Goodnight Blackbird (2 page)

"S
o this is it," Laurie said, "the House on Haunted Hill."

1661 Shadeland wasn't on a hill, it was at the end of a cul-de-sac in Lyndhurst, a middle-class Cleveland suburb whose only virtue, Darren believed, was that it was five minutes from his office in Mayfield Heights. He pulled into his driveway as Laurie pressed her face close to the passenger side window like a little girl getting her first look at the Magic Kingdom.

Darren had to shade his eyes against a spectacular setting sun. It was the beginning of May, the weather was perfect, Laurie was here and he was feeling good. Even his house looked like it was feeling good. The sun turned the western windows a blazing, welcoming gold, and the recently mowed lawn was immaculate (if a bit brown in places). Darren hoped the house would behave itself tonight. He was about eighty-five percent sure it would. There hadn't been any disturbances since the phone incidents two weeks ago, and the more he thought about them the more he could write them off as minor electrical glitches—nothing more.

Like any girl raised on a steady diet of PG-13 horror flicks, however, Laurie was hoping for some good, old-fashioned supernatural fireworks. Last week they had had a fine time on their first date—En Fuego, a four-star Mexican place downtown—but for their second date, Laurie had insisted on cooking him dinner at his house. She wanted to "feel the cold spots" first-hand.

Darren toted the bag of groceries while Laurie carried the two-liter bottle of root beer (she didn't drink alcohol) and the box of pastries. She lingered on the front lawn, looking up at the bland, clean lines of the house, its bland white siding, its utterly vanilla architectural character. In fact, the house's character was defined by its sheer lack of character. 1661 looked like one of the tiny plastic houses that came with every Monopoly board. There were clones of 1661 on every suburban street in every city and town of America. Some homeowners would try to jazz things up with a deck in the back or premium decorative shutters from Home Depot, but the effect would always be like Donny Osmond trying to cover an Aerosmith tune. Nothing would ever disguise the drab Willy Loman soul of a house such as 1661.

In a strange sort of way, it was one of the things Darren found endearing about the place. He nodded at the front picture window which was almost totally obscured by a large evergreen bush that reached up past the roofline. "Know what really sold me on the place?" he said. "Aside from the price? That bush. It looks like the house is holding it up in front of its face, hoping no one notices it. Like it's bashful."

Laurie's grin made the sunset seem dark and insipid by comparison. "If my hands weren't full I would seriously hug you right now."

He held the screen door open for her. "
Après vous, mademoiselle
."

Darren gave her the nickel tour, which took all of two minutes. She oohed and ahhed from time to time, too goodhearted to comment on how threadbare his couch and chairs were, how dusty his vertical blinds were. Then she commandeered the kitchen and told him to stay out of her way.

Watching Laurie whip up some chicken parmigiana and grilled squash while listening to her running commentary on fifteen different subjects at once, Darren felt—not for the first time—that disorienting moral pang that comes from being with a substantially younger woman. In three years he would be forty; six months ago, Laurie hadn't been old enough to order a chocolate martini.

"—and I'm actually glad I won't be graduating until next December," Laurie she was saying, bouncing from pot to pan to cupboard, "because even in a good economy, how employable are psych majors? I am
so
not anxious to end up waiting around for a temp agency to call. You are so lucky to be where you are."

Writing press releases for an aerospace components company that was barely solvent wasn't exactly the height of worldly success, but Darren supposed it was all a matter of perspective. He grated the parmesan and took a swig of root beer. "Does my age bother you at all?"

"How do you know I don't like older men?" She said it with a half-comic sauciness that was far too adorable to be sexy. Laurie sliced the squash with rapid-fire efficiency. She was blushing. "You know, you were the only one of the lunchtime crowd who didn't act all pompous and loud, like the insurance company guys, or try to hit on me all the time. I appreciated that. But it sure took you long enough to ask for my number." She stirred the squash in the sizzling skillet, adding a pinch of garlic. "You are going to love this. My dad will sometimes make this at the restaurant for his lunch but he never puts it on the menu."

