“It’s a joke, Lauren. A joke.” Jackie threw her hands up in exasperation. “Let go a little, will you?”
Lauren forced a chuckle. “You sound like Todd.”
“I always did like that guy.” Jackie moved the box to the counter and sat back down. “Heard from him lately?” she asked, taking a sip of her tea.
“He called last night.…” Lauren stretched her long legs under the table and inspected her fingernails.
“And?”
“And he says people change,” Lauren answered with a sigh. “That he has.”
“But you’re afraid.” Jackie’s question was a statement.
Lauren looked up at her friend. “I don’t think I could stand being hurt again.”
“I understand.” Jackie covered Lauren’s hand with her own. “But he’s a wonderful man.”
“Wonderful men don’t always make wonderful husbands.”
“At least you got one out of two.” Jackie smiled as only those who have been long divorced can when discussing their ex-spouses. “Simon actually threatened to go to court to get custody of Matthew if I don’t stop writing this book. He’s afraid that the notoriety about my ‘weirdness’ will negatively affect Matthew’s academic progress—but you and I know all Simon’s really worried about is how it might reflect on him.” She chuckled. “Thank goodness Helene’s out of school and married.”
“It’s amazing that after all these years the man just can’t let it go.”
“A man of Simon’s towering ego doesn’t like being left for a woman,” Jackie said with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. True to form, Jackie had never hidden the fact that she had divorced Simon because she had fallen in love with a woman, Andrea Molineaux. She and Andrea had lived together in Jackie’s house until Andrea had died of breast cancer three years before.
“But I’ve got to admit, I’m kind of guilty of not letting go too.” Jackie waved her hand toward an empty spot on the wall above the stove. At Lauren’s confused look, she explained, “I got immense pleasure out of giving Deborah the Willard print that belonged to Simon’s mother.”
“You gave Deborah the Deodat Willard?” Lauren was incredulous. Although far from a household name in the twentieth century, Deodat Willard had been a well-known and respected scholar in the seventeenth, dabbling in painting and ink block as well as in historical study. Lauren stared at the bare wall where the print had hung. Jackie had told her that when she had stumbled on the Willard in her in-laws’ garage, Simon’s mother had been more than happy to give her the strange little print. Unaware that the seductive young girl beckoning to a field of towering corn was supposed to be a witch, Simon’s mother had nonetheless confessed to Jackie that the piece had always given her the creeps.
Jackie shrugged off Lauren’s surprise. “Deborah was entranced by it when she was here the other day. She said it was an inspired portrayal of the Colonial love-hate relationship with women and witchcraft.” She shrugged again. “So I gave it to her.”
“Isn’t it valuable?”
“It was mine to give,” Jackie said, draining her cup and dropping her mug in the sink. “Let’s go get your books. I’m anxious to get rid of you and take a look at that cursed chronicle.”
Lauren glanced at her watch as she started to follow Jackie. “You’re in luck—I’ve only got a few minutes. I can’t be late picking up Drew again. His teachers are no more pleased with me than they are with him.”
Jackie raised her eyebrows.
“Drew’s been acting up lately. His teacher says he’s having trouble concentrating. And he’s been misbehaving. Apparently, he’s been drawing violent pictures for his classmates—women and children hanging by nooses from trees and such.” Lauren sighed. “Last week he input a bunch of swear words into the class’s spelling test file—which Mrs. Baker then printed up and distributed to twenty-two highly amused seven-year-olds.”
Jackie burst out laughing. “Doesn’t sound too serious to me.”
“She also mentioned something about him ripping another child’s art project.” Lauren shook her head. “Anyway, she figures he’s acting out because of the divorce, and she wants to talk to me about it tomorrow morning.”
“Sounds all too familiar.” Jackie touched Lauren’s sleeve as they entered the dining room. “Kids are tougher than you think.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he is,” Lauren said, although she was far from certain. Drew had been having a difficult time accepting his parents’ separation, and she had been trying to compensate by spending more time with him. But it seemed the more time and attention she gave him, the more demanding and out of control he became. “Stability,” Mrs. Baker had said. “Kids just need to feel safe.”
