Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories (15 page)

Without thinking about it she walked down the steps of the porch and along the flagstone path to the sidewalk. She felt as though she were being dragged, the way she used to feel when Michael tugged
insistently at her hand when he wanted her to hurry. She felt that he was reminding her of the cross-my-heart promise to take Peter and him to school on opening day.

She'd keep that promise. She'd go with Peter. No matter how you felt about a child, you couldn't let a little boy face his first day alone.

She was in front of him. Her lips felt dry and cracked. Scott had said she'd never get over losing Michael till she forgave this child. “Hello, Peter.” It was scarcely audible.

His “hello” was matter-of-fact, ignoring the last three months.

“I'll walk you to school,” she said.

He nodded and started trotting beside her. “I know, Michael said you promised to.” His voice faltered over the name, and she realized with unwilling compassion that Peter must have had a lonely summer too.

Marion glanced down at his empty hands. “Didn't you bring a snack or milk money?” she asked. “The card from school said you were supposed to.”

“I know.” Peter's voice was resigned. “I reminded my aunt last night but she forgot. She always forgets things.” Then his tone became anxious. “I won't be hungry, but do you think I should have brought a leaf?”

“A leaf?” Marion asked.

“Yes. The kids who were in kindergarten last year told Michael and me that if you bring in a leaf or something you can talk about it in Show and Tell. Michael was trying to get a great big one when he fell. I told him there was lots of time, but he wanted to.”

Michael had been reaching for a leaf.

Marion closed her eyes, seeing again the scene in the backyard. Then she stopped abruptly and turned to face Peter. “But why did Michael climb on the dead branch? It didn't have any leaves.”

Peter looked up at her, puzzled. “He didn't fall off the dead branch. He was on the one above it. When he fell I got scared and
I started out on the dead branch to catch him, and that was when it snapped off. But I was still holding onto the tree.”

Marion sank to her knees before Peter and put both her hands on his shoulders. “Peter, please,” she said, “this is terribly important. Are you sure that Michael didn't fall from the dead branch? Are you very, very sure?”

Peter looked even more puzzled. “But I told you—he was trying to get a leaf.”

She pulled his head against her neck. “Thank you, thank you,” she sobbed, and thought: I did not kill my child. I did not kill my child. Oh, Michael. And for the first time since his death the sound of his name brought peace. She felt about him the way she used to when he was asleep at night—warm, tucked in, cared for, without further need of her.

Peter pulled back a little. “Michael and I had a very good secret. I'd better tell you about it.”

With his last breath Michael had tried to tell her about that secret. “What is it?”

“Well”—he looked a little proud, a little anxious—“it's just that Michael said that next to you and his daddy I was his very best friend. And if you're not mad at me anymore, can I still be? Because you can be best friends with Mr. Blaine, but I just had Michael.”

•  •  •

Marion was suddenly conscious of the bony hardness of Peter's shoulders. He'd got terribly thin over the summer.

“I haven't been much of a friend to Mr. Blaine or anyone,” she said unsteadily. “But, Peter, of course you're still best friends with Michael—and with Mr. Blaine and me too, if you want. I'll tell you what—after school I'll be waiting for you and we'll ask the other boys to come back to play with you.” She smiled into his shining eyes. “Would you like that?”

Michael's toys were packed in the storage room in the basement. She'd have to dig them out—Peter had always had such fun taking them apart. She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “I'll bet anything,” she told him, “that by now you're wonderful at putting things together again.”

I
t was dark when they arrived. Mike steered the car off the dirt road down the long driveway and stopped in front of the cottage. The real estate agent had promised to have the heat turned up and the lights on. She obviously didn't believe in wasting electricity.

An insect-repellent bulb over the door emitted a bleak yellowish beam that trembled in the steady drizzle. The small-paned windows were barely outlined by a faint flicker of light that seeped through a partially open blind.

