The Town (37 page)

Couldn’t anyone else see it?

She scooted her chair to the left, saw the small figure crawl along the rigging pipes until it was directly above the stage. There was something unnatural about it, a deformity visible even in its silhouetted shape that marked it as inhuman. That made no logical sense, but she knew it to be true, and though she wanted to look away, she did not.

The shadow began fiddling with the center spotlight.

Deanna stood, pointing and screaming, as she realized what it was trying to do, but the concert was too loud, and though a few of the people around her saw her pointing and looked in the direction of her finger, no one seemed to hear her.

The light fell.

It crashed on Linette, the huge, blocky casing landing corner-down on the singer’s bleached-blond head, crushing her skull and shearing off the entire right side of her face. Blood was everywhere—spurting, spraying, misting—and the song ended unnervingly, not with a scream but with a quiet “uh” that cut off Linette’s voice as the musicians continued obliviously for a few more bars.

The shadow was jumping up and down on the rigging in a furious assault, and seconds later the entire thing collapsed, lights and pipes, wires and metal bars falling forward onto the audience.

People were screaming, scrambling to get away. Screeching feedback from the speakers drowned out even the screams, and it was as though the entire scene was taking place in some overloud movie. Deanna’s mind focused on and absorbed individual events, recording them with a clarity she had never known before: the musicians, covered with spraying blood, dropping their instruments, stumbling back; a stray light swinging from an attached cord and smashing into the face of the long-necked man, knocking him flat; an intact section of rigging falling onto one of the big tables, crushing several couples beneath it; a stray bar of metal spearing through the foot of an older woman, pinning her to the floor as she tried to run.

Where was the shadow?

At the same time she was backing up, trying not to be knocked down by the surging, panicked crowd, Deanna was scanning the ceiling above the stage for any sign of the dark figure.

There it was.

She saw it swinging through the rafters like an ape, and then she was knocked to the ground by a screaming old man who did not even stop to see if she was all right but continued running over her.

She struggled to her feet, leaned back against a post for protection and scanned the ceiling for the figure. Her eyes found the place where it had been, but it was not there, and her eyes darted back and forth, searching.

She found it.

In the rafters directly above.

It was looking down at her, and for a split second she saw glowing white teeth grinning in its dark shadow face.

And then a speaker came crashing down on her head.

J
ulia walked home from the funeral alone, declining to ride with Gregory in the van. She held her breath as a pickup passed by, trying not to breathe until the agitated dust settled.

Moving to McGuane was the biggest mistake they’d ever made.

If she’d thought it once, she’d thought it a thousand times, but it was truer now than it had ever been. As she walked down the dirt road from the American cemetery, she thought of Deanna’s death, thought of Adam at the police station, and knew that it was time for them to admit defeat, give in, call it quits, and head back home to California. Their noble experiment had been a failure from day one, and it was time to get out while the getting was good.

She would have a hell of a time convincing Gregory of that, but she was set on this course of action and nothing could dissuade her. She’d go without him if she had to, although she didn’t think it would come to that. His mother and the kids would jump at the chance to move back to California, and the pressure of all five of them would hopefully be sufficient to convince him to leave.

Because it was getting dangerous here.

That’s what the alarm bells inside her head were saying, and it was not something that she would dispute. She had always felt danger here, from the first day in that dark house, and though she’d tried to rationalize it, explain it away, deny its existence, it had been the one underlying constant in her experience here. She had never felt at home in McGuane, and she knew now that she never would.

It was time for them to cut their losses and run.

Another vehicle passed by—the preacher’s car, she thought—and she moved aside and held her breath until the dust had started to settle. She looked over her shoulder, saw the backhoe filling in Deanna’s grave behind the iron gates at the end of the road, and was consumed with a profound sadness and sense of loss. Deanna had been her only friend in town, and that, of course, had amplified her feelings, but the truth was, Deanna had been a
real
friend, a person she’d liked immediately, to whom she’d grown close in an extraordinarily short time. Next to Debbie, in fact, Deanna was probably her best friend in the world.

She’d had a tough time maintaining her composure during the funeral service. She’d cried the entire time, but the crying had constantly threatened to erupt into hysterics, and she’d had to hum some goofy old Monkees song in her mind in order to keep from dwelling too intently on the fact that her friend had died.

She didn’t know that, she told herself. She didn’t know that for sure.

But she did. She did.

Gregory’s mother had not gone to the funeral, had stayed home with the kids instead. She had wanted to come, had wanted the children to go, but Julia did not want Adam or Teo to attend. She remembered her own mother dragging her to church funerals all during her childhood. It was a Molokan tradition, and her parents’ generation thought nothing of it, considered it normal and appropriate, but she had hated spending so many weekends in graveyards, had had nightmares and resulting fears and worries that she swore even back then she would never inflict on her own kids. She still considered it unhealthy to spend so much time glorifying and thinking about death, and she had refused to budge on her funeral prohibition for the kids.

Her eyes were so swollen they hurt, and the dust was not making things any better. She wondered if she should have ridden home with Gregory after all, but when she thought of his blank, expressionless face at the graveside service, she knew she had made the right decision. If they’d been trapped in the van together all the way home, they would have been fighting by now. She needed this time away from him, needed this time to herself.

Maybe she wouldn’t go home at all for a while. Maybe she’d just wander around, walk, think. Give herself the opportunity to really feel what she needed to feel, to sort out her emotions, to dwell on Deanna’s passing and mourn her friend. Alone. In private. Where she could indulge her own feelings and not have to worry about the needs and feelings of others.

