Night Relics (46 page)

Now, as he watched her sitting before the fire, the sadness in her eyes was as clear to him as the passing years, and he regretted
that he’d left the quiet of his house and come out into the night. The wind blows to the south, he thought, and goes round
to the north; and on its circuits the wind returns….

He opened his hand and looked at the painted tin soldier that he’d been holding in his palm like an amulet. After a moment
he returned it to his pocket.

A
SCATTERING OF CHILDREN’S TOYS STOOD ON THE SECOND
shelf—marbles and a windup tin duck, a pocketknife, and the carved wooden head of an Indian that sat atop three dusty
books, the spines turned away so that she couldn’t read the titles. A dozen feathers lay next to the books, their quills tied
together with a string. There was another framed photograph, too, this one of a thin ascetic-looking boy with sleepy eyes.
He stood holding a gray cat in his arms in a sunlit clearing in the woods.

The hollow within the chimney was a shrine, set up to the memory of the woman and boy, the collection of trinkets reverently
arranged, and then the narrow room sealed up like a crypt. She was reminded suddenly of Peter, arranging
and rearranging the parlor with a thoroughness that was nearly fanatic, trying to re-create something, to reanimate something
that was long ago dead and gone….

She set the flashlight on a shelf of broken brick so that it illuminated the interior of the chimney, then leaned in, reaching
through the darkness to pick up the perfume bottle. The scent of jasmine was strong within the enclosure, mingled with the
smell of smoke. She cast her eyes downward to the floor below the edge of the shelf. Against the wall lay a tin pail, a rusted
trowel, a gallon jug, and a small heap of brick. Sitting atop the brick was a glass tumbler and a tarnished silver flask.

Beside the flask lay a dead man, his face tilted up toward the light.

She jerked her hand back, accidentally sweeping the glass stopper off the shelf with the edge of her palm. Something pushed
her, solidly, like hands against her shoulders, and she reeled backward, grabbing onto an edge of broken brick to keep from
falling. She heard the stopper clatter against the tin pail, its ringing echo reverberating against the walls of the chimney.

There were sounds of movement in the room above, telegraphed through the stones of the chimney itself, growing in volume until
she could hear every small rustle and click, even the breathing of the three occupants, as if the reanimated family had grown
even more insistently real. She pressed her hands over her ears, trying to crush out the noise, but that seemed only to magnify
it, and her head was filled with the sound of voices raised in anger, a woman’s drawn-out scream, the plaintive cries of a
lost child wandering through the windy, midnight darkness….

A wild, disconnected terror arose in her mind, like a night fear rising through a dark and incongruous dream. In her panic
she turned toward the open gate, suddenly compelled to flee. Beyond the moonlit wall the forest trees bent and waved, ridden
by the wind. She heard the sound of a woman’s voice, calling from somewhere far away, from the
open spaces above the canyon. And then abruptly, as if awakening from a dream, she realized that the voice was her own. She
stood looking around her at the dim cellar, breathing in ragged gasps.

Picking up the flashlight, she forced herself to look at the thing on the floor inside the chimney. It sat in a slumped heap,
a mummified human dressed in dusty rags, the leather-covered skull bent forward across the collarbone. Its cheekbones showed
through rents in the dried skin of its face, the color of dirty ivory in the reflected light, and its hands were curled and
brown like monkey paws.

She stared at him, the house quiet now. How long ago had he locked himself away behind the layers of brick and stone? And
the flask—poison? Did he drink it and
then
set about bricking himself in, mixing mortar in the pail while the poison worked? When the last brick was set, he must have
lain dying in utter and complete solitude and darkness, waiting for the oil lamp to wink out, too weak from the poison to
change his mind. It was nearly impossible to imagine the perverse will, the desperate self-loathing that would have been necessary
to carry through with such a thing.

The carefully arranged shrine was easier to understand—the choosing of the magic-laden objects, of photographs that captured
exactly what it was about the person; the eyes had to be right, the mouth, even the tilt of the head. He had taken the top
off the bottle of perfume, filling the narrow tomb with scent, maybe staring at the sad photograph, the beaded purse and the
jewelry until darkness hid it from him….

