Black House

sure I heard her. Her footsteps, her way of walking, her tread. Rhoda’s been gone for six years now. Pretty funny, huh? I’d think it was funny, if I didn’t think I was going bats.”

“You call out her name,” Jack says. “And you get out of bed and go downstairs.”

“Like a lunatic, like a madman. ‘Rhoda? Is that you, Rhoda?’ Last night, I went all around the house. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda?’ You’d think I was expecting her to answer.” Henry pays no attention to the tears that leak from beneath his aviator glasses and slip down his cheeks. “And I was, that’s the problem.”

“No one else was in the house,” Jack says. “No signs of disturbance. Nothing misplaced or missing, or anything like that.”

“Not as far as I saw. Everything was still where it should have been. Right where I left it.” He raises a hand and wipes his face.

The entrance to Jack’s looping driveway slides past on the right side of the cab.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Jack says, picturing Henry wandering through his darkened house. “Six years ago, you went through all the grief business that happens when someone you love dies and leaves you, the denial, the bargaining, the anger, the pain, whatever, acceptance, that whole range of emotions, but afterward you still missed Rhoda. No one ever says you keep on missing the dead people you loved, but you do.”

“Now, that’s profound,” Henry says. “And comforting, too.”

“Don’t interrupt. Weirdness happens. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Your mind rebels. It distorts the evidence, it gives false testimony. Who knows why? It just does.”

“In other words, you go batshit,” Henry says. “I believe that is where we came in.”

“What I mean,” Jack says, “is that people can have waking dreams. That’s what is happening to you. It’s nothing to worry about. All right, here’s your drive, you’re home.”

He turns into the grassy entrance and rolls up to the white farmhouse in which Henry and Rhoda Leyden had spent the fifteen lively years between their marriage and the discovery of Rhoda’s liver cancer. For nearly two years after her death, Henry went wandering through his house every evening, turning on the lights.

“Waking dreams? Where’d you get that one?”

“Waking dreams aren’t uncommon,” Jack says. “Especially in people who never get enough sleep, like you.” Or like me, he silently adds. “I’m not making this up, Henry. I’ve had one or two myself. One, anyhow.”

“Waking dreams,” Henry says in a different, considering tone of voice. “Ivey-divey.”

“Think about it. We live in a rational world. People do not return from the dead. Everything happens for a reason, and the reasons are always rational. It’s a matter of chemistry or coincidence. If they weren’t rational, we’d never figure anything out, and we’d never know what was going on.”

“Even a blind man can see that,” Henry says. “Thanks. Words to live by.” He gets out of the cab and closes the door. He moves away, steps back, and leans in through the window. “Do you want to start on Bleak House tonight? I should get home about eight-thirty, something like that.”

“I’ll turn up around nine.”

By way of parting, Henry says, “Ding-dong.” He turns away, walks to his doorstep, and disappears into his house, which is of course unlocked. Around here, only parents lock their doors, and even that’s a new development.

Jack reverses the pickup, swings down the drive and onto Norway Valley Road. He feels as though he has done a doubly good deed, for by helping Henry he has also helped himself. It’s nice, how things turn out sometimes.

When he turns into his own long driveway, a peculiar rattle comes from the ashtray beneath his dashboard. He hears it again at the last curve, just before his house comes into view. The sound is not so much a rattle as a small, dull clunk. A button, a coin—something like that. He rolls to a stop at the side of his house, turns off the engine, and opens his door. On an afterthought, he reaches over and pulls out the ashtray.

What Jack finds nestled in the grooves at the bottom of the sliding tray, a tiny robin’s egg, a robin’s egg the size of an almond M&M, expels all the air from his body.

The little egg is so blue a blind man could see it.

Jack’s trembling fingers pluck the egg from the ashtray. Staring at it, he leaves the cab and closes the door. Still staring at the egg, he finally remembers to breathe. His hand revolves on his wrist and releases the egg, which falls in a straight line to the grass. Deliberately, he lifts his foot and smashes it down onto the obscene blue speck. Without looking back, he pockets his keys and moves toward the dubious safety of his house.

PART TWO

The Taking of

Tyler Marshall

5

WE GLIMPSED A janitor on our whirlwind early-morning tour of Maxton Elder Care—do you happen to remember him? Baggy overalls? A wee bit thick in the gut? Dangling cigarette in spite of the NO SMOKING ! LUNGS AT WORK ! signs that have been posted every twenty feet or so along the patient corridors? A mop that looks like a clot of dead spiders? No? Don’t apologize. It’s easy enough to overlook Pete Wexler, a onetime nondescript youth (final grade average at French Landing High School: 79) who passed through a nondescript young manhood and has now reached the edge of what he expects to be a nondescript middle age. His only hobby is administering the occasional secret, savage pinch to the moldy oldies who fill his days with their grunts, nonsensical questions, and smells of gas and piss. The Alzheimer’s assholes are the worst. He has been known to stub out the occasional cigarette on their scrawny backs or buttocks. He likes their strangled cries when the heat hits and the pain cores in. This small and ugly torture has a double- barreled effect: it wakes them up a little and satisfies something in him. Brightens his days, somehow. Refreshes the old outlook. Besides, who are they going to tell?