You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [78]
He leans to kiss her, but she turns her head. A bit of the lipstick he gave her is smeared across her cheek. He wonders why she ever decided to wear it. They remain there on the bed, neither of them moving. Hot air streams from a vent somewhere on the floor. His lips are dry and cracked.
From beneath the pillow, he notices a dark red stain seeping along the sheet. Looking down he sees his crotch is dark and wet. Lauren moves quickly off the mattress, wrapping herself in a towel, hurriedly moving to the bathroom. She closes the door behind her. He’s kneeling there, on this enormous bed, staring into a circle of blood.
THREE TIMES SHE presses the bell, but there is neither sound nor answer. The downstairs lights are on, the shades up, snow visible as it drops through the squares of brightness into the bushes. She is cold and would like to be inside. Trying the latch, she finds it unlocked.
“Hello?” she calls, standing in the huge front hall, beneath a sparkling chandelier. “Ted?” The only reply is a click followed by the soft rumble of the furnace.
The walk has tired her. She passes into the dining room looking for a place to rest. The table needs painting, though it looks like a fine, sturdy old piece of furniture. She sits at the near end, taking off her hat, opening her coat. They have gone for a walk, she decides, young lovers in the snow, walking this ground she used to play on. She feels herself kneeling on the veranda, her arms around Peck, the shaggy mutt, holding him as he barks at a bird in the yard, feeling the bark’s reverberations in her chest, her brother yelling at a friend up in the copper beech, the drone of the mower in the back field, air scented with grass; and she wrestles on the lawn with her father, trying to pry a coin from his fist. Her fingers run over the dent in his thumbnail; her mother says, Watch it, you two, leaning down to kiss her father. On the floor of the upstairs landing is a grate just above where her grandmother sits at her desk, and with her ear against it, crouched on the floorboards, Elizabeth hears the steel nib of her grandmother’s ink pen scratching the thick card stock she writes her thank-you notes on. She is playing by herself upstairs. The bedspreads have patterns of tufted cotton. The posts of her grandparents’ bed are of dark red cherry wood, tops carved in the shape of pineapples. Standing on the corner of the mattress, grasping the bedpost, her heels sink lower than the balls of her feet, stretching the joints of her ankles. The knife she uses to stab at the wood is the knife her grandfather uses to carve roast chicken on Sundays. Beneath the quick jabs of the silver tip spots of lighter red blossom in the dark varnish. Her heart beats so fast she can hardly breathe. Her mother shuts her in the guest room and in the evening her father spanks her over the edge of the couch, though she tells him she didn’t want to do it. The marks are still on the posts of the bed there in the candlelight, as the snow falls, and she lies grasping her mother’s hand, wishing the doctor would come to make her baby safe.
She wonders what other people’s lives are like.
Ted halts at the entrance to the dining room, slack jawed. Mrs. Maynard sits in her fur coat at the far end of the table, staring out the window, a bleary, ruined look on her face.
“Mrs. Maynard?”
Elizabeth turns to see Ted standing in the door to the living room. He’s not wearing a shirt, only jeans. His hair is as messy as she’s ever seen it.
“Mrs. Maynard, what are you doing here? How did you get here? What’s going on?”
“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” she says. “It’s snowing, you know. I thought you and Lauren were on a walk.” She looks about the room as if searching for something. “I used to play on the ground this house is built on. Did you know that? Some say this place is an offense—ugly—that most all of what we’ve done since the beginning is ugly. But you’re not, Ted. I told you. You’re beautiful. The dead don’t remember you. It’s better that way. Will you come here and sit?”
Ted watches Mrs.