Blood Music (28 page)

H
e looked into the rearview mirror as the tunnel gave way to cool night air. The mirror had joggled up, and he found himself looking into the shadowy back of the van. There was something lying in the middle of the carpet back there. A little shape, a darker shadow. He pulled the van over into the gas station where he would have made his right turn to go home; what was lying there? It stared with vacant eyes, shark's eyes, button eyes: a tiny brown bear.

Mary's bear. What would Mary's bear be doing in the back of his van? Suddenly an image of Zelly rose, Zelly rooting in her purse for her keys, when was it? Two nights ago, a year ago? For a long time Zelly had carried around a little plastic duck teething ring that Mary no longer found attractive. For luck. In his mind she took things out of her fanny pack and laid them on her dresser: a lipstick, a packet of tissues, a tiny brown bear. For luck. Now it lay next to a dark, triangular stain and looked at the ceiling.

He reached his hand out but did not touch it. Could not. Zelly had been in the back of the van. The chorus from Handel suddenly blasted back into his head—
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
—and he dug his nails into his palms.

He looked with some surprise at the crescent indentations, which hurt. Zelly had seen the clippings, the unfinished letter. Under the cardboard box the notebook lay undisturbed but he knew she had opened it. The tarp had been moved. She had looked into the bucket. She knew who he was.

His hands as he started the van again were very calm; he felt calm. He had been stopped less than a minute. He was going to have to kill Zelly.

How long had she known? She had had that anticipatory look, like a deer staring down headlights, for some time now. Since she'd run away to her mother's house and then come back. Funny, he'd never truly been able to believe that what he did could have been associated with his other life. Even the panties—they could have come from anywhere. They had slid so easily from her dead body, they lay like a pile of lavender on the gray carpet of the van. Her lifeless eye had stared—he had loved her then. He had moved the panties down over her unresisting thighs and Zelly had held them in her hands.

It was almost a miracle to him that objects did not transmit memory. What had Zelly thought while she was holding the panties? That he was having an affair. She must have done her snooping when she'd said she was going out to dinner with that other mother. Last night.

So last night when he'd made love to her she must have known. He had felt a stirring toward her as she lay in bed with her back to him. She had lain as though asleep, although he knew she wasn't asleep. And in the morning she'd said she had a headache, and he'd noticed that she wouldn't put the baby down at all, but he hadn't thought anything of it. Yet while she stood near the window in the living room (uneasily, he realized now, teetering a little on one foot like an adolescent waiting for a phone call), she had had a memory of the inside of his van. How could he not have known?

As he drove the last blocks, the buildings and the freight yards he was passing began to shudder and buckle in on themselves. Every time he had driven down this road was right here. The silhouette of an abandoned engine doubled in on itself; the lights in the tenement across the street were on and off and on again, pale against the lightening sky or a bright yellow beacon in the dead of night. The empty train cars gleamed with every shade and nuance of light he had ever seen move across their hulls. He had seen a man once, coming out of the mouth of an abandoned railroad car; the man was there now, forever descending, looking down, one foot held irresolute.

As he turned the corner Manhattan swung into view, in shadow, in bright sunlight, dim with rain. One had screamed, and three had struggled. One had never seen his face at all. One had smiled at him. Two had spoken. They were all the same woman, and in the dark front seat of the van he began to hear her voice.
Hushabye, don't you cry, go to sleepy little baby.
She used to sing him that. His house was half a block away. He could see a light in the living room window. She had not called the police. Behind the shifting memories his senses were clear. There were no unmarked vehicles, no snipers hiding behind parked cars. There was no foreign presence in the apartment; the bland welcoming light was no subterfuge. On the porch next door an old Italian woman sat with her deaf husband; her placidity was unfeigned. Along the length of the street no leaf stirred.
When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses.
He would say hello to the old woman and her husband and he would go upstairs and kill his wife's lying eyes.
Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses.

What did she used to say? When you're bigger we'll go to London to visit the Queen. That's what she used to say. Just like in another of her many nursery rhymes. And he had believed her. The other he could not remember at all. Even with the rush of memory, the sudden availability of memory, he could not remember him. An arm, a hand. The arm would be raised forever, and it would be forever falling.

After he killed her he would have to do something with the baby. He couldn't just leave it there. The baby sitting next to its dead mother had not cried. In the closed low room where he crouched watching he did not cry.

When he opened the door to the apartment he did not know for a moment what he would see. That other room was suddenly so real that he almost forgot what he was going to do, and he hesitated against the blank wall of fluorescent light that came out of the kitchen. Where was she?

Something was wrong—the absence of monotone chatter from the television set. He could see it standing dark in the corner through the living room door. He knew it was no trap. There was no one waiting here, no drawn sweaty guns.

The apartment was empty. She was gone. As he stood in the kitchen the kitchen disappeared and he didn't feel anger or relief or regret or fear. Somewhere a wall melted and he was aware of only one thing: She was gone.

The boy sat uncomfortably in the little space under the stairs. He was five years old. His father's raw voice sometimes took on the cadence of repetitive ritual; his mother's retorts, her whimpers and her screams, were part of an ancient call and response. From where he was crouched under the stairs they couldn't see him. And when they could see him it didn't matter. Their entire lives were lived out in this illegal basement studio apartment. In the dark, from his mattress in the corner, he heard love and he heard hate, and when he heard love he thought it was hate, because he heard so much hate.

The only real love he recognized was in his mother's voice when she spoke only to him, in the lullabies she sang and the stories she told. When his father wasn't home the single room took on the rareified aspect of a bell jar, in which he and his mother existed unmolested and only for each other. Then the door opened and the familiar litany began again.

