by John Saul
"Hey, they don't drink that much blood," Jared had replied last week when she'd wondered how he could stand the incessant buzzing in his tiny room at the back of the squat one-story bungalow. It was exactly the kind of response Ted would have made years ago, when they'd first been married and his alcohol intake was little more than an occasional extra drink at a party. There was so much of Ted in Jared, just as there was so much of herself in Jared's twin sister, Kim, that at times Janet wondered if she and Ted had somehow managed accidentally to clone themselves, rather than produce offspring that were an amalgamation of the two of them.
For Jared's sake, she prayed he wasn't too much like his father, just as she hoped that Kim wouldn't prove to have a weakness for the same kind of man she herself had married.
Which wasn't really fair, she reminded herself. When she met Ted Conway, he'd had an easygoing charm that was so unlike her own family's stiff formality, she'd fallen for him almost instantly. And for a long time the marriage had been fine. Ted had a knack for the hotel business, and both of them had assumed they'd wind up in Atlanta, or Miami, or even New Orleans, with Ted running one of the major hotels, and she showing in some of the better galleries.
But somewhere along the way his drinking had crossed a line neither of them quite noticed, and that was the end of their dreams.
Not that those dreams had completely slipped away: Janet still harbored fantasies of showing at the major galleries, though she'd long since stopped sharing her hopes with Ted, whose former appreciation of her talent had devolved to carping about the amount she spent on canvases, paints, and brushes.
His own dreams were still wildly alive, at least when he'd had a few too many drinks. Then she would hear about how bad the management was at whichever hotel had taken a chance on hiring him. Though there was a time when she might not have agreed with him, during the last couple of years, she'd had to admit he was at least partially right. After all, what manager who knew his job would hire Ted, given his reputation and his history?
So why had she stayed with him?
It was a question Janet had pondered more than once, and she was all too aware of the answer: She stayed with Ted because she didn't have the nerve to take the kids and strike out on her own. After all, how much worse could things get? She might not be able to make much money, but she suspected that whatever she could earn would stretch at least as far as Ted's paycheck, since she wouldn't be wasting a single cent of it on liquor. And the shock of her packing up the kids and leaving just might jolt Ted into taking an honest look at his own life. In the privacy of her own conscience, she knew she was at least as responsible for the conditions of her life as Ted was. But how much longer could it go on?
She was rescued from having to come up with an answer to that question by the sudden appearance of Molly, charging into the kitchen with far more energy than even a fifteen-month-old had the right to possess in the face of the heat and humidity that had settled thickly over the stillness of the evening. Right behind Molly came Kim, who swept her baby sister off the floor just as Molly was taking a desperate plunge toward the shelter of her mother's legs.
"Gotcha!" Kim cried out, raising the little girl high over her head and tipping her up so that Molly was peering almost straight down. Molly feigned outrage at being snatched off her feet, but her giggles got the better of her, and a huge grin spread across her face.
"Down!" she cried. "Wanna get down!"
"Oh, you do, do you?" Kim asked. "Okay, fine!"
Releasing her sister, she let Molly drop in free fall before closing her hands around the little girl's waist once more.
"Don't do that!" Janet cried out as Molly uttered a shriek far more of delight than fear. "I swear, you'll give me a heart attack!"
"She loves it," Kim replied, swinging her sister around, then lowering her to the floor.
"Again!" Molly cried, trying now to shimmy up the legs of the very same person she'd been trying to escape only seconds before. "Do it again!"
"After supper," Kim told her. "And if you're very, very good, I'll let you help me wash the dishes." Giving Molly a gentle nudge toward the kitchen door, Kim opened the cupboard that held the luncheon china Janet's mother had given her for a wedding present. "You don't need anything more formal for a few years, dear," Janet could still hear her mother saying, and she'd certainly turned out to be right. "Is Pa going to be here for dinner?" Kim asked.
Janet heard the same tension in Kim's voice that she'd caught a few minutes before in Jared's. "I'm not sure," she said carefully, maintaining the fiction that all was well within their family. "But let's set a plate for him. I know he'll be here if he can make it." Kim shot her a quick glance that Janet had no trouble reading: You mean if he's sober enough! But like Jared, Kim didn't push the issue. "We'll give him a few more minutes," Janet said.
But it was far more than a few more minutes before Ted came home that evening, and when he did—a little after eleven—his face was flushed, his step unsteady, and his eyes bloodshot from the long hours of drinking. Janet was alone in the living room, trying to concentrate on one of the books she'd gotten from the library that afternoon. Molly had been tucked into her crib hours earlier, and Kim and Jared had escaped the heat and uneasiness in the house by going to a movie. When Ted didn't call out to her as he came through the back door, Janet's suspicion that he'd been drinking all evening was confirmed. Steeling herself to cope with the argument that was surely coming when he finally appeared in the living room, she set the book aside.
"I quit that stinkin' job today," Ted announced without preamble as he confronted her, a beer clutched in his right hand.
Janet felt a sinking sensation in her stomach: she knew that whatever she said would be the wrong thing, but not saying anything at all would be even worse. "Did someone offer you something better?" she asked, choosing her words carefully, and keeping them free of any inflection that might trigger Ted's temper.
