Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set) Read online

  “Renee,” he said in a wheeze.

  “Don’t talk.”

  He wasn’t talking. He was gasping, choking, mouthing nonsense air. He opened his eyes again.

  Renee bent over him, and her face filled the hazy circle where the spotlight had been. She was nothing but eyes and a slash of teeth. The eyes were like lost binary stars against the endless depth of space.

  Those eyes looked familiar.

  Whose eyes? Green like that—

  And it all came back in a scream, the fire, the collapsing roof, Mattie amid her scorched stuffed animals. He fought to sit upright but was far too weak. The movement sent a rocket flare of agony up his left hip.

  “Where’s Mattie?” he said, this time summoning enough air to fill the room with his words. They echoed off the room’s sterile surfaces of tile, chrome, and glass.

  He couldn’t see Renee well enough to be sure, but her face seemed to collapse in upon itself, like a flower gone putrid in steam.

  “Shhh, honey,” she whispered. “We can talk about that later.”

  Later? How could she possibly think he would make it to later unless he knew? Giant claws scratched at his intestines, a monster inside him wanting to tear itself free. He fought it down as if it were a rush of nausea. “Where is she?”

  Renee turned her head toward the doctor, and they must have shared a look. Dr. Masutu gave a stiff nod. Renee’s hand took his, and her small fingers were slick in the ointment that coated his skin. He squeezed weakly, begging with all the meager strength he could summon.

  “Where?” he whispered, already knowing, never wanting to know.

  “The fire—when the second floor collapsed and threw you out of the fire, she was still there and—she got burned bad—”

  Her voice cracked in synch with the breaking of Jacob’s heart.

  Not Mattie.

  Not. Not. Not.

  She was the Happy Sunshine Girl, who played doctor to make her dolls better and held tea parties for her stuffed animals. She was the favorite in her class among all the teachers at Middlewood Elementary. She loved soccer and jump rope and Sunday morning cartoons, the ones that came on just before the scary preacher shows. She was beautiful, the thing that spiritually bound him to Renee, the creature that connected him to the future rather than a past he loathed.

  A strange sound poured out of his lungs, the internal monster turning into a vomit of voice. If not for the raw pain of its passing through his throat, he wouldn’t have recognized the voice as his own.

  Renee squeezed more tightly, two hands now, as he twisted in the sheets. Dr. Masutu moved around the bed, trying to calm him with incomprehensible medical terminology. Jacob thrashed his head from side to side, the ceiling a blur of silver and white streaks.

  “It’s all going to be okay,” Renee said, choking, her face close to his, her breath cool on his cheek.

  The monster ripped his insides, claw and tooth and sharp bone. The monster laughed, rattling the truth against his rib cage like a scythe strumming a xylophone. The monster chewed his aortic chambers, spitting pieces of flesh in its triumph. The pain inside met the pain outside and rose into an unbearable crescendo.

  Jacob wailed, a plea to God, a damning of God.

  He sobbed and coughed, pushed at the tube in his mouth with his tongue.

  He had promised himself that he would be stronger this time, that he’d protect her from Joshua. He would protect all of them. But he had failed again. And that knowledge slashed him with its acid talons.

  Renee dabbed a tissue against his eyes. Her whisper was as soft as the steady wheezing of the respirator: “Jake.”

  “Where is she?” he repeated, his teeth clenched around the tube. He looked in the mirror above the sink as if Mattie were in the room.

  Dr. Masutu moved closer, a model of crisp efficiency. “You’d best leave, Mrs. Wells. We can’t risk an additional sedative with his respiratory system so stressed.”

  Jacob clutched her hand, muscles tight with desperation. Sweat broke loose on his face. “Where is she?”

  Renee stepped away and the ointment caused Jacob to lose his grip. He stared at the back of his hand, at the white blisters, at the pink skin peeling away. His wedding ring was gone. Everything was gone. Joshua had taken it.

  “She’s here,” Renee said.