She deserved at least that much.

Yes, she thought. She would walk around town for a while.

She’d just make sure to stay far away from Russiantown.

 

She and Gregory had not made love in weeks. No, that was not true. They had not had
sex
in weeks. They had not made love for months.

That record was not broken tonight. She didn’t really want sex, but she wanted someone to hold and hug, a shoulder she could cry on, and Gregory, the bastard, ignored her completely, sitting up in bed and reading his damn
Time,
the blankets pushed into a little wall between them.

She’d gotten home just before dusk to find that Gregory’s mother had already made
nachinke
for dinner. They’d all eaten separately—Gregory in the living room in front of the television, Adam and Teo in the dining room, Sasha in her bedroom. Her mother-in-law had sampled as she’d cooked and wasn’t hungry, but Julia was famished, and she grabbed four of the pastries and ate them over the sink in the kitchen.

After dinner she’d taken a hot bath, and by the time she was finished, the kids were all safely ensconced in their separate bedrooms. She had the feeling that either Gregory or his mother had told them to leave her alone, not to bother her, and while she would have preferred some noise, would rather have heard the sounds of talking and laughter and life in the house, she was too tired to make the effort to set things right.

She did not bring up the idea of moving back to California until she and Gregory were both in bed because she did not want to fight in front of the kids, and she knew this would provoke a confrontation. She also wanted a little lag time, a little breather so she could marshal her emotional forces and build up some strength. It had been a long and draining day.

It was an ultimatum she intended to deliver, but she did not want to phrase it as such, and on her first pass the approach was light. “What do you think about moving?” she said.

He looked up from his magazine. “To a different house?”

“Back to California.”

She saw his face harden, saw the stubbornness settle over his features, and her own anger rose in reaction. “It’s not working out here,” she told him. “We tried it, we all followed your dream, but it’s turned into a nightmare.”

“Still afraid of our haunted house, huh?” He looked like he was sneering.

“Our son was arrested, our friend is dead, there’s been a string of murders that somehow we’re supposed to be responsible for!” She glared at him. “This fucking town is practically ready to lynch us, and you’re obliviously going on like nothing’s happened! Well, something has, and it’s affected our ability to live here, and it’s time we left!”

He looked at her levelly, and he put on his calm, rational, explaining voice, the voice he used when he was going over something with one of the kids or when they were in the middle of an argument and he really wanted to get her goat.

Once again, it worked perfectly.

“I have put a lot of money into this house and into the café, and we will not be getting another lottery check until next summer,” he said. “We—”

“We can get jobs!” she interrupted him. “And in case you haven’t noticed, your precious stage collapsed! It killed Deanna and three other people and—”

“Paul has insurance,” he said calmly.

“Stop that!” she told him. “Stop playing these fucking games and talk to me like an adult. We’re not competing to see who wins this argument here. I’m telling you that we are going to sell this house and move.”

“And I’m telling you we’re not.”

“Well, the kids and I are. Your mother too, probably. We’re getting out of here. We’re moving back to California—”

“No, we’re not.” His smile stopped her. There was something strained and artificial about it that frightened her. She was reminded suddenly of an old friend from college, Teri Yu, who, for a brief period of time, had been involved in an abusive relationship. Her boyfriend, Todd something or other, had hit her and beaten her, but Teri always gave the usual unprovable excuses that she’d tripped and fallen, hit her head on a piece of furniture or twisted her arm on the stairs. One evening, however, they’d double-dated, gone to a Jethro Tull concert at the Forum, and in the parking lot afterward, Teri and Todd had gotten into some kind of argument. Todd had slapped her, and he would have done more had not Julia stepped between them and faced him down. His expression at that moment had been terrifying: he was smiling, yet filled with anger, filled with hate.

And he’d looked, at that precise second, exactly like this.

She stared at Gregory. He stared back. She knew they’d been drifting apart, but the thought came to her that they did not know each other at all. She had no idea who this man was anymore, and that frightened her more than she could say.

Then the expression was gone from his face, and her feeling with it, and Gregory just seemed to deflate. The stubbornness was gone, the anger, the hatred, and she saw the fear beneath his bluster, the confusion and vulnerability behind his macho mask.

She saw her husband again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” There were tears pooling in his eyes, and for the first time she saw how hard all this had been on him. He was stressed out too, and instinctively she reached over to him, put her arms around him, hugged him. They’d drifted so far apart that they’d been unable to read each other’s moods. Maybe that was at the root of their problem—lack of communication. They were both the same people they’d always been, neither of them had changed, and she thought that maybe their recent adversarial relationship had arisen from the strangeness of circumstance rather than any true differences between them.

“I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.”

“I know,” she told him.

“I’ve failed all of you. I didn’t want to—”

“Shhh,” she said. “Shhhhh. It’s all right.” She held him, felt the familiar contours of his body beneath her fingers, the ridges of his collarbone, the muscles in his back, and for the first time in a long while, she felt close to him, truly close to him. They were going to see this through, she thought, they were going to make it, they were going to survive.

“I love you,” she told him.

“And you were going to leave me?”

“I couldn’t leave you.”

“Then give it one more chance,” he said. “A month. And if things haven’t changed, things haven’t improved, we’ll sell the house and move somewhere else. Back to Downey . . . wherever you want.”

She wanted to argue, knew that she should stick to her guns. This wasn’t a problem between them, it was something else, something bigger, and the need to leave seemed imperative. It made no logical sense, but she felt as though the chance to move was a rare window of opportunity that was being offered them, a window that soon would close, and close forever.