I used to do that quite a lot at the house when Erika wasn't there. I used to sit in a big wing-backed chair in the living room and listen to the noises that the house made, and I used to say to myself that it would never change, that the house would stand forever, that Erika and I would live forever in it, because that's what was and how could it possibly change if I kept watching it?
It's what I was doing the day after the vandalism happened. Erika had taken off for the afternoon. We'd awakened late and she'd had a cup of coffee and said simply, "I've got to get out of here for a couple hours, Jack." Then she got into her blue Volvo and was gone.
I sat in the wing-backed chair and I thought, in so many words, Something's happening to her. She's changing! I wondered if it was life at the house that was doing it or if, perhaps, her attitude toward me was changing; I dearly hoped not.
In the room around me, things were much as we'd found them the night before. The big oak grandfather's clock I'd labored on so long and lovingly stood with its waist door open and the chain and weights, the pendulum, chimes and chime board scattered on the floor. In front of me, the gray art-deco couch that Erika and I had bought four years earlier, our first major purchase, lay on its back, its underside torn apart. Above the fireplace—a bare wall that lots of people had been after us to "put something on"—still more graffiti asked, in the same red block letters, WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY? It was, I remembered, a line from a Cat Stevens song.
In the fireplace itself, toward the front of it, there were what looked like partial footprints in the ashes.
"You'll get your locks changed, of course," Mansfield Barnes had said. "You'll get dead bolts."
And I answered, nodding at the footprints, "Maybe that wouldn't do any good, Mr. Barnes. Maybe these people came down the chimney."
To which Barnes, with great stoicism, replied, "That wouldn't be possible, now would it?"
And I realized, as I sat in the wing-backed chair, that I'd begun to miss Erika. Not for that moment, not because she'd gone off in her blue Volvo. But that I'd begun missing the Erika who slept with the night-light on, the Erika who got a big kick out of Kliban cats, the Erika who gave me arguments about politics—we had certain basic disagreements in that area—and who occasionally had fun with my tastes in art and movies—I liked Andrew Wyeth; she thought he was starkly commercial; I enjoyed reruns of old Steve Martin movies; she thought he was simply a buffoon.
And I missed the Erika who often made a game out of lovemaking, who played the role of a vamp, or a prostitute, or a "sweet young thing"—as she said—and carried the act out to the end, grinning and chuckling through her passion now and again. (I remembered that several months earlier, for my birthday, she'd given me an official-looking hardcover book titled An Analysis of Keynesian Economic Theory and its Bilateral Effects on Third World Industrial Growth.
("Very nice, Erika," I said, and she pointed at the bottom of the cover. There were some words in tiny gray print, so they were nearly invisible on the light blue background—How to Have Multiple Orgasms.)
("Oh," I said, grinning, and flipped through the pages. They were blank, except at the center, where a stylized Viking woman proclaimed, spear in hand, "Do it over and over and over again!")
Sex was very important to her, but she always had great fun with it, and I thought that was healthy. But, in the last month, that had changed. Now she made love with an overwhelming and passionate intensity that scared me at times because she did it as if her life depended on it. And she sometimes said, when it was done, "Thank you, Jack." To which I usually replied, for lack of anything better to say, "You're welcome, Erika. Gee, let's do it again sometime."
I drove to Granada that afternoon. I went there because I supposed that I'd find Sarah Talpey there. I didn't.
I found Granada inhabited.
I found people mowing lawns, washing cars, walking dogs, trimming hedges, pushing baby carriages.
And as I drove through Granada, heads turned, I got quizzical looks, a few smiles, I got ignored, someone yelled, "Hi."
But there were no lawns to mow in Granada, and no lawnmowers, or baby carriages, no hedges to trim, or hedge trimmers, or cars to wash.
Only people pretending to do the things that people who live in places like Granada do.
And it was clear that they believed the things they were doing because they did them with such earnest intensity. As if they'd been doing those things all their lives.
