26
Falling off a roof, Dusty had not been this scared, because now he was frightened for Martie, not for himself.
Her face, before she dropped the crowbar and ran away, had been as stark as the face of an actor in a Kabuki drama. White-greasepaint skin, pale and smooth. Eyes darkly outlined, not with mascara but with anguish. Red slash of a mouth.
Even above the engine noise, he’d heard her warning, the terror scraping her voice raw.
Debris in the garage. A mess in the kitchen. Trash can on the back porch, at the open door, stuffed full of everything but trash. He couldn’t extract meaning from any of it.
The downstairs was cold because the kitchen door wasn’t closed. He found it too easy to imagine that part of the chill resulted from the presence of an icy spirit that had come through another door, one not visible, from a place infinitely stranger than the back porch.
The silver candlesticks on the dining-room table appeared to be as translucent as they were reflective, as though carved from ice.
The living room was filled with the wintry glitter of glass bibelots, brass fireplace tools, porcelain lamps. The grandfather clock had frozen time at 11:00.
On their honeymoon, they had found the clock in an antique shop and acquired it for a reasonable price. They weren’t interested in its value as a timepiece, and they didn’t intend to have it repaired. Its hands were stopped at the hour of their wedding, which seemed like a good omen.
After silencing Valet, Dusty decided to leave the dog on the front porch for now, and he quickly climbed the stairs. Although he ascended into increasingly warmer air, he brought with him the chill that had pierced him at the sight of Martie’s tortured face.
He found her in the master bedroom. She was standing beside the bed, with the.45 pistol.
She had ejected the magazine. Muttering frantically to herself, she was prying the bullets out of it. Jacketed hollowpoints.
When she extracted a round, she threw it across the room. The cartridge snapped against a mirror without cracking it, rattled onto the top of the vanity, and came to rest among the decorative combs and hairbrushes.
Dusty couldn’t at first understand what she was saying, but then he recognized it: “…full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women…”
In a whispery voice, pitched high with anxiety, a voice almost like that of a frightened child, Martie was reciting the Hail Mary, fingering another round out of the magazine, as if the bullets were rosary beads and she were paying penance with prayer.
Watching Martie from the doorway, Dusty felt his heart swell with fear for her, swell and swell impossibly, until the pressure made his chest ache.
She flung another bullet, which cracked off the dresser — and then saw him in the doorway. Already sufficiently white-faced for a Kabuki stage, she grew even paler.
“Martie—”
She dropped the pistol and kicked it across the carpet so hard that it traveled the length of the room and clattered noisily against a closet door.
“It’s only me, Martie.”
“Get out of here, go, go, go.”
“Why are you afraid of me?”
“I’m afraid of
“Martie, what—”
“Don’t get close to me, don’t, don’t trust me,” she said, her voice as thin, shaky, and urgent as that of a high-wire walker losing balance. “I’m all screwed up, totally screwed.”
“Honey, listen, I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s happened here, what’s wrong,” Dusty said as he took another step toward her.
With a despairing wail, she threw the bullet and the half-empty magazine in different directions, neither at Dusty, and then ran to the bathroom.
He pursued her.
Only a minute ago, Dusty would not have been able to imagine any circumstances in which he would have used force against Martie; now his stomach fluttered queasily as he resisted her. Inserting one knee between the door and the jamb, he tried to shoulder into the room.
She abruptly stopped resisting and backed away.
The door banged open so hard that Dusty winced as he stumbled across the threshold.
Martie retreated until she bumped against the entrance to the shower stall.
Catching the bathroom door as it rebounded from the rubber stop, Dusty kept his attention on Martie. He fumbled for the wall switch and clicked on the fluorescent panel in the soffit above the twin sinks.
Hard light ricocheted off mirrors, porcelain, white-and-green ceramic tile. Off nickel-plated fixtures as shiny as surgical steel.
Martie stood with her back to the glass-enclosed shower. Eyes shut. Face pinched. Hands fisted against her temples.
Her lips moved rapidly but produced not a sound, as if she had been stricken mute by terror.
Dusty suspected that she was praying again.
He took three steps, touched her arm.
As dire blue and full of trouble as a hurricane sea, her eyes snapped open.
Rocked by her vehemence, he relented.
The seal on the shower door popped with a
Before she could pull the shower door shut, he intervened and held it open. “Martie, I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be, you’ve
Bewildered, he said, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
The radiant patterns of striations in her blue eyes resembled cracks in thick glass, her black pupils like bullet holes at the center.
Explosive shatters of words broke from her: “There’s more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there’s no Other and there’s just me alone, then I’m not the person I always thought I was, I’m something twisted and horrible, horrible.”
In his worst dreams and in the most desperate moments of his waking life, Dusty had never been this profoundly frightened, and in his private image of himself as a man, he had not allowed for the possibility that he could be so utterly humbled by fear as he was now.
He sensed that Martie, as he had always known her, was slipping away from him, inexplicably but inexorably being sucked down into a psychological vortex stranger than any black hole at the far end of the universe, and that even if some aspect of her remained when the vortex closed, she would be as enigmatic as an alien life-form.
Although, until this moment, Dusty had never realized the depth of his capacity for terror, he had always understood how bleak this world would be if Martie were not in it. The prospect of life without her, joyless and lonely, was the source of the fear that racked him now.
Martie backed away from the glass door, until she wedged herself into a corner of the shower, shoulders cramped forward, arms crossed over her breasts, hands fisted in her armpits. All her bones seemed to be surfacing
