Merrick - Anne Rice [63]
She pointed to the hallway that separated us from the room in which Aaron and I had spent our uncomfortable night.
“After he was gone and she went away, I took out the furniture. It’s in the front bedroom next to Great Nananne’s. That’s where I’ve slept ever since.”
“I can imagine why,” said Aaron comfortingly. “It must have been dreadful for you to lose them both.”
“Now Matthew was always good to us all,” she continued, “I wish he had been my father, lot of good it would do me now. He was in the hospital and out of it, and then the doctors stopped coming because he was drunk all the time and shouted at them, and then he just choked out his last.”
“And had Cold Sandra already gone?” Aaron asked gently. He had laid his hand on the table beside her own.
“She was out all the time at the barroom down on the corner, and after they threw her out of that one, she went to the one on the big street. The night he started to go, I ran down two blocks and over there to get her, and banged on the back screen door for her to come out. She was too drunk to walk.
“She was sitting there with this handsome white man, and he was just in love with her, you know, adoring her. I could see it. And she was so drunk she couldn’t stand up. And then it hit me. She didn’t want to see Matthew go. She was afraid to be at his side when it happened. She wasn’t being hard-hearted. She was just really scared. So I came running back.
“Great Nananne was washing his face and giving him his Scotch, that’s what he drank all the time, he wouldn’t have any other kind of drink, and he was choking and choking, and we just sat by him till sometime about dawn, the choking stopped, and his breathing got very steady, so steady you could have set a clock by it, just up and down, up and down.
“It was a real relief that he wasn’t choking. But Great Nananne shook her head to mean no good. Then his breathing got so low you couldn’t see or hear it. His chest stopped moving. And Great Nananne told me he was dead.”
She paused long enough to drink the rest of her coffee, then she stood up, pushing the chair back carelessly, and took the pot from the stove and gave us all some more of the heavy brew to drink.
She sat down again and ran her tongue along her lip, a habit with her. She seemed a child in all these gestures, perhaps because of the convent-school way in which she sat up straight in her chair and folded her arms.
“You know, it’s nice having you listen to this,” she said looking from me to Aaron. “I never told anyone all about it. Just the little things. He left Cold Sandra plenty of money.
“She came home around noon the next day and demanded to know where they’d taken him, and started screaming and throwing things and saying we never should have called for the morgue to take him away.
“ ‘And what did you think we were going to do with him?’ Great Nananne asked. ‘You don’t think they have a law in this town about dead bodies? You think we can just take him out and bury him in the backyard?’ Turned out his people in Boston came and got him, and soon as Cold Sandra saw that check, you know, the money he’d left her, she was out of this house and gone.
“Of course I didn’t know it was going to be the last time I ever saw her. All I knew was that she had packed up some of her clothes in a new red leather suitcase, and she was dressed like a model from a magazine, in a white silk suit. Her hair was pulled back to a bun on the back of her head. She was so beautiful she didn’t need any makeup, but she had put some dark-violet eye shadow above her eyelashes and a dark color, like violet, too, I think, on her lips. I knew that dark violet meant trouble. She looked so beautiful.
“She kissed me and she gave me a bottle of Chanel No. 22 perfume. She said that was for me. She told me she’d be coming back