If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “What should I do?” Lally had asked Hugo next morning in the café.

  “There’s nothing you can do, or at least nothing you should do.”

  “How can you say that if there’s a child at risk?”

  “Kids are always getting bruised.” Hugo shrugged, and his pony tail bounced. “It may not mean anything.”

  Since Hugo Barzinsky had come to live in Lally’s house two and a half years before, he’d become her closest friend. Hugo was thirty-four, tall and skinny, with a hawkish nose, a gentle smile and straight, light brown hair, receding a little for which he compensated by wearing it long, usually in a pony tail. Until his twenty-sixth year he had danced with the Joffrey Ballet in New York, but then a violent mugging in Greenwich Village had left him with a back injury that had ended his career and brought him back home. Their community being a small one, Lally had known all about Hugo’s rise and fall, yet they had hardly exchanged more than a courteous greeting until two summers before, when they had both chosen, on an especially lovely day, to eat their respective lunches on a bench in the Berkshire Botanical Garden off Route 102. They’d chatted about the weather for a moment or two, exchanged sandwiches and a little local gossip, and had swiftly discovered not only that they had dance in common, but also that they loved good food, baked their own bread, hated Wagner and liked crime novels. Their friendship had blossomed; in a matter of months, Hugo had come to live in Lally’s house as a paying lodger; within the year, Hugo’s had opened its doors on Main Street, and with their combined talents, there was seldom a free table to be had in the café.

  Many people in the community thought that Hugo was gay, which he was not, but Hugo didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought about his sexuality. The only person he really cared about at all these days was Lally, and since that day when they’d shared their sandwiches in the Botanical Garden, he’d never looked at another woman. So far as Lally was concerned, their relationship was one hundred per cent platonic, but though Hugo knew he would never risk telling her how he felt, he still fantasized, sometimes, like a teenager with a crush, that Lally – who had no special man in her life – might wake up to her own feelings for him, but she never had and he doubted that she ever would.

  “What if Katy’s bruises do mean something?” Lally asked Hugo now.

  “You mean what if someone’s hurting her?”

  “Of course that’s what I mean.” The thought made Lally feel physically sick. “I can’t stand by and do nothing.”

  “That’s exactly what you should do,” Hugo said, gently. “You have no real evidence, Lally – you said yourself it was more of a gut feeling, and I respect your instincts, but they’re not proof, are they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on her.”

  “You bet I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  Lally clapped her hands.

  “Into the centre, girls.”

  The children assembled neatly in the middle of the studio. There were nine girls and three boys, some more graceful and natural than others, but all pink-cheeked, sparky eyed and eager to please.

  “Okay, we’ll start with grand plié in second position, ending with the right arm in third position and the left in second.”

  She walked towards them. Katy Webber was in the front row. Lally saw it right away, could hardly understand that she’d missed it until then. She felt a kick of horror in the pit of her stomach.

  “Madame?”

  Lally blinked. Thomas Walton, one of the boys, was looking expectantly at her. All the children were waiting.

  She tore her eyes away from Katy and took a deep, steadying breath.

  “Turn your bodies to the right,” she directed, “and step on the right leg in second arabesque . . .”

  The class went on.

  She called Hugo at the café directly the children had gone.

  “It’s on the inside of her left arm,” she said. “It looks like a bite.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “She said that one of her mother’s German Shepherds bit her – a nursing bitch, upset because Katy picked up one of her pups.”

  “Sounds reasonable enough.” Andrea Webber ran a dog-breeding business from their house in Stockbridge.

  “Does it?” Lally was in the kitchen, Nijinsky twining himself around her ankles. “Katy’s been living around her mother’s breeding kennels ever since she could walk. She knows better than to pick up a brand-new pup.”

  “What are you saying, Lally?”

  “That I don’t think it was a dog bite.” Her voice showed her distress. “Hugo, it was her face, her expression. Katy’s such a transparently honest child, and I’m sure she was hiding something.”

  “Or someone.”

  “I think so.”

  “So what now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You could go to her school, talk to her teachers, see if they’ve noticed anything.”

  “I could, or I could pay the Webbers a visit.”

  “Lally, you can’t do that – you can’t just walk into someone’s home and start talking about something as sensitive as this.”

  “I know I can’t,” she said wretchedly.

  “So what? You’ll try the school?”

  “Maybe.” Lally heard voices at Hugo’s end. “Customers?”

  “It’s pretty busy in here.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Promise you won’t do anything on impulse?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Okay, okay, I promise.”

  The dizziness hit her about five seconds after she put down the phone, catching her unawares. Lally grabbed the edge of the pine table to stop herself falling, then stood very still, hunched over at the waist, for a moment or two after it had passed, and then, slowly, she straightened up again.

  “What was that about?” she said to the cat.

  Nijinsky made one of his small low chirruping sounds, and went on rubbing.