  He sat up and dizziness swarmed in. The room tilted, Dr. Masutu’s face grew alternately larger and smaller, Renee bobbed like a ship moving away toward the horizon.

  Jacob tried to move his legs, but they were mutinous. He lunged for the edge of the bed and collapsed on the railing. His IV bag fell over and spattered open against the cold tiles. Dr. Masutu gripped him by the shoulders and tried to ease him back onto the bed.

  “Easy, Mr. Wells,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of disinfectant, the first odor Jacob had noticed since awakening.

  “I want to see her. Where is she?” he screamed at Renee. He didn’t care if she lied. He just needed an answer, any answer, or the hard concrete in his chest would let no more air pass.

  Renee stopped at the door, hunched and shivering. She cupped her hands and leaned against the wall, slowly sliding down its surface like the victim of a firing squad.

  “Mr. Wells,” the doctor said, pulling him against the pillow. “Don’t make me have to call for assistance.”

  “Fuck you,” Jacob said, yanking free and pulling himself onto the rail. He caught a fleeting glimpse of himself in the mirror, a wild-eyed lab animal breaking free of a cruel experiment, its flesh mottled red. Then he went over. The respirator tube must have become disconnected, because oxygen escaped with a snakelike hiss. The loose tube protruded from Jacob’s mouth as his torso struck the floor, one leg tangled in the bed rails, the other twisted in the sheets. He kicked free, ignoring the pain that chopped him with its hundred dull axes.

  He scrabbled across the floor like a paraplegic crab, Dr. Masutu in a hurry somewhere across the room, Renee shaking. The tiles were cool against his skin, and the thin hospital gown had come undone. The strings dangled down the backs of his legs, lit firecracker fuses. His whole body was heating up, swollen dynamite, a bilious volcano about to erupt.

  He reached Renee and pulled her hands from her face. Her green eyes were drowned with red, her face twenty years older than he remembered it. She was a stranger, he was a stranger, and neither belonged to this world. Not where things like this happened.

  Jacob grabbed the respirator tube with one hand and pulled it from his throat. A piece of skin broke free from his lip and clung to the clear plastic. If only he could tear himself away a piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse, and undo his own existence. But even if he vanished, Joshua would still be there, and then Joshua would have everything.

  “Tell . . . me . . .,” he said. “Where?”

  She turned away and sobbed some words against the white surface of the wall.

  He touched her hair, fought an urge to clamp his fingers around the strands and slam the truth out of her.

  Her words were invisible bullets: “You said it wouldn’t happen again.”

  Dr. Masutu moved somewhere above them, and someone else had entered the room. They may as well have been shadows on the wall, for all Jacob noticed or cared. Dr. Masutu shouted some sort of command, but Jacob obeyed only one master now and that was his naked need to know.

  “Where is she?” He grabbed Renee’s chin, forced her to face him. Hands grabbed at him, plowing new furrows of agony on his shoulders.

  “Where do you think?” Renee’s lips trembled, bitten through in spots, cheeks shiny with tears. She appeared to have escaped the fire without injury. At least any visible, physical hurt.

  “She’s in the hospital, isn’t she?”

  “You said nothing would ever happen to her.”

  “Please, Mr. Wells,” came Dr. Masutu’s voice as if from another land, one where reason prevailed and patients were expected to will themselves back to health.

  Jacob elb
owed the doctor away and climbed onto Renee, his left leg skewed limp and useless. Half of him wanted to crawl inside her and hide, to seek those soft places that had always offered him sanctuary. The other half wanted her to bleed, to suffer, to choke on her words. And that half was taking over.

  He drew back his hand to slap her. Dr. Masutu tried to grab his wrist, but he squirmed free, losing another piece of skin in the process. He swept his hand toward her face and her eyes locked on his, not blinking against the blow. Inviting him. Daring him.

  And he stopped.

  She couldn’t win. Not like this.

  He collapsed into a fetal position, the ointment sticky against the tiles. The floor smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. Dr. Masutu gave directions to the nurse, and someone was mopping up fluid. Dr. Masutu knelt and took Jacob’s arm. This time, Jacob didn’t resist as the needle entered the inner crook of his elbow.

