The Dwelling: A Novel (38 page)

“That’ll be fun. You haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“I guess.” It felt like a deadline.

Lucy made the crowd laugh. It roared up and fell, in a wave.

Petey lay awake in bed. He’d gone up on his own after watching
I Dream of Jeannie
with his mom, which was a totally dumb show but Jeannie was pretty. His mom had gone into the kitchen during a commercial and had come back out with a candy bar for him and a drink with ice for herself. He went upstairs and put on his pajamas and afterward she came upstairs and they read an
Encyclopedia Brown
together. When she kissed him good night she tasted like whiskey. It was unnerving.

His dad didn’t tell him about getting married. He said, “I have a surprise for you this weekend. I hope you’re going to like it.” But first he asked him if he’d talked to his mother that day. That was how he said it: “Did you talk to your
mother
today?” Petey had said yeah. He asked him if she’d said anything.

“’Bout what?” he said. He knew what he was doing. His dad’s voice sounded familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and there was a hollow sound at the other end, as though he was very far away. After that he said
never mind
and then said he had a surprise for him. Petey knew what the surprise was.

If his dad got a new wife was she his other mother, or what?
Jeremy’s parents weren’t divorced. Neither were Bobby and Angela’s parents, the kids who used to live next door. He used to sort of know a girl whose mom had a new husband or something, but he thought the old one had died. She was at his old school. Not that he’d asked her anything.

His dad wasn’t nice to his mom anymore anyway, so maybe she didn’t really care. Maybe she was just mad. She was something, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Like she had a curtain up over her or something.

He didn’t want to go to his dad’s. Not if he had to meet some stupid woman and call her Mom. He sort of wanted to see his dad. Mostly he wanted to see Jeremy.
What if he teases me about my stomach in front of his new wife?
That would be worse than school. He wondered if his mom meant it about him not having to go back there. He had wanted to ask her all night, but was scared. She would probably make him go back. You
had
to go to school.

He wished it were summer.

The thoughts went round and round. There seemed to be no safe place in his head to go.

Sleep took a long time to come.

Barbara stumbled up the stairs a little in her cups. She’d had two drinks, straight whiskey, with ice, thinking it would be enough to keep her in the numb state that she’d had most of the day. Shock, likely. It was the same kind of apathy she’d felt in the first few days after Dennis had left. She pulled off her clothes and got into her oldest, softest nightie, the whiskey already making her mouth taste bad and her head pound. She crawled into her bed by the window and lay on her back.

Whatever pleasant effects the whiskey had promoted disappeared when the heaviness of reality rolled over her.

Dennis gone. For good, for real, forever.

Petey fat and persecuted.

Long forevers twisted in front of her, new horrors likely ahead, all of it to be faced alone. Alone. The worst word in the world. After
fat.

And then dreams.

Petey’s with us, Mrs. Parkins.

She tried to tell them that it wasn’t Parkins anymore, that it was
Staizer,
but they disappeared as quickly as they had come, their blond heads bobbing up and down, reminding her sweetly of clean white rabbits, and instead of
Staizer
coming out, she laughed out loud. It was returned by them. It was so pretty here. Sky and field seemed to go on endlessly, the air and breeze warm and soft. There was laughter. Among them—although she couldn’t separate his voice from the others, but somehow just
knew
—was Petey’s laugh, hearty and real. She grinned hard enough that she thought her face would hurt later if she kept on. She could feel it, her cheeks puffing out from it, the sting in the corners from being held broadly.

In the dream the smile stretched across her teeth and it did hurt. It was a hard smile.

But it was right.

Barbara woke two hours later.

The house shook, rocked with the sound of explosion.

She sat up, crouching against the sound of it, and fumbled out of bed. She clamped her hands over her ears. It sounded like the earth was breaking in two. She ran out of her room calling,
“Petey! Petey!”
In the confusion and noise, she didn’t turn on the light. The room was black dark, not even the streetlamp seemed to be on.

