Yesternight (28 page)

U
p in the bedroom, the flames of candles and kerosene lamps fluttered upon blackened wicks. I remembered Mr. Harkey mentioning something about lighting the lamps as his wife and I ran out to the outhouse, but, still, it shocked me to see signs of life in the empty room.

Inside that smoky haze of light, I dropped to my knees and buried Bea's telegram deep inside one of the suitcases, beneath dresses and nightclothes and toiletries.

I was the one who told you about Yesternight when we were children
,
she had said, and a vague memory of a book came to mind. A slim red volume that may have, perhaps, included Cornelia Gunderson's photograph.

Pretend we're eating fingers from the garden,
I remembered an eight-year-old Bea once whispering beside me with a giggle when she chomped on a fresh green bean at the supper table.
You're eating fingers, Nell. How do they taste?

Child's play.

Simple child's play, used as a means to work out feelings about the mysteries of death. “Funeral play,” as one professor called it.

But one day you took it too far.

“I think I just escaped a horrifying death by outhouse,” said a voice by the door.

I shot up to a standing position and hid my hands behind my back, even though they carried nothing.

Michael closed the door and worked the knot out of his blue necktie. “I'm sorry. Did I startle you?”

“It's just the house.” I tried to shrug, but my shoulders merely twitched. “I'm so terribly jumpy.”

“I think this house might be more afraid of you than you are of it, Alice.”

I lowered my face. “We're still not positive that I'm her.”

“You sounded so certain. And that bullet mark . . .”

“It's not like with Janie. There's no sister to verify my statements.”

“Maybe there is.” He strolled toward the bed and slid the tie off his neck. “Maybe Mr. Harkey's grandmother talked of Mrs. Gunderson having a sister—”

“Don't be an idiot, Michael. Mr. Harkey probably lied about his grandmother knowing Mrs. Gunderson. He's a huckster who admits to selling bunk to saps.”

“Why are you snapping at me?”

“Please”—I sat on the bed and tore my right shoe off my foot—“forget what I said about Cornelia. It all sounds so stupid now that I'm upstairs.”

“But—”

“This was a mistake. I knew I shouldn't ever be with a man again. I knew it!” I tugged my left shoe off my heel and felt him staring at me.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, there's something definitely wrong all right—just ask my sisters, because apparently they know everything about me. They can tell you all about how I'm an emotional wreck and an embarrassment to the family, not because of any past life, but because of a far more pressing issue that even Mr. Harkey seems to think we should all be discussing.”

I tossed the shoe to the floor and cupped my hands over my face.

“What pressing issue?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

I sighed into my fingers. “I love sex, Michael. I'm an unmarried woman, and I absolutely adore climbing into bed with men. It's been killing me for years.”

“What do you mean, it's killing you?”

“It's so terribly dangerous—so terribly wrong for me to love it.”

“Dangerous?” He breathed a short laugh. “I don't understand—”

“A girl could get pregnant. She could lose her career. She could have people calling her ‘loose' or ‘slut' and render everything else in her life—all of her work and hard-earned respect—
meaningless
. I feel absolutely worthless when people think of me that way, especially my own sister Margery. And I feel so awful for raising your hopes for a better life, when here you are, stuck Christmas Eve with a broken woman who's desperate to blame her problems on someone else.”

“Alice?” Michael laid his tie over a corner of the bed. His voice softened. “Why are you saying these things? Have people been cruel to you? Has another guy . . . ?”

Tears strangled my throat. I clasped my hands around the back of my neck.

“Alice . . . come on now . . .” He wandered over to my side of the bed and sat down. “I don't think poorly of you. I love sex, too, as a matter of fact. Desperately.”

“You're a man. You're allowed to.”

“I swore to you before, I won't get you pregnant.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I'll pull out in time.”

I huffed. “That doesn't always work.”

“I've had practice. It does.”

I shut my eyes and ground my teeth together. “I'm such a wreck, Michael.”

“So am I.” He placed a warm hand on my lower back and stroked my spine. “You don't know how badly I'm falling apart inside. But your wanting to be with me is helping me survive. It's the only thing getting me through.”