This time it was very bad. He was a small boy, brown-haired, with deep brown eyes that had little folds at the inner corners. He looked like his mother. His mother's hair was honey blond, and he could see her now across the room, with the light on her hair where his father held it clenched in his fist. Schubert was on the stereo—he knew that because his mother loved that music, she always played it. “Ave Maria” and the
Lieder
and the Quartetsatz. She used to play classical music all the time, especially when his father was out of the house: “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” and “Peter and the Wolf.” Her favorite was Schubert, who had died young. Her name was Emily. His father's rage was inexplicable. His father never spoke his name. His mother did: “Patrick.” Never Pat, always Patrick. “Patrick, when you're a bigger boy we'll go to London to visit the Queen.” In her mouth his name was a caress.

“You're a fucking whore,” his father was saying softly. Patrick where he was hiding caught his mother's supplicating eye. Do not, she said with her eye, do not move. Do not breathe if you can help it. She had showed him once how a little animal will freeze when a bigger animal wants to eat it. He had been the bobcat and she had been the squirrel and they had laughed.

His father held a liquor bottle up in his right hand. The top slopped over with amber liquid; there was a puddle on the linoleum. The violin swelled. “This is the music the universe moves to, Patrick,” she had told him. Beneath the stairs Patrick held his breath, his nails clenched against his palm in crescents of pain, and then the bottle was flying, her head was wrenched back—he loved her—and the bottle hit the wall across the room, leaving a big wet spot and a smell. Now there was something else in his father's hand. He held his breath—it was a hot pain in his chest—and his father's arm went up and the knife came down and for a moment Patrick was afraid of his mother, because he was afraid of blood.

If his father saw him now he would kill him, he knew that. His father stood over his mother as she looked at the ceiling with her mouth open and his breathing filled the room; it was the room, the walls pulsed raggedly in and out to the beat of his father's breathing. The violin had become romantic, yearning. His own breath was too big for his chest, and it frightened him too. He couldn't stop it, and his father would hear him. In the darkness under the stairs Patrick crouched into a little ball and lay on his side waiting to die.

Some time later he became aware that his father was gone. The music had ended and the needle rasped against the empty record. He had lain for a long time and then become aware that he was awake. He didn't know if he'd slept. The high small windows were black. His mother had not moved. One eye stared unblinking at the gray ceiling. The blue iris was flecked with red. Her mouth was open as though she were about to speak.

Patrick crawled out from under the stairwell: Then he was next to his mother. He couldn't hear anything from outside on the street; he wasn't aware of any street. There was nobody in the apartment above this one, nobody in the world except for him and his mother.

Patrick didn't know how long he sat there—he became aware, after a long time, of a strange sweet awful smell—and he didn't notice how many times the window went from black to gray to bright to black again. He loved her and he couldn't make her move. This is what “dead” was. The unwearying eye, the cold rigid fingers, the rancid smell. If she would not move he could not.

First there were voices, then pounding. Then silence, and Patrick was relieved, because he knew that they were going to take his mother away from him. The windows were light then. There was a violin playing all the time in his head now. When the windows went black again the voices came back, then pounding. He held her head in his lap—he was covered with blood—and held his breath, and for a moment he heard nothing but the needle, which was still rasping against the record.

Then there was the sound of wood groaning and splitting, and unfamiliar outdoor light, and horrified, self-righteous cries. Patrick hated them; it was as if he were to blame for the blood. He heard them talking but he didn't understand it—he heard “four days”—and when they tried to pry him away from her he fought them. And when they carried him out he fought and flung himself backward and looked at her one more time and promised himself he would find her again.

T
he lighted window got brighter and brighter the longer he looked at it, and everything around it, the street and the trees and the other houses and windows, receded into haze and blackness. The yellow-white square of light seemed almost to pulse. Then he shook his head slightly and the window swam back into focus. It was the third-floor window of an old brownstone two blocks off Washington Street, in Hoboken. He didn't know what this street was called; there were no signs.

The van was parked on a leafy street in front of a dark porch where an old man sat in silence next to an old woman. John could just see the man's tall form disappearing into the building next door. To see him again was shocking. After a long moment the man's silhouette appeared at the third-floor window.

He was dark against the window, a monstrous shadow thrown across the pale ceiling. He moved across the room, stopped, and moved again. For some reason John had assumed that the man lived in a house. What now? Would he and Madeleine saunter up the steps, with a nod to the couple next door? Ring the bell, go up the stairs, introduce themselves, and kill him? John turned his head to find Madeleine looking at him; when their eyes met she laughed. Her laughter was bitter and rueful and genuinely amused.

“Any ideas?” she asked; and then she gasped.

“Wh—” said John. The figure at the window, which had been standing like stone, suddenly sank out of sight. John and Madeleine looked at the empty space, and after awhile it started to get brighter and brighter.

“Is this wrong?” John asked once, and Madeleine didn't answer him; she said, “I don't hear sirens, do you?”

“I don't think you're going to hear any. Even if they come, they won't come with sirens.”

“But I told them—”

“And a thousand other people told them today, too. How many tips do you suppose they've got, just today, from people who think they saw the Slasher? Or know the Slasher, or sleep with the Slasher, or are married to the Slasher?”

“But the police have to come. I don't want you to kill him.”

“What do you think we've been
doing
for the last four weeks? You do want me to kill him. You
asked
me to kill him, remember? God, I'm doing this for you. For Cheryl, yes—but for you, now.”

Madeleine's face was turned away. “I don't want you to kill him. I want him dead. I just don't want you to be the one to do it. I know I'll be ready soon, and when I am I don't want to touch palms through a plate of glass three inches thick, you know?”