Stranger Things Happen (4 page)

Outside, the moths beat at his face, and he reeled beside
Rachel's mother on the moony-white gravel, light as a thread spun
out on its spool. She walked quickly, leaning forward a little as
her right foot came down, dragging the left foot through the small
stones.

"What kind of dogs are they?" he said.

"Black ones," she said.

"What are their names?"

"Flower and Acorn," she said, and flung open the barn door. Two
Labradors, slippery as black trout in the moonlight, surged up at
Carroll. They thrust their velvet muzzles at him, uttering angry
staccato coughs, their rough breath steaming at his face. They were
the size of small ponies and their paws left muddy prints on his
shirt. Carroll pushed them back down, and they snapped at his
hands.

"Heel," Mrs. Rook said, and instantly the two dogs went to her,
arranging themselves on either side like bookends. Against the
folds of her skirt, they were nearly invisible, only their
saucer-like eyes flashing wickedly at Carroll.

"Flower's pregnant," Mrs. Rook said. "We've tried to breed them
before, but it never took. Go for a run, girl. Go with her,
Acorn."

The dogs loped off, moonlight spilling off their coats like
water. Carroll watched them run; the stale air of the barn washed
over him, and under the bell of Mrs. Rook's skirt he pictured the
dark wood of the left leg, the white flesh of the right leg, like a
pair of mismatched dice. Mrs. Rook drew in her breath. She said, "I
don't mind you sleeping with my daughter but you had better not get
her pregnant." Carroll said,

"No, ma'am." "If you give her a bastard, I'll set the dogs on
you," she said, and went back towards the house. Carroll scrambled
after her.

#

On Friday, Carroll was shelving new books on the third floor. He
stood, both arms lifted up to steady a wavering row of psychology
periodicals. Someone paused in the narrow row, directly behind him,
and a small cold hand insinuated itself into his trousers, slipping
under the waistband of his underwear.

"Rachel?" he said, and the hand squeezed, slowly. He jumped and
the row of books toppled off their shelf, like dominoes. He bent to
pick them up, not looking at her. "I forgive you," he said.

"That's nice," she said. "For what?" "For not telling me about
your father's—" he hesitated, looking for the word, "—wound."

"I thought you handled that very well," she said. "And I did
tell you about my mother's leg."

"I wasn't sure whether or not to believe you. How did she lose
it?"

"She swims down in the pond. She was walking back up to the
house. She was barefoot. She sliced her foot open on something. By
the time she went to see a doctor, she had septicemia and her leg
had to be amputated just below the knee. Daddy made her a
replacement out of walnut; he said the prosthesis that the hospital
wanted to give her looked nothing like the leg she'd lost. It has a
name carved on it. She used to tell me that a ghost lived inside it
and helped her walk. I was four years old." She didn't look at him
as she spoke, flicking the dust off the spine of a tented book with
her long fingers.

"What was its name?" Carroll asked.

"Ellen," Rachel said.

#

Two days after they had first met, Carroll was in the basement
stacks. It was dark in the aisles, the tall shelves curving towards
each other. The lights were controlled by timers, and went on and
off untouched by human hand: there was the ominous sound of ticking
as the timers clicked off row by row. Puddles of dirty yellow light
wavered under his feet, the floor as slick as water. There was one
other student on this floor, a boy who trod at Carroll's heels,
breathing heavily.

Rachel was in a back corner, partly hidden by a shelving cart.
"Goddammit, goddammit to hell," she was saying, as she flung a book
down. "Stupid book, stupid, useless, stupid, know-nothing books."
She kicked at the book several more times, and stomped on it for
good measure. Then she looked up and saw Carroll and the boy behind
him. "Oh," she said. "You again." Carroll turned and glared at the
boy. "What's the matter," he said. "Haven't you ever seen a
librarian at work?"

The boy fled. "What's the matter?" Carroll said again.

"Nothing," Rachel said. "I'm just tired of reading stupid books
about books about books. It's ten times worse then my mother ever
said." She looked at him, weighing him up. She said, "Have you ever
made love in a library?"

"Um," Carroll said. "No."

