WIDOW (11 page)

Charlene turned her head. Shadow saw the movement from the corner of her watering eyes. She came down the rest of the stairs and went to her. She stooped near the sofa and laid a hand on her friend's shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Do we have to live here?” Charlene asked.

They were making progress now. It was the first time she had spoken in two hours, when Shadow first found her sitting alone on the floor, staring.

“Nothing here's going to hurt us. What happened, the guy deserved. He was using the kids and paying them off with drugs and alcohol. He was the scum of the earth. Look at those bars on the windows. He was a sadist to lock those kids up in here. He ruined half the boys in this town. But he's gone, Charlene. He isn't here anymore. You might say this place paid him back. You don't have to be afraid.”

“I've seen his ghost. At night. Floating through the rooms.”

Shadow sighed and patted Charlene's shoulder. “You were just dreaming.”

“I've heard boys laughing.”

Shadow brought her head close to Charlene's and touched foreheads. She whispered, “Come on, listen to me now. We're partners, aren't we? We're friends. I wouldn't let anything happen to you, would I?”

“No.”

“That's right. I wouldn't. You're safe now. Betty's not here to steal your things. You don't have to hear the women's life stories and remember for them. You don't have to lose your mind. You're free, Charlene. I want to keep you that way, but you have to talk to me. You can't let these moods take over where you don't say anything or move. It scares me.”

Charlene managed a smile and brought up her arms to hug Shadow. “You're the best person I ever knew.”

“Damn right!” Shadow stood and pulled on Charlene's hand to raise her to her feet. “Now, let's go find out what we have in the fridge. Are you cooking? You're cooking, right? Can we have omelets? We have any mushrooms to put in them? I could eat a basketful of mushroom omelets. And I need a strong pot of coffee. We have any of that chocolate-almond coffee we bought in Galveston—what's it called, mocha almondine?”

Charlene let herself be propelled up the stairs, cringing slightly when she passed the wall next to the landing at the top where the blood was supposed to have splattered, and followed Shadow toward the kitchen. “You'll get fat and then you can't dance,” she said.

“Oh, I can dance. After we eat, we'll go run around this place, get all sweaty and feel glorious. All right? You want to run with me after we have breakfast?”

“It's noon. It's not breakfast time.”

Shadow laughed, pushing Charlene toward the stove, taking the egg carton from the commercial-size refrigerator. “It's my breakfast time. I'm a night person now, remember. I work the night shift at the titty joint. All for you, Charlene. What I do for you and you're bitching it ain't breakfast and I can't have an omelet.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Okay then, whip this up and I'll find the mushrooms.”

While they busied themselves chopping and whipping and frying, Shadow kept up a stream of conversation until Charlene's frozen demeanor thawed and she became herself again. Soon it was Charlene who was talking nonstop, rattling on about when she was a girl and had to cook for her large family because her mother had died young. By the time the omelets were served at the shiny oak table pushed against one wall of the big kitchen, Shadow wolfing down the fattest, fluffiest mushroom omelet she had ever tasted, Charlene was a changed person. Happy, bubbling, overflowing with enthusiasm, jokes, and talk talk talk.

Shadow grinned while she ate and listened to her friend, but one part of her attention wondered which drawer had held the knives, and which knife, if it wasn't taken for evidence, killed the former owner. Crazy. She shouldn't even be thinking such dark thoughts for they led her to think about violence in general, and her loss in particular.

Trailing Scott to the den.

Pleading for him to put the gun away.

Watching him pull the trigger.

“You're not listening!” Charlene reached over and drew away her plate. “I listened to that whole sick-sick story about the killing in the mansion and you won't even listen to me now. That's not fair, is it? Is that fair?”

Shadow shook herself mentally, blinked, and smiled tentatively. “We both just tend to drift off, don't we? What a pair we make. Isn't it strange and wonderful?”

