Strangers Among Us

by LR Wright

  He knew that the owner was getting impatient with the Nova Scotia relatives, who were supposed to have made arrangements to have the contents removed and the place cleaned. But it was now almost December, and Alberg figured that nothing was likely to be done before Christmas.

  He trudged across muddy ground, around the corner and up onto the porch. The pair of rubber boots he’d noticed the day of the homicides was still there; now both boots were overturned, the shaft of one resting across the shaft of the other. The back door was unlocked, which he hadn’t expected. Alberg went inside: he would lock up when he left.

  He closed the door behind him and stood quietly in the darkness. After a moment he became aware of the perfectly ordinary sounds of a house left to its own devices. He was profoundly struck by this; it was as if nobody had told the house, yet, that its owners wouldn’t be returning. The refrigerator gurgled to life. The furnace came on with a click, followed by a rattling noise Alberg figured was made by one or more of the vents, insecurely fastened. A gust of wind came up and sprayed the window with a sheaf of rain, and the window shook in its casements, then subsided. Alberg heard an occasional creak, a sporadic moan, sounds created not by man or beast but by the house itself.

  He flicked on the overhead light and looked around the kitchen. Everything was just as he remembered it, looking in through the window two and a half weeks ago: the dishes were still stacked in the drainer; the tea towel was still draped over the back of a chair; the hooks on the wall by the back door still held an umbrella, a denim jacket, an orange waterproof boating jacket, and a woman’s shawl.

  In the living room he saw a newspaper spread in disarray upon a sofa; a beer can sitting on an end table; an ashtray full of butts on the coffee table. On a TV tray next to an easy chair sat a coloring book and a handful of crayons, and the crayon box. There was also a vase, sitting on a sideboard. Alberg went closer and saw that it contained the same kind of chrysanthemums that grew in the corner of his own backyard. Although many of the leaves were brown, and the edges of the flowers had begun to curl and discolor, they weren’t yet quite dead. He thought about Verna picking them, maybe the day she died, maybe the day before. Maybe they were the last thing she saw before she left the house that morning.

  He climbed the steps, clutching the banister. He was immensely weary, and suddenly bewildered to find himself here in this empty house.

  And so he created a task for himself.

  Alberg opened doors until he had located Rosie’s room, and went inside. The bed was rumpled and unmade. Toys were scattered on the floor around a cardboard box containing more. Alberg looked around despairingly. He had thought to take something familiar to Rosie in the hospital. But he didn’t know what would comfort an eight-year-old girl. He tried to remember his own daughters at that age, but couldn’t. Then he spotted something partially covered by the bedclothes. He reached for it, and pulled out a large stuffed teddy bear, a koala, with one eye missing. This would do, he thought.

  Alberg closed the door behind him and stood in the hall for a moment. Then he went in search of Eliot’s room.

  When he opened Eliot’s door he was immediately aware of a foul odor, and sniffed it out as coming from under the bed. He turned on the light and looked under there, and saw a cardboard box. He put the koala bear down on the desk, pulled out the box, and took off the lid. Inside lay a dead bird, lying on a bed of cotton, wrapped in toilet paper long before it had reached its present state of decomposition. Alberg replaced the lid and hesitated for a moment, then put the box on the floor in the hall, outside the bedroom door.

  Over the back of a desk chair hung the white apron Eliot had worn when working in the restaurant.

  Earl had been dismayed when Alberg told him about Eliot. “I don’t need a busboy,” he’d said, indignant.

  “Yeah, you do, Earl,” Alberg said persuasively. “Look how hard you work around here.”

  “I like to work hard. I don’t need a busboy. A busboy! I already got a waitress, I don’t need a busboy.” He picked up Alberg’s coffee mug and swiped at the tabletop with a dishrag.

  “Look,” said Alberg. “Do me a favor. Hire the kid on probation. Tell him you’ll give him a week to make himself indispensable.”