He dropped onto the sofa, his free hand landing on her thigh. "Just couldn't take Frank Gilman any longer. Man's a dumbass!"
"Well, I'm sure you'll find something else," Janet offered, but even through his drunkenness, Ted recognized her ploy.
His eyes narrowed to puffy slits, and his hand tightened on her thigh. "Don't patronize me."
Janet's mind raced, remembering the night two years ago when Ted came home even drunker than this, and decided he wanted to make love to her. She'd tried to put him off, but it hadn't worked, and rather than fight him, she'd given in.
It had been a horrible night for her. When she discovered she was pregnant, she'd toyed with the idea of getting an abortion, but only for a moment. And when Molly was born, Janet knew she'd been right. But she didn't want it to happen again. "I'm very tired, Ted," she began, but Ted only leered.
"Then let's go to bed."
She cast around in her mind for something else—anything to put him off—when the phone rang. The surprise of it startled Ted as much as Janet. His hand fell away from her leg as she stood up to answer it, thoughts of some accident to Kim and Jared already leaping into her mind.
"May I speak to Ted Conway, please?" a woman asked.
There was an official-sounding tone to the voice that raised Janet's apprehensions even further. But whatever news this caller possessed, Ted was in no condition to deal with it.
"This is Mrs. Conway," she replied.
"I'm sorry to call you so late," the woman said, and Janet's fear ebbed slightly. Surely no one would apologize if it was about her children, would they? "This is Lucille Mathers, from the Willows in St. Albans?" Janet felt the worst of her fears instantly abate. It wasn't the kids—it was Ted's aunt. "I'm calling about Cora Conway," the woman went on, confirming Janet's thought. "I think your husband should come down here."
Janet's mind raced. Right now? St. Albans was 140 miles southeast of Shreveport; even if they left right away, they wouldn't get there until three in the morning. And given Ted's condition ... "How bad is she?" Janet a
sked. The last time she'd talked to the people at the Willows, Cora had been in a semicomatose state, and her condition hadn't changed in several months.
"I'm afraid it's not good," Lucille Mathers replied. Very quickly she added, "I don't think she can last more than another day." A pause. Then: "She wants to see your husband. If it's at all possible—"
"Tomorrow," Janet said, making an instant decision.
"We'll leave early in the morning, and we should be there by eleven. Can you tell her that?"
"Of course," Lucille Mathers replied. "We'll look for you in the morning, then."
Hanging up the phone, Janet told Ted about Cora's request. As she talked she wasn't sure he was even listening, but when he spoke, his tongue thickened with the liquor he'd consumed, she knew he had.
And she knew it was the alcohol that was replying to her, not her husband. At least she hoped it was.
"Why the hell should I go see Aunt Cora?" he demanded. "She's crazy as a loon, and always has been. What am I supposed to do about her?"
"For God's sake, Ted!" Janet snapped. "She's dying, and you're the only family she's got!"
"So?" Ted replied. "What's she ever done for me?" Then, before Janet could answer him, his head dropped down onto the sofa and his eyes closed.
Janet was tempted to leave him exactly as he was and go to bed, but remembering that Jared and Kim hadn't come home yet, she changed her mind. Let them at least think he'd been sober enough when he came home to get himself into bed, she decided.
Shaking him hard, she finally got him to wake up just enough to let her guide him into the bedroom. A second later he was unconscious again, sprawled out on the bed in his clothing, snoring loudly.
No more, Janet thought as she lay beside him an hour later. Though Jared and Kim had come in and gone to bed and, undoubtedly, right to sleep, she herself was still wide-awake, listening to Ted's heavy breathing.
Something was going to have to change.
She couldn't live this way any longer.
None of them could.
CHAPTER 4
Jared and Kimberley didn't have to glance at each other over Molly's head to understand that both of them were thinking exactly the same thing: How come we've never been here before?
The long drive southeast from Shreveport had been made in silence, the kind of silence that strained everyone's nerves, as if a bomb were ticking somewhere in the car, and each of them was nervously waiting for it to explode. Both the older children had held their breath when their mother offered to drive so their father could sleep, but Ted contented himself with a deep scowl in his wife's direction, and the observation that "I drive better dead drunk than most people do stone sober."
Silence. No one was going to fall into that trap. Even Molly had somehow sensed that today was not a good one for fussing.
But now, as they drove into the town of St. Albans, the tension in the car finally began to ease, partly out of the simple knowledge that the long drive through the humid heat was almost over, but mostly because the scene unfolding before them was so completely unexpected, at least for Jared and Kimberley. Although neither of them had ever been there, they had both been aware of St. Albans for as long as they could remember.
It was where Aunt Cora lived, locked away in a sanatorium. Even when the twins were very small they'd imagined what it must look like. They'd whispered descriptions of it to each other in the bedroom they shared until they were five, vying with each other to describe the scariest place imaginable: a brick building with bars over the windows, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. "With barbwire on top," Jared solemnly assured his sister, "so the crazy people can't climb over and kill us all."
"I bet they keep them in cages," Kim had offered, but Jared, ten minutes older, and thus far wiser than his sister, shook his head.
