The Last House on Needless Street(29)
‘Pretty,’ she says, running her finger across one of the blankets. It is yellow, with a pattern of blue butterflies on it, and it is like a duckling’s back to the touch.
He closes the lid of the freezer slowly but steadily, so that she has to remove her hand. As he does, she notices the fading bruising on his forearm, his swollen hand.
‘Hey, you’re hurt,’ she says. ‘How’d that happen?’
‘The car door closes on my arm,’ he says. ‘Closed, I mean. I was parked on a hill. At least it’s not broken, I guess.’
She makes a wincing face. ‘Still hurts, I bet. I broke my arm once. It was so awkward, you know, opening jars and stuff like that. Are you right-handed? If you need help, let me know.’
‘Uh,’ he says. She lets the ensuing silence stretch. ‘What do you do?’ he asks eventually.
‘I wanted to be a dancer once,’ Dee says. ‘I’m nothing, now.’ Strange that this is the first time she has allowed herself to admit it out loud.
He nods. ‘I wanted to be a cook. Life.’
‘Life,’ she says.
At the door, she shakes his hand. ‘Bye, Ted.’
‘Did I tell you my name?’ he asks. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’
‘It’s on your shirt.’
‘I used to work at an auto shop,’ he says. ‘I guess I got used to the shirt.’ Manual labour or unemployed.
‘Anyway, thanks,’ Dee says. ‘You’ve been very neighbourly. I won’t bother you again, I promise.’
‘Any time.’ Then he looks alarmed. He locks the door quickly behind her.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
She walks back slowly across the parched yard. He’s watching her as she goes, of course. She feels the weight of his eyes on her back. It takes all her restraint not to run. The encounter has shaken her more than she expected. She had been sure he wouldn’t let her in.
Dee closes her front door behind her with trembling hands and sits down on the dusty floor with her back against it. She tries to breathe, to calm herself, but she seems to have handed her body over to someone else. Her hands clench and unclench. Hot tides crawl across her skull. A sawing gasp comes from her throat. Her heart thumps in her ears. A panic attack, she thinks vaguely. Got to get it together. But it’s like sinking deeper and deeper into a sand dune; she can’t just climb out.
At length it subsides. Dee coughs and breathes. She becomes aware of an acrid scent in the house, a mingling of dry grass and pepper trees, wattle and stinkbugs. The outdoors is coming inside where it doesn’t belong. She gets up, weak as a kitten, and follows the scent to its source. In the dusty living room a pane of glass is missing from the window. Dry leaves have blown across the scarred boards. Something has been sleeping in here. Not a skunk, she doesn’t think, but something. Possum or raccoon.
‘Nope,’ she whispers to the empty room. ‘No room at the inn.’ She pushes a small bookcase in front of the broken pane, blocking it. She’ll probably have to get that fixed herself. Her landlord doesn’t seem like the type to go to any trouble. She doesn’t mind. The more he leaves her alone the better.
As an experiment, she looks around at the living room, walls brown with old cigarette smoke and corners hung with dust, and thinks, This is my home. It actually makes her laugh a little. She can’t recall the last place she felt was home. In her early teens, perhaps, when Lulu still slept in the next room, thumb locked tight between her pursed lips, emitting her light, penetrating snores.
She is surprised to discover that the gas is connected. Dee makes steak, green beans and a baked potato in the hissing white stove in the kitchen. She eats quickly and without pleasure. She can’t care about food, but she takes care of herself. She learned the importance of that the hard way. The stove still hisses after she switches it off and the kitchen smells faintly of gas. Another thing to get fixed. She’ll do it tomorrow – or maybe she will die in the night. She decides to leave it up to fate.
Dee sits cross-legged on the living-room floor as dusk falls. The night flows in, pools in the corners, spreads across the floor like a tide. She looks at the dark and the dark looks back at her. The little circles in Ted’s windows light up. Through one, colour and movement shiver – the TV, she guesses. Later the circles go dark downstairs, and for a few minutes two moons shine out upstairs. They go out at ten. Early to bed, then – no TV or book in bed either. She watches for a few moments longer. The house is dark but she cannot let go of the feeling that it is not at rest. There is something manic in its stillness. But she keeps watching and nothing happens. Her limbs are twitching with exhaustion; the dark revolves before her. She should sleep too. There is a long road ahead.
The bathroom is old white tile, mapped with cracks. A buzzing neon light hangs overhead, filled with the corpses of moths and flies. She puts blankets and pillows in the bathtub. Safest place in an earthquake, as her father used to say. Anyway, she doesn’t have a bed. Dee lays the clawhammer down beside her on the cold tile. She closes her eyes and practises reaching for it, reinforcing the muscle memory, imagining herself just woken from sleep, imagining a dark figure looming over her.
She pictures Lulu’s face, the way expressions chased across it, clouds over the sun.
She reads Wuthering Heights. She is only a couple of pages from the end. When she finishes, she opens the book at random in the middle and continues reading. Dee only ever reads this one book. She likes to read, but you never know what books are going to do to you and she can’t afford to be taken off guard. At least the people in Wuthering Heights understand that life is a terrible choice, which you must make each day. Let me in, Catherine pleads. Let me in.