In the Night Season (12 page)

Except that Jack had decided differently: “He worked all his life so I’d have this—so we’d have this.”

“This isn’t what you wanted, Jack.”

“Do people ever get exactly what they want?”

“What about the music?”

“Oh, come on, Nora.”

“So that’s it—you’re just going to stop here?”

“This is a pretty good place, isn’t it? Why do you want to upset everything?”

This was when she began to know—even as her whole heart resisted the knowledge—that she was stronger than he was and had always been stronger….

Had she been asleep? The squares of the windows had grown pale. The house was deep in silence.

“Jason?” she murmured.

He sighed, groaned. He was asleep. She waited, sniffling softly. Time had ended, stretched out and died; hours, years went by. It seemed to her that she counted minutes, hours, days, weeks, months; it all ran together, years and decades. Generations. She had been dreaming again. She clung to consciousness, looking into the endless night, searching her mind for some indication or hint of what Jack might have left her that these men could want. The hours passed, slow as the stages of evolution. She slept, then woke again. Jason was still, quiet. The world had stopped in its tracks. Her life would end here. The knowledge came to her in an instant of panic. She inhaled, exhaled, and she could feel her heartbeat on the hard boards of the floor, which creaked now and creaked again. The house settling slowly, passing through its stages of completion. A moment later, half-conscious, she heard movement. She was wide awake, striving for the sound: someone was walking back and forth downstairs.

N
ORA’S MOTHER WORE A WRISTWATCH
set to eastern time, so she could know at a glance, without having to think, what time it was where her daughter and grandson lived. This was a mildly superstitious indulgence, actually—some small part of her believed that the connection was stronger if she could at least maintain this much of her life in the other time zone. The odd thing was that it had affected her life here: she often felt three hours ahead of everything. Making a quiet dinner for Henry, who liked to eat precisely at six o’clock, she imagined it was later, no matter what the light outside her windows said. For Gwendolyn Spencer, it was nine o’clock.

In the evenings, before she went to bed, she watched the news and paid close attention to the weather on the other side of the country. She was more attuned to that than the weather here, which was rainy less often than she’d been led to expect. She liked Seattle, in fact. And Henry seemed very happy, doing his consulting work with computers, keeping his own hours, really, and spending weekends puttering around the place, fixing the room where Nora and Jason would stay whenever she got around to bringing the boy out for a visit. He had been after Nora to sell that old house in Virginia, with all its bad
associations, and make a clean break with the past (his phrase). He was of the opinion that Nora’s resolve was growing weaker. She would relent and come to Seattle.

Her mother wasn’t so sure.

Tonight, it was raining, a steady gray downpour, and she stood at the window in the kitchen, thinking about the thousands of miles that lay between them. She did like it here and yet—and yet. It seemed so far, such a long way away from her only grandchild. She was sixty-four; it seemed somehow perversely selfish, not to say idiotic, to be spending her retirement at such a distance from them. When she tried to speak of this to Henry, he grew restive, as if he were afraid she would ruin his good time by hinting that she was less than satisfied with the arrangements. Well, she was. For all her enjoyment of the cloud-capped mountain out her bedroom window, and the fine country, and the friendly neighbors, she wanted to be nearer her daughter.

Henry was a man blessed with a talent for seeing whatever he wanted to see in a given situation; this was not a quality she found particularly distressing, either. It meant that he considered, almost always, the positive side of matters. He would try to find something to work with in the worst situations because he believed in making the best of whatever was given or thrust upon him. He was seventy-four now and still enjoyed the energy and the interest in the world that he’d had when he was a young army air corps pilot with a record of heroism in Europe. He could still wear the uniform he’d worn then and still stood as erect. He had long-fingered, expressive, freckled hands that she loved watching him gesture with. His straight-ahead vision was still as good as it had always been, too, though there had been some erosion of his peripheral field, and he might have to stop driving a car in the next couple of years if it grew worse. He didn’t think it would. He seldom thought anything would have a negative outcome, and this was a man who had looked upon destruction and suffering. It just wasn’t in him to dwell on the harsh facts of existence. He was interested in the sports on television, and in the history he was always reading, and in what there was good to eat and drink, especially the huge variety of delicacies that came from the ocean, on the edge of which they now lived.

