Candle in the Attic Window(47)
“Uh,” she groaned. She’d be anxious to get into the attic by midnight and, if no one was there, get out of here.
Could she bear to think that no one would be there?
That Sheridan was gone? Grief does things to your mind. How many times had Ave heard this from her university’s counselor, her aunts and girlfriends, in the blisteringly lonely months since Sheridan’s death?
“I just have to try,” she said aloud, a habit these days. “Sheridan believed in ghosts.” Which led to that unspeakable hope: Maybe his belief can bring him back.
It was worth a try. What did Ave have to lose? Sheridan will try to come back to me. If anywhere, here. He will know I need him. He will know I stayed alive just to come here for him.
She would go into his arms once more. This thin thread had tied her to life. Because the worst thing about death was that it came without giving fair warning, one last chance to fill up your soul with enough love to last as long as you had to keep going.
A winter ago, Ave had prepared a lecture on war-and-water literature for her university students as she tossed together a soup and salad for Sheridan, on his way home from a Deans’ meeting. But Sheridan flung aside his trenchcoat and briefcase to gather in his arms a rape/murder victim in an alleyway and was shot along with the fleeing culprit by the arriving police officers.
Struggling to hold onto life at the hospital, he’d weakened so alarmingly before she even got there that just kissing his cracked lips seemed a cruel imposition. As she waited and watched the emergency team work on him, Ave never doubted for a moment that he would revive.
But the doctor pulled up the sheet to cover Sheridan’s face. He looked up as Ave started to scream and shouted for help, tugging her out past the curtains of the emergency room.
She fought all the way, shrieking Sheridan’s name. But he was gone. And her first coherent thought, struggling up out of layers of shock and sedatives, had been that they would never make love again.
Not easy to say to her aunts when they came to her loft apartment with plates of steaming greens, spicy cornbread, and savory dirty rice. “Eat, Ave Marie. You’re not in the grave yet, no matter how badly you wish to be.” Not easy to explain to friends who asked her to a party, a club, a blind dinner date. “Maybe it’s time for you to meet someone new, girl.”
I’m not through with Sheridan. I have to hear his voice. Tell him I love him. Feel his arms around me again. If another man touches me, I’ll kill him. I’ll die. I need to make love with Sheridan. Maybe then she could finally say goodbye.
Sheridan would have understood exactly how she felt. And if he came to the Mardi Gras ghostly ball ....
By now, Ave had snatched off dust covers all the way from the front door through the dining hallway and up to the kitchen. They littered the floor behind her, waiting to be gathered up and dumped into a washing machine.
And there was just such a machine where she remembered it in the corner of the kitchen: frontload, European-style.
Ave deposited her load of candles and cleaning utensils and a handy camping lantern on the kitchen worktable, and went back for the dust covers. She jammed them into the washing machine and took a deep breath before she snatched open the broom closet.
Shushed sounds of brittle things scuttling out of her way.
Ave stood her ground. She shone her light bravely around inside the cramped storage space, driving hideous creatures before her, back into the darkness. Only brooms and a dustpan, a bucket, and a collection of string and sponge mops remained.
The water and gas companies had done better than the electric people. Soon, Ave had mopped a disinfectant trail throughout the downstairs rooms that was guaranteed to send vermin staggering back into the city’s sewage system.
Nothing scampered at the edges of the darkness now, she thought with satisfaction as she dumped the muck into the gutter outside. She really should finally close the front door when she went back into the pine-scented townhouse. Close herself in with her ghost.
The latch clicked loudly in the silence.
Seemed to echo far away, upstairs.
Ave’s heart stutter-skipped. Could an echo carry that far in here? All the way up to the attic? “Hello?” she called, after the sound ricocheted off the dark cathedral ceiling.
No answer. No more sound.
She should go back outside to the Porsche 914. One of its two trunks held Sheridan’s battery-operated sound system and his favourite CDs. She should play Sheridan’s music so she wouldn’t have to listen to sounds she couldn’t explain while she prepared to see him again.
Ave left her cleaning bucket to wedge open the heavy front door, even after she returned and set up Sheridan’s music system.
Blues would be good for the invocation. Soon, Bobby Blue Bland crooned, “I’ll take care of you. Please let me take care of you.”
Now for a romantic dinner.
Ave retrieved a candelabrum from the mantelpiece in the parlour and carried it to the dining hall. Had she and Sheridan eaten at this very dining table before they went in search of the ghostly ball? Was this the same candelabrum Sheridan had carried upstairs? Ave couldn’t be sure. That one honeymoon night they had spent at the townhouse was hazy, entangled as it was in her mind with so much fear and desire.
Ave fitted new white candles into the holders and debated lighting them this early. Decided against it.
She went, instead, to the kitchen, and washed and dried a collection of fragile plates from the china cabinet. She set out a circle of brie, a baguette of fresh bread, some buttery mascarpone cheese, and clusters of willow-green and violet-black grapes. She covered all these under upturned serving bowls on the dining table, in case the vermin crept back in while she was away, up in the attic.