Dust of Eden (17 page)

Ruta
laughed harshly. "No, no, we can never give Ariel what she wants, because she's just going to want more and more. I don't know why no one else can see that."

Marjorie tapped a card. "You're still missing the point. Ariel has her own motives, but now that we're here this is about us, our . . . attitudes. She may be right about one thing: we've all got a second chance."

"
I'm
not happy;
that's
the point,"
Ruta
said.

Helen, who especially didn't like an argument being passed around like a baton, seized her chance to snuff out the metaphysical flicker. "At least your husband is here."

"Pardon me . . . pardon me, but you never married, so I don't see that your situation is any worse than mine."

"I'm not the one complaining."

"—and Beverly's husband died in the Vietnam war, didn't he? A hero too. So she's got closure."

Beverly—Our Lady of Perpetual Sarcasm—responded as if poked. "Maybe we should play Old Maid."

"And we have children—
Paavo
and I—don't forget that,"
Ruta
said.

Beverly rolled her eyes.

Marjorie did not miss her own husband particularly and found Helen's spinsterhood admirable. Out of a sense of duty she worried sometimes that she should find out if her husband was still alive; but then what would she do about it? "Molly has children," she pointed out, "and a grandchild, I believe. And Dana's husband may be alive."

"Dana's husband is a brute. Cinderella is thrilled to be out of her marriage, dead or alive." Cinderella.
Ruta's
exclusive term for the wholesome-looking and now much younger Dana
Novicki
.

And then it happened—just like that. The thing that hadn't happened for many months but which tethered them to their creator and kept them in fear and trembling. Helen, who was facing the staircase, saw it first: Ariel coming slowly down the staircase, no cane, one hand on the banister, the other looped through the arm of a companion. Ariel's face was incandescent, her brow nearly geisha white, her eyes like ice at sunrise. A mad artist's look, fresh from creation. But it was the companion who was the draw . . .

"Danielle . . ."
Ruta
whispered.

Marjorie and Beverly drew back with shock as they turned.

Because it was not the beautiful Danielle Kramer, inamorata of Kraft Olson, whose death in middle age had left them with the memory of a cowl of ebony hair, languid eyes, a serene mouth, a gypsy's flashing teeth and nails, taut skin as luminous as moist marble and a haughty confidence in all of the above. That was Danielle Kramer when she had died. But what was coming down the staircase was a coffin-sprung travesty of ragged flyaway hair the color of ashes, burning ferret eyes and a slack jaw, yellowed teeth and a crone's nails. The skin was stretched and sagging. Worst of all, in the expression of this pitiful remnant there was a contradictory mix of hideous joy and fear and shame at being alive on any terms.

It was this trembling gratitude that struck the room dumb. They could all be like this. The mocking husk of what they remembered as Danielle Kramer was the object lesson of a woman who could paint with the dust of creation. A few strokes of a brush here and there and another decade would reside in their flesh. The paint would dry and their bones would bend, their skin would loosen, their heads would bow. And whatever was commensurate with physical corruption would enfeeble their minds until they were like this ghastly drooling hag on the stairs.

So they froze around the card table, four vassals of their suzerain lady, unable to return Ariel
Leppa's
triumphant smile. And as the lone, last float of a grand mummers' parade that had started a year ago reached the bottom step and moved inexorably into line with where Kraft Olson sat, the women at the card table understood:

Ariel's revenge.

Ariel's test.

Ariel's vanity.

Here is your lover, Kraft. See how beautiful she is? Take her. Show me a sign that you haven't been deceiving me. Show me that you really have lost your memory. . . .

Ariel
Leppa
stared intently into Kraft Olson's face, searching for the slightest twinge of recognition from the man who still scorned her.

"See who I've brought you, Kraft? Don't you want to say hello?"

He may have guessed by Ariel's tone, then, who it was and even the unholy spectacle she had prepared for him, and maybe that was why he refused to lift his face from his chest. But when he heard
her
voice—a rag of the silken fabric that had been Danielle's soft voice, croaking his name—he slowly raised his eyes.

Five intuitive females, with their lifetimes of reading emotions, were riveted on him. They pulled in every nuance of color, avoidance, pace, breathing, posture. But Kraft Olson stared through the terrible corruption of his once and forever love as though waiting placidly for a distant star.

T
he jaw had been torn away, that was all. That explained why Denny Bryce hadn't been able to reconstruct the thing's mouth when he had stared down at the remains in the heart-shaped ivy alongside the road. Not because it hadn't had a mouth to begin with. That was clearly impossible. But he wouldn't mind having another look at it. Just to be sure. He hadn't actually picked it up and checked the first time. It was a bloody mess, after all, and the flies were swarming. And when it had loped across in front of his car, that was inconclusive too. How could you tell anything when you were fighting to avoid running down an animal with your car?

So now he was driving past the spot again on the way to New Eden, and he slowed and surveyed the ivy but couldn't pick out the place. Things didn't last long out here in nature's cemetery. No coffins, no embalming. Lots of undiscriminating appetites in the adjacent woods. So be it.

He feathered the accelerator faster. A minute later the driveway appeared, and he drove too fast up its shattered surface. The archipelago of asphalt hammered the suspension on his
Tercel
, making it hard to focus on the farmhouse. It looked so alien and impenetrable. Was his father really in there?

