“She lives about two blocks away from us,” said India placidly. “I go to school with this kid who lives in the same building, but he’s on the floor above and I won’t—”
“What!” cried Big Barbara. “Do you mean to tell me you have seen her!”
“Of course. I pass her on the street all the time. Not ‘all the time,’ I guess, but once a week maybe. I—”
“Luker told me he had no idea what had become of that woman!”
“Probably he didn’t want to upset you,” said India after a moment.
“He’s not thinking of . . . of a reconciliation? I mean, he’s not seeing her, is he?”
“God, no!” India laughed. “He won’t even speak to her. He cuts her dead on the street.”
“You are not to trust that woman, India, do you hear me?” said Big Barbara sternly. “You are to stick your fingers in your ears when she talks to you, and if you see her coming down the street, I want you to turn right around and run the other way as fast as you can. Before you go away I’m going to give you a roll of quarters. I want you to have that money with you at all times, so when you see that woman coming you can jump in the first bus you see and get away from her!”
“She can’t do anything to me,” said India. She rode over what looked to be another interruption from Big Barbara: “Let me tell you about what happened with her, and then you won’t be upset.”
“India, tell me everything! I’d love to be alone with that woman and a bathtubful of boiling water!”
India pulled her green-threaded needle through the blue cloth and began, “When Mother ran off, Luker didn’t make up any stories or anything, he just said to me, ‘Your mother has run off, I don’t know where and I don’t know why and to tell you the truth I’m pretty glad about it.’ And so everything was fine for about eight years, and then one day we were on our way to a movie or something, and she came right up to us on the street—I recognized her from her photographs. So she came up to us, and she said ‘Hello,’ and Luker said, ‘Fuck off, bitch’—”
“India!” cried Big Barbara, stunned by the profanity, even if it was only quoted.
“—and we walked off. I didn’t say anything to her. Then one day I was by myself and she saw me on the street and said she wanted to talk to me for a few minutes. So I said okay.”
“Oh, India, what a mistake!”
“So it turned out she lived about two blocks away. She was living with this psychiatrist whose name was Orr, and he was real rich and she had this ditsy job doing PR for an auction gallery.”
“I can’t believe you just let her talk to you like that!”
“Well, it wasn’t so bad. I just sat there and she gave me all this bullshit about how she’d like to have the chance to form some kind of relationship, that the time would come when I needed a mother—”
“You always have me!”
“—and I listened to what she had to say, and I said, ‘We’ll see.’”
“And was that all that happened?”
“No,” replied India. “Something else happened. One day I was home alone. Luker was shooting in the Poconos and I knew he wouldn’t be back before late. There was a knock at the door, and I went and opened it. She was standing there—I don’t know how she got in the building. If she had rung the buzzer, I wouldn’t have let her in. She had this little bag from Zabar’s and she said, ‘Can I come in and talk to you for a while—I brought you some lox.’ I didn’t want to let her in, but I go apeshit over lox. I don’t know how she knew that.”
“The devil knows everything!”
“Anyway, I let her in, and she was very polite and we talked for a few minutes and then she said, ‘Let me go in the kitchen and fix everything.’ She said she had forgotten to get anything to drink, and she gave me a five-dollar bill and told me to go out and buy some Perrier and limes. So I did—”
“You left her alone in Luker’s apartment!”
“Yes,” said India. “It was an asshole thing to do, all right. When I came back with the Perrier, she was already gone—and she even took the lox with her!”
“And what else? She must have done something else!”
“She did. She went to the refrigerator and took a bite out of everything that was in there. I had just made three dozen chocolate chip cookies, and there was a bite taken out of every one of ’em. She punched teeny-tiny holes in all the eggs and turned ’em upside down. She peeled all the bananas, and squeezed out all the almond paste. There was this new loaf of bread, and she opened it and she took a cookie cutter and cut out the middle of every slice. She punched holes in the bottom of the canister set, and she mixed all the spices together in the Cuisinart. And she got out the punch bowl and poured in every bottle of wine and liquor in the house!”
“Oh, no!” groaned Big Barbara. “You poor child! What did you do?”
“I was upset, because I didn’t know how I was going to explain to Luker what had happened. I sat down and cried and cried, and when Luker came home all he said was that I was a real asshole for letting her in. He said I should have poked her eyes out and ripped her tits off and slammed the door in her face.”
“That’s what I would have done,” said Big Barbara complacently. “But did Luker have her arrested?”
“No, we just called her up. He was on one extension and I was on the other, and when she answered it we both blew police whistles as loud as we could. He said we probably broke her eardrum and there must have been blood all over her phone. And now when we see each other on the street we don’t even speak. One time Dr. Orr—the psychiatrist she lives with—called me up and said he wanted to talk to me about mother-daughter relationships in general, but I told him to drop dead in a shed, Fred.”
“Oh, child!” cried Big Barbara, embracing her granddaughter. “If it weren’t for your language, I would say that Luker had raised you as a child for us all to be proud of!”