Her eyes adjusted and she stumbled into Peter’s room, her head pounding either from the
BOOM BOOM BOOM
that vibrated the floor, or from the whiskey.

He wasn’t in his bed. Panicked, she swung around, squinting into the dark, bending and searching.
Was he hiding, afraid?

“PETER!” She cried to scream over the sound. She could hardly hear her own voice. She looked under the bed. Ran across into the bathroom. He wasn’t in there. The sound came from everywhere, with no discernible position, just as loud in the hall and bathroom as in her room and Petey’s room. She ran down the stairs, calling his name.

She flung open the front door, expecting to see neighbors out. The street itself was lit with lamps, an orange glow blanketing the yard and road. The houses were blank, windows dark; she could see no one on front steps or sidewalk. She checked the kitchen, the living room, behind the sofa.

It’s a dream. This happens in dreams.

That calmed her.
Petey’s upstairs in bed I’ll wake up in a moment or start something else,
and swung around the banister pole, the panic not as easy to lose as the knowledge that it was a dream was to accept.

Halfway up the stairs she fell and knocked her knee. Pain shot up her leg. She clutched it and moaned, unable to hear her own voice. Where was the sound coming from? She limped up the rest of the stairs. She had to find Peter.

“Peter!” she shouted, straining her throat, making it burn. She called and called, terror replacing panic, and still the booming sounded, echoing through the house, through her body. She looked into her room—
maybe he came in here when he couldn’t find me hear me.

“PETER!” she screeched. She swung around in the hall and went back into his room.

And the booming stopped.

Silence was heavy and thick after the cacophony. It, too, seemed to echo. She collapsed on Petey’s bed, body still shaking and vibrating as though she was in a part of the house still roaring.

“Petey,” she said into the dark. Her voice was a croak, broken and shrill.

Murmurs made her look up and the room was filled with the children. They watched her with big round eyes, the whites glowing in the black room. A little girl,
why, it’s Mariette: she hadn’t left, after all
and behind her, boys. They were blond and handsome. Her mouth opened and she leaned away

—dream dream dream—

“Peter’s with us, Mrs. Parkins,” said the little girl. She reached out her hand. Barbara looked down; it was grubby and plump, a child’s hand. “Peter doesn’t want to go to school,” she said apologetically. “He wants to play with us.”

The tallest boy moved forward through the others and placed a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “He wants to stay,” he said.

“I’m dreaming,” Barbara mumbled. The boy grinned appealingly.

The little girl took Barbara’s limp hand from her lap. Her little hand was sun-warm. She was gentle. “Our mama died,” the little girl said. “It’s nice where we are. It’s summer. Peter likes it. No school in summer.” Barbara stared down at the tiny pink hand in hers. It felt so real. So warm.

“We want you to come too,” she said simply. She tugged on Barbara’s hand. “Come.”

The tall boy said, “Yeah. It’s nice.”

Then the room was empty. The cubbyhole door stood open. Barbara buried her face in her hands, rubbing hard.
Wake up!
Any moment she would wake up in her own bed and this would fade.

Petey’s with us, Mrs. Parkins.

“Mom?”

Barbara pulled her hands away from her face and saw Petey, flushed, dressed, in front of the cubbyhole. She opened her arms to him. He ran to her and folded himself into her arms, his body vibrant and more than awake, alive. He smelled fresh like summer. He let her cling to him for a moment and then pulled away. He grabbed her hands and tugged. His were warm like Mariette’s.

“Come on, Mom. Come with me.” He pulled her to standing. He pulled her to the cubbyhole door.

She stopped. “No.”

“It’s wonderful. It’s nice. You’ll like it.” He pulled her.

Light shone through the little door. Bright sunlight, midsummer afternoon. The smell of wildflowers and tall grass wafted over her on a breeze. Beyond the door an endless field of green, dotted with color. Not too far away were eight little blond heads, still; waiting.

She looked at Petey, his eyes pleading. “You’ll
like
it.” His eyes sparkled with an unfamiliar expression, something she rarely saw. He looked happy. She glanced back through the bedroom door. The bathroom was dark, forbidding. Downstairs music played. Out on the streets there was no one.

