Authors: Mary Chase Comstock
“I don’t have any intention of going to bed anytime soon.
Come on over. I’ll watch for you from the window.”
When he pulled up in front of the apartment almost
exactly fifteen minutes later, he spotted her slim form silhouetted against the
dim light of her living room. Watchful and alone.
The sight brought the corners of his mouth
down. The wariness was just as fundamental a part of her as her beauty. Would
she ever be able to live her life without looking over her shoulder? Aunt Rosa
would tell him some lives were made that way, part of their design, part of the
lesson, but he didn’t want to accept it. He realized even now that he’d begun
to care too much. He was walking right into the big heart trap. Selfishly, he
hoped Deirdre was too.
“I don’t know if this stuff will help,” he said as
Deirdre let him in, “but it could be important.” He carried his load through
the shadowy living room into the bright light of the kitchen and set it on the
table.
In response to the look of curiosity on her face, he
said, “Willard’s garbage.
We don’t know
much about what he has, but maybe we can learn something about it from what he
throws away.”
“How did you get it?” she asked, peering over the edge of
the container.
He related the incident, playing it for humor. “It’s
amazing,” he concluded, “how much you can get away with once someone decides
you’re an imbecile.”
Deirdre didn’t smile. “Asshole,” she muttered. “I’m sorry
you had to go through that.”
Manny patted her on the shoulder.
“Anyway, it’s a comfort to know that if he
had to pick me out of a line-up with the Cisco Kid and Tonto, he’d be
hard-pressed to make an I.D. Come on, let’s take a look at this.”
He dumped the trash onto the table and together they
began to sort through it, smoothing out wadded papers and making stacks.
Manny kept an eye on Deirdre as he went about
the task, watching to see if anything caught her attention, made her tense up.
So far, nothing.
“I feel like I should be wearing rubber gloves and a
mask,” Deirdre commented. “I don’t even like touching this stuff.”
She gathered a pile and tossed it back into
the can.
“Just memos,” she explained.
“The kind everyone gets.”
“Here’s a stack of copies from Internet sites.
Take a look through them and see if anything
jumps out at you.”
“I sincerely hope not,” she returned, taking the pile
gingerly. Manny watched as she flipped through the pages one by one. Her hair
was coiled in a knot, covering the place where it had been cut. One lock had
escaped and curled over her shoulder like a party streamer. He wanted to touch
it, feel it wrapped around his finger in a shining copper ringlet. He could
almost understand someone wanting to cut off a piece to have for their own, to
see the sheen as light traced the coil.
Manny shuddered. For a moment, a blinding flash of
communion had seized him and forced him to feel what had prompted a hand with a
blade. It was uncanny and sickening.
He
shoved his hands in his pockets and pulled his gaze away from her.
“It looks as if Freemont’s been searching for poetry,”
Deirdre said, interrupting his thoughts.
When he glanced up again, she was absently tucking the stray lock behind
her ear.
“I can’t say anything he’s
printed really looks familiar.
In fact,
a lot of it’s pretty bad.
Like something
you’d see in an intro writing class.”
“Self-conscious confessions of love?” he asked.
“Mostly,” she nodded.
“Why would he bother, I wonder? We read enough of it in our classes
without seeking it out. Unless . . . well, we know he’s plagiarized before
this.”
She turned another page. Her hand arrested in midair as
she stared at the sheet before her.
“What is it?” Manny asked.
She shook her head slowly as she continued to smooth the
crumpled page.
He glanced at it and saw lines of poetry printed from a
web page. “Your poetry?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her voice sounded neutral, almost matter-of
fact.
“I don’t know how… I haven’t
thought of these poems in years.
It was
a small publication. I thought I had all the copies.”
Manny sighed. Had Deirdre made the obvious connection? A
key to the past she guarded so closely was out on the Internet for the whole
world to see.
She looked him in the eye, just then. “I’m okay,” she
said.
“Just surprised.
Shocked. I know I shouldn’t be, but…."
Her voice drifted off. Manny waited for her to form the words.
“I thought I’d done everything to cover my tracks, but
I’ve been found. Twice in one week. It’s almost funny.”
“Found twice?” he queried.
Deirdre nodded as she began to sort through the rest of
the stack, but said nothing more. She wasn’t really looking now, he could tell,
just smoothing and sorting the pages with such automaticity that they might
have been a pile of socks to be matched and folded.
“A relative of mine surprised me this week,” she said
finally. “My father’s sister. She’s a horrible woman. She has fingernails like
talons and paints them crimson.”
She
gave a dry laugh. “When I was a little girl I thought she was a witch. You know
the story that scared me most when I was growing up?”
He shook his head but said nothing.
“Hansel and Grethel. Somehow children can believe that
story more than any other fairy tale. It seems altogether likely to them that
their parents could abandon them to the forest and whatever monster might live
there. However many crumbs they scatter they will never find their way back.
Crumbs of love, I used to think.”
Deirdre took a moment and surveyed the piles of papers on
the table. Then she went to the sink and washed her hands.
“I’d better tell you my story now,” she said evenly.
