Twice now they had exchanged long glances, their eyes sort of locked in a wordless stare. Both times he had been behind the wheel of his Buick while she had been walking with Erskine. Both times something had passed between them, something special... was the look they exchanged a father’s and daughter’s?
It was exciting and upsetting and a little crazy. After a while she ran a tub, took a bath, making the water hotter than usual and adding some of Roberta’s bath salts. She lay back with her eyes closed, soaking for a long time in the hot tub. Then, drained, she dried off and went to bed.
She lay in bed exhausted but unable to sleep. She began touching herself, as if to reassure herself that she was there, as if to read her features as a blind person might. She touched her face, her shoulders, her breasts. She touched between her legs, then put her hand to her face and breathed in her own scent.
Images bombarded her. At one point she saw Channing standing alongside the woman in the portrait. They were dressed like the man and woman in American Gothic. Instead of a rose, the woman was holding a baby. For a moment the baby was herself, and then it was Caleb, and then it was a rose again, a rose that wilted until a drop of blood fell from its petals.
Ariel slept.
Jeff couldn’t sleep. After an hour’s tossing and turning he gave up and got out of bed. In the living room he tried to concentrate on a magazine but couldn’t make sense of what he was reading. He tossed it aside and tried to make sense out of the afternoon.
Had he really seen them?
It was hard to believe he had seen two children who looked like them. Their appearance was too distinctive and he had had too good a look at them to have been confused in that fashion. Of course it was possible that he had fancied a resemblance where none existed. He’d been tired, emotionally exhausted, and he could have seen two children who really looked nothing like Ariel and her friend and his imagination could have connected the dots.
Or there might have been no one there at all. No boy and girl walking past his house. People under a strain sometimes saw things that weren’t there. It was not comforting to admit that possibility where one’s own self was concerned, but it was not a possibility which could be categorically denied.
Finally, it was possible that he had seen precisely what he had thought he had seen. But what on God’s earth had sent them wandering through his neighborhood? It was miles from where they lived. Assuming they had a reason to be in Charleston Heights, was it sheer coincidence that put them in front of his house on his return?
Or had they come looking for him?
He put his head in his hands, pressing against his temples, trying to make his thoughts run along logical lines. There ought to be some way to make sense of all this and he couldn’t seem to latch onto it. Was all of this linked to pressure resulting from his affair with Bobbie? Or did it somehow tie in with what he had learned about the portrait?
He closed his eyes, and his mind filled with Grace Molineaux’s image. It flickered and was gone, replaced, for God’s sake, by a vision of Ariel. He wanted to open his eyes, but half afraid that should he do so he’d discover her standing there in front of him.
He opened his eyes. He was alone in the room, and he reacted to this discovery with a mixture of relief and disappointment.
Nineteen
It was impossible to say what woke her. Roberta was sleeping soundly, deep in Valium-induced dreamlessness, when some force propelled her up out of sleep. She was suddenly sitting up in bed with her eyes open.
In the other bed, deep in his usual brandy stupor, David grunted and rolled over onto his side. Across the room, beside the window, stood the woman in the shawl.
She was as formless, as imperfectly defined, as on the first night Roberta had seen her three nights before Caleb’s death. Her pale face loomed in the dimness, and all the rest of her was shadowy and indistinct, shifting as if tossed by air currents in the room.
Was it a dream? She had dreamed this woman’s appearance once. Was she dreaming now?
“What do you want?”
Had she spoken the words out loud or merely voiced them in her mind? The apparition did not react, nor did David stir. He slept on, unaware.
“Who are you? Why are you here?” She listened as the words seemed to reverberate off the walls, shaking loose windowpanes like strong wind.
The woman turned her face a little more directly toward Roberta. There was something in her eyes, something Roberta thought she ought to be able to read.
Then, like smoke, the woman melted away and was gone.
Roberta put her fingertips to her breast over her heart and felt its insistent beat. She forced herself to take slow deep breaths.
She got up.
Caleb’s door was closed. She hesitated before opening it, afraid of what she might find. Perhaps this was a dream, she thought, and she decided to be on the lookout for any inconsistencies in Caleb’s room which might indicate that she was indeed asleep and dreaming.
She opened the door. The room was undisturbed, with everything in its proper place. The only thing missing, she thought, was Caleb — and the thought, catching her at a vulnerable moment, brought a rush of grief that very nearly knocked her off her feet. She clutched the doorframe for support and managed to keep her balance.
There was no question now that she was awake. But for how long?... She left Caleb’s room, closed his door, and went back to the bedroom for her robe. There was only one cigarette left in the pack on the night table, and when she got it out she saw that it was broken in the middle. She went downstairs for cigarettes, and even before she reached the bottom of the staircase she could smell gas escaping.
She went into the kitchen. All three pilot lights were out. For a moment she worried that it might be dangerous to light a match, but the burners themselves were shut off, and how much gas could escape from the pilot lights? Not much, she was sure. David had said so. She was just extremely sensitive to the odor.
She lit the pilots, opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, smoked two of them in the living room. Why, she wondered, had the woman in the shawl appeared after all this time? What did it mean?
She crushed out her cigarette, mounted the stairs, winced at the sound they made underfoot. The house was listed for sale now, according to David, but so far nothing had happened. There’d been not a single call, no one coming around to be shown through the place.
And when that happened, she thought suddenly, would she take them through Caleb’s room? How would she explain a nursery with no baby in it?
Ariel’s light was on. She noticed it when she reached the top of the stairs, a sliver of light beneath the child’s door at the end of the hall. Had it been on before? She hadn’t noticed one way or the other.
Why was the child awake? It was the middle of the night. She started down the hall, slowed, stopped.
She turned instead to the bathroom, where she took two little blue tablets from the Valium bottle. She gazed at them for a moment, the two of them an inch apart in the palm of her hand. Without having swallowed them she could already anticipate how they would smooth things out inside her.
She filled a glass with water, swallowed the pills.
In the hallway, she glanced once again at Ariel’s door and the light that was visible beneath it. The light seemed to flicker, as if it were not an electric light at all but a gas flame, or perhaps the flame of a candle.
Maybe the Valium was already at work, she thought, distorting her perceptions. She took a hesitant step toward Ariel’s room, then changed her mind. No need for a confrontation with the child, not at this hour, not after what she’d been through already. Let her stay up all night if she wanted. Just so Roberta got some rest herself.