Bad Desire (5 page)

Digging into her pocket, she pulled out the jewel-encrusted sea horse. He's so much smarter than I am, she kept thinking, and he's so powerful. Once more the feeling of unreality crept over her. This's unbelievable, Sheila thought.
He's married
.

She swung herself off the bed, took a miniature key from the drawer of her nightstand and went to her closet, leaving the door ajar for the light. Her dress shoes were stored in the original shoe boxes, neatly stacked on the floor. Dropping to her knees, she quickly and quietly set the boxes aside, exposing, behind them, an old leather-covered stationery box standing on end. Sheila took it up and leaned into the spill of light. A small metal hasp and lock held the lid snug. With a twist of the miniature key, the lock snapped open.

The shallow box contained gold bracelets and gold chains and earrings, gold and jewelled pendants, gold pins, one set with diamonds or rhinestones—she couldn't tell which. Some of the pieces were heavy for their size, she thought. He also had given her money from time to time, and Sheila kept it hidden here, the twenties, the five fifties, rolled very tight and held by a rubber band. “Buy yourself something pretty,” he would say. She didn't take time to count it now, as she often did, with wonder. Tonight, she placed the sea horse among the other things, closed and locked the box and put it back, rearranging the camouflage of shoe boxes in front of it. I'd better find a new place, she thought, closing the closet door, before Gramma stumbles onto this one. She went back to her book report on the bed.

It was after eight-thirty when Denny Rivera called.

“Where've you been?” she asked him. She returned the campaign button to the handkerchief drawer and her homework to the night-stand. Then she said, softly, “Wait a minute.”

Carrying the telephone in her left hand, Sheila walked out on the landing and listened for her grandmother's movements downstairs. She heard nothing out of the ordinary, went back into her bedroom and quietly shut the door.

“I can't,” she whispered. “
No
, you know I can't.
Denny!
Not this close to the prom. You think I'm crazy? If I got caught, she'd ground me for sure. You know my Gramma!” Sheila brought a strand of her hair up through her lips and chewed it. Then with her fingers, she drew it away, wet, across her cheek. “Uh-hum,” she murmured.

The cassette had finished its cycle. She flipped the switch to the radio, and music of a different tempo spilled from the cheap speakers. She smothered a laugh in her hand, her cheeks reddened and she looked back at the closed door as if expecting to find her grandmother there. “You know I do,” she murmured, and she took a few steps, swaying, dancing to the music, watching herself in the vanity mirror. “You're terrible.”

Her whisper grew even more discreet. “I
can't. Dennnee
, stop it!
Stop
it. I really can't … I've already—” She checked herself and didn't finish. She didn't say: I've already lied to my Gramma once today. In the end, she told him, “Okay. Okay, I'll try.” She cupped her hand against the receiver so that nothing she said would escape. “Wait for me … you know. If I'm not there by ten-thirty, I can't make it. Okay? Okay, I promise. Okay, bye.”

At a quarter to ten, she heard her grandmother's footsteps climbing the stairs. With her face washed, her teeth brushed, wearing her nightgown, Sheila drew the quilt up, nestled her head deeper into the pillow and shut her eyes. She took long, slow breaths, as if already sound asleep. On the black screen of her eyelids, she could almost see her grandmother mounting the wide tier of steps. Her hand, nowadays, always clasped the rail. Rachel was humming some old tune as she reached the landing this evening. If she saw that Sheila was awake, she would linger in her room, talking and saying good night, as they usually did.

Lying very still, she listened as her grandmother went into the bathroom across the hall where she would change into her night-clothes—as she called them; Sheila heard the water turned on, then off; she heard the doorknob jangle, the click of the latch, the yawning creak of the hinge as the bathroom door opened.

With her eyes closed, Sheila sensed more than felt her grandmother in the bedroom with her. She imagined Rachel hovering closely over her, inches from her pillow. The clock on the nightstand was taken up. The striking mechanism chimed once, softly, as Rachel checked to see that the alarm was set.

Sheila took another slow, sleep-deep breath.

