Night Night, Sleep Tight (5 page)

Click.

“Joelen?” Henry said.

Deirdre nodded.

“Now what does she want?”

“I don’t think she
wants
anything. I told you, she rang the bell this morning right before the police. She’s a Realtor. She had a meeting with Dad.”

“So why is she calling now?”

“She’s being nice?” Deirdre yawned and stretched. The room had long ago stopped spinning and she felt drained and far too tired to try explaining to Henry the concept of
nice
. “I’m going to bed,” she announced. She hoped there were clean sheets.

“I’ve got to take these guys out. Then I’ll turn in, too.” Henry pulled his leather jacket off the back of a chair. The dogs perked up and started yipping and circling him.

“And you’ll take care of that?” Deirdre pointed to the deflated garbage bag that Henry had left on the floor. “And the things that Dad wanted you to throw away?”

“Oh yeah.” Henry crouched and snapped a leash to each dog’s collar. “Don’t worry, it will all be gone by morning.”

Chapter 8

T
he wind had died down and the house settled into an uneasy silence as Deirdre ferried beer bottles and leftovers to the kitchen. She carried her duffel bag into the room that was once her bedroom. The stuffy space had been taken over by Henry’s bench press, weights, and an exercise bicycle. Judging from the layer of dust on them, they didn’t see much use.

She opened the windows, but the air barely moved. On hot nights like this her father used to hose down the roof.

Her sliding closet door was sticky, but she managed to work it open. There, on the rack, hung some straight skirts and pleated skirts from high school, all of them much too long, with a few matching cardigan sweaters. A much shorter, swingy, navy blue tent dress that she’d worn in college hung there, too. She’d bought it because she thought it made her look like That Girl, Marlo Thomas. There was the cream-colored linen suit she’d worn to her college interviews, along with a brown trench coat that she used to wear with its broad collar turned up, its belt tied at the waist in the style of Catherine Deneuve.

Way on the end was the white two-piece dress she’d worn to her high school graduation and to the dance after. She fingered the silk brocade that had gone brittle with age. The shoes that were supposed to have been her first high heels were still in their box on the closet floor. When she’d bought them she’d been optimistic that she’d be able to take a few steps, maybe even dance. Just one more thing that was supposed to happen that never did.

Deirdre tossed her duffel bag on top of some cardboard boxes stacked in the closet. Her name was written in block letters on the sides—certainly her writing—though she had no memory of boxing anything up.

She turned. On the adjacent wall hung a large framed pencil sketch of a waif with enormous, honey-dripping eyes. The little girl held a gray kitten with its own wide teary eyes. Preadolescent Deirdre had selected this awesomely awful artist-signed (Keane) piece of ’60s kitsch herself. After the accident, she’d identified with that girl and begged her parents to get her a cat. She’d made up stories, none of them with happy endings, about how the pair came to find themselves in their pitiable state. Now she limped over, took the picture down from the wall, and stuck it in the closet facing the wall.

The mattress of her trundle bed was adrift in Henry’s magazines:
Rolling Stone
with U2 on the cover, something called
Spin
with a sultry Madonna,
Cycle World
. Deirdre pushed them aside, unearthing Ollie, her teddy bear. The felt that had covered his paws and nose had long ago been worn away. She pressed Ollie to her face and let his sweet, woolly smell take her back to a time well before this nightmare. Her mother would have been running her a hot bath and asking if she wanted hot cocoa to help her sleep. The bed would have been made up with freshly laundered sheets instead of two naked pillows and a stained mattress cover.

Well, there was certainly no hot cocoa now. Shrugging off her old memories, Deirdre tossed Ollie into the closet where he could have a pity party with the waif and her kitten. She took a quick shower, made the bed, and got into it. Exhausted but wired, she opened the drawer in her bedside table, pulled out Arthur’s manuscript, and started to read where she’d left off.

The second chapter, titled “The Bronx Is Up,” recounted his childhood. He’d grown up, the youngest son of Russian immigrants, with four brothers, none of whom Deirdre had met. She skimmed the pages, through a life story told in anecdotes, many of which she’d heard Arthur tell more than once. She paused at the sound of the front door opening and dog claws scrabbling on the floor. Henry was back.

