Son of Destruction (14 page)

Thank God Grammy isn’t talking tonight, she just sits like a doll on top of a cheap candy box and nods and smiles, smiles, smiles. She doesn’t care how she looks or who’s here and she certainly doesn’t care what happens to her at this party, thank God. Furthermore Grammy always kind of likes Steffy when her brain is home, which it isn’t right now. Mom’s parents like to dress Grammy up and drag her out to parties even though she doesn’t always know where she is. It’s their way of making it up to her for sticking her in Golden Acres. Grammy’s nurse put her in her best party dress and fluffed up her white hair so the scalp hardly shows. Grandpa Henderson got her a drink and plopped her down and that’s fine with Grammy. She looks the same kind of happy no matter where she is.

When ladies come over to make nice, shouting to cut through the fuzz in Grammy’s head, she lifts her hand like Queen Elizabeth, accepting the praise of a grateful nation with that sweet, old-lady smile. Although Grammy still has her moments, tonight she can only find one word. She says it nicely, ‘My. My my my.’

The ladies all say, ‘Why Grammy, how nice you look.’ Then they say, ‘Why Stephanie, what are you doing tending your gramma instead of dancing with cute boys?’

And with a vindictive smirk Steffy sells Nenna down the river: ‘It’s only until Mom . . .’ so they see her Mom out there flirting. In green satin, she’s hard to miss; she’d fit right in if this was the Emerald City. Ozma would have a cow.

To a woman, the ladies tsktsk. ‘You ought to be the one dancing.’ Like she’d dance to that crap. Plus, her friends are all at fucking Jen’s party, especially Carter, so Steffy makes one of those noises where people can’t tell if you’re belching or answering or what.

Sweet Grammy takes up the slack. ‘My,’ she says, ‘my my my my my.’

Then they say, ‘Girls together, you and your great-grandmother,’ and, the bitches, they’ve had enough of
old
so they run away.

Very well
, Steffy thinks grandly.
Alone
. This party will never end. It’s late and they still haven’t had the toast so she can go. Four hundred people and not one of them Carter Bellinger, if he doesn’t come she’ll die stuck to this chair. Waiters know old ladies don’t eat so the hors d’oeuvre trays never come here. By the time she’s free, the buffet will be picked clean. Fine. They’ll be sorry when they find her desiccated corpse. The band is repeating numbers, everybody’s hanging in even though the party is beyond tired. Mom’s getting loud; that laugh sets Steffy’s teeth on edge. The grownups are drinking buckets because it’s rude to leave before the father of the bride gets up on the bandstand and makes his stupid speech.

Funny. Mr Kalen isn’t anywhere. Neither is Dad. Steffy would just feel better if he walked in and explained. By this time Mom’s run out of people she knows. She’s so lame, faking fun conversations with the bandleader and cute waiters because she can’t leave until it’s over, she just can’t. Will Dad and Mom will dance together or fight and kill each other if he does come in? God she hates being here, listening to Grammy breathe, but it beats being out there pretending to have fun.

‘Look at Nenna dancing, she’s frantic!’ For crap’s sake, can’t Mom’s friends wait until they’re out of fucking earshot?

‘Shh, the girl! Poor thing, it’s always hardest on the kids.’

That’s Jen Cashwell’s mother, grinning like a shark: ‘It’s what Nenna gets for fishing in cold water. She could have married somebody local, but no.’

And Mrs Von Harten, Mom’s best friend! ‘Northerners, it’s anybody’s ballgame. How can you tell what a man will do when you don’t know who his people are?’

The worst was the Carlson sisters, after they made their manners and pushed off into the mainstream. The ugly one said to the entire room, ‘Lord, Nenna’s plastered to Sammy Kristofferson like a dog humping a tree.’

When Carter comes she’ll get up and punch them in the face.

After a while Steffy knuckles. To survive around here you have to pretend, and she hears herself saying in her mother’s fake party voice, ‘Lovely party, don’t you think?’

Parked next to Grammy Henderson, Carter’s great-grandmother rises to the occasion. ‘Yes indeed it is.’

Old Mrs Bellinger is no picnic, talks to herself, ugly things, but Carter’s mom will make Carter stop by and kiss her as soon as he comes in, so Steffy sits here with the great-grandmothers on velvet seats that were new back when these old ladies were still real. He’d better not bring some skank with love bites and her boobs all smeared with whisker burn, this is one insult she is not prepared to take.