"They keep the worst ones in pits," he told her. "With only a hole on the top that they drop food through, and a metal lid so they can't climb out."
The St. Albans of their fantasies was no less grim than their imaginings about the sanatorium. "I don't even want to talk about it," their father told them the few times they'd asked him what it was like. "My uncle threw my father out, and he never went back. Hated the place till the day he died, and hated my aunt and uncle, too. Said he'd rather burn in hell than live in St. Albans." The image the children conjured from this grim declaration was composed of bits and pieces of the worst things they'd ever seen—rotting shanties with no windows and sagging roofs, jumbled together on grassless tracts of worn-out land facing unpaved roads; a crumbling, heat-baked main street with a few stores with peeling paint and filthy windows displaying dusty, unwanted merchandise. In their minds, St. Albans was all but deserted—most of the population, of course, having been confined to the sanatorium, which they'd imagined as looming darkly in the center of the town.
What they now saw was even more surprising than their wild imaginings. The little town appeared almost out of nowhere as they came around a bend in the highway. Rather than narrowing, the road widened as it came into St. Albans, and became a boulevard with a broad median strip separating the two lanes. A row of ancient oak trees marched down the median, spaced widely enough when they were planted so that now their branches, dripping with Spanish moss, provided a perfect canopy for the street and the front yards of the homes that faced it. After half a mile the street opened into a large oak-shaded square that held a bandstand, some picnic tables, and a small playground for children. On one side of the square a row of shop fronts glistened from buildings at least a dozen decades old, but as freshly painted as the day they'd been built. Everywhere, the influence of New Orleans was clear, from the gated facades that promised sun-dappled courtyards hidden behind them, to the ornately worked wrought iron that decorated second-floor balconies. Jalousied shutters were closed against the morning heat, and only small windows pierced the thick walls of the shops, which were identified by ornately lettered signs hanging from curlicued iron brackets.
"It looks sort of like the French Quarter," Jared said as they passed through the center of town.
"But a lot duller," his father observed darkly, and a moment later turned right, away from the square.
The side streets appeared to be as well kept as the main street and the area around the square, and were lined with houses that also echoed New Orleans, with French, Georgian, and Victorian styles jumbled together in a pleasant melange brought together by the moss-draped trees that spread over the lawns and gardens. These offered shady respite from the pervading heat that lay over the town even now, in early fall.
"It's beautiful," Kim breathed as her father turned left after driving two more blocks. Here, the oaks gave way to willows, their branches draping gracefully to within a foot of the ground. Then, in the next block, placed in the center of a large lawn, she saw a sign:
The Willows At St. Albans
The sanatorium was not at all what she and Jared had imagined. A white limestone structure whose core section rose two stories, it was fronted by a broad porch with five Corinthian columns rising all the way up to support the roof. Single-story wings spread out from the center, also constructed of white limestone. The windows, far from being barred, were flanked with gray wooden shutters, held open with wrought-iron hooks. Bougainvillea blooming in a profusion of scarlet, red, and pink was banked against the twin wings, and a low fence of sculpted wrought iron surrounded a broad lawn that boasted two of the largest willow trees Kim had ever seen.
Ted pulled the car to a stop in a parking area at the foot of the steps that led to the wide front porch. But as his wife and children piled out into the late-morning sunshine to stretch after the long ride, he stayed behind the wheel, his eyes fixed on the building almost as if he expected some danger suddenly to manifest itself.
Janet glanced nervously at the kids. "She's a harmless old lady, Ted," she said quietly. "And she's dying. It's not going to hurt you to say goodbye to her."
Ted's eyes narrowed, but he finally g
ot out of the car.
Together, the family mounted the steps, crossed the porch, and pushed through the front door.
Inside, they found a comfortable reception area, with several chintz-covered, overstuffed chairs arranged around a large coffee table. A gray-haired woman wearing a pale blue dress—and a small white badge that identified her as Beatrice LeBecque—looked up from a computer terminal, her smile of welcome fading into an expression of sympathy as she recognized Ted and Janet Conway. "I'm so glad you were able to come," she said. "I think Mrs. Conway's been waiting for you."
"She didn't even know—" Ted began.
"She's awake?" Janet quickly asked, deliberately cutting Ted off, her glance darting warningly toward Jared and Kim.
"I believe so," the receptionist replied. She pointed toward a set of double doors at the far end of the reception area that led to one of the two wings. "The third room on the right, in East Two."
"Can the children wait here?" Janet asked.
"Of course," Beatrice LeBecque replied. "But if the two older ones want to see their aunt, I can look after the little one." Producing a bright red lollipop from the center drawer of her desk, she held it out toward Molly. "Look what I've got for you."
Molly immediately squirmed to be set free from her mother's arms, and Janet lowered her to the floor. In an instant she was around the end of the desk and climbing up into Bea LeBecque's lap. "I think we'll get along just fine." Bea smiled. "I like to think children like me, though I suspect it's more the lollipops."
As her youngest daughter picked at the wrapper of the lollipop, Janet turned to the older children. "Why don't you wait here until we find out if she's well enough to see you."