Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (14 page)

He needn’t have worried. Ma had still been asleep. It had been a simple thing to retrieve the gun and return it to its rightful place, and all the while she hadn’t stirred. It worried him.

The radio voices still filled the house, and there his ma lay, curled up on the sofa, snoring lightly. The last of the day’s light filled the room with a blue gloom, and after he’d put the gun away, Teddy went and clicked on the floor lamp by the sofa. He knelt beside his ma and shook her gently awake.

“Ma, you’re still sleeping,” he told her, and the words sounded so dumb to him. “Sorry I’m so late. I was out with Mikey and we kinda lost track of time.”

Such a weak excuse, and he hated to lie to her. It made him feel ashamed. But Ma had smiled sleepily and then, as she sat up and saw the darkening windows and realized the time, she had frowned deeply.

“Look at the time,” she said. “You must be starving, and I haven’t fixed anything for dinner.”

“How about breakfast for dinner?” Teddy had suggested.

Sometimes, as a special treat or when they were in a hurry, his ma would make bacon and eggs for dinner. They always made a big deal out of it, like they were getting away with breaking the rules somehow.

Tonight, it had not seemed so special. His ma had barely touched her eggs and only had a couple of pieces of bacon. Teddy had been famished, but the weight of guilt slowed him down and when the eggs got cold he stopped eating. His ma had asked him to clean up the dishes, apologized, and then gone back to the couch, and when Teddy asked if she was okay, all she would say was that she was a little under the weather.

“I’ll be right as rain, tomorrow,” she had promised.

By the time Teddy finished up with the dishes, she had fallen asleep again. He had left her with her radio voices and gone out back to retrieve the sweater and the gun belt, quickly returning everything to the painted-over closet in the front hall.

Now, lying in bed, he could still feel the weight of the gun tingling in his hands, and he could still hear the low murmur of radio voices drifting up to him from below. His ma had slept on the sofa before, but she had never been asleep when it was time for Teddy to go to bed, not even when she had the flu. Tonight he had brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas and gone down to say good night, but he had not wanted to wake her, so he had kissed her softly on the cheek and gone upstairs.

He didn’t like sleeping upstairs all by himself, but if his ma had the flu again, he wanted her to get the rest she needed. She had promised she’d be right as rain come morning, and he hoped she was right. But deep down he doubted that, and it made him wonder if she doubted it, too.

Teddy opened his eyes slowly, only vaguely aware of the hiss of static from downstairs. The radio station had gone off the air for the night. As that bit of information formed in his mind, he realized with no little surprise that he had fallen asleep after all. Quickly he remembered the ghost, and almost as quickly he wanted to see the cowboy again. As he had feared, already the image had lost its sharpness in his mind, and he could not summon a complete picture of how the ghost had looked when he had first seen it, out on the street in front of his house.

He sighed with disappointment, but knew he could do nothing to get that moment back. His eyes were heavy and even now he had not come fully awake. Sleep called him to return, and though he knew the memory would retain little clarity come morning, he began to succumb.

A sound halted his eyelids at half-mast, and a slight frown creased his forehead. Tick-tock, tick-tock, but it wasn’t a clock. Teddy listened with half an ear, trying to sort out the origin of that familiar sound. It grew louder, though still muffled, and he opened his eyes fully and stared at his bedroom window. He did know that sound. Not a tick-tock, but the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves.

His bedroom lay draped in indigo darkness, enough light provided by the streetlamp in front of Mr. Graham’s house to silhouette the furniture, but not enough for him to make out the time on the clock by his bed. Who rode a horse down his street in the middle of the night?

A terrible possibility rushed through him—
Mr. Hatton
. Had the rancher learned of his trespassing and come to confront him? Teddy’s heart pounded in his chest for ten full seconds before the absurdity of that idea made it crumble apart. Mr. Hatton might be the only one living around here who kept horses, but the old man would not come riding up in the middle of the night just to scare a fifth-grader.

Don’t be stupid, Teddy
, he thought to himself, and smiled.

But the clip-clop sound began to slow, and curiosity dragged him out of bed. If not Mr. Hatton, then who could be out riding so late? It occurred to him as he went to the window that, since he didn’t know anyone else who owned horses, maybe someone had stolen one from Mr. Hatton. Teddy might be able to get a look at the thief and tell the police. He might even get a reward!

