'I am standing up for myself.'
'That's why your family hates me!'
'And I'm standing up for my family.'
'I have nothing against them,' she said, and tears welled up in her eyes. 'They're the ones who don't like me! They don't like me because I'm poor. They don't like me because I love you more than they do and I
think about your feelings and what's good for you and not just what'll look good and save face for the family.'
'They don't want me to see you anymore,' he said.
'And I don't want to see you either.'
'Fuck your family,' Donielle told him.
'No,' he said. 'Fuck you.'
The tears stopped flowing, her face hardened. 'What did you say?'
'You heard me.'
'That's the way you want it?'
'That's the way it's going to be. Get out of here. I
never want to see you again.'
'What you want and what you'll get are two different things.' With a flip of her hair, she turned and walked away, and he thought that from behind she didn't look like a child at all, she looked like a dwarf.
That lessened the attraction somewhat.
Lessened it.
But did not get rid of it.
He closed the door. Behind him he heard the click-tap of his grandmother's cane on the floor, and he turned to see her standing by the foot of the stairs.
'I can't find Billingham ,' she said.
'I ... I think he's gone,' Stormy told her.
There was a brief flash of lucidity, a quick second in which he saw panic and fear and incomprehension on her face. She knew the butler had been part of the House, and she knew that if he was gone, something was seriously amiss. Then her usual tight expression of stoic immobility settled into place, and she said, 'You will have to serve in his place, then.'
Stormy nodded. 'Do you want me to help you up the stairs?'
'No,' she told him. 'I want you to draw my bath. I will bathe tonight in blood. Have my tub filled with goat's blood. Temperature tepid.'
He nodded dumbly, watched her struggle up the steps.
From far down the first-floor hall, he heard his mother wailing, heard his father bellow, 'Billingham!'
He stood in the foyer, unmoving. What had he accomplished?
Nothing. He'd tried his damnedest and confronted his parents, put it all on the line, and they had remained unmovable, entrenched, fatalistically resigned to things as they were. Everything was exactly the same as it was before.
He sighed. You really couldn't go home again.
Still, he felt better for having talked to his parents, for having confronted them, for having at least tried to stop their abandonment of Billingham and the House, to change their increasing reliance on Donielle.
If he had it to do over again, he would not run away from home. He would stay in the House with his parents, and try to work things out with them.
There was no sign of his grandmother on the stairs, he could not hear the tapping of her cane, so he walked up the steps to make sure she was all right. She was not in the second- or third-floor hallways, and he knocked on the door of her bedroom. 'Grandma?'
No answer.
He tried to open the door, but it was locked.
He knocked on the door of her bathroom, but again there was no answer, and he put his ear to the wood, listening for sound.
Nothing.
Could she have gone somewhere else? He started toward the stairs again, but his eye was caught by the open door to his bedroom. Had it been open before?
He didn't think so.
'Hello?' he called out tentatively. He poked his head into the room, and there was a sudden shift of atmosphere and air pressure, a lightening of mood. He saw earthquake debris strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and against the opposite wall, a broken television.
He was back.
Norton Norton understood the change immediately.
After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he'd spent the last several days, the House he'd shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he'd grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, theundefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.
Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else.
The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.
With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. Low conversation. Laughter.
It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Barren's room, past the bathroom, and to the library.
He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.
And saw his family.
He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he'd expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.
They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they'd worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Barren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.
It was the type of evening they'd often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.
There were no books in the library.
How could he have not noticed something so obvious?
The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.
What had happened to the books? he wondered.
Where had they gone? All of his father's books had been in place downstairs, in the den.
But that had been back at the other House, the current House.
He was confused. Was he on the Other Side now?
