When he spoke again, his voice was tight, controlled, as frosty as an iceberg.
“The man you see at night? The naked man?”
The children nodded. They had no words at this point.
“ There is no man in here!” Willard stomped to the closet and tore armful after armful of shirts and coats and school pants from their hangers and flung them onto the floor. “ There’s nothing in here! There never was!
“Now I want to know which one of you killed that hamster!”
“Willard!” Catherine’s voice cut through his like a saber, quick and sharp to his bludgeoning broadsword. “Willard Huntley, I want to talk to you. Now!”
She grabbed his arm with a strength she didn’t know she possessed-certainly Willard had never felt anything like it in their entire married life-and pulled him so hard that he almost lost his footing.
“Outside. Now! And you four stay in here. Don’t any of you move.”
Catherine and Willard disappeared through the door and down the hall.
Behind them came the soft sounds of sobbing. Sounds that grew louder and louder.
10
She finally stopped yanking on his arm when they stood at the corner of the back yard, behind the garage and right below the eight-foot slump-stone fence that separated their yard from their neighbor’s.
“I can’t believe that. I don’t believe that. You just accused your own children of killing their pet!”
“Let go of my arm.” Every word slow, carefully enunciated. “Now.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but let me tell you…”
Craaack!
With his free hand Willard swung furiously and struck Catherine sharply, viciously across the face. For a moment she froze, not even breathing, uncomprehending, unbelieving.
“Let…go…of…my…arm.” Not a syllable had changed tone or pitch.
She dropped her hand. Without a word, she spun on her heels and strode into the house, slamming the door behind her. Willard heard the lock click.
Stunned, he crumpled against the garage wall.
What had he done?
He had never struck Catherine, never struck any of the children. Certainly not in anger.
Certainly not in the rage of fury that had overwhelmed him while talking with the children.
His head throbbed.
And his hand hurt, stung, burned like he had thrust it into an open flame.
He slumped to the ground.
What was happening to him? To them?
The house.
Everything had begun to go to hell when they bought this damned house, with its shattered foundation and its disintegrating slab and its web-work of cracks crisscrossing every damned wall in the place.
And now it was shattering him.
Him and his marriage.
Catherine would never talk to him again. Would never love him again.
11
Nothing was easy.
It wasn’t easy to get back into the house. Every door, every window he tried was locked, solidly, as if barred by solid oak instead of cheap tract-home plywood. He stood by the front door for perhaps five minutes, then turned and trudged down the drive.
It took two hours and a long walk through the Charter Oaks subdivision, following one twining street after another, before he even began to feel a bit like himself. Before his breath calmed and he realized with even greater clarity the horrendous step he had just taken.
In an instant, everything in his life seemed to have changed.
Changed, nothing! It was a full-out train wreck!
He had struck his wife.
As he walked, however, he gradually began noticing things. Perhaps it was his obsession revealing itself to the rational part of is mind. Perhaps it was just that his eyes were finally opened.
Everywhere- everywhere- in almost every house, across almost every stretch of sidewalk, every length of drive, he spotted flaws. The corner of one house was literally crumbling away a few inches above the ground, the cement flaking off like layers of too-thick make-up peeling from the cheeks of some ancient hag. In another, every window had thin, spidering lines like age-wrinkles fanning from each corner, some masked by meandering splotches of plaster, others fresh and jagged, painfully black against the stucco. This one had a long front eave that sagged in the center, making the entire place look off-kilter. That one was as sway-backed as an aging nag, its roof line slumping tiredly, as if weighed down by the decades.
It came as a shock. It wasn’t just their house. It was every house on every block.
It wasn’t just him.
When he finally returned to the house at the end of Oleander Place, he found the front door unlocked. That was a good sign, at least.
He moved quietly down the hallway until he stood in front of the back bedroom. The door was closed but he could hear the subdued murmuring of voices inside. He couldn’t understand any of the words-it sounded like ghosts whispering through the labyrinth of dead branches in some midnight cemetery. Rising, falling, rising, falling, but never quite emerging into articulated speech.
He didn’t try opening the door. He tapped with one finger on the smooth surface. Click. Click. Click.
The sounds inside ceased. He felt that he could almost hear five hearts thrumming just on the other side, could share the ache of hot, pent-up breath in five waiting breasts.
“Catherine.” Barely audible-but shatteringly loud in the silence. “I…I’m sorry. Please. Can we talk.”
Nothing from inside the room.
“Please.”
Not even the rustle of bed clothing shifting beneath the fragile weight of a child’s body.
“I’ll be in the family room.” That way, if she wanted to, or if one of the children needed something, she could skirt him completely and still go to the kitchen and back.
“I’ll wait as long as you want.”
It was nearly an hour later when she appeared in the doorway from the front entry. One second the space was empty and cold-the next, there she was, stock-still…and cold.
He stood up but did not move toward her. He started to speak, then halted. He would wait for her to make the first move.
“If you ever speak like that about my children”- my children, not our children-“or so much as threaten to strike me, or them, you will never see any of us again. Ever.” Cold, dispassionate yet resonant with anger and hurt and, even now, disbelief. “Believe it.”
“I know.”
They remained like that for several long minutes.
Finally, he felt like he could break the silence. “Saying ‘sorry’ isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. If I could take back everything, run the clock back to this morning when the kids’ needed me, I would. I would do anything to change what happened.”
She waited.
“I don’t know what got into me. You know I’m not like that, I’m not that person. It was…it was like someone