Jackie picked up her glasses from the table and perched them on the end of her nose. She craned her neck and looked up at the top of the bookshelves. “So what books did you tell me you needed to borrow?” she asked. “You wanted Robert Brown, right?”
“And Thomas Swain’s Mission and Reason in Colonial New England.”
Jackie pointed to the top shelf. “You’ll have to get the step stool. They’re all up there.”
Lauren laughed. Jackie was barely five feet tall, and whenever she started a new project, she pulled down all the books she might need to her level. The lower shelves were currently filled with books on the historical roots of feminism, the occult, and analyses of European and American witch trials. The fact that the historiography books were on the top shelf was a clear indication of the esteem in which Jackie held them. The study of historical method and philosophy was far too traditional for Jackie’s revisionist tastes.
“I like historiography,” Lauren said, as she climbed on the stool.
“You would.” Jackie walked over to the table and looked down at the chronicle. “It’s probably just as well that you’ve got to go. I’ll read through this quickly to get an idea of what it says. Then we’ll know if it’s worth our time—and our weekend.”
“Do you need me during the day tomorrow?” Lauren asked as she grabbed the Robert Brown from the shelf. “How about after I talk to Mrs. Baker in the morning, I hit the library? I’ll read up on some of that paranormal stuff you’ve been after me to take a look at.” She climbed down off the step stool and checked her watch. “You get started on the chronicle and I’ll come back here—say around five? Aunt Beatrice has Drew for dinner, so I’m free until eight. And we’ll have plenty of time over the weekend—I’ve got no plans.”
“It’s going to be great fun,” Jackie said, giving Lauren a quick hug. “I promise.”
As Lauren headed for the door with Jackie’s books under her arm, she found herself drawn to the chronicle. She stopped and stood staring down at the book. Gingerly, she moved her hand toward it, then pulled it back.
“It’s not going to bite you,” Jackie said.
Lauren thrust out her hand and touched the cover. No bobbing shadows. No chanting voices. Relieved, she put down Jackie’s books and lifted the chronicle. But as soon as she opened it, she was overtaken by a powerful sense of déjà vu. For a moment, it was as if the plaster walls of Jackie’s dining room had been stripped away and the rough-hewn wood exposed. The computer and fax machine disappeared, replaced by pewter tankards sitting on a narrow oaken table board in the center of the room.
Lauren blinked and all was as it had been. Yet she had the strangest feeling that she had been in this room before. That she had stood right on this spot and held a book in her hand—and that it had been a long, long time ago. A furry shiver ran down her spine. She snapped the book shut and dropped it on the table. Then she grabbed her coat off the cobbler’s bench in the small foyer and headed out the door.
Five
BOOKS TOWERED OVER HER HEAD. BOOKS EVERYWHERE. Lauren reached out her arms and touched the shelves that rose until their tops appeared to tip inward, to bend toward each other, like railroad tracks extending to the horizon. She whirled around, but there was only one way to run. Ahead. She had to keep going.
To find her way out of the maze.
But she couldn’t move. She tried and she tried, but her feet wouldn’t budge. She looked down. Books. Books covered her shoes and her ankles and her calves—she was knee-deep in books! Frantically, she snatched at them: hardcovers, paperbacks, and piles and piles of handsome oversize leather volumes. She flung them to the left. To the right. Quickly. Quickly.
But she was not quick enough. For when she looked up, she saw the man. The man was walking slowly between the soaring stacks, moving silently and inexorably toward Lauren, his muddy cloak brushing dirt on the books as he passed. Lauren cried out, but she was no more able to speak than she was able to move. The man was getting closer. And closer. And closer.
At first Lauren had no idea who the man might be, but then, with the terrifying certainty of nightmares, she knew it was Oliver Osborne. Oliver Osborne, the one who had masterminded the Cambridge witch trials, the one who had arrested and prosecuted the coven.
Oliver’s bushy hair was filled with dirt and leaves. His eyes were filled with hatred. As he drew nearer, Lauren saw a flash of metal. Many flashes of metal. Oliver held a fan of knives in his hand, undulating and unfolding, shiny and sly. Then Oliver was upon her.