  “You’re right,” Lally said. “It was nothing.”

  She wasn’t especially concerned. Probably she’d eaten too little for lunch – in winter, she needed extra fuel, particularly when she was teaching – or maybe she was getting her period a little early, which sometimes affected her strangely.

  She put it out of her mind, and returned her thoughts to Katy Webber. She might not have any idea who was hurting the girl, but she was certain now that someone was. She didn’t know yet exactly what she was going to do about it, or even how best to begin to tackle the problem without running the risk of making life worse for Katy instead of better.

  She only knew that she had to do something.

  Chapter Two

  Tuesday, January 5th

  The man leaned back in his chair, and wondered if it had begun. Outside, the sky was as dark as it ever became over the city. Snow flurries blew past the plate-glass windows, beyond the sealed room. Inside, the filtered air was warm, maintained at just the right humidity, not too dry, not too moist, the lighting an even pre-dusk, electronically sustained.

  The man led a full, vigorous life outside the room, yet there was no other place in the world where he felt so comfortable, so at ease. He encountered dozens of people every day, yet the only friends he trusted were here, within these walls. He confided in them, he cared for their every need, he sustained their life processes. He controlled their very existence, which was why he felt able to trust them. He had always found power intensely satisfying, and he knew now that the absolute power he had created extended beyond the room, further, perhaps, than even he could hazard, but no one else knew that yet. Though they would know soon enough.

  “Mother would be so proud,” he told his friends.

  He often spoke to them about his mother. He had lost her a long time ago, and he had waited interminable, patient decades to punish those he blamed for that loss.

  “She taught me many t
hings,” he told them, softly. “But there were three rules of life more important than the rest. Mother’s Rules of Life. Identity – knowing and never losing sight of who I was and where I sprang from. Self-control . . .”

  It was his litany, repeated daily, sometimes aloud, often silently, in his mind. Self-control meant denial and suffering, sometimes even humiliation, but without it you were lost.

  “And the third rule.” He regarded his friends with benign tolerance. “Never to forget the existence of dragons.”

  They’d heard it all before, many times, but they never seemed to grow bored and, after all, they couldn’t have complained if they were. The man often talked to them about dragons, sometimes for hours on end. They were out there, he said. Outside the room, in the city, in the country, all over the world.

  “Mother told me once that she lost self-control for a while – early in her life – and the dragons were out there, waiting to pounce. They take many forms, but they’re always out there, always waiting.’

  His music was playing, his beloved Wagner. Götterdämmerung – ‘Twilight of the Gods’. His mother’s favourite. All about heroes and dragons, about Siegfried, the dragon slayer.

  “She called me her little hero.” He lay back on the reclining leather chair and closed his eyes, remembering. He’d squashed a dragonfly when he was six, and that was when she’d begun calling him her little Siegfried. Dragonflies were known as the devil’s darning needle, she’d told him, because they could sew up the eyes and ears and mouth of a sleeping child. Mother had admired heroism more than anything.

  He opened his eyes and looked at his friends in their glass enclosures. His own little captive dragons. Nine of them. Five gekkonidae. Two iguanidae. And the most dangerous, his favourites, helodermae suspectum, the two Gila monsters. Each family lived in its own vivarium, required its own special environment, set up so that each home had areas of light and shade. The man had provided no large rocks or tunnels for them to hide in, for they were there for his pleasure, for him to observe, to master.

  He had felt intense fear when he’d first brought them to the room. The first time he’d touched one of them, he had experienced such revulsion and terror that he had vomited. But once he had placed them safely into their vivaria, a new excitement had begun to replace the revulsion. Touching them now, sometimes, brought him to erection. He suspected that the greatest elation of all might come from killing them, but for now, at least, he chose to dominate them instead, and to practise self-control.

  He tried not to think too much about the terrible days, such a long time ago yet still so clear in his mind. The night he had lost her, when they had robbed him of her, when he had become aware that her breathing had ceased and that she had left him. And then those other days, worse even than the loss itself, when they had humiliated her, when they had laughed.

  If he thought about it now, the pain was still intolerable, and he would have to punish himself to expunge the agony from his mind. Sometimes, he would use his fingernails to gouge into his flesh – always on his lower abdomen or on his buttocks, so that no one would see what he had done – and sometimes he used lighted cigarettes to burn himself. He never smoked, but he still bought the same brand of cigarettes that she had liked, partly because he needed the aroma to help himself, partly because she had used them to correct him. Very seldom, of course, for Mother had nearly always been kind to him, almost an angel really, and if she had found it necessary to administer a little discipline, then he knew that it was just as necessary for him to continue.

  Their punishment had been a long time in coming, but now the time had come. Those who had killed her, those who had humiliated her, those who had laughed, at her, at him, would all pay now. And innocents, too, would suffer, but that was unavoidable. Sad, but inevitable.

  The man stared out of the window, into the dark, snowy night.

