“What did you see?”
She rubbed her eyes. “I screamed, didn’t I? Sorry.”
“A bad dream?”
“It must have been.”
“Okay, so you don’t need me here?”
“I guess not. No.”
But he lingered in the doorway. “Listen, Kat. There’s something you need to know. I got cold and went looking for a blanket in the upstairs bedroom closet. I found something.”
“You did?”
“Leigh’s purple shirt. The one she was wearing when she left.”
Kat shivered and pulled the cover up to her shoulders, unable to care for the moment about some old shirt he found.
“Kat, are you really okay?”
“No, I’m not. I saw the damn ghost. At first I thought-then I realized it was a black door, floating by the doorway. I saw it and it saw me. I’m not staying down here! God, what if you hadn’t showed up? What would it have done to me? Stop laughing!”
“You saw-a door?”
She threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. Ray’s eyes widened and she realized she was wearing bikini underwear and nothing else. Ray wore boxers, cotton, and his skin had a warm glow from the light behind him. “Lovely girl, aren’t you?” he murmured.
The air between them quivered like their breaths.
She looked at him standing in that awful doorway, the hairy chest and legs, the loose boxer shorts, the goose bumps forming on his muscular arms.
A mutual, accumulated longing soaked the room.
Ray didn’t move, just stood there gathering up that frightening masculine power that usually slayed her on the spot.
Under such heavy pressure, in the quiet she heard a tiny voice saying, “No, no.”
Maybe he heard the same voice. He turned away.
“Don’t leave, Ray, please? Wait for me,” she said, pulling on her jeans and T-shirt. “Okay, let’s go.” At the top of the stairs she closed the door firmly and tilted a chair back against the knob.
“If we had done anything,” Ray said, as they walked toward the living room, where the embers of their earlier fire continued to flare, “we would have ruined everything.” He pulled a flannel shirt off the coatrack by the front door and put it on. The tails swung down nearly to his knees. Must have belonged to James Hubbel, a large man.
She nodded. She felt better, back by the fire, in better light, her jeans on and zipped. “Yep,” she said. Ray poked the fire, bringing up some heat. They sat on the floor, feet as close to the burning wood as they could stand. Finally warmed up again, Kat said, “I thought you weren’t positive what she wore the day she disappeared.”
“I am now. Take a look.” He led and she followed him into the upstairs bedroom. A purple V-necked shirt lay across the pillow.
“That’s Leigh’s, and I don’t mean from years ago. It was thrown in the back. The rest of the clothing was folded.”
Kat picked the shirt up. It was inside out and wrinkled. She spread it, looking closer. “My God. What’s this?” She held the shirt up to the light, and even he could see it, holes. Rusty-looking spots. “What the hell?”
Ray examined the shirt. “Oh, no,” he said. “I didn’t really look at it. God, no.”
“She was injured.”
Voice constricted, like someone who had been punched in the stomach, he finally said, “Yeah.”
“What happened to her?”
Ray broke through a long silence saying, “But she left the shirt here. Doesn’t that mean she’s okay?”
Kat, the shirt dangling from her right hand, didn’t know. “Maybe. Should we call the police?”
Ray looked flummoxed. “I just don’t know. Maybe she was working with her power tools? It wouldn’t be the first time she hurt herself.”
“Oh no, Ray. These are like-jabs. Too many to be an accident.”
After a long discussion, they decided to bag the T-shirt and take it to the sheriff the minute they got back.
“She left it here. She’s okay,” Ray said.
“If that’s so, they’ll figure that out,” said Kat.
And so at last they had something, and it was hard to look at each other, because they were both thinking the same thing. Ray fetched the sleeping bag and resettled himself on the living room couch, not far from the dread door to the downstairs. Kat took the upstairs bedroom bed and left her door open and the light on. Even so, she only dozed. Ghosts, dead bodies, old houses, and bloody shirts flitted through her dreams.
She was running out of the manhattan mix from the liquor store. Esme sloshed some more into her coffee cup and took a drink. Really, she preferred a more delicate glass. What was she up to, drinking from such crude pottery? Even Ray would not approve.
She poured it full. It had been a long day, starting with calling in sick at the store. She settled herself on her couch.
No need to cook tonight; she wasn’t hungry.
During the couple of years they were together, when the world seemed so wide open and possibilities stretched out infinitely, the fact that Henry’s parents didn’t like Esme seemed like nothing, a flick of a feather duster. Who cared what they thought? Her grandparents did not approve, but nobody expected to gain their approval. Good God. These people had been born in the early nineteen hundreds, so very, very long ago.