‘Steffy honey, what are you doing stuck back here?’ Oh shit, it’s Dad, squinting like a shipwrecked sailor washed up on the beach. He looks OK, except he isn’t. His outline is unstable, like a first-grader quit drawing his face before it was done.

Everything piles in on her and she cries, ‘Where were you?’

He won’t exactly look at her. He doesn’t know where Steffy stands with the mess between him and Mom. He doesn’t even know if she knows there is one, clueless Dad. He’s all ulp. Blush. ‘I was on the phone.’

‘Where were you all this time?’

‘Long distance.’ There’s too much to explain so he doesn’t explain any of it. ‘Business call.’

‘Aunt Gayle.’

Does he have to yap like a dog? ‘She’s not your aunt!’

Crap. Steffy’s just too tired to say anything back. Distressed by her silence, he adds a sweetener: ‘Tell you what. I’ll send Mother Henderson to rescue you, OK?’

Steffy just sits, trying to figure out how she feels about him.

‘OK?’ He waits a little too long for her to say it’s OK, which it isn’t. He gives her a miserable wink. ‘Tell you what. We’ll go out after, Heath Bar Mint Blizzards, my treat.’

‘Whatever.’

He’ll be too far away to hear her groan. Dad pushes off from the gilt chairs and he’s gone for good, just like everybody else. Probably he and Mom are out on one of the long porches, having a fight. No. Look at him, he’s trying to grab Mom out in the middle of the floor. She breaks free and dances away with Mr Rivard the club tennis pro like they’re in love, all sexy and
fuck you
.

Steffy hates her dad for being helpless and stupid. It’s late and she’s starved but the thought of chewing and swallowing in front of all these people brings up issues. Sometimes it’s easier to die.

Then like a shot out of nowhere, Grammy Henderson rouses herself. It’s as though all the lights in her head just went on. ‘Inconsiderate, unfaithful bastard, he isn’t worth it,’ she says so clearly that it’s scary. Then she turns to Steffy with tears in her eyes. ‘Tell your mother not to be so frantic, it’s mortifying. Look at her, throwing herself around like a ten-dollar whore.’

‘God, Grammy.’ Steffy reaches out to her oldest living relative, closing her hand on that translucent arm. ‘Are you in there? Oh, Grammy. Please stay!’

But as quickly as Grammy’s lucid flashes come, this one goes and the best part of Grammy is locked up inside again.

She’s been stranded forever when, like one of those visions saints used to have, previews for an upcoming miracle, Carter appears. He’s alone, which is good, never mind that he and not Jen Cashwell has the purple hickey on his neck. If you send your guy on an all-day field trip without you, with a long busride home in the dark, it’s bound to happen. The miracle is, he’s bending close, so his breath is like a kiss. ‘Hey.’ Like she thought he was only here for Mrs B. He’s here for her! Carter doesn’t even notice his great-grandmother which is OK because she doesn’t much notice him, but Grammy Henderson rises to the occasion, lifting that gracious hand to Carter, saying, ‘My my. My my my my my.’

‘Girl,’ he whispers into Steffy’s hair. ‘It took forever to find you in this mess.’

Over his shoulder she sees Dad approaching, all helpless and baffled, so, is Mom still with the tennis pro, or did he escape? No grandparents in sight, just Dad with his hands floating up like party balloons while Carter murmurs, ‘Babe, let’s go get loaded and do stuff to each other.’

Rats.
Words pop into her head.
They’re all rats.

Ordinarily she’d flow upward into Carter, bod on bod; she’d grab his hand and put it
there
, but Dad is flailing in plain sight which means that her mother really is lost somewhere, glued to Mr Rivard or Mr Kristofferson, whoever she can get; Steffy caught her hitting on nice Dan Carteret in the Florida room today when it was
her
he’d come to see, she knows because of the grin he flashed when Mom started on her about the shoes.

She turns Carter slightly, scanning the surface of the party like a pirate with a spyglass until she locates Mom. Her mother and Mr Rivard are dancing close, like Steffy’s awesome friend Dan means nothing to her, so that’s good. Dad’s crazed but hey, he brought it on himself, and meanwhile Carter’s hand is winkling into her dress even though his great-grandmother is swaying and moaning and Grammy’s my-my-my-my-ing because they’re so tired and Steffy, well, she has fucking had enough of Carter Bellinger, she thought she loved him but he is fucking insincere.

