had a sign on the doorknob reading guest room
Downstairs. And it was here that Richard lingered the longest. The snarls of wire were gone; the amplifiers and microphones were gone; the litter of tape recorder parts that Seth was always going to 'fix up' were gone (he did not have Jon's hands or concentration). Instead the room bore the deep (if not particularly pleasant) stamp of Lina's personality -- heavy, florid furniture and saccharin velvet tapestries (one depicting a Last Supper at which Christ looked like Wayne Newton, another showing deer against a sunset Alaskan sky-line), a glaring rug as bright as arterial blood. There was no longer the faintest sense that a boy named Seth Hagstrom had once inhabited this room. This room, or any of the other rooms in the house.
Richard was still standing at the foot of the stairs and looking around when he heard a car pull into the driveway.
But he hadn't murdered Seth.
'I DELETED him,' he muttered, and went upstairs to meet her in the kitchen.
Lina was fatter.
He had sent a woman off to bingo who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds or so. The woman who came back in weighed at least three hundred, perhaps more; she had to twist slightly sideways to get in through the back door. Elephantine hips and thighs rippled in tidal motions beneath polyester slacks the color of overripe green olives. Her skin, merely sallow three hours ago, was now sickly and pale. Although he was no doctor, Richard thought he cold read serious liver damage or incipient heart disease in that skin. Her heavy-lidded eyes regarded Richard with a steady, even contempt.
She was carrying the frozen corpse of a huge turkey in one of her flabby hands. It twisted and turned within its cellophane wrapper like the body of a bizarre suicide.
'What are you staring at, Richard?' she asked.
'That bird, Lina,' he managed finally. 'That's one of the biggest damn turkeys I've ever seen.'
'Well don't just stand there looking at it, idiot! Help me with it!'
He took the turkey and put it on the counter, feeling its waves of cheerless cold. It sounded like a block of wood.
'Not
'Sorry,' he murmured. They had never had a freezer before. Never in the world where there had been a Seth.
He took the turkey into the pantry, where a long Amana freezer sat under cold white fluorescent tubes like a cold white coffin. He put it inside along with the cryogenically preserved corpses of other birds and beasts and then went back into the kitchen. Lina had taken the jar of Reese's peanut butter cups from the cupboard and was eating them methodically, one after the other.
'It was the Thanksgiving bingo,' she said. 'We had it this week instead of next because next week Father Phillips has to go in hospital and have his gall-bladder out. I won the coverall.' She smiled. A brown mixture of chocolate and peanut butter dripped and ran from her teeth.
'Lina,' he said, 'are you ever sorry we never had children?''
She looked at him as if he had gone utterly crazy. 'What in the name of God would I want a rug-monkey for?' she asked. She shoved the jar of peanut butter cups, now reduced by half, back into the cupboard. 'I'm going to bed. Are you coming, or are you going back out there and moon over your typewriter some more?'
'I'll go out for a little while more, I think,' he said. His voice was surprisingly steady. 'I won't be long.'
