As Night Falls (32 page)

T
wenty-four years ago, Sandy's mother had asked her not to testify in court. Only Sandy hadn't been Sandy then. That wouldn't become her name for a few more years.

Her mother hadn't spoken to her much in the aftermath of her father's death. The words she had said the morning they were setting out to see Nick's lawyer had been among the first.

“He's going to ask if you have anything to say, Cassandra,” her mother said. “But I don't think you saw anything. If you did, you couldn't possibly remember it right.”

Sandy felt her back bow upon being given the command. It was delivered creakily because her mother hadn't used her voice in so long. Sandy had never realized before how rarely her mother spoke when Nick wasn't around.

She had been looking forward to the start of the trial like other kids anticipated summer vacation or graduation. There was no escaping the truth now. Nick's monstrousness would be described to a jury who would hand down justice. A judge would mete out the punishment that had been missing for so long.

Only what was her mother asking Sandy to do? Good God, what was her mother going to do in court herself?

“You can't make me not tell what happened,” Sandy had replied.

Her mother's eyes were like chips of stone. “Maybe not,” she said. “But I can tell everyone that you're a liar when you say whatever foolishness you have in mind.”

Sandy felt pressure build inside her chest. She offered the only thing she had left.

“If I don't get to talk in court, I won't come back here,” she said. “You won't see me again. Not unless you come find me. And we both speak the truth.”

Her mother wasn't even listening by the end.

She had begun to smile as soon as Sandy spoke.

Sandy hadn't been able to make good on her threat, at least not right away. She was fifteen and had nowhere to go, although it occurred to her from time to time that Glenda Williams might have taken her in. But instead of pursuing that, Sandy had set her sights on school and achieving a straight-A average. She had graduated early and gone to college downstate with a full scholarship. She met Ben, and if his dream hadn't been to start a guide service and live the life of an outdoorsman in the high peaks, she wouldn't have settled anywhere near this close to Cold Kettle.

Her mother had never come to find her, of course.

Until tonight.

Sandy raced after Nick, who seemed to be having trouble navigating the uneven hummocks of snow, following marks that had to lead to Ivy. Sandy had no idea who might've saved her daughter, whose footprints these were. But she couldn't let Nick find him.

Cold clenched Sandy. She blinked particles out of her snow-encrusted eyelashes. Nick ran ahead, the lead in some dreadful race.

But he was running strangely, blockily and relatively slow. His pace allowed Sandy to catch up.

She put on a burst of speed, maneuvering over hillocks of snow. Sheer rage seemed to spur Nick on, giving him momentum. He moved like an unbridled animal, emitting vaporous puffs from his nose, sweat shiny upon his face despite the temperature.

At a flash of light, Sandy spared a glance behind her. Back at her house, the front door stood open, and her mother was stepping outside, coat clutched around her. She spotted Sandy and Nick, and began to trudge in their direction.

Her voice drifted over on a faint gust of wind. “My goodness! You don't have much in that kitchen of yours, do you?” A pause, then another cry. “Nicky! Where are you going?”

The prints on the ground changed direction, and Nick careened away. Sandy had let herself be distracted for a second, and she damned the part of her that still opened like a bud every time her mother appeared.

But while seeing her mother for the first time back at the house had been like a physical blow, now Sandy recovered from the sight quickly, picking up her pace again without so much as a stumble. Because she knew. Her mother had eyes only for Nick, and Sandy was but a chink in the wall of her feeling. Nothing had changed. And nothing ever would.

The knowledge, putrid and buried for so long, was somehow liberating. It was like the moment you finally allowed yourself to be sick, then lay back afterward, panting and sweaty and emptied.

Sandy charged forward, Nick almost close enough to touch. Another advantage she had: she knew where they were headed. These footprints led to the Macmillans' camp.

As they approached, the front door on the structure swung open, and someone stepped out onto the sagging porch. One of the Macmillan descendants. It had to be.

“Hey!” the guy called. “Are you from the big house? I just found this girl on my—”

There was a momentary delay, Nick nearly tripping before he shouted back, “Thank God. She's my daughter. Can you send her out?”

Sandy was near enough that she could see how young the man standing there was. Too young to hear the husky thrum in Nick's throat, or to understand the madness it implied. The guy took a few steps across the uneven boards on the porch.

