Crooked House

by Joe McKinney

  “Well, okay. Yeah, I guess. Sure, we’ll be there.”

  “Great! Check your e-mail. I send you a map to their place. Okay, I gotta run.”

  “Oh, okay. See you then.”

  They hung up, and Robert stood there in the kitchen without knowing what to do with himself. What the hell was wrong with Sarah? She’d already made it plain she didn’t want to go back to work for Thom Horner, which completely mystified him, but she’d never been out and out rude with him. Certainly never dismissed him so forcefully.

  “Sarah?” he called into the recesses of the house.

  He went out to the entryway, called for her again. He went down the east wing on the first floor, still calling for her, but got no response. Finally, he circled back to the entryway and hollered her name up the stairs.

  A moment later, he heard sobbing.

  “Sarah?”

  He started up the stairs. About halfway up, he called out to her again.

  Still the sound of her sobbing. It was coming from the sitting room at the top of the stairs, and that caused him to stop.

  “Sarah?”

  He swallowed the lump in his throat and stepped toward the door.

  She was in there, standing in the middle of the room, her back to him. He could see her shoulders hitching with her sobs.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  She turned then, and he could see her face was streaked with tears. She looked so much like Angela had that morning, when they’d found her crying in her room. He remembered how Sarah had gone to her and pulled her into her arms. How mother and child had stayed that way until he began to feel like a third wheel and had wandered off, filled with a curious mix of ennui and embarrassment. From the look on her face, one that suggested she was eager, hungry even, for his comfort, he half expected her to dive into his chest and wrap her arms around his neck.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Instead, at the last minute, she pulled away from him. She turned her face away with a sigh and tried to give him a wide berth on her way to the door.

  “Hey,” he said. “What gives?”

  “Nothing gives,” she said.

  “Then where are you going?” And just like that, he found all the pity and warmth and desire to comfort her that had brought him in here to check on her had bled out of him, leaving only a tight, ice-cold knot of anger and resentment.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Yeah? Well, I want to know what the hell is wrong with you. Why’d you act like that on the phone? Thom is just trying to help us out, and you’re treating him like trash.”

  She held up a finger at him. He could see it shaking with her anger. A torrent of words hung on the tip of her tongue. She wasn’t blinking. Her lips were tight, pulled into thin bloodless lines. Her chest was heaving. “Don’t talk to me about this,” she finally managed. “I mean it. Don’t.”

  He could hear her teeth grinding as she spoke, and it frightened him a little. He’d never seen her like this. He said, “But why? Sarah, I don’t know what the problem is, but you can talk to me. Can’t you?”

  For a moment, it looked like she might say something, but then she shook her head and, in a much more subdued voice, said: “Just don’t.”

  “Why do you hate him so much? That’s it, isn’t it? You hate him.”

  “I’m going to take a nap, Robert.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stood there gawking at her in disbelief. What in the hell had happened to his wife? And who the hell was this woman?

  “Please,” she said. “Let me by.”

  It took him a moment, but he moved.

  *

  Sarah threw herself back on to the bed. She’d been kidding herself about taking a nap. The way she felt right now, she couldn’t even conceive of taking a nap.

  Which sucked, because she was exhausted.

  Every time she closed her eyes half-formed questions flooded her mind. She hadn’t felt this confused, this overwhelmed, this laden with guilt and hopelessness, since right after Angela was born. Thinking back on those months, which had been on her mind a lot recently, she remembered how awful it had been, working two full-time jobs, never having enough money, never feeling like she was any good at taking care of the baby, how empty she’d felt. And ashamed too. She remembered Jay Carroll, drunk and wolf-like, watching her as she danced around in nothing but a sequined G-string and trying her best to pretend she liked it. The image rose up with such force, such suddenness, that she nearly vomited.

  Now that had been awful.

  Probably the worst shame she’d ever experienced.

  Well, almost.

  But then she’d met Robert and that had all changed. He was the opposite of Jay Carroll, of every man she’d ever had anything to do with, in fact, and he became a sort of reset button on her life. She’d quit The Wild Horse. She’d quit Columbia. And she’d turned her life around and dedicated herself to her new husband and family and she’d never looked back.

  Until now.

  But why now? Why was everything spiraling out of control like this?

  Well, it was Robert. Mostly.

  Sarah hadn’t thought of her stepfather, that perverted, abusive asshole, in years. But now she kept thinking about something he once said. People aren’t light switches, he said. They don’t just turn on and off. They’re more like pressure cookers, building up a slow head of steam, and they either figure out a way to bleed off some of that steam, or they explode. The man was a creep, trying to get in her pants from the time she was twelve, and most of what he said was as worthless as he was; but that bit about people being like pressure cookers, well, that pretty much nailed what was going on with Robert, didn’t it?

  How long, she wondered, had he been building up steam? Looking back over the last two years or so of their marriage she suspected that it had been a while in the making. He’d been complaining about the credit card bills and all the doctor’s bills at least that long. At first it didn’t strike her as odd. They’d weathered some rough years together, especially that last year of his candidacy and the anxious months leading up to his post at the University of Florida, and so when he complained about how steep the monthly payments were on their credit cards, it didn’t seem all that bad. After all, they had health insurance. They both had cars. They had a house and Angela had braces and there were groceries in the fridge each week. From her perspective, things were looking up. It certainly beat the growing up she’d had.

