The Uninvited (29 page)

“You have?”

“I’m going to Baylor.”

“Where’s that?”

Lazar laughed. “A good question,” he said. “It’s in Waco, Texas. I have to learn how to say that. It’s
Way-co,
yes? I did not know this at first.”

“You’re moving to Texas?” Mimi tried to imagine Lazar in a cowboy hat.

“It’s the largest Baptist university in the world,” he said. “Me teaching in a Baptist university. Communication studies. I tell you, my world is … how shall I say this? Changing?” he said. “Yes, that puts a good spin on it. Changing.”

Mimi was shaking with relief. He was moving thousands of miles away. And she refused to feel guilty, and yet—

“You will be happy?” he asked. She wasn’t sure, but there did not seem to be any malice in what he was saying. “Because it is important to me, after everything, that you are happy. Well, a little bit sad. Yes?”

“Okay,” she said meekly. “But—”

“No
but
s, Meem. You be happy. That is good. And before I get too ridiculous, let me just say thank you for the good times and say good-bye, you delightful creature.”

And it was over.

Quietly he hung up. And she knew he would not call again. Which is when she started to really cry. She cried so much she thought she would drown the little house, and so she went outside. And then she heard the sound of a branch cracking.

When she spoke to him—the man in the trees, wherever he was—she felt as if she was in some bizarre off-off-Broadway play. The girl who talks to trees. She spoke without fear because, quite frankly, she had nothing left in her. She was emotionally exhausted. And if this monster dropped out of the tree with Jason’s mask on his face and a gleaming meat cleaver in his hand, she would have only laughed in his face.

She went inside and took her little vial of poisonous spray to bed with her. To sleep, perchance to scream.

Her mind drifted in and out of the elevator in the many-floored House of Sorrow.
Ding!
Regret.
Ding!
Denial.
Ding!
Outrage. But finally she dozed off, only to wake suddenly with the words “up there” clanging in her head like a fire alarm.

Up there?

She had heard someone say it. She could almost hear someone saying those two words in her head. “Up there.” For a moment or two she couldn’t figure out why the words seemed so jarring. Then it came to her.

Cramer Lee on the street outside the Hungry Planet, his eyes filled with concern.

No one’s been bothering you up there.

That’s what he had said. But there was a problem with that. A big problem.

She had never told him where she lived.

Was she crazy? Well, there was one way to find out. She flipped on her lamp and looked at her watch. Not even eleven. She crawled across the mattress to the chair where she hung her purse and looked through it until she found the business card with his phone number scrawled on the back. Then she flipped on the lights in the front room and sat at her desk. With the card in front of her, she punched in Cramer’s numbers. Then she leaned on the desk, her eyes staring straight ahead, willing it to be him who answered. It wasn’t. “Hello,” said a sleepy woman’s voice.

And Mimi pushed
END.
But it wasn’t because she had woken up Mrs. Lee, if that’s who it was. She terminated the call because of something very odd she saw before her on the wall. One of her father’s telephone numbers. A number he had etched over more than once and drawn an elaborate frame around. Beside it were the initials M.L. The number was the same one she had just called.

PART THREE

Sometimes the pain was too much.

He wanted to scream but he couldn’t scream. His mouth felt as if it were wired shut, and so the scream smashed around in his head like some enraged, caged, wild thing, shaking every bone of his skull, exhausting him.

He dreamed.

He was in the tunnel again, a small bag clutched in his teeth. Then he was in the room under where she lay. He took the bag from his mouth and laid it in the corner of the room of dirt, like a good dog returning something to his master. Then he stood, though he could not stand up all the way. He listened, his ear pressed against the roof that was her floor. In his dream he could hear her breathing; resting his palms on the trapdoor, he could almost feel her. It was as if he was holding her up. There was a noise in the room. She was stirring, awake—if he could only reach her. He had to try to explain. He knew what he would say—he’d had a lot of time to think about it. Could he change the past? No. But he could change that small piece of the past that was him—that was still him. He would say something like that. He couldn’t think beyond that. Couldn’t think what she would say, couldn’t reach her, couldn’t—

“Cramer? It’s all right,” she said, her voice urgent but so quiet, speaking just to him. “Shhh, calm down already.”