The slippered footsteps padded around the bed, a window was wrenched up, then the steps faded away altogether. Still, Sheila waited a few minutes longer before she opened her eyes and sat up. She looked at the clock—five after ten.

All the lights were out; the silence settled through the house like emptiness in a jar. From the large front bedroom, as if through a funnel, she heard her grandmother's mumblings and knew by heart the words that were always spoken: “… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.”

Through the two east windows, moonlight fell across Sheila's bed like silver rails. She stood away from the sheets, the hem of her nightgown falling about her ankles. As she passed through the moonlight her body glimmered through the sheer cloth. Reaching beneath the cushion on the old chaise, she grabbed her bathing suit—even in the dark, it gave off a faint scintillation.

Going into the shadows, she shed her nightgown and pulled on the black bathing suit, drawing the spaghetti straps over her shoulders. The suit fit her like a second skin, making her body feel smooth and power packed. Over it, she pulled on jeans and a denim shirt, her fingers rushing to close the zipper and the buttons. Again she looked at the bedside clock. Eight minutes had passed. 10:13. It didn't seem possible. I have to hurry, she thought.

Without making a sound, she bent to the vanity mirror, uncapped her lipstick and applied red color that looked black on her mouth. She ran a brush through her hair, then took up the spritzer of cologne but instantly changed her mind and shoved the glass vial into the pocket of her jeans. Even the slightest scent might betray her in the dark. Sheila lifted her canvas shoes, hugged them against her—a thrill of fear and excitement ran through her.

On tiptoe, she edged up to the doorway of her grandmother's bedroom. The raised doorsill pressed firmly against the arch of her foot; through her hair, a cool draft from the stairwell licked the back of her neck. With the moon's sudden passage through clouds, the light in the front bedroom waned, then burgeoned to a ghostly glow and shrank back to gray again.

A corner of dull moonlight exposed the monogrammed
B
on the pillowcase; the carvings of the headboard stood out in delicate, twisted tendrils. Gradually Sheila's eyesight adjusted to the shifting darkness; she saw her grandmother's sleeping face. She went no farther into the room. In the stillness, she could hear the slow progression of her grandmother's raspy breaths.

Feeling her way back across the landing, she started down the carpeted stairs, trying to remember every loose plank, stepping over the familiar stair that creaked so loudly and then, halfway down, where there was an audible weakness in the joists, sitting down and sliding from step to step until she counted four and stood upright again. The rooms downstairs seemed to ebb with the changeable moonlight. Emerging through the gloom, Sheila sat on the last of the stairs and slipped on her shoes.

The double front doors lay in a line almost directly beneath her grandmother's bed, so she retreated from them—went back through the house, taking the cologne spritzer from her pocket. She lifted her hair and sprayed the back of her neck once and then sprayed once more inside the collar of her shirt for good measure. Returning the vial to her pocket, Sheila crept to the back door, looked over her shoulder and grasped the doorknob.

When she drew the door open, the pane of glass quivered, and she stepped outside, holding back a deep sigh. The night rushed up around her, full of tiny sounds. The glass shuddered softly a second time when she pulled the door shut.

The sky was swept with dazzling stars. Mist thinned and broke around the dark columns of trees. Sheila leapt from the porch step to the grass and darted around the corner of the house. Suddenly, she stopped, her nerve endings tense with fright. She had the overwhelming sensation that she had passed someone close by, brushed by some breathing thing in the dark. Her toes dug down, gripping at the insides of her shoes. She looked back toward the garden, searching the dark trellises and arbors. Leaves stirred and grew quiet.
There's something I can't see
. Rotating on her toes, Sheila turned, crept back to the corner of the house and stepped out bravely into the moonlight. She peered at the back porch, but the door she had closed only moments before was still shut, exactly as she had left it. Touched by the wind, the pane of glass again shimmered in the door frame. No one was there. This is silly, she told herself. I'm imagining things.

She hurried down the side of the house to the front yard, where street lamps burnished the lawn with light. There was nothing to do but to cross through it, and so she fled toward the far corner of the iron fence.

