If only he would say something that made sense...
“Who would have thought you’d be back? Last time you killed yourself but this time you won’t do it, will you? Will you?”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a tiny silver gun.
Oh, God, she thought. The gun terrified her and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked like a toy, a shiny little cap gun, but somehow she knew it was real. Had a bullet from the gun shattered the mirror? Had another one made that little hole in the window and cracked the surrounding glass? She sniffed the air, trying to detect the odor of gunpowder, but smelled only her own fear.
She tried the door. It wouldn’t open, he’d locked the doors by pressing something on the dashboard. She tried to raise the button to unlock the door but she couldn’t budge it.
Oh, God...
He turned the gun toward her. She didn’t want to look at it but couldn’t keep her eyes from the black hole in its muzzle. He kept the gun pointed at her for a moment, then reversed it, first placing its muzzle against his temple, then sticking it into his mouth. At first she willed him to press the trigger, then found herself praying that he would not.
Maybe it was a toy—
As if he’d read her mind, he suddenly took the gun from his mouth and swung it around, aiming at the window of the rear door on her side of the car. He squeezed the trigger, and the gunshot was the loudest sound she’d ever heard in her life. The gunpowder smell reminded her of descriptions of Hell — fire and brimstone and the reek of sulfur. The window was much more severely shattered than the one beside her, and the bullet had made an irregular hole the size of a half dollar.
She turned to look at him again. He was still holding the gun but it was hanging loosely in his hand, pointed at the seat between their bodies. The act of firing it had drained some of the tension from his features. His breathing was slow and deep.
She looked at him and felt herself gathering strength. She thought of how she’d felt last night, after she’d perched on the stairs listening to David and Roberta argue, thought of the unfamiliar feelings she’d experienced later in her room. And the portrait came into her mind, and she made her eyes like the eyes of the woman in the portrait, and with each breath she drew she felt herself growing stronger.
His grip tightened on the gun. He was pointing it at her again.
She moved toward him, ignoring the gun now, no longer afraid of it. Her eyes caught his and held them. She put her hand on his knee, ran it up along the inside of his thigh. She felt a quivering in her loins, a melting, a rush of warmth. The gunpowder stench was lost in a heavier scent of musk. Her hand was between his legs now, holding him, and her other hand was under his coat, pressed against his side, clutching at him, and she was leaning into him, her head tilted up and back, her lips slightly parted, her eyes burning bright.
His shoulders stiffened and he tried to draw away from her. She continued to flow toward him, her mouth reaching for his, and she watched with satisfaction as his eyes glazed and his lower lips trembled. He made a sound, a sigh or a sob, and then his shoulders drooped in surrender even as his arms went around her, clutching her to him.
Afterward she sat on her side of the car. There was a lingering pain in her loins, and she could tell that her arms and legs would be sore from the awkwardness of their coupling. She had a headache, too, a dull pulsing in her right temple, and her throat was dry and scratchy.
For all of that, she felt good.
He was still holding the gun but she was not afraid of it anymore. He had never released his grip on it, and at times she had been aware of it, the cold metal pressing against the nape of her neck while their bodies tossed together. Now he was turning it in his hands, studying it as if he had never seen it before.
He looked from the gun to her, his jaw slack, his eyes deeply troubled. “My God,” he said.
“I want to go home now.”
He was turning the gun over and over in his hands, looking first at it and then at her.
She thought of the portrait and gathered strength, thought of the fire that had burned where now she felt only a dull ache.
“Put the gun in your pocket,” she said. “I want to go home.”
He did nothing at first. Then he nodded slowly to himself and dropped the gun into his jacket pocket and turned the key in the ignition....
When she got home Roberta told her she was late. “We were worried about you,” she said.
“I was over at Erskine’s.”
“I called there and his mother said you had left. That was a long while ago.”
“I left something in the schoolyard and I had to go back for it. It’s not that late, is it?”
“It’s late. I was starting to worry.”
Why would Roberta worry about her? What did Roberta care?
“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Twenty-three
The next day was a Saturday. Roberta slept later than usual, waking up groggy with a Valium hangover. She had awakened during the night in spite of the pills she’d taken before retiring, then took more pills to get back to sleep. As a result the Valium blurred the memory of the brief interval when she had been awake. She knew she had seen the ghost for the third successive night, but that was about as much as she could recall.
When she got downstairs, David showed her the morning paper.
She had trouble taking it all in. But the paper screamed out its news and David kept filling in the blanks for her, telling her what he had learned from the radio news. Some twelve hours previously, Jeffrey Channing had shot his wife and his two young daughters to death. Then he had attempted to set fire to their house, but the fire had evidently gone out of its own accord. After lighting the fire he had gone to his car, where he had placed the barrel of his gun in his mouth and fired a single shot into his brain. Death, according to reports, had been instantaneous.
That afternoon Ariel sat in her room trying to read a novel about a teenage girl’s struggle to overcome compulsive overeating. She couldn’t seem to focus on the story. She put the book down and switched on Erskine’s tape recorder to listen to the duet tape.
She turned the volume high, and for a while she was able to lose herself in her own music, but then the volume made the music sound wild and out of control and it bothered her. Once she had adjusted the controls she found herself unable to get back into the music.
She let it play, got out her diary, uncapped her green pen.
Why do I keep thinking he was my father?
I know better. He was Greta and Debbie’s father and they’re dead now. He killed them. I wonder if they knew what was happening. It said they were found in their beds, but were they asleep when he did it? Maybe he killed them first and put them in their beds.
I wonder if they saw the gun first and thought it was a toy.
It’s not my fault!
He would have killed me. He followed me and he made me get in the car and he had the gun along and he meant to kill me. He even pointed the gun at me.
Then he put it in his mouth. That’s how he killed himself finally, with the gun in his mouth.
How could he do that?
It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything but save myself.
I am all alone in the house now. David was up first and then when I got up I heard him telling Roberta. I was on the stairs. They didn’t even know I was there. He went out and then I thought she was on the phone or something because I was in my room and I heard her talking. I went halfway down the stairs again and discovered she was talking to herself. About David and me and about him and about wasting her life.