She's Not There (37 page)

There had to be a tree somewhere lying across the electric wires leading to Tommy's house. But there were no trees on Block Island. Maybe a branch from one of those scrubby pines I'd seen sprawled across Esther's roof had ripped off and blown into a wire. The branch hadn't broken all the way through the wires though. I thought of Joe's complaints about the frequent Block Island brownouts.

I took off my sneaker. I went to the window and bashed at it. I knew it was futile. It was still a sneaker, not a boot. But Tommy looked up, and when he did I thought maybe he was more than Esther's friend. Now he was watching me. He was not androgynous. I took off my bra. I put my hands on my hips. I felt perspiration trickling down between my breasts. And Tommy stared.

I unzipped my jeans and peeled them off. They were soaked through.

The sounds around me grew a little stronger. So did the light. The power was returning. I slid off my underpants and held out my arms to him. I said, “Tommy. Come and get me out.”

The light flared and the din bowled me over. I was down again, rolling, holding my ears, stopped by the wall, banging my head into it. I threw up.

I no longer felt the pain in my shoulder. The hallucinations returned. I was outside in the storm. The thunder and lightning were nonstop, piercing my ears, stabbing at my eyes, right through them and into my brain, filling my head. I was in a boat on the water, tossed up and down, back and forth by the waves. I tried to throw myself into the sea. I did and I went under, under the cruel seas of Esther's paintings—down, down, down to the rocky bottom strewn with bones—and then everything stopped, all the horrendous clanging and whistling and smashing. I was dead.

I was dead and a new sound, a familiar one, came from deep inside me. I listened carefully and then I recognized it. It was the beating of my heart. I had survived the shipwreck, I hadn't drowned. I heard Esther's words, I read her description of the courage of Dutchy Kitten, twelve years old, half dead, frozen, unable to understand what people were saying to her, unable to get them to repeat her name, and so I made the same effort she had once made to crawl out of the surf. I pulled myself along and I felt the tide helping me, the waves washing me onto the shore. All was quiet and still. It was pitch dark. But I knew my eyes were open and then a thought came to me, a rational thought instead of the ones I'd just been having, one that reflected reality. Another pine branch just heavy enough to do more than lean onto a wire had severed it. Or maybe the transformer at the start of Tughole Way had been hit by lightning. Toppled over.

The electric power to Tommy's house was cut off.

My body was shaking so hard, I couldn't move. Instead of the noise of the amplifiers, I heard echoes of that noise reverberating through my skull. The pain in my ears was a dull, deep ache, the terrible throbbing gone. And then I saw a small pinprick of light outside the little window, a steady one that remained on, nothing to do with lightning. Tommy had turned on a flashlight. I could see my bare skin. I snapped my fingers but I couldn't hear the sound. I was deaf. Tommy and I were even.

I willed myself to a spot next to the window and flattened my body up against the wall. He had to be deciding whether to wait it out or get rid of Christen and me now. But he knew what I knew—even if the transformer had burnt out, the islanders didn't mind going without electricity because they all had generators in place. But not a generator strong enough to create the kind of power necessary to run Tommy's torture machine.

He did have a genius, though, at his beck and call—Jake. Jake could probably build a generator to service all of Block Island, but obviously he hadn't. At that moment I felt such a vast hatred for Tommy, for what he'd put Jake up to, I wanted to kill him, to beat his head with a rock, to make his head feel just the way my head had. And then I felt shame.

I remembered Tommy already knew what my head felt like. I didn't want to kill him at all. I wanted to rescue him. I understood now exactly what Tommy had gone through when he was a boy. His injuries had left him with a severe hearing loss, his brain had been damaged, and he had been left with a propensity to madness. But I had to save myself. And I had to get to Christen.

Through the little viewing window, his flashlight's beam roamed the floor of the room and then the walls, but I was huddled under the window and Tommy never saw me. Then the beam disappeared for a few seconds before it reappeared in a long thin line. Tommy had opened the door a crack. I'd never heard the bolt slide or the door open. I could only hear the pounding inside my head.