  But Robert must have been building up steam all that time and holding it, keeping it from her. He never once asked her to go back to work. She would have, too, in a heartbeat. If he’d only asked. But he never did. He kept it bottled up, and then, finally, exploded. He’d stormed out of the offices at the University of Florida, over what exactly she still couldn’t quite figure out, and come home jobless and angry and, well, frightened. She didn’t want to admit it – even now, with the curtains pulled fast and the room quiet and dark – but he frightened her, the way he got so angry at little things, the savage, almost crazed look in his eyes when he talked about money, or the lack of it. He had become, she decided, like some wounded animal backed into a corner.

  And then, out of left field, this offer to come teach at Lightner. And this house. She remembered how excited he got about it. The look on his face when he talked about it, about how it was the answer to all their problems. He looked like he’d just won big on a game show.

  But this house.

  What was up with this house? She thought back to the morning. She’d been so certain there’d been someone in there with Angela. She’d heard shrieking. She’d heard a voice, an angry, nasty-sounding voice. But Angela had denied it, and after looking into her daughter’s tear stained face, there’d been no question the girl was telling the truth. She’d heard nothing. And her tears? When Sarah had asked her what was wrong, Angela had said: “I want to go home, Mommy. I want to go home.”

  She’d been uprooted from her friends, her
school, everything she’d come to know and trust in her short life. Tears were to be expected.

  But what of that god-awful smell in the hallway outside Angela’s room? That had definitely been real. Even Robert – who had denied hearing any voices – had commented on the smell, though how he could mistake the stench of raw sewage for smoke was beyond her.

  And so it came back to Robert. Her mind kept circling him, coming back to him. There was a gravity there that she couldn’t deny, and sooner rather than later, she knew she was going to have to talk to him about what was going on in their marriage. She was really dreading that conversation, though. There was no way to predict how it would go, how he would react.

  Well, she could always go up there and cut up her credit card on his desk. He’d probably appreciate that.

  And she’d tell him she was going back to work. She didn’t know what, exactly, some kind of office job. It’d be a good thing for everybody. It’d bring in some extra cash for the house, and it would give Sarah something to do outside of this damned house.

  Yeah, she thought, she’d do that.

  She got out of bed, slipped on a pair of jeans and her sandals, got her Visa from her purse, and headed up the stairs to Robert’s office.

  She got as far as the landing before she stopped and looked to her right, down the short hallway that led to Robert’s study. His door was open and she thought she could hear him pacing in there, talking to himself. Sarah stood on the landing for a long time with the Visa card in her hand trying to work up the courage to go in there. But what was she going to say? What could she say? The things she’d decided on downstairs now seemed like too little too late, a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. What would he think now of her offer to cut up the credit card, or to go out and get a job? It would, she knew, only lead to a lot of questions that didn’t need asking. The past was what it was, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  But she didn’t move from the landing. Now, more than ever, she felt like this house didn’t really belong to her. Or, rather, she didn’t belong here. That morning she’d felt like she was waking in a hotel, and that feeling hadn’t dissipated. If anything, it’d grown more acute, more pronounced. This wasn’t her house, and it did not welcome her.

  She stopped there, her train of thought abruptly quieted.

  Her attention had drifted to the east wing, to the room that had made her so upset earlier in the day. At the door to the sitting room she saw seven little off-color circles in the wood floor. Somebody had done a fairly professional job of cleaning those up and fitting them to the surrounding wood, but they were still faintly visible. She looked up, and along the top of the doorway, saw matching filled holes. The significance of what she was looking at eluded her until she connected the holes with imaginary bars, and then she gasped.

  Oh my God, she thought. This wasn’t a room. This was a cell. Oh my God.

  She felt sick to her stomach, a little dizzy.

  Oh God.

  She wanted to back away, but at the same time she couldn’t. Her curiosity was too strong. She stepped forward slowly, cautiously, a finger trailing along the open door as she stepped inside. There were no windows, no closets set into the walls, only old-fashioned chairs arranged around delicate little card tables. It was a dreary room, lit by a small fixture in the center of the ceiling – a fixture, Sarah knew, that must have been added in recent years. It probably wouldn’t have been there in the 30s, when this room was used as a cell.

  She shivered, though more because she was creeped out than by any sort of chill. A few years before, she’d accompanied Robert to London on one of his conferences. They’d spent a week prior to the conference playing tourist, visiting all the sites. Robert was in heaven. For an academic like him, one who had spent most of his life reading about the places they were visiting, it was very nearly a spiritual experience. He’d even cried at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Sarah, meanwhile, thought London was nice. It was big, the shops were cool, lots of interesting people. And those accents were so much fun, almost musical. But she hadn’t really been affected at all by what she saw. She spent her teens and early twenties in New York City, after all. The history of London, the significance of the place – she got it, she wasn’t stupid – but it didn’t especially move her. Not until they went down to the basement of a pub on the fringe of the old Newgate Prison grounds. They had one of the old prison’s cells down there, a little indentation in the wall, grimy and moldy and dark. The bartender told them the pub had left it as is, out of respect for the condemned men who had served out the final days of their lives there. He also told them that as many as twenty-four men at a time had been kept in there, pressed close. Like fish in a tin, he said. That had got to Sarah. Standing in that cell, she’d felt sick, overwhelmed. It filled her with uneasy disquiet that chilled her to the bone.

