by Nevada Barr
Lurid. The streetlights made things look lurid. Ever aware of language, the actor in Clare noted this but ascribed no meaning to it. Digging beneath the damp dog, she fumbled the Camels from the pocket of David’s inside-out raincoat. Pack opened, she put one between her lips and lit it. She noticed without interest that, though she had stopped smoking years ago, her hands had never forgotten how to hold and strike, how to protect the nascent flame.
The first drag was like she’d never quit. She drew smoke and tar and carcinogens deep into her lungs. It was the least she could do. Closing her eyes, she let the smoke trickle from nose and mouth. The end of the world smelled of smoke, not the smoke of Turkish tobacco but the wet reeking smoke of lives ruined, goods destroyed by fire, futures incinerated. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes.
She didn’t cry for Dana and Vee, for their pain, their fear. She didn’t even cry for the pain she would bear over a lifetime of their loss. These things were too great for tears. Screaming and pounding one’s face on the stones of the seashore, rending one’s garments, raking the flesh from one’s bones with broken fingernails as other cultures, other times, had recognized the need for, might have given some relief, but Clare wasn’t them. Americans had no way of expressing the big emotions. Americans weren’t even supposed to have them.
She cried because she cried. Then she slept because she was tired.
Childish whispers entered her dreams.
“She’s on fire, like the house.”
“No. Look. There’s a cigarette in her hand.”
“Smoking’s bad for you.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s dead.”
“Stop it. She’s not. She’s sleeping.”
“No sir. Mackie’s dead, too. Look at his tongue.”
“His tongue’s always like that.”
“Wake her up. I’m cold.”
Clare smiled. A little girl’s voice. Vee. Dana. Something pushed into her eyelid; then light, piercing and painful, spiked into her brain. To escape it, she flailed. The dog was dislodged. The ghosts scattered in a flutter of white cotton.
“See. Not dead.”
“She smells dead.”
The ghosts reconvened around the flashlight that Philip, at eleven the eldest Donovan child, shined into Clare’s face.
“What are you kids doing out at this time of night?” Clare whispered because they had, because it seemed right. Why did she still sound like a mom when she had no children?
“Nobody would tell us anything,” Philip said.
“So we came to see.” This from eight-year-old Colt, who, if born a cat, would have been long dead from curiosity.
Crimson Rose, youngest but for the baby, was not yet six. She’d come because where her brothers went she went, and they were too besotted with their fairylike sister with her waist-length hair and angel face to deny her much of anything. Standing close enough to Philip to keep one hand clamped on the folds of his bathrobe, she nodded gravely over the threadbare brown head of a stuffed dog.
Vee’s stuffed dog; Sleepy Dog. A toy she’d gotten when she was three months old from Clare’s sister, Gretchen. It had a bell in its tail and perennially shut eyes, the felt lashes worn nearly off from being loved so long by Vee. Vee never went to bed without it, carried the ragged toy with her from room to room when she was sick, made up stories and acted them out with Sleepy Dog. It took a control Clare didn’t know she still had not to snatch the stuffed animal from Crimson Rose and shriek at the child for profaning it. Lest this gossamer thread of discipline snap, Clare pushed herself to her feet. Her legs had gone to sleep, and she had to hold on to the glider to keep from falling.
“Are you sick?” Crimson Rose asked.
“Are you drunk?” Colt said at the same time.
“Let’s get you guys back home,” Clare said as she stomped life back into her limbs.
“There’s policemen waiting for you,” Philip told her as she gathered them in front of her to shoo them through the secret passage in the lilac hedge. “Can we wait and listen to them asking you stuff?”
Police. Of course there would be police. Clare had murdered her children. Somebody said that. The officer with the bum knee. As soon as they saw her they would lock her up. She shrugged, a spastic twitch of the shoulders. Since cowardice dictated she live, it didn’t much matter where. Prison was as good a place as any.