On the book shelf next to the window was a little lamp, but Teddy didn’t turn it on. If he managed to get a look at the horse thief, he didn’t want to be spotted. Instead, he crouched beside the window and peered around the edge of the dusty curtain. A quarter moon hung low in the sky and the street lamp down in front of Mr. Graham’s flickered a little, like maybe it would go out soon, but despite that illumination, for a few seconds he didn’t see anyone out there at all.

Then movement caught his eye, and he heard the slow clip-clop of hooves again. Teddy narrowed his eyes as he saw the rider—all dressed in black and astride a black horse—and then he blinked and his eyes went very wide. With his black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and the long black coat he wore, the man on horseback looked even more like a gunfighter than the cowboy’s ghost.

Holding the horse’s reins loosely, the man in black sat up high in the saddle, and his coat fell open to reveal the moonlit gleam of black metal at his hip. He watched as the rider urged the horse forward at an achingly slow pace. The man in black studied the Grahams’ house as he passed, and then glanced across the street at the Sullivans’, like he might be searching for a certain house but didn’t know the exact address.

The thought froze the breath in Teddy’s throat. He stared, eyes widening further as the man passed through the dome of yellow light from the street lamp, and he realized he could see right through both horse and rider.

Shivers went up his spine and he bit his lip. From downstairs he could hear the hiss of the radio, the sound it made when the world had stopped broadcasting.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, the rider came on, more and more slowly. Right out in front of Teddy’s house, he seemed to pause a moment and tilt his head slightly to the side, like he was listening for something.

“No,” Teddy whispered, there alone in his darkened room. “Keep riding.”

For another breath, the black rider hesitated and then, almost reluctantly, spurred the horse onward. The animal’s hooves clacked on the pavement, and Teddy felt pretty sure it had picked up the pace a little. Still, he stared, watching as the black rider and his horse moved on, past the Hesses’ house and then the Landrys’.

Teddy’s lower lip trembled and his eyes began to fill. He slid down and leaned against the wall, taking long, steadying breaths, unable to put together even just in his own thoughts why such fear had gripped him. A single tear traced its way down his cheek and he sighed with relief.

“You should have been here,” he whispered into the dark, thinking of the cowboy, and then realizing that the words had not been meant for that ghost, but for his father. His heart hurt his chest.

Then he froze once more.

Outside, the clip-clop had ceased. Teddy rose up to his knees and peered out the window, hoping for a moment that the black rider would have simply vanished, the way the cowboy’s ghost had earlier in the day. But no, the figure remained. The rider had come to a halt in front of the Landry house, but wasn’t looking at the Landrys’ or at the Mansurs’ across the street. The black rider hung his head, hat tilted almost straight down. He seemed almost to have fallen asleep in the saddle.

Then, without looking up, he tugged the reins and the black horse turned. Slowly, the rider raised his head, facing Teddy’s house, and though the brim of his hat covered his eyes, Teddy knew the dark man was looking right at him, that the rider could see him despite the darkness in his bedroom.

With a tug on the reins, the black rider started back toward Teddy’s house. Clip-clop, clip-clop. His coat hung wide open, and in the moonlight, the black metal of his gun seemed to wink.

“No,” Teddy whispered. “I won’t let you.”

The rider snapped the reins and the horse leaped into a gallop, and then Teddy was up and running. His bare feet squeaked on the wood floor as he raced into the hallway and sprinted for the steps. The hiss of the radio grew loud in his ears as he gripped the banisters and half-ran, half-slid down the stairs. His face burned with the desperation of tears he refused to shed, and he tried to steady his heart the way that his hands had steadied his father’s gun that day.

And he knew why the ghost had visited his house.

At the bottom of the steps he came face to face with the front door, and he heard the thunder of hooves right outside, could practically feel it shaking the floorboards as he turned from the door and ran down the front hall. In the room on the left, he could hear his mother coughing in her sleep. It was an awful sound, almost like choking, and the wheeze that went along with it seemed to match the static hiss of the radio.

Teddy grabbed the handle of the door under the stairs and yanked hard. Thick with old paint, it stuck.

The sound of hooves had stopped, but now he heard the tread of boots on the front stoop, and the doorknob rattled. The frame creaked as the rider tested its strength.

The little pantry door under the stairs gave a shriek of warped wood as he forced it open. Desperate, he snatched the old cookie tin off of its shelf, popped off the cover, and let the tin clatter to the ground as he hefted the weight of his daddy’s gun.

