have explained the creak in the floorboard that she had heard earlier. Trouble was, that wasn’t what she believed in her heart. With a mother’s instinct, she didn’t think either of her children had wakened from their sleep.
Rebecca went into the master bedroom and changed into her nightgown. Bill got into bed first and was asleep in a few minutes. That left Rebecca as the only one awake in the house.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and left a light on. Her eyes were glued upon the open bedroom door to the hall. The house was quiet. It was so quiet that she was aware of a low noise at regular intervals.
It started to rattle her. What was it? What was she hearing now? Her heart began to race. Then she realized what she was hearing was her husband inhaling and exhaling right next to her.
Still, she got up from bed and went to the door. She looked out on the wide quiet hall. Her gaze instinctively found the door to the turret room.
She was relieved. The door remained shut.
She left an extra light on in the hall and went to bed. She had difficulty relaxing, but sleep did claim her by midnight. The next morning, she was equally soothed to see that the door to the turret room had remained undisturbed through the night.
Nonetheless, she maintained her resolve to “reclaim” the room.
She worked out a budget for furniture and went to IKEA the next day. She ordered a daybed for the room, plus some play furniture. The store had some great posters, a toy chest, and various games with blocks and climbing. Rebecca got everything she needed for less than four hundred dollars. The store said delivery would take six days.
That was fine. First the paint, she told herself, then the furniture. That would be the last she ever heard of Ronny.
“By God! This is my home!” she vowed. Bravely, she told herself there was no way she would be run out of her house by a figment of her own children’s imaginations, or for that matter, by anyone or anything else, living or dead.
Chapter 11
The Moores’ housewarming party took place the following Friday. The first guests to arrive were the Sorensons, who walked from down the block. Melissa Ford, the UCLA lecturer, was next. She arrived with a woman named Claire who was about ten years younger and wore the shortest skirt of any woman that evening.
Melissa said Claire was a graduate student. Bill shot his wife a curious glance when neither was looking, as if to wonder exactly what sort of couple Melissa and Claire made. As for Melissa’s roommate, June, June didn’t show.
Another dozen and a half people drifted in over the next forty minutes. They all seemed to know each other, yet ranged in ages from Mr. and Mrs. Jansen, who were retired and in their sixties, to Roger Davis and Terry Hopkins, an unmarried pair of strivers, both of who had jobs with banks. He was an MBA from Wharton, and she had a similar academic license to steal from Stanford. Rather than making a family, they were setting to make some money and seemed to be doing a good job at it so far.
Bill Moore, ever with a nose to possible financial and business contacts, struck up immediate friendship with the Davis-Hopkinses while every once in a while eyeing young Claire and her perfect legs. Claire, in fact, served as a magnet for any stray straight men. Eventually, she retreated to Melissa’s side.
The crowd was mildly eclectic, but remorselessly white and upper middle class. Then again, who else but the upper middles could afford to put down money for a house on that block? Most of the Moores’ guests had steady mainstream jobs, but one, Tony Arsdale, was a television director, and Marty Gross and his Russian-born wife Nadia both worked for Sony Pictures, he in marketing and she in digital media. Nadia also had the second shortest skirt in the place that evening, a fashion statement Rebecca noted immediately upon introduction.
Then there was a single woman named Francine Yerber, who was a photographer. Francine was a diminutive woman with sharp features, big front teeth, and short dark hair. She looked like a small caricature of a female Jerry Lewis, and she walked with a very pronounced limp.
Francine’s home, Rebecca learned from talking to her, was also her studio. When Bill pressed her about the type of photography she did, she demurred and made it all sound esoteric. It took Melissa to happen by and explain things.
“Francine’s got a Pulitzer, but is too modest to tell you,” Melissa said.
“Is that correct?” Rebecca asked. Francine rolled her eyes. It was correct, she admitted.
“When I was a kid, I used to go around and risk my life getting pictures,” Francine admitted later. “Some of them appeared in newspapers. Some of the ones in newspapers won some awards.”
But when she was a kid, she meant, in her twenties, and by risking her life, she meant that during the Gulf War, she was there snapping shutters from Hum Vees, stopping only long enough to duck bullets.
“Were you afraid of getting killed?” Rebecca asked.
“Oh, no,” Francine said blithely. “I was kind of hoping for it. I had this urge to go out of this plane of existence and onto the next one with a blaze of glory. I was looking to get shot. I had some issues with my family so I wanted to lay a massive guilt trip on them by getting snuffed.”
