smell the whiskey he'd drunk, up close his eyes didn't look like a drunken man's eyes at all. 'This thing of living at the old house – look what it's doing to you. Right? If I said, 'Hey, okay, let's sell the place and I'll take less than my half,' would that help? If you and Jack took sixty to my forty? Momma'd go for that, I'd bet.'
'I've got to get dinner up. You're in my way.' She opened a cupboard door so that it swung into his face, and he had to step away to keep looking at her. Her hands clattered among the spice jars, not certain what they were looking for.
'You trying to go back to the good ol' days? Is that it? Think you can re-create your youth?'
She was bringing out jars without even knowing what they were, setting them on the counter. 'Yes, I'm sure that's it. Something you wouldn't understand, Ro-Ro, given your arrested development. Having never relinquished your adolescence in the first place.'
He grabbed her hands and pulled them down to the counter, stilling the frantic reaching and sorting. 'I was at home while you went off to school! Remember? I had to do a lot of growing up and coming to grips, real fast. Maybe I have the misfortune of remembering some things you don't.'
His pain was real, too, she saw, and suddenly she felt terrible about provoking him, wounding him. She'd rather see him smug and insulated than laid so bare and vulnerable. Fler heart panged with sympathy so powerful it was as if she'd been stabbed. In the intent look he was giving her, she could vaguely see her remembered big brother, once her best friend, protector, ally. She turned her hands in his and held on desperately, all her defiance going out of her.
'I'm sorry!' she blurted. 'I'm just all shook up today. I don't know what you're trying to say to me!'
'You don't remember a goddamned thing, do you?' He was whispering, and though his words were harsh, his eyes were only intently curious and his hands held hers softly. 'You really don't? I'm always trying to figure how much. How much you might be pretending.'
'Pretending? I'm not pretending anything!'
Clearly, she'd misinterpreted him. He flicked his eyes at the ceiling, a token look to God Almighty for the strength to forbear, then looked around the room as if trying to find the words that would allow him to say what he meant.
At last, his face very close to hers, he said, 'Lila, put the shoe on the other foot. What if… let's say you knew there was something that happened – something I did, something that put me in danger. How would you handle that? What would you do?'
'Well, I don't know… it depends, I – '
'If you knew I could barely live with having done it,' he whispered, 'if you knew it was something I could never ever do again. Wouldn't you try to protect me? Wouldn't you try to keep it from catching up to me? Wouldn't you look out for your family? Even though you think I'm the lowest scum lowlife in the world, isn't blood finally thicker than water?'
'Well, yes, of course, Ronald! Is that what this is about? You did something that – '
He shook his head, frustrated. 'I just want you to think about that. What I just said. What you just answered.'
Jack stumped past the kitchen doorway and went into the bathroom in the hall. In a moment they heard the clank of the toilet seat and the sound of his urinating. It sounded as if he'd left the door open, and Lila wondered if he was drunk or just didn't know company was still present.
'Does it have to do with the house?' she whispered. 'Is that it? Is that why you -?'
'You're just not getting this, are you? Just think about what I said, goddamn it!' Ronald took his hands away from hers. He glanced over at the doorway as Jack flushed and ran the tap, and when he looked back at her he was angry again. He shook his head in disgust, made a flinging-away gesture in her direction, and strode away.
Lila heard Jack's voice in the hall as Ronald headed toward the front of the house: 'Hey, Ro-Ro. Done with your sibling heart-to-heart? Sure you don't want to stay on for supper, now?'
Ron's answer was to slam the front door.
Lila squeezed a glob of cerulean blue into the dimple in the little plastic palette. This was probably hopeless. In the past, she'd found some comfort in painting, but that, like everything else, seemed to have been taken from her. She wished her hands would stop shaking.
The sun was setting, sending long shafts of peach-colored light through the west-facing window of her second-floor studio. The room had been a walk-in closet before she'd set it up to get her painting stuff out of the rest of the house, and it was cramped, too small for the worktable, drafting stool, easel, bureau, and shelves she'd put in. The table held several jars of brushes, a cubbyhole for her paint tubes, and the easel she almost always used, a little table-mounted tripod just the right size for smaller canvases.
Just outside the door, she heard a floorboard creak and knew it was Jackie, finding excuses to walk by, wanting to talk to her but not mustering the resolve to intrude into her sanctum. She'd fled to her closet as much to get away from his well-meaning, ineffectual concern as to paint. Especially after the drinks he'd downed with Ro- Ro, he'd be too maudlin and suffocating to bear. Though his compassion for her was genuine, it was so infused with male condescension for the weaker sex and so diluted by his own insecurity as to be worthless. It meant his solicitousness was really something of a shoehorn by which he hoped he could ease her back into her prior state of mind, her prior role, their prior life. And she didn't fit any more.
She worked her way through the blues and into the greens, a circle of rainbow on the white palette, then began with the earth tones.
As she'd feared, returning to the house and telling about the horrors had awakened it all again. The frightful images, the awful memories kept springing suddenly up into her thoughts. The world had become a frightening place, as pliant as a dream, where nothing held certain, where things twisted and distorted and became other things – bad things. But unlike a nightmare, you couldn't wake up from it.
And though she'd clutched some slight reassurance from her meetings with Cree Black, it had all been swept away by her talk with Ron, which seemed to promise another horrible secret, another awful transformation. He'd been trying to say something and couldn't find the words, or she couldn't hear them right, and he'd given up on her. It sounded as if he'd been pleading with her, asking her to understand that he could be in danger. 'Something I did…' The only thing she could think of was Temp Chase, the horrible murder. Was he suggesting that he killed Temp? k That somehow her moving back to the house could expose him? How could it possibly?
She wrestled with it for a time: If she knew that Ron had killed someone, would she protect him from the consequences of his crime? No. Yes. Maybe. Depends.
It didn't quite make sense. Even if Ron had done something like that, he'd never let anyone hear a hint of it, he'd never show his hand even if he was falling-down drunk. No, that wasn't quite it, that wasn't exactly what he was trying to say.
Of course, maybe that whole talk in the kitchen was just Ron being Ron, being manipulative and greedy and trying to prevail upon her sympathy and family loyalty to get what he wanted. Exploiting her confusion and distress right now. That she could easily see. Except he'd seemed too sincere, too vulnerable. But what, then?
She realized she had a tube of paint in her hands and didn't know what color it was or whether she'd put any on the palette yet. She read the label, alizarin crimson, and squeezed some out. Yes, it was time for the reds now. One after the other, they came out like half-congealed blood. The pigment got on her trembling fingers when she tried to replace the caps, and the idea of so much red on her hands, flowing from her, struck her as appealing.
There was always that, wasn't there. There would be respite in that, surely.
Behind all the specific images, the snake and the table and the wolf and even the boar-headed man, loomed a dark, impenetrable storm cloud, turbulent and cruel. And perhaps the scariest thing was the knowledge that though she saw or felt that cloud only now, after the events at the house, it was a familiar menace. It had been there before the ghost. It had always been there. She had lived her whole life in its shadow. And she didn't know what it was.
She completed laying out the paint, set the palette aside, and wiped her hands clean on a towel. From the shelf she selected a canvas board the size of a hardcover book and propped it in the table easel. She stared at it, trying to imagine what she would paint on it. It seemed at once too small and too vast an expanse to deal with.
The floorboards creaked in the hall, Jackie just happening to pass by. She felt a twinge of compassion for him: The poor thing was beside himself.
She'd better get control of herself, she decided, stop all this hysterical, self-indulgent, overblown dramatizing.