  She’d left that cell never ever wanting to feel that way again. But she was experiencing the same awful sensations now, the same sickening dread, the same feelings of lingering pain and misery and hopelessness. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, but it was as if all the joy, all the life, all that she had loved, was being pulled away from her, leaving only vile abasement and the utter shock of being alone and lonely.

  Sarah opened her eyes when she heard the noise. A whisper, a voice barely discerned. She looked around.

  “Angela?”

  You make so much damned noise.

  Sarah froze. The voice had seemed feminine the first time she heard it, but when it came again, it was so colored by a bald contempt, by the rage of one pressed by frustration beyond all endurance, that it barely seemed human.

  The smell was back too. Raw sewage. She gagged, coughed.

  Beside her, on one of the little card tables, a picture frame began to shake. She stared at it as it danced and jerked, unable to look away, unable to do anything but stare. From the other side of the room, the door slammed shut, and she jumped. The next instant the entire room was trembling, like she was caught up in an earthquake. Sarah lost her balance and fell against a chair.

  You make so much damned noise!

  The words were deafening. They hit against her chest like a physical blow, knocking her further off balance.

  Get out! Get out! Get out!

  The entire room was shaking. Sarah clapped her hands over her ears and still withered beneath the roar of the voice.

  Get out! Get out!

  The picture frames on the walls burst, spraying glass on the wooden floor. Chairs bounced and danced, shifting across the floor. Sarah sagged to her knees, hands still pressed against the sides of her head, mouth open in a silent, suspended scream, eyes shut tight against the mounting pain.

  Get out!

  And then, as abruptly as it started, the noise stopped. The door clicked and sighed open. And Sarah, still on her knees, looked up at the door.

  It took her a moment to realize nothing around her was damaged. She’d heard picture frames exploding. She’d seen chairs shake, tables tottering over. But there was no glass on the floor now. No broken picture frames. No chairs or tables out of place. All was as it had been. Except for the faint, lingering stench in the air.

  Shaking and shivering, uncertain of what, exactly, she’d just experienced, Sarah made her way out of the room and down the hall to Robert’s study. Her legs felt unsteady, and she paused in the doorway, her gaze wandering over the books, the big oaken desk, all the old baseball memorabilia, without really seeing any of it. She couldn’t focus on that stuff. What had just happened, whatever that was, was still too raw. She turned her head back toward the rest of the house for a long, questioning moment, listening to its enormous depths. She shivered and walked into Robert’s study.

  He wasn’t pacing anymore. She could hear him snoring softly behind the bookshelf, sleeping on his cot. She went back there and stood over him, watching him sleep. She hugged herself. It was cold in here, but that wasn’t why she held herself the way she did. Looking at him, Sarah
felt strange. Not scared, for the bad shock she’d taken was fading now. No, she felt somehow cowed. What she wanted was to climb into the cot with him and let him pull her close, cradle her in his arms. She wanted him to comfort her.

  “Robert?”

  He stirred, but didn’t wake.

  She touched his arm. “Robert?”

  His eyes flew open and he screamed. He slapped at her hand and backed into the wall, his eyes wild and scared.

  “Robert?” she said. “Robert, it’s me.”

  “What?” He was breathing hard. “Who?”

  “Easy,” she said, her own fear completely forgotten now. “Robert, you’re dreaming.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes were still wide, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fearsome grimace. “No, not dreaming. You were – Oh God, Sarah. That is you.”

  “Of course it’s me. Robert, what...?”

  She knelt down in front of him, trying to take his hands in hers, but he pushed her away.

  “Robert?”

  “No.”

  He sat up. His hair was a mess, and he was sweating. As cold as it was up here, and he was sweating. He ran a hand over his face, and, to Sarah, he looked like a man trying to convince himself the nightmare was really over.

  “Were you dreaming?”

  And just like that his expression changed. The vulnerability, the fear, were gone. He looked at her then like she disgusted him.

  “Let me up,” he said. He pushed her hands away. “God damn it, I said let me up!”

  She scrambled to her feet, not sure how to take this outburst or what she’d done to provoke him. “Robert, I – ”

  “Don’t you ever scare me like that. What the hell’s wrong with you? Sneak up on a man like that. Jesus.”

  She just stared at him. She didn’t know what to say.

  He sidestepped her and put his hands to his forehead like he was trying to rub out a migraine.

  “Robert, I’m sorry. I...I didn’t mean to...”

  “Just leave, Sarah. I have work to do.”

  “Oh. Okay. I really am sorry.” She remembered the Visa card in her back pocket and thought, maybe, she could salvage this. “Robert, I was thinking about dinner. I could make – ”