Mike stretched. Ten hours of driving for the past two days had cramped his long, muscular body. He brushed back his dark brown hair from his forehead wishing he'd taken time to get a haircut before they left New York. Laurie teased him when his hair started to grow. “You look like a thirty-year-old Roman Emperor, Curlytop,” she would comment. “All you need is a toga and laurel wreath to complete the effect.”

She had fallen asleep about an hour ago. Her head was resting on his lap. He glanced down at her, hating to wake her up. Even though he could barely make out her profile, he knew that in sleep the tense lines vanished from around her mouth and the panic-stricken expression disappeared from her face.

Four months ago the recurring nightmare had begun, the nightmare that made her shriek,
“No, I won't go with you. I won't sing with you.”

He'd shaken her awake. “It's all right, sweetheart. It's all right.”

Her screams would fade into terrified sobs. “I don't know who they are but they want me, Mike. I can't see their faces but they're all huddled together beckoning to me.”

He had taken her to a psychiatrist, who put her on medication and began intensive therapy. But the nightmares continued, unabated. They had turned a gifted twenty-four-year-old singer who had just completed a run as a soloist in her first Broadway musical to a trembling wraith who could not be alone after dark.

The psychiatrist had suggested a vacation. Mike told him about the summers he'd spent at his grandmother's house on Oshbee Lake forty miles from Milwaukee. “My grandmother died last September,” he'd explained. “The house is up for sale. Laurie's never been there and she loves the water.”

The doctor had approved. “But be careful of her,” he warned. “She's severely depressed. I'm sure these nightmares are a reaction to her childhood experiences, but they're overwhelming her.”

Laurie had eagerly endorsed the chance to go away. Mike was a junior partner in his father's law firm. “Anything that will help Laurie,” his father told him. “Take whatever time you need.”

I remember brightness here, Mike thought as he studied the shadow-filled cottage with increasing dismay. I remember the feel of the water when I dove in, the warmth of the sun on my face, the way the breeze filled the sails and the boat skimmed across the lake.

•  •  •

It was the end of June but it might have been early March. According to the radio, the cold spell had been gripping Wisconsin for three
days. There'd better be enough coal to get the furnace going, Mike thought, or else the real estate agent will lose the listing.

He had to wake up Laurie. It would be worse to leave her in the car, even for a minute. “We're here, love,” he said, his voice falsely cheerful.

Laurie stirred. He felt her stiffen, then relax as he tightened his arms around her. “It's so dark,” she whispered.

“We'll get inside and turn some lights on.”

He remembered how the lock had always been tricky. You had to pull the door to you before the key could fit into the cylinder. There was a night-light plugged into an outlet in the small foyer. The house was not warm but neither was it the bone-chilling cold he had feared.

Quickly Mike switched on the hall light. The wallpaper with its climbing ivy pattern seemed faded and soiled. The house had been rented for the five summers his grandmother was in the nursing home. Mike remembered how clean and warm and welcoming it had been when she was living there.

Laurie's silence was ominous. His arm around her, he brought her into the living room. The overstuffed velour furniture that used to welcome his body when he settled in with a book was still in place but, like the wallpaper, seemed soiled and shabby.

Mike's forehead furrowed into a troubled frown. “Honey, I'm sorry. Coming here was a lousy idea. Do you want to go to a motel? We passed a couple that looked pretty decent.”

Laurie smiled up at him. “Mike, I want to stay here. I want you to share with me all those wonderful summers you spent in this place. I want to pretend your grandmother was mine. Then maybe I'll get over whatever is happening to me.”

Laurie's grandmother had raised her. A fear-ridden neurotic, she had tried to instill in Laurie fear of the dark, fear of strangers, fear
of planes and cars, fear of animals. When Laurie and Mike met two years ago, she'd shocked and amused him by reciting some of the litany of hair-raising stories that her grandmother had fed her on a daily basis.

“How did you turn out so normal, so much fun?” Mike used to ask her.

“I was damned if I'd let her turn me into a certified nut.” But the last four months had proved that Laurie had not escaped after all, that there was psychological damage that needed repairing.

