The footsteps stop before they reach the bedroom door.She hears another door close.Where did he go?The bathroom?
Silence.She counts it out to herselfto keep from losing her mind, the numbers create a kind ofpathway, bread crumbs in the forest.When she gets to thirty, she hears a voice shouting from the downstairs.It’s the voice ofa young man, someone she’d describe as obviously black.There is a foghorn quality to his voice, something to be heard over constant noise.
“Come on, Kenny, let’s go.”
“Lemme alone,”a voice answers from the bathroom.Kenny.His voice is sharp, high, full ofcomplaint.
“What are you doin’up there?”
“Taking a shit.”
“Come on.Someone’s gonna come in and find us here.”
“I’m not shitting outside.”
Kate leans back and gropes for the telephone in the darkness.She is not just going to sit here like some poor animal in a trap.She picks the receiver up, pressing her thumb onto the earpiece so that the hum ofthe dial tone won’t carry.
She dials911and waits for one ofthe emergency police operators to pickup, onering, tworings, three…
“Hey, Cyril,”another voice is saying downstairs,“there’s a bathroom by the kitchen.”This kid pronounces it“baff-room,”just the way Kate’s father did when he did his imitation ofhis one black patient who always said,“I still wishin’I could go to the baff-room mo’.”That he might use the bathroom in Dr.Ellis’s office was a subject ofjoke-camouflaged anx-iety—“lock da baff-room,”and“git some bleach fo’da baff-room”were typical ofthe remarks Kate’s father made.
Her call to911has yet to be answered.How many rings has it been?
Fifteen?Twenty? Fucking hell, what is wrong with those people?
The husky-voiced boy calls up again.“This place is fucked.It’s darker in here than outside.We’re leaving!”
And not a moment after he says this, the maple tree that stands in front ofthe house, the proud, gnarled, forty-foot tree that as much as any other thing made Kate want to buy this house, suddenly cracks in two from the weight ofthe snow.The crown ofthe tree hits the roof, im-mediately tearing down the gutters;branches, halffrozen, covered in snow, thrust themselves like monstrous arms through the windows on the east side ofthe house.One long branch smashes through the bed-room window;the branches at the end are cold and thin and they brush roughly against Kate’s face.Wind and snow rush in.
Kate falls offthe bed, onto her side, and rolls over on her stomach, covering her face.She uses her elbows and knees to push herselfbeneath the bed.And while she is there—hiding—she hears the boys leaving her house, screaming crazily, halfin terror, halfin excitement.
Daniel stands next to Iris in the guest bedroom, holding a flashlight for her while she makes up the sofa bed.
“You don’t have to do this,”he finally says.“I’m perfectly capable of making a bed.”He nervously continues.“In fact, I used to make beds for a living.In college, or in the summers, actually, two years running I worked in a hotel in Delaware.I was a chambermaid.”
“You were?”
“Or a chamberman, or maybe a chamber pot.I made beds, that’s all I know.”
“You can make the bed when I’m snowed in at your house,”she says.
She speaks softly, as ifcalming an excited animal.
And then, because he cannot let anything stand with her, nothing is enough, he says,“We’re not really snowed in, we’retreedin.”
But she doesn’t volley back, she ends the exchange with a smile, brief, insubstantial, that could be weighed but wouldn’t register on any scale.She finishes her work.She has strong, useful hands;she smoothes her palm over the sheet and every wrinkle disappears.
“I don’t even know what time it is,”Daniel says.He tilts the flashlight beam toward his watch;a circle ofbright golden light appears on hiswrist.
“It’s too cold to stay awake,”she says.“Anyhow, when Nelson goes to sleep, as far as I’m concerned the night’s over.”
As best as he can make out, the sheets she has placed on his bed are dark blue.Surely, as in most households, these sheets have traveled from bed to bed, surely, then, Iris and Hampton have lain upon them in their own bedroom down the hall.He imagines Iris and Hampton on those sheets, their beautiful dark skin on the deep evening blue.
Iris steps back from the sofa bed and lays two fingers on Daniel’s wrist.The tenderness ofthis gesture overwhelms him, it is as ifshe has kissed him.But all she is doing is redirecting the beam ofthe flashlight.
She points it at the closet, where she finds extra blankets.“You’re going to be nice and cozy,”she says, dropping the blankets at the foot ofthe bed, and the proclamation, delivered in a throaty, good-natured voice, devastates him.He takes her to mean:Stay in your own bed.Don’t come creeping into my room.You are here, these are your blankets and stay be-neath them, be a good boy, nice doggie, stay.
“Do you have enough blankets in your room?”Daniel asks, bleating it, as ifasking for mercy.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
There are so many possibilities for speech or action;he could take her wrist, he could pull her toward him, he could say,“No, I want to sleep with you,”he could sigh, he could say,“I think we both know what’s going on here,”he could play it cool and just say good night, he could place his hand over his heart, he could—somehow this, too, seems possible—burst into tears, yes, yes, he could try to boo-hoo her into bed.It’s been done, what hasn’t happened in the history ofseduction? But finally Daniel can do nothing.He watches her as she moves toward the door.Then, a miracle.The bingo parlor ofhis mind comes up with a clear thought.
“I’ll light your way,”he says.
”Okay,”she says.“You can be like a watchman, those guys who carried a lantern and saw people home.”
“Useful work,”Daniel says, with a kind ofmanic encouragement in his voice, one that borders on hysteria, and then to himself:Shut the fuck up.
He points the beam up and the light bounces offthe ceiling and casts a pale gray glow.He walks behind her;her silhouette has put him into a kind offugue state.
They have arrived at their destination:the master bedroom.He waits at the threshold, shining the light into the bedroom while Iris goes to the night table, opens a drawer, finds a book ofmatches, and lights a bedside candle.
He can no longer wait there for the impossible to occur.She is not going to ask him to lie with her in that bed.In fact, the quality ofher si-lence now is pushing him away.She seems to have regained her balance.
The drug ofthe storm is wearing off, she is coming to.
“Why don’t I leave this flashlight with you,”he says.
”It’s okay.I’ve got one in here.”
He forces himself to smile, not certain she can see his face.“Sleep well, Iris.”
Here he is, standing practically in her bedroom, saying good night to her.It’s enough,he tells himself.He’s saidSleep well, Iris,he’s always wanted to say that.
But lying in that sofa bed, pinioned by the cold and the darkness, he finds that the miracle ofsaying good night to Iris isnotenough.Desire blooms in the darkness, he is choking on its scent.He is tormented by her nearness—how can he be letting this chance go by? He tries to force himself to sleep, but sleep gets further from him the more desperately he pursues it.Sleep has never eluded him as maddeningly since the months directly preceding his fall down the stairs, an assault that left him with a whole new vocabulary ofpain—searing, metallic, throbbing, dizzying, freezing, burning, electric—and an enduring dependence on painkillers.Percocet and Lortab didn’t really kill the pain, or signifi-cantly lessen it, but seemed to create a little chemical pavilion within his consciousness, a semipleasant place to which he could retreat and let the pain go on without him.It had not taken him long to increase his con-sumption from four pills a day to sixteen, and the number could have in-creased from there had he not, in a burst ofself-preservation, stopped taking them altogether, leaving his body not only without its customary supply ofsynthetic endorphins but unable to recall how to make its own, as ifthe supply ofopiates had lulled his body into a state ofmetabolic amnesia.At first, parts ofhis body that were not even injured began to throb and ache;he felt as ifhe had been dragged out ofsome weightless chamber and condemned to suffer the agonies ofgravity.Then the wrist, the jaw, the ankles, the back—which never really got better—and throughout it all he was unable to sleep.