Folly (18 page)

covering it

holding it

warming it

while my right hand writes these words, makes these lists and I list to the left and I list to the right and to the port and starboard and if I had any port I’d drink that with my right hand the woodwright/the wordwright and at my left hand the gun, and between them in a triangle/the top of a triangle formed by right and left and words and gun stands a tight little forest of six smooth phallic bullets, beautiful smooth pieces of brass and lead and I’m sorry

Dr. Hunt

Roberta

Hunter After Truth

I’m so sorry but there was a footprint near the spring and I’m tired, tired and

tired

lonely

alone

afraid

small

weak

tired

tired

tired

afraid

It was Petra, all unknowing and innocently asleep in her bed a thousand miles to the south, who reached out a hand and kept her grandmother from sliding the bullets into their chambers.

I’m sorry
, Rae had written, knowing that Roberta Hunt would read the journal, but when she wrote the words, she seemed to hear herself say them, and suddenly she was wrenched back to winter the year before, to the first week of February, looking up into Petra’s horrified, tear-streaked face and telling the child, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

The dates had taken on a luminosity in the calendar of Rae’s memory, a counting-down of days.

November 1: repairing Tamara’s roof with Alan and Bella.

November 25: Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s beach house: children running, fragrant turkey roasting, cold sea air with the taste of wine on Alan’s mouth and wood smoke in his hair.

December 3: finishing Bella’s present, an intricate inlaid box bristling with secret drawers.

December 11: Alan’s last class, his grade sheet turned in, home now.

December 12: the world came to an end.

A middle-aged real estate broker with a cell phone in one hand and the remnants of a well-lubricated Christmas party singing through his blood. Alan was killed instantly. Bella died twenty-four hours later, or so they told her; Rae did not know it for a couple of days. Rae was in surgery for five hours to piece together the smashed left arm, the torn flesh
of her left breast and shoulder, the hairline fracture of the left jawbone, all injuries given her—cruelest of ironies—by Alan, some fluke of air bags, seat belts, and the driver’s-side impact that had flung her husband’s beloved body into her. His glasses had shattered against her chest. His skull had smashed her raised forearm. A later surgeon found a piece of his front tooth buried in Raes shoulder.

If Bella had screamed one last terrified
Mommy!
it was wiped from Rae’s memory. Or perhaps not entirely: Maybe it was the echo of that cry that came to her beneath the rain and in her moments of awakening.

Five days in the alien world of an intensive care ward at Christmas, a place that even Rae’s mind registered as bizarre (the grimly cheerful tinsel swags on the monitors still appeared in her nightmares), followed by two weeks in a private room, then nine more days under the care of Tamara’s series of round-the-clock nurses before Rae could pull together sufficient energy to throw them out. All these health professionals saw only the expected battering of the bereaved; not one of them looked deep enough to notice the massive weight of melancholia settling in. Sitting in a still house in a dumb haze, Rae knew what was happening. A part of her looked on, that portion of her mind that split away at times like these, to watch with dry amusement as she slumped for six hours in a chair without moving, to observe her friends arriving to take her to the long-delayed funeral and finding her unwashed, unfed, wearing old jeans and one of Alan’s plaid shirts, having to brush Rae’s hair and get her dressed around the cast on her left arm. Sardonically, the looker-on noted the people, a sea of faces: colleagues, students, friends, touching Rae’s good arm, tears on their cheeks; Rae herself was aware only of nothingness. Home again, to a house in which silence dwelt, silence and Rae and the looker-on who had accompanied her into depression each time before, whose grim business it seemed to be to make careful and disinterested note of the number of sharp knives in the kitchen, the length of the cord on the radio near the bathtub, the vent of the propane tank, the proximity of the wheels of passing trucks. Rae had just enough sense to give up driving then, not wanting to take anyone else with her when she went.

It was in the middle of January, five weeks after the accident, that Rae first began to feel the presence of the Watchers. They came at night, picking at the edges of the grim blanket that smothered her mind, small, niggling twitches that could have been life returning to deadened limbs,
but which felt more like the threat of a further descent into lifelessness. A sound from the deck that, mere weeks before, would not have had her looking up from her book now drove her to the light switches, off for all the inside lights, on for the outside floods. Nothing was there, just the trees pressing up against the railing, the branches of the winter-dull garden moving gently in a breeze. Nothing there, but still Rae began to retreat into the upper rooms, or to the storage spaces that had no windows. After a few days, she went around with a staple gun and fastened bedsheets to all the uncurtained windows—which, it being a house without neighbors, was virtually every one. This transformed her house into a place simultaneously of refuge and of enclosure, a hiding place and a jail.

Rae started to walk. She would leave the house each morning, trudge her mile-long driveway and several more miles of lightly used public road to the small country market, where she would buy a paper and a desultory selection of groceries. Some days, when she was feeling too ill, she would occupy the bench at the bus stop for most of the day; on others she would wander on, far afield, miles and miles of mindless walking, watching the approach of each car and wondering calmly if this would be the one whose wheels she flung herself under. She could not have said, afterward, where she had been, but always she would return home before darkness fell, pick at some tasteless food, and take out the newspaper she had bought, clipping all the articles about disasters. A drug-related killing. A multicar pileup in the fog. A woman arrested for locking her child in the closet for two years. A massive earthquake in some dry and distant country. Disaster, catastrophe, death, disorder. She began to keep lists: the places struck down, the names and ages of the victims, the cars sought in the hit-and-runs. Lists of words that occurred in the articles, in descriptions of the victims and their assailants, even in adjacent articles, as if the words held some hidden meaning she might understand if she took sufficient care, as if the world might reveal meaning if she paid sufficient attention.

