After lunch, he sat again by Rowan’s bed. He had sent the nurse away. He couldn’t stand her presence any longer. He wanted to be here alone. And she had hinted heavily that she needed to visit her own sick mother at Touro Infirmary, and he said, “Things are just fine around here. You go on. Come back at six o’clock.”
She’d been so grateful. He stood by the window watching her walk away. She lit a cigarette before she reached the corner, then hurried off to catch the car.
There was a tall young woman standing out there, gazing at the house, her hands on the fence. Reddish- golden hair, very long, kind of pretty. But she was like so many women now, bone-thin. Maybe one of the cousins, come to pay her respects. He hoped not. He moved away from the window. If she rang the bell, he wouldn’t answer. It felt too good to be alone at last.
He went back to the chair and sat down.
The gun lay on the marble-top table, big and sort of ugly or beautiful, depending on how one feels about guns. They were no enemy to him. But he didn’t like it there, because he had a vision of taking it and shooting himself with it, and then he stared at Rowan, and thought: “No, not as long as you need me, honey, I won’t. Not before something happens…” He stopped.
He wondered if she could sense anything, anything at all.
The doctor had said this morning she was stronger; but the vegetative state was unchanged.
They had given her the lipids. They had worked her arms and legs. They had put the lipstick on her. Yes, look at it, very pink, and they had brushed her hair.
And then there’s Mona, he thought. “Yuri or no Yuri, she needs me too. Oh, it’s not really that she does,” he said aloud to the silence. “It’s that anything more would hurt her. It would hurt them all. I have to be here on St. Patrick’s Day, don’t I? To greet them at the door. To shake their hands. I am the keeper of the house until such time as…”
He lay back against the chair thinking of Mona, whose kisses had been so chaste since Rowan came home. Beautiful little Mona. And that dark, clever Yuri. In love.
Maybe Mona was already working out the scheme for Mayfair Medical. Maybe she and Pierce were working on it now uptown.
“Now, we are not handing the family fortune over to this juvenile delinquent!” Randall had said in a booming voice last night, when arguing with Bea outside Rowan’s door.
“Oh, do be quiet,” Bea had answered. “That’s ridiculous. It’s like royalty, you old idiot. She is a symbol. That’s all.”
He sat back, legs outstretched under the bedskirt, hands clasped on his chest, staring at the gun-staring at its silver-gray trigger, so inviting, and its fat gray cylinder full of cartridges, and the sheath of black synthetic closed over the barrel, oddly like a hangman’s noose.
No, sometime later, perhaps, he thought. Although he didn’t think he would ever do it that way. Maybe just drink something strong, something that crept through you and poisoned you slowly, and then crawl in bed beside her and hold onto her, and go to sleep with her in his arms.
When she dies, he thought. Yes. That’s exactly what I’ll do.
He had to remember to take the gun away and put it someplace safe. With all the children, you never knew what would happen. They had brought children to see Rowan this morning-and St. Patrick’s Day would draw the children, as well. Big parade on Magazine Street only two blocks away. Floats. People throwing potatoes and cabbages-all the makings of an Irish stew. The family loved it; they’d told him. He would love it too.
But move the gun. Do that. One of the children might see it.
Silence.
The rain falling. The house creaking as if it were populated when it was not. A door slamming somewhere as if in the wind. Maybe a door of a car outside, or the door of another house. Sound could play tricks on you like that.
Rain tapping on the granite windowsills, a sound peculiar to this octagonal and ornate room.
“I wish…I wish there was someone to whom I could…confess,” he said softly. “The main thing for you to know is that you never have to worry anymore. It’s finished, the way I think you wanted it finished. I just wish there was some kind of final absolution. It’s strange. It was so bad when I failed at Christmas. And now somehow it’s harder, that I’ve won. There are some battles you don’t want to fight. And winning costs too much.”
Rowan’s face remained unchanged.
“You want some music, darling?” he asked. “You want to hear that old gramophone? I frankly find it a comforting sound. I don’t think anybody else is listening to it now but you, and me. But I’d like to play it. Let me go get it.”
He stood up and bent down to kiss her. Her soft mouth gave no resistance. Taste of lipstick. High school. He smiled. Maybe the nurse had put on the lipstick. He could barely see it. She looked past him. She looked pale and beautiful and plain.
In the attic room, he found the gramophone. He gathered it up, along with the records of
The window was closed.
The floor was clean.
He thought of Julien again, the instantaneous Julien standing in the front doorway, blocking Lasher’s path. “And I haven’t even thought of you since that moment,” he said. “I guess I hope and pray you’ve gone on.”
The moments ticked by. He wondered if he could ever use this room again. He stared at the window, at the edge of the porch roof. He remembered that flashing glimmer of Antha gesturing for Lasher to come. “Make the dead come back to witness,” he whispered. “That you did.”
He walked down the steps slowly, stopping quite suddenly, in alarm, before he knew exactly why. What was this sound? He was holding the gramophone and the records, and now he set them carefully down and out of the way.
A woman was crying, or was it a child? It was a soft heartbroken crying. And it wasn’t the nurse. She wouldn’t be back for hours. No. And the crying came from Rowan’s room.
He didn’t dare to hope it was Rowan! He didn’t dare, and he knew as well as he knew anything else that it wasn’t Rowan’s voice.
“Oh, darling dear,” said the crying voice. “Darling dear, I love you so much. Yes, drink it, drink the milk, take it, oh, poor Mother, poor darling dear.”
His mind could find no explanation; it was empty and consumed with silent fear. He went down the steps, careful not to make a sound, and, turning, peered through the bedroom door.
A great tall girl sat on the side of the bed, a long willowy white thing, tall and thin as Lasher had been, with reddish-golden locks falling down her long graceful back. It was the girl he had glimpsed below in the street! In her arms the girl held Rowan, Rowan, who was sitting up and clinging to her, actually clinging to her, and nursing from the girl’s bare right breast.
“That’s it, dear Mother, drink it, yes,” said the girl, and the tears splattered right out of her big green eyes and down her cheeks. “Yes, Mother, drink, oh, it hurts but drink it! It’s our milk. Our strong milk.” And then the giant girl drew back and tossed her hair, and gave Rowan the left breast. Frantically, Rowan drank from it, her left hand rising, groping, as if to catch hold of the girl’s head.
The girl saw him. Her tear-filled eyes opened wide. Just like Lasher’s eyes, so big and wide! Her face was a perfect oval. Her mouth a cherub’s mouth.
A muted sound came from Rowan, and then suddenly Rowan’s back straightened, and her left hand caught the girl’s hair tight. She drew back away from the breast and out of her mouth came a loud and terrible scream:
“Michael, Michael, Michael!”
Rowan shrank back against the headboard, drawing up her knees, and staring and pointing to the girl, who had leapt up and put her hands over her ears.
“Michael!”
The tall thin girl wept. Her face crumpled like that of a baby, her big green eyes squeezing shut. “No, Mother, no.” Her long white spidery fingers covered her white forehead and her wet trembling mouth. “Mother, no.”
“Michael, kill it!” screamed Rowan. “Kill it. Michael, stop it.”