“Dude, I don't think I can do that,” he called out. “I hate to tell you this, but she's hurt pretty bad. I just called for an ambulance—”

Sandy's mind tore through possibilities. If she screamed at him, he might not understand, or listen. Certainly he didn't seem to sense anything off about the situation yet. If she could just get there before Nick, then she could blow past the guy, barricade them all inside—

Some instinct, or maybe it was the sight of Nick, now neck and neck beside her, drove out the capacity for rational weighing, and Sandy began to scream. “Get back! Inside your house! Close the door and lock it!”

“Huh?” the guy called. “What did you—”

A bullet screamed through the air.

The young man's face bore an expression of faint perplexity as he went down on his knees, then tumbled over.

Nick made the front steps a slash of a second before Sandy got there, and leapt.

There was a blur from behind, or to the side; it seemed to be everywhere at once. Sandy's first thought was that a deer, tawny and white, was running inexpressibly fast to catch up with Nick. But then she realized the animal was too small for a deer. It was Mac, moving with such swiftness and grace, he seemed winged.

The dog erupted in a volley of barking, bristles of fur standing on end as he dove.

For a single heart-stopping and joyful moment he was a puppy again, or maybe the puppy he'd never gotten a chance to be, scattering snow with his snout, shaking himself off in midair.

Then he seized Nick's calf and sank his teeth deep into the flesh.

Nick let out a shriek of rage and agony, and the gun went flying. He kicked, but Mac hung on, his jaw locked. Nick made it onto the first step with one foot, but the other sank into the snow, and he stumbled backwards, trying to rid his body of the clinging dog. One leg kept kicking, the other hopping to maintain Nick's balance, so that he looked like a dybbuk, a dancing devil, or maybe simply an out-of-control, tantruming boy.

Mac's forelegs and even his lips on Nick's leg trembled as he fought to keep hold. You would have had to know their dog, been there after his rescue, overseen the long climb back from a life of abuse, to realize that Mac had never before rallied such force and such strength, and probably never would again; that, no matter what happened tonight, whether they all lived or died at Nick's hands, Sandy was getting to witness McLean's last great stand.

When Mac grabbed hold of Nick's leg, the gun had sailed free, landing in the snow. Now Nick pulled out the knife he'd taken from the Nelsons', the handle a sleek extension of his rolled fist. He twisted around behind him, stabbing viciously at the dog, and Sandy let out a long, blistering scream. “Mac! Runnnnnnnn!”

The dog turned, love and comprehension both in his strangely beautiful pair of eyes, one dark, one the liquid of a clear daytime sky.

Mac let go, and did as he'd been told.

He wasn't as nimble as he'd been just moments ago, and his paws stuck once in a drift, sending him face-first into the snow. But he made it out of Nick's reach. McLean found the woods and entered them like a snowy shadow.

Nick spun on one foot to face Sandy. The other leg leaked blood. It looked black in the night, as did the holes Mac's fangs had drilled in the pants Nick wore.

Their mother had nearly caught up to them. The sheet of snow where the gun had landed lay in front of her, its presence revealed by a dark well.

Nick lunged forward with the knife, but he didn't seem able to aim precisely and Sandy felt only a whicker of air from its blade.

“Nicky,” came their mother's voice. “What is going on out here?”

“Not shore,” Nick said, or that's what it sounded like, as he pogo-stepped in Sandy's direction, holding the knife thrust out at an awkward angle. With a rasp, it slashed the fabric of their mother's coat, and then her arm. Barbara looked down as if she wasn't certain what had made that sound, still less what might be causing her to bleed.

Then it was as if a curtain came up, and everything onstage was exposed for their mother to see. Shock and pain transformed her, widening her eyes and twisting the skin on her face into a thready web of crevices and wrinkles. Her mouth opened, forming a small, dark cave.

There was a hard, wrinkled pit inside Sandy that felt glad. Surely the sight of her own blood flowing would make their mother finally start to feel.

Instead her eyelids came down, pressing into the gray hollows beneath, and she uttered one word, in the tone of voice someone would use to chastise a child who'd just spilled juice. “Nicky!” She made a
tsk
ing noise with her tongue as she walked forward, arms outstretched as if she hoped to draw Nick into a bloodied embrace.

Nick ignored her, coming for Sandy in an ungainly lurch that seemed no less menacing for its imprecision.

Their mother was going to pass right by the gun.

“Mama,” Sandy pleaded. “You're bleeding! Do something!”

Their mother continued to take light, tripping steps through the snow, impervious to the red dots now stippling it.

“Mama,” Sandy said again.

