Red - Jack Ketchum [24]
He got off the bed and turned and she saw that her mother was standing in the hallway behind him. Watching.
All her mother ever seemed to do these days was watch.
She wondered if she’d always been like that, and that Peggy as a child just had never noticed. And if her mother had been that passive at her own age, when she and her father first met in the same high school corridor she now walked every day, or if it had happened gradually over time, this slippage — and if so, would it happen to her too someday? Would she inherit this? And gradually melt into the ghost of some unknown man‘s desires?
She was afraid it would. But then for a while she’d been afraid of a lot of things.
~ * ~
He showed no signs of displeasure at her being there watching them and Belle thought that was good — because she needed to try to have a serious discussion with him. In fact he placed a tender hand on the nape of her neck as they walked together to their room.
Once inside she turned on the bedside lamp and he closed the door and started to undress unbuttoning his shirt first the way he always did, his back to her as she put her hand to his shoulder. She warned herself against seeming too concerned.
“Chris, honey? Could we talk a minute? That woman. Do you really think we should be…”
He whirled and her hand dropped away from his shoulder and suddenly her face felt on fire.
He raised his other hand as though to slap her again. His eyes were glittering slits, his lips thinned, jaw set.
“Jesus, Chris!”
He let the hand fall slowly to his side.
He hadn’t hit her since the abortion, what she thought of as the abortion though there had been no doctors involved, no clinics, no lines of protesters thank god. He hadn’t hit her since. But even then he’d had no cause. She’d only said there were other ways to go about this than the one he proposed.
Her face stung and her ears rang.
You bastard, she wanted to say. You son of a bitch.
I didn’t deserve that.
He turned and slipped out of his shirt, kicked out of his slippers, unbuttoned his pants and pulled them off his legs and folded both shirt and pants neatly over the corner chair. Then sat down and patted the bed beside him. Smiled at her.
“Let’s get some sleep, Belle.”
He shifted to his side of the bed. Plumped the pillows. Pulled the covers over him. And then he was just lying there.
She took her own sweet time undressing and getting into her nightgown, sitting in front of the mirror and brushing out her hair. The woman looking back at her in the mirror wouldn’t just fall asleep. Not tonight. Not for a long while.
She thought, if I had known back then, would I still have married him?
She had a lot of questions about herself. Always had. But she knew the answer to that one.
~ * ~
Brian listened in the dark for the house to settle. For everyone to sleep.
When he felt sure they had, he got out of bed and walked to the window opposite and as quietly as he could, raised the blinds. The yard was silent. No dogs barking or howling. No sound of night birds. Not even crickets. Down by the pond there would be crickets — and frogs too. But here? Nothing. Moonlight and stillness.
He stared at the fruit cellar door.
Stillness there too.
He wondered what she was doing down there. What she looked like hanging there in the dark. He imagined her in the dark.
~ * ~
She gazes at the mess of food and glass in front of her. She has bled from her ear into the food. It is easily within reach. She will not touch it.
She hears movement to her right, faint, from beneath the old trunk across the room. She has no need to scent the air to know what makes these sounds. The scent has been with her for a long time. The scratching sounds are mice and she sees them now, three of them, hesitant yet scurrying toward her in short fits and starts.
Three small brown mice that at last find the food in front of her and do what she will not.
PART TWO
THIRTEEN
The morning was bright, a crisp in the air before the day’s heat took hold. He drove to