They were dressed for spring, in light jackets and double-knit slacks, in gardener's pants, in wide-brimmed hats, in Izod shirts, and peasant dresses.
I stopped. I rolled the window down a crack.
"Hi," someone said again.
"Hi," someone else said.
"Hi," said a man nearby who was going through the motions of washing a car. "Come over later, have a beer."
And I saw a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman in a beige blouse stick her head out of a first-floor window. "Where are the children playing?" she called. Some faces turned toward her. There were some desultory shrugs; someone—the man close to me, I think—said with obvious disinterest, "I don't know," as if she were trying to involve him in a game of trivia and he didn't want to go along with it.
And then he turned toward me. His right hand—the hand that would have been holding the garden hose—moved further to the right, so he wouldn't splash me. But I had my foot off the brake then, and I heard nothing of what he had to say; only this: "And you—"
And I was gone.
I found Sarah on Clement Road. She was carrying her sleeping bag under one arm, what looked like an attaché case under the other, and when I stopped beside her and rolled the window down—"Sarah?" I said—she didn't acknowledge me. She kept walking. Her head was lowered slightly; she had that little frown on her mouth. I moved the car forward thirty feet or so, stopped, jumped out, and called back to her, "Sarah? Where are you going?"
She looked up at last. Her frown was replaced briefly by a friendly, flat, and tired smile. "Oh. Jack, isn't it?" she said. "Good to see you. Have you been to Granada?"
"Yes," I said, and took the sleeping bag from her.
"They're back, Jack."
"Why don't you come to the car, Sarah?"
She stopped walking, glanced around toward Granada, then back at me. "I had to leave my truck there, Jack. I was beginning to like that truck. I don't often grow attached to machinery. I detest machinery. I own a typewriter, but I never use it. Someone tried once to explain to me how computers work, and I didn't understand a word of it. But I did like that truck, Jack."
"Get in the car, Sarah, please."
"I'll go back for it. When they're gone. I don't think they're going to stay. I think they'll be out of there in a day or so." She looked confusedly at me. "How do you judge these things, Jack? How do you judge something that you've never before experienced? I don't know why they're there. I woke up this morning, and there they were. All around me. Like flies."
"Come to the car, Sarah." I took her arm, coaxed her toward the car.
"I thought they were kind of . . . entertaining, at first, Jack. Really. Entertaining. As if they were putting on a show for me. They weren't, of course. They believed what they were doing. I knew that. I could see that."
I continued coaxing her to the car. I opened the Toyota's passenger door, tossed the sleeping bag onto the backseat. "Get in, Sarah. Buckle up."
She got in. She buckled up.
I went around to the other side, got in, pulled away from the shoulder. I felt her touch my hand.
"You know," she said, and her tone was suddenly one of excitement, "we really should go back there. It's a marvelous anthropological opportunity. They've returned, Jack." She paused. "Of course, they're awfully damned spooky. And you can't really talk to them. I tried it. I said to one of the women, 'Why are you doing that?' She was in the house I was using, Jack. She was vacuuming the floor. She had all the motions right—my God, she even ran over the cord a couple of time
s and cursed at it. But there was no cord. And there was no vacuum cleaner. And she was such a beautiful woman. A real knockout. 'Because the floor's dirty,' she said. I asked her who she was. 'I don't know,' she said."
I tromped on the accelerator then, because I'd glanced in the rearview mirror and had seen a group of five or six people coming our way.
Sarah continued. "And it occurred to me that they were probably dangerous. I didn't realize at first who they were. I mean, who they were"—out of the corner of my eye I saw a wide, amused smile on her face—"was really so improbable—impossible, actually—that it didn't occur to me. And it never occurred to me that they would come back to Granada after twenty years. So of course I thought they were just a bunch of crazies."
I glanced in the rearview mirror. The group of five or six people there looked, incredibly, to be at the same distance. I pushed harder on the accelerator, got the Toyota up to sixty-five, then seventy. "Keep talking, Sarah."