Behind her, in the garden, the figure in the rose arbor remained in darkness except for the transitory gleam of his wire-rimmed glasses. Beecham stood watching the girl as she ran through the moonlight. That was close, Beecham thought. Now that she had vanished, he moved out from under the canopy of vines. He wondered how long the girl would be gone, when she would come back, but he really didn't need to see any more. Tonight he had studied the interior of the house through its downstairs windows; he knew everything he needed to know.

Swinging up over the old iron fence, Sheila shrank into the dark crevice between the lilacs. A hand—she saw a boy's hand—reached for her, and Denny drew her into his arms. “The curtains,” he whispered, “upstairs,” and he looked toward the front of the house, all awash in shadows. “I saw something.”

Catching her breath, Sheila looked in the same direction Denny was looking, but the upstairs windows only appeared dark to her and blank. “No,” she told him, “it's nothing. She's asleep; I checked.”

Denny was a year older than she was and several inches taller; his hair lay in dark rumpled curls. He touched her cheek with his hand, and her mouth was soft and slick when he kissed her. “They're waiting,” he said, quietly, leading her through the crooked lilac branches toward a car that emerged from the shade of the roadside oaks, a gray Firebird idling at the curb with its lights out.

The charcoal-colored door swung open for them, the seat fell forward, and first Sheila and then Denny scrambled into the back of the car. “Hi, Mary,” Sheila whispered and then to the driver, who had shifted gears, “Tommy, please,
please
, don't gun it. Don't wake her up. I think maybe she heard you last time.”

Tommy Ames looked back over his shoulder and grinned at her. “Sheila,” he said, “you worry too much.” But he did as she asked him.

Invisible except for the streetlight glancing from its chrome, the gray Firebird moved smoothly into the night. Behind it, the air carried only a trace of the warbling in its mufflers.

When there was no sound at all left beating the air, the brown-spotted fingers let go and the part in the upstairs curtains fell to, as if weighted. That boy, Rachel thought. It was maddening—all this sneaking around. One minute she would think, I've got to put my foot down; the next she was torn with indecision. She knew that Denny Rivera was the least of her troubles; she wanted Sheila to be interested in someone her own age. This wasn't the only time the girl had slipped away in the last few hours—Sheila had also disappeared before suppertime for almost half an hour and Rachel was certain she knew who she had gone to meet.

“I'm going to have to do it,” she whispered to herself. “I said I would; now I have to.” She crossed the dark landing and entered Sheila's bedroom. Reaching under the shade, she flipped on the bedside lamp and tugged open the drawer of the nightstand. The key was still there, where it always was. Taking it firmly in her fingers, she went toward the shoe boxes in Sheila's closet, wondering what new bauble Henry Slater had given her this time.

I've got to do it, Rachel thought. She's my little girl—and he won't quit. He's still after her.

The gray Firebird rumbled through the country club parking lot, staunched its headlights and swung in beside the black and gold Trans Am. Doors flew open, dome lights blinked, doors slammed shut. A murmuring rose among the gathering of high school boys and their girlfriends—ten of them, juniors and seniors, congregated between their parked cars. Cans of cold beer were passed around; a joint was lit, burning a red point in the night. One of the boys streaked across the dun-colored grass to the privacy fence. Seconds later, the gate squealed open and the underlit, Olympic-size swimming pool glowed before them like an eerie green lagoon.

“That thing better be heated,” Claudia Finney said.

“Trust me,” said two of the boys simultaneously.

Zippers and buttons slipped undone. They were quickly pulling off their outer clothes. On Mary McPhearson's swimsuit, a sprig of blue sequins glittered. Twisting her hips, Lana Russo wiggled out of her bib-overalls, revealing a bikini of bright chrome yellow. Two of the couples ran off toward the pool.

“It looks radioactive,” Claudia groaned.

“Just think,” her boyfriend said, “tomorrow we'll be salamanders.”

Denny was stripped to his trunks before Sheila had folded her jeans. “Go ahead,” she told him. “I'll be just a minute.”

In the carbon light, he looked lean and tough. “I'll wait,” he said and stood looking at the pool.

“No, go on, Denny,” she insisted. “Go ahead. I want you to. I'll come with Mary.” Sheila smiled at him, her fingers motionless on the top button of her denim shirt.