“Who are you? What do you want?”
There was a gust of wind. She heard it in the live oak, rustling the leaves, tossing the bunches of Spanish moss. It rattled the window glass and seemed to blow the woman about, as if she were a bundle of old rags. But she was a woman, it was very clear that she was a woman, the same woman who had been there the night before. Her form was quite distinct in the dim corner. She stood facing the window, her hip and shoulder toward Roberta, her face invisible.
Roberta reached for the bedside lamp. Her fingers rested on the switch. She thought David, but did not speak his name aloud.
The woman turned toward her. She had a quick impression of a pale face. And the woman was holding something in her arms. Roberta squinted, trying to focus on the woman’s face, trying to see what she was holding, and even as she narrowed her gaze the woman began to fade away, to merge with the shadows.
She switched on the light. The woman was gone.
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She was drained, exhausted, and for several minutes all she could do was remain where she was, breathing raggedly, willing her heartbeat to return to normal. David slept on. She checked the time on the alarm clock, something she hadn’t thought to do the night before. It was a quarter to four.
She told herself to go to sleep. She turned off the light and tried to lie still but it was impossible. She had to get up, had to check the baby.
She hurried down the hall. Caleb was sleeping like a lamb. The sight of him was evidently all she needed. She sighed with relief and tiptoed out of his room, returning to her own room without bothering to check Ariel.
In her own bed, she had a sudden impulse to go downstairs again, to check the doors and windows, to make sure none of the pilot lights had gone out. But she resisted the urge and sleep came to her with surprising swiftness.
When she awoke a light rain was falling. She changed Caleb and fed him, then went downstairs. David had made his own toast and coffee and was sitting behind the morning paper. Ariel had helped herself to orange juice and a bowl of sugared cereal. Roberta joined them at the table with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette.
No one spoke during breakfast. Twice Roberta was on the point of mentioning what she’d seen in the room the past night, but both times she repressed the impulse. The sentences she tested in her mind proved inadequate. “I had the strangest dream last night.” But had it been a dream, last night and the night before? If so, it was unlike any dream she’d ever experienced before. “I thought there was someone in the room last night.” But it was more than that, more than a trick of lighting and shadow. She’d sensed a menacing presence, had seen the woman turn to her before disappearing. “There was someone in our bedroom last night.” But was there? Or was her own mind conjuring up images?
David was the first to leave. They chatted briefly, perfunctorily. Then he carried his briefcase to the car while she poured a second cup of coffee and lit a third cigarette and picked up the newspaper he’d abandoned. As usual, it told her precious little about what was new in the world and rather more than she needed to know about Charleston. She scanned an article about plans for the next Spoleto festival, skimmed a report on activity in the state legislature at Columbia, and read wire service pieces on arms-limitation talks and congressional maneuvering without really taking them in. She turned with some relief to Ann Landers and immersed herself in other people’s problems. A secretary found her boss’s wife domineering, a man felt guilty about putting his old mother in a home, and an adolescent girl felt unloved, unwanted, and singularly unpopular. Ann told her to make a list of all the positive things in her life.
“Time for school, isn’t it?”
Ariel nodded, rose from the table, carried her dishes to the sink. How pale the child was, Roberta thought. Pale skin, pale blue eyes. Expressionless eyes — looking into them gave her a feeling that verged on vertigo, as though one could fall through the child’s eyes into a bottomless abyss.
“Have a good day, Ariel.”
”Thank you. I will.”
“You’ll be home afterward?”
”Where would I go?”
Where indeed? The child didn’t seem to have any friends. She spent all her time alone, reading or doing homework or playing her horrible flute. Had she been as isolated when they lived in the suburban split-level? It seemed to Roberta that Ariel had been less thoroughly alone, that she’d had a playmate or two, but it was hard for her to be certain. That had been before Caleb’s birth and so many things had been different.
But she was always a solitary child, Roberta thought. She seemed most content that way, as if she required solitude as other children required companionship.
The door closed. Roberta hesitated a moment, then went to the front room and drew the drapes a few inches apart. She stood at the window long enough to watch Ariel walk to the end of the block and turn the corner, disappearing from view. Then she opened the drapes all the way.
Back in the kitchen, she rinsed the dishes and thought about Ann Landers’ column. Perhaps she ought to make a list of all the positive things in her life. Well, there was the man she’d married, the daughter they’d adopted, and the son she had recently borne. And there was this house, historic and well-preserved, on one of the best blocks in the Old Charleston section south of Tradd.
An impressive list. So what if the marriage had turned loveless? So what if there was something strange, almost frightening, about Ariel? So what if the house made sounds in the night, and the pilot lights wouldn’t stay lit, and the damp was so pronounced you could grow mushrooms on the kitchen’s worn brick floor? So what if sleep was interrupted by nightmares, or visions, or whatever had possessed her two nights running?
Caleb fussed in his crib, demanding her attention. “I’m coming, sweetie,” she called out, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray, hurrying up the stairs, grateful for the distraction from her own thoughts.
The rain stopped by late morning, and shortly after noon the sky cleared and the sun came out. Roberta gave Caleb a bottle, lunched on leftovers, then bundled the baby into his carriage and took him for a walk. She headed aimlessly up one street and down another. She never seemed to tire of walking in the neighborhood, its houses dating clear back to Colonial times, its narrow streets free of heavy traffic, its walks shaded by ancient live oak and crape myrtle and magnolia.
Soon, she thought, the leaves would be turning. It was her favorite season, autumn was, a welcome relief after a summer that was invariably too hot and far too humid. Caleb had been born in the spring, and summer had been hard on both of them, but it was autumn now and autumn was a long season on the Carolina coast. Winter, when it finally came, was brief and not too bad, yielding before long to spring.
“And in the spring you’ll be able to sit up in a stroller,” she told Caleb, cooing the words to him. “You’ll be able to see everything — dogs and children and people. You’ll be a big boy in the spring.”
He beamed at her and something clutched at her heart.
Around one-thirty she was seated on a green-slatted park bench at the Battery, gazing out at the ocean. Off to her left, several old men were fishing, their poles extending over the iron railing.
“They don’t be catching nuffin but a cold,” a voice said. Roberta turned to see an old black woman ease herself down onto the far end of the bench. She had frizzy white hair and very dark blue-black skin. She was tiny, small-boned and gaunt, and her skin clung to her bones like leather that had been soaked and left to dry in the sun.