Summer evenings, he often drove down to the shore and took long walks. He’d stop and pick up shells that interested him. There were two big buckets of them in the garage—every shape and color and size, every texture, from scalloped edges to polished smoothness, some of them blemished with tiny holes of erosion, all of them beautiful and delicate as ancient artifacts. He intended to make something with them one day, a kind of wall, he said. A whole wall of shells, so he could gaze upon it and think of his walks along the edge of the coast, the last mile of land, of his country. How he liked to watch the sun go down over the sea. He wanted Gwendolyn with him for these passes of course. But the sunset always filled her with sadness. She would go with him, would sit with him while the light failed and think how Nora and Jason were already in the dark, already in bed, probably. The thought unnerved her, their helpless sleep, so far away, and she sometimes caught herself thinking of death, too, watching the sky turn dark purple, the haze of the far-off redness, the rim of the last light, like embers sinking into the sea.

There would be no embers tonight.

The rain came straight down, in a windless calm—lazy, somnolent. Henry was asleep on the couch in the living room, having drifted off while watching a movie. She had sat for a time in the lamplight, reading the paper, listening to him snore. No one on earth slept as deeply or as innocently as Henry.

Now he stirred, sat up, ran his hands through the sparse, wiry brown hair on his head. She had once teased him by saying that he didn’t have the decency to go gray. She herself had been dyeing her hair for years, since just after her fortieth birthday.

“Lost track of the movie,” he said.

“Wonder why.”

“Must not’ve been very good.” He liked mysteries, suspense movies, and adventure-thrillers. Long ago the two of them had decided that their taste in books and movies was never going to coincide. They compromised, mostly, if they wanted to be together. But in the last few years she had noticed that they spent more time in different parts of the house. She supposed it was normal.

“You decide what you want for dinner?” he said.

“No.” She sometimes attributed the success of their marriage to the rather unromantic fact that they were temperamentally suited to each other: they had remained affectionate, and generally interested, because their moods were often the same.

“I don’t much feel like going out. Do you?”

“I guess not. I hadn’t thought the rain would keep up.”

“No.” He stood, padded to the window in the door, and looked out. “There’s a car in front of the house.”

“Must be for the neighbors.”

“Looks like there’s somebody in it.”

“Probably waiting for the rain to let up.”

“It’s not going to let up anytime soon.” He crossed to the entrance of the kitchen. “Maybe I’ll make some spaghetti.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I’ve had heartburn the last couple days. I don’t feel like anything too spicy.”

He stood there thinking. Then he went on into the kitchen. She heard him bringing out dishes, rattling pots and pans.

“What’re you doing?”

He was quiet. She got up and went in to him. He had put his hands down on the counter. His head drooped between his arms.

“What?” she said.

“Let’s go out and see a movie or something.”

“You just woke up from a nap. You’re always restless when you sleep in the middle of the day. Why don’t you make yourself a drink and relax a little.”

“The last few days,” he said. “I can’t explain it—but I’ve had the odd sense that somebody was following me. I keep seeing this guy. A young guy.” He shrugged. “Seems to be watching me. I saw him outside the post office last week, and I thought he was behind me in traffic a couple of days ago. Then at the grocery store, as I was going out. I almost said hello.”

She waited for him to go on.

“The strangest thing. Can’t put my finger on it. I see other faces, you know. People who go to the store the same time I do. But I—this feeling of being watched. There’s something about the way this
guy looks at me. And just now it upset me to see that car out there, exactly as if—hell, I don’t know.”

“Was that the same car you saw in traffic the other day?”

“I can’t remember. I didn’t really look at the car. Maybe I’m losing my mind.”

She said, “A feeling isn’t always to be explained one way or the other, is it?”

He put his arms around her. “I suppose I can never be’one of those men who says his wife doesn’t understand him.”

“You sound almost regretful about it.”

“No,” he said. “I’m quite happy.” He opened the refrigerator and stood gazing at the confusion there.

“I’ve been thinking of going back for another visit,” she told him.

He closed the refrigerator. “There’s nothing holding her in Virginia, is there? She can teach here just as well as she can teach there, can’t she? And she’d have us to help out.”

“Would you mind if I went to stay with her a few days?”

He considered. “Yes, frankly. I would mind.”

She turned from him.

“It’s been almost a year,” he said. “The guy left her with nothing. I think a certain period of mourning is fine—but the guy did leave her with nothing.”

“It was an accident, Henry. He didn’t do it to her. It happened. They loved each other.”