In the next chapter, “Helluva Town,” Arthur flunked out of college and landed in Manhattan, found work as an assistant stage manager and a shabby room with a shared bath in Hell’s Kitchen. Late nights, he hung out in Greenwich Village. Mornings he’d get up early and write plays.

Deirdre heard the front door open and close again, then the rumble of Henry’s motorcycle catching, revving, and roaring off. She wondered when he was planning to take Sy’s advice and get rid of anything that they wouldn’t want the police to find.

Deirdre yawned. She tried to continue reading but the words swam on the page. She slid the manuscript back in the folder and tucked it into her bedside drawer. Then she plumped up the pillows and lay back. The house was silent with the occasional comforting sounds of dogs lumbering about. She stared up at the ceiling. There was a water stain in the corner. Would she and Henry have to fix the roof and get the rooms painted? Right now she was too tired to care.

The bedside clock said it was nearly one in the morning. Deirdre turned over, bunched the pillow under her head, and closed her eyes. Maybe it had been at about this time Arthur had gone for a swim. She could see him walking to the pool, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. Diving in.

Was that when it had gone wrong? He’d taken a running leap from the board, hit the water, and gotten the air knocked out of him. Struggled to reach the surface, flailing in darkness, propelling himself toward what he thought was sky and smashing headlong into the cement at the bottom of the pool.

Sweat broke out across Deirdre’s neck and back and she sat up, gasping for breath. She imagined Arthur hanging there, a dark shadow under the water, life seeping out of him. Her fingertips tingled and her heart beat a tattoo in her chest. She smelled chlorine and death and gagged.

Breathe,
she told herself as she tried to relax, counting a slow in and out, until finally the tension eased and her lungs filled completely. Shivering, she sat there for a few moments longer before sinking back into the pillow and pulling the blanket around her. The handlebars of the exercise bike looked like shadows outlined against the window. The open closet was a dark rectangle. She started to close her eyes but that feeling, like someone was chasing her and she couldn’t get away, started to take hold.

Deirdre had long known that the truly scary stuff was in her own head. Doped up on Demerol after her car accident, she’d dreamed that her limbs were scattered down a hillside and she had to convince the EMTs to collect them for her. Or that she was on the table in an operating theater, a light beating down on her from above as doctors sawed off her leg, the surrounding stadium seats filled with onlookers. Or that her father was driving her home but she had to get back to the hospital because she’d left behind her hands. Even when she knew she was dreaming, she couldn’t wake herself from those dreams. The memory of that paralyzing panic was far more vivid than any memory of the accident or of anything the doctors had done to her after.

She’d learned, over time, to avoid Demerol and redirect her mind. Anchor her attention on a sensation. Like the heavy sweet smell that was in the air, maybe a gardenia or night-blooming jasmine in the yard? The scent reminded her of hairspray. Aqua Net. Connect the dots and up popped Joelen Nichol, standing in front of her bathroom mirror years ago, spraying Deirdre’s hair. Deirdre remembered the feel of that cool mist drying to a tight coating like a skim of egg white on every skin surface it touched.

Joelen. Who had stood at the front door hours ago and offered Deirdre a business card before bolting out to her car. Then called to offer any help she could. So she was a Realtor, not the movie star she’d dreamed of becoming.

There was a flash. A roll of distant thunder. Then the hiss of a light rain. The rain grew steadier, and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Deirdre pulled the blanket more tightly around her and let her mind drift back to a safer place, to the morning before school in sixth grade when Joelen Nichol had walked into her life.

Chapter 9

T
he sixth-grade girls at El Rodeo set their hair in pin curls and wore blouses with Peter Pan collars and circle pins. When Joelen Nichol appeared in their midst with her reddish-brown hair poufed out around her head like spun sugar, her eyes outlined in black, and mascara clumped on her stubby eyelashes, she seemed like a seismic anomaly. Her lipstick wasn’t Cherries in the Snow or Coral Bells, but instead the color of a politically incorrect “flesh tone” crayon. In a world filled with Carols and Barbaras, Pattys and Nancys, even Joelen’s name was exotic.

The first day Joelen came to school, Deirdre had been waiting outside for the bell to ring, her books pressed to her chest, feeling like a tree stump growing out of the concrete. As usual, the popular girls camped out at the picnic tables, their backs to outsiders, their books on the spaces between them, sending the clear message that there was no room for anyone else to squeeze in.

