“I knew too,” Shane said.
“And we did nothing. I don’t know what I thought. Or maybe a part of me thought, I had to put up with it, why shouldn’t she? Maybe that’s what a very cold, cruel part of me thought.”
I looked around the room. Emily’s face was a blizzard of tears. Jerry Dalton knelt by her, holding her hand. Shane had gone back to staring at the floor.
“And then Marian was suddenly, mysteriously ‘ill’…except she wasn’t. We knew she wasn’t, we all knew she was pregnant. We knew it from the way Mother was so unhappy, the way she’d cry herself to sleep at night…the way she couldn’t look at Father anymore, and the way he couldn’t look at anyone…the way no one was allowed to see Marian, or if we were, she wasn’t allowed to say anything to us…we knew she was pregnant and we…and I was jealous…and I blamed her…and it seemed like such a special fuss was being made of her, I wished it was me. We never…well, I never saw the baby…I don’t even know what happened, it was never spoken of…was it stillborn?”
“Eileen Casey thought she heard a baby cry one night,” I said.
“Did she?” Sandra said. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? For a baby to have been born into the world…into this house…and for there to be no trace of it left…it’s about as bad as it could be…and we never spoke of it…never…who knows, did they give it away, or murder it, or what? We never knew.”
“They gave it away,” Shane said. “That’s what I always reckoned, to one of the adoption agencies, or to a home, or some such. That’s why Marian…that’s why she couldn’t…”
“That must be right,” Sandra said. “That’s why she…because she couldn’t. She couldn’t face life without the baby, so she walked into the pool in her nightdress holding the heaviest rock she could find, and laid the rock on her chest, and lay down in the water and couldn’t get up…at least that’s how she was when I found her, that’s how I imagined she did it…Oh God forgive us, she was just a little girl, and we did nothing…”
Sandra began to cry then. Great, wrenching, ugly-sounding sobs filled the room. She made a harsh “mmmm” sound in her throat and in her mouth to make herself stop.
“Keep going, to the end. The only thing we did…Mother gathered Shane and me together, on the day of the funeral, and said, ‘Marian’s room is to be kept like it was the day she left us. It will be cleaned, but it must never be altered, as long as you live in this house. Do you understand?’ And so it never has been, not a jot has been changed or taken from it to this day.
“So what I did then, I completely denied everything that had happened. I think it took me a few years. I think teaching was my way of not following in my father’s footsteps. But I helped to nurse him…”
“Along with Eileen Casey.”
“That’s right.”
“She told me he didn’t rape her.”
“Well, that makes everything all right then,” Sandra said. “After his death…and maybe it was in getting to know Dr. Rock…in seeing, for the first time, a future…I don’t know, it was as if I decided everything had been the opposite of what it was, everything had been perfectly fine…if not for our sake, for the sake of the children we had, that they would never know about it, or be affected by it…but I suppose all I was doing was living a lie, and making them live one too, crippling them under the weight of it. God, what have I done to my little boy?”
She wept again. I wanted to go to her, to hold her, to tell her what I didn’t believe, that it would be all right, that we could be together. I took a step in her direction, and she turned from the window and looked at me, looked through me, and I knew that what we had had, whatever we had had, was gone, gone and best forgotten. I hadn’t been straight with her, and she couldn’t be straight with me; now she looked right through me and I looked right back, and she passed along to where her brother was sitting. She sat on the floor between his outstretched knees, and he slid down off the couch and cradled her in his great arms, just as she had done with him the night Emily was found, the night David Brady and Jessica Howard were murdered, just as she had been doing with him for years; now the years seemed to fall away until they were like children again in their haunted house, waiting out the dark.
Outside, the pink was filling up the sky, slices of grapefruit and salmon frothing one against the other. The sun rose over the bay like a fat blood orange. At long last, after a long long night, on All Souls’ Day, some light.
Thirty
THE FIRST PETROL BOMB CAME THROUGH THE DOOR AND shattered golden against the piano. The second was smashed by hand on the inside of the door, which was then slammed shut from the outside. I could hear something being dragged against the door out in the corridor, but it wasn’t necessary; the flames had shot up against the door handle, making it impossible to get out.
At the other end of the room, the drapes by the corner window Sandra had been standing at went up like tinder. Shane drew the curtains on the far window and tried to open it but it had been nailed shut, and the glass was reinforced. It might have been worse; as a ground-floor window, it might have been barred. The fire was spreading fast, and the thick smoke made it difficult to see, and to breathe. We tried to break the glass with tables and chairs, but the furniture was old and flimsier than it looked, and ended up shattering. I wondered about trying to launch the piano through the window, but it was too heavy, and now it too was engulfed in flames. Finally, Shane Howard, Jerry Dalton and I hoisted the heaviest sofa in the room and, using it as a battering ram, together we ran it at the window and shattered the panes below the sash. This let air in, making it easier to breathe, but it also fed the flames with oxygen. It took us a while to extract the sofa from the shattered windowpanes, and then it was a case of kicking out the remaining shards of glass and wood. Below us there was a drop of about eight feet to a concrete path about four feet wide; beyond the path, the lawn rose in a steep incline to our knee level and then swept off down the hill.
The flames reached the drapes on the second window, framing the dawn on one side in golden fire. I shooed Emily toward the open window and beckoned Jerry Dalton.
“You first, come on.”
“I’m not parting with this,” Emily said, hugging her dollhouse to her.
I nodded, then grabbed it out of her arms and tossed it out the window. It bounced on the lawn unharmed.
“Now, go,” I said.
Emily hung from the window and dropped to the ground below. Jerry Dalton held back, waiting for Sandra to get to safety; she was huddled near the empty grate of the fireplace.
“Sandra, come on, we don’t have much time,” I cried. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I took her by the wrist, and she grabbed my arm hard and looked into my eyes and shook her head.
“I don’t want any more time, Ed,” she said. “I can never leave this house.”
I released her at once, by reflex, as you might recoil from the dead.
She smiled then, and clasped the bloodstone around her neck tight in her hand and turned and vanished into the flames. I never saw her again.
I went to the window and helped Jerry Dalton down. When I turned back to the room, it was an inferno. Whatever stuffing was in the furniture and cushions was highly inflammable; there was a circus of flame across the center of the room. Shane had his back to me; he looked like he was trying to find a way through the blaze. I clapped him on the back.
“Where’s Sandra?” Shane said.
“She was by the fireplace,” I said.
Shane tried to head that way, but the flames were impassable; his trouser leg caught fire, and I dragged him back and beat the flames off.
“I can’t go without her,” he shouted.
“Maybe she got out the door.”