Crooked House (12 page)

“Robert?”

He stirred, but didn’t wake.

She touched his arm
. “Robert?”

His eyes flew open and he screamed
. He slapped at her hand and backed into the wall, his eyes wild and scared.

“Robert?” she said
. “Robert, it’s me.”

“What?
” He was breathing hard. “Who?”

“Easy,” she said, her own fear completely forgotten now
. “Robert, you’re dreaming.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head
. His eyes were still wide, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fearsome grimace. “No, not dreaming. You were – Oh God, Sarah. That is you.”

“Of course it’s me
. Robert, what...?”

She knelt down in front of him, trying to take his hands in hers, but he pushed her away.

“Robert?”

“No.”

He sat up. His hair was a mess, and he was sweating. As cold as it was up here, and he was sweating. He ran a hand over his face, and, to Sarah, he looked like a man trying to convince himself the nightmare was really over.

“Were you dreaming?”

And just like that his expression changed. The vulnerability, the fear, were gone. He looked at her then like she disgusted him.

“Let me up,” he said
. He pushed her hands away. “God damn it, I said let me up!”

She scrambled to her feet, not sure how to take this outburst or what she’d done to provoke him
. “Robert, I – ”

“Don’t you ever scare me like that
. What the hell’s wrong with you? Sneak up on a man like that. Jesus.”

She just stared at him
. She didn’t know what to say.

He sidestepped her and put his hands to his forehead like he was trying to rub out a migraine.

“Robert, I’m sorry. I...I didn’t mean to...”

“Just leave,
Sarah. I have work to do.”

“Oh
. Okay. I really am sorry.” She remembered the Visa card in her back pocket and thought, maybe, she could salvage this. “Robert, I was thinking about dinner. I could make – ”

“God damn it,
Sarah. Didn’t you hear me? I’ve got work to do. I don’t want dinner.” He seemed to catch himself and eased back on his tone. “Please, just go. I love you.”

She nodded.

“Okay. I...I love you too.”

Don’t cry, she told herself
. Don’t you dare.

She turned away and went out
. At the landing, she paused for a moment and stared searchingly at the doorway to the sitting room. Then she hurried down the stairs.

*

Wounded now, but also still a little sick and uneasy from her experiences upstairs, she was barely aware of walking into the kitchen and putting a frozen pizza in the oven. She pressed buttons on the oven’s display, but couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. It was hard to focus, hard to concentrate. Come on, she told herself. Please, hold it together.

“Mommy?”

Sarah jumped. She spun around and stared at Angela, who was standing in the doorway with sweaty bangs on her forehead and a basketball under one arm.

“You okay, Mommy?”

Sarah let out a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, baby...I’m okay. You scared me is all.”

Angela looked doubtful
. She said, “Mommy, are you and Daddy fighting?”

“What
? No. No, of course not.”

But she stopped herself there
. Growing up with a mom who drank all the time and a step-father who was more interested in getting into her pants than her mom’s, Sarah had promised herself she would do better. Her daughter wasn’t ever going to spend her Saturday mornings cleaning up her mom’s vomit and changing her bed sheets while her mom cried in the corner. That wasn’t ever going to happen to Angela. And she wasn’t going to lie to her either. Besides, Angela was a smart girl. She would see the smokescreen.

Sarah
sat at the kitchen table and patted the chair next to her.

Angela hesitated for a moment, then put the ball down and took the chair
Sarah offered.

“You miss home, don’t you?”
Sarah said. “Our old house, I mean.”

Angela shrugged.

“It’s okay. I do too. All these changes, it’s been hard, hasn’t it? I know it’s been hard on you. It’s certainly been hard on me. Well, me and Daddy both, I mean. That’s what we’ve been fighting...well, arguing about. It’s okay, though. We’re just having a bit of a rough patch, your Dad and me.”

Angela nodded, but she didn’t look convinced, and
Sarah’s heart went out to her. When she was Angela’s age, Sarah had been living through hell. That wasn’t going to happen for her daughter. No way was that going to happen.

Sarah
put her hand on Angela’s and smiled at her. “You know what? I remember when you were little. Now that was hard. We never had
any
money. I mean nothing at all. There used to be this old man who sold pretzels on the street corner near where Daddy went to school. On cold mornings, the steam would rise off the sides of his cart and you could smell those pretzels all the way down the block. Every morning you used to cry for one of those pretzels. They only cost fifty cents, but, well, like I said, we never had any money. Oh honey, how you used to cry for those pretzels.”

“Did I ever get one?”

Sarah chuckled. “Yes, silly. Whenever we could afford one. Which wasn’t often, believe me. One day you were crying for a pretzel we couldn’t afford and the man took pity on us, I think, and gave you a pretzel.” She gestured around at the house, at its vastness. “I think back on those times, how hard they were, and I know we’ve come a long way. We’ll weather this too. I’m certain of it.”

Sarah
knew her daughter. Angela loved to hear stories of when she was a little girl. More than just about anything else, those stories seemed to fascinate her, keep her hanging on every word. And it worked, for a while anyway. As she’d told the story of the pretzel man, the dark clouds had cleared from Angela’s expression. She was the innocent little girl that Sarah remembered. But then she’d gone and spoiled it by mentioning this house. She hadn’t meant to. She’d only meant to show how far they’d come. But, just like that, at the mention of the house, the clouds had gathered again in Angela’s expression.

“Mommy, I don’t like it here.”