Darren was doing sad, morbid arithmetic in his head. Laurie had been born in 1988. He wondered if she'd even heard of Jackson Browne. For her Elton John was probably just the old guy who did the
Lion King
song.

"How long were you married?" Laurie asked suddenly.

Darren set two places at the little dining room table. "Two years. Divorced for three."

"You said you split up because of this house?"

"Oh Lord, let's talk about something more interesting. Like the results of my last colonoscopy."

"I'm just curious. I told you my dark secret of stealing my mother's Vicodin, remember?"

Darren smiled, thinking how best to sum up the end of his marriage without turning it into the kind of bitter, depressing rant better reserved for a therapist's office. "We were living in an apartment, saving our money for a place. Annika really wanted this big old arts-and-crafts-style house out in Wickliffe near her family. I hated it. Smelled like a wet dog. And it was about twenty grand more than this place. I liked this house. Neither of us would budge. She was getting her Master's and didn't have a job and I was doing the financial heavy lifting for the two of us, so I felt my decision should carry more weight. Not very chivalrous of me, I know."

Laurie said nothing.

"Annika could not believe I would want to live in a house where...." His eyes instinctively went to the bookcase in the corner of the tiny dining room. Behind the massive leatherbound collected works of Shakespeare was the dimple in the drywall where the final .45 slug had ended up seven years ago after exiting Jerry McAvoy's skull. "She moved out the day I made an offer on this place," Darren said.

Laurie quietly filled their plates with food. Darren was overcome with the need to soften the picture he had just painted of himself—the sick, cruel spouse who wanted to force his wife to live in the Amityville Horror. "Remember, this was years before the housing market crashed," he said. "There weren't a whole lot of affordable places out there. Definitely nothing this decent at such a low price. The monthly payment on this place is about a hundred dollars less than it would have been on the house Annika wanted. Money does matter. Especially when you don't have a lot of it."

"Maybe it wasn't the money that appealed to you about the house. Maybe it was just a way to be done with Annika without bearing the responsibility for ending it yourself."

"Ouch. The doctor is
in
."

"Oh God, I can't believe I said that out loud. I'm so sorry—"

He laughed. She was beyond adorable. He kissed her on the forehead and told her to eat.

They talked for more than two and a half hours. They talked about her job at her dad's restaurant, about her potential life after college, about a dozen other things. By ten-thirty, he began clearing the table and rinsing off the dishes, figuring he would impress Laurie's parents by getting her home just past eleven. When he felt Laurie's hand linger on the small of his back as she put her plate in the sink, however, he sensed that maybe she had other ideas. She took her coffee and went into the living room. Darren put the dirty silverware in the dishwasher, feeling a satisfying glow inside. This was the way life was supposed to feel.

"You really ought to get some pictures and stuff to put on the walls," Laurie called out. "When I get my own place I'm gonna blow up some of these black and white pictures I took of Glacier National Park. When my parents took me and my sister last year. The photos actually turned out really good."

"You're into photography?" Darren poured himself some coffee and was about to reach for the sugar bowl when Laurie shrieked. It was the most startling sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of raw, atavistic terror—the sound that welled up when you were suddenly face to face with something repulsive and threatening and irrational on a scale that exceeded what your mind could handle. The horror in her voice was so intense it was contagious: Darren's heart rate leapt into a throbbing, adrenalized overdrive and he felt chilled to the core, as if he had stepped into a vortex of supercooled air.

He charged into the living room to see Laurie standing in front of the couch, her eyes wide and staring at the far wall, her hands up by the sides of her face and twisted into tarantula-shaped claws, as if she were about to shred her cheeks open. Her coffee cup lolled on the carpet by her feet in a small puddle of Taster's Choice.

"Oh my God oh my God," she said. "Oh
God
."

Darren saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was the couch, the sagging armchair, the coffee table, the cheapo pressed wood entertainment center with all its chips and nicks. Nothing else. Darren
felt
nothing else, sensed nothing else. The living room was the same as it had always been.

"What is it? What did you see?"

