Where is the Baby? (17 page)

Everything about the bathroom was new and yet it had been done up in a way that was gratifyingly faithful to the heritage of the house. White wainscoting, a porcelain pedestal sink with a square basin and simple faucets, an oblong claw foot tub with a rolled rim. Above it, a chrome shower rail suspended from the high ceiling extended from one end of the tub to the other. It held a plain white curtain. Chrome towel rods held thick white towels. The walls awaited painting but he suspected they, too, would be white.

Considering that large master bedroom, monastic was the word that came to mind as he washed his hands. Not a word he'd initially have associated with this woman, based solely on her appearance. But it felt appropriate. He couldn't have said why. Impressions were stacking up, one atop another, fleshing out his mental image of her. He liked her ability to be silent, her obvious intelligence, her failure to ask typical questions. And of course he liked simply looking at her. She was a gift, in red high-tops.

‘Would you like to use my phone to call about getting towed in the morning?' she asked when he returned downstairs.

‘I would. Thank you.'

‘Help yourself.' She pointed to the wall-phone situated just inside the kitchen door.

While he made his call, and the coffee was dripping, she went to the dining room and started gathering up the last of the wet wallpaper shreds from the tarp, pushing them into one of the huge garbage bags the general contractor had supplied.

Already the room looked bigger, cleaner. And Hay was right: the yellowing paint on the paneling was dreadful. Perhaps she'd investigate the specifics of paint removal; a project to work on during the winter. Save painting this room for later.

‘You're going to try doing it yourself, aren't you?' Hay asked from the doorway.

It earned him a little smile. ‘That's exactly what I was thinking,' she admitted. ‘You read my thoughts.'

He nodded. ‘You read my reaction to stripping the paneling a little while ago. And now I guessed your thoughts. Transparency seems to be the order of the day.'

‘Sometimes it feels good not to have to explain things. My turn for hand washing,' she said, pushing the garbage bag into the corner. ‘Coffee will be ready in a minute or two. You're probably dying for another cigarette. Feel free, please. And if you have the skill, you could relight the fire in the living room.'

‘I have the skill,' he said. ‘I've been known to start a fire or two. And I wouldn't mind a cigarette. Thank you.'

‘Given that you work in a kitchen,' she said lightly, on her way to the stairs, ‘you could help peel the vegetables for the stew.'

‘Happy to. I have peeling skill, too.'

Amused, she continued on her way, thinking that this was the longest conversation and the most exposure she'd had to another person in more than five thousand days.

‘I'm curious about the logistics,' she said. ‘What do you do for water on your hill? And plumbing?'

‘I have a jury-rigged composting situation for waste. I keep a rain barrel filled with water for cooking and washing up. When the water freezes I use an ice pick to fill a big pot with chunks that I melt and replenish every couple of days. Laundry I do at The Farm once a week or so, and I grab a shower there most mornings before work. Now and then, if the weather is really bad or I just need a break from the rustic life, I'll bunk there for a night or two.'

‘And there's always room for you?'

‘Worst-case scenario, I can bed down in my sleeping bag on somebody's floor. But that's only happened a couple of times in all the years I've been here.'

‘How many years is that?' she asked.

‘Six now. I came in July of seventy-seven as a client.'

‘A client?' Her brows drew together slightly.

‘I had a little drug problem courtesy of my stint in 'Nam . . . along with a few other issues.'

‘I see,' she said, eyes on the carrot she was peeling over a stainless steel basin. ‘A lot of the boys came home messed up in some way,' she said softly. ‘It was a terrible time.'

‘That it was,' he agreed. ‘There were moments when I used to think the guys who didn't make it back were the lucky ones. Those of us who did come home . . . we weren't the same.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Not the same at all.'

‘People you knew?'

‘We should change the subject,' she said, ‘for both our sakes.'

‘Agreed.' He was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘About this stew.'

‘What about it?'

‘Why don't I show you how it's done.'

‘You actually cook at The Farm?'