If they had looked at Henry objectively, not as a crazy, lovestruck young man who didn’t know what he was doing, they might have recognized him for the catch he was. Henry had graduated with honors from high school, attended Cal for two years. He almost finished his degree before they got married, and planned to take graduate courses so that someday, he might teach at Cal State. Before everything went so bad.
Who could have predicted such a tall man with such winning blue eyes could turn against her so utterly?
Pouring herself another glass, walking out into her garden, she remembered that she had been so young. Henry wanted her, yes. He loved her fluffy hair, her innocence, her sweet youth.
Oh, give Ray a girl like herself back then! She had been irresistible!
Then she’d had Ray. She ballooned from a hundred and ten pounds to a hundred and sixty-five. After graduation, Hank worked at Cal State Long Beach as a TA, a teaching assistant. He came home at the end of the day disgruntled, unsatisfied with his lot, and disapproving.
“Other women keep their figures,” he would say. “Other women go back to work right away after their baby is born.”
He wanted her to support him so that he could finish his graduate degree and couldn’t understand when she didn’t rate that goal as a priority.
She didn’t care about prettier women or his education. She would not go back to work until this amazing boy spent most of his days in school. She did not give a damn about her figure.
“Real men want their wives to stay home and take care of their precious sons,” she said.
Esme wondered where Ray was. She had called him twice today. He didn’t answer. She tried his cell phone, leaving a message.
The last dregs of the bottle dribbled into her glass and she drank them. Although her thinking was fuzzy, she was sure her driving reflexes were fine. Certainly her emotions were full and flourishing. She called a cab, gathered up her keys, locked the front door, and picked up her own vehicle in Granada ’s lot.
She stuck her key into the ignition, which did not start.
But she did not believe in divine intervention. She did not believe in fate. After about four tries, the car started up. She recognized a certain unsound quality to her driving, but she seemed able enough to stay within the boundaries of her lane. Be very careful. She opened her eyes very wide and put both hands on the wheel and kept reminding herself that she was driving toward Topanga Canyon.
She made her way out of Whittier through the maze of numbered freeways. This exercise frequently reminded her of those mazes people marked with stones that started in the center and led to some outside goal. People claimed to find the walk edifying, even spiritual. She had tried walking the labyrinths, with mixed emotions. They frustrated and angered her. If a choice had to be made, which, depending on the maze, choices did have to be made, she invariably picked the wrong route.
Kind of like picking Henry, who turned out to be so wrong for her.
Now she followed a well-worn path, and when traffic stalled, she listened to talk shows.
“I hate my father!” one tearful caller said.
“Let’s figure out why,” said the patient radio host.
The host probably had no credentials, no counseling experience whatsoever. He probably had three ex-wives and seven children, vaguely related, all wondering what love meant witnessing his mean existence and emotional detachment.
Esme arrived at Ray’s house around seven Saturday night. Maybe he was out.
During daylight savings time, even the canyon stayed relatively light. She saw no signs of life except for the landscape lights bursting on when she stepped out of the car. She wove up the driveway, her Rockports crunching on the gravel, aware that she was not at her best.
Tonight, she wanted to tell her son the whole story, the whole sad tale of herself and her hero, Henry Jackson. How it all fell apart. How she regretted so much.
She dreaded the encounter slightly more than she welcomed it. Her power over Ray had weakened through the years. Leigh came along, a normal course of events. Leigh loved Ray; even Esme could see it, how much Leigh loved her son. But as a mother who had invested absolutely everything in her child, she could barely stomach the change. She went to work at the grocery store every day, yes, but with what purpose? No little boy came home to her anymore needing a hug, fresh crayons, help with his science project.
Sometimes she indulged in a vision of grandchildren. Whenever she broached the topic with Ray, she got put off. “We’ll think about that when the time comes.”
In other words, Leigh didn’t want them, not ever, and Esme could just up and die of a broken heart, for all Leigh cared.
Drinking brought up negativity. She remembered that. She must crush these unpleasant thoughts. Finally reaching the entrance to Ray’s house, she rang the bell. Nobody came.
She knocked. No one answered.
“Ray?” she called softly. Then, “Ray!” regardless of the neighbors. After waiting a polite amount of time, she gave up and took the hidden key from behind a bramble bush. She pushed the old- fashioned key first into the door lock, then into the dead bolt. Both slipped open like well-oiled musical instruments. She opened the door to his immaculate, magnificent, sterile home.
A perfectly tempered air swept over her, forcing her eyes closed. “Ah,” she said, accepting this benevolent feeling that came from money and good planning.
Replacing the key, she went into the house. Lights greeted her, turning on as if bidden. Ray adored modern technology, and at this moment, so did she. She felt so welcomed.