  “He’d be more trouble than he’s worth.” Earl folded his arms. “I got no time to train anybody. Neither does Naomi.”

  “That’s my point,” Alberg told him. “So give the kid a chance. I’ll pay his wages for the first week.”

  Earl had reluctantly agreed.

  Eliot wasn’t a cheerful employee. When he talked, it was in monosyllables. He averted his eyes when Earl told him what to do. At the end of his week of probation Earl was still reluctant. But he’d taken the kid on anyway. Alberg figured this was because he didn’t want to go back to washing dishes himself, and sweeping the floors, and stocking the shelves in the storeroom. Alberg folded the apron and placed it on the seat of the chair.

  Eliot’s closet and chest of drawers were filled with clothes, but nothing hung on the walls of his room: none of the Kurt Cobain posters Alberg had half-expected to find; no sign of teenage angst. On the floor in the corner, a pair of rollerblades. On top of a bureau, an acoustic guitar. On the desk, school texts and exercise books. Alberg thumbed through the notebooks, looking carefully at each page. Eliot hadn’t taken many notes; this was no surprise. What did surprise Alberg was the lack of anything else in the notebooks. There were no drawings, no sketches, no squiggles—no sign of the doodling that even the most artistically inept of students does when his mind wanders. Eliot had been careful to keep his mind blank. Or his thoughts concealed. Alberg closed the exercise book and sat down on the edge of the boy’s unmade bed.

  He shut his eyes and rubbed them, and his temples, and the back of his neck. When he blinked and focused again he was looking across the room at the window in the opposite wall…and for just a second—maybe even less than a second— he was completely disoriented. For an instant he felt himself to be in another room, sitting in the darkness in another room, enveloped as now in sudden grief and frustration—but in another room; some other room. He saw in the gloom, on the floor in the gloom, a small pale inert figure, wearing a white blouse, a flash of gold at her throat…

  Alberg blinked again, and Eliot’s room reasserted itself. Once again he was looking at the window in Eliot’s room, aware of the sound of rain, aware of the sight of it on the window, falling harder now, sheeting across the glass, disinterested but judgmental.

  Several hours later, Enid was watching the eleven o’clock news. It was in her mind to go to bed as soon as it was over. But why wait? she thought. She wasn’t listening to the news—why didn’t she go to bed now?

  But there clung to her a feeling of sadness. She couldn’t seem to shake it off. It hadn’t been a good day, really, waking up with that dream in her head, and ending up snooping on her lodger, for heaven’s sake. And when she had called Reggie in California he wasn’t home and she had had to make conversation with The Spouse. Which was always a strain. She had hoped that Reggie would call her back, but it must have been too late when he got in. Or else The Spouse hadn’t even told him that his mother had called. Which was, when she thought about it, more than likely.

  So Enid continued to sit there, facing the television screen, feeling blue, uncertain about life and the future, not even cheered by the prospects of greenhouse gardening. And then she heard the lodger’s truck approach, pull up in front of the house and stop.

  She had closed his door, of course, and left it unlocked. She hadn’t touched a single thing in the suite, only just sat down in the basket chair for a moment, had looked at the photograph but not so much as brushed it with a fingertip, even though she had wanted to do that, to offer comfort or reassurance to that solemn child.

  She turned down the volume on the television and strained to hear; thought she heard him making his way around the side of the house; definitely heard him unlocking the door, opening it, closing it beh
ind him. A few muffled footsteps, then nothing.

  Enid relaxed, gradually, and turned the volume up again.

  And practically leapt out of her chair when she heard a soft tapping on the door to the basement. Then she froze. Another tap. Enid still couldn’t move. When she heard him start to go back down, she was released.

  She hurried to the door, and opened it. “Hello!” she said, with a bright smile. “Did you knock?”

  She couldn’t see him well. The light had been turned on in the laundry room but that was behind and below him, and she didn’t want to turn on the one in the stairwell because it might feel like a spotlight falling on him.