As all fell silent at the front door, he twisted around to see the black rider step right through the door, just as easily as the ghost had passed through the screen earlier, his head still dipped, face half-hidden behind the brim of his hat. Hands shaking, Teddy nearly dropped the gun, but he managed to lift it and take trembling aim.

“I won’t let you,” he said, and somehow his voice did not quaver, and then his hands went still.

The rider lifted his head as though taking notice of him for the very first time, and Teddy nearly screamed. Where his face ought to have been there was only emptiness, darker than the darkest night and deep as forever.

The rider went for his gun, and Lord he was fast. Teddy pulled the trigger three times. His daddy’s gun bucked in his hands but made not a sound. The rider staggered backward and fell through the door, like it wasn’t even there.

Whispering silent prayers, and sometimes private thank-yous to a gunfighter whose days had passed, he stood with the gun aimed at the front door for as long as he could keep his arms raised. When he could no longer hold them up, he sat on the floor and leaned against the frame of the open pantry door, the gun cradled across his lap, listening to the hiss of nothing on the radio.

Ma woke him in the morning, flushed with colour, eyes bright with anger and confusion, wondering what he thought he was doing sleeping in the hallway.

Teddy caught hell for playing with his daddy’s gun. Even got grounded for a week, which meant he had to spend every second he wasn’t at school right there in the house with his ma.

He didn’t mind at all.

Tim Graham woke slowly, the sounds of raucous sex drawing him up into the waking world. He frowned sleepily and looked around in the darkness of his hotel room as though he expected to find the perpetrators of the disturbance screwing acrobatically on one of the floral-patterned chairs near the balcony slider. He liked to keep a room as dark as possible for sleeping—something he’d picked up from Jenny—so the heavy curtains were drawn and the only light came from the ghostly glow of numbers on the alarm clock. If someone
had
been screwing in his room, he would barely have been able to see them.

But the sounds, he quickly realized, came from the room next door. The bed in there must have been head to head with his own, for he heard the lovers far too well, their grunts and moans and exhortations, the slap of flesh on flesh, the rhythmic tap of the headboard against the wall. Most hotel chains had long since learned to attach the headboards to the wall so they wouldn’t knock against it when guests got busy, but apparently that bit of logic had been overlooked here.

At first, Tim smiled. Half asleep, he felt a mixture of envy and arousal.

“Yes, like that!” the woman said and sighed, repeating it several times, making it her mantra. Then she started to plead, almost whining, urging him on.

After several minutes of this, Tim’s erection brought him fully awake. He closed his eyes and put a pillow over his head, trying to force himself back to sleep, but he could not drown out the sounds. His pulse quickened. He wondered how long they could go on. Unless the guy was young—or old and using Viagra to regain his youth—it shouldn’t take that long.

He had heard people having sex in hotel rooms before. More than once, he and Jenny had
been
the people making too much noise. One time an angry old woman had banged on the wall and shouted at them to keep it down and they had laughed and made love even more vocally. Tim had never banged on the wall himself. He didn’t like the idea of interrupting, and he had always felt a little thrill at overhearing.

So he listened, his erection painfully in need of attention. Jenny had been gone for nearly a year. He was tempted to masturbate, but the image of a sad little pervert jerking off on the other side of the wall disturbed him, so instead he got up and went to the bathroom. With the light on, the bathroom fan drowned out most of the noise from next door. He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes. He had to wait for his erection to subside before he could aim for the toilet, but at last he managed to piss, then washed his hands and returned to bed.

The fucking continued.

“Christ,” he muttered.

He wanted sleep more than cheap thrills. The voyeur inside him seemed to have given up and gone to sleep, because though his cock stirred and rose once more, it only achieved half mast, apparently tempered by his growing irritation.

He laid his head back on the pillow and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. Had they heard him go to the bathroom? The sound of the fan and the flush of the toilet? If so, it had not troubled them at all. If anything, the lovers had gotten louder. The man started to call her filthy names, making her his slut, his whore, his bitch, and she rose to what she seemed to consider a challenge, agreeing with him at every turn. If he’d ever tried that with Jenny he would never have had sex again, but for these two it seemed a huge turn-on.

