“Okay.”
He went out into the cellar and I heard the water running. He came back with a bucket and some dust rags and put them on the floor. Then he hung the work light from the hook in the ceiling. He didn’t look at us. Not once.
He reached for the door.
“I’ll see you,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “See you.”
And then he closed the door.
Chapter Forty-Five
The long chilly night drew on.
We received no more visits from above.
The house was quiet. We could dimly hear the radio going in the boys’ room, the Everly’s singing “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” Elvis’s “Hard Headed Woman.” Every song mocked us.
By now my mother would be frantic. I could imagine her calling every single house on the block to see if I was there, camping out or just staying overnight somewhere without telling her. Then my father would call the police. I kept expecting that official-sounding knock at the door. I couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t come.
Hope turned to frustration, frustration to anger, anger to a dull resignation. Then the cycle began again. There was nothing to do but wait and bathe Meg’s face and forehead.
She was feverish. The back of her head was sticky with crusting blood.
We drifted in and out of sleep.
My mind kept latching on to singsongs, jingles. Use Ajax! The foaming cleanser-da-da-da-da-dadum-dum. Wash the dirt right down the drain-da-dada-da-da-dum. Over the river and though the woods … the river and through the woods … the river and through the … I couldn’t hold on to anything. I couldn’t let go of anything, either.
Sometimes Susan would start to cry.
Sometimes Meg would shuffle and moan.
I was happy when she’d moan. It meant she was alive.
She woke twice.
The first time she woke I was running the cloth over her face and was just about to quit for a while when she opened her eyes. I almost dropped it I was so surprised. Then I hid it behind me because it was pink with blood and I didn’t want her to see. Somehow the idea really bothered me.
“David?”
“Yeah.”
She seemed to listen. I looked down into her eyes and saw that one of her pupils was half again as large as the other—and I wondered what she was seeing.
“Do you hear her?” she said. “Is she … there?”
“I only hear the radio. She’s there, though.”
“The radio. Yes.” She nodded slowly.
“Sometimes I hear her,” she said. “All day long. Willie and Woofer too … and Donny. I used to think I could listen … and hear and learn something, figure out why she was doing this to me … by listening to her walk across a room, or sit in a chair. I … never did.”
“Meg? Listen. I don’t think you ought to be talking, you know? You’re hurt pretty bad.”
It was a strain, you could see that. There was a slurring to her words, as though her tongue had suddenly become the wrong size for her.
“Unh-unh,” she said. “No. I want to talk. I never talk. I never have anybody to talk to. But … ?”
She looked at me strangely. “How come you’re here?”
“We’re both here. Me and Susan both. They locked us in. Remember?”
She tried to smile.
“I thought maybe you were a fantasy. I think you’ve been that before for me sometimes. I have a lot … a lot of fantasies. I have them and then they … go away. And then sometimes you try to have one, you want one, and you can’t. You can’t think of anything. And then later … you do.
“I used to beg her, you know? To stop. Just to let me go. I thought, she’s got to, she’ll do it a while and then she’ll let me go, she’ll see she should like me, and then I thought no she won’t stop, I’ve got to get out but I can’t, I don’t understand her, how could she let him burn me?”
“Please, Meg …”
She licked her lips. She smiled.
“You’re taking care of me though, aren’t you.”
“Yes.”
“And Susan too.”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“It’s hard for her too,” she said.
“I know. I know it is.”
I was worried. Her voice was getting weaker. I had to bend very close now in order to hear her.
“Do me a favor?” she said.
“Sure.”
She gripped my hand. Her grip was not strong.
“Get my mother’s ring back? You know my mother’s ring? She won’t listen to me. She doesn’t care. But maybe … Could you ask her? Could you get me back my ring?”
“I’ll get it.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
She let go.
“Thanks,” she said.
Then a moment later she said, “You know? I never really loved my mother enough. Isn’t that strange? Did you?”
“No. I guess not.”
She closed her eyes.
“I think I’d like to sleep now.”
“Sure,” I said. “You rest.”
“It’s a funny thing,” she said. “There’s no pain. You’d think there would be. They burned me and burned me but there’s no pain.”
“Rest,” I said.
She nodded. And then she did. And I sat listening for Officer Jennings’s knock, the lyrics to “Green Door” riding absurdly through my head like a garish painted carousel, round and round: … midnight, one more night without sleepin‘lwatchin’, ‘til the morning comes creepin’/green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin’?/green door?l
Until I slept too.
When I woke it was probably dawn.
Susan was shaking me.
“Stop her!” she said, her voice a frightened whisper. “Stop her! Please! Don’t let her do that!”
For a moment I thought I was home in my bed.
I looked around. I remembered.
And Meg wasn’t there beside me anymore.
My heart began to pound, my throat tightened.
Then I saw her.
She’d thrown off the blanket so she was naked, hunched over in the corner by the worktable. Her long matted hair hung down across her shoulders. Her back was streaked with dull brown stains, crisscross channels of drying blood. The back of her head gleamed wetly under the work light.