  And so he spoke from shadow, from a shadowed face, half-turned toward her. She was aware of the breadth of him; a large, male presence on her stairway, and when he spoke she was faintly surprised that his voice wasn’t deeper.

  “You left the iron on,” he said.

  Enid’s hand covered her mouth. “Oh dear. No. Surely not.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh dear.” Her hand fluttered away from her face. “That’s right. I was going to do the napkins. And—and the phone rang.”

  “No harm done. I unplugged it.” He turned to go back down the steps.

  “Thank you,” said Enid.

  “No problem.”

  “I’m very grateful.”

  He looked up at her and now he stood in light, his face crinkled with fatigue, or pain. “Next time, unplug it before you answer the phone.”

  “I will,” said Enid quickly, humbly. She began closing the door. “Good night,” she called, and couldn’t be sure that he answered her.

  She took the chair she always took, the one by the window, and she tried to smother a gleam of fury when once again she found it too small. I’m my own size today, she thought, my own size, not my large size, and still this chair is too small.

  He came in and sat down beside his desk and said hello, politely, as always.

  He was her psychologist.

  She had not wanted to come to see him ever again. But there was despair in her.

  “I had a dream about Heather,” she said. “It frightened me.” She had never told him about a dream before.

  His face looked like the bark on a tree, she thought. It was dark, and had shattered; there were tiny lines all over it. Yet somehow it managed to stay stuck together, and also to appear peaceful.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  He probably had children of his own, she thought suddenly, amazed. Perhaps he even dreamed about them.

  “We went to Vancouver,” she began. “Heather and I. We were going to meet Jack there.” Heather wore a navy-blue suit with a pleated skirt and Betty was surprised that she looked so much like Betty had looked when she was the same age—plumper than she normally was, her blond hair curly, her blue eyes darker.

  Betty’s eyes rested on the doctor. “You may take notes, if you like,” she said generously.

  He looked up from his pen and paper. “Thank you, Betty.”

  “We had a whole suite of rooms,” she went on. “One of them had no windows and the walls were green. It was empty except for a stool. On the stool sat my mother, who is dead.” Betty’s hands were getting sweaty.

  In the dream her mother’s hair was white and her face was old, and when Betty opened the door her mother covered her face with one hand and with the other waved her violently away. Her dress was wrinkled and dirty and Betty closed the door quickly; she didn’t want Heather to see. But Heather had gone off up the hall.

  Betty drew a shuddering breath. “That’s one of the bad parts,” she said to the doctor, who nodded.

  “I put Heather to bed, and decided to go for a walk.” There was a red glow in the evening sky and it was warm outside. Betty strolled up and down among strangers who were happy and smiling but not bothering her, not bothering her at all. There were little bands of people playing music…

  She looked frantically around the office. “Oh this will frighten me again I know it will.”

  “You can stay here until you aren’t frightened anymore, Betty,” said the doctor.

  “I shall hold on to this chair,” she said, gripping the armrests.

  “I stopped and looked into a store window, where there was a charming thing, so charming.” It was a white statute of a young boy, sitting on a rock. He had one foot propped up upon the other knee, and he was resting his elbow on the higher knee, his chin in his hand. He gazed right at her, with a soft smile that made Betty want to cry and comfort him, even though he looked quite content. And Betty heard sweet tinkling sounds coming from a music box that was set into the base of the statue.

  She kept walking, and soon saw, black against the red sky, a small house with a peaked roof. A crowd of people stood looking at it and muttering among themselves.

  She loosened her hands and clutched them again around the armrests of the chair. “Here comes the second bad part,” she said anxiously. “There are three of them, three bad parts to this bad dream of mine.”

  In the dream, the door of the little house opened and a wide shaft of light spilled out, and silhouetted against the light were three women. The middle one was taller than the others, and seemed to be leaning on the other two. They were walking slowly from the house toward the crowd of people.

  “The feeling of the dream had changed,” said Betty, “and I was nervous, very very nervous. And then the middle woman suddenly toppled forward and lay still upon her face, and there was a big knife sticking out of her back.”

