Strangers (16 page)

“Not in Boston. In New York, I’ve got aunts, uncles…”

But Ginger could not stay with any of her relatives. They would be happy to have her, of course—especially Aunt Francine or Aunt Rachel. However, she did not want them to see her in her current condition, and the thought of pitching a fit in front of them was intolerable. She could almost see Francine and Rachel huddling over a kitchen table, speaking in low voices, clucking their tongues: “Where did Jacob and Anna go wrong? Did they push her too hard? Anna always pushed her too hard. And after Anna died, Jacob relied on the girl too much. She had to take over the house at twelve. It was too much for her. Too much pressure too young.” Ginger would receive considerable compassion, understanding, and love from them, but at the risk of sullying the memory of her parents, a memory she was determined to honor, always.

To George, who still sat upon the edge of the bed and awaited her response with an obvious concern that touched her deeply, she said, “I’ll take the guest room with the view of the bay.”

“Splendid!”

“Though I think it’s a horrible imposition. And I warn you, if I really
like it there, you might never get rid of me. You’ll know you’re in trouble if you come home some day, and I’ve hired people to repaint the walls and hang new drapes.”

He grinned. “At the first mention of painters or draperies, we’ll throw your butt out in the street.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek, got up from the edge of the bed, and walked to the door. “I’m going to start the release procedures now, so you should be out of here in two hours. I’ll call Rita and have her come pick you up. I’m sure you can beat this thing, Ginger, but you’ve got to keep thinking positive.”

When he left the room and his footsteps faded down the hall, she stopped struggling to maintain her smile, and it collapsed instantly. She leaned back against her pillows and stared morosely at the age-yellowed acoustic tile on the ceiling.

After a while she got out of bed and went into the adjoining bathroom, where she approached the sink with trepidation. After a brief hesitation, she turned on the water and watched it whirling around and around and into the drain. On Monday, at the surgical scrub sink, after successfully performing the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger had been panicked by the sight of water swirling into a drain, but she could not imagine why.

Damn it,
why?
She desperately wanted to understand.

Papa, she thought, I wish you were alive, here to listen, to help.

Life’s nasty surprises had been the subject of one of Papa’s little sayings that Ginger had once found amusing. When anyone fretted about the future, Jacob would shake his head and wink and say, “Why worry about tomorrow? Who knows what’ll hit you
today
?”

How true. And how utterly
un
amusing now.

She felt like an invalid. She felt lost.

It was Friday, December 6.

5

Laguna Beach, California

When Dom went to the doctor’s office on Monday morning, December 2, in the company of Parker Faine, Dr. Cobletz did not recommend immediate diagnostic procedures, for he had only recently given Dom a thorough examination and had seen no signs of physical disorder. He assured them there were other treatments to be tried before jumping to the conclusion that it was a brain disorder that sent the writer scurrying upon errands of fortification and self-defense in his sleep.

After Dom’s previous visit, on November 23, the physician had, he
said, become curious about somnambulism and had done some reading on the subject. With most adults the affliction was short-lived; however, in a few cases, there was a danger of it becoming habitual, and in its most serious forms it resembled the inflexible routines and pattern-obsessed behavior of worst-case neurotics. Once habitual, somnambulism was much harder to cure, and it could become the dominant factor in the patient’s life, generating a fear of night and sleep, producing profound feelings of helplessness culminating in more serious emotional disorders.

Dom felt he was already in that danger zone. He thought of the barricade he had built across his bedroom door. The arsenal on the bed.

Cobletz, intrigued and concerned but not worried, had assured Dominick—and Parker—that in most instances of persistent somnambulism, the pattern of nocturnal rambling could be broken by the administration of a sedative before bed. Once a few untroubled nights had passed, the patient was usually cured. In chronic cases, the nightly sedative was augmented with a diazepam compound during the day when the patient was plagued by anxiety. Because the tasks that Dominick performed in his sleep were unnaturally strenuous for a somnambulist, Dr. Cobletz had prescribed both Valium during the day and a 15 mg. tablet of Dalmane, just before slipping under the covers each night.