He touched her on the elbow. Laurie recoiled as if Darren had jabbed her with a needle, her eyes still riveted to the blank wall behind the La-Z-Boy recliner. Darren followed her eyes but saw nothing. Just a chair; just a wall.

"Laurie, what is it? What did you see?"

"I want to go home. Please. Take me home. I have to go home."

"Laurie—"

Her hands shook as she grabbed her purse. "Take me home, please," she said, her voice turning shrill.

In the car, she would not tell him what she saw. He pulled into the empty parking lot of a strip mall and held her hand and begged her to calm down and just tell him what happened. This only made things worse. She began to weep and yell at him, demanding that he just drive, just take her home
now
. She would not look at him. She stared straight ahead, breathing loudly through her nose. She was nearly hyperventilating. She held her purse primly in her lap in two white-knuckled fists.

She did not say goodbye. When she yanked open the front door of her parents' house, she did not look back at him.

A grim scrapbook of the following week:

Several unreturned phone calls, several plaintive voice mails, hi Laurie, please call me back, let's at least talk about this.

Two visits to Pizza Italia—during the first one, she saw him and slipped out of sight into the kitchen. Another waitress took his order. Laurie's father watched him from behind the register, his expression unreadable but not exactly brimming with hospitality. For a moment Darren could almost see himself the way her dad must see him: desperate and borderline creepy, way too old and worn for a girl whose life was made up of final exams and iTunes downloads.

During the second visit Darren wouldn't let her avoid him. When her shift was over and she walked outside, he was right there. The wincing expression on her face told him that this meeting was about as pleasurable to her as gum surgery.

"Why won't you talk to me?" Darren said. His attempt to keep a wheedling, annoyed tone out of his voice was unsuccessful. "We need to talk about this. What happened that night?"

She shut her eyes. "Look. I just don't want to talk about it. I just think... that we probably shouldn't, you know, hang out anymore. I'm sorry."

He recalled the lingering feel of her hand on his back that night. It had meant something. He could have sworn that it had. "This doesn't make any sense. Why are you treating me this way? Can you at least answer me that?"

"Darren." She rubbed her forehead as if she felt the onset of a migraine. She was avoiding his eyes, preferring instead to watch the traffic go by on Wilson Mills Road. "I just don't think we should keep seeing each other." More firmness in her voice now. The subject was closed.

He didn't know what else to say, so he said, "All right." What could he say? She was completely shut off to him now. He was old enough to know when to cut his losses. He was about to head back to his car when she spoke again.

"I just had some time to think about it. And I think you're right, the age difference is kind of a problem."

"It wasn't a problem before."

"You just..." she began, staring at the ground and shaking her head. She seemed to be on the verge of leveling with him, but then she pressed her lips firmly together and the hard, unreadable glaze came over her eyes again. "You need to get out of that house," she said finally.

"Laurie, just tell me what you saw."

"I've got to go."

She hurried off to her old Chevy Cavalier, leaving Darren more confused than ever. Within hours the confusion gave way to an all-too-familiar, low-grade sense of mourning—for another lost opportunity, for another bungled shot at the ordinary sort of happiness that came so easily to most people but for him always seemed to be a little out of reach.

It was the second week of May, and his life settled once again into its usual pattern of work and microwave dinners in front of the TV. Since that evening with Laurie there had been no further incidents at his house. It was as if whatever monster she had glimpsed had gone dormant, sated for now.

The only thing out of the ordinary that occurred that week was an e-mail sent to his workplace account from someone named Jacqueline Prentiss. It said:
So, have you decided? One who suffers or one who teaches?

J
acqueline Prentiss had a secret.

Actually, she had several—and this fact surprised her, given how guileless and aboveboard her life had been for so long. The life of a one-dimensional girl. One time in high school it got back to her that a few of the guys thought she was an airhead despite her good grades. A naïve, sweetly smiling airhead who said little in class because she had little to say. At the time Jacqueline—then known as Jackie—was outraged. Just because someone's shy doesn't mean she's stupid, she'd wanted to say. But in retrospect she had to admit that they were right. She had no depth. She didn't read the newspaper, she didn't know why America fought the Vietnam War. She read teen magazines and thought endlessly about boys. She was honest and simple. And of course she had no secrets. Simple people never did. Secrets implied complexity, nuance, a palette of unorthodox tints. Simple people painted their lives in broad strokes of primary colors.