  “Mattie is in the hospital, Jakie,” Renee said.

  Numbness crept up his arm, rushed into his head, and the drug massaged his brain with its icy fingers.

  “On the bottom floor,” Renee said, as Jacob slipped back into the grotto, surrendered once more to the black soothing liquid of unconsciousness.

  He drowned at Renee’s last words: “In the morgue.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Renee didn’t know what was more terrible, burying an older child or burying an infant.

  Mothers should not outlast their children. Mothers should go first, by any rule of the universe, under any decree of a caring God.

  She wiped her eyes and the dishwater stung. She only had three plates, and they were all clean, but she washed them again anyway. Same with the coffee cup. She had scrubbed it until no hint of brown remained. If she rubbed the cup any harder, she would wear through its ceramic skin.

  The apartment was devoid of any personality. Beige couch, matching armchair, solid oak table in the kitchenette with matching benches. Bare walls of antique white, a drab sea of gray carpet. Perfectly lifeless.

  She was afraid she would never feel alive again. Sure, her lungs inflated and her heart pumped blood, her fingers and toes moved, her eyes blinked. But life was more than the sum of working parts.

  Once, while making love to Jacob in their first year of marriage, she had the sensation of floating outside her body. She saw the two of them below, Jacob on his back, her with blonde hair dangling as they moved in a smooth and careless rhythm of hips.

  “How happy and alive they look,” the disembodied part of herself had thought. Even without her glasses, she could see with great clarity from her ethereal vantage point. A voyeuristic guilt tugged her back into her flesh and the sensation had passed, but not the notion that she was totally and absurdly right where God had wanted her to be.

  She experienced that same discorporate sensation last year when the tractor was lowering Christine’s coffin into the rectangular, red hollow of the Earth. There had been no pleasure in the sensation that time, only an aloof split, and then she rose like a polluted balloon. She swept over the scene on a September wind, cold, brittle, bound for the dead of winter. The cemetery stones jutted like broken icebergs, the greater part of their mystery unseen beneath the surface. The ancient maple by the steel gate had already lost its leaves and stood as helpless as the priest while the tractor’s engine whined. Jacob stood in a dark wool coat, holding Mattie against him. Mattie wore black mittens, and their ends were damp because she had wiped her nose with them.

  The tractor stripped a gear in its winch box and the coffin jerked, the chain from which it was suspended digging into the well-shined surface. Lawrence McMasters, the funeral director, kept his lips pursed in practiced, stoic sorrow as he tried to usher the grieving family away.

  The Renee she’d left behind on the ground couldn’t take her eyes from the coffin, which began to spin awkwardly two feet deep into its final resting place, knocking against the earthen sides of the grave and raining dirt. The tractor operator cursed and Father Rose crossed himself. Jacob called Renee’s name and then Christine’s, and Renee was grateful that the main service had been at St. Mary’s and that the graveside service was restricted to immediate family.

  A family whose membership was now reduced.

  She witnessed the debacle from the distant safety of the sky, and remembered looking down at herself with pity, though part of her was glad to be momentarily free of the pain.

  She had no delusions of being an angel. In that bleak stretch of impossible perspective, she saw herself as she really was: scared, fragile, clinging to the threads of a reality whose fabric threatened to unravel.

  It wasn’t at all how she viewed herself in the mirror, when vanity battled insecurity and the face was always familiar, plain, and far too old. That woman standing beside the oblong hole was an utter stranger, alone and futureless, unconnected to the flesh she had created and nurtured.

  The escape was all too brief, and the wind pulled her spirit back into her body, or the illusion dissolved, or the dissociative episode of grief ended. And all that was left was the coffin swinging from the end of the chain like the tool of a brutal hypnotist.

  Dishes. She plunged her hands back into the soapy water. The plates needed to sparkle like those in detergent commercials. Out, out, damned spots.