  Betty took her hands from the chair and rubbed them quickly together.

  “I was terrified, terrified,” she said, “and ran back to the hotel.” But when she got to the suite, Heather was gone from her bed. And then Betty heard a tinkling musical sound—the sound of the white statue, the statue of the little boy.

  “I ran down the hall toward the sound, and opened the door of a bedroom. The statue was there, sitting on the chest of drawers at the far end of the room. And two children were there, two of them.” They were sitting on a large cloth-covered trunk at the end of the big bed. The room looked ancient and rich and was filled with a musty smell.

  Betty jerked to her feet. She turned to the window and pressed her hands against the glass.

  “The two children had their backs to me,” she went on, hurrying. “Both were blond: one had long straight hair, stringy, it was; the other one had hair that shone and sparkled, oh! it looked like gold.” She was filled with terror, in the dream, despite the peacefulness of the scene, despite the sweet tinkling of the music box.

  She left the window and sat down again. Her hands were trembling. “Now comes the worst part. I can’t stop now.”

  “It’s all right, Betty. You’re safe here.”

  Again, she clutched the armrests. “I made a sound. I called Heather’s name. The child with the long stringy hair turned around slowly. It was Heather.” She was holding a comb, a comb with sharp metal teeth, and she was combing her bare chest with it, her pajama top was undone and she was combing her child’s chest and where she combed long thin fingers of blood were running slowly down her chest, and tears were falling from her eyes. Betty ran and picked her up and took her out of the room and told her to run to the kitchen. Then she went back.

  “The white statue turned to look at me. The music still played. I called out—‘Heather.’ ”

  The second child turned around. Her blue eyes were bright and excited and she was smiling, a smile so cold Betty thought there should be fangs in her mouth but there weren’t, only a child’s teeth, a straight white row of them—and she slowly stood up and in her hand she held a butcher knife. She raised it slowly and began to move toward Betty.

  “I turned around and ran and ran,” said Betty. “I knew I was running too fast for her to catch me but I knew that she would catch me. I ran into the kitchen where the other Heather stood, still combing her chest in jerks with that comb with teeth like knives. I took it away from her and threw it�
�I don’t know where it went—and then I put my arms around her and we waited for the other Heather to come. I could feel her coming slowly down the hall and I heard the tinkling of the music box. And then I woke up.”

  Tears streamed down her face. The doctor brought her a handkerchief, but she didn’t look at it or reach for it. Her hands were still wrapped tightly around the armrests of the chair. He dabbed the tears from her cheeks and unwound one of her hands gently and put the handkerchief in it. He sat down on a chair that was beside hers.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “What’s going to happen now?” Her face was still flooded with tears.

  “What do you think it means?”

  Her mouth hung open, stupidly; she could feel it. She flapped it closed, then open, trying to know what to say. She stared hard at him, at the hair brushed back from his forehead, at his eyes.

  “What do I think it means? What do I think?” She pulled away from him. “You tell me what it means! That’s your job! That’s why I came!”

  “You must have some notion in your mind, Betty, of what the dream was trying to say to you—”

  “Why do you think I came here!” she shouted, tugging at one hand with the other. “If I already knew what it meant why would I come?”

  “It’s a complicated dream, Betty—”

  “Of course it’s complicated!” she roared. “I dreamed it!”

  “You need to talk to a psychiatrist about it, I think,” he said gently, putting his hand over her two, which were twisted together.

  “You can’t help me,” she said, her voice suddenly dead.

  “I’ll set up an appointment for you,” he said, moving toward his desk.

  “No, no, no!” She rushed past him to put her hands over the telephone. “I will not tell it again! What kind of a doctor are you,” she said bitterly, “if you have to send me to another person? What kind of a doctor is that?”

  “Sit down, Betty. Listen to me for a minute.” He waited until she had sat. “Perhaps you should go to the hospital for a few days.”