23
Arthur woke me up because I was having a nightmare. I don’t know what I was saying, but I felt his hands on my arms and when I woke up and saw him crouching over me, I thought he was holding me down. I threw him off and he fell off the bed.
“Katherine,” he said, “it’s me.”
I caught my breath. “What the fuck were you doing?”
“You were having a bad dream. Who’s Nancy?”
“I don’t know who Nancy is,” I said.
Arthur got up and sat beside me on the bed. “You were yelling at Nancy to let you go.”
I heard footsteps down the hall and then a soft voice at the door, “Is everything all right?” It was Travis.
“Katherine had a bad dream,” said Arthur.
“That’s understandable,” said Travis. “Night, y’all.” His footsteps retreated back up to his room.
I took a deep breath and got up. “What the fuck is going on?” I said. I went to the window and looked down at the point, at the water beyond, which sparkled in the moonlight.
“We’re going to be all right,” said Arthur.
“Get me a cigarette, will you?”
The cigarettes were in the living room and Arthur went to get them. I was watching the water, half-watching it really, the perceptive parts of my vision pointed inward, when I saw the figure on the point. At first I thought it must be a deer, or maybe a policeman prowling around, but the figure was a woman. She was wearing a skirt—that much I could see—and she was looking up at the house. I heard Arthur coming up the hall.
“Come here,” I whispered.
Arthur came beside me and looked out the window, but the figure had retreated back into the line of shadow thrown down by the trees.
“Wait,” but nothing happened.
“What am I looking for?” Arthur said.
“I saw someone out there.”
“Really?” Arthur stepped closer to the window and cupped his hands around his face, just like he had the first time we’d met at the bookstore. “I don’t see anything,” he said, “Should I call the police?”
I took a cigarette and lit it. I shook my head.
Arthur thought. “I should call the police,” he decided.
“It wasn’t Bad Billy,” I said. “I saw a woman.”
“A woman?”
“I think it was a woman. She was only there for a second.”
“Should I go out and investigate?”
I shook my head.
“I should go and investigate,” he said.
“No. Let’s go back to sleep. I’m probably just strung out, imagining things.”
Arthur accepted this and soon he was sound asleep. He was wrapped around me, hugging me close, and it was hard to extricate myself without waking him up. I crept down the hallway, waving off Kevin, who was now up and determined to follow me. I put on Arthur’s coat and lit a cigarette, then, with my boots loose and clammy on my feet, went out into the night. It was bitterly cold, but with no wind. I walked as quickly as I could to the tip of the point, worried the whole time that I’d run into some patrolling officer, but there was no one. Even where the land dropped off to the tidal bay, all was quiet, not even a fox. I turned around to go to the house, when I caught a whiff of smoke. Then it was gone. I turned to the woods and said, with minimal bravery, “Hello?”
No answer.
Then, “Mother?” Because although I found this highly unlikely, I did not know where she was, and I knew that if she had escaped, she would come to find me. There was no answer. I took a step into the woods. Everything was still except for a few high branches tapping on each other and the light skittering of leaves. I was about to make my way back to the house when I noticed the print, a footprint, small, a woman’s, with the unmistakable human quality of a cigarette butt pressed into its center.
As I wandered back to the house, I found myself thinking of my brief tenure at boarding school. When I was fifteen, my father packed me off to his old school, very impressive and pedigreed, conveniently coed, in the northern suburbs of Boston. I suppose my father was feeling put upon by my mother’s fits. My being institutionalized coincided with her being institutionalized for the first time, although my father didn’t term it as such. He said there was a new treatment for her illness—fresh air, constant care—and I imagined her bundled up in the freezing cold on the long veranda of a sanitarium, her sickness one of the lungs rather than of the soul.
My roommate, Astrid, was a pretty, pleasantly remote girl who was in some funk over her parents’ divorce. She spent most of her time in bed and found me acceptable since her last roommate had been a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. I was reading The Dead for my Joyce class and when the rock hit my window, thought that I’d hallucinated it. Michael Furey and his shower of pebbles, perhaps. With the second rock, which nearly cracked the glass, I thought it must be one of Astrid’s suitors—wealthy boys with floppy hair who were invariably good shots through years spent at lacrosse, squash, and baseball. Astrid didn’t seem inclined to move, although she did give me one of her appealing, monumentally bored looks. Her blond hair was matted to her skull and she pulled it a little so that it covered her eyes. I got up from my bed and went over to look. Standing on the ground outside my window was my mother. There was a cab waiting on the drive behind her, headlights slashing through the dark, its low rumble barely audible because it was a windy night. Windy and cold. I opened the window and smiled.
“Katherine,” she said. She was wearing a suit, but her feet were bare.
“Come up the fire escape,” I answered.
“I don’t have any money to pay the cab.”
Astrid sat up in bed, more animated than I’d seen her in days.
“It’s my mother. She’s escaped from the asylum and needs money to pay the taxi.”
“Take it out of my purse,” said Astrid. “I should have a couple of hundred in there.”
My mother spent the night curled up in bed next to me. She had a terrible cold that turned into pneumonia. I knew she was really sick, or I would have tried to hide her a bit longer. My father came to get her and found me with my bags packed. He seemed resigned to taking us both home, although he did find the strength to argue with me for the entire hour and a half it took to reach our house.
A week later, I tried to call Astrid, to thank her, but there was no answer in our room. Finally, I called the house counselor, Mrs. Grady. I wanted to pay Astrid back. I owed her seventy five dollars. But Mrs. Grady couldn’t tell me where she was. She started crying and finally said that Astrid had hanged herself the week before. Did I know why?
I didn’t really, but then the impulse to live was to me just as surprising as the one to stop it all. What was the pride in survival? How did we find the strength to mount each obstacle when we all knew in no uncertain way that it was not the last? I wanted to tell Mrs. Grady that the weak make way for the strong, but I felt that Astrid’s was a useless death.
That night, in bed with Arthur snoring beside me, I kept seeing Astrid’s pale face, the blue eyes and thin pink lips. I couldn’t get my mind to relax and found myself wondering if death wasn’t anything more than a side effect of time. Astrid was very much alive ten years ago. What made the present any more valuable than any other time? Why was Astrid more dead than I was, when I was bound to be dead at some future date? Wasn’t the present just an arbitrary lens for viewing existence? Finally, realizing that lying there was giving me a headache and that there was no chance of falling back to sleep, I got out of bed. If I’d stayed there I might have started thinking about God, about the existence of good and evil, how my view of time left no room for the afterlife (or the present life, for that matter) and that such thoughts were silly indulgences and I’d be better off doing some laundry or taking the dog for a much-needed walk.