  There was a knock on the door. She hadn’t had a visitor in several days, when the last of her friends had paid their obligatory sympathies. Her best girlfriend Kim, who knew secrets about her that even Jacob hadn’t plumbed, had resigned herself to the fact that Renee wanted to get through it on her own. A stubborn blonde, that’s what Kim had called her, and if she ever needed a shoulder to cry on, give a call. Otherwise, here’s a casserole and don’t hurry about returning the dish.

  Renee dried her hands on a towel that was wrapped around the refrigerator handle. She didn’t want company right now. The house was a mess. No, “house” wasn’t the right word, house had connotations of home, and what had once been her home was now a heap of dark, dead ashes. This apartment wasn’t home, it was a temporary sleep chamber of the soul.

  The knock came again, more insistent, authoritative. Be polite, she told herself. A good hostess. Mrs. Jacob Wells. She opened the door.

  It was Kingsboro’s fire chief, stocky, dressed in an informal uniform of dark trousers and blue shirt. Her red hair was tied back but the sun caught some stray strands that glowed like firecracker fuses. Renee wondered if her hair color had led the woman to her career choice, the result of some homeopathic psychological pull. Or maybe she’d suffered some long-ago disaster of her own that had compelled her into public service.

  “Hello?”

  Renee had forgotten the woman’s name, since their first meeting had been in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. The Tragedy, with a capital T. That was how she referred to the night, both in forced conversation and in the hidden depths of her private thoughts. But now she saw the name above the badge, Davidson, and remembered they had spoken at some length, but couldn’t recall a word either of them had said.

  “Davidson, Kingsboro Fire Department. Sorry to bother you again.”

  “That’s okay,” Renee said, struggling to drive images of The Tragedy from her mind: the confusion as she rolled from the blankets, the stench of chemical smoke, the winking numerals of the alarm clock, Jacob’s shouting, her attempt to follow him before the flames cut her off, the flight down the stairs, the descent into hell, the escape into night air, and then the continuing descent into a deeper hell.

  “I’d like to ask you a few more questions. May I come in?”

  Renee stood aside, and the sliding of the invisible mask over her face was an almost physical sensation. “Please excuse the mess. And wipe your feet.”

  Davidson looked down at her boots, which she had wiped on the outdoor welcome mat. She wiped again, then once more on the carpeted rug inside. Renee led Davidson to the couch and sat across from her in the armchair. The apartment seemed too small.

  “First of al
l,” Davidson said, “I’m sorry for your loss. If we’d had any chance for a rescue—”

  “I know. I’m sure you guys did everything you could. Nobody’s blaming you.” Because Renee bore all the blame, except for that one dark sliver she allowed Jacob.

  “I understand how difficult this is, but we need some more information to help us determine the cause.”

  “You already have my statement.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But that was made in what we like to call ‘the heat of the moment.’” She smiled, but the expression on Renee’s face made it fade fast. Davidson’s voice shifted into an official monotone. “People sometimes remember things later, after they’ve settled their minds a little bit. Could you please go over the sequence of events one more time?”

  Renee closed her eyes and tried to separate the actual events from her nightmares of the past two weeks. The reality and the nightmare had fused into one giant hell storm, a series of flickering images that seared her psyche and hot-wired her nerves. “I woke up,” she said finally. “And Jake was sitting on the edge of the bed.”

  “Are you sure? You didn’t wake up first and then wake him up?”

  “No. I’m a heavy sleeper—” Renee rubbed at her swollen eyelids. “I mean, I used to be a heavy sleeper. Jake always had to poke me in the ribs to get me to stop snoring. Or so he says. I’m still not convinced that I snore, and I challenged him to make a tape recording to prove it. Seems unladylike somehow, breathing through your nose like a lumberjack in a cartoon.”

  Davidson nodded, and Renee knew she was babbling, but the act of recollection had pushed her to the dangerous cliff edge, the wind was blowing, the abyss was black and deep, and her balance wasn’t what it should be. Renee rushed on, afraid that if she paused, she would go back to that scary place inside that had beckoned her with the promise of isolation and safety.