On the drive back to Laguna Beach from Dr. Cobletz’s offices in Newport, with the sea on the right and hills on the left, Parker Faine argued that, until the sleepwalking stopped, it was not wise for Dom to continue living alone. Hunched over the steering wheel of his Volvo, the bearded and shaggy-haired artist drove fast, aggressively but not recklessly. He seldom glanced away from the Pacific Coast Highway, yet he gave the impression, through the sheer force of his personality, that his eyes and attention were fixed constantly and entirely upon Dom.

“There’s plenty of room at my place. I can keep an eye on you. I won’t hover, mind you. I won’t be a mother hen. But at least I’ll
be
there. And we would have plenty of opportunity to talk about this, really get into it, just you and me, and try to figure how this sleepwalking is related to the changes you went through the summer before last, when you threw away that job at Mountainview College. I’m definitely the guy to help you. I swear, if I hadn’t become a goddamned painter, I’d have become a goddamned psychiatrist. I have a knack for getting people to talk about themselves. How about it? Come stay with me for a while and let me play therapist.”

Dom had refused. He wanted to stay at his own house, alone, for to do otherwise seemed to be a retreat into the same rabbit hole in which he had hidden from life for so many years. The change he had undergone during his trip to Mountainview, Utah, the summer before last, had been
dramatic, inexplicable, but for the better. At thirty-three, he had finally seized the reins of life, had mounted it with a flourish, and had ridden into new territory. He liked the man he had become, and he feared nothing more than slipping back into his dreary former existence.

Perhaps his somnambulism was mysteriously related to the previous changes of attitude that he had undergone, as Parker insisted, but Dom had his doubts that the relationship was either mysterious or complex. More likely, the connection between the two personality crises was simple: The sleepwalking was an excuse to retreat from the challenges, excitement, and stress of his new life. Which could not be allowed. Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and Dalmane as Dr. Cobletz had prescribed them, and tough this thing out.

That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the correct decision. Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did not. Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate. Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently. Before beginning drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less disturbing than they had been. He no longer gathered up weapons, built barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both occasions, he merely left his Beautyrest for a makeshift bed in the back of the closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.

Thank God, the worst seemed past.

By Thursday he had begun to write again. He worked on the new novel, picking up where he left off weeks ago.

On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good news. Two prepublication reviews of
Twilight in Babylon
had just come in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even better news: Bookseller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was now being raised again. They talked for almost half an hour, and when Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.

But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been either a turn for the better or the worse. Every night that he had gone walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed. Then, Saturday, he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him fleeing
through the house in somnambulistic panic, but this time he remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the end.

In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a half-glimpsed bathroom, everything blurred. An unseen man shoved him against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the porcelain bowl. Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own. He felt rag-limp, and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling. A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into the sink. He could not speak. He could not draw breath. He knew he was dying. He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but he did not have the physical resources to take flight. Though his vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the chrome-plated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches from the bottom of the sink. It was an old-fashioned drain without a mechanically operated stopper. The rubber plug had been removed and set aside, somewhere out of sight. The water was running, spewing out of a faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin, whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down. The two people forcing him into the sink were shouting, though he could not understand them. Around and down…around.…Staring hypnotically into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain, which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there, something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away—

He woke, screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.

Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.

The room in his nightmare had not been this room.

Dominick washed his face and returned to the bedroom.

According to the clock on the nightstand, it was only two-twenty-five
A.M.

Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing. However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.

In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his
dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him. Then he would be better able to deal with it.

Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn’t hurt.

He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the Chivas, and returned to bed.

He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now, he’d be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious aberration, and he’d wonder how he’d allowed it to get the better of him.

Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling, a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.

“The moon,” he whispered thickly. “The moon, the moon.” He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon?
“The moon,”
he whispered again, and then he was gone.

It was three-eleven
A.M.,
Sunday, December 8.

6

New York, New York

Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the
fratellanza,
Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.

At one o’clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in with the receptionist and was given a visitor’s pass.

One would not think the place was a hospital. The public area was tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building’s period. There were two small Erté originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s’ look.

It was too damn luxurious. The Ertés were unnecessary. A hundred other economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was
important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of all types—middle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the long-term comatose both young and old—but they all had two things in common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.