Instead of letting him lock her in place with the other arm, she edges away. Carter doesn’t get it, he leans a degree closer for every inch she slides off the gilded chair, breathing, ‘Babe?’

She stands up so fast that she clips his chin with her skull. ‘Go to hell, Carter. I have a new boyfriend,’ she says.

The minute she says so, it’s true.

He picks up takeout at a drive-thru and parks near the Chaplin house, munching on Slim Jims while he processes his material. He has a lot to process, starting with this compulsion to break and enter. He’s fully equipped, waiting – no, praying – for Chaplin to go out so he can search the house. He has no idea what he expects to find. His mother was no stranger to this house, he’s sure, but he can’t start with Chaplin without proof, and this is bad.

He can’t start at all unless Chaplin goes out.

It’s been hours since he left the Archambault house, but weirdness filled up that stifling bedroom, weirdness drove him out of the house and followed him here, and the question is driving him nuts. What
was
that?

Where did it come from? Product of exhaustion or the heat, hallucination or what? Listen, it was nothing he did. All Dan was was there, laid wide open by her rage. Alone in that house, in the room where she died, he heard it! He heard her voice! My God, the woman’s been dead for thirty years, but all the hatred and humiliation of the night she burst into flames exploded, boiling inside his head.

He could hear her yowling, trapped and raging inside his skull like a frustrated ghost.

Unless I am fucking nuts.

Eat. Get your shit together. Wait.

He’s too jittery to eat. It’s quiet in Pine Vista, nothing to see here, no signs of life in the Chaplin house, although the lights are on. The last commuters went by hours ago, heading home. He’s alone on this road, as far as he can tell. If someone else is out here in the dark somewhere, if there’s someone watching, Dan Carteret has no way of knowing. In fact, anybody could be parked out by the garden shed or behind the bank of oleanders that marks the property line and Dan wouldn’t know because he’s new to the territory. To him, Pine Vista is as bleak and strange as the face of Mars. And as still.

Waiting, he absorbs the night and silence in a neighborhood where nothing happens and nobody comes. After living on Ventura Boulevard where the traffic never sleeps, it’s like a soundproof headset. The silence is profound. Then a night bird cries and he jerks to attention.
What was I thinking? Doh!

He slithers into the garage by a window on the far side, shielding his light. It picks up a dusty SUV, and in the space next to it, a patch of oil left by a second car. Chaplin’s been gone for hours. There’s nothing going on inside the house that he can see, but instinct tells him to wait.

He’s back in the car, gnawing his fajita wrap down to the paper when the front door opens. So he wasn’t, like, fantasizing about that blur in the tower window today, the pale face that came and went faster than you can say Mrs Rochester belongs to the woman coming out. So that was her he saw, flickering like a silent movie wraith. The man is put together like Bob Chaplin, tall and loose-jointed, but he’s so heavy that he shuffles. The two flick on the porch light and fuss over the keys in one of those practiced departure rituals, like pet owners patting the house and telling it be a good dog until they come back. Locking up against whatever comes.

Which will be Dan Carteret. With no evil intentions, exactly. He can’t be sure what his intentions are. If he’d known there were others living here, would he have come? Belching, he slouches behind the wheel, waiting for them to roll up the garage door and get the second car started, which takes a while, and back it out into the oyster-shell driveway and go.

Then he waits a little longer, to make sure.

What else does he have to do tonight, besides go back to his room at the Flordana and brood? He’s locked and loaded: flashlight and screwdriver from Ace Hardware in the messenger bag he’s wearing, in case. It’s big enough to conceal anything he decides to take. Another hour passes. Nothing moves. When he’s satisfied that there are no signs of life anywhere, he makes a cautious circuit of the house. He doesn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that these people are either timid or lazy. They left all the lights on.

Crunching through the bushes, he goes from window to window like a voyeur at a Times Square peep show. If he rocks forward and up on his toes, he can see in. For Dan, houses at night are like decorators’ display windows, advertising better ways to live. There are complete, happy lives available inside if he can just find the right place, and come up with the cash. Walking home from school in New London, he dawdled, lingering in spite of the cold. He stood around in the snow until his toes froze, waiting until people’s lights went on so he could look into those bright houses and will himself inside, happy Dan on his belly in front of their TV with brothers and sisters, snug in a tight family unit, waiting for suppertime. Night after night he prowled, stealing other people’s lives.