‘Your body knows, Volva,’ George used to tell her. ‘Your body knows what the mind can’t see.’
She realized she did not believe Stephen.
She had expected him to resist, to be angry. His compliance troubled her. But why should it? Perhaps he too had been plagued all these years. How could he not have been?
She watched the doorway he’d disappeared into when a small creak sounded behind her.
Twisting around, she saw him from the corner of her eye. He had slipped into the sitting room through another door.
She hitched forward and tried to jerk away, but he sank his hand into her long hair and yanked her head back. He jabbed something sharp into her neck.
Liv cried out and hurled her body forward. He released her hair, and she catapulted from the couch, out of control, and into the coffee table. She landed on the wood, and one of the legs splintered. Her glass of sherry tumbled to the floor, staining the rug.
Stephen watched her, making no move to catch Liv as she scrambled away.
The drug moved swiftly through her veins. She felt the icy current fanning down her legs, pumping toward her heart.
‘Block it,’ George whispered in her ear.
She gazed at the floor as if he would be sitting there, but saw only the fine particles of dust drifting in the lamplight.
She crawled on her hands and knees toward the hallway.
Drawing in a shaky breath, she tried to imagine how she might stop the poison in her blood. Only the panicked emptiness of her mind returned. She didn’t know.
Her hand grew numb, and when she went to put weight on it, she crashed onto her face instead. She lay in Stephen’s hallway, face down, the toes on her left foot twitching.
Focusing on her breath, she counted to ten.
“One, two, theer, no thwee, no.” But she couldn’t say it. Her tongue lay thick and heavy on the floor of her mouth.
Stephen’s feet moved into her line of sight, but her eyelids had grown too heavy.
She wanted to grab him, demand that he stop, but the darkness reached up and pulled her in.
Chapter 10
Jesse
Jesse woke at dawn, refreshed as he hadn’t been in months. He sat up and gazed around the room.
The walls were papered in scrolling foliage that ended in a dark velvet border topped by crown molding. A heavy gold chandelier dangled in the center of the room.
Jesse watched cobwebs swaying beneath the chunky fixture, light filtering through the gauzy tendrils.
Remembering the woman, Jesse searched the house. He opened curtains, peeked in closets and beneath furniture.
The search took on a feverish quality when he reached the attic, but he maintained his composure, carefully returning furniture to its exact location rather than flinging it aside in his frenzy to find some evidence the woman had been there.
There was no woman, and the more he thought about it, the more absurd the idea of a woman became. What woman in her right mind would arrive at that house in the dead of night?
No car had pulled into the driveway. He would have awoken to a splash of headlights, a car door slamming, something.
He’d imagined her.
Strangely, he could still see her long, pale legs stretched on the chaise.
Jesse was no stranger to hallucinations.
In the months after Nell and Gabriel died, he saw them everywhere. He once grabbed a woman at the train station who so resembled Nell that his heart nearly leapt from his chest. The woman had turned wide, terrified eyes on him, clutched her purse, and ran toward the conductor as if Jesse had attacked her.
Eventually, the visions faded. Even in his dreams, he rarely saw his departed wife and son.
Perhaps had they had gone on. To where, he didn’t quite know.
Jesse’s father had been a man of faith, but not a man of the church. They never attended a single service.
Jesse’s understanding of the bible came through the harsh declarations made by the nuns in various orphanages he’d occupied in his youth. When he could not quote scripture, they beat him. In that cruel way, he learned the words of God — some of them, anyhow — but they did little to comfort him in the days after the death of his family.
Instead, he grieved Nell and Gabriel as if they’d gone into the ground to darkness.
After his search, Jesse returned to the kitchen.
He flicked on the faucet. It groaned and spat rust-colored sludge into the sink, but after several seconds, the water ran clear.
Jesse found an old cannister of coffee. As he waited for water to boil in the kettle, he opened cupboards, marveling at the stacks of porcelain dishes and the sparkling goblets.
Drinking his coffee from a delicate white and silver cup, he toured the house a second time, more slowly, no longer hunting for a phantom woman.
The house appeared as if the owners woke up one morning and walked out. Clothes hung in the closets. A hairbrush lay by the sink in the upstairs bathroom. The beds were made.
In the largest bedroom, where he’d imagined the woman, pink satin slippers lay next to the bed as if their owner had taken them off one night, climbed into bed, and disappeared.
The third floor contained a bedroom he imagined belonged to a young man. The clothes were about Jesse’s size, but included school uniforms. A stack of high school textbooks lay scattered on a dresser top.
When he returned to the kitchen, Jesse found the remains of a half-eaten cake in the icebox. The cupboard held jars of apples and blueberries, and he gorged himself on the oversweet pie fillings.
He bathed quickly, unable to shake the sense of eyes gazing at him from the cracked bathroom door. He would have liked to savor the shower. Like so many other things, a proper shower had been a luxury of the past, but his paranoia got the better of him.
When he opened the door, the long hall stood empty - save the hundreds of eyes staring out from the portraits on the walls.
Jesse cleaned the kettle and returned it the cupboard. He rinsed his cup and put it away. He even smoothed the fibers of the rug he’d slept on the night before.
Convinced that the house looked exactly as it had when he entered it, he left through the cellar.
The daylight through the open cellar doors washed away the darkness from the night before. He observed bottles of wine and stacks of empty crates.
He closed the cellar doors behind him and wandered into the woods, deep in contemplation.
He’d never been a thief.
A year before, when he’d lost his wife and child, he walked out on his life. He left their little house, surely now cleaned and rented to someone else.
He’d abandoned his job without so much as a note to his boss.
He’d just left - left it all. Packed his bag and walked out of town.
He still wore the same pair of shoes. He’d brought one change of clothes, a booklet of photographs, Gabriel’s stuffed Mickey Mouse, and all the money he’d had to his name, which after the funeral expenses had been little.
Since then, he’d slept beneath bridges, or tucked between boxes on the railroad cars. The soles of his feet were hard, his face was tanned, and the youthful appearance he’d had for the first forty years of his life had been replaced with grooves of sorrow.
For two hours, Jesse walked the woods around the big, abandoned house, considering his options. He paused at the train tracks that would take him to another town.
The thought of walking away from the house caused an ache in his gut.