29
Two glasses of Scotch, a brick of lasagna, and the events of this terrible day left Martie half numb with exhaustion. As Dusty cleaned up the dinner dishes, she sat at the table, watching him from under heavy eyelids.
She had expected to lie awake until dawn, racked by anxiety, dreading the future. But now her mind rebelled at assuming an even heavier burden of worry; it was shutting down for the night.
A new fear of sleepwalking was the only thing preventing her from nodding off here at the kitchen table. Somnambulism had never previously afflicted her, but then she had never suffered a panic attack until this morning, either, and now all things were possible.
If she walked in her sleep, perhaps that Other Martie would control her body. Slipping out of bed, leaving Dusty to dream on, the Other might descend barefoot through the house, as comfortable as the blind in darkness, to extract a clean knife from the utensils basket in the dishwasher.
Dusty took her hand and led her through the downstairs, turning off lights as they went. Valet padded after them, his eyes red and shining in the gloom.
Having brought Martie’s raincoat from the kitchen, Dusty paused to hang it in the foyer closet.
Sensing a weight in one of the coat pockets, he fished out the paperback book. “Are you still reading this?” he asked.
“It’s a real thriller.”
“But you’ve been taking it to Susan’s sessions forever.”
“Not all that long.” She yawned. “The writing’s good.”
“A real thriller — but you can’t get through it in six months?”
“It hasn’t been six months, has it? No. Can’t be. The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I’m enjoying it.”
He was frowning at her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Plenty. But, right now, mostly I’m just so damn tired.”
Handing the book to her, he said, “Well, if you have trouble going to sleep, obviously a page of this is better than Nembutal.”
To sleep: perchance to walk, to knife, to burn.
Valet preceded them up the stairs.
As Martie ascended with one hand on the banister and Dusty’s supportive arm around her waist, she took some comfort from the realization that the dog might wake her if she went sleepwalking. Good Valet would lick her bare feet, slap his handsome tail against her legs as she went down the stairs, and certainly bark at her if she withdrew a butcher knife from the dishwasher without using it to carve a snack for him from the brisket in the refrigerator.
Susan dressed for bed in simple white cotton panties — no embroidery or lace, no adornment of any kind — and a white T-shirt.
Prior to the past few months, she had favored colorful lingerie with frills. She had enjoyed feeling sexy. No more.
She understood the psychology behind her change in sleepwear. Sexiness was now linked in her mind to rape. Appliqued lace, fimbria, furbelow, plicated selvage, bargello stitchery, point de gaze, and the like might offer encouragement to her mysterious postmidnight visitor; he might interpret frills as an invitation to further abuse.
For a while she had gone to bed in men’s pajamas, loose and ugly, and then in baggy exercise cottons. The creep hadn’t been turned off by either.
In fact, after undressing her and brutally using her, he took the time to re-dress her with attention to detail that was obvious mockery. If she had buttoned every button on her pajama top before going to bed, he buttoned each; but if she had left one unbuttoned, the same remained unbuttoned when she woke. He retied the waistband drawstring in precisely the bow knot that she had used.
These days, simple white cotton. An assertion of her innocence. A refusal to be degraded or soiled, regardless of what he did to her.
Dusty was worried about Martie’s sudden torpor. She pleaded bone-deep weariness, but judging by her demeanor, she was succumbing less to exhaustion than to profound depression.
She moved sluggishly, not with the loose-limbed awkwardness of exhaustion, but with the grim and determined plodding of one who labored under a crushing burden. Her face was tight, pinched at the corners of the mouth and eyes, rather than slack with fatigue.
Martie was only a half step down the ladder from fanaticism when it came to dental hygiene, but this evening she didn’t want to bother brushing her teeth. In three years of marriage, this was a first.
On every night in Dusty’s memory, Martie washed her face and applied a moisturizing lotion. Brushed her hair. Not this time.
Forgoing her nightly rituals, she went to bed fully dressed.
When Dusty realized she was not going to take off her clothes, he untied her laces and removed her shoes. Her socks. Skinned off her jeans. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t cooperate, either.
Getting Martie out of her blouse was too difficult, especially as she lay on her side, knees drawn up, arms crossed on her breasts. Leaving her partially dressed, Dusty pulled the covers over her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her brow.
Her eyelids drooped, but in her eyes was something more stark and sharp-edged than weariness.
“Don’t leave me,” she said thickly.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t trust me.”
“But I do.”
“Don’t sleep.”
“Martie—”
“Promise me. Don’t sleep.”
“All right.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Because I might kill you in your sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes, which seemed to change from cornflower-blue to cyanine and then to purple madder just as her eyelids slipped shut.
He stood watching her, frightened not by her warning, not for himself, but for her.
She mumbled, “Susan.”
“What about her?”
“Just remembered. Didn’t tell you about Susan. Strange stuff. Supposed to call her.”
“You can call her in the morning.”
“What sort of friend am I?” she muttered.
“She’ll understand. Just rest now. Just rest.”
In seconds, Martie appeared to be asleep, lips parted, breathing through her mouth. The pinched lines of anxiety were gone from the corners of her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, Dusty was sitting up in bed, combing back through the tangled story that Martie had told him, trying to pull the burs out and smooth it into a fully intelligible narrative, when the telephone rang. In the interest of uninterrupted sleep, they kept the ringer switched off in the bedroom, and what he heard now was the phone in Martie’s office down the hall; the answering machine picked up after the second ring.
He assumed Susan was calling, though it might have been Skeet or one of the staff at New Life. Ordinarily, he would have gone to Martie’s office to monitor the incoming message, but he didn’t want her to wake up while he was out of the room and discover that he had broken his promise to remain with her. Skeet was safe in good hands, and whatever “strange stuff” was going on with Susan, it couldn’t be any stranger or more important than what had transpired right here this evening. It could wait until morning.