I could see the muscles pull along her shoulders and outward from the elegant line of vertebrae as she worked. I heard the scrabble of fingernails.
I got up and went to her.
She was digging.
Digging with her fingers at the concrete floor where it met the cinderblock wall. Tunneling out. Tiny sounds of exertion escaping her. Her fingernails broken back and bleeding, one gone already, the tips of her fingers bloody too, her blood mixing with the grit she dug from the flaking concrete in an uneven yielding of the substances of each. Her final refusal to submit. Her final act of defiance. The will rising up over a defeated body, to force itself on solid stone.
The stone was Ruth. Impenetrable—yielding just grit and fragments.
Ruth was the stone.
“Meg. Come on. Please.” I said.
I put my hands under her arms and lifted her up. She came away as easily as an infant child.
Her body felt warm and full of life.
I laid her back on the mattress again and covered her with the blanket. Susan handed me the bucket and I bathed her fingertips. The water turned redder.
I began to cry.
I didn’t want to cry because Susan was there but it wasn’t anything I could help or hinder. It just came, flowed, like Meg’s blood across the cinderblock.
Her heat was fever. Her heat had been a lie.
I could almost smell the death on her.
I had seen it in the expanded pupil of her eye, a widening hole into which a mind could disappear.
I bathed her fingers.
> When I was finished I shifted Susan over so she could lie between us and we lay together quietly watching her shallow breathing, each breath of air flowing through her lungs another moment binding the moments together, another few seconds’ grace, the flickering of her half-open eyelids speaking of the life that roiled gently beneath the wounded surface—and when she opened her eyes again we weren’t startled. We were happy to see Meg there looking out at us, the old Meg, the one who lived before this in the very same time as we did and not in this fevered dream-space.
She moved her lips. Then smiled.
“I think I’m going to make it,” she said, and reached for Susan’s hand. “I think I’ll be fine.”
In the artificial glare of the work light, in the dawn that for us was not a dawn, she died.
Chapter Forty-Six
The knock at the door could not have come more than an hour and a half later.
I heard them rising from their beds. I heard masculine voices and heavy unfamiliar footsteps crossing the living room to the dining room and coming down the stairs.
They threw the bolt and opened the door and Jennings was there, along with my father and another cop named Thompson who we knew from the VFW. Donny, Willie, Woofer and Ruth stood behind them, making no attempt to escape or even to explain, just watching while Jennings went to Meg and raised her eyelid and felt for the pulse that wasn’t there.
My father came over and put his arm around me. Jesus Christ he said, shaking his head. Thank God we found you. Thank God we found you. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him use the words but I also think he meant it.
Jennings pulled the blanket up over Meg’s head and Officer Thompson went to comfort Susan, who couldn’t stop crying. She’d been quiet ever since Meg died and now the relief and sadness were pouring out of her.
Ruth and the others watched impassively.
Jennings, who Meg had warned about Ruth on the Fourth of July, looked ready to kill.
Red-faced, barely controlling his voice, he kept shooting questions at her—and you could see it wasn’t so much questions he wanted to shoot as the pistol he kept stroking on his hip. How’d this happen? how’d that happen? how long has she been down here? who put that writing there?
For a while Ruth wouldn’t answer. All she’d do was stand there scratching at the open sores on her face. Then she said, “I want a lawyer.”
Jennings acted like he didn’t hear her. He kept on with the questions but all she’d say was, “I want to call a lawyer,” like she was preparing to take the Fifth and that was that.
Jennings got madder and madder. But that didn’t help. I could have told him that.
Ruth was the rock.
And following her example so were her kids.
I wasn’t. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about my father standing beside me.
“I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” I said. “Me and Susan will.”
“You saw all this?”
“Most,” I said.
“Some of these wounds occurred weeks ago. You see any of that?”
“Some of it. Enough.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you kept or keeper here, kid?” he said.
I turned to my father. “I never hurt her, Dad. I never did. Honest.”
“You never helped her, either,” said Jennings.
It was only what I’d been telling myself all night long.
Except that Jennings’s voice clenched at the words like a fist and hurled them at me. For a moment they took my breath away.
There’s correct and then there’s right, I thought.
“No,” I said. “No, I never did.”
“You tried,” said Susan, crying.
“Did he?” said Thompson.
Susan nodded.
Jennings looked at me another long moment and then he nodded too.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll talk it over later. We better call in, Phil. Everybody upstairs.”
Ruth murmured something.
“What?” asked Jennings.
She was talking into her chest, mumbling.
“I can’t hear you, lady.”
Ruth’s head shot up, eyes glaring.
“I said she was a slut,” said Ruth. “She wrote those words! She did! ‘I FUCK. FUCK ME.’ You think I wrote ‘em? She wrote ’em herself, on herself, because she was proud of it!