“You’re joking,” Bill said.
“Why would I joke about that?” Francine asked.
Bill walked away to talk to the bankers while it sank in upon Rebecca that Francine wasn’t kidding.
“Francine is the resident crackpot on our block,” Melissa said, giving her a hug. Francine grinned.
“Well, no matter how you got it, the Pulitzer is impressive,” Rebecca said.
“I have two of them,” Francine said.
The other came in 2002, she said, and had to do with conditions within migrant camps. That one led to an assault by some security goons and an attack with ax handles. Francine still had a ten million dollar suit in California Supreme Court against one of the state’s largest avocado packagers. It also explained the limp.
“If Francine wins and collects the full amount,” a man named Jim Doleman interjected, “it will raise the cost of the average avocado two cents per fruit for the next two years.” This set off a wave of laughter, even though Doleman, a CPA, wasn’t kidding.
“I do a lot of female nudes right now,” Francine continued. “It’s a lot more pleasant. I’m trying to get Melissa to pose for me.”
“I haven’t given in yet,” Melissa said with a laugh, over hearing. “And probably won’t.”
“What about you, Rebecca?” Francine asked.
“Me, what?”
“Have you ever been photographed nude? As an adult.”
“Not my thing!” Rebecca said.
“Your husband would love it. Surprise him,” Francine suggested.
“He can surprise me in the shower any time he wants. He doesn’t need a photo.”
“That’s what you think.” Rebecca excused herself to meet other guests.
There was a bearded man, stout and fiftyish. He was the other person attached to a university, aside from Melissa and her girlfriend. Rebecca went to him.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Rebecca Moore. I’m your new neighbor.” The man’s face creased into a smile above a trim gray beard.
“Maurice Lerner,” he said. “I’m in the house four doors down, opposite side of the street.”
Ah, Rebecca thought. The psychiatrist whom Melissa had mentioned. An author and fully tenured professor in the UCLA psych department.
“Is there a Mrs.?” Rebecca asked.
“Not anymore. My wife passed away four years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “She hasn’t left the neighborhood.” It took Rebecca a second, but then his allusion registered.
“Oh. The cemetery?” she asked.
“Cemetery of Angels,” he said evenly. “And my angel is there already. Right over the wall.”
“What are you talking about?” R
ebecca asked. “I thought there were no new burials there since World War Two.” Dr. Lerner blinked once.
“Officially, no. There aren’t,” he said. “But I didn’t want my wife to be distant. So I just went in there one night with her urn. She was cremated, you see. I just buried her in the field behind the tombstones.” He paused. “I’m probably not the only one to do something like that. Security is non-existent in that yard. Just an old Chicano man during the day. I suspect my Deborah is happy where I put her.”
He said this in an even, cheerful voice.
“May I get you a drink?” Rebecca asked.
“A cold beer would suit me fine. Anything but Coors.”
“We have plenty,” she answered. “Heineken, Corona and Samuel Adams.”
“Corona would be fine,” Dr. Lerner said. “And I wouldn’t have come if you didn’t have beer.”
The widower, it turned out, was also a practicing M.D. and a lecturer in hypno-therapy. He was joined that evening by a Doctor Lim, a friend in the same field, with whom Dr. Lerner had a tennis match every Sunday.
One of the bankers came over and engaged the doctors in conversation. It was just about then that Rebecca heard a heavy noise from overhead.
Something like a chair scraping. Or a heavy footstep. Her pulse rate quickened. That room again. Ronny’s room.
She looked around for Bill and didn’t see him. Her heartbeat eased. It had to be her husband upstairs, she told herself. She wondered what he had gone upstairs for and, for that matter, what he was doing in the turret room, which remained empty.
Consciously, she turned her attention back to her duties as the new hostess in the neighborhood. A half a dozen of the invitees brought their children. Two of the boys who came over were teenagers and quickly departed with their parents’ blessing, skateboards and all. Rebecca and Bill were glad to have met them, but equally glad to get them out of the house. They went back over to Jim Doleman’s house to shoot some hoops at a basket above the garage door.
Karen and Patrick came out as big winners. They were, in fact, in their glory. There were two boys about Patrick’s age and a girl about Karen’s. Rebecca watched from a distance and was tickled to death when the kids hit it off so well. She began to think that there was some justice in the world, and that sometimes things worked out with a perfect geometry.