“I’m going to make myself a sandwich, and then I’m going to go out and see a movie,” he said. “You’re welcome to come along.”

Lately he had assumed this abruptness, this way of closing off discussion by means of an announcement of plans. It was his way of saying he would not speak about it further, and it never failed to make her cross with him. She suppressed the feeling now, though she wanted to say that sometimes his positive nature was little more than that of the spoiled child used to having his way in everything. And in fact she had mostly given him just that.

“I’m going to see about going back to spend a week with Nora and Jason,” she said. “And
you’re
welcome to come along.”

He said nothing, reaching into the bread basket for slices of rye bread, which he set out on the counter.

She went back into the living room and was startled to find a man’s shape, head and shoulders, in the window of the door. “Henry?” she said.

The man knocked lightly on the glass.

Henry came up behind her. “Who’s that?” He stepped around her, walked over, and spoke through the glass. “Yeah?”

Gwendolyn couldn’t make out the words the other said.

Henry opened the door a crack. “What is it?”

“Could I use your phone, sir? I’m stranded.”

Henry looked beyond him and held the door tight.

“I’m sorry, I’ll go to the next house.”

“Hell,” Henry said, low. Then he opened the door. “Come on in, son.”

The man was big. Tall and blocky, with wide shoulders dripping with the rain. He wore a dark blue baseball cap, which he took off now, and held in front of his body. He had long dark hair that was thinning at the crown of his head. He nodded at Gwendolyn, then followed as Henry led him through to the kitchen and the telephone on the wall. Thanking Henry, he picked up the handset, punching the numbers with a kind of emphasis. He cleared his throat and waited. Henry stood by and then seemed to think better of it. He came toward Gwendolyn a little. “I started thinking about how it would be if I followed every damn paranoiac impulse,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” the stranger said into the phone. “This is Robby. Let me talk to John.”

Henry walked over to the door and looked out at the street.

“John. I’m broke down. Yeah. Wait a minute.” He looked at Gwendolyn. “What street is this, ma’am?”

“Jonquil Street,” she said.

He repeated this into the phone and waited again. He looked around himself, at the kitchen, the walls. When his eyes settled on Gwendolyn, he smiled at her, revealing a space between his front teeth, right at the center. “Okay. Thanks,” he said into the phone.
Then he put the handset back and nodded at Gwendolyn, starting back through the living room. “I’m very grateful, thank you.”

“Miserable day out there,” Henry said to him.

“Yes, sir.” His movements, the rustle of his coat, the air of the outside that was on him, all seemed to have set something loose in the room, an energy that disturbed Gwendolyn. She had a moment of realizing how much she had come to depend on the closed door, the insulation between her and the rough life outside. She felt oddly threatened by this very large and very polite young man. He pulled his hat from the coat pocket, put it on, and nodded at Henry, even bowed slightly toward Gwendolyn. “Sorry to bother you.”

“No bother,” Henry said.

The other bowed again and was gone. Henry closed the door and looked out the window for a moment.

“I swear,” Gwendolyn said to him. “That scared me.”

“What scared you?”

“This strange big man coming to the door, after you talked about being followed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She walked to him and put her arms around his middle. “Henry, let’s go back east.”

He took her elbows and stepped back. “What?”

“Just for a visit.”

“Look, is it the place you miss, or Nora and Jason?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You
know
what it is. But Nora and Jason won’t come out here. And you know that, too.”

He returned to the kitchen, and she went down the thin hallway to their bedroom. She lay down, without putting the room light on, though it was dim here, the windows running with the steady drumming of the rain.

In a while, she heard the television. He had started watching the same movie again. She heard the gunfire; the shouts, but they grew far away; she was drowsing. How wonderful it felt to let go—the sweetest pause, with the soft tattoo of the rain on the windows. She woke to the television: explosions. The windows were dark. For a
few seconds she couldn’t remember where she was. “Henry,” she called out. “Please turn it down.”

Nothing.

In all the movies he had ever brought home, there was a scene where people were running or diving to get away from exploding fire. The scene was obligatory, she decided, like those absurdly religious-seeming sexual passages in the movies of the sixties and seventies, as though that small biological act between complete strangers were somehow more mystical and freighted with the spiritual than it could ever be in such barren circumstances. She got out of the bed and moved to the doorway of the room to look down the hall into the space of the living room where his chair was. He was sitting there, but he wasn’t looking in the direction of the television. His face was white; he looked aghast at something.