But I recognized her before I knew that.
She is the beautiful stranger.
I’m not beautiful. But she really is beautiful and she really does look like me.
When I look at her I get the feeling she has things to tell me. If only she could talk. But if she really could talk she’d probably just say how boring it was to spend fifty years in a dusty attic.
I wonder how long she really was up there waiting for me to find her. I wonder who she was or is or whichever it should be.
I keep writing a few words and then looking up at her again.
Tonight would have been a good time to ask David about my mother. He was in a good mood, explaining to me about the painting. Then he went downstairs to his study and I thought about going in and sitting on his lap like I used to do, and lighting his pipe for him. But I just didn’t feel up to it. I wanted to be alone in my room. Alone with her, I mean.
She put her diary aside, played the flute for a few minutes, then had her bath and went to bed. Her room was quite dark, but for a moment she fancied she could see the eyes in the portrait, beaming down at her in the darkness. Before she could entertain this thought for any length of time she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Sometime in the middle of the night she got out of bed and went to the bathroom. After she had used the toilet she went downstairs to the kitchen. The stairs were silent beneath her feet. Without turning on a light she went through the kitchen drawers until she found a small box that contained five of its original six candles. The candles were four inches long and made simply of ordinary white wax. She took one of the candles from the box and put the rest back in the drawer.
There was an empty applesauce jar in the garbage. She washed and dried its lid, then lit a match and melted the bottom of the candle enough to affix it to the center of the jar lid.
Back in her room, she positioned her bedside table so that it was centered directly beneath the portrait. She cleared everything from the table and placed the candle in its center. She lit the candle with another match and sat cross-legged on the floor so that her eyes were level with its flame. She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at the portrait.
When the candle had burned to within an inch of the jar lid she blew it out and got back into bed. And fell asleep immediately.
When she awoke in the morning she remembered what she had done but the memory was hazy and she thought it might all have been a dream. But the bedside table was underneath the portrait and there was a jar lid on it with the stub of a white candle on it.
Quickly she got out of bed and placed the candle in her bottom dresser drawer. She returned the table to its usual position beside her bed and restored her lamp and clock to their usual places. She had to hunt for the folder of matches; they turned up underneath her bed, and she put them in the dresser drawer with the candle.
If they knew about this they’d lock me up, she thought. They’d think I was really crazy.
Thirteen
There was a sound that woke her, a sharp dry sound like a tree branch snapping. Then she was awake, and sitting up in bed, and the woman was in the corner of the room near the window. She was perfectly defined now, her pale face gleaming, her eyes fiery. The shawl covered her shoulders and was draped over her décolletage.
She was holding a rose.
Roberta stared at her, heart pounding, throat dry. The woman’s image shimmered, swayed in the darkened room, the pale face glowing as if illuminated from inside. Roberta tried to avert her eyes but the woman’s gaze held them.
“Jeff!” she called out. The name echoed in the room and she realized she had made a mistake. “David... I meant David!”
There was no response. She tried to cry out again but the two names fought one another and no sound escaped her lips. Roberta looked at the woman’s eyes, dropped her own eyes to the rose clasped in her hands. Its petals were red as blood, and drops of blood hung from its thorns.
Again Roberta tried to call out and could not. With an effort she turned her eyes from the woman and looked across at the other twin bed, one hand extended to rouse her sleeping husband. But there was something wrong with the other bed. Roberta couldn’t touch the body lying on it because there were rails in the way, as if it were not a bed at all but an oversize crib.
And who was it who lay on top of the bed? David? Jeff?
No, it was a skeleton. Bare bleached bones lying uncovered on the bed, and she wanted to scream, and she looked at the woman and saw the pale face grow larger and more vivid, remaining where it was but seeming to come closer, so close that Roberta could see brushstrokes on the forehead and the sides of the face...
Brushstrokes?
Crib rails on her husband’s bed?
With a great effort she hurled herself up out of sleep. It had been a dream. Sleeping, she had dreamed an awakening but had emerged only into the dream itself. Now she sat up in bed and of course there was no apparition in the room, no rails on David’s bed. He was deeply asleep, his body giving off its familiar night-sweat scent of alcohol, his breathing slow and regular. He had not awakened because she had not made a sound. A dream, all a dream.
She wanted to get up. Drink a glass of water, smoke a cigarette. But the dream had been exhausting and the relief at having escaped from it had a profoundly sedative effect. She heaved a sigh, lay back for a moment, closed her eyes for a moment, and was instantly asleep again.
When she awakened hours later at her usual time, she did not remember the dream. Perhaps she repressed the memory; perhaps she had been so briefly awake and had fallen asleep again so quickly that the dream had had little opportunity to impress itself upon her conscious mind. In any event, she went downstairs and had breakfast and set about the business of the day without any thought of the terror that had interrupted her sleep.
Then, shortly before noon, it came back to her in a flood. She remembered what she had experienced and how it had felt, and her chest and throat constricted at the recollection. She could close her eyes and picture the woman, standing just as she had stood in the dream, her features clear as they had never been during her three appearances immediately before Caleb’s death. Then she had been wispy and insubstantial, like the ghost Roberta had assumed her to be. In the dream she looked as though she’d been painted.
Painted!
The brushstrokes she’d seen just before wrenching herself up out of the dream. And the rose she held in her clasped hands.
She ran to Ariel’s room, barely aware of the furious creaking of the stairs beneath her feet....
Moments later she was on the phone to Jeff. They had spent the previous afternoon at a motel, an enervating and ultimately unfulfilling afternoon, and had not planned to meet today. But she was insistent. He had to come to the house. Not to pick her up, but to come inside.
When he arrived she sat him down in the front room and told him about the dream. When she had finished he didn’t bother to mask his irritation.
“So it was just a dream,” he said. “I broke an appointment to get here, Bobbie. I’m sure it was a scary dream, but I can’t rush over and hold your hand every time you have a bad night.”
“Come upstairs.”
“I don’t see—”
“Just come with me.”
She led him up the stairs and the length of the hall to Ariel’s room, then pointed to the picture. The woman’s eyes glowed, catching the light in the room, throwing it back at them. “There,” she said. “That’s her.”