“San Antonio’s a nice city, baby. This is a good – ”

“No, Mommy, I mean here
. This house.”

Sarah
felt a chill move over her skin. “What don’t you like about this house?”

“The upstairs
. It scares me.”

Sarah
swallowed, and when she spoke, she chose her words carefully. “What is it that scares you, Angela? Is it because it’s so big?”

She shook her head.

“No? What then?”

Angela sniffled
. Then she looked back toward the hallway that led out to the entryway. More than anything she’d experienced upstairs, that furtive little backwards glance, that brief window into the fears her daughter was living with, terrified her.

“When I’m up there,” Angela said, her voice a whisper, “I feel like I’ve been bad
. I feel like everyone’s mad at me.”

“Angela, nobody’s mad at you
. You’re wonderful. Your Daddy and I think you’re – ”

“No, I know that
. When I come downstairs I...I know that. It’s just that...”

Again the backward glance toward the entryway.

“What is it, Angela?”

“Mommy, you know that room at the top of the stairs
? The one that just has the chairs in it?”

Sarah
was holding on to her composure with both hands now. “Yes. What about it?”

Angela lowered her voice another notch
. “That’s where it’s coming from, Mommy.”

“Where what is coming from?”

“All the hate, Mommy. It’s a bad place. It’s so angry.”

December 21

Robert stood at the window of the downstairs library, watching the circular drive in front of the house. Angela was out there around the far corner of the east wing, shooting baskets. He’d catch a glimpse of her every couple of minutes or so when she’d come around for an outside shot. Through the trees he could see a washed out watercolor sky, a gray smear. It looked to him like rain, but the guy on the TV said it was only a twenty percent chance, which meant the faculty Christmas party would go on as planned, no chance of getting out of it due to rain.

He really, really didn’t want to go
. For the last several days he’d been feeling lethargic. Not really sick, and not really depressed either. His mother had been one of those women who, after the last of their children are born, never seem to shake the postpartum depression funk. After his younger sister Tammy was born, the youngest of the four Bell children, his mother just seemed to start a long, slow fade away. She was always exhausted and apologetic because she “just wasn’t up to doin’ nothin’ today.” As a young man he’d recognized her mounting depression, her isolation, her increasingly odd behavior. And later still, in his early twenties, he learned she’d been self-medicating with a combination of alcohol and painkillers. So he knew what real depression looked like, and this, what he was going through, wasn’t that. He just didn’t feel up to going out, or working on his syllabi, or anything else for that matter. He’d hit a low point – temporary, of course, no doubt brought on by the stress of having to constantly worry about money and the new job and this crap with Jay Carroll trying to get custody of Angela. But it wasn’t depression. That much he was sure of. More like the emotional equivalent of indigestion.

He touched his
shirtsleeve; it was wet again.

Christ, already?

Earlier, when he was deciding what to wear to the party tonight, he’d put on a white shirt to go with his gray suit, but all the itching he’d been doing lately had left open cuts on his upper arms and the blood had soaked through the white T-shirt and shirtsleeves almost immediately. After that, he’d put on some ointment and bandages and a dark blue shirt. But apparently he’d already soaked through the bandages. Gingerly, he touched his right shoulder. It burned, but despite the tenderness of the wound, he felt an awful itch moving across his skin, over his shoulders, down his back, to his belly, his chest.

He glanced at his watch
. Twenty past six.

Just then
Sarah pulled into the driveway, the babysitter in the passenger seat. About damn time, he thought. Robert watched them get out. They were going to be late. Why was he the only one around this house with a sense of urgency? He huffed, frowning at them as he scratched at a spot just below his collar.

Sarah
called over to Angela, who came running to meet the college girl who was going to be watching her. The college girl – her name was Kaylie Ross, he reminded himself; and how could he forget it, after the way Thom Horner had talked about her – bent down to Angela’s height and smiled. Angela seemed to like her right away, and Robert’s frown softened a little. The girl was pretty, he thought. And then he frowned again, studying her. She wore blue Levis, a form-fitting red blouse, strappy little sandals and a black sweater hanging off her arm. But it wasn’t her clothes so much that he noticed, or even her figure, as it was her brown, wavy hair, her smile, her bright, alert eyes.

And then it hit him
. She was the spitting image of Sarah at nineteen. Wind Sarah’s clock back ten years, and the two could have passed for sisters, no question about it.

Well, he thought, Thom did say she was a pretty thing
. And he was right about that.

Robert met them in the entryway
. Sarah was smiling when she came in, but her expression changed to a confused frown when she saw him.

“Angela,” s
he said, “why don’t you show Miss Kaylie the kitchen? I’ll be right there.”

When the two girls were gone,
Sarah turned to him. “What’s wrong with you?” And then, with a little more hesitation in her voice, because she suddenly seemed uncertain of him, she said: “You look angry.”

He looked at his watch and shrugged
. “It’s 6:30, Sarah. What the hell? What took you so long?”

“I...We’ve got thirty minutes
. What’s the big deal?”

“I don’t want to be late
. That’s the deal.”

“Robert, we’re not gonna be late
. I did the Google thing and it said it takes like ten minutes to get there. Besides, it’s a party. Nobody ever shows up right when a party’s supposed to start.”

He nodded, but he
meant it to mock her. To be honest, he was seething inside. A part of him sensed that he was about to lose control, that he was being irrational, but he couldn’t listen to that part of him. It seemed too remote. And the anger was so big, moving through him like a current he couldn’t channel or divert.