Chapter 15
When he got up, it was not because he felt rested, or even fully awake, but because getting up seemed preferable to sinking back into a dream that had left him without any recollection of its details yet with a distinct feeling of claustrophobia. It was like one of the hangovers he’d experienced in his college days.
He forced himself into the shower, which slightly improved his mood, then dressed and went out to the kitchen. He was relieved to see that Madeleine had made enough coffee for both of them. She was sitting at the breakfast table, looking out thoughtfully through the French doors and holding her large spherical cup-with steam rising from it-in both hands as if to warm them. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and sat across the table from her.
“Morning,” he said.
She smiled a vague little smile in reply.
He followed her gaze out across the garden to the wooded hillside at the far edge of the pasture. An angry wind was stripping the trees of their few remaining leaves. High winds usually made Madeleine nervous-ever since a massive oak came crashing down across the road in front of her car the day they moved to Walnut Crossing-but this morning she seemed too preoccupied to notice.
After a minute or two, she turned toward him, and her expression sharpened as though something about his attire or demeanor had just struck her.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
He hesitated. “To Peony. To the institute.”
“Why?”
“Why?” His voice was raspy with irritation. “Because Mellery is still refusing to report his problem to the local police, and I want to push him a little harder in that direction.”
“You could do that on the phone.”
“Not as well as I can face-to-face. Plus, I want to pick up copies of all the written messages and a copy of his recording of last night’s phone call.”
“Isn’t that what FedEx is for?”
He stared at her. “What’s the problem with me going to the institute?”
“The problem isn’t where you’re going, it’s why you’re going.”
“To persuade him to go to the police? To pick up the messages?”
“You honestly believe that’s why you’re driving all the way to Peony?”
“Why the hell else?”
She gave him a long, almost pitying look before answering. “You’re going,” she said softly, “because you’ve grabbed onto this thing and you can’t let go. You’re going because you can’t stay away.” Then she closed her eyes slowly. It was like the fade-out at the end of a movie.
He didn’t know what to say. Every so often Madeleine would end an argument just this way-by saying or doing something that seemed to leapfrog over his train of thought and render him silent.
This time he thought he knew the reason for the effect on him, or at least part of the reason. In her tone he’d heard an echo of her speech to the therapist, the speech he’d so vividly recollected a few hours earlier. He found the coincidence unsettling. It was as though Madeleine present and Madeleine past were ganging up on him, one whispering in each ear.
He was quiet for a long time.
She eventually took the coffee cups to the sink and washed them. Then, rather than laying them in the dish drainer as she usually did, she dried them and put them back in the cabinet above the sideboard.
Continuing to look into the cabinet, as though she’d forgotten why she was standing there, she asked, “What time are you going?”
He shrugged and looked around the room as though a clue to the right answer might be on one of the walls. As he did so, his gaze was attracted by an object resting on the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the far end of the room. It was a cardboard box, of the size and shape one might get at a liquor store. But what really caught his eye and held it was the white ribbon encircling the box and fastened on the top with a simple white bow.
Dear God. That’s what she’d brought up from the basement.
Although the box seemed smaller than he remembered it from so many years ago and the cardboard a darker brown, the ribbon was unmistakable, unforgettable. The Hindus had definitely gotten it right: white, not black, was the natural color for mourning.
He felt a tugging emptiness in his lungs, as though gravity were dragging his breath, his soul, down into the earth. Danny. Danny’s drawings. My little Danny boy. He swallowed and looked away, looked away from such immense loss. He felt too weak to move. He looked out through the French doors, coughed, cleared his throat, tried to replace stirred memories with immediate sensations, tried to redirect his mind by saying something, hearing his own voice, breaking the dreadful silence.
“I don’t imagine I’ll be late,” he said. It took all his strength, all his will, to push himself up out of his chair. “I should be home in time for dinner,” he added meaninglessly, hardly knowing what he was saying.
Madeleine watched him with a wan smile, not really a smile in the normal sense of the word, said nothing.
“Better go,” he said. “Need to be on time for this thing.”
Blindly, almost staggering, he kissed her on the cheek and went out to the car, forgetting his jacket.
The landscape was different that morning, more like winter, with virtually all of autumn’s color gone from the trees. But he sensed this only dimly. He was driving automatically, almost unseeingly, consumed by the image of the box, his recollection of its contents, the significance of its presence on the table.
Why? Why now, after all these years? To what purpose? What was she thinking? He had driven through Dillweed, driven past Abelard’s without even noticing. He felt sick to his stomach. He had to focus on something else, had to get a grip.
Focus on where you’re going, why you’re going there. He tried to force his mind in the direction of the messages, the poems, the number nineteen. Mellery thinking of the number nineteen. Then finding it in the letter. How could that have been done? This was the second time Arybdis or Charybdis-or whatever his name was-had performed this impossible feat. There were certain differences between the two instances, but the second was as baffling as the first.
The image of the box on the coffee table pressed relentlessly against the edges of his concentration-and then the contents of the box, as he remembered them being packed away so long ago. Danny’s crayon scribbles. Oh, God. The sheet of little orange things that Madeleine had insisted were marigolds. And that funny little drawing that might have been a green balloon or maybe a tree, maybe a lollipop. Oh, Jesus.
Before he knew it, he was pulling in to the neatly graveled parking area at the institute, the drive hardly registering in his consciousness. He looked around at his surroundings, trying to center himself, trying to wrestle his mind into the same location as his body.
Gradually he relaxed, felt almost drowsy, the emptiness that so often followed intense emotion. He looked at his watch. Somehow he’d arrived exactly on time. Apparently that part of him operated without conscious intervention, like his autonomic nervous system. Wondering if the chill had driven the role players indoors, he locked the car and took the winding path to the house. The front door, as on his previous visit, was opened by Mellery before he knocked.
Gurney stepped in out of the wind. “Any new developments?”
Mellery shook his head and closed the heavy antique door, but not before half a dozen dead leaves skittered over the threshold.
“Come back to the den,” he said. “There’s coffee, juice…”
“Coffee would be fine,” said Gurney.
Again they chose the wing chairs by the fire. On the low table between them was a large manila envelope. Gesturing toward it, Mellery said, “Xeroxes of the written messages and a recording of the call. It’s all there for you.”