Vigilantes of Love (17 page)

The old man’s chill eyes twinkled, and he simply nodded.

She frowned then, and stepped over to view first one rug, and then the next, trying to surreptitiously find a price tag. The old man didn’t move, just stood in the doorway before the beads.

“What do the prices on these range?” she finally asked.

He shrugged. “They are reasonable. We can discuss. But first,” he nodded to the displays, “look. Look for your heart’s desire.”

With that, he vanished back from where he’d come, leaving Jan alone in the room. She ran her hands over the velvety fabric, admiring twists and twirls of satiny purple spiced with tangerine, and mauve laced with silver.
They were all beautiful,
she thought, turning from one pattern to the next, but always looking for the next, and the next, and the one that might be just a little better. More perfect. More her.

Finally, in the back of the store, just to the right of a clay pot hoarding a spray of fake flowers, she found it. A white tasseled rug with deep, rich blue runes, veined with burgundy streams and silver accents. Some of the twisting patterns doubled back on themselves like intricate knots. Others followed twining threads deeper and deeper into the pattern until they were lost, like creeks run down to their muddy grass-choked end.

“Yesss,” Jan murmured, and jumped when a voice answered her.

“That’d be the one, eh?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding exuberantly but then stilling her chin, slowing her enthusiasm, thinking of the rent that would be due soon, the rent that still didn’t feel comfortable. She still worried that she wouldn’t have enough in the bank to cover it, though so far she always had.

“How much?” she asked finally. The shopkeeper laughed.

“I can tell that this is the one for you, and I want to make sure you have it,” he said. “In a regular store, this would go for upwards of a thousand dollars.”

Jan could feel the blood drain from her face and her stomach twist.

“But I certainly didn’t pay that much for it, and I know that you probably can’t either. So let’s find a solution that benefits us both. You get the rug you want, and I clear some space in my store and put some change in the cash drawer. How does $99 sound?”

Jan couldn’t stop her lips from rising. It was more than she should spend, but she knew sh couldn’t get a fake one for that price.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

The old man nodded, as if he’d expected nothing different. He lifted the rug from its hooks.

She’d worry about how she was going to pay for it later.

Jan shimmied the coffee table back and forth across the center of the Oriental rug. No matter how she positioned it, she couldn’t seem to get it quite right.

Finally, she hit on lining up the edge of the table with the square turn of one of the burgundy patterns. It still wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. Wiping the greasy sweat from her brow with the back of her palm, she collapsed into the comforting cushions of her sofa, and stared at the rug.

She traced the curling threads of color with her eyes, following them into the weave like secret trails. It reminded her of the time she and Jeremy had hiked in the North Woods, and how he’d lost her when she wasn’t looking. He’d stepped off the trail to pee, but after several minutes passed, she followed him into the twisted brush and branches to see what was taking him so long.

When she didn’t find him, she’d returned to the trail to wait, but once there, she began to worry that she’d strayed too far from where he’d left her. She’d turned all the way around three and four and five times, peering into the dense brush that closed in the narrow dirt trail. She called out his name, softly at first, and then with increasing urgency.

What if a bear had come up behind him while he was wetting down a treetrunk? It could have happened so fast he wouldn’t have had time to cry out, and she wouldn’t have heard…

“Boo!” Jeremy yelled, leaping out from behind her.

Jan gasped, grabbed her chest and fell to her knees with the shock.

He apologized, pulling her to her feet and hugging her tightly.

“I thought something had happened,” she cried. “A bear or you fell and broke your leg or… ”

“No, baby, no… I just wanted to make you jump. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out that much.”

His words and hugs had turned to kisses and caresses. They’d made love in the bushes at the side of the trail. For weeks after, she’d fantasized that the tryst had made her pregnant, until the bleeding began, like clockwork…

Jan pulled her gaze away from the carpet that she was no longer seeing and leaned against the back of the couch, stifling a sob.

The bleeding had always come. And Jeremy had always shaken his head, as if disgusted with her…

Time for bed. When her thoughts turned to this… Jan turned out the light, but didn’t rise from the couch. She stared at the wall she couldn’t see in the darkness, and cried.

For a week, Jan came home and spent her evenings staring at the rug, memorizing its twists and paths and delicate twinings in her head. While sometimes those intricately threaded trails led her mind to wander down unpleasant paths of its own, mostly, she was happy, lost in the blur of the day’s events and the swimming color of dyes. Jan enjoyed the warmth the rug brought to her apartment. Though she couldn’t say it had completely filled that empty feeling that came when she stepped in through the door at the end of the day.

The next Thursday, on a whim, she pulled off Glenn Ellyn Road into the parking lot of the carpet shop after work. She felt lazy, idle. Maybe she’d browse the statuary, or just admire one of the other carpets.

There still was no sign on the door, only the glow of neon tubes to announce that it was a store at all. Jan pulled the door open and stepped inside. The door snapped shut behind her like a trap.

The store was empty.

White walls and beige carpet, fixture on the ceiling without a bulb.

The store had failed fast!
she thought, and then considered… it’s hard to draw a crowd when you never posted a sign.

“What’s on your mind?” a familiar voice said, and the white-haired man seemed to materialize like a light flicked on, from the darkness of the hallway.

“Oh,” she said. Jan felt embarrassed for some reason, as if she’d stepped into the man’s bedroom and caught him in his stained, torn boxers.

“The store,” she said, pausing awkwardly. “didn’t do well?”