CHAPTER 11
Big Barbara had exaggerated when she told India that she had not closed her eyes all night. Nothing could keep that woman from sleep, but a very little could prevent her from sleeping well. After Odessa had served up a lunch of hamburgers and potato chips, Big Barbara put on her bathing suit and commandeered the blanket that had been laid on the Gulf beach. A few minutes later Luker came over and draped a large towel over his mother’s sleeping body so that she would not burn. In deference to Big Barbara’s modesty, Luker carried another blanket farther down the beach out of sight of the three houses before he took off his bathing suit and lay naked in the sun.
“You’re disgusting,” said India, waking him an hour or so later.
He opened his eyes, shaded them and looked up at her; but in the glare he could make out only her colorless outline against the sky. “Why?” he whispered; for the sun had leached out not only his energy and his intellect but his voice as well.
“The way you tan,” she replied. “You haven’t been in the sun in six months, but you’re out here one day, and already you’re starting to go dark brown.” India wore long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and her coolie hat. She seated herself in the sand beside him. “And look at me. The only part of me that’s uncovered is my feet, and they’re already starting to burn.”
“Tough shit,” said Luker.
“Can I borrow your camera?”
“Sure. But you have to be careful. It’s very easy to get sand in it out here. What are you going to take pictures of?”
“The third house, of course. What else?”
Luker said nothing for a moment. “I thought you wanted me to take pictures of it,” he said carefully.
“No, I decided that I would do it. You’re not going to, that’s obvious.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I know you. You won’t go near the place. If I asked you to do it, you’d put me off and put me off. So I decided I’d do it myself.”
“India,” said Luker, “I don’t want you climbing that dune again. It’s dangerous. You nearly cut your foot
off up there yesterday. Let that be a lesson. And don’t go up on the verandah either. I don’t think those boards are safe. You could fall through. Those splinters would eat you alive.”
“Whenever you come back to Alabama, you start acting like a father. India, do this; India, don’t do that. Listen, the third house is just as safe as the other two, and you know it. Lend me your camera and let me take a few pictures. I’m not going to make a big deal of it, and I’m certainly not going inside—at least not today. I just want to get some shots of what it looks like from different angles, how the sand is taking over. I can’t believe that you’ve never taken any pictures of it—you could have sold about a million prints.”
“Listen, India. Nobody knows about Beldame, and if people find out there are these three perfect Victorian houses down here, they’re going to be out here in droves. Beldame has never been robbed, and I don’t intend to give people any ideas.”
“That’s bullshit,” said India contemptuously. “You’re scared shitless of the third house, that’s all.”
“Of course I am,” said Luke, rolling over with something like anger. “It’s a fucking childhood trauma, and we’ve all got childhood traumas . . .”
“I don’t.”
“Your whole life is a fucking trauma,” said Luker. “You just don’t know it yet. Wait’ll you grow up, then you’ll see how fucked-up you were . . .”
“Can I borrow your camera?” India persisted.
“I told you yes,” said Luker. As she walked off back toward the houses, he called after her: “India, be careful!”
From his room, India took her father’s second-best Nikon and his light meter and carried them out into the yard. Odessa sat on the back steps of the Savage house, shelling peas in a wide pan and tossing the pods into a newspaper laid open at her feet. India measured the available light, and snapped on the wide-angle lens and a sunlight filter. Odessa rose from the steps and came to her side. She pointed to the second floor of the house. “Mr. Dauphin and Miz Leigh sleeping,” she said in a whisper. “You gone take some pictures?”
“Of the third house,” replied India.
“Why? Nobody lives there. Why you want pictures of that old place?” Odessa frowned—and there was warning, not curiosity, in her voice.
“Because it’s very strange looking. It’ll make good photographs. Have you ever been inside?”
“No!”
“I’d like to take some pictures inside the house,” mused India.
“There’s no air inside that house,” said Odessa. “You’d suffocate.”
India raised the camera, framed the house quickly, and took a picture. She half expected Odessa to object, but the black woman said nothing. India moved a couple of steps away and took another photograph.
“Luker says the place is dangerous—”
“It is,” said Odessa quickly, “you just don’t know what—”
“He says it’s structurally unsafe.”
“What?” said Odessa, not understanding.
“Luker says the boards will give way. I think he’s just scared. I—”
“Don’t stand there,” said Odessa. “Cain’t see anything from there, move over there.” She pointed to a spot on the broken-shell walk a yard closer to the house. Puzzled, India moved there and took another photograph.
Odessa nodded, satisfied, then pointed out another spot, several places to the left, but inconveniently close to a thorny bush, so that India’s ankles were scratched.
India could not imagine what knowledge this black woman had of photographic setups, that she could dictate these positions. But Odessa pushed India all around that yard, told her on which windows and architectural details to focus, and whether the camera should be held horizontally or vertically. And all this in a whisper, so as not to disturb the sleepers on the second floor. India obeyed her mechanically.