Deirdre didn’t see Joelen walk in from the street. What she noticed was how, one by one, like a herd of prairie dogs picking up a scent, the boys shooting hoops on the other side of the fence had paused. She noticed how oblivious Joelen seemed to the stir she was creating, leaning nonchalantly against the chain-link fence that separated the picnic tables from the playground, adjusting her cinch belt, smoothing her blouse.

Maybe because they were both outsiders, doomed to perpetual orbit around Marianne Wasserman and her circle (or coven, as Joelen liked to call them), Deirdre and Joelen became fast friends. When the bell rang and the other girls gathered up their books, Deirdre fell in beside Joelen. They walked home from school together that afternoon. From that day on, they shared their lunches and talked on the phone before bed. On weekends they had sleepovers—until the Saturday night when both their lives flew off the rails.

Deirdre turned over. It had taken her two years after the car accident before she could do that simple thing: turn over onto her injured side without aching. She’d always be uncertain on her feet without her crutch.

She closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she could walk unaided. She saw herself moving up the stairs and into the school where her friendship with Joelen had begun. She drifted through her memory of the building, down hallways and up staircases, remembering the smell of the cafeteria on fried fish day and the art room’s peppermint smell of paste.

Deirdre didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until a thump yanked her awake. What time was it? Her wristwatch glowed: ten past two. She heard a shuffling sound, then a grunt. That was a person. The dogs would be growling and snarling if it were an intruder. It had to be Henry.

She tried to go back to sleep but was jarred awake by a louder thump and the sound of something being dragged. Annoyed, she grabbed her crutch and got out of bed. Paused for a moment behind the closed door and listened. She turned the knob and opened it a crack.

Henry, looking like a ninja in a black T-shirt and black pants tucked into motorcycle boots, was carrying the plastic garbage bag, which now looked to be full, from the bedroom hallway into the living room.

He disappeared into the front hall. Deirdre waited to hear the front door open and close but it didn’t. Baby padded over and sniffed at Deirdre. She gave the dog a peremptory pat.

Henry reappeared. He yawned. Stretched. Turned around and scratched his head. Then he sank down on the couch and leaned back. Moments later she heard what sounded like a cow’s rhythmic lowing. He was snoring.

She crept over to him. “Henry?” she said, and touched his shoulder. He collapsed a little farther onto his side, out cold.

Deirdre pulled off his boots, tilted him over onto his back, and put his feet up. Then she covered him with a plaid flannel stadium blanket that Arthur kept over the back of the couch. Warren Beatty—that was who Joelen used to say Henry resembled, and Deirdre had always been sure that Henry knew it. She’d once caught him practicing in the bathroom mirror, a Beatty-esque puckish grin morphing into a sleepy-eyed, seductive gaze. Back then he was forever pulling at his hair to get that forelock to come down over his eyes. It seemed utterly goofy and contrived to her, but girls ate it up.

These days, with his hollow cheeks and hooded eyes, his looks had sloped off into cool, sardonic Robert Mitchum territory. She pushed his dark hair off his face and brushed his forehead with a kiss.

She’d started back to bed when she noticed that Henry had left the garbage bag sitting on the floor by the front door. She went over and poked at it with her crutch. It was folded over, not tied shut. She steadied herself against the wall and leaned over to open it. Out wafted a rich, earthy smell like patchouli. Weed, packed up but not disposed of. If the police arrived early in the morning to search the house, it would be the first thing they’d trip over.

Deirdre opened the front door. The rain had stopped and the air was much cooler. Up and down the street, outside lights were on but the windows in most of the houses were dark. In the distance a siren wailed.

Get rid of it.
That was easier said than done. Where? The police would easily find it if she put it out in the alley with the trash. The trunk of her car seemed the safest bet, for the moment at least.

Deirdre took her time feeling her way over the uneven paving stones, pulling the bag across the dark courtyard and out to the street. She opened her car trunk and heaved the bag inside. Then she pressed the trunk lid down until the latch clicked. At least it was out of the house. Later she’d figure out how to dispose of its contents.

She returned to the house and crawled back into bed. This time she fell asleep almost instantly.