Cast a Pale Shadow(5)
No, he decided, he could not replace Janey with this one. He should not be thinking of replacing Janey at all. There had to be an end to it. If he fell into the trap of assuming that anyone, saint or slut, would do, then where was the mystery in it?
He was not being true to the magic if anyone would do, and that would make everything that had gone before more horrible than it already was. Janey was the last. He had to make her the last.
But when he emerged from the bathroom with her repacked satchel and with her wet undergarments rolled up in a clean, dry towel tucked under his arm, Nicholas knew it was too late. It was the sight of Beth tiptoed on a chair, reaching for a jar of peanut butter on a shelf far beyond the tips of her fingers, the effort raising the hem of the sweatshirt to the bottom pink curves of her rump that made it so.
They had two months. Though Beth said she had no experience with kindness, had never expected it from anyone, didn't quite know how to respond to it, for a while she had seemed to revel in it. The brittle edges of her undernourished body softened. A natural bloom on her cheeks belied her need for the rouge that was her addiction. Her hair, always her glory, acquired a deep, lustrous fire of its own.
He gave her money to buy clothes, and she spent her days shopping or watching television and regaled him with daily blow-by-blow descriptions of The Guiding Light and General Hospital.
And Nicholas hadn't suspected a thing until he found the photographs of Mitch in a roll of film he was developing.
"I don't know why you're so upset. I told you it's only sex with him. It's all he's capable of," she had informed him casually.
Nicholas wanted to threaten her with what he knew was in his blood, what it didn't even take fury to incite in him, that slow, smoldering craving for the darkness, madness, and, maybe murder. He could have frightened her with it, he was sure. He had done it before. Janey had packed her bags when faced with the storm of it, small difference that it was not directed at her, nor could it ever be at any woman. It was not a woman's face or voice that ignited Nicholas's black rages.
But he couldn't do it. After Janey, he had worked so hard to get that part of him under control. He could not now use his latent madness as a weapon, no matter how Beth provoked him.
When she demanded money from him to end her pregnancy, he refused. He saw that tiny life within her as a chance. For both of them.
But he hadn't really been surprised to come home to find her gone with only the note for her goodbye. His life would go on without her. In this form or some other.
Trissa
At sixteen, Trissa's body betrayed her, buckled under to the assault of hormones that had set her emotions into rages for so long and succumbed to the curves and shapes she had envied in others and yet feared in herself. Finally, no amount of round-shouldered slouching or shapeless sweaters could disguise it. And without her willing it, the same food she had always eaten, magically transformed itself into round, firm breasts, slim but curving hips, and a slender waist.
If she still saw a wide-eyed, scrawny monkey in her mirror it was because she refused to see anything else. In her heart, she feared others who cared to look saw quite a different reflection.
On the city bus she shared daily with other commuting students, the same boys who had ignored her for her more precociously ripe classmates now cast their less-than subtle eyes in Trissa's direction. What the eyes beheld, the hands sought to confirm, and only her cold looks and her well-placed clutch of books saved her from the worst of the poking and pawing
In April, her mother rallied her dormant interest in Trissa long enough to express her wonder why she had heard no plans for the Junior Prom.
"I can't believe you won't be going," Edie Kirk said one afternoon. "Did you know I was princess at my junior prom? Your father looked so handsome in his tux and boutonniere! I knew I would marry him from that very day. These are memories that you can never replace. You have to go, Trissa."
"I don't want to go. In case you didn't notice, I don't have boys lining out the door begging for the opportunity to escort me," said Trissa, swallowing the comment that she never realized she had a carnation and a rented suit to thank for her miserable life.
"You go to an all-girls' school. Of course, you have to take the initiative to find some one. Maybe one of Lonny's old friends has a little brother who..."
"No! I don't want you to manufacture a boyfriend for me. That is not the kind of memory I want."