But with time comes nuance. Now she had become a keeper of secrets.

One such secret was now printed on her new batch of business cards, some of which were stowed in her purse. Jacqueline LaPierre—her maiden name. When she pulled into her driveway in Beachwood and saw Kevin's Lincoln Navigator already there, she made a plan to keep her purse out of Kevin's sight tonight. He was known to occasionally root around in her purse for gum, for loose change, for tissues. If he happened upon one of the cards and saw that she had jettisoned his last name he would be hurt. He wouldn't show it, of course. Kevin would be detached, analytical and understanding to a fault.
Well, it's to be expected
, he would say.
We're separated, you're trying to establish a new identity, and you want your work life to be fully separate from me, from everything that came before.
But it would hurt him, and even if it was just the equivalent of a pinprick, it would still hurt. The fact that he kept showing up like this meant that he was not trying to separate his life from hers, from everything that came before.

He stood next to the SUV, hands in the pockets of his Dockers, looking pensive and a little nervous. He always did nowadays whenever they were together. Jacqueline sensed that it was her increasingly erratic lifestyle that was making him uneasy.

"What's up?" she asked. She gathered her pile of folders from the front seat.

"You work late and still bring work home. You'll be running that place soon."

At Datascape Market Research, she wrote studies about a dozen different industries. Whenever the CEO of an office supplies company gave a PowerPoint presentation saying that demand for felt tip pens was expected to increase two percent over the next five years, he invariably used information compiled by someone like Jacqueline. It wasn't a glamorous job, and she wasn't raking in the money the way Kevin was—he was part of the in-house legal team for Stratus Chemical downtown—but she was getting by, although Kevin still paid the mortgage.

"How come you didn't wait inside?" she asked. "You still have your key, don't you?"

Kevin nodded, not looking at her. Of course he wouldn't wait inside. It was a dumb question, now that she thought about it.

"Just came by to see if you wanted to go to Leslie's party tomorrow," Kevin said. Leslie was Kevin's sister, and her daughter Claire would be nine years old tomorrow. "Last week you said you'd think about it."

"I said I'd get back to you if I wanted to go." She let them into the house and Kevin stood by the kitchen table while she poured herself a glass of iced tea. He declined the pitcher when she held it out to him.

"So, you're saying no."

"I'm not up to it, Kevin, I'm sorry."

"It's just that Leslie hasn't seen you in months. Claire kind of misses you too. She asks about you—"

"She's not going to notice one missing adult. She'll be busy with her friends." Jacqueline put a Lean Cuisine French bread pizza in the microwave. Did he really think she wanted to spend four hours in the high-pitched chaos of a kids' party? Did he really want to be there himself? Jacqueline knew he loved children but why did he want to put himself smack dab in the middle of situations that would only inflame that old phantom pain?

Kevin said nothing for a long time. Then: "Last weekend you blew me off when I asked if you wanted to grab lunch somewhere. I guess I'm getting a little frustrated here. It's like I don't quite know where I stand with you. If you want me to buzz off completely, maybe it would be better if you just came right out and told me."

"You chose to move out," Jacqueline reminded him.

"I moved out because I couldn't take living in this house anymore. After what happened anyone could understand that. I wasn't leaving the marriage."

"It amounts to the same thing."

"No, it doesn't. I wanted to get a new place. I still do. Hell, if you like this neighborhood so much we can just buy a place down the street. I just can't be here."

"I understand that."

"So explain to me a couple things. Can you do that?"

"Okay," Jacqueline said.

"First, why are you so distant from me? Are you trying to get back at me for moving out?"

"I'm not trying to get back at you for anything. Believe it or not, sometimes I just want to spend some time alone."

"Spend some time alone here," Kevin said.