I sniffed and unlocked my fingers from the back of my neck. “Is it?”

“Yes.” He scooted closer. “Please, let's forget about past lives. Past pain. Past lovers. We both want each other right now, in this life, tonight, so why should anything else matter?”

“If I become pregnant—”

“You won't.” He swallowed up my hands in his, his flesh as bitter cold as the wind howling at the window. “I promise.”

A
LL IT TOOK
was that one promise.

One more kiss.

One hand placed just so.

Before long, we had buried ourselves beneath the blankets on the bed, our clothing forgotten on the floor.

“I want to kiss every single part of you,” he whispered against my neck, “but it's just so damn cold.”

“Stay here, then, with your lips against mine.”

All around us, the blizzard blustered. It breathed through the cracks in the walls and froze our skin, and yet our kisses led to caresses, to tasting, to tingling, goose-pimpled flesh and pounding hearts.

“Don't forget your promise,” I whispered.

“I won't,” he said as he climbed on top of me, just before that marvelous sensation of pressure pushed between my legs.

I wrapped my arms around his back, and the mattress purred beneath me, while the wind rattled through the boards and shuddered across the windowpane. I closed my eyes and gave myself up to the recklessness of it all, no longer thinking, only feeling—hungering and reacting and rising above my anxieties for as long as we could dare let the moment linger. Sighs and whimpers escaped my lips. My toes curled against the bed sheet.

Michael quickened his pace, and our arms and stomachs clenched against each other. His breathing loudened next to my ear, and he whispered with dreamy reverence, “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Is it almost time?” I asked. “Should we—”

A rush of warmth.

A groan of pleasure.

He shook against me, and my eyes flew wide open. I grabbed him by his hair and cried out, “No! Stop!” And yet he shook and shook and shook.

“Michael!” I pushed at his shoulders to get him off me. “You promised! You swore to me you wouldn't do that.”

“I'm sorry . . .”

“Get off of me.” I wriggled my legs.

“Alice—”

“Get off me!”

He lifted his chest away from mine, and I maneuvered around his locked arms and slid off the side of the mattress.

“Damn it!” I bundled up my clothing in my arms. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”

“Don't panic so much.”

“Don't tell me not to panic!”

He eased himself up to a seated position and wobbled as though drunk.

I slung my slip over my head. “Oh, Christ, you men have it so easy.”

“Don't turn this into a sexist thing. We both agreed to do that.”

“What does it feel like to be able to screw and know you can walk away without consequences? What does it feel like to not have to worry about your parents ripping you out of their lives and your hard work collapsing around you?”

He staggered around in the darkness of the other side of the bed and hit his knee on the bedside table. “Damn!”

“Did you ‘pull out' so expertly when you shacked up with your nurse at your training camp?”

“I told you not to bring up past lovers.”

“Did you knock her up?”

“No!” He tugged his pants up to his waist and buttoned them up. “If you must know, we used French letters. Condoms.”

“Why didn't you bother to get any for me?”

“Because we're in the middle of goddamned nowhere, Alice. You know that. I did the best I could right now. Don't invite me into your bedroom if you can't handle a fuck.”

I grabbed up one of my shoes.

Don't invite me into your bedroom if you can't handle a fuck,
I heard him say again, and my fingers gripped the smooth leather.

Aw, you're so loose,
Stu had told me,
some other chap was bound to knock you up anyway
.

Michael plopped down on his side of the bed and turned his undershirt right-side out before pulling it down over his chest.

I didn't even remember walking over to him.

All I saw was the side of a head of golden-blond hair that resembled Stu's, and then blood, spattering my cream-colored slip from a strike of the sharp edge of the heel against his skull.

Michael's mouth opened wide. He dropped to his knees on the floor and held his head, and I hit him with the shoe again, this time behind his ear.

“Alice!” he shouted. “What are you doing?”

He tried to reach out with his left hand, but I hammered his head a third time.

“Stop it!”

More blows. More blood. Tears drenched my face, and I wanted to stop, but I found myself being rushed on a gurney down the too-bright halls of a hospital, my womb contracting, people staring, staring, staring, and blood everywhere.
Four months pregnant,
they'd told me, and I pretended that was nothing. I pretended I hadn't wished for the loss to happen. I pretended I didn't care . . .