“Then we can talk about what to do.”
XXI.
Deirdre led Manny out to the dark living room. A shaft of
light shone from the kitchen and a glow from the street below. Everything was
in shadow.
As he sat down, Deirdre lit a candle. The holder, he
noticed was etched with the faces of angels. They looked stern, daunting, not
the usual smiling faced cherubs.
She took a seat beside him, then reached up and uncoiled
her hair. It fell in a cascade of auburn. As she ran her fingers through it,
she reminded him of a subject for a painting, a Victorian perhaps, glints of
red on her curls, her expression closed. A stranger might even have described
her as serene or thoughtful.
“Where to begin?” she mused.
She tapped her fingertips together in the
silence and looked straight ahead into the flame of the candle.
“I don’t remember a time before the Nightmare King,” she
said. “He was always there, waiting in the darkness. I knew he was everywhere I
couldn’t see. Waiting for me to disturb him, to displease him, so he could
exact a punishment.”
Turning her eyes to him, Deirdre smiled. “You’re waiting
for me to get past the metaphor aren’t you? I’m sorry, Manny.
This is real.”
Manny shifted. Fear was real for him, too. In the days of
hiding, before the green cards and finally citizenship, the places he and Aunt
Rosa had huddled together were full of fear. He often thought that was why his
aunt took such pleasure in cleaning. It was a way of cleansing the past. But Deirdre's
story was going to be very different from his own. His heart sank at the
knowledge.
Deirdre sighed and began again.
“You see,” she said, “it was my father who was the
Nightmare King. That’s what I called him in my head. My father, whom the world respected
and rewarded, was the nightmare I lived with, the incubus who shared my
mother’s bed. Everything we did was driven by the need to please him. I used to
try to hide my sins. My mother tried to teach me that there was no hiding. She
tried to help me please him, and tried to protect me when I didn’t. No, she
never attempted to hold him back, just distracted him with her own
transgressions. Sometimes it worked, but when I was old enough I learned the
only way to protect her was to help her please him.
“It was a game he played with us. We couldn’t really
please him, of course, and the three of us knew it. I think it amused him to
see the lengths we would go to avoid his anger. That was at first. Trivial mind
games. Later it took more to make him smile.”
In the silence, Manny reached out and took Deirdre’s
hand. It was stiff beneath his. He smoothed it softly, and felt it relax a
little.
“I . . . I can’t begin to tell it all to you,” she
whispered.
“Hush,” he said and continued to stroke her hand. He
could sense in his soul how bad it must have been. He didn’t need her words to
help him see. In his mind the image of a harsh Goya battle scene was beginning
to form. How had she managed to come through such a life? She seemed so frail,
yet he’d already glimpsed the razor wire that held her together.
“I had my poetry. I had my mother,” she said, as if in
answer to his unformed question. “I don’t blame her. She’s not as strong . . .
she was never strong.”
“None of it was anyone’s fault except your father’s. You
fell into the hands of a monster. That’s all.”
“No.”
Deirdre shook her head emphatically. “I’m guilty as hell. I grew in anger,
deeper and more violent than his even. One day I didn’t hold it in.”
Even
as Deirdre pronounced the words, the memories of being Katie came flooding
back. Like Freemont, her father had played with her, drawing out her anxiety as
long as he could, letting relief snap back into place, only to be withdrawn a
moment later. She remembered his soft footsteps coming down the hallway.
Always, they paused outside her bedroom door, and she would begin counting. The
longer he stood there, the more likely she would see the handle turn and the
door open. Always, he spoke to her in a quiet, almost gentle voice, a slight
smile on his lips.
But
the things he said. She shut her eyes for a moment.
In
all those years, he never actually harmed her. Just stroked her hair and made
her touch him. That’s all he ever asked her to do. It was always her mother who
suffered the real blows, who willingly offered her small frame as she took the
blame for Katie’s sins. The last time, Katie was thirteen years old. He had
come to her room that night, flipped on the bright overhead light and glanced
about, taking in the details. Everything was perfect; she had made sure of it.
Behind the closet door, her dozens of pale, sweet pea colored dresses hung on
silk padded hangers. Shoes stood in a polished row, toes exactly aligned. Her
books on the shelves were arranged according to height. Her bathroom was spotless,
no sign of any human function. And she herself in a pink nightgown lay rigid,
barely making a wrinkle in the bedspread.
He stood at the foot of her bed and shook his
head. "I’m afraid your mother has let you be bad," he said softly.
"Very bad indeed."
Then,
as if his anger had telegraphed itself directly to her heart, she knew. For
three months in a row, she and her mother had kept the secret, but today, he
must have found some accidental sign. A cramp rose up deep inside her, but she
kept herself as still as death.
Her
father paused and looked her up and down, his eyes as narrow and accusing as
those of a puritan judge. Then he continued, "Your mother says you
couldn’t help yourself, but we both know she’s lying. Don’t we, Katie? Don’t
we?"
Of
course she couldn’t help it. Her mother had told her that menstruation was
natural, part of growing up. But it was to be kept secret from her father, as
so many things were.