The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [71]
In the morning, while preparing the girls’ breakfast with Chip, she tried to make sense of Reseda’s kiss and the reality that she and her husband had finally christened their bedroom in New Hampshire—and how, for the first time in well over half a year, the sex had left her satisfied. It wasn’t a coincidence, this she knew. There was a connection. But for the life of her she couldn’t decide what it meant.
Chapter Eight
The house always seems a little more peculiar to you when the girls are at school and Emily is at work. When you’re alone. It’s as if it suspects that this is when you’re the most receptive. Or, perhaps, the most vulnerable.
It.
One day you stood on your driveway and just stared at it. The windows were eyes, the long screened porch a mouth. It watched you back.
You know the air moves in currents along the hallways like breath, especially in that back stairway to the second floor and the thin corridor along the third floor. One day you came across Desdemona cowering in the living room, her orange body a small ball between the radiator and the corner where the wall angled into the bay window. She was quivering, her fur fluffed and her eyes wide. For the only time ever she hissed at you.
And then there was the time you found her with her collar caught on the pineapple finial on the banister to the front staircase. She was trying and failing to extricate herself and growing panicked. She was hanging herself, choking to death because for some reason the breakaway collar hadn’t unclasped. If you hadn’t wandered into the hallway at that very moment, in all likelihood the animal would have died.
In the end, you didn’t tell Emily about this because you know it would have upset her. There is actually a great deal you are shielding her from.
You realize, of course, that you are giving life to slate and clapboard and horsehair plaster. To bad wallpaper and a door in the basement. There is no it. But there is something. There are people. You know what you have found and you know what you have hidden in newspapers in the back of your armoire.
She deserves friends.
It’s Monday, the start of a workweek for Emily and a school week for your girls, and once more you are here all alone. You tell yourself it wasn’t a bad weekend, despite your encounter with Ethan Stearns and Sandra Durant from Flight 1611 in the small hours of Sunday morning. After all, you spent time with the living, too. You got to know Emily’s boss a little better on Saturday night; you had a nice evening at Reseda’s on Sunday. Both parties were actually rather pleasant, and you made new friends. Moreover, when you awoke hours before sunrise today, you and Emily made love with an ardor you hadn’t felt in months.
So, you tell yourself, in many ways you are managing just fine. For a long moment you sit in a ladder-back chair and stare at the grotesque sunflowers on the dining room walls. These are not the cheerful Tuscan sunflowers of August. They are the dying blossoms of September, brown not merely because the wallpaper is antique. Even brand-new this paper may have been morbid.
The plan today is to continue stripping that god-awful wallpaper. In the past—in this house and in West Chester—you always scraped the old wallpaper off all of the walls before starting to hang the new paper. That is the logical way to proceed. But not this time. The other day you grew so bored with scraping that you started hanging the new paper, a serene (and appropriate) Victorian array of roses, on the wall on which you had removed all the old paper. You expect you will finish scraping today. You have one long wall and a small portion of another to go. Then you will have only one