All the while, Rae’s own internal Watcher was fully aware that she looked a sight. Unkempt and often inappropriately dressed, she could not summon the energy to care. Friends came and buzzed in her ears with worried offers of driving her to the supermarket or the doctor’s; her lawyer came with papers, as if the transfer of Alan’s possessions to her mattered; Tamara arrived to tidy the house (although when she
attempted to clear out Alan’s closet, Rae drove her off in a rare summoning of fury). Nurses, doctors, lawyers, Alan’s colleagues—all called or left messages on the machine until Rae just stopped answering.

In the evenings, behind her stapled-up barriers, she sat at Alan’s desk or in the beat-up leather chair that bore the clear imprint of his shoulders along its back. The last book he had been reading lay on the table next to the arm, and she read and reread the pages where the bookmark lodged, troubled mightily that she did not know at which precise spot he had stopped reading. The page before the bookmark, so that he might start here afresh? Or halfway through the left-hand page where a section break occurred? Or even all the way to the bottom of the right? Oh, why couldn’t he have put the bookmark in at a new chapter? she raged. And why didn’t she know him well enough to guess? If she scrutinized the words closely enough, maybe she could feel which words his eyes had passed over, and which remained unread …

At night Rae curled up in Bella’s bed, where the pillow still smelled faintly of peanut butter and crayons and lemonade, or so she imagined, if she buried her face deeply enough into it. In the morning she put on clothes (baggy sweaters that would go over the cast; mismatched socks) and pushed her spoon around a bowl of cold cereal, staring at the floral and geometrical fabric prints over the windows and trying to convince herself that there was nothing on the other side of them, that if she pulled one aside she wouldn’t see a stranger’s face looking back at her. The anxiety usually hit before she finished her cereal, cramping her belly and making her pace up and down, hands clenched or wringing each other, until she could bear it no longer and burst out the door to hurry down the gravel drive toward the road.

Once her feet hit the tarmac, the feeling of Watchers would begin to fade. She would sink back into a dull, apathetic state, not caring much about anything or anyone, so long as she could keep moving.

And keep moving she did. She must have put on twenty miles a day during the end of January, rain and shine, up and down the roads with her hands thrust into her jacket pockets, her eyes on the pavement in front of her feet, a quart of milk sloshing beside the newspaper in the green knapsack. Fortunately, it was a mild patch of winter weather, even for California, and only twice did she get truly drenched. But the rain seemed to interfere with the Watchers, because as she splashed up her long, empty drive on those wet days, the back of her neck did not prickle
so ominously and the skin of her arms felt merely cold and clammy, without the crawling feeling that usually started up at the first curve in the road. Well worth the discomfort of being soaked to the skin, even if it meant the cast on her arm went spongy for days.

It was just bad luck that on the second of these drenchings the propane tank ran empty less than an hour after she reached the sanctuary of the house. She had neglected to phone for a delivery, or to unlock the gate for the truck. Now her only heat was the open fireplace. She used the last logs before midnight, leaving her the options of venturing outside to the woodpile or going to bed. She did eye the wooden furniture, but in the end took to her blankets.

She awoke to full sunlight, a scratchy throat, and the sound of footsteps walking across her deck. No knock came, no voice, and the sound was not repeated. Cold terror trickled into Rae’s veins. Long minutes passed with a whimpering deep inside, until finally she fumbled for the telephone with trembling hands and whispered to the emergency dispatcher that she had an intruder.

The sheriff’s deputy took forever to arrive. Red-faced from the stiff climb up the drive from the locked gate, he kept one eye on Rae the whole time he checked the house for intruders; whether he was more taken aback by her appearance or the state of her house would have been hard to say.

He found nothing, and eventually walked off down the hill, shaking his head.

In the week that followed, Rae called 911 twice more, each time with the same result, or lack of result. The third time the sheriff himself, Sam Escobar, strode up the road, walked briskly through her chaotic house, sat her down for a long talk, and left with a spare key to the gate in his pocket. She did not call again, not even when the Watchers took to scratching at her windows with twigs and rattling her doorknobs.

So she huddled into the sofa in front of her fireplace, concentrating fiercely on her newspaper disasters and her lists of related words and events until she could bear the noises no longer. Then she drew a pillow over her head to muffle the scratches and rattles, and she lay through the night, listening to the whispers that rose and fell just below the threshold of her hearing.

Rae’s own internal Watcher was aware that her behavior was irrational. As if it were studying a stranger, a woman curled up in the dark
and spending long midnight hours poring over endless lists, her inner eye knew there were neither whispered conversations nor heavy-footed Watchers outside of her head, as it was also faintly aware that before too long something would have to be done. However, the truth was, Rae found the unjustifiable terrors strangely comforting. Focusing on them, she had no energy left to think about the impossibility of life without Alan and Bella. Imaginary enemies were infinitely easier to face than real ones.

It seemed, looking back, that this period in her life went on for years. In fact, the downward spiral lasted for just under three weeks, from the funeral to Rae’s readmission to the hospital intensive care unit, feverish from a low-grade pneumonia, a rebroken left forearm, a lot of superficial cuts and bruises, and a nasty infection in her left shoulder where what they thought was a bone chip was creating havoc.