Little Girls(23)

Her name was Marney Owen. She was twenty-three, and possessed a slim figure and a face that reminded Ted of a wide-eyed Disney heroine. Yet she was anything but unworldly. She was a Marxist or a Maoist (Ted hardly understood the difference) and she wore kitschy berets and wool scarves even in the springtime. She was also a grad student at CUNY and quite talented. She had also had a small role in Whippoorwill, which was how they’d met. He knew very quickly that he could sleep with this girl if he so desired. And, of course, he desired.

He had been at Marney’s one afternoon, lazing naked beside her in bed, when his cell phone rang. It was Laurie’s number, but there had been a man on the other end of the phone. The man was a coworker of Laurie’s, and he’d found her car parked up on the shoulder of the highway, Laurie seated in a catatonic state behind the wheel.

What had happened? To this day, no one knew for sure. Not even Laurie herself. She had been heading to work at the university when she had been suddenly overwhelmed by what her doctor would later term a “fugue state.” She remained buckled into the driver’s seat, her hands on the steering wheel . . . but for an undisclosed amount of time, she was unsure of who she was or where she had been headed. Later, she would describe it to Ted like having the power go out in the middle of a television program. “And when the program finally came back on,” she had told him, “I was a little lost, having missed the part in-between.”

There were some CT scans, an MRI. Yet nothing was found to be wrong with Laurie. It seemed everyone was ready to chalk it up to stress—Laurie included—but Ted began to wonder if she hadn’t grown wise to his unfaithfulness and had suffered a moment of collapse, a mental breakdown. If this was the case, she never admitted such a thing to him, nor could he summon the courage to ask her. If she had learned of his infidelity and was willing to put it aside, so was he. And if she didn’t know, then he certainly wasn’t going to burden her with it. Overwhelmed by this unspoken guilt, he ended his relationship with Marney, who seemed hardly surprised or disappointed, and he had supported Laurie with her decision to quit work in order to give her mind some relaxation.

That had been roughly one year ago. There hadn’t been another recurrence of the incident, whatever the incident had actually been, since that first time. At least as far as Ted knew. . . .

He downed the rest of his cognac, then dropped down off the porch and into the damp grass. The sky was alive with stars. Taking a deep breath, he could smell the river over the crest beyond the property. Once again, he was stupefied at just how much the house and the property was worth. Why hadn’t Laurie ever mentioned this place to him?

His bladder full, he waded across the driveway and stopped at the edge of the old well. Briefly, he contemplated kicking the plank of wood off to the side, unzipping his fly, and pissing down into the black chasm. But that seemed like too much work. Instead, he crossed the lawn and sidled up in front of the wooden fence that separated the two properties. Through the heavy foliage that grew over the top of the fence, he could see the house next-door, dark against the night. There was a flickering bluish light in one of the ground-floor windows that Ted recognized as the glow from a television set. Maybe they weren’t all hillbilly Luddites around here after all.

Still watching the house, he unleashed a stream of urine against the fence. Above, small bats darted across the starry sky. He listened and thought he could hear the distant growl and mutter of boat engines along the river, even at this hour. Ted knew nothing about boats.

Something struck him squarely in the chest. He looked down but found nothing there. He hadn’t seen anything, either, which caused a pang of fear to rise up in him as he considered that the sensation might have actually been internal. They say you feel a heart attack in the left arm first, but was that true one hundred percent of the time?

When something whizzed by his right ear, stinging the rim of cartilage there, he knew it wasn’t a heart attack. He quickly shook off and zipped up his fly. Taking a few steps back from the fence, he tried to peer straight into the darkness and through the tangle of overgrown foliage above the pickets. A moment later, he saw something shoot out from the darkness and rush toward his eyes, quick as a bullet fired from a gun. He blinked and jerked his head to one side just as something hard struck his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. It stung.

He scrambled back toward the driveway, his hands up over his face now in a defensive posture. He listened but could hear nothing. The item that had struck him rolled across the lawn and came to rest beside the old well. It was a small stone.

“Hey! Is someone over there?” His voice was both a whisper and a shout. “I see you,” he lied. “Come out.”

There was a rustling sound on the other side of the fence, like someone treading on a carpet of dead leaves.

But no one came out.

Slowly lowering his hands, he looked up and surveyed the surrounding greenery, pitch-black now in the darkness. The trees rose high over the small fence, their boughs weighty with leaves and birds’ nests. He listened and could hear squirrels or birds or bats moving around up there. Had they dropped acorns or stones down on him? He supposed it was possible, though it seemed unlikely. Besides, the force with which that last stone had hit him couldn’t have been from a bird or a squirrel. And it hadn’t fallen from above, either. It had come from over the fence.

Embarrassed by his own apprehension, he laughed. Then he trotted back across the lawn to the house, where there were lights on in many of the windows and where his girls awaited his return.