“Oh, we’re doing just fine, ma’am,” he answered, and smiled, eyes glinting brightly in the glare of the bulb.

“You just come back when you need something – when you really want something – and we’ll have it. I guarantee.”

With that, he turned and vanished into the back hallway of the shop.

Jan stood there a moment, almost as lost and disoriented as the last time she’d stepped inside and been overwhelmed by the rugs.

She felt betrayed as she stared at the empty white walls and the boring beige floor.

What kind of game was this guy up to?

She drove home in a kind of shock.

“
You just come back when you need something – when you really want something…
” she kept hearing in her mind.

When she reached her apartment, she dropped her briefcase on the foyer and kicked her shoes off with force, bouncing one off the wall to land on top of the coffee table. She knelt at the edge of the Oriental rug.

Tears were already starting to run down her face. “I
know
what I want,” she whispered, “I know what I want.”

Later that night, after the microwave, after the TV news, after the vodka, Jan climbed back in her car.

“I know what I want,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

The store’s door slapped shut behind her, and this time she wasn’t shocked to see a bare bulb and an empty room.

It wasn’t completely empty.

Against the back wall leaned a pickax and shovel, obviously freshly used. There were muddy prints on the banal carpet, dark, dirty footprints that ended in a jumble at the side of the dirt-smeared silver casket. It served as the only furnishing of the otherwise white room.

“You’ve made up your mind, then,” the proprietor said, his voice a cool dagger parting the silence with bloody sound.

Jan was too drunk to cry, too tired to crumble.

“I want Jeremy,” she whispered. Then, thinking of the cruel way he’d treated her, blamed her and left her, she corrected herself. “No… I want Jeremy’s child.”

The nod of his silver hair was almost imperceptible.

“So I surmised.”

“Is that… him?” she asked, staring at the casket.

The man nodded. “Is that what you really want?”

“More than anything else.”

“Then I will leave you in privacy. You have until midnight.” He checked his watch. “Roughly an hour.”

“And the cost?” she whispered, already moving forward.

“That you never return,” he said, and then vanished once more into the dark hallway.

Jan moved to the edge of the casket. Her eyes wouldn’t stop leaking; the room wouldn’t stop shivering beyond the veil of her tears. What if it wasn’t him? What if it was him, six months gone?

She pushed at the lid and her hands slipped on the damp earth still smeared on the edge. She pushed again. This time it opened, slowly, with a creak like a door in a haunted house.

It was Jeremy.

His hair, so blond and perfectly coiffed in life, was dulled, dirty, unkempt. His lips, once so full of sarcasm, were pale, lacking in spite or cynicism. His eyes, once electric and sparkling grey, were flat, listless.

But his lips opened when she gasped, and his eyes blinked as she laid her head on his pinstripe-suited chest.

“I love you,” she cried, almost incoherent, tears muddying the dust on his deep blue tie.

“And I loved you,”
he croaked, barely audible in the silence of the empty room.

His arm raised, slowly, hesitantly, like a construction crane that’s spent the winter months rusting tight in the yard.

“I wanted to have your child,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was never you,”
he hissed, and pulled her down into the velvet clutch of the casket with him.
“But I could never admit it.”

Jan never went back to the store with the neon lights. She passed it every day on her way home from work, sometimes noting a car parked there. She wondered what the store held for those patrons, but never dared to stop and find out.

She thought of the store nearly every evening as she sipped warm tea and watched the nightly news and traced the ever-twisting patterns of the deep, dark Oriental carpet with the fingers of her mind.

She smiled a little when she thought of Jeremy. And she cried. But mostly, she just closed her eyes in contentment, and felt the warmth of her belly, and of the child growing so quickly there.

She had what she wanted. And would ask for nothing more.

One by one the candles lit, flames flickering into existence without the aid of a match or spark. Will smiled and counted: 25. Perfect. He glanced down the hall to make sure nobody was coming and then smiled a devious grin. Why do it the hard way?

The strand of lights rose like a thin green snake from the bag. Will pointed to the crowning branch of the blue spruce and the strand obeyed. Its end still hidden in the storage bag, as it began to twine around the tree.

On the third loop the plug sailed out of the bag and slapped the wall to mark the wire’s last circle about the tree.

Will smiled in appreciation.

No point in getting stuck with pine needles. This was the way to set up Christmas. Flushed with pride, he didn’t note the shadow of his father against the wall until his second strand of lights was sailing around the evergreen.

The tree began to turn – without his help. Slowly at first, perfectly matching the spiral of his snaking lights and preventing them from coming to rest on the branches. It spun faster, dislodging bulbs already placed. The tree’s motion was matched by a whirlwind that blew Will’s long blond hair into his eyes, and his candle flames into oblivion.

Seconds later, the wind and the tree were still, and Will’s work undone. Lights lay in tangled heaps on the floor, and the candles hidden throughout the nooks and crannies of the great room were smoking in dark silence.

“Do it right, this time,” a familiar voice grated. “Your aunt Ertie will be here soon.” His father’s heavy steps echoed cruelly through the ruined room as Will stared at the mess.

“Damn, damn, damn!” he hissed, stamping his foot in frustration. Why did they insist on doing things the hard way at Christmas? Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to just get it done? And why did Ertie have to materialize every year? She was so damned annoying. Chatter, chatter, chatter – as if she had a clue what living in today’s world was like.

Will shook his head and picked up the nearest plug, shaking the stubborn lights apart one by one to detangle the strand. He’d be here for hours!