She bent forward, her hand closing over the crystal perfume bottle. Instantly she was slammed backward again, and she kicked
through the debris on the floor, tripping and falling into the dirt. A voice shrieked in her ear as wind howled through the
lattice, and the floor above her creaked ominously, as the entire room shifted on its stone piers.

At that moment a man’s face flickered into existence in the dark window she’d broken into the chimney. The eyes jittered spastically,
and the mouth worked as if the face would speak, but couldn’t. It was pale white, like smoke. She could see the chimney through
it as it drifted toward her, the shelves full of trinkets hovering behind its eyes. Almost without thinking, she hurled the
perfume bottle at it, pushing herself to her feet as the bottle flew straight through it and broke on the stones of the outer
wall, showering the narrow shelves with glass fragments that rang like crystal bells.

Again the ground heaved as if a wave had run through it, throwing her down again into the chalk-fine dirt and debris. There
was a rumbling, like rocks turning over in a flooded river, and the beams and joists that supported the floor groaned and
popped above her. Dust fell from the old wood, sifting out from between cracks in the floorboards, and a broad section of
brick and rock fell out of the chimney in a dusty heap.

A
MANDA AND
D
AVID SAT AT THE TABLE AT THE END OF
the kitchen playing Crazy Eights, the pale cards spinning across varnished wood, their plastic surfaces reflecting a dull
light. Peter walked slowly toward them. Behind him everything was dark, hidden—something he knew without having to look. The
kitchen lay in shadow, and the cupboards and counter, the stove and refrigerator, were dark rectilinear masses without any
real dimension, flat sketches
of shadow. Only the distant table was illuminated with a glow something like the light of fireflies, emanating from the atmosphere
itself.

Suddenly he stood next to the table, looking down at the litter of playing cards. On the edge of the table, next to the window,
sat a glass pitcher of green Kool-Aid and ice. Beads of condensation hazed the glass, and someone had drawn a smiling face
in the moisture, long drips of water trailing away from either corner of the mouth. Beside the pitcher lay a plate heaped
with Oreo cookies.

Amanda poured Kool-Aid into a clear glass tumbler and set it in front of an empty chair, then gestured at the chair and whisked
up the cards, shuffling them together, clicking the deck against the top of the table. There was darkness outside the window.
Something that looked like sheet lightning shimmered in the distance. She flicked the cards out onto the table, dealing out
three hands.

Abruptly he was looking down at the table from above, as if he were floating on the ceiling. He could hear distant thunder
now, although it occurred to him dimly that it could as easily be the sound of the wind. The light diminished, and the facedown
card that left Amanda’s hand moved sluggishly in its course, a slowly spinning white bee against a red background, the tiny
white diamonds around the bee revolving like a spiral nebula way off in the twilight.

Slowly he was conscious that it
was
the wind blowing somewhere far away, outside, beyond the dark window. Its sound suggested to him that there was something
he knew but couldn’t remember, something desperately important….

He touched his forehead. On his fingers was a red smear of blood. Abruptly he pictured a man’s face in his mind, vaguely familiar,
then the uncanny notion that it was his own face he saw, reflected in a fog-shrouded mirror. A curtain seemed to have lowered
itself between the present moment and the past. Memories shifted in the darkness beyond it, memories shaped like the shadows
of moving trees,
or of hillsides, or of clouds in a windswept sky. Some forgotten thing wandered deep in his mind, lost in the darkness of
unlit corridors. He could hear the echoing sound of its footsteps growing slowly louder until those footsteps became a heavy
pounding that nearly shook the house.

Then the pounding stopped, the room grew lighter, and the notion that he was searching for something slid past him and was
gone. The cards accelerated, spinning crazily, dropping to the tabletop and sliding away across it. David twisted an Oreo
apart, holding the halves up in the center of each palm like stigmata, one black, one white with frosting. “To undo it, you
unscrew it,” he said, then scraped the frosting off with his front teeth, leaving a dark sort of two-lane highway across the
center of the frosted half.