"Here, out taking a walk, out at the museum, the mall. What difference does it make?" She sat down on the couch in the living room. The couch faced the large sliding glass door to the patio and the thirty-foot pool, a dingy, debris-dotted, white-tiled hole in the ground that hadn't held water for six years. It was like the gaping burial vault for some enormous monster that had not yet died.

"Are you involved with someone?" Kevin asked.

Jacqueline stared at him. "Where did that come from?"

Kevin's expression was sharp. He seemed to be steeling himself for her answer.

"No, Kevin, I'm not seeing anyone."

"You'd just rather sit around here instead of having anything to do with me."

"I'm not always here. I just told you." The microwave oven chirped. She went into the kitchen with Kevin trailing behind her, a grim shadow.

"Actually, you do seem to be here all the time," Kevin said. "Every time I drive by here, your car is here."

"Are you
watching
me? Good God, why would you do that?"

"Because I'm trying to figure out why you love this damned house more than me. Why you won't leave it. You go to work, then you come back here. Work, then here. You shut everyone else out. I guess I'm relieved—it's not just me you're trying to blow off. It's Leslie, it's Claire, it's everyone."

She stared at the meager pizza in front of her, her appetite vanishing. "Kevin, it's been a long day."

"If you're going through another... if this is like the depression you had...." He sat down at the kitchen table across from her. "I just wish you'd tell me. Because you do know how this appears to everyone, don't you? Your refusal to even consider selling this place... it's like you're punishing yourself, rubbing your nose in what happened."

"Maybe I like the house. Have you ever considered that?" The stridency in her voice surprised her. It seemed to surprise Kevin as well.

"Then we'll get one just like it. I saw one for sale on Belwood a couple blocks away. Same kind of ranch, but it had an attached garage. Bigger lot, too. How about that?"

Jacqueline said nothing.

"You're not making any sense at all," Kevin said. "I offer to get us a better house, but you don't want that. It's irrational."

"And maybe I think your inability to stick it out here is pretty damned irrational. Do you think if we just pick up and move to some other house the bad memories will magically disappear?"

"No, but I think it's healthier than living in a goddamned crime scene." His voice was hoarse, close to breaking. He stood up and raked a hand through his thinning hair. For a moment he looked at the pool—the scene of the crime—before returning his gaze to Jacqueline. His face was puffy and lined, and there were more than a few grey hairs at his temples. The double chin that he sometimes got when he grimaced now seemed to have become a permanent feature on his face. (Or maybe there was just so much more to grimace about.) A small part of her wanted to touch his face and comfort him. He was growing older, his wife was fading away from him and the life he had envisioned for himself fifteen years ago was dissolving all around him like a sand castle at high tide.

It would have been so easy to get up, take him in her arms and tell him okay, let's start again.... The look of relief and hard-won joy in his eyes would have been heart-rending.

But she couldn't bring herself to do it. His wife may have been fading away from him, but Kevin was fading away from her as well, like a man standing on a pier as a ferry spirited her away. The affection she felt for him was morphing into something lukewarm and, at best, sisterly. It wasn't a deliberate choice on her part, but at some point during the separation Kevin had stopped feeling like home to her.

He stood by the stove, his back to her. "I don't suppose you've given any more thought to what we talked about last month."

Jacqueline wished she had taken some aspirin before coming home. "Kevin. I don't want to have another baby. And I'm not sure you do, either."

"Do you think I keep bringing it up just to fill time between the awkward silences? I'm serious about it."

"I think you just want to paper over Michelle." She said this as gently as she could but she knew it was going to hurt him anyway. Everything she said or did nowadays seemed to hurt him—like little inadvertent slices with a razor blade. "I think when it comes to having children, you should want to have them rather than need to have them."

"What does that mean?"

"Sometimes I see you looking at families in a restaurant or on the street. You have this desperation in your eyes. To find some way to get back what you—what we—lost." She had the image of a gambler who's lost his shirt at the tables and can't sleep, obsessed with getting back to the casino floor to try to win it all back. "I don't think that's the best frame of mind to be in when it comes to having children."