Long minutes passed. Tim’s throat was dry, his breath coming a little quicker as his erection returned, more painful than ever. He could not help but start to imagine the scene taking place next door, picturing positions and stiletto heels. In his mind the guy was a blur, but the woman had a body sculpted by desire, with round, heavy, real breasts and hip bones perfect for gripping.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, not daring to look at the clock, though he felt sure he had been awake at least half an hour by now, and had no idea how long they had been going at it before they had woken him.

And still they went on.

Tim lay on his side, listening closely. There was no alternative except leaving the room or hiding in the bathroom, and so he surrendered to eavesdropping, trying to pick out each word. Mostly it was repetition, dirty talk, and baby-oh-baby-come-on from him and give-it-to-me from her.
The classics
, he thought, chuckling tiredly.
Unoriginal but much beloved the world over
.

And then a break in the rhythm, a pause.

“Can I?” the man asked.

The answer, when it came, sounded clear and intimate and close, as if she had whispered the words into Tim’s ear.

“You can put it anywhere you want.”

Jesus
, he thought, breath catching in his throat. It really had sounded like she was there in bed next to him. He listened as the sounds started up again, but soon the man lapsed into silence broken only by wordless grunts. His lover continued to urge him on—demanding, pleading for him not to stop.

Then the man let out an almost sorrowful groan and the woman cried out in triumphant pleasure and, at last, the thumping of the headboard subsided.

Tim’s heart was still thudding in his chest and his face felt flushed, but he figured if he just lay there in bed, he would calm down enough to go back to sleep. He closed his eyes and took a breath.

And she spoke again, there on the other side of the wall.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, and he heard it as though she was whispering it right into his ear. “That was exactly what I needed.”

The hunger and the pleasure in her voice did him in. He threw back the sheets and went back into the bathroom, where it took only seconds for him to get himself off.

Afterward he lay in bed, ashamed and frustrated and missing Jenny so hard he felt ripped open inside.

Eventually, he slept.

Room service brought his breakfast at nine o’clock on the dot. Tim figured that most people who had their morning meal brought to their rooms were up and out of the hotel for meetings by 9
A.M.
, which explained them being so timely. He signed for his breakfast, giving the thin Mexican guy who’d delivered it a decent tip. In his visits to Los Angeles over the past few years, he had been consistently amazed by how much more effort Mexican immigrants seemed to put into their jobs than native born Los Angelenos. And not just more effort, but more hustle, and greater civility. There was a lesson to be learned in the great immigration battle, but he had lost too much sleep last night to give it very much thought.

Sunlight splashed into the room through the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony. He liked to sleep in the dark, but during the day he wanted as much sunshine as he could get, and if there was any place in the world to find it, it was right here.

In light cotton shorts and a blue t-shirt Jenny had bought him two years back in Kennebunkport, Maine, he carried the tray out onto the balcony and set it onto a little round table. First order of business, he poured himself a cup of coffee—cream, no sugar—and sipped it as he looked down at the beach below, the waves crashing on the sand. The surf made a gentle shushing noise that comforted him.

The hotel backed right up to the ocean. From the balcony he could see the Santa Monica Pier. At night, the lights from the pier provided their own kind of beauty, but during the day the view was truly spectacular. Tim breathed in the salty ocean air and felt cleansed, refreshed. The coffee relit the pilot light in his brain and he started to feel awake for the first time this morning.

Jenny had loved the view. They had stayed here during both of their visits to L.A. together, the first time only months after they had started dating—it had been that weekend, Tim believed, that they had fallen in love—and the second as a special getaway for their fifth wedding anniversary. Not in the same room each time, of course. Jenny might have remembered the room numbers—he had never asked her—but guys just didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing.

And, anyway, it was the view that she had loved, not the room.

With another deep breath, he sipped at his coffee and then set it down, settling into a chair beside the small table. He removed the metal cover over his breakfast plate to reveal a Western omelette accompanied by a small portion of breakfast potatoes and half a dozen slices of fresh melon. Sliding the table over in front of him, he tucked into his breakfast. The omelette was delicious, but halfway through, his appetite failed him and he wondered why he hadn’t just ordered juice and toast. He ate the melon because it was sweet and good for him, and drank the small glass of OJ that had come alongside the coffee pot and then he settled back to digest.