The link between them was forged of something he could follow to hell and back if need be, he thought, but he had an uneasy feeling that his old man was suffocating in that shadowy mausoleum of cellars and high-ceiling rooms. He still thought of him as sitting in the living room of their Cape Cod in Little Canada, his mother in the kitchen or
putzing
in the garden. In the evenings his parents had always been together, his father's head on his mother's lap on the couch, and she making her gentle outpouring of thoughts and feelings for the day while he listened. That was how they never lost track of each other. As simple and profound as that. How could one exist without the other? So it was natural that he, the son who had grown up witnessing that, had to adjust to a change of environment now, just like his father did.

But there was something different about the farmhouse today, some shade or texture. Denny swung around in a tight turn just short of the willow, whose nesting birds had taught him their range. As he got out of the car, his gaze went to
Paavo
Seppanen
. He had long since concluded that maintenance was one of
Paavo's
live-in duties, and the burly Finn was leaning wearily on the porch in long sleeves and bib overalls. The front door banged then and Beverly took two steps out, read in his expression that he had forgotten her cigarettes, turned back.

"Do you like filters?" he called lamely.

She put a hand to her hip and swung around not unlike Quasimodo. "They all have filters these days, unless you want to bring me a joint. Which is fine with me. I'm going to smoke my girdle if I don't find something illegal for my nerves."

"Sorry—"

"Oh, don't be sorry. I don't stand here at the door just waiting for you, you know. Standing there, listening to an old man spit"—she glanced at
Paavo
in disgust—"and
Ruta
prattling on about her nightmares. Why should I want to smoke? What I need is a drink. Bring me a five-gallon drum of schnapps and I'll give you a drum roll when you drive up."

"Sorry . . ." he repeated.

She saw that he was; waved her hand fussily. "Don't mind me. I'm a little nervous, that's all. I'll kill
Ruta
before nightfall, and then they'll put me in jail where you can buy anything you want."

Denny smiled to the side, and that was when he saw it: the chicken wire over the ground-floor windows. That was what had changed the light hitting the house as he came up the drive. And next to
Paavo
was a hammer and a coffee tin full of nails. He gave
Paavo
a flicker of a smile as he gestured toward the windows.

"Birds,"
Paavo
explained, punctuating this with a throat-clearing cough and a glance at Beverly.

"Birds," Denny repeated and couldn't bring himself to break the poetry of that taciturn elucidation by asking him to elaborate.

He found his father curled up on the bed in his room, facing the window. Despite the heat, the old man was wearing a sweater. His left slipper was still on, the other floating in the folds of a thin green blanket.

"You awake, Dad?"

"Huh?" Martin rolled a quarter turn. "Oh." He rolled back, right hand pillowing his cheek. "Good to see you, son."

"Sleepy?"

"Just lazy."

"Not you, old guy. You've done enough in your life to qualify for the Goldbricking Anytime program."

"Want your radio on?"

"No."

"I should bring your TV, but you never watched it at . . . you never watched it. Do you want me to bring it?"

"Want what?" He rolled onto his back, folded his hands on his chest.

"Your TV."

"No."'

The commercials threw his concentration, Denny knew. He couldn't re-engage the story lines by the time they came back on. Maybe he had trouble seeing too.

"I don't see your glasses, Dad. Ah. Here they are. I'll put '
em
right here on the nightstand."

"What is this place?"

"It's called Kenyon New Eden Assisted Living." He went through the litany again, explaining everything as he did at least once a visit, until his words stopped registering. "How's the food?"

"I don't remember."

"Well, I see a tray here. You must have room service whipped into shape, eh? Maybe you'd like to go eat with the others more. Get to know them."

"They're all women here."

"Mostly."

"Beth is dead, isn't she?"

"Yeah."

"That's where I should be."

"You've got a contract to live."

"A contract with who?"

"With God. With me."

"Hmm. Says you. I'm tired of waiting. It doesn't seem fair that everyone else is gone but me."

"Maybe there's a purpose for you being here."

"What purpose?"

"Maybe there's something you have to do. Maybe just be happy with life. Then God will take you home."

"I don't know if I believe in God. Bunch of ghosts floating around. Where would they all fit?"

"Mom believed in God."

"What's that you've got in bed with you?"

The old man lifted his head, looked where Denny was fussing with the covers. Something bright red was nestled on either side of him. Bright red and shiny and—

"Fire extinguishers. Now where did you get those?"

They were the small household kind. Denny thought he had seen one of them in the kitchen. His father was genuinely bewildered.

"I don't know."

"You expecting a fire?"

"Yeah, I guess I am."

"Kidde. Good fire extinguishers, Pop. You steal the best."

"Hmm."

"You need a haircut, old guy. Can't let you go on growing hair faster than me."

"I don't think they do that here, so I'll just have to bring some cigarettes—I mean, scissors. Now's my chance to turn you into a skinhead."

"Your mother's dead, isn't she?"

"Yeah. Yeah, she's dead. She was a great lady, and she lived her life, and you had all there was of it, and someday you'll be together again."

"I hope so." The poignancy of that wish squeezed his words as dry as a whispered prayer and seemed to penetrate the torpor. For a moment he was lucid again. "She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I loved her because her idea of romance was giving, not getting. You don't see that anymore. These women nowadays—their idea of romance is a man giving to them."

"Tell me about it."

"It's a two-way street."

"Yeah. When a woman gives to a man—afterward, that's called rape."

His father strained to bring him into focus. "Well . . . they're not all like that, Denny. There's some good ones out there."

"I keep looking."

"You aren't married, are you?" Starting to lose it again.