Now Mike smiled down at her, loving the vivid sea-green eyes, the thick dark lashes that threw shadows on her porcelain skin, the way tendrils of chestnut hair framed her oval face.

“You're so darn pretty,” he said, “and sure I'll tell you all about Grandma. You only knew her when she was an invalid. I'll tell you about fishing with her in a storm, about jogging around the lake and her yelling for me to keep up the pace, about finally managing to outswim her when she was sixty.”

Laurie took his face in her hands. “Help me to be like her.”

Together they brought in their suitcases and the groceries they had purchased along the way. Mike went down to the basement. He grimaced when he glanced at the coalbin. It was fairly large, a four-feet-wide by six-feet-long plankboard enclosure situated next to the furnace and directly under the window that served as an opening for the chute from the delivery truck. Mike remembered how when he was eight he'd helped his grandmother replace some of the boards on the bin. Now they all looked rotted.

“Nights get cold even in the summer but we'll always be plenty warm, Mike,” his grandmother would say cheerily as she let him shovel coal into the old blackened furnace.

Mike remembered the bin as always heaped with shiny black nuggets. Now it was nearly empty. There was barely enough coal for two or three days. He reached for the shovel.

The furnace was still serviceable. Its rumbling sound quickly echoed throughout the house. The ducts thumped and rattled as hot air wheezed through them.

In the kitchen Laurie had unpacked the groceries and begun to make a salad. Mike grilled a steak. They opened a bottle of Bordeaux and sat side by side at the old enamel table, their shoulders companionably touching.

They were on their way up the staircase to bed when Mike spotted the note from the real estate agent on the foyer table: “Hope you find everything in order. Sorry about the weather. Coal delivery on Friday.”

•  •  •

They decided to use his grandmother's room. “She loved that metal-frame bed,” Mike said. “Always claimed that there wasn't a night she didn't sleep like a baby in it.”

“Let's hope it works that way for me.” Laurie sighed. There were clean sheets in the linen closet but they felt damp and clammy. The boxspring and mattress smelled musty.

“Warm me up,” Laurie whispered, shivering as they pulled the covers over them.

“My pleasure.”

They fell asleep in each other's arms. At three o'clock Laurie began to shriek, a piercing, wailing scream that filled the house. “Go away. Go away. I won't. I won't.”

It was dawn before she stopped sobbing. “They're getting closer,” she told Mike. “They're getting closer.”

•  •  •

The rain persisted throughout the day. The outside thermometer registered thirty-eight degrees. They read all morning curled up on the velour couches. Mike watched as Laurie began to unwind. When she
fell into a deep sleep after lunch, he went into the kitchen and called the psychiatrist.

“Her sense that they're getting closer may be a good sign,” the doctor told him. “Possibly she's on the verge of a breakthrough. I'm convinced the root of these nightmares is in all the old wives' tales her grandmother told Laurie. If we can isolate exactly which one caused this fear, we'll be able to exorcise it and all the others. Watch her carefully, but remember. She's a strong girl and she wants to get well. That's half the battle.”

When Laurie woke up, they decided to inventory the house. “Dad said we can have anything we want,” Mike reminded her. “A couple of the tables are antiques and that clock on the mantel is a gem.” There was a storage closet in the foyer. They began dragging its contents into the living room. Laurie, looking about eighteen in jeans and a sweater, her hair tied loosely in a chignon, became animated as she went through them. “The local artists were pretty lousy,” she laughed, “but the frames are great. Can't you just see them on our walls?”

Last year as a wedding present, Mike's family had bought them a loft in Greenwich Village. Until four months ago, they'd spent their spare time going to garage sales and auctions looking for bargains. Since the nightmares began, Laurie had lost interest in furnishing the apartment. Mike crossed his fingers. Maybe she
was
starting to get better.

On the top shelf buried behind patchwork quilts he discovered a Victrola. “Oh, my God, I'd forgotten about that,” he said. “What a find! Look. Here are a bunch of old records.”