In the end, her mother won and she went off to the prom in pink tulle with Steven Maher, somebody's cousin's friend. After detailing his financial outlay for tux rental and flowers, and gas for the car he'd borrowed from his brother, and pizza after the dance, Steven told her she owed him the opportunity to create a few memories of his own.
And so Trissa found herself in one of the parked cars on Calvary Drive on a rainy predawn in May, hidden from view behind steamed-up windows. Trissa tried to imagine herself watching the old Buick from her place on the other side of the tracks, as she had watched so many other old cars and their young occupants the lonely summer before.
It was like watching someone else's dream with Steven supplying what she had only imagined could be going on in the slightly swaying cars. She marveled at the ease at which the intricate hooks and eyes and fastenings of her dress succumbed to his nimble fingers. These same pesky closures had required ten minutes of her mother's fussing while Trissa got dressed. She laughed out loud at his facile cajolery while the barrier of her bra yielded to his onslaught.
"My God, your tits are so soft and sweet. Like ripe, little peaches. If I could just look at them... If I could just touch them... If I could just kiss them..." And he did every 'if' without her saying he could. But then, Trissa never said he couldn't either. She supposed she should be fighting him off, but her hands seemed to clasp only at empty air until he guided them to touch his neck, to reach beneath the popping studs of his dress shirt to stroke his chest, to ruffle through his hair while he kissed her lips, insinuating his tongue between her teeth to tease her mouth. ß
"I won't hurt you, Baby. I'll stop any time you say. No one will know," came his easy promises as his hands ventured lower. Trissa became so amazed and intrigued that this should be happening to her, and that she had no conscious will to make it stop, to test his promise with a "no" that when his fingers reached their secret, magic destination, his words seemed to come to her garbled through a sparkling haze of heat.
A sudden dazzle of light in her eyes and a pounding on the window glass she at first mistook for the pounding of her heart brought the spinning world to a halt. All around her, Trissa heard the grinding of ignitions and the fitful rumble of newly started engines.
"You kids get home now. This here's private property. I give you two minutes and then I'm calling the cops!"
"Damn!" muttered Steven as he scrambled over the seat to get behind the wheel. Trissa had barely managed to reassemble her clothing and gather her scattered wits before she was deposited on her doorstep with a perfunctory kiss and an "I'll call you".
He never did.
Cole
The telegram was creased and finger-smudged from repeated unfolding and refolding, but Cole was sure he had never read the words himself until now. It was dated May 23, three months ago.
DUNCAN BREWER TRANSFERRED TO STATE MAXIMUM SECURITY PSYCHIATRIC FACILITY IN SPRINGFIELD STOP VITAL THAT I MEET WITH YOU IMMEDIATELY STOP
FITAPALDI
Three months. Mechanically, Cole began to pack, hardly aware of how he knew where the things he needed were stored in this unfamiliar apartment, in God knows what city. The telegram was addressed to Erie, Pennsylvania but the newspaper told him Cleveland and the date, if it was a local paper and today's. Maybe he was already headed in the direction of home. He had lost track of his intentions when he had lost track of himself.
It made little difference, a day or two, or a month or two, this city or that. Cole had misplaced more time, great precious chunks of it, on other occasions. He had gone to sleep in Philadelphia or Dayton or Terre Haute and awakened in Detroit or Chicago or Atlanta with no memory of the trips. He found it best to gather the fragments of life without searching for reasons. It was better not knowing what went on in those times and places between.
TWO FREIGHTERS COLLIDE OFF NANTUCKET; 20 FEARED DEAD
Cole read the first few paragraphs of the sea disaster story with its photograph of one of the doomed ships on her beam-ends moments before plunging to the bottom of the ocean, and another of a rescued seaman, round eyed with shock.
He thought it not unlike his own story with two lives colliding, one being sent to the murky depths of consciousness, the other left in startled awareness that some kind of life must go on. He had long since learned to handle such madness with a semblance of sanity. Cole was the only one to suspect the truth of it, that he was his father's son and probably insane beyond redemption.