"I am talking, Jack. And please don't drive so fast. It's incautious."
"We're being followed."
"Of course we are."
I glanced quickly at her. She gave me a knowing smile, touched my hand. "Jack, I'm afraid they have certain . . . powers. So it really will do little good—"
The front right tire hit a deep pothole. I heard myself curse, felt the steering wheel being wrenched from my grip, realized that Sarah's hand was still on mine, that she was still smiling at me as we went off the road. The Toyota rolled once, and again. Finally, it came to rest on its roof.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"We've flipped over," Sarah said. She was strapped in; the shoulder harness was holding her in place.
I wasn't strapped in, and when the car had rolled, I'd hung onto the steering wheel and hoped for the best, though it had done little good. I realized, painfully, that my shoulder was probably broken.
"Sarah," I managed, "I'm hurt."
"Of course you are."
"I need help."
"We both do, Jack." Her tone had become deadly serious.
I tried to gauge the position I was in, tried to determine if I could push my door open. I wiggled the fingers of both hands, felt an odd tingling sensation in my right hand, then moved the hands themselves and my right arm. My left arm wouldn't move.
"You look like hell, Jack."
"I feel like hell."
"Are we going to stay in here, or what?"
"I think I have to. I'm in a little bit of pain, Sarah."
"I can't move you." A short pause. "I can move myself, but I can't move you." She fumbled with the seat belt. After a few moments she said, "There's a small problem, Jack. I can't get the seat belt to work."
"It's jammed?"
"No. My weight's on it." I heard the beginnings of anger in her voice. "My weight's on it, Jack, so I can't make it work. If I took my weight off it—if I took my damned weight off it—Christ, why do they make them like this?!—why would anyone make a goddamned seat belt that you can't get out of if you're upside down in it? Can you tell me that, Jack?" She was fumbling with the seat belt as she spoke. "Can you? I know this situation is just a little unusual, but why in the name of heaven couldn't someone somewhere have designed a seat belt that works under all situations and conditions?" I was beginning to find some perverse comfort in her tempered intellectual anger. "People are so damned enamored of their gadgets and their machinery and their mechanical toys, but they have never figured out how to make some things well." She continued fumbling. "Toilet seats, for instance. A marvel of anti-engineering. And women's shoes. Electric can openers. Ice cube trays. Christ—and seat belts!" She cursed under her breath; it was clear that she cursed rarely because, even in those circumstances, she didn't want me to hear her. Finally she said, "Got it!" and a moment later found herself sprawled on the roof of the car. She chuckled once or twice. Then a man's face appeared at her window and a little screech erupted from her.
The man said, "You got a problem here, don'tcha?!"
I groaned. And Sarah, after several moments to compose herself, said almost matter-of-factly, "Yes. We have a problem. Could you help us?"
We were taken to the Dansville Memorial Hospital. Sarah wasn't seriously injured, though she had sprained her neck slightly in the fall from the seat to the roof of the car. My shoulder was cracked, and the ring finger of my right hand smashed. I remember shaking my head and grinning when the doctor—a short, balding man named John Wilson who spoke in a high monotone—told me all that. "Jesus," I said, "it sure hurts like hell." I had already been put in a hospital bed.
"It's nothing that won't mend nicely in time, Mr. Harris," Wilson said, nodding and smiling his reassurance. "You're going to have to stay with us a few days, though I imagine you guessed as much."
"I did." I glanced about the tiny, beige-colored room. "Is there a phone handy?" I asked. "I'd like to call my wife."
Wilson said, predictably, "We've tried to do that already, Mr. Harris. One of the intake people is in charge of it." Another reassuring nod and smile. "I'll check to see if she's made any progress if you'd like."
"Yes." I tried for a friendly smile but it felt strange. "If you don't mind."
He nodded again and left the room. He came back less than a minute later, smiled, said, "They couldn't get hold of her, Mr. Harris. They've been trying, but, apparently, she hasn't been home. Does she work?"
