The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [136]
He made himself open the door.
For one impossible instant he saw her as he had envisioned her. The suggestion was that powerful. A scream rang in his head, a silent shriek, before his eyes caught hold of reality. There was no body swinging from the ceiling. She was where he always found her these days, sitting in their bed with her knees drawn up. Her skin shone in the dim light that came through the partially open bathroom door.
She said, “I’m sorry, Petey.”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry I’m not dead like the boy upstairs. The painter. Didn’t you paint a little picture of Gretchen dead? Oh, you did, Petey, I know you did. But I would never hang myself, baby. I would find a better way.”
“Gretchen, stop it.”
“Don’t be afraid, Petey. I didn’t do it.”
“Don’t even talk that way.” He stepped into the room, closed and bolted the door. His hands trembling and his heartbeat seemed almost audible.
“Or isn’t that what you’re afraid of? You were afraid I would be alive, Petey, and I am, I am. Poor Petey, coming back to his Gretchen and the bitch hasn’t had the simple decency to die.”
“Stop it,” he said. He closed his eyes, made fists of his hands. “Just stop it.”
And she surprised him by doing just that. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a child’s small voice this time. “I’ll go to sleep now, Petey. I was just waiting for you to come home to me is all. But I’m tired and I’ll go to sleep now.”
And she lay down and closed her eyes at once.
He undressed quickly, turned off the bathroom light; lay down in bed beside her. She did not move or say a word, and her breathing became deep and regular. He knew, though, that she was not asleep. She would feign sleep, but he could always tell her real sleep from the imitation she gave, and he knew that he always fell asleep before her these summer nights. And it would be so again this evening, for already he felt the powerful pull of sleep. He did not even want to sleep now. There were thoughts that he wanted to think, that he had to think, but in spite of them the impulse to sleep drew him like a small boat to a whirlpool.
She was right, of course. He had hoped to find her dead. The wish had fathered the thought, and it had been his desire that gave him that incredibly vivid sight of her hanging as Donatelli had hung, dead as Donatelli had died. He had not consciously realized this before but felt now as though he must somehow have known it all along.
The realization did not make sleep impossible now, did not even postpone its onset more than a matter of seconds. He had recently faced his desire for her death too many times to be overly upset by each new form it took. He wanted her to die not so much out of malice but because nothing but her death would so utterly solve his problems. And it would solve her problems in the bargain, and if anything hers were more blindingly unsolvable than his own. Donatelli’s suicide baffled him. Gretchen’s would seem no more than logical. She had no life at all, at least none worth living. She was constantly miserable with no way out. Why shouldn’t she kill herself—for everyone’s sake?
In the morning he awoke coming out of a dream, a dream that slipped from his memory even as he emerged from the shadow of sleep. At first he thought he had merely found his way from one dream to another. The blinds were drawn, sunlight flooding the room. There was a smell of bacon permeating the room. He looked around and saw that Robin’s bed was made and the piles of dirty clothes that customarily littered the floor had been put away.
When Gretchen emerged, hair combed, wearing a yellow blouse and red plaid skirt, he knew not only that he was dreaming but