Sleep No More

immediately turn left. You’ll see a staircase leading to the mezzanine. Walk up, then take the elevator to the third floor. There’s an exposed walkway just before the suite’s door, where you can be seen from the courtyard or from rooms above, so walk fast there. I’ll be there by 10:30 p.m.

M

He put the jar back in its hole, but this time he kept the note. As soon as he got back to the office, he got the portfolio back out and did something he had not yet found the courage to do: he opened the bundle of Mallory’s old letters.

The handwriting matched perfectly.

Chapter 10

When he arrived at the Eola suite that night, he saw that she’d been right to choose it. The brick and stone hotel was a local landmark; it occupied most of a city block, and at seven stories had held the title of tallest building in the city for decades. Two popular nightclubs operated nearby, and their patrons frequently spilled out into Main Street, go cups in hand as they laughed and danced to the beat of live bands thumping through the walls. On any given night, those bars were filled with people who would recognize Waters on sight, but he felt reasonably safe approaching on foot from Pearl Street, as Mallory had told him to do.

Entering the doors of the grand hotel hurled him back in time, not twenty years but thirty. When he was a boy, his father had often brought the family to the Eola for Sunday dinner. He still remembered his passage through the lobby as they walked to the restaurant. Old men sat in club chairs, smoking cigars and playing checkers; a black shoe-shine man quietly solicited business; an attendant with a gold-braided uniform manned the elevator, which had a brass cage door that Waters always dreamed of opening and closing. He could still hear his father ordering shrimp remoulade from the red-haired waitress, still see the sliced yellow pound cake, strawberries, and whipped cream that awaited them for dessert.

On the first night he met Eve, the lobby was empty but for a lone security guard who sat far away with his back to the door. A bell rang somewhere, but as Eve had predicted, the guard did not challenge him. A dark business suit provided all the bona fides he needed for access.

When he opened the door to suite 324, he found Eve lying naked across the bed like Marilyn Monroe, a huge red bow tied around her waist, a champagne flute in her hand. The Rat Pack campiness of it broke the tension that had built inside him on his way up, and they celebrated their new digs with wild excess.

It was a good beginning for a week that would end badly. For after that first night, things began to change. Lily was behaving differently toward Waters at home. Her tone of voice became more affected, and sometimes he caught her watching him from the corner of her eye. He began to worry that he’d made some mistake, that she could smell Eve on him despite the fact that he always showered before returning home. And not all the clues to his betrayal were as subtle as scent. Eve was so physical that she sometimes left marks on him, even though she tried not to. If he and Lily had had a normal sexual relationship, his infidelity would have been discovered in the first week. But though she did not discover the marks of passion, Lily did notice changes in his behavior.

The move to the Eola had necessitated that the trysts become nocturnal, and Waters’s nightly ritual never varied. He would put Annelise to bed, wait for Lily to retire, then go out to the slave quarters to “do some mapping.” After he was sure Lily was asleep, he would slip on a sport coat, drive down to Pearl Street, park under some trees, and walk two blocks to the Eola.

One night, though, Lily varied her ritual. She came into the kitchen after they’d put Annelise to bed, and remarked that he’d been cold to her for the past few days. Waters could not believe she’d used the word “cold.” When he asked for clarification, she said he seemed unusually distant, and she didn’t think it was just the EPA investigation. He hadn’t hugged or kissed her for ten days, she said. Waters almost pointed out that Lily hadn’t made love with him for seven weeks, and that effort was only a painful charade she suffered through to keep him from going out of his mind with frustration. But he didn’t. As he stood awkwardly by the refrigerator, Lily walked up and laid her head on his shoulder, then said she was going to take a hot shower. Waters stiffened. Lily normally took baths. “Taking a hot shower” was one of her rare preambles to sex.

Afraid she would sense his anxiety, he hugged her, then said that he had a full night’s work ahead, mapping a new prospect. Lily gave him a hurt look, but he did not relent. He went out to the slave quarters and sat looking blankly at his drafting table while he waited for Lily to fall asleep. As his mind drifted, an underlying irony of his marital sex life hit him. As long as Lily knew that he wanted to go to bed with her, she was quite content not to have sex. But the moment she sensed real indifference on his part, she felt compelled to take him to bed.

He went to the Eola that night in the hope of forgetting the tension at home, but he found only more tension. That night, when Eve said, “I love you,” she held eye contact, waiting for her declaration to be returned. When Waters didn’t comply, he saw anger in her eyes. Later, after sleep deprivation had caused him to doze off, he awakened to find her sitting Indian-style at the foot of the bed, staring at him in the half dark.

His bladder almost emptied at the sight. Coming out of sleep, he was not sure whether the woman watching him with shining cat’s eyes was Eve or Mallory. He had found Mallory like that countless times, and he’d hoped never to see the sight again. Mallory never slept. If she did, it was while he was sleeping, and she always woke before he did. He couldn’t count the times he had surfaced out of slumber to find her propped on one elbow, watching him with luminous unblinking eyes. It unnerved him. And after her mind slipped its moorings, the cutting became part of her nocturnal vigil. He would awaken to find her sitting at the foot of the bed, her eyes glazed as she slowly raked the point of a safety pin along her inner forearms, leaving little trails of blood behind. Sometimes she used only her fingernails, but other times a key or a pocketknife. To wake and find Eve in the same position made him shudder beneath the covers. He was trying to think of some banal words to mask his fear when her lips parted and her low voice floated to him.

“Do you ever think about our babies, Johnny?”

“What?” he asked, hoping he’d misheard.

“Our babies.”

Memories too traumatic to face flooded his mind, and his fear morphed into panic. He could no longer convince himself that the woman sitting three feet from him was Eve Sumner. Her face was lost in shadow, her eyes seemed to burn with cold light, and her question reflected the central preoccupation of Mallory Candler’s broken mind. During her time with Waters, Mallory had terminated two pregnancies, both babies fathered by him. The first abortion had triggered her descent into madness, and Waters knew-if no one else did-that even after marriage and the birth of three healthy children, Mallory had never fully recovered from those abortions.

“Tell me, Johnny,” Eve insisted, her eyes never leaving his face.

He could hardly bring himself to address her as Mallory in a nonsexual situation, but what choice did he have? “I’ve thought about what happened,” he said cautiously. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I still think it was the right thing to do at the time. I know you don’t agree, but-”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Do you think about what they would have been like? Blends of you and me. They would be twenty-one and twenty-two now. Do you realize that?”

The skin on Waters’s neck rippled as though he’d touched a snake.

Eve hugged herself and rocked slowly. “I don’t think of them that way,” she went on. “I think of them as children. Three and four. A boy and a girl, Johnny. That’s what they were. I asked the doctors.”

He had heard this a thousand times, but that did not lessen his anxiety. When Mallory let herself think this way, she entered a psychological danger zone, in which thoughts of her lost children drove out all else, and her guilt and anger searched desperately for an object upon which to discharge themselves. Eve might only believe she was Mallory, but that wouldn’t lessen the violence of her actions if she carried her delusion that far. She sat three feet away from him, her nude body as still as that of a meditating yogi. Yet danger radiated from her as from a coiled cobra.

“Are you afraid, Johnny?”

He fought to keep his voice under control. “No.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Then go back to sleep. I’m fine.”