The boys disappeared into the lilac branches. Crimson Rose, waiting patiently for Mackie to follow them, turned to Clare. She held out Vee’s beloved Sleepy Dog and said, “I found this by Mr. David’s big car. Will you give it to Vee? She won’t sleep good if you don’t.”
Crimson Rose held up the dilapidated stuffed dog. Clare watched as, too quickly, her greedy hands pushed forward to grasp it. Then, with the speed of thought, which puts the speed of light to shame, jagged pictures clattered onto her brain pan: the house exploding—not burning, exploding—someone had dynamited it.
Did anyone but Wile E. Coyote use dynamite anymore? Wasn’t it done with plastic or something? She shook the question off. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that bombers didn’t target middle-aged clothing manufacturers and certainly didn’t target character actors in small repertory companies. The house had been blown up because somebody wanted her dead, the girls dead, all of the Sullivans dead.
David—Daoud—was Saudi Arabian. A hate crime, maybe; there were skinheads in Seattle, mostly boys and men who had to hate somebody a little more than they hated themselves just to prove they weren’t at the very bottom of the barrel.
David could have done it.
Clare startled herself with the thought. David had never been violent. The abuse that had sucked what love there might have been from the marriage was comprised of indifferent neglect and an iron-willed assumption of superiority. Not an assumption—it was stronger than that—an unassailable truth, a mandate from David’s god. When things were done David’s way, life was easy. When they were not, she and the girls froze in the northward of his opinion. When he was displeased, the three of them simply ceased to exist for him.
As did the money for them. Checkbooks became unavailable. Credit cards and ATM cards failed to work. Clare’s salary from Seattle Rep wasn’t enough to fund the enormous home and fuel-guzzling automobiles and private schools David felt necessary to his dignity and to theirs as members of his household.
Frustrating and embarrassing as that was, what always brought Clare to heel wasn’t the money but Dana and Vee. They adored their handsome daddy—and he was handsome, almost faintingly so, a fact Clare seldom remembered till she saw other women looking at him. When David shut out his daughters, he broke their tender loving little hearts. Clare could bear anything but that.
Her mind raced on: Sleepy Dog by David’s SUV, Mackie out of doors.
Why would Vee’s favorite toy be outside the house? A freak of the explosion? Why was Mackie outside? A freak of the explosion might leave a stuffed dog intact, but it would surely kill a flesh-and-blood dog. Somebody had let him out. David, Jalila—somebody—had let the dog out. They had let Sleepy Dog out, too, out in Vee’s arms. It was the only way the stuffed creature ever traveled.
Another girl, tiny, hair black as an obsidian knife, her hand held by a man with an odd accent, a man who’d jerked her arm, flashed behind Clare’s eyes.
“Aisha,” she’d said. Suddenly, blindingly, Clare knew why the word had sounded so familiar. Over the years with David, she had picked up a good deal of Arabic. Both girls were fluent in it. They and David and, this past year, Jalila chattered away in Arabic for hours together. Sometimes, Clare knew, they were shutting her out intentionally. So she’d learned.
Aisha, in Arabic, meant “alive.”
Her children were alive.
The lion’s share of her brain knew she was kidding herself, building her bright and shining castles upon the shifting sands; still, hope was life, and she couldn’t let go of it. She held to the thought, and it took root. As she realigned her world
to this new and wondrous possibility, it occurred to her that she had gone mad.
The bodies. The little burned bodies of children.
That was a precipice she could not afford to fall over. She would think about the bodies later, when she was stronger. I’ll think about it tomorrow, at Tara. After all, tomorrow is another day. Her brain rattled out the lines from a Gone With the Wind monologue she hadn’t thought of in fifteen years, and again the possibility of madness threw its shadow over her mind. The shadow was not as dark as the hard night of reality, and without conscious thought Clare chose to embrace it.
The police were waiting. They’d seen the bodies. They’d know soon, if they didn’t already, that she and David weren’t Ozzie and Harriet; that David was cheating on her under her own roof with a woman who looked after her children. They—the all-powerful and faceless They—would never believe that she didn’t mind.