Charlene grinned uncertainly and started up where she'd left off about what slobs her brothers and sisters were and how much responsibility she had caring for them when she was growing up. It never occurred to her that drifting off might not be wonderful at all, that the two of them were wounded creatures fighting for survival, and that the odds were against them holding onto reality for any measurable length of time . . .

~*~

Charlene, a tall woman carrying twenty extra pounds around her forty-year-old waist and hips, jogged as easily around the house behind Shadow as any Olympic champion. She didn't even breathe hard or become flushed. Mainly, she thought, it was a trick of the mind, what the body went through. She knew how to turn off her mind from the event the body experienced so that she wasn't affected greatly by either exercise, heat, cold, even pain.

Especially pain. She had known such physical and mental pain, that she had long ago learned how to escape. Now, as she pumped her legs and swung her long arms in the baggy sweater, pacing herself ten feet behind Shadow as they circled the brooding old brick mansion, Charlene went over her earlier thoughts when she had been sitting on the rug, Shadow's voice coming through to her from the stairway as through veils of thick gauze. She was . . .

Alone. So alone. She thought she was alone, anyway, believed it fully. She was ten years old and her father had taken the other children to town. Charlene, the eldest, was supposed to clean house before they returned. Mother was dead. There were always too many chores to do and only Charlene to do them.

Someone was coming to visit—one of Daddy's friends from the chemical plant, his only friend, the man he played dominoes with at the ice house in Houston on Friday nights and bowled with on Saturdays. Charlene was making the beds—the twins' bunks in one of the bedrooms at the back of the house—and she was perfectly content to do the work. She had never whined or pretended it was too much trouble for a ten-year-old to take on so many household duties. She rather liked the mindlessness of housework. She was one of those people destined to find joy where she could, and cleanliness and orderliness gave her a sense of satisfaction that provided her with little gifts of cheer and accomplishment throughout each day.

She tucked the sheet beneath the thinly worn mattress. She squared the corners. She plumped the pillows in their cases and set them just so at the head of the bunks.

She never knew he—that horrible man, that demon man—was coming. She was whistling beneath her breath—“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”—and he crept up behind her before she ever knew someone was in the house with her. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her off her feet, the pillow she had in her hands falling to the floor. She shrieked, trying to twist free, heart racing, her song cut off in mid-tune.

“Hush now,” he said gruffly. “You wouldn't want your daddy to find out you lured me in here and took off all your clothes for me.”

She recognized the voice as belonging to her father's friend who wasn't supposed to be there until dinner time. She had heard it on the telephone when he called and she had met him once at his car when he picked up her father for Saturday-night league bowling.

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, but he clamped a hand over her mouth.

From then on the painful memory blurred around the edges like a partially burned photograph. There was kicking. There were brutal hands searching her little body for all its crevices. There were tears squeezed silently out of her lids as he kept her mouth covered. She knew the taste of him. His hand, his penis. She knew the pain of him and his perspiring stench and his weight and his thickness that tore her and made her bleed.

When he was done, he balled the stained sheets from her sister's bed, and pulled down the stairs to the attic in the hallway. He climbed up there and left the sheets. He warned her if she told, he'd kill her. And he'd kill her family. He'd kill everyone she knew.

He left by the back door, and she thought she'd heard him chuckling to himself. She sat in the bathtub, the water running until it slopped over the sides, and still she wasn't clean and still she couldn't walk without wincing in pain. She cried until her daddy came home from the store and she told him.

It took some time and buckets of tears, but he believed her. He was her daddy. He knew she didn't lie. He climbed like an old man with aching joints into the attic and found the bloodied sheets. He went with the policemen to his friend's home and watched them cuff and haul him to jail. During the trial, he tried to leap over the table to get at the rapist, to strangle him to death during her testimony, but they restrained him in time.

The man was sentenced to nine years in prison. Just as he left the courtroom he winked at her and shouted, “Wait till I get out, sugar. You just wait.”

So for nine years, even though they moved four times, and did not install a telephone, she dreamed that her rapist, her worst nightmare, was out of prison and creeping into her room where he would take her again just to make her suffer before he cut her throat. And the throats of her siblings and her father.