‘No.' He shook his head, emitting a low laugh. ‘There's an honest-to-God chef. I'm a helper and a server. I do whatever needs doing in the kitchen. But I like cooking and I don't often get a chance to use
that
skill beyond prepping salad or veggies.'

‘In that case,' she said, ‘please teach me. I have no skill at all.'

After the vegetables were done and they'd carried everything to the kitchen, Hay said, ‘I think I should go get my sleeping bag from the truck. From what I can see, the snow is really piling up out there. If I wait much longer, I may not be able to get to the truck.'

‘You're going to need that sleeping bag,' she said, somewhat apologetically. ‘A couple of weeks from now there will actually be furniture, so no one will have to sleep on the floor.'

Picking up on her tone, he said, ‘Believe me, I'm glad to be indoors. As I said, I'm used to bedding down on the floor now and then. I even keep a change of clothes in the truck, just in case.' Was she saying he might be welcome to return? He hoped so. He didn't have many non-program friends. And though he was deeply grateful for the program and the support that was always there for him, while it was unlikely he'd ever admit this to any of his sober friends, every now and then he got tired of drunks and druggies, their drama and the sometime narcissism that so tediously placed them at the center of their personal universes.

It wasn't that he ever forgot he was one of them; it was just that there was a larger world he also belonged to. And sometimes he deeply missed that world: its casual chaos or calm, its risky so-called normalcy. Usually after a few days or even only a few hours in that world, he was glad to return to the patterned, predictable sanity of the program. Yet that longing for the other world was like the ache of grief that was never far from the surface. It pulled at him, a siren song trying to lure him back to a past that could never be resurrected. They were gone and so was the shyly optimistic young man he'd been.

A minute after he went out, she grabbed her down jacket, pulled on her boots and stepped out onto the porch, watching as he pushed his way through the drifts, moving down the driveway. The snow closed around him about halfway down and she stared into the gusting snow, trying to see where he'd gone.

Irrationally, she felt a surge of fear. It was, she reasoned, because she couldn't see more than a few feet in front of her, something she'd never before experienced. But what did she really fear? she wondered, reminding herself that she was the woman who believed her life or death was of no consequence. Had that changed? She didn't think so. Was she afraid of this man she didn't really know? Never. She knew with certainty that he was harmless, kind-hearted, good-humored. What then?

Such a strange, unsettling sensation, all because she was unable to see her surroundings. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets, making herself smaller inside the jacket, while the wind pushed the snow in at her, getting into her eyes and down her neck, robbing her body of its heat. The snow was piling up against the inside perimeter of the porch railing. The snow, she decided, was like her beautiful mother: soulless and cold. But unlike her lack of feeling for her mother, Tally actually liked the snow, respected its beauty, its power. And yet there was this inner shaking.

She was so startled when Hay suddenly appeared at the foot of the porch steps that she laughed – a surprised little yelp. And then she was embarrassed.

‘What?' he asked with an automatic smile, sleeping bag under an arm that also held a backpack, a gloved hand wiping his eyes.

‘I couldn't see anything,' she confessed. ‘It gave me the willies. And then you suddenly appeared. I don't know . . .'

‘Welcome to the northeast,' he said cheerfully. ‘We get a lot of this in the winter.'

‘I'm looking forward to it,' she said, as they returned inside to remove their boots and jackets in friendly silence. ‘Now that I know what to expect, it won't give me the willies.'

She was glad he was there. He was good company. Perhaps they would become friends.

F
aith walked slowly through the downstairs rooms, a nearly full glass of neat Scotch in one hand and a single-edged razor blade in the other. It was dark, past nine o'clock, but she hadn't bothered to turn on any lights down here. In the dark, the house seemed even larger, yet felt oddly less imposing. She hated this goddamned house.

She paused in the living room, carefully turning the razor blade over and over in her fingers as she took a sip of the Scotch. Maybe she'd do it in here, smack in the middle of the antique oriental carpet. That'd be good. She smiled briefly, more of a grimace really, feeling the shallow, worn-away nap of the pile beneath her bare feet. Upon consideration, it struck her as disrespectful to damage a carpet that had probably caused several young Chinese women to go blind as they worked the wool day after day in some unheated place with almost no light. So she moved on, into the front hall.