Arrest, questions, scrutiny, and arraignment: All this would take time. With a surety she’d seldom experienced even when contemplating the sun’s rising in the morning or death or taxes, Clare knew Time was her enemy. Time was running off with her daughter, maybe both her daughters.
“You run, Crimson, honey, you run and catch your brothers and tell them not to tell the police you guys saw me. Okay? Can you do that? It’s a game we’re going to play. I’m hiding and the police are seeking. Can you do that?”
The perfect oval face turned up to her, the sick orange of the sodium vapor lamps unable to transform it from its celestial lines. “It’s not a game,” Crimson Rose said. “They think you did something bad. Did you?”
Clare fell to her knees. “No, honey, no, I didn’t. I’ve lost my girls, and I have to find them. Nobody but me knows they’re waiting for me.” She put her arms around Crimson the way she had a hundred times over the years the Donovan children and hers had been playing together. This time it was harder to let go, to relinquish that special softness and warmth that is a child. Time refused her the luxury of prolonging it. “Run! Catch your brothers. Tell them.”
Crimson Rose ran, a flash of white swallowed by the black of the lilac’s glossy leaves. Whether she ran to tell the police there was a murderess in the bushes or to stop Philip and Colt from doing so, Clare had no way of knowing. She turned and ran as quickly in the opposite direction. Mackie, torn between the two options, dithered but a heartbeat, then ran at her heels.
TEN
As they headed out of Seattle, Blackie watched the road beyond the windshield wipers. Dawn was leaching the mystery from the liquid light running psychedelic on rain-dark streets, and he felt the same relief he always experienced with the coming of the day. Night was a time when things he didn’t want to think about were around. Things like him, like Dougie.
Worse, he thought, then smiled to himself. There wasn’t much even long dead that was worse than Dougie was, or would be when he grew into his vices. The smile was short-lived, as were all Blackie’s joys. He knew too much of the world to allow something so fragile to show for longer than a moment. It was bad juju to dwell on certain things, bad juju to mock them. Abruptly, he stabbed the ON button on the radio.
A talk program, that was good, took more thought.
He glanced at his companion. The kid wasn’t watching the road like any normal person; hot-eyed, lips loose and damp, jaw slack, he was staring into the back of the van. Blackie knew the look; he’d seen it on the faces of Rick B’s clients. It was the look men get when they want something real bad and are dreaming they’ve already got it.
“Fucking watch the road,” Blackie snarled.
“It don’t hurt’em none. They ain’t moving. ’Cept the little darkie. You’re moving, ain’t you? Bet you move and wriggle and—”
Blackie took his hand from the wheel and slammed the back of it across Dougie’s face. He didn’t worry the kid would hit back. His kind never did, at least not when you were looking. “Watch the fucking road,” Blackie said but with less venom this time. Dougie was just a tool. No sense blunting your tools as long as they worked.
Dougie dutifully turned his eyes to the front, apparently taking no umbrage from the fact he’d just been backhanded. Blackie had been to college; he read the papers, listened to National Public Radio. The legends and lore of modern psychology had not passed him by. Dougie was a perfect example of what happens to a boy when he’s abused as a child and grows up finding comfort and familiarity in violence as well as a need to create it by tormenting other helpless beings. Except none of that had ever happened to little Douglas Dewitt. His folks didn’t live more than two miles from Blackie’s family. Nice people, nice house, nice kids. Except for Dougie. He’d been a bastard since he’d been old enough to kill the family gerbil.
“Bad seed,” Blackie muttered and turned up the radio. For a blessed few miles Dougie didn’t say anything. The radio did the talking, that, and the sound of wheels on wet pavement, almost drowning out the faint whimpers from the little girl sitting in back with the two lumps under the blankets. Blackie slowed the van to sixty-nine miles per hour and switched on cruise control. With this load, getting stopped by even a stupid cop would be bad trouble. The road unrolled between the knuckles of his hands on the wheel; the white line came at him in a blur; the talk radio droned.