Lauren’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding, sweat running between her breasts. Whoa, she thought as she grabbed her dream journal and the little flashlight she kept by her bed. This coven was not only disrupting her life, it was beginning to seep into her unconscious. Lauren flipped open the notebook, and just as Jackie had instructed, she scribbled down a few key words to remind her of the dream in the morning.
Lauren had started the journal two years before, on Jackie’s recommendation, as a way to release her creativity and perhaps, as Jackie put it, “to crack open her rigid mind-set.” Although most of Lauren’s dreams were a mishmash of her day’s activities and worries, she was surprised that some actually did give her interesting insights. Unfortunately for Jackie, there hadn’t been any noticeable changes in her mindset.
Lauren closed the notebook and checked the clock. Then she flopped back onto the pillow, contemplating her dream and the absurd notion of graduate education. One of the problems with doctoral programs was that the faculty’s major goal—aside from inflicting as much misery as possible—was to immerse a graduate student in the subject matter to such an extent that the academic discipline and the pupil became one. In Lauren’s case, the idea was to imbed Colonial history so deeply into her psyche that it became a part of who she was, of how she would think and view the world for the rest of her life. Lauren smiled without humor. Given the nightmare from which she had just woken, she was in the running to be her department’s greatest success.
She tried to will herself back to sleep, but it was no use. In the year since Todd had moved out, she had suffered bouts of insomnia and she now recognized all the signs of impending wakefulness. In an all too familiar ritual, she climbed out of bed, walked over to the window, and pulled up the shade. She stared at the street below. It was full of handsome houses and majestic trees, its stillness belying its closeness to both Porter and Harvard squares. But the calm moonlight bathing the silent pavement did little to subdue her anxiety.
She and Todd had been so excited when they had heard that a couple of Todd’s friends were moving from their rent-controlled apartment on the second floor of an old Cambridge mansion. It was a price they could afford for a place they had never dared hope to live in. They immediately broke their own lease. The apartment was half the original bedroom wing, with four large rooms—two with turrets—flowing around what had once been an open, curved staircase. The top of the staircase was now at her front door. One bedroom had been converted into an airy kitchen and another into a spacious living room with two bays and a fireplace. Lauren used the huge built-in linen cabinet in the hallway for her books.
Moving away from the window, she took her bathrobe from the hook and went to check on Drew. As always, he was sprawled all over the bed, with Bunny, his favorite stuffed animal, clutched to his chest. Drew had slept with Bunny every night since he was a baby. Lauren vividly remembered the frantic searches she and Todd had made for the stuffed rabbit while Drew cried for his toy from his crib.
She stared at the spot under the window where the crib had once stood. Suddenly, it was four years ago, a hot summer day, and she and Todd were taking the crib apart. Drew was jumping on his new bed while he watched their every move, obviously worried about what this desecration might mean.
“Don’t hurt crib, Daddy,” Drew cried. “Don’t hurt.”
“Don’t worry, slugger,” Todd assured him. “I’m not hurting it, we’re just taking it apart. We’re going to put it in the basement until we need it again.” He raised his eyebrows at Lauren and she playfully jabbed the screwdriver she was using into his side. Todd was anxious to start “trying” as soon as possible, but Lauren was starting graduate school in September and wanted to get a year behind her before she got pregnant again. Not to mention that with Todd’s fledgling business and Lauren not working, they couldn’t exactly afford another child.
Drew looked puzzled. “I have new bed,” he said. “No more crib. I’m a big boy.”
Lauren and Todd exchanged glances. “You are a big boy,” Lauren told Drew. “But maybe some other baby will use it some day.”
The little boy was silent for a moment and then his face lit up. “For Baby Jonathan or Baby Adam.” Jonathan and Adam were Drew’s second cousins, the twin sons of Aunt Beatrice’s daughter Roz.
Todd slid behind Lauren and pulled her to him so that she could feel him hardening against her buttocks. “Or maybe a baby girl,” he said, more to Lauren than to Drew.