He felt—imagined—no,
felt
her hand on his chest, just lying there. “Shhh. Listen…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

C
RAMER WOKE UP
in the middle of the night to the sound of a drive shaft torquing too high. His eyes snapped open. There were headlights out in the yard.
The cops,
he thought, almost relieved, as if getting arrested would give his misery some real shape. But by then the screaming motor had crested the steep driveway and was clunking on bad suspension across the yard, and he knew no cop would drive a vehicle in that bad condition.

He slipped out of bed, stepped over the sopping clothes strewn across his floor, and stared out the window. Waylin Pitney’s ghostly panel truck was pulling into its usual place behind the drive shed on the lip of the hill, pulling as far forward as the space allowed to hide the truck from anyone passing by on the road.

Lights were on downstairs. And as soon as the engine was cut, Cramer heard the screen door slam. Mavis stepped out into the yellow light seeping from the front window. She was in a sleeveless summer dress. There wasn’t much back to the dress, from what he could see. Her hair was all done up. This wasn’t a surprise visit. Not to her, at least.

From around the corner of the drive shed, Waylin appeared, the yard light revealing a white tee, jeans, and cowboy boots. His long shadow was behind him and then it passed him, as if in a hurry to get to Mavis. But only his shadow hurried.

“Hi ya, doll,” he shouted.

“Hi yourself,” she said. She had her hands clasped behind her back, and she was swiveling left and right from the waist like some teasing schoolgirl. Waylin stopped halfway across the yard to look back, apparently to make sure the vehicle was out of sight. And Cramer could hear through his open window his mother swear. But not out of anger, he thought. She had sworn because she couldn’t wait one more second. Then she was running in her bare feet across the yard to Waylin, and he was twirling her in the air.

Cramer made his way back to bed and pulled the covers up over his head, hoping the party wouldn’t get too loud. Hoping it wouldn’t end in a fight.

The next thing he knew it was morning. Exhaustion had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him down into oblivion. Not even his mother’s midnight cowboy could keep him awake.

When Cramer thumped downstairs, Mavis was making something from a cookbook, still wearing the little floral number with no back she’d had on the night before.

“There’s flapjacks,” she said in a cheery voice. But the flapjacks were cold. Cramer wandered over to the window. The Taurus was gone.

“How am I supposed to get to work tonight?”

“Since when do you work on Sunday?” said his mother, without looking up from the cookbook.

Cramer stared at her, astonished. “I work an eight-night shift and then have a four-day break,” he said. “It’s been that way for three years. It has nothing to do with what day of the week it is. I thought you knew that.”

She glanced back at him, but the resentment in his voice had not registered. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “Merv phoned.”

“My shift manager?”

“I don’t know any other Mervs, honey,” she said. “Anyway, he said to tell you you’re laid off. Just temporary-like. He was nice about it.”

Cramer stared at her in disbelief. Then he went to the phone and made the call. It was true. Nothing to do with Cramer. A bit of a work slowdown. Only be a few days.

“I thought you were going to make me full-time,” said Cramer.

“And I am, Cramer. You can count on it. Just not right now. Relax. You take a bit of a vacation, okay? God knows you deserve one.”

And that was that.

Mavis turned toward him, holding out her arms. “And since when do you come downstairs of a morning without saying, ‘Good morning, Mama’?”

But he didn’t go to her. He felt cut adrift. It was as if someone had drilled a row of holes in Cramer himself and he was sinking.

“Ah, come on,” said Mavis. “It’s not so bad, is it?”

Something happened to her when Waylin was around. She started talking like someone from another time—another planet. She reverted to some fifties idea of Mrs. Good Wife—a southern variety, about to serve up catfish and collard greens.

“Actually, it is bad,” he said. “I’ve got this bank loan, just to name one thing.”