I slid along the wall until I was behind the door. It opened halfway. The beam of the light came into the room, and behind it a hand I knew was there but couldn't make out. Joe had taken me crabbing once on the Chesapeake Bay. Joe said crabbing was an art. Fingering the line, you can feel when the blue crab begins to tamper with the rotted chicken leg at the other end. You can feel when he takes hold of the bait, settles in to eat, one claw holding fast to the bait, the other forking pieces of the chicken into his mouth. Then you lift him very slowly, just off the bottom, a few inches at a time, stopping each time the line feels slack, continuing when you feel him holding firm again; then, near the surface, you have to guess where he is and scoop swiftly upward with your long-handled net. Took practice, Joe told me, especially the guessing part. I'd practiced until I reached a point where I could feel a crab on my line before Joe could feel one on his, and I would lift the bait, lift the line a half inch at a time, lift just a little bit more, then yank the net up out of the water—always with a glistening wet blue crab struggling inside.

So I deliberated for half a second and guessed as to where exactly Tommy's wrist was. I made my hand rigid and lifted it high. With all the power I could muster, I sliced down through the air behind the light.

My wounded ears felt the vibrations of a scream. The flashlight hit the floor and went rolling. Tommy was in the light for just a second. In his other hand he held a short metal pipe.

He took a swing at me. The pipe glanced my bad shoulder. I didn't see black dots, I saw flashing stars, so I knew I wouldn't faint. I had the advantage. My shoulder hurt but it was back in position. Tommy's broken wrist would stay broken.

There was no strength in my left hand but at least I could use it. I grabbed at the iron pipe and tried to wrench it away. I couldn't. We both went down. He went for the flashlight, which was not a cheap plastic one but was metal and solid, and he swung it at me. He swung it and swung it, and on his third swing I pulled the pipe from his grip just as the flashlight hit me in the jaw. The blood filling up my mouth gave me what I needed. I felt a rush of adrenaline surge through my veins.

I went for the door, opened it, ran through, and slammed it shut. I threw the bolt just as Tommy flung himself against it. He flung himself at the door again and then again. He had no chance. I spit the blood out and I took a few deep breaths. Icy hands touched my back. I swung around and screamed a scream I couldn't hear.

Christen was in front of me. In the light that came from the flashlight I could see her face; her mouth gagged the way Kate's had been, but she'd managed to loosen it and yell. I got the gag off. She said something to me.

“Christen, I can't hear you.”

She yelled into my ear, “My hands are tied!”

She turned around and I untied her wrists.

Tommy was smashing his boot against the window. The window wouldn't be broken. It had to be hurricane glass; it would take a lot of pounding. He stopped and threw his body against the door yet again. Christen yelled into my face, “The bolt is wiggling!”

I said, “Get the bookcase.”

She didn't need me to help her; she was a strong girl. She pushed the bookcase back into position. She dragged a workbench across the cellar floor and shoved it up against the bookcase. The lightning was still coming through the crack in the black curtains covering Tommy's cellar windows, not such sharp flashes anymore, distant glows. The storm was moving offshore.

Christen was staring at me. She shouted, “Can you hear me now?”

I could, as though she were talking to me from the hallucinations I'd had just a few minutes earlier. “Yes. I can.”

“You're naked.”

She pulled off her sweatshirt. I went to put it on but I'd forgotten about my left shoulder. A pain shot through it when I lifted my arm.

Christen said, “Omigod, what's wrong?”

“Nothing. I hurt my shoulder. It's okay.”

She said something else.

“Louder, Christen.”

“Is your arm broken?”

“No.”

“I broke my arm once. It really killed. When I was nine.…”

While she shouted the story of falling out of a tree, I eased my sore arm into the sleeve of the sweatshirt, got the other arm in the other sleeve, and pulled it down over my head. The sweatshirt came down to my knees.

She stopped her story. She smiled. “You're warm now, right?”

She'd thought I must have been cold. It was such a childlike voice. But I heard it and that was all that mattered. I wouldn't be deaf forever, like Tommy.