Michael grabbed the vase of geraniums from the table behind
him and whacked it against my skull with a blinding pain that knocked me sideways, onto the edge of the bed.

“What have you done?” one of us yelled—I wasn't sure who.

I fell backward to the floor, and the room blurred; my ears blared with a horrendous ringing commotion that drew vomit to my throat. An orange light blinked and throbbed in front of my left eye,
on and off, on and off . . .

“Is everything all right in there?” asked a garbled voice in the distance.

“Oh, Christ. Get up, get up, Alice.” Michael shook my shoulder. “This doesn't look good—you in just your slip, bleeding from the head. They're going to think I attacked and murdered you if you die. They're going to think
you
fought back, instead of the other way around.”

I rolled back and forth against my shoulder blades, my arms and head too heavy to lift off of the floor.

“Get up—please!” Michael stared down at me with his fingers wrapped around the vase, his teeth chattering, his eyes damp, his forehead bleeding. “Oh, God,” he said. “Why did you hit me? Why'd you go nuts just like Bec did? You're all ripping me to pieces right now. Get up!”

His face turned dim and distorted and then faded from view as my eyes no longer stayed open.

Someone slammed his weight against the door from the other side. More voices. Stern voices.

“Oh, Christ, Alice,” cried Michael. “I'm done with all of this. I'm done!”

The vase shattered against the floorboards.

A window opened.

Cold wind blasted through my hair.

I
woke up with surges of pain pulsating through my left temple—surges that brought on a dire need to vomit. Bandages squeezed the top of my head, and the smell of fresh gauze only added to the nausea. I crawled across the bed on my elbows and my belly and threw up on the bare floor below.

More sleep ensued, and then I awoke with a start, remembering.

Down on the floorboards at the foot of the bed, blood betrayed our violence. Piles of discarded clothing lay about like naughty children unwilling to hide their misbehavior. I still wore nothing but my slip, and I couldn't imagine what the Harkeys had thought when they found me lying in the middle of the room, half-naked, a wound gaping from the left side of my head. I remembered the sound of the window opening and wondered if they'd found Michael gone, or if he had stood there cradling his skull that I'd pummeled over and over again.

Not a soul seemed to stir downstairs.

I dressed and tiptoed down the staircase. A sickening wave of dizziness rolled through my brain, but I gripped the banister and called out, “Is anyone down here?”

Mrs. Harkey tromped into view upon shoes with sturdy heels that summoned more bile to my mouth. She wrung her hands and burst into tears. “We've called the police . . . and the doctor. No one can come until the roads get plowed.”

I stiffened. “You—you called the police?”

“He attacked you and left you for dead. It was horrifying, finding you that way.”

“Where is he?”

“He left.”

My heart stopped.

“We don't know how far he got,” she added, biting her lip.

“But . . . there was a blizzard.”

“He escaped out the window before Al could pry open the door.”

“There was a blizzard!”

“I bet it was this awful old house that did it.” She wiped at her eyes with her hands. “Did he think he was attacking Mrs. Gunderson? Was it Al's obsession with death—or his stories about cannibalism? It's too much, isn't it? I always tell him, it's too damn much!”

I left the bottommost step and froze in place, for I spied Michael's black overcoat, still hanging beside my jacket. His gloves and his scarf drooped out of the pockets.

“Do . . . do you know why he attacked you?” asked Mrs. Harkey, still sniffling.

I shook my head, not knowing how to answer—too confused to properly decide whether I needed to lie about the entire situation. I couldn't stop staring at Michael's coat and gloves.

Mrs. Harkey coughed and choked before sputtering out, “Al's out digging through the snow in that vegetable garden. The storm
passed, and he couldn't wait. The house is driving him out of his mind, too. All he talks about is those disgusting bodies.”

“I've got to find Michael.” I sprang for the coatrack and grabbed my jacket.

“The snow's deep. Please—wait for the police.”

“If he's still alive he'll need help.”

“Mrs. Lind . . .”