“I was tryin’ to teach her, to discipline her, to show her some decency. She wrote it just to spite me, ‘I FUCK. FUCK ME.’ And she did, she fucked everybody. She fucked him, that’s for sure.”
She pointed at me. Then at Willie and Donny.
“And him and him too. She fucked ’em all! She’d have fucked little Ralphie if I hadn’t stopped her, hadn’t tied her up down here where nobody had to see her legs and her ass and her cunt, her cunt—because, mister, that’s all she was was a cunt, woman who don’t know any better than to give in to a man any time he asks her for a piece of pussy. And I did her a goddamn favor. So fuck you and what you think. Goddamn meat in a uniform. Big soldier. Big shit. Fuck you! I did her a goddamn favor …”
“Lady,” said Jennings. “I think you should shut up now.”
He leaned in close and it was like he was looking at something he’d stepped in on the sidewalk.
“You understand my meaning, lady? Mrs. Chandler? Please, I really hope you do. That piss trap you call a mouth—you keep it shut.”
He turned to Susan. “Can you walk, honey?”
She sniffed. “If somebody helps me up the stairs.”
“Just as soon carry her,” said Thompson. “She won’t weigh much.”
“Okay. You first, then.”
Thompson picked her up and headed out through the door and up the stairs. Willie and Donny followed him, staring down at their feet as though unsure of the way. My dad went up behind them, like he was part of the police now, watching them, and I followed him. Ruth came up right behind me, hard on my heels as if in a hurry to get this over with now all of a sudden. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Woofer coming up practically at her side, and Officer Jennings behind him.
Then I saw the ring.
It sparkled in the sunlight pouring in through the backdoor window.
I kept on going up the stairs but for a moment I was barely aware of where I was. I felt heat rushing through my body. I kept seeing Meg and hearing her voice making me promise to get her mother’s ring back for her, to ask Ruth for it as though it didn’t belong to Meg in the first place but was only on loan to her, as though Ruth had any right to it, as though she wasn’t just a fucking thief, and I thought of all Meg must have been through even before we met her, losing the people she loved, with only Susan left—and then to get this substitute. This parody of a mother. This evil joke of a mother who had stolen not just the ring from her but everything, her life, her future, her body—and all in the name of raising her, while what she was doing was not raising but pushing down, pushing her further and further and loving it, exulting in it, coming for God’s sake—down finally into the very earth itself which was where she’d lie now, un-raised, erased, vanished.
But the ring remained. And in my sudden fury I realized I could push too.
I stopped and turned and raised my hand to Ruth’s face, fingers spread wide, and watched the dark eyes look at me amazed for a moment and afraid before they disappeared beneath my hand.
I saw her know.
And want to live.
I saw her grope for the banister.
I felt her mouth fall open.
For a moment I felt the loose cold flesh of her cheeks beneath my fingers.
I was aware of my father continuing up the stairs ahead of me. He was almost to the top now.
I pushed.
I have never felt so good or so strong, then or since.
Ruth screamed and Woofer reached for her and so did Officer Jennings but the first step she hit was
Jennings’s and she twisted as she hit and he barely touched her. Paint cans tumbled to the concrete below. So did Ruth, a little more slowly.
Her mouth cracked open against the stairs. The momentum flung her up and around like an acrobat so that when she hit bottom she hit face-first again, mouth, nose and cheek bursting under the full weight of her body tumbling down after her like a sack of stones.
I could hear her neck snap.
And then she lay there.
A sudden stink filled the room. I almost smiled. She’d shit herself like a baby and I thought that was most appropriate, that was fine.
Then everybody was downstairs instantly, Donny and Willie, my dad and Officer Thompson minus the burden of Susan pushing past me, and everybody yelling and surrounding Ruth like she was some sort of find in an archaeological dig. What happened? What happened to my mother! Willie was screaming and Woofer was crying, Willie really losing it, crouched over her, hands clutching her breasts and belly, trying to massage her back to life. What the fuck happened! yelled Donny. All of them looking up the stairs at me like they wanted to tear me limb from limb, my father at the base of the stairs just in case they tried to.
“So what did happen?” asked Officer Thompson.
Jennings just looked at me. He knew. He knew damn well what happened.
But I didn’t care just then. I felt like I’d swatted a wasp. One that had stung me. Nothing more and nothing worse than that.
I walked down the stairs and faced him.
He looked at me some more. Then he shrugged.
“The boy stumbled,” he said. “No food, lack of sleep, his friend dying. An accident. It’s a damn shame. It happens sometimes.”
Woofer and Willie and Donny weren’t buying that but nobody seemed to care about them much today and what they were buying and what they weren’t.
The smell of Ruth’s shit was terrible.
“I’ll get us a blanket,” said Thompson. He moved past me.
“That ring,” I said. I pointed. “The ring on her finger was Meg’s. It belonged to Meg’s mother. It should go to Susan now. Can I give it to her?”
Jennings gave me a pained look that said enough was enough and not to push it.
But I didn’t worry about that either.
“The ring belongs to Susan,” I said.