Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [115]
She bends to her husband’s face. “Sexton, I’m pregnant,” she says.
She can see him struggling to comprehend, as if he didn’t quite catch all the words. His fingers scrabble against the wooden floorboards. And so she has to say it again. “Sexton, I’m pregnant. We are going to have a baby.”
With her hand on her husband’s leg, she turns to find McDermott’s face. And it is all there, she thinks; she has become as good at reading faces as he is. The shock of the news. The wave of comprehension. And then regret. Terrible regret.
“I didn’t know,” she says, reaching for his hand.
There are footsteps on the stairs. In the kitchen, Ross is saying, Oh, Jesus.
Vivian, in the doorway, holds Alphonse to her breast. The men coming through the kitchen door have white hoods and guns.
Vivian executes a graceful dance step and slips behind a sofa with the boy.
In another life, McDermott says and turns.
Honora yells the word no! but McDermott cannot hear her.
Through the doorway, Honora watches Louis vault into the air in a way he could never do on his own. Ross, as if he had been pushed, sits heavily on a chair that tips over onto the floor.
McDermott spins like a child’s top — already damaged, already broken.
A man with a hood is standing in the doorway. He raises the long gun in his hands and says, “This must be the guy.”
A second man, also in a white hood, pushes his way into the room. “He’s gone,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”
The first man, a faceless creature, holds his gun toward Honora for a long second, and then he lowers it to his side.
In the kitchen, a young girl is bleating like a sheep.
Honora moves on her knees to the place where McDermott has fallen. At first she cannot tell if he has been hit. He seems merely to be stunned, or even, oddly, to be sleeping. She puts her fingers to his face, calling his name. She cradles his head. And then she feels the blood, warm and sticky in his hair. She stares at her hand. The girl in the kitchen is making an inhuman sound.
Honora stands, bewildered. Her own blood drains from her head, and her vision begins to narrow. Strong hands catch the sides of her shoulders.
Wordlessly, Vivian leads her away from McDermott to a chair in the kitchen. Alphonse, white faced, appears in the doorway. Vivian shields his eyes from the carnage as she marches him through the kitchen to the porch. “Go for help,” she commands. “And don’t come back inside this room until I tell you to.”
Honora gazes around her. Alphonse’s sister is holding her arm and crying in a way that is frightening to listen to. It is the sound of pure fear — the pealing of a bell long after it has been struck.
Mironson is sitting on the floor, against a wall, a smear of blood behind him on the yellowing wallpaper.
Ross, in death, has the posture of a clown midprank — his bulk against the back of the tipped chair, his feet in the air.
Mahon seems no longer to have a face.
Tsomides is cradling his head, but his eyes are open and unmoving.
The worst, though — the very worst — is the unnatural way Alphonse’s mother is bent backward over the sink.
Honora counts.
Six dead.
A massacre, she thinks.
She stands and moves back into the living room, where McDermott is on the floor. In the corner, Sexton calls for her. Honora kneels over McDermott’s body and puts a hand on his chest. She minds that she cannot see the color of McDermott’s eyes — that lovely turquoise blue. She lifts her face to a God she does not know very well, and a wail begins to rise inside her.
Honora
Honora sets her suitcase on the slab of granite. Alphonse, returning from the beach wagon, picks it up, his shoulder hitched for balance.
“It’s very heavy,” she says.
“I’ve got it,” he says.
His face has filled out some around his eyes, so that his features are no longer quite as comical as they used to be. And there is something sad in his mouth that will never go away. Vivian has taken Alphonse to her own hairdresser, a woman named Irma in Exeter, for a haircut, but still the boy’s hair grows forward and wants to spike.
The