“He's not wearing much clothing.” I slung my arms through the sleeves.

“Mrs. Lind, I'm so sorry, but unless he made it back inside the house without us hearing . . . There's nothing but open fields out there . . . Even if he had worn his overcoat . . .”

I muffled a sob and buttoned up my jacket, my chin tucked against my chest, my throat swelling shut.

“The police will probably want to know why he hurt you. If it was marital abuse . . .”

I wrapped the scarf around my neck, not caring that it choked.

“They won't understand what this house does to people.” She rubbed her hands along the sides of her skirt. “I know you said you don't behave like Mrs. Gunderson anymore, but . . .”

My hands went still on the scarf's yarn. I met her eyes.

“Do be careful how you answer their questions.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Don't bring up that you were once Cornelia. The police might worry about you, too. Things that sound normal inside this house don't sound quite right to outsiders' ears.”

“But I wasn't Mrs. Gunderson—that's the thing. There's been a mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of reincarnation and put too much stock in coincidences.”

“But—”

“Michael lost his temper and attacked me. That's what happened. He attacked, and I fought back, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Gunderson.
Nothing.
He attacked me first. It had nothing to do with my past.”

The woman just stood there with her arms by her sides.

“Do you understand?” I asked. “Do you believe me? I was never Cornelia Gunderson.”

She gave two blinks of her bloodshot eyes, her pupils noticeably constricted, as though she partook in laudanum to endure the Hotel Yesternight.

“F-f-fine,” she said—the same old response I myself was trained to give to the schoolchildren.

M
Y EARS ACHED
from the lack of sound in that open field of endless, virgin snow. A troubling stillness had seized the land, and it seemed to thicken the air I breathed.

Twenty to thirty yards to the south of the house, a figure in a brown coat and Homburg hat shoveled snow away from a patch of earth. I saw Mr. Harkey's breath curling into the air and heard the faint swoosh of his blade digging into the powder, but he didn't even notice me out there.

My legs sank into snow clear up to my thighs; my muscles strained to clamber through the piles. I scanned the prairie as I went, in search of a stripe of color, an uneven hump, a patch of blond hair . . .

I saw him.

Oh, dear Lord.

To the east, a snowdrift the size of a man broke the flatness of
the land. I covered my face with mitten-clad fingers and breathed with strangled gasps.

You must go to him,
I told myself.
He once reached out to you in a storm
.
Go.

I slogged through a sea of snow over three feet deep with my eyes tearing up from the cold and the pain, and again Bea's warning from Thanksgiving haunted my head.

Don't insert yourself into other people's stories
.

Don't. Don't. Don't.

But I did.

He was Janie's father.
Janie's father.
How I envied that little girl for her newfound sense of peace—for the love and acceptance heaped upon her, even when she behaved in the strangest of ways. Everyone swore how much they protected her, and look what I did.

LOOK WHAT I DID.

This was not the life I was meant to lead.

This was not who I was.

Michael O'Daire lay flat on his stomach with his face angled toward me, his right cheek pressed against the frozen ground, his eyes faded to the coldest shade of blue. He wore only his undershirt and trousers and a pair of untied boots, and snow dusted them all. His skin had turned purple; his lips and the tip of his nose, a shocking black. Traces of blood stained his blond hair behind his left ear, above his forehead, on the top of his skull . . .

I wheeled around in the other direction and clasped my hands beneath my chin, shaking, crumbling into a thousand pieces. Tears hot and bitter burned my mouth and my tongue.

Mr. Harkey's shovel whooshed through the snow, and the Hotel Yesternight rose up in the near-distance, its slanted roof stretching
toward a colorless, unwelcoming sky. Sunlight reflected off one of the upstairs windows—the one through which Michael had made his exit. My vision blurred, and the reflection seemed to be a wink, as if the house were telling me,
You may not have ever lived here, Alice, but, my goodness, you sure do behave as though you did.

I sank down onto the snow in front of Janie's father and contemplated whether I should stay by his side and freeze into the prairie along with him, or if another chance still awaited me.

If this was the end, or a beginning.

If I would always have to be this Alice, or if I could heal myself into something entirely new.