With Peter holding her hand, Barbara ducked her head under the door.

She sat on the downside of the hill, playing her hands over the long grass. Every once in a while she could see the sun glint off something bright and she knew it was blond heads. Among them was a red head, somewhere, and that alone made her smile.

It was all so pretty. She scanned the horizon. For miles, as far as her eyes could see, it was meadow. Far, far in the distance, she could see something dark on the edge of the earth, a building or a silo, or something country-like. She strained for a better focus but it seemed to shift in her vision. She could only hold her attention on it for a moment before it was lost.
Like trying to read in a dream,
she thought.

But this is a dream.
She smiled. It wasn’t a dream. It was a dream. It would be perfect, but for her eyes drawn back time and again to the dark spot on the horizon. Whatever it was, it was a
bad part
and it was best not to look. It was far away and from where she sat,
far far away
from the dark spot on the horizon, she could hear the children, Petey with them. Peter. Here he was
Peter.

When their voices became too distant, she frowned. She stood up and tried to see or hear them better and it was lost, their voices fading in and out of the air that never seemed to move and yet was alive with breeze and scent. The building was closer. The hill was suddenly behind her. She took this in with the panicked calm of a dream.

This is a dream,
she reminded herself.

The children shouldn’t play so close to the barn, their father doesn’t like it.
Yes, it was a barn. How could she not have known that?

Children!
she called.
Don’t go near the barn!
Dennis would be angry. She had to call them back. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

Come back!

Beside her, clear as a bell, clearer even than her own voice had been in her own ears, one of the children said,
We can’t come back because it’s time. We have to go now.

She nodded without ever glancing beside her. She understood.
It was time.
Petey/Peter would have to come home now.
Peter will have to come home,
she repeated, dream-firm.

She saw the line of children walking into the barn.
Petey!
she called, without answer. She strained to see his red hair in the line of children and, like the barn itself, her focus kept shifting. She called again and again, her throat aching with it, her lips dry with the effort.

The sun was dropping. Gray clouds blew in from somewhere else and covered the sky.
It might rain.
That didn’t matter.
This is a dream. Petey’s not coming because it is a dream.
Her dream-heart began to pound with fear every time the big dark barn came into focus, and the gray clouds seemed to rush around her like a storm about to start, a terrible storm with gusts of wind and cracking lightning and earth-moving shakes of thunder.
Bad storm coming. PETEY!
Terror rose in her throat even as she screamed it out, calling her son, willing him to answer, fearing great doom and horror if he didn’t, even though
this is a dream.

Great booms sounded from the direction of the barn and Barbara screamed, for the first time hearing herself do it, screaming one long keen of horror. The booming was thunder, great cracks of it, shaking the earth under her and the children were gone—not one blond head could be seen. Not one red head.

She dream-ran, the barn coming closer. As she crested the hill, she saw the children, in a line, from oldest to youngest. Ethan was first.

A man, tall and swarthy, dark, stood at the door, cradling a rifle. He called Ethan into the barn. She couldn’t hear the words, but she knew he told him
There’s a surprise;
he motioned the other children to stay where they were. They’d all get a surprise.

BOOM!

Over and over the children walked into the barn. Barbara was nearly there. Petey was second to last. The man came out again and called to Peter as though he were his own son, child of the dead mother. No one to care for them. Too many mouths.

PETER! NO!
The man turned and saw her, and turned away as though it were of little meaning. She ran on dream-legs, slogging through grass as though it were the deepest lake. Peter disappeared into the barn.

She ran down the hill, moving faster with dream-logic and gravity. The man came out of the barn. The sky was dark with thunderclouds and the air smelled of ozone and smoke.

Mariette looked over her shoulder sadly at Barbara. Barbara threw her hands up and screamed,
NO!
The man shouldered his rifle and shot the little girl. Mariette flew up into the air, arms spread wide; she hovered for a moment, silhouetted against the sky, and then fell, dream-slow to the ground. She lay still.