I put my good arm around her. “Don't hug me back, Christen, it'll hurt. What about you, are you okay?”

“Yes. I snuck up to Tommy's house. But I tripped over something. Then he was right there and he grabbed me and tied my wrists. He put me in there, in that room.”

Christen looked toward the bookcase, hiding the window with the room behind. She said, “I heard this music and then this really loud bell.
Really, really
loud. But then red lights started flashing outside the window, in the cellar. He came and got me out and made me go upstairs. He was going to hit me with a pipe. He said to me he wanted to watch me just like I'd watched him. I tried to tell him I didn't know what he meant. I never watched him. He really scared me, Poppy.”

“I know.”

“He locked me in a bedroom and tied me to a hanger screwed in the door. It took me a long time but I ripped it out. I broke down the bedroom door just now.”

I sensed a noise, a crack. Christen's eyes went wide. Tommy had cracked the window. “He can't break it, Christen. It's hurricane glass. It'll only crack. You've trapped him. There is no way for him to escape that room. We've got to get out of here and go find someone to come and see to him.” She was still as a statue. “Now.”

She turned her head just a little bit. “No,” she said, “let's not. Let's not tell anyone. Let's let him just stay there until … until he
starves
to death.”

“Christen, he's ill. Psychotic. He's—”

“I don't care what he is.” She whirled around, came back to me. “Oh, no! Poppy, I can hear the door shaking.”

He'd loosened the bolt. “He can't get through that door. We'll get someone here to guard him until the police come.”

“But what if he does get out?”

“He won't. Believe me, you've seen to that. Let's go, Christen. Let's go right now.”

We went up Tommy's cellar steps, through his kitchen and his living room, and out the front door.

I could hear our footsteps and I could hear Tommy's bashing. The little sensory cells in my ears were rising up again. I could feel it happening because of Auerbach, who'd made it sound so real, so alive. The tiny sensory cells were collecting sound waves once more.

Outside, the storm had lost its violence. Flashes flew in the far black distance. The rain still fell in sheets, but it wasn't flying horizontally. A candle burned in Jake's window. I said, “Christen, I want to see if Jake is all right.”

She grabbed me. “Jake will let him out.”

“He won't do anything unless he's told to do it.” I went into Jake's shack through his unlocked door. Christen was a weight, hanging on to the back of the sweatshirt she'd given me. But Jake wasn't inside. “He's not here, Christen. Let's get the van and drive to the clinic, get the doctor.”

“The van's out of gas.” She looked up into the sky, the rain pelting her face, a face so innocent, hiding her instinct, her insight.

“Christen?”

“What?”

“How did you know it was Tommy?”

Her face came to mine. “He'd stare at us. He didn't laugh at us, but he stared. He seemed, I don't know, it was like we made him nervous or uncomfortable or something. That's how things are, though, with some people. I figured he just didn't like fat people. Or, you know, judged us. But Stupid would always say, No, he's just very serious. Because he's like a sheriff. Stupid said he reminded her of her grandpa. Her grandpa was gruff but he had a kind heart, she'd say. That's how I knew she would trust the constable.” And then she turned her face away again. She was listening to something. “Poppy, what's that?” I tried to hear. She said, “I think there's a plane coming.”

I heard it too. “That's Joe's plane.”

“How do you know?”

“Because no one else is fool enough to fly in this weather. C'mon, the airstrip is less than half a mile.”

“Okay.”

We hurried along, past the dead van as we went splashing through the puddles, trying to be careful and not fall. I heard the sound of the plane land. Christen and I went faster, helping each other stay upright. I was getting winded. She wasn't. Christen was capable of enormous endurance. And then the lights of Fitzy's car came at us. Christen began waving wildly. I remembered to wave with my right arm, not my aching left one.

The car had barely stopped before Joe and Fitzy were out of it. They ran toward us. I stopped in my tracks. When they reached us, I said, “Joe, don't touch me.”

Christen said, “She's hurt.”

He stopped.

“A little. It's nothing. My shoulder…”

“Jesus, Poppy, are you all right?”