Peter picked up his hand. The twelve cards were sticky with chocolate and Oreo frosting and Kool-Aid. All of the cards were
spades. Only the eight was missing. It dawned on him suddenly that he couldn’t win, not with this hand. She’d dealt him worthless
cards on purpose. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “I have too many cards.” This was what he was doomed to: playing out a losing
hand.

He sniffed the air, smelling fireplace smoke now—the menthol smell of burning eucalyptus logs. There was the low sound of
muttering voices, as if from the other room, but when he turned and looked through the kitchen door into the living room,
he could see almost nothing at all, just hazy gray-tinged darkness like a densely foggy night. Shapes moved through it like
shadows on a screen. He heard the pounding again, very distant now, but it meant nothing to him. On the tabletop, moving hands
placed card after card faceup on the discard pile.

“I don’t love you anymore,” Amanda said to him without looking away from her cards. “I used to, but now I don’t. It wasn’t
easy, realizing that. Or maybe admitting it wasn’t easy. Maybe I realized it years ago. You know what’s funny?”

He stared at her. “What’s funny?”

“I can still remember
why
I loved you. None of the memories have changed, you know. I thought maybe they’d rot, like old pieces of fruit, but they
didn’t. All of them are still there—the trip to Maui, that old apartment in Carlsbad, all those breakfasts at that waffle
place downtown—remember that? The walnut-and-cinnamon waffles every Sunday morning? David growing up … Remember that school
of crazy-looking squid we found? What island was that?”

“Antigua,” he said mechanically.

“That’s right. I wouldn’t change a thing—not any of that. It was all good, and still is. And yet what’s funny is all of it’s
changed in some bigger way. We can still have all those things, we can still keep them, but we can’t have any
more
things, not together, we can’t. That’s what you need to know. It’s what you haven’t understood. Here, look at this,” she
said. “I’ve kept it all.”

From somewhere she produced the small handbag he had bought for her years ago, during their trip to the Caribbean. He peered
inside as she held the handbag open. Down in the bottom lay a scattering of big jewels, lumps of facet-cut glass in gaudy
colors like a kid’s pirate treasure. There were tiny shadows moving within the glass, and he was filled with the certainty
that if he held them up to the light he’d see things in there—happier times, maybe. Abruptly he remembered a time when he
and David had buried a cigar box full of rhinestones and dime-store rings and glass marbles in the back garden, late one rainy
Sunday afternoon. How many years ago was that?

“A long time ago,” David said, studying his cards. “I forgot all about it. I was just a kid then.”

“So did I,” Peter said. “I forgot, too.” It was still buried out there, had to be, the mahogany cigar box bug-eaten and decomposed.
He thought about going home and digging it up, but then it seemed that he already was home, although the direction of the
backyard—or the back door, for that matter—was lost to him, hidden somewhere in the recesses of his memory.

Amanda closed the bag and put it away someplace. “I’m keeping these safe,” she said. “But that’s all. There won’t be anything
more to add to it. It’s finished, like a book.”

He couldn’t answer her. He realized abruptly that the same thing was true for him. There were some things that had happened
to them both, together, in some other lifetime—bright memories like fallen stars that he had picked up off the sidewalk and
kept in his pocket. Already they were artifacts, museum pieces. Now there was nothing left between him and Amanda, no connection—that’s
what she was saying. Nothing except David.

He looked at his son, astonished at how grown up he looked. It seemed like only yesterday that he was four years old, not
even in school yet, and they had all the time in the world. He wondered vaguely about the box of treasure out in the garden,
whether digging it up would mean anything to David anymore.

Outside the window nothing had changed. Lightning flickered in the dim distances. The wind murmured beyond the wall. Unable
to play his hand, he watched sadly as Amanda and David tossed cards onto the growing pile.

“You should let it go,” Amanda said.

He couldn’t answer her. It was already gone.

“Hearts,” Amanda said, changing the suit by laying down the eight of spades.

He was suddenly aware of a rattling sound, like glass figurines clattering in a china hutch. Something shook the kitchen floor.
Amanda and David still played steadily. He was reminded of—what? Somewhere he had to be. Something left undone. The unreality
of his surroundings swept through him, and he looked around with growing unease.