  He wondered if it had begun.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, January 6th

  On icy winter mornings like this one, Sean and Marie Ferguson liked nothing better than having their breakfast in bed. Not that they needed to stay under the covers to keep warm, since their townhouse on North Lincoln Square in Chicago’s near north side was as lavishly heated as it was furnished and decorated; but with Marie fully occupied with her patients for between ten and fifteen hours a day, Sean liked keeping his wife as physically close as possible every moment he could, and besides, the sunny Renoir painting that hung over the fireplace directly opposite their bed made them both feel spiritually summery every morning of their lives.

  “How’re you feeling?” Sean looked across at his wife, just pouring her second cup of lemon tea.

  “Great.”

  “Really?”

  Marie smiled at him. “Really.”

  “No symptoms?”

  “Not a single one.” She spread honey on a slice of rye toast. “You have to stop worrying about me, Sean. We’ve all told you and told you, there’s really no need.”

  “It’s only been three weeks.”

  “And I’m trying to forget about it.”

  “I know you are. I’m sorry.” Sean looked penitent.

  “No need to apologize for loving me. It’s just that I wish you’d believe that I’m feeling one hundred per cent okay.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  Marie was the only child of William B. Howe, a multimillionaire industrialist and fine art collector whose wife had died in childbirth. Marie’s father had expected his fair-haired, green-eyed daughter either to take over his business empire or to marry suitably, preferably a man of sufficient means to complement and expand the Howe fortune. Marie, however, had confounded her father by insisting on studying medicine and then specializing in obstetrics. Upon his death, she had inherited the house on North Lincoln Square which she loved for its beauty and its happy childhood memories, but she had sold two other major properties, one in San Francisco and the other in Newport, Rhode Island, in order to fund the creation of the Howe Clinic in the Rogers Park district. Her partner, John Morrissey, a cardiologist, shared Marie’s ideals. The clinic was luxurious and scrupulously well run, its fees on average no lower than most similar establishments, but it was not unusual for more than one room at a time to be occupied by impecunious patients, and Marie had been known to look after women from first pre-natal to final post-natal checks without charging a single cent.

  Her marriage to Sean Ferguson five years earlier had raised the collective eyebrows of the extended Howe family to even greater heights. Her husband was a writer – part journalist, part poet, part novelist of modest success – a passionate, dark-eyed man who adored and admired his wife unreservedly. He knew that the father-in-law he had never met would have disapproved of him intensely, but Sean never held that against William Howe’s memory, for he knew that Marie had loved her father deeply. He was also aware that most of Howe’s contemporaries, and many of Marie’s, suspected him of having married for money, but both he and his wife knew those suspicions were wholly unfounded, and Sean didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought. He would gladly have lived with Marie in a tent, but he had enough common sense to realise that the old Howe home was infinitely more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, and Sean did not believe in depriving his wife for some idiotic, senseless male pride.

  Until that day just over three weeks ago, Sean had never seen Marie sick. She’d had the occasional light cold, of course, but nothing more significant, not even the flu two years back when he and most of Chicago had crashed with it. When she’d developed the sudden irregular tachycardiac heartbeat that John Morrissey had explained might become lethal unless they fitted her with a pacemaker, Sean had been terrified despite Marie’s calm. She understood the wonders of modern pacing, knew that she could go on to lead a perfectly normal life even to the point of delivering twins at four in the morning, but Sean was so panicked by
the description of what needed to be done, so anguished at the very idea of a thoracic surgeon being called in, that Marie and Morrissey had both banished him from the room while the procedure was carried out. Ten days later, after the surgeon, technicians, nurses and John Morrissey himself had all sworn that Marie was no longer at any risk, that everything was fine, perfectly fine, and that they could both go home and forget all about it, Sean had begun to allow himself to be persuaded. But while Marie regularly pleaded with him to allow her to forget all about it, her husband could not imagine that he would ever be able to obliterate it from his own mind.

  “Are you ever going to make love to me again?” Marie had asked him last night, just after he’d turned the light out.

  “Of course I am.”

  “How about now?”

  “I’m a little tired right now, sweetheart.”

  “I don’t think you’re a bit tired.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “I think you’re still scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of giving me a heart attack.”

  “That’s crazy, Marie.”

  “I know that, but do you?”

  Sean had not answered.

  “You still don’t believe what John told us about getting back to normal, do you?” In the dark, Marie’s voice sounded even, but her upset showed through. “He said I could do anything and everything I used to do – exercise, work, sex – everything.”

  “I know what he said.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “Of course I do – I know John wouldn’t lie, not about you – not about anything, but especially not about you – ”

  “But?”

  “But you’re right. I am scared.” Sean stared into the dark, holding her hand tightly. “I’m so afraid I might hurt you, and I’m sorry for that, and I love making love to you more than almost anything, but I’d sooner go without for the rest of my life than risk your health.”