"I didn't realize all your time alone here has given you the ability to read minds and provide dime-store psychological insights."

"Kevin—"

"No, you've had your say, I'll have mine. You can't see into my mind, Jacqueline, so don't pretend you can. If you want to reduce me down to a few pitiful pop psychology motives, I can do the same to you. How about this? You won't leave the house because you're punishing yourself. You don't want to forget seeing her in the pool like that. I know what that therapist said, that you had finally gotten beyond blaming yourself. But maybe you haven't. And maybe you don't want any more kids because deep down you're afraid you're incompetent. A lethal mother. But rather than admit that, it's easier to attack me."

Jacqueline placed her hands on the table, the cold, unappetizing pizza between them like a modern still life. It was clear she would probably throw the pizza away, even though the only things she'd eaten all day were some cheese and crackers from the office vending machine.

"Does what I said capture the essence of you?" Kevin said. "Does it sum you up? Probably not. I hope not. So maybe my desire to get back to a normal life with you has nothing to do with the pathetic little caricature you've drawn of me."

She sounded like a sullen, chastened little girl when she said, "I wasn't trying to hurt you."

Kevin sighed. "I just don't get you anymore. It's like you're completely closed off to me now. Like you're full of secrets you don't want to tell."

"I think we're all like that," Jacqueline said.

And she did have secrets. There was the issue of the business cards, there were her changing feelings for Kevin, who had once been the alpha and omega of her life, whose very presence had once been enough to make her heart race with a love/lust/adoration/joy that had been nearly painful.

There was also the matter of the anorexia. Well, maybe it wasn't truly anorexia yet—but in the last six months she seemed to have lost all interest in food. There were many, many days when she subsisted on toast and coffee for breakfast, and nine hours later she'd have a peach and a glass of iced tea for dinner. No lunch. Even when the hunger got too distracting and she broke down and had a full meal—take-out Chinese, usually, or lasagna classico at Olive Garden—there was invariably quite a bit left on her plate at the end of the night. Food just seemed unimportant—a necessary evil. It amazed her how some people made such a big deal out of it. She labeled such people trivial and then avoided those people.

There were other secrets as well. Little ones, unimportant ones. Like her newfound love of seventies soul music—the Commodores, Marvin Gaye, the Delfonics, the Chi-Lites. There was her almost sensual satisfaction in being alone. Xanax was wonderful but being alone cleared her mind and calmed her like nothing else could.

And being alone made another secret, her final secret, possible.

After Kevin left that evening, she went about her usual routine: a few minutes of TV, another glass of iced tea, a halfhearted attempt to catch up on some office busywork. Once that was done it was eight o'clock and the rest of the night spread out before her like a quiet, dark ocean, breathtaking in its vast emptiness. Sometimes at night she would read—books on life after death and mediumship, mostly. But most of the time she simply wandered the house, not thinking of much in particular, just trying to get her mind to gear down into a trance-like peace where everything in her world fell away—Kevin, work stresses, everything. She could then feel her senses sharpen and she'd become more receptive to her surroundings. The throbbing, frantic buzz of the evening crickets would sound louder, more hypnotic. The everyday house smells—the mock orange blossoms from the bush by the front door, the synthetic lemony scent of the dishwashing liquid—would intensify, as if they were magical perfumes cast by some invisible sorceress. The sorcery was almost always effective; Jacqueline would be so drowsy and empty and mentally purged that a rejuvenating, healing sleep would be almost guaranteed. And lately that sleep had a nice little bonus to it. A couple weeks ago, Michelle had come to her in a dream in the early morning hours. In the dream, Jacqueline had been at the Richmond Mall Starbucks and lightning had struck the power pole. Michelle's voice had told her:
Tonight your life begins again
. When she went to the coffee shop that night and she saw the lightning, she felt such a surge of satisfaction it was nearly erotic.
Your life begins again
. What did she mean? Jacqueline didn't know. The only thing she knew was that the dream wasn't just a dream—it was proof positive Michelle was communicating with her. So sleep was now as precious to Jacqueline as gold.