In the camera the compositions seemed to frame themselves perfectly, and often India had no more to do than check the lighting and trip the shutter. She anticipated happily showing her father a set of splendid photographs of the third house and the dune that was slowly burying it.
After fifteen or so changes of positions, and perhaps two dozen photographs—Odessa sometimes demanded that a particular picture be taken twice—the black woman said, “All right. That’s enough, child. You’ll get what you want out of that. And once you see those pictures, you’ll have had enough of the third house, I can tell you.”
“Thank you,” said India, who now thought that Odessa’s directions had been merely to keep her from mounting the back steps of the place or going too near the windows. “But I still have the other side of the house to do.”
“Child,” said Odessa softly, “don’t . . .”
India looked Odessa in the eye. “I think you’re all crazy,” she said, then went around to the other side of the dune to photograph what little was visible of the front of the house.
She had intended to regard her father’s commands to the letter, but as she stood alone at the base of the dune with the shallow Gulf waters breaking in low waves directly behind her, she understood that she must, at all costs, keep at bay the fear of the third house that was fast rising in her. It was necessary that she conquer it, as all the others evidently had not.
It was not the entire house that frightened her, but only that single room that corresponded to the one in which she slept in the McCray house—the door of which had been slowly pulled shut as she watched through the window. India wondered now why she had said nothing of what she had seen to any of the others. Partly, she considered, she had been afraid, afraid to describe an experience that smacked of the supernatural. Partly, Luker’s reluctance to talk of the house had infected her as well. Too, India had never been an obvious child, and to speak of what was uppermost in her mind seemed a crass superficiality. At the last, the occurrence, the vision—whatever it had been, had seemed meant for India alone. And India wasn’t one to betray a confidence.
The sun was almost directly overhead. India knew that she could not go away without looking into that room once more. She snapped the cap over the camera lens and quickly climbed to the top of the dune. On the way she tossed aside her coolie hat, fearful that it would flaw her balance. Her foot unearthed the fleur-de-lis that she had broken off the frieze; she picked it up and flung it into the sea. She grabbed hold of another, and stood before the window once more.
She wasn’t certain whether she had hoped to find the door closed or open; whatever her preference might have been, the door remained closed. Probably, it occurred to her now with considerable relief, the shutting of the door had been the result merely of the atmospheric change in the room occasioned by the breaking of the pane. But whatever the case, the fact was that now the room looked quite different. She realized quickly however that this was only on account of the difference in light. An entirely new set of objects in the room was delineated, it seemed; and those she distinctly remembered were now hidden in obscurity. Above the door was a plate painted with a proverb she could not at such a distance decipher. Two slats had fallen out of the bed frame. On the shelf of the dresser she saw a chipped cup piled high with silver coins: half-dollars and dimes.
But she could no longer see the line of red dust on the rush matting. The broken picture frame behind the bed was only a shadow. The shaving implements atop the dressing table appeared an indistinguishable jumble.
On the floor beneath the window was a mound of sand as high as the window and fanning gently out from the broken pane, at greatest to a distance of about four feet. It replicated in miniature the dune that crouched outside the house. The pressure of her weight sent more sand through the aperture, and at a place on the left-hand arc of the fan, the delta buried several more knots of the rush matting.
The destruction was not so bad as it might have been, India supposed, but she didn’t recall pleasurably that her agency had begun it. How easily the sand had got in, she knew; and how difficult it would be to clear the r
oom of it now, she could scarcely imagine.
She took half a dozen photographs of the room, with the regular lens, attempting to record everything that could be seen through that window. She must hold the camera with only one hand, for with the other she maintained her balance and position. With the slow shutter speed required to capture the dim interior, she feared that the slight trembling of her hand might blur the image. She smiled to think that her indiscretion would be discovered by Luker only when he saw the developed prints—but that might not be for weeks, and by then, who knew? she might actually have gone inside the third house. Luker’s fear was obviously groundless—as he had said, a childhood trauma and nothing more. She herself had been frightened by the third house, but only momentarily; she had returned and proved both that she was not afraid and that there was nothing to fear.
One shot more would finish the second roll of film. She held the camera up to the window and peered through the viewer, focusing on the mirrored door of the opened chifforobe. It reflected a portion of the front wall otherwise invisible to India. Looking through the camera at this mirrored door, she caught sight of a slight but agitated movement in the sand—as if something burrowed beneath. She quickly lowered the camera, and peered through the window; though she twisted and leaned far to the right, she could not see directly that portion of the sand heap figured in the mirror. She returned her gaze to the mirror, and watched mystified as the sand slowly bulged and twisted.
She looked down at the broken window. Sand spilled through still, but at only a slow rate, and it now accumulated to the right side of the window, not the left.
Now she could see the shape of whatever was beneath the sand—yet that was not it precisely. The shape rather seemed to form out of the sand itself. It was human, but small, about India’s own size.
The sand twisted and spilled over itself in ropes and nobs, sculpting the form and image of a child. In a few seconds, it became obvious the child was female.