Rachel stripped off her woolly sweater, her blue undershirt.
Underneath, her bare flesh burned. The lights clicked off two rows
down, then the row beside Carroll, and he moved forward to find
Rachel before she vanished. Her body was hot and dry, like a newly
extinguished bulb.

Rachel seemed to enjoy making love in the library. The library
officially closed at midnight, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays when
he was the last of the staff to leave, Carroll left the East
Entrance unlocked for Rachel while he made up a pallet of jackets
and sweaters from the Lost and Found.

The first night, he had arranged a makeshift bed in the aisle
between PR878W6B37, 
Relative Creatures
, and
PR878W6B35, 
Corrupt Relations
. In the summer, the
stacks had been much cooler than his un-air-conditioned room. He
had hoped to woo her into his bed by the time the weather turned,
but it was October already. Rachel pulled PR878W6A9 out to use as a
pillow. "I thought you didn't like books," he said, trying to make
a joke.

"My mother doesn't like books," she said. "Or libraries. Which
is a good thing. You don't ever have to worry about her looking for
me here."

When they made love, Rachel kept her eyes closed. Carroll
watched her face, her body rocking beneath him like water. He
closed his eyes, opening them quickly again, hoping to catch her
looking back at him. Did he please her? He pleased himself, and her
breath quickened upon his neck. Her hands smoothed his body, moving
restlessly back and forth, until he gathered them to himself,
biting at her knuckles.

Later he lay prone as she moved over him, her knees clasping his
waist, her narrow feet cupped under the stirrups of his knees. They
lay hinged together and Carroll squinted his eyes shut to make the
Exit sign fuzzy in the darkness. He imagined that they had just
made love in a forest, and the red glow was a campfire. He imagined
they were not on the third floor of a library, but on the shore of
a deep, black lake in the middle of a stand of tall trees.

"When you were a teenager," Rachel said, "what was the worst
thing you ever did?"

Carroll thought for a moment. "When I was a teenager," he said,
"I used to go into my room every day after school and masturbate.
And my dog Sunny used to stand outside the door and whine. I'd come
in a handful of Kleenex, and afterward I never knew what to do with
them. If I threw them in the wastebasket, my mother might notice
them piling up. If I dropped them under the bed, then Sunny would
sneak in later and eat them. It was a revolting dilemma, and every
day I swore I wouldn't ever do it again."

"That's disgusting, Carroll."

Carroll was constantly amazed at the things he told Rachel, as
if love was some sort of hook she used to drag secrets out of him,
things that he had forgotten until she asked for them. "Your turn,"
he said.

Rachel curled herself against him. "Well, when I was little, and
I did something bad, my mother used to take off her wooden leg and
spank me with it. When I got older, and started being asked out on
dates, she would forbid me. She actually said 
I forbid you
to go
, just like a Victorian novel. I would wait until she
took her bath after dinner, and steal her leg and hide it. And I
would stay out as late as I wanted. When I got home, she was always
sitting at the kitchen table, with the leg strapped back on. She
always found it before I got home, but I always stayed away as long
as I could. I never came home before I had to.

"When I was little I hated her leg. It was like her other child,
the obedient daughter. I was the one she had to spank. I thought
the leg told her when I was bad, and I could feel it gloating
whenever she punished me. I hid it from her in closets, or in the
belly of the grandfather clock. Once I buried it out in the
strawberry field because I knew it hated the dark: it was scared of
the dark, like me."

Carroll eased away from her, rolling over on his stomach. The
whole time she had been talking, her voice had been calm, her
breath tickling his throat. Telling her about Sunny, the
semen-eating dog, he had sprouted a cheerful little erection.
Listening to her, it had melted away, and his balls had crept up
his goose-pimpled thighs.

Somewhere a timer clicked and a light turned off. "Let's make
love again," she said, and seized him in her hand. He nearly
screamed.

#

In late November, Carroll went to the farm again for dinner. He
parked just outside the barn, where, malignant and black as tar,
Flower lolled on her side in the cold dirty straw. She was swollen
and too lazy to do more than show him her teeth; he admired them.
"How pregnant is she?" Carroll asked Mr. Rook, who had emerged from
the barn.

