It had started to rain while she was on the train. Now, as she emerged from the station, it was pouring hard and the November dusk was closing in.
There was no sign of a cab anywhere, so she took up her place at the head of the taxi stand under cover of the station forecourt, and waited. She felt little except a strange numbness, a detachment from reality that reminded her of the way her mouth felt after a shot of novocaine at the dentist-still there, but mysteriously untouchable.
It was a defense mechanism, she told herself, while marveling at the fact that knowing something didn't change the way it worked or the effect it had. But if it were not for this strange sense of being there and yet not there at the same time, she knew that the madness hovering on the edges of her consciousness would overwhelm her, and she would disintegrate totally.
A cab swished up and stopped to disgorge a couple who went through to the ticket office, then it pulled around and picked up Joanna. She gave her parents’ address and sat back, hoping the driver wasn't the talkative kind. He wasn't.
She tried to analyze her feelings, to observe and define what was going through her mind, but found it impossible. Everything both conceivable and inconceivable seemed to be happening at once in her imagination, but she didn't know what she was actually thinking. That too, she supposed, was part of the defense mechanism that was enabling her to function well enough and long enough to reach her destination. What would happen when she got there was another question-one that she found herself unable even to contemplate.
The gate to her parents’ driveway was shut, so she paid off the cab and walked to the house. There was a wind coming up, driving the rain at an angle into her face. She lowered her head and pulled up her collar, quickening her pace.
At the door she paused a moment, protected by the small portico, and shook out her hair. For the first time it struck her that maybe they wouldn't be at home. There were lights in the house, but they always left lights on. Then she recognized the thought for what it was-a delaying mechanism to put off the confrontation that she knew was going to be the most painful and traumatic of them all. She rang the bell.
She heard it ring in the distance. Skip began to bark, running toward the door from wherever he'd been- probably asleep by the fire or curled up in his basket in the kitchen. She called his name through the door, but the barking didn't stop and turn into excited whimpering the way it usually did when he recognized someone's voice. She called his name again, but his bark just became more agitated.
A light went on over her head, then her mother's voice came tinnily from the speaker by her shoulder.
“Who is it?”
“Momma, it's me.”
There was a long pause, during which Skip continued to bark, scrabbling at the door now as though trying to claw his way through and attack her. She could hear her mother calling out to him, maybe even coming to get him and hauling him physically away, because his barking became more distant but lost none of its excitement.
She knocked on the door several times and called out, “Momma? Momma, are you there?”
When her mother spoke, it was through the entry phone again. She sounded different now, strained and ill at ease.
“Are you the person who called me earlier?”
“Momma, for heaven's sake, it's me. Let me in-please.”
She could hear Skip's barking through the speaker, but distant and hollow sounding now, as though he'd been locked in somewhere.
“Why are you doing this?” her mother asked. “If you don't go away, I'll call the police-do you understand?”
“Mother, I'm begging you, open the door, look at me, tell me I'm Joanna- please.”
“I am looking at you. And I don't know who you are.”
Joanna turned sharply toward the source of the voice. She had forgotten about the security camera that her parents had installed a year or so ago after a couple of break-ins in the neighborhood. She stared into its impersonal gaze.
“Momma, for the love of God, it's me. Don't tell me you don't know me! Please, just open the door and face me-that's all I'm asking. Open the door and look at me!”
There was a silence. Joanna waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall, for the sound of a key being turned in a lock, a bolt being drawn.
She waited, but she waited in vain. Then she forced herself to wait some more, biting back the anguished cry that was building in her throat, angrily wiping away the tears that had begun to blur her vision. She waited until she could wait no more, and rang the bell again.
When there was no response, she banged at the door a couple of times with the side of her fist and called out to her mother. When there was still no response, she banged harder. The physical effort dispelled the last vestiges of her self-control and freed the panic so far held in check just beneath its surface. She clawed and kicked and battered at the door like a madwoman trying to escape from her locked cell, or like someone buried alive and screaming for release.
But no one answered. She stopped, exhausted, her throat hoarse. It was then that she remembered the dream her mother had described to her months earlier: she outside, hammering at the door to be let in, and her mother cowering terrified inside. There had even been rain, driving rain like now. It was that dream come true.
“Momma,” she cried, her face pressed against the wood, her fist beating out a relentless, steady rhythm to underline her words. “Momma, don't you remember? It's your dream. Remember your dream? The nightmare? You told me I was outside in the rain, and you were too afraid to open the door. There's nothing to be afraid of, Momma. It's me. Open the door, Momma. Please, please open the door…”
A beam of light swept over her. She turned, shielding her eyes as a car came up the driveway at speed. It stopped with a scrunch of tires on the gravel. Doors banged. She heard the static of a radio, and realized that the two figures moving toward her were in uniform. Her mother had called the police as she'd threatened she would.
One of them turned a flashlight on her. She threw up a hand to shade her eyes.
“Step away from that door.”
She obeyed automatically.
“Turn and face the wall on your left.”
The second voice was a woman's. It was the female officer who now came up behind Joanna.
“Place your hands on the wall and stand with your feet apart.”
Joanna tried to protest that she wasn't carrying a weapon, but the female office snapped at her to shut up while she briskly patted her body up and down.
“Okay, turn around.”
Joanna faced the two cops. Rain dripped from their faces, and she could see they were wearing heavy waterproofs that gave them an awkward, semi-inflated look. The man shone the powerful flashlight in her face again, making her squint.
“You got some ID, lady?”
“No, I…” She was about to explain that she had left everything in a friend's apartment in New York, but saw at once it would be pointless. “No, I don't have any.”
“Who are you and what are you doing on this property?”
“I'm Joanna Cross, and this is my parents’ house.”
She saw a look pass between the cops. The man shook his head as though confirming to the woman that this was a he.
“Get in the back of the car,” he said to Joanna, flicking his flashlight toward the patrol car and indicating she should walk ahead of him. When she was in, he left the door open but stood by it.
Looking past him, Joanna could see that the female cop was now talking to her mother at the front door. Her mother gave a nervous glance in the direction of the pale young woman sitting in the back of the car, and shook her head.
“No,” Joanna heard her say, “I don't know who she is. I've never seen her in my life.”
“Are you quite sure of that, ma'am?” the male cop said, taking a few steps away from the car. “I've met Mrs.