Nick grew distracted by the pattern of their mother's blood, his eyes perfectly round, glassy in the darkness as he stared at the ground, and a second was shaved off his wild lunging with the knife.

Their mother looked up, a paralyzing toxin of futility and regret and hatred freezing her features. She touched the blood now matting the cloth of her coat. “And just what is it that you would like me to do, Cassandra?” She turned back toward Nick.

Sandy plunged her hand deep into the snow. She withdrew a hunk of icy metal.

As Nick limped toward her, blinking to clear his vision so that this time he could drive home the blade, Sandy sighted on him.

“This,” she said, through a scrim of tears so hot they felt like flames.

And she fired the gun.

T
he police chief arrived with a plow that sent up a high wake of white, clearing the road for the ambulance that came next, gunning its engine and lunging up the road. Two police cars followed, cutting through the blackened night like fins, their light bars spinning in a kaleidoscope of red and blue, while their sirens let out a long, wailing cry.

Eight people jumped out onto the snow.

Sandy stood on the Macmillans' porch. “Please!” she cried. “Over here! My daughter's hurt! And this boy!”

A medic swerved in her direction, black medi-kit banging against his leg as he ran.

“My husband's in the basement of that house,” Sandy shouted again, pointing.

But she couldn't help dropping her head in defeat when a second medic headed in that direction. She knew Ben couldn't possibly have survived. Only the thought of Ivy enabled Sandy to move forward again.

She held on to Ivy's startlingly chilled hand without letting go.

The Macmillan boy had been led off to the ambulance, gauze applied to his shoulder, more terrified than gravely injured.

Nick wasn't a good shot after all. Just like their father had said.

Sandy felt tears slide down her face, for him, for Ben, for them all.

A medic tended to Ivy, who passed in and out of consciousness while she was wrapped in an emergency blanket and her ankle immobilized. But her vital signs were fine, the medic assured Sandy. Ivy would recover.

Her mother's wound had stopped bleeding by the time it was examined.

Sandy followed her daughter to the ambulance, which stood parked on the long, curving road that ran between the two properties. She caught a glimpse of an old black man walking over to one of the police cars. He pulled open its rear door, and quietly, without looking around for anyone, lowered himself down and took a seat inside.

From her own house came a noise that split the night: the irritated sound of tearing, clawed-apart wood.

Then the other medic burst out of the now-open underground level.

“I'm gonna need that gurney!” he shouted. “Get the DOA off of it now!”

Nick's corpse was lifted aside, and the gurney shoved forward.

In a swirl of events, Sandy watched the gurney rolled carefully back out again, with a different body upon it. But this one wasn't dead. Instead it was wrapped in a second emergency blanket, its face concealed by a bulbous, insectile mask.

The medic who accompanied the gurney leaned over, hands pressing down hard as he said, “I'll apply pressure now, sir. You did great. Just great. Now let me take over.”

Sandy snatched one look over her shoulder at Ivy, being loaded into the ambulance.

Then she began to take the frozen moguls of snow at a leap, racing toward her husband.

W
ith even less to fill her days, lacking the semblance of routine and the bright spot of her Wednesday prison visits, Barbara took to driving the same route that had brought her to her son at the end. Once, she left her car near the cabin with the
For Sale
sign on it, and trudged through the woods alongside an endless road. There were enough fir trees with laden boughs, and snow-draped, hulking boulders surrounding the house that nobody saw Barbara approach. She reached the place soundlessly, and stayed hidden, observing the people who moved about inside.

At first, Barbara didn't dare risk such a trip again. But as the months passed, she found herself beckoned back. She wanted to see them.

The man on his crutches, his right leg encased by some contraption from ankle to thigh. When Barbara had arrived during the boundless maw of that sucking, swallowing winter, the man had worn two such contraptions, and he had been in a wheelchair.

But now it was summer, and he had come a long way.

They all had. Barbara never even looked at the divot of skin on her arm anymore, like a new and girlish dimple.

And the daughter, too. She bore a resemblance to how Barbara used to appear, a long, long time ago. There were class pictures from that period, which helped Barbara to recall, and also scant memories of a mirror they had before her mother removed every glass from the house, declaring that she wasn't going to have six girls preening themselves around her. This one called Ivy looked different from Barbara in only one respect: she walked with a glitch in her step. Barbara, at sixty-three, was lighter and easier on her feet than the girl, and during the first of her visits, that fact had given Barbara a jaundiced sense of satisfaction.

She had a boyfriend, Ivy did.