Already the day had grown warmer. The weatherman had said it would reach the mid-80s by noon, and Tim had no trouble believing that. He planned to go to Universal Studios in the afternoon, just for a few hours—it was what he and Jenny had done the last time they were here together—but this morning he intended to take it easy. He got up and went into his room, fetching the James Lee Burke novel he’d bought to read on the plane. Then he shifted the chair to keep the sun out of his eyes, poured himself another cup of java, and sat reading and enjoying his coffee with the sound of the ocean enveloping him.

Twenty or so pages later, he was pulled from the book by the sound of a slider rattling open. He looked up to see a woman stepping out onto the balcony of the room next door. Instantly his mind went back to the night before and the sounds that had come from that room, and he felt both embarrassed and aroused at the same time. This had to be the same woman whose voice he had heard so clearly. It was too early for her to have checked out and a new guest to have arrived.

“Good morning,” she said, raising a coffee mug in a toast to him.

Her smile was brilliant. His throat went dry just looking at her—five feet nine or ten, lean and limber like those Olympic volleyball girls, long blonde hair back in a ponytail, bright blue eyes—and the pictures he had painted in his mind of last night’s acrobatics became that much more vivid. She wore a black and gold bikini that nearly gave him a heart attack.

“Morning,” he said, wondering if she would notice the flush in his cheeks—was he actually blushing? God, he felt awkward.

He forced himself back to his book, desperate to look at anything but her. The words blurred on the page. The balconies were open-post style, and he had gotten a fantastic look at her stunning legs.

Just read
, he thought, trying to focus. Should he get up and go into his room, or would that be even more awkward?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I disturbing you?”

God
, he thought,
you have no idea
.

“Not at all. Just enjoying the morning.”

“I know what you mean,” she replied, sinking into a chair and stretching her legs out, propping her feet up on the railing of her balcony. “I don’t have to be anywhere until after lunch and wanted to get a little sun while I have some downtime. It’s quiet out here this morning.”

She stretched out to maximize her body’s exposure to the sun and, consequently, to Tim as well. He held his place in the book with one finger and turned to smile politely at her.

“It’s a weekday. People are off at business meetings, I guess.”

She shielded her eyes from the sun to look at him. Her lips were full and red and perfect. “No meetings for you?”

“Fortunately not.”

He shifted uneasily, not sure he wanted to have this conversation but also not wanting to be rude. And God she was beautiful. The sounds from the previous night returned as he stared at her and he could not help imagining those lips saying those things, pleading, moaning, and then . . . 
You can put it anywhere you want
. Shit, he’d almost forgotten about that, and now that he’d remembered he could barely even pay attention to what she was saying.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What was that?”

She smiled, a sparkle of mischief in her eyes, as if she knew exactly what had distracted him.

“I asked what brought you to Santa Monica, if not business.”

Tim ran through possible answers in his mind, but they all came down to a choice between lying and telling the truth and he had given up lying years before. He and Jenny had been going through a rough patch, distance growing between them because he had been travelling for work so often, and he had been unfaithful. It had nearly ruined his life, nearly destroyed their life together when he confessed to her, but they had gotten through it. He had vowed that he would never stray again but it had taken years before she actually seemed to believe him. Forgiving him, though, was something else. She had said she did, but he had always wondered, and wondered even still.

“Honestly, it’s sort of a sad story for such a beautiful morning,” he said. “What about you?”

She cocked her head curiously, maybe intrigued by the tragic air about him. Tim had seen it before. Maybe someday he would take advantage of the way some women reacted to sad stories, but he had not yet reached a place where he could do that.

“Just sightseeing. A little California dreaming, you know? Started in Napa and made my way down with . . . well, Kirk’s no longer with me.”

So his name had been Kirk.

“Kirk?”

She arched her eyebrow suggestively. “I guess I was a little too much for him.”

Tim could have taken that any number of ways, but the eyebrow made it clear what she meant. In his mind he could practically hear Kirk’s voice even now, calling her every filthy thing he could think of. When he had imagined the woman on the receiving end of those words, she had been nothing like this lovely creature on the balcony. As beautiful as she was, she seemed sweet, even charming.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tim said.

“It’s a morning for sad stories, I guess,” she said. “My name is Diana, by the way.”

“Tim,” he said.

“Sorry if we kept you up last night, Tim.”

He grinned, feeling himself flush even more deeply, and glanced away. If he had seen the comment coming he could have prepared, pretended to have slept through it all, but her directness had snuck up on him.