Leilani knew that Preston had moved the chair close to the bed when she heard him sit on it. The interlaced strips of cane protested when they received his weight.
For a while he was mum. The cane, which would creak and rasp with the slightest shift of his body, produced no faintest noise. He remained perfectly motionless for a minute, two minutes, three.
He must be meditating, for it was too much to hope that he had been turned to stone by one of the gods in whom he didn’t believe.
Although Leilani could see nothing in the darkness and though Preston was behind her, she kept her eyes open.
She hoped he couldn’t hear her thudding heart, which seemed to clump up and down and up the staircase of her ribs.
“We did a fine thing tonight,” he said at last.
Preston Maddoc’s voice, an instrument of smoke and steel, could ring with conviction or express steadfast belief equally well in a murmur. Like the finest actor, he was able to project a whisper to the back wall of a theater. His voice flowed as molten and as rich as hot caramel but not as sweet, and Leilani was reminded of one of those caramel-dipped tart green apples that you could sometimes buy at a carnival. In his university classes, students had surely sat in rapt attention; and if he had ever been inclined to prey upon naive coeds, his soft yet reverberant voice would have been one of his principal tools of seduction.
He spoke now in a hushed tone, although not exactly a whisper: “Her name was Tetsy, an unfortunate variant of Elizabeth. Her parents were well meaning. But I can’t imagine what they were thinking. Not that they seem to think all that much. Both are somewhat dense, if you ask me. Tetsy wasn’t a diminutive, but her legal name. Tetsy — it sounds more like a little lap dog or a cat. She must have been teased mercilessly. Oh, perhaps the name might have worked if she’d been sprightly, cute, and elfin. But of course, she wasn’t any of that, poor girl.”
In Leilani’s vital coils, a chill arose. She prayed that she wouldn’t shiver and, by shivering, alert Preston to the fact that she was awake.
“Tetsy was twenty-four, and she’d had some good years. The world is full of people who’ve never known a good year.”
Starvation, disease, Leilani thought grimly.
“Starvation, disease,” Preston said, “desperate poverty—“
War and oppression, Leilani thought.
“—war, and oppression,” Preston continued. “This world is the only Hell we need, the only Hell there is.”
Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla’s screwed-up fairy tales to Preston’s familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast’s dark side was thrilled by the bears’ savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.
The silken voice of Preston Maddoc slipped through the darkness, as supple as a strangler’s scarf: “Leilani? Are you awake?”
The chill at the core of her grew colder, spreading loop to loop through her bowels.
She. closed her eyes and concentrated on remaining still. She thought that she heard him move on the thatched seat of the chair. Her eyes snapped open.
The cane was quiet.
“Leilani?”
Under the sheets, her good hand still rested on the detached brace. Earlier, the steel had felt cool to the touch. Now it was icy.
“Are you awake?”
She clutched the brace.
Still speaking quietly, he said, “Tetsy had more than her share of good years, so it would have been greedy for the poor girl to want still more.”
As Preston rose from the chair, the stretched cane flexed with considerable noise, as though he had been more difficult to support than would have been any man of equal size.
“Tetsy collected miniatures. Only penguins. Ceramic penguins, glass penguins, carved wood, cast metal, all kinds.”
He eased closer to the bed. Leilani sensed him hulking over her.
“I brought one of her penguins for you.”
If she threw back the sheet, rolled off her side and up, all in one motion, she could swing the brace like a club, toward that darker place in the darkness where she imagined his face to be.
She wouldn’t strike at him unless he touched her.
Looming, Preston said nothing. He must be gazing down at her, though he couldn’t possibly see anything but the vaguest shape in the gloom.
He always avoided touching Leilani, as though her deformities might be contagious. Contact with her at least disturbed him and, she believed, filled him with disgust that he struggled to conceal. When the aliens failed to come, when the time finally arrived for baking a birthday cake and for buying party hats, when he had to touch her to kill her, he would surely wear gloves.
“I brought you one little penguin in particular because it reminds me of Luki. It’s very sweet. I’ll put it on your nightstand.”
A faint click. Penguin deposited.
She didn’t want his souvenir, stolen from a dead girl.
As if this house had been built to defeat the laws of gravity, Preston seemed not to be standing by the bed, but to hang from the floor like a bat adapted to strange rules, wings furled and silently watchful, a suspensefully suspended presence.
Perhaps he was already wearing gloves.
She tightened her grip on the steel bludgeon.
After what seemed an interminable time, he broke this latest silence in a voice hushed by the importance of the news that he delivered: “We burst her heart.”
Leilani knew that he was speaking of the stranger named Tetsy, who had loved and been loved, who laughed and cried, who collected miniature animals to brighten her life, and who never expected to die at twenty-four.
“We did it without fanfare, just family. No one will know. We burst her heart, but I’m confident she felt no pain.”
How satisfying it must be to live with unshakable confidence, to know beyond doubt that your intentions are honorable, that your reasoning is always correct, that therefore the consequences of your actions, no matter how extreme, are beyond judgment.
God, take her home, Leilani thought, referring to the dead woman who had been a stranger moments ago, but to whom she herself was now forever linked through the heartless mercy of Preston Maddoc. Take her home now where she belongs.
With supreme confidence even in the darkness, he returned the cane chair to the spot from which he’d moved it. Surefooted, he went to the door.
If earlier the snake had spoken to Leilani, while coiled upon her mother’s bed or from its refuge under the chest of drawers, this would have been its voice, not wickedly sibilant but a honeyed croon: “I would never have caused her pain, Leilani. I’m the enemy of pain. I’ve devoted my life to relieving it.”
When Preston opened the bedroom door, a ghostly portal of light appeared on the wall opposite him, as before, and his phantom form on that threshold, looking back at her. Then his shadow appeared to cross into another reality, distorting as it went, and a slab of blackness swung shut upon the exit he had taken.
Leilani wished that the shadow show represented reality and that Preston had indeed stepped out of this world and forever into another place better suited to him, perhaps a world in which everyone would be born dead and therefore could never be subjected to pain. He was but a wall or two away, however, still sharing the breath of life with her, still abiding under the same vault of stars that were, to her, filled with wonder and mystery, but that were, to him, nothing more than distant balls of fire and cataclysm.
