But move the gun. Do that. One of the children might see it.
Silence.
The rain falling. The house creaking as if it were populated when it was not. A door slamming somewhere as if in the wind. Maybe a door of a car outside, or the door of another house. Sound could play tricks on you like that.
Rain tapping on the granite windowsills, a sound peculiar to this octagonal and ornate room.
“I wish…I wish there was someone to whom I could…confess,” he said softly. “The main thing for you to know is that you never have to worry anymore. It’s finished, the way I think you wanted it finished. I just wish there was some kind of final absolution. It’s strange. It was so bad when I failed at Christmas. And now somehow it’s harder, that I’ve won. There are some battles you don’t want to fight. And winning costs too much.”
Rowan’s face remained unchanged.
“You want some music, darling?” he asked. “You want to hear that old gramophone? I frankly find it a comforting sound. I don’t think anybody else is listening to it now but you, and me. But I’d like to play it. Let me go get it.”
He stood up and bent down to kiss her. Her soft mouth gave no resistance. Taste of lipstick. High school. He smiled. Maybe the nurse had put on the lipstick. He could barely see it. She looked past him. She looked pale and beautiful and plain.
In the attic room, he found the gramophone. He gathered it up, along with the records of La Traviata. He stood still, holding this light burden, once again entranced by the simple combination of rain and sun.
The window was closed.
The floor was clean.
He thought of Julien again, the instantaneous Julien standing in the front doorway, blocking Lasher’s path. “And I haven’t even thought of you since that moment,” he said. “I guess I hope and pray you’ve gone on.”
The moments ticked by. He wondered if he could ever use this room again. He stared at the window, at the edge of the porch roof. He remembered that flashing glimmer of Antha gesturing for Lasher to come. “Make the dead come back to witness,” he whispered. “That you did.”
He walked down the steps slowly, stopping quite suddenly, in alarm, before he knew exactly why. What was this sound? He was holding the gramophone and the records, and now he set them carefully down and out of the way.
A woman was crying, or was it a child? It was a soft heartbroken crying. And it wasn’t the nurse. She wouldn’t be back for hours. No. And the crying came from Rowan’s room.
He didn’t dare to hope it was Rowan! He didn’t dare, and he knew as well as he knew anything else that it wasn’t Rowan’s voice.
“Oh, darling dear,” said the crying voice. “Darling dear, I love you so much. Yes, drink it, drink the milk, take it, oh, poor Mother, poor darling dear.”
His mind could find no explanation; it was empty and consumed with silent fear. He went down the steps, careful not to make a sound, and, turning, peered through the bedroom door.
A great tall girl sat on the side of the bed, a long willowy white thing, tall and thin as Lasher had been, with reddish-golden locks falling down her long graceful back. It was the girl he had glimpsed below in the street! In her arms the girl held Rowan, Rowan, who was sitting up and clinging to her, actually clinging to her, and nursing from the girl’s bare right breast.
“That’s it, dear Mother, drink it, yes,” said the girl, and the tears splattered right out of her big green eyes and down her cheeks. “Yes, Mother, drink, oh, it hurts but drink it! It’s our milk. Our strong milk.” And then the giant girl drew back and tossed her hair, and gave Rowan the left breast. Frantically, Rowan drank from it, her left hand rising, groping, as if to catch hold of the girl’s head.
The girl saw him. Her tear-filled eyes opened wide. Just like Lasher’s eyes, so big and wide! Her face was a perfect oval. Her mouth a cherub’s mouth.
A muted sound came from Rowan, and then suddenly Rowan’s back straightened, and her left hand caught the girl’s hair tight. She drew back away from the breast and out of her mouth came a loud and terrible scream:
“Michael, Michael, Michael!”
Rowan shrank back against the headboard, drawing up her knees, and staring and pointing to the girl, who had leapt up and put her hands over her ears.
“Michael!”
The tall thin girl wept. Her face crumpled like that of a baby, her big green eyes squeezing shut. “No, Mother, no.” Her long white spidery fingers covered her white forehead and her wet trembling mouth. “Mother, no.”
“Michael, kill it!” screamed Rowan. “Kill it. Michael, stop it.”
The girl fell back against the wall sobbing, “Mother, Mother, no…”
“Kill it!” Rowan roared.
“I can’t,” cried Michael. “I can’t kill it. For the love of God.”
“Then I will,” cried Rowan, and she reached out and picked up the gun from the night table, and, holding it in both her trembling hands, and blinking as she pulled the trigger, she shot three bullets into the girl’s face. The room stank of smoke and burning.
The girl’s face went to pieces. The blood welled from within as if through broken bits of china, a bleeding and shattered oval mask.
The long thin body slumped and fell heavily and noisily to the floor, the hair spreading out on the rug.
Rowan dropped the gun. She was sobbing now, sobbing as the girl had been, and her left hand was up to gag her sobs as she slipped from the bed, and stood shakily, reaching out for the post.
“Close the door,” she said in a rough, choking voice, her shoulders heaving. She seemed about to collapse.
Yet she stumbled forward, her entire body trembling with the effort, and then, beside the girl’s body, she sank down on her knees.
“Oh, Emaleth, oh, baby, oh, little Emaleth,” she sobbed.
The girl lay dead, her arms out, her shirt open, face a soft mass of blood. Once again, the hair was all tangled in it, fine and beautiful, as Lasher’s hair had been, and there was no face left. The long thin hands lay open like the thin delicate branches of a tree in winter, and the blood oozed down upon the floor.
“Oh, my baby, my poor darling,” said Rowan.
And then she closed her mouth again on the girl’s breast.
The room was still. No sound but the sound of suckling. Rowan drank from the left breast and then moved to the other, sucking as ravenously as before.
Michael stared, speechless.
At last she sat back, wiping her mouth, and a low sad groan came from her, and another deep sob.
Michael knelt down beside her. Rowan was staring at the dead girl. Then she deliberately blinked her eyes as if trying to clear her vision. A tiny bit of milk remained on the girl’s right nipple. She reached out and took it on her fingertip and put it to her lips.
The tears came down from her eyes, but then she looked deliberately at Michael, deliberately as if she wanted him to know that she knew. She knew everything that had happened, she was here now. She was Rowan. She was healed.
And suddenly, the tears spilling down her face, she took his hands to try to comfort him, though her own hands were trembling and cold.
“Don’t worry anymore, Michael,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll take her out there under the tree. No one will ever think of it. I will do it. I’ll put her with him. You’ve done enough, you leave my daughter to me.”
She sat back crying in a soft, raw muffled way. Her eyes closed and her head slipped to the side. Fiercely she patted Michael’s hands. “Don’t worry,” she said again. “My darling, my baby, my Emaleth. I’ll take her down. I’ll put her in the earth myself.”
10 p.m.
August 5, 1992