999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [122]
I smiled at her and shook my head. I know now that I was never scared of the boy in the dark ballroom. I was tense with fear of each fresh unknown dawn, which the boy had found a way to hide from, but which always did come to me mercilessly shining right through my closed eyelids. I opened my mouth to croak some reassurance to her, but she was looking past me with an empty expression.
“Jesus,” she said then, reverently, in a voice almost as hoarse as mine, “this is where that other picture was taken. The photo of the duck by the avocado tree. In the photo album, remember?” She pointed back toward the house. “There’s no tree here now, but the angle of the house, the windows—look, it’s the very same view, we just didn’t recognize it then because we remembered this house freshly painted, not all faded and peeled like it is now, and like it was in the picture, and because in the picture there was a big distracting avocado tree in the foreground!”
I stood beside her and squinted through watering eyes against the sun glare. She might have been right—if you imagined a tree to the right, with the poor duck leaning against the trunk, this view was at least very like the one in that old photo album.
“The person with the camera was standing right here,” she said softly.
Or will be standing, I thought.
“Could you drive me to Stater Brothers?” I said.
Several times I’ve gone out and looked since she drove away, and I’m still not sure she was right. The trouble is, I don’t remember the photograph all that clearly. It might have been this house. All I can do is wait.
I don’t imagine that I’ll be going to Stater Brothers again soon, if ever. The trip was upsetting, with so many curdles and fractures of mirage in the harsh daylight that you’d think San Bernardino was populated by nothing but walking skeletons and one-hoss shays. I did get an avocado, along with my crackers and processed cheese-food slices, and my sister left off a box of our dad’s old clothes because I’ve been wearing the scorched pants and shirt still, and she said it broke her heart to see me walking around all killed. I haven’t looked in the box, but it stands to reason that there’s one of those jumpsuits in it.
I know now that she’s going back, at last, to poor stalled Hakim at the airport in Roissy. I called her from the phone in the kitchen here.
“I’m on my way to the hospital,” I told her. “You can go back to France.”
“You’re—Gunth—I mean, Doug, where are you calling from?”
“I’m back in Santa Ana. I just want to change my clothes, try to comb my hair, before I get on a bus to the hospital.”
“Santa Ana? What’s the number there, I’ll call you right back.”
That panicked me. Helplessly I gave her the only phone number I could think of, my old Santa Ana number. “But I didn’t mean to take up any more of your time,” I babbled, “I just wanted to—”
“That’s our old number,” she said. “How can you be at our old number?”
“It—stayed with the house.” If I could still sweat, I’d have been sweating. “These people who live here now don’t mind me hanging around.” The lie was getting ahead of me. “They like me; they made me a sandwich.”
“I bet. Stay by the phone.”
She hung up, and I knew it was a race then to see which of us would be able to dial the old number most rapidly. She must have been hampered by a rotary-dial phone too, because I got ringing out of the earpiece; and after it had rung four times I concluded that the number must be back in service again, because I would have got the recording by then if it had not been. My lips were silently mouthing Please, please, and I was aching with anxious hope that whoever answered the line would agree to go along with what I’d tell them to say.
Then the phone at the other end was lifted,