Lauren arched her body, pressing even closer to Todd. She twisted her head and met his kiss. “Maybe,” she had said. “Maybe.”
As quickly as the vision had come, it disappeared and Lauren was once again in Drew’s dark bedroom. No Todd. No toddler Drew. And no hope for her little baby girl.
Lauren straightened the blanket and sheets and tucked them around Drew. She snuggled her face into his neck, breathing in his slightly stale sleeping smell. She kissed him. “I love you,” she whispered. But he didn’t stir. Drew was a very deep sleeper. Just like Todd.
Lauren wandered back to her bedroom, running her hand along the rich wood of the linen cabinet-bookcase. Sometimes she ached so from missing Todd, like the pain an amputee feels in a lost limb. Todd was just as severed from her life as her cousin Roger’s leg was from his. Roger claimed he still felt his leg twenty-five years after it had been blown off in Vietnam. Lauren wondered if she was still going to ache twenty-four years from now.
In the beginning, she and Todd had been so good together: backpacking across Europe, throwing parties in the studio apartment they had painted bright red to disguise the fact that it had only one small window; reading Fitzgerald and Dickens and Tolstoy out loud to each other deep into the night. She had loved that he was a photographer, an artist, able to see what others missed, able to make the ordinary extraordinary. Todd had taught her to appreciate the moment, the living of life, the exquisite pleasure that was now.
Then Todd had changed, or she had changed, or life had changed. Todd’s spontaneity and fierce independence, which had so appealed to Lauren, grew into annoying impulsiveness and irresponsibility. He ran off to Peking before Time actually hired him—which they never did. He screwed up their tax return and brought on an audit. His business failed, bequeathing a loan they would be struggling to repay into the next millennium. He forgot to pick up Drew at kindergarten, leaving her to stand, passive and repentant, pressing her sobbing child close, as she received a lecture from the teacher on the importance of stability and predictability to a five-year-old. The day Todd tried to explain away his fling with Melissa as a “meaningless mistake” was the day Lauren asked him to leave.
Lauren returned to her post at the window. She stood there for a long time, thinking about love and life and
lost chances. Exhaustion finally overcame her and she dropped back into bed without even taking off her bathrobe. She fell into an immediate and surprisingly deep sleep.
She didn’t wake until her bedroom door creaked open and Drew peeked in. He was wearing a pair of Celtics pajamas two sizes too big for him. The early morning sun shone like a fuzzy halo behind his tousled blond hair.
“Hi, honey,” she mumbled, waving him over. “Want to cuddle?”
Drew shuffled to her side of the bed, managing not to trip over the pant legs that engulfed his feet. Looking down at her, his little mouth set in a straight line, he said, “I’m not going to school.”
Lauren sighed. So it was going to be that kind of day. “Well, how about some breakfast anyway?” she asked, sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “I’m hungry as a bear.” She reached out and pulled him to her. “Grrrrr,” she roared. “Better watch out.”
Drew struggled out of her arms. “Don’t, Mom,” he said, but Lauren saw the twinge of a smile at the corners of his lips.
She turned away to give him some time to save face. Keeping her back to him, she stretched her hands to the ceiling and said, “You go pick out your cereal. I’ll be there in a minute.” As he scurried toward the kitchen, Lauren headed to the bathroom, preparing herself for what she knew was going to be a difficult morning.
When Lauren entered the kitchen, she was surprised to see Drew sitting at the table, finishing up his cold cereal. She kissed the top of his head and he gave her a hug. “Want seconds?” she asked.
“Okily-dokily,” he said, smiling and holding out his empty bowl.
Taking it, she leaned over and kissed him again. Maybe she was going to be spared a temper tantrum after all. Lauren refilled his bowl, put on the coffee, and toasted herself a bagel while Drew prattled on about his camp counselor last summer. Why this would come into his head on a late October morning was a mystery to Lauren. Placing her breakfast on the table, she sat down and smiled at him. When his bowl was empty, she said, “Go quick and do your stuff: clothes, teeth, hair, and bed.”
See No Evil Page 4