For nine years, until she was nineteen years old, she woke screaming in the night. Her schoolwork suffered. She was put into the dummy classes and gained a lot of weight. Boys made fun of her, woofing like dogs when she passed them. Girls wouldn't befriend her. She started shuffling and keeping her head down so she wouldn't have to see the world mocking her.

She was alone all the time. Alone.

Just before the rapist's parole date, she had a psychotic episode that scared her father into calling an ambulance. She was completely insane, but she didn't know it until later when she woke up restrained by a straightjacket in Marion State.

From her nineteenth year until her present fortieth one, Charlene Brewster recounted the rape scene in her dreams at least once a month, and sometimes during the day the dreams overtook her and left her paralyzed, unable to function. That was what had happened this morning while Shadow told her about the mansion's history.

She wished she could change everything. Her mother's dying young, leaving her the head of the household. Her father's invitation to his friend for dinner that night. Her staying behind to clean while they left her to go shopping.

But most of all she wished she could have had a weapon, any weapon, when she was attacked, so that she could have defended herself.

Wishing didn't change the past. Wishing didn't keep her safe or provide her with peace. Even Marion State's best psychiatrists over the years couldn't do that.

Her legs pumped and carried her through the sunshine where the wind blew back her mousy graying hair from wide cheekbones. Ahead of her Shadow pranced, calves rounded and strong in the Spandex pants she wore for running. Her black hair had a luster like that of a raven's wings in the burning light.

Shadow didn't know. Charlene had never been able to tell anyone. If they already knew, the way the doctors at Marion did, she couldn't help it, but she never volunteered the facts of her soul's death on that ordinary day when she was ten.

She knew it wasn't any worse a fate she'd suffered than Shadow. Or were there degrees of suffering, she wondered, that demanded some kind of extra payment in this life? Shadow's children, little boys, had had their brains blown out all over the floor. Her husband had stood right there and done something irrevocably evil and had made his wife witness to it.

Tears welled up and dripped down Charlene's cheeks. They dried as she ran, her hands clenching and unclenching as she swung them at her sides.

How were they supposed to live? How was she supposed to recover from the death of childhood and innocence? How was Shadow supposed to continue living as if she had never been a devoted mother and wife? Were there really people who were able to go on, unaffected and unmarred by life's ruthlessness? Why wasn't every last one of them a raving maniac, that's what she wanted to know. Was there a secret to successful coping that she had been born without?

Shadow ran up the steps and beckoned for her to follow. She said, breathless and hanging over her knees, “I'm pooped. That's enough for today. C'mon, we'll get big glasses of ice water and sit around back by the bay.”

Charlene, as compliant as a child, nodded her head, and jogged up the stairs into the mansion's cold interior.

Whatever Shadow said. That's what she would do. She had to listen to someone, trust someone to tell her how to live through one hour after another. It was that or suicide and she wasn't quite ready—not yet—to employ that option.

 

Ten

 

Mitchell stumbled around the kitchen, Pavlov bending his lanky fawn body into half-circles barring passage.

“Pavlov! Outta the way, boy.” But he stopped going for the coffee pot on the back of the stove, and leaned over to rub behind the dog's ears. Pavlov's tail-stub wagged like crazy and he made little whiny sounds of pleasure. “I'll feed you in a sec. Let me get some java going here so I can crack open my eyes.”

When Mitchell straightened to reach for the pot, Pavlov flipped a complete circle in the air. All four feet off the floor. His tongue hung out, eyes upturned and pleading, tail wagging like a metronome. Mitchell looked at him again. Holding perfectly still, he said, “You want out?” He knew he did, he just loved seeing the dog flip in the air like a ballet star.

Again Pavlov executed the perfect twirligig, four paws thumping the floor on landing. This meant yes. It might even mean yes, are you a moron? Then he curled again into that odd half circle, butt almost to head, that boxers were known to adopt when they are pleased to have a master's attention.