"She isn't at work," I said, and realized that the tranquilizers were taking hold because I wasn't sure I'd said anything at all. "She isn't at work," I repeated.
"She isn't at work?" Wilson asked.
"No. She didn't go in today."
"I see. And you don't know where she is?"
I sighed. "This is getting a little silly, Dr. Wilson."
"Perhaps." A short pause. "Do you know how long you've been with us, Mr. Harris?"
"I think I was brought in an hour or so ago," I said. "A couple of hours ago."
He shook his head. "You were brought in yester-day afternoon. I'm sorry. It's the tranquilizers. Just the tranquilizers. You've been drifting in and out of consciousness—and coherence—since you got here. And we've been trying to contact your wife since then."
"Are you sure you have the right number?"
"We got it from the telephone book."
"And how often have you tried calling her?"
"Quite often, Mr. Harris. You need some minor surgery, I'm afraid, and next of kin need to be consulted on such matters, not, of course, that we can't go ahead with it without their consent—"
"She should be at home, damnit!"
"She's not, Mr. Harris. At least she isn't answering the phone. You look upset. Don't be. These things are often simply a matter of coincidence. We call; she's not there. She comes home; we don't call." Another reassuring nod and smile. "And of course, there's the fact that she's worried about you, which I'm positive does quite a lot to modify her comings and goings. If need be, I know some people in your area, and I can have them check your house to make sure everything's all right."
"Of course everything's all right."
"Of course." A short pause. "I have other patients to tend to, Mr. Harris. Why don't you get some sleep? I'll let you know if we succeed in contacting your wife."
Erika drove off in her blue Volvo and was gone. That's the last I remembered of her. I remembered that the Volvo spat some gray exhaust fumes when she turned onto Hunt's Hollow Road and I said to myself that it might need a tune-up. I remember she put her hand to her hair, as if she were patting down some errant curl, when she accelerated to the south. I remember that I waved a little from the front window of the house, but she wasn't looking, so she didn't wave back. And when I took these memories out and looked at them, I got frustrated, and I got angry, because they weren't the kind of memories that parting should be made of. They were quick and purposeless, and they didn't mean anything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
My brother Will went to the house three days after the accident. He s
aid when I called that he could hear the tension in my voice, and although it was a long drive for him, he agreed at once to go to the house.
He came to my room at Dansville Memorial Hospital early on my fourth evening there. He was dressed in jeans, a white, long-sleeved shirt, a denim jacket, and he looked scruffy and tired. He shook my hand, backed away a few steps, said I looked awful, which I conceded, and then he added, "I couldn't find her, Jack. Maybe she's left you or something."
I shook my head. "No, Will, she's finished doing that kind of thing . . ."
He cut in, "Your house is a mess."
"It was vandalized."
"You told me. I cleaned some of it up for you."
"Thanks."
"I fed your cat, too. She was awfully hungry, Jack. I thought you had two cats."
"We did. One ran off."
"Then I went looking for Erika. I hear you were with some other woman when the accident happened."
I sighed. "I was with a friend who happens to be a woman."
"Not that it matters," he said. "I mean, Erika's missing, and that's what matters, isn't it?" I started to answer. He hurried on, "I just can't help but think that she knew about this woman, Jack, and that she left you because of her; you certainly couldn't blame her if that's what she did."
"Let's not get off on tangents, Will—"
"I agree. This woman you were with is hardly the point; I agree." He glanced quickly about. "How long do you think they're going to keep you, Jack?"
"A couple more days. Will, we're going to have to stick to the subject here, and the subject is Erika."
"Sorry."
Sorry.
"Did she leave a note?"
"No. No note, Jack. Are you saying that she knew about this other woman?"
"For Christ's sake, there is no other woman. There is only Erika; there has always been only Erika, and I'm worried as hell about her. I'm at the point where I'm going to go looking for her myself—"
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