“Do you think Mr. B might give me a freebie?” Dougie’s thin voice squirted into the emptiness Blackie was nurturing so assiduously in his mind. “You know, a pass, like a reward? A finder’s fee.” Dougie laughed as if “finder’s fee” were a clever witticism. Blackie failed to see the joke and didn’t try too hard. He’d long ago given up trying to figure out what went on inside the boy’s head. The closest he could get to picturing the inside of Dougie’s skull was a kind of reddish sandstorm.
He tried to go back to that place where there was only the radio and the road.
“He did once, you know, when one of the jewels got broken. He gave me the pieces. Piece.” Dougie laughed again. This time Blackie got the joke but didn’t find it funny. He never found Dougie funny. Nobody needed to. Dougie always laughed at his own jokes. Blackie wished the kid had a screeching bray or a weird cackle, instead of the rich warm burble that seemed full of Christmas and candy and evenings around the dinner table. It creeped him out to put that laugh with what Dougie laughed at.
“You’re like a dog,” Blackie said. “Feed it once and it keeps coming around begging. Fuck.” He was disappointed in himself for getting drawn into conversation.
“Stray dogs used to come around our place. I’d sneak table scraps out so they’d come back.” Again the beautiful laugh; the laugh that would lure toddlers onto a man’s knee. Blackie didn’t want to think about why Dougie fed the strays.
“Watch the fucking road.”
“I ain’t driving,” Dougie complained, but he watched the road.
A few miles passed in relative peace. Even the trickling whimper from the back of the van had dried up. Blackie knew it was too good to last and was almost relieved when Dougie broke into the murmur of the voice on the radio.
“Uh-oh,” he said in a childlike singsong. “Man, you’re gonna be pissed!”
Blackie didn’t doubt that. He waited to be informed on just why.
“Really, really pissed,” Dougie said.
“Cut the crap.”
“I forgot something.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. What?”
“Remember me taking my coat off so I wouldn’t get stuff on it? I think I left it on the couch there.”
Blackie laughed. “Good. That thing was a pimp’s advertisement.”
“It cost two hundred dollars,” Dougie said, affronted.
“You got ripped off. Somebody saw you coming.”
“No sir.”
Blackie shook his head. “Christ on a crutch,” he muttered.
“You know what else?”
Blackie could hardly wait.
“I think my wallet is in the pocket.”
ELEVEN
Running shut out though
t. The burn of cold air in her lungs and the rasping squeak of her sneakers on the wet pavement filled voids where she might have lost herself; places where logic killed her children all over again and the future housed nothing but an antique radiator and windows black with wire mesh.
A block, two, and she realized she had to find another way to shout down the monsters in her mind. Running would call attention to her more surely than an inside-out man’s raincoat on a lone woman in the dark of early morning. She needed to get out of sight, get to a place she could stop and decide just how long the rest of her life would be and how she might best spend it.
Jalila was the key.
Jalila and David had left the house together. Only David was carried from the fire.
If it was David.
For a dizzying moment Clare realized she hadn’t recognized her husband’s body, only his bathrobe.
“Jalila,” she whispered to focus her mind. The au pair would know why the two of them had run out in the middle of the night, why David had returned.
Clare slowed her steps; her heart ceased its hammering; her mind cleared to a degree. David had warehouses and two factories down near the docks. For the past several years, maybe more—Clare was not kept apprised of David’s business dealings—he’d kept a small apartment nearby to rest in when he worked late, change clothes, shower.
And entertain, Clare didn’t doubt. She’d never been invited there, nor had she had any desire to barge in. A time or two she’d seen the outside of the building when she’d been called on to pick David up for a social function of one kind or another. He kept a tuxedo there as well as a couple of suits.
Beneath a streetlamp, she came to a stop. Standing in the pooling yellow light on a deserted corner, she suddenly saw herself from above: Harvey. The movie, not the play. Seven years ago Clare played the psychiatric nurse. Now she watched herself slipping into the skin of Elwood P. Dowd.