Here, for some reason, the cool marble floor made her think of the bathroom upstairs. She turned and looked up. The light from her bedroom cast a remote glow. Experimentally she tightened her hand around the blade. A bit more pressure and the slick metal would slice neatly into the cushion of flesh at the top of her palm. She relaxed her grip slightly, the blade resting almost weightlessly against her incurled fingers.

Another sip of Scotch while she considered doing it right here in the hall. Someone or other would open the front door and there she'd be: eighty-one pounds of unadorned flesh sprawled in a pool of blood on the perfectly polished black and white marble squares. Quite a statement that'd make. She smiled again and started up the stairs, taking her time because she wasn't sober and the last thing she wanted was to fall ass-over-teacup and break her neck. No. It couldn't be an accident. For once in her life she wanted to be the one in control.

She stood in the bedroom doorway for a time, looking in objectively. It was inarguably a nice room, spacious, with graceful dimensions. There was a fireplace, a walk-in dressing room/closet, an en suite bathroom. The fabric of the curtains matched the custom-made bedspread, and the upholstery on the settee positioned at an angle in front of the fireplace matched exactly the bluish green that predominated in the curtains and spread. Antique-white finish with subtle gold trim on the headboard, night tables, and desk. Three expensively framed prints of pastoral scenes hung in a precise row over the mantel. The walls were covered in beige silk. Silk! A bedroom right out of a forty-year-old decorating magazine. ‘House and goddamned Garden,' she said aloud.

Making a face, she went to sit on the side of the bed, looking down at herself. Her belly curved inward as if pushed in by the weight of the surgical tracks, her thighs were narrow blue-white cylinders of meat, her ribs were visible and she had no breasts. ‘Jesus!' she whispered, despising herself. Half an inch over five feet tall, eighty-two pounds: the size and shape of a ten-year-old. She took a gulp of the Scotch, then put the glass down on the bedside table, pulled open the drawer and got out her Marlboros and the ashtray.

After a hard pull on the cigarette, she positioned the razor blade point-down just above her knee, applied a moderate degree of pressure, and drew it up the length of her thigh.

She gasped. It stung, and in the blade's wake a thin strand of blood welled up. Gazing at the cut, she took another drag on the cigarette, wondering what would happen if she just went to work and started cutting off her flesh in slabs. She could slice herself down to nothing. Too bad she'd bleed to death before she had a chance to see her skeleton.

Repositioning the blade, she concentrated on making another cut, exactly parallel to the first. It was slow, painful work. Tears built up in her eyes. Her nose started to run. She sniffed, paused to take another drag, propped the cigarette on the lip of the ashtray and swallowed half the remaining Scotch. She was starting to feel a bit sick. Little beads of blood dotted the length of the two cuts.

She wet a finger and rubbed at the blood, making sticky smears on her skin. Her leg was smarting now. She reached over and took a last puff of the cigarette, stubbed it out, then turned to look over her shoulder at the room, a sob taking her by surprise.

Gripped by despair, she thought how much she hated this room, this house, everything and everyone in it. She hated the tedious predictability of her existence in this house. But most of all she hated the loathsome body she had to drag around every day. She held up her left hand and looked at her long, blood-red-painted fingernails. What a joke! As if people would be so distracted by her fabulous nails that they wouldn't notice she was about fifteen pounds underweight and had a face that, in profile, looked like a wedge of cheese.

Closing her eyes, she could see him wearing his indulgent expression, could hear him saying, ‘There's no need for you to have these problems. It's purely an issue of mind over matter.' He said it in a tone she knew was meant to be gentle, kind, concerned. But it came across as condescending, superior. He couldn't help himself. She knew that, too.

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, anguish lodged like a brick in her chest as she directed her gaze at the open door to the bathroom.
Do it now
, she told herself.
Stop trying to make tricky plans. Just get it over with once and for all
. For years she'd been considering ways and means. Maybe now was as good a time as any.