He came up the long driveway in a new car now, too big and fancy for any child, or any grown-up either, for that matter. Though sometimes Barbara regretted not giving Nicholas his own car. Maybe if Nicholas had gotten that, everything would've been different.

The boy climbed out and joined in the meal the family was eating on their enormous covered porch. God knew what it must cost to construct such an arena-sized expanse of stone. The food being served on the glossy wooden table looked expensive, too.

After some time, when Barbara had grown sore from sitting on her haunches, parting the branches of a tree with stiff fingers, the boy and the girl prepared to leave.

The father asked them their plans.

Cassandra gave Ivy a look that made Barbara want to grab hold of something and tear it apart. How could a mother look at her daughter that way, with eyes so full of love and adoration that they overflowed?

“That's really where you guys will be?” Cassandra said. “All night, honey?”

The girl pranced across the stone—that snag in her step, but still, prancing—and said, “All night, Mom. Unless if we go over to Brian's—his parents aren't home this week—but I promise I won't drink, even if everybody else is. And I'll call for a ride.”

The boyfriend let out a guffaw. “Man. No secrets in the Tremont family.”

Cassandra's hand reached for the man's, like a missile finding its target, and the man said, “You got that right, Cory.”

And then Cassandra and the man laughed, great, blooming laughs, louder than the joke really warranted—Barbara didn't get what was so funny actually—and they both watched as the boy helped the girl down the stairs, even though she really didn't need much help, not anymore.

Barbara watched too, from amidst her stand of broad, leafy trees, leaning against the scabby bark of a trunk for both concealment and support.

The next time she crouched in back of the house, behind a rock whose nooks and crags she studied as voices floated her way. And as the weeks wore on, Barbara risked additional visits. Finding that she wanted to feel more a part of things, she began to crawl forward on the ground, below eye level. She wasn't noticed, and so she drew close enough to sit beside the forged metal latticework that encircled the porch, almost as if she were a guest at the party.

Cassandra and the man would linger outside on those soft, peachy nights when their daughter had gone off, and the sun seemed incapable of sinking. They had an old dog, who lay on the hot, baking stone beside them, occasionally blinking one milky blue eye and snuffing in gratitude as they dropped pieces of food down to him, charred meat and bits of roll.

The dog was aware of Barbara—he lifted his head and sniffed—but her presence didn't appear to bother him, and Barbara took that as a sign.

Maybe she belonged here too, just a little bit.

She liked listening to the conversations Cassandra and the man had. So intimate and understanding. Those qualities didn't enrage her as they had in the beginning. And as the summer passed, Barbara decided to make one final trip, as if aware that both the year and her time would soon be growing short.

Cassandra's voice traveled out over the fields.

“I know I've said this before,” she said. “But I didn't keep anything from you, Ben—I kept it from myself.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold despite the balmy temperature. Cassandra had always been the most vexing and illogical child. “If you don't think about something for long enough, it begins to go away. Or gets buried by the passage of time.”

Her husband studied her across the table.

“I didn't want to be that person anymore. I wanted to be someone…I wanted to be worthy of you.” And for some inexplicable reason, Cassandra put her face down in the cupped bowl of her hands.

Her husband began quietly stroking her arm. “Worthy of
me
?”

Cassandra looked up.

“Oh, Ben, you know how you are. You're strong—good God, but you're strong—and you're moral and good-hearted. But you see things one way. If ever I hadn't been that way…I mean, look what happened when you wanted to move up here and I didn't.”

After a moment the man said, “We moved up here.”

They both chanced a smile.

“Right,” Cassandra said.

“I'm not strong,” the man said, his smile fading. “I can barely walk.” A long pause before his next words. “I'd say you're the strong one.”

The irregular oblong of wood wasn't even, like a table was supposed to be. Cassandra laid her arms across its short end.

“How many bones broken?” she replied. “And how close did that bullet come to hitting your spleen? A fraction of an inch and you might not even be…” Cassandra compressed her lips and stopped speaking.

The man looked away from her to gaze out over the land. Far off in the distance, now pared down to a speck, was the retreating car that carried their daughter.

“It's the nights,” he said at last. “The nights are still hard.”

His hand found Cassandra's and they came together like links on a chain.

Barbara awaited Cassandra's response, watching these people, who had taken away the only person who'd ever mattered to her, put a stop to his reign on her heart and her life.

And for just a moment, as brief and fleeting as warmth in Wedeskyull, she was glad.