"She's due any day," Mr. Rook said. "The vet says there might be
six puppies in there." Today he wore a tin nose, and his words had
a distinct echo, whistling out double shrill, like a teakettle on
the boil. "Would you like to see my workshop?" he said.

"Okay," Carroll said. The barn smelled of gasoline and straw,
old things congealing in darkness; it smelled of winter. Along the
right inside wall, there were a series of long hooks, and depending
from them were various pointed and hooked tools. Below was a table
strewn with objects that seemed to have come from the city dump:
bits of metal; cigar boxes full of broken glass sorted according to
color; a carved wooden hand, jointed and with a dime-store ring
over the next-to-last finger.

Carroll picked it up, surprised at its weight. The joints of the
wooden fingers clicked as he manipulated them, the fingers long and
heavy and perfectly smooth. He put it down again. "It's very nice,"
he said and turned around. Through the thin veil of sunlight and
dust that wavered in the open doors, Carroll could see a black
glitter of water. "Where's Rachel?"

"She went to find her mother, I'll bet. They'll be down by the
pond. Go and tell them it's dinner time." Mr. Rook looked down at
the black and rancorous Flower. "Six puppies!" he remarked, in a
sad little whistle.

Carroll went down through the slanted grove of Christmas trees.
At the base of the hill was a circle of twelve oaks, their leaves
making a thick carpet of gold. The twelve trees were spaced evenly
around the perimeter of the pond, like the numbers on a clock face.
Carroll paused under the eleven o'clock oak, looking at the water.
He saw Rachel in the pond, her white arm cutting through the gaudy
leaves that clung like skin, bringing up black droplets of water.
Carroll stood in his corduroy jacket and watched her swim laps
across the pond. He wondered how cold the water was. Then he
realized that it wasn't Rachel in the pond.

Rachel sat on a quilt on the far side of the pond, under the six
o'clock oak. Acorn sat beside her, looking now at the swimmer, now
at Carroll. Rachel and her mother were both oblivious to his
presence, Mrs. Rook intent on her exercise, Rachel rubbing linseed
oil into her mother's wooden leg. The wind carried the scent of it
across the pond. The dog stood, stiff-legged, fixing Carroll in its
dense liquid gaze. It shook itself, sending up a spray of water
like diamonds.

"Cut it out, Acorn!" Rachel said without looking up. All the way
across the pond, Carroll felt the drops of water fall on him, cold
and greasy.

He felt himself turning to stone with fear. He was afraid of the
leg that Rachel held in her lap. He was afraid that Mrs. Rook would
emerge from her pond, and he would see the space where her knee
hung above the ground. He backed up the hill slowly, almost falling
over a small stone marker at the top. As he looked at it, the dog
came running up the path, passing him without a glance, and after
that, Rachel, and her mother, wearing the familiar black dress. The
ground was slippery with leaves and Mrs. Rook leaned on her
daughter. Her hair was wet and her cheeks were as red as
leaves.

"I can't read the name," Carroll said. "It's Ellen," Mrs. Rook
said. "My husband carved it." Carroll looked at
Rachel. 
Your mother has a tombstone for her
leg?
Rachel looked away.

#

"You can't live without water."

"So that's your choice?"

"I'm just thinking out loud. I know what you want me to
say."

No answer.

"Rachel, look. I choose water, okay?"

No answer.

"Let me explain. You can lie to water—you can say no, I'm
not in love, I don't 
need 
love, and you can be
lying—how is the water supposed to know that you're lying? It can't
tell if you're in love or not, right? Water's not that smart. So
you fool the water into thinking you'd never dream of falling in
love, and when you're thirsty, you drink it."

"You're pretty sneaky."

"I love you, Rachel. Will you please marry me? Otherwise
your mother is going to kill me."

No answer.

#

After dinner, Carroll's car refused to start. No one answered
when they rang a garage, and Rachel said, "He can take my bike,
then."

"Don't be silly," Mr. Rook said. "He can stay here and we'll get
someone in the morning. Besides, it's going to rain soon."

"I don't want to put you to any trouble," Carroll said.