Devoted(35)
After switching on one of the nightstand lamps, she left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
She went down the narrow back stairs, which terminated in the kitchen.
The meat loaf stood on a wire rack, in a pan, beside the ovens. When it cooled and firmed, she’d cut two servings to be reheated. Covered with foil, the finished potato-and-cheese casserole waited in the warming drawer. The back door proved to be locked, as she’d known it would be. Verna Brickit was an entertaining curmudgeon, but she was also as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun.
Megan put plastic place mats and paper napkins and flatware on the breakfast table.
For whatever reason, Woody ate with less haste and was more content at dinner if the meal was served by candlelight. Megan put six small, red votive glasses on the table and inserted a four-hour candle in each. The candle glow must always be filtered through red glass. If the holders were clear, the flickering flames agitated Woody. If the glass was blue, he lost his appetite. If it was green, he grew depressed.
She didn’t put china on the table, but set it on a counter for later service. She required one plate, but Woody needed a plate for his meat loaf and three shallow dishes, one each for servings of the potato-cheese casserole and the two accompanying vegetables. If one food touched another, he could not eat it. She didn’t know why, and perhaps neither did he.
When Woody came down from his room, she would put the carrots and the cauliflower on the stove to cook and pour his “cocktail.” If Megan was drinking a white wine, Woody wanted a clear, flavored water. If she was drinking red, he wanted grape raspberry to match the color of her cabernet. Trapped as he was within his condition, he nevertheless sought connections between them, however awkwardly.
She allowed herself one or two glasses of wine in the evening. Now, as she waited for Woody, she poured Caymus cabernet.
At the window in the back door, she stared at the yard where, in her current canvas, Woody stood feeding the deer. Only a few of her works featured the boy, but once she painted him in a setting, the place never seemed right again without him in it. In spite of his autism or perhaps because of it, he possessed a gravity that she couldn’t explain, that bent the world around him, reshaped any venue and colored it anew and gave it fresh meaning. The yard now, without him, looked incomplete, like a simple sketch, a study for a more serious scene. She supposed that it wasn’t Woody who transformed those places where she’d painted him, but rather her love for him that made her see a mystical quality in them.
At the end of the lawn, in the gathering dusk, the forest darkled into a castellated architecture of turrets and battlements, just as she portrayed it in the current painting. She hadn’t quite known why she’d given it an ominous character, but now she realized that it represented the evils of the world that contrasted so starkly with Woody’s innocence, which would be such a threat to him if anything happened to her and she was no longer here to protect him.
She went to the table, where earlier she’d left a half-read novel. She sat and found her page and began to read again. The day had been one of accomplishment, and her pleasure felt earned. The story was good, and the wine was better.
A theme of the novel seemed to be the power of solitude. She assured herself that she wasn’t lonely, and she knew that assurance for a lie. She told herself that life was good, that there were worse things than loneliness, and those were truths.
32
The hallway light passes through the living room archway and lays a faint golden arc across floor and furniture, but the deeper reaches of the large room are veiled with shadows as the day recedes beyond the French windows.
Shacket’s strange augmented eyes conjure an eerie light by which he crosses the room to the Steinway. He had forgotten that Megan played the piano.
The lid is down on this parlor grand, and upon it stands an artfully arranged collection of photographs, the silver frames of which attract what light reaches this part of the room. His new way of seeing makes the silver seem to be in motion, molten and flowing even though the frames retain their shapes.
The photographs are from happier days when the family remained intact: Jason and Megan, Jason and Woody, Megan and Woody, three of them together, Jason by himself, and another of Jason, and another. Mom and Dad always smiling, but the kid only sometimes. The brain-screwed kid, the mental case. Jason steals Megan from Shacket, and he saddles her with the useless boy, and then he dies, and still the treacherous sonofabitch is here, still in possession of her heart.
One by one, Shacket turns the photos facedown. Later, when the boy is dead, when Megan understands who owns her now, he will watch while she takes the photos from the frames and throws them in the fireplace and burns them.
Noises arise from the back of the house, probably from the kitchen. He is not concerned. The sounds remain at a distance. He can smell her back there, the moistness of her, such a hot bitch, and she isn’t approaching.
This house is his now. She doesn’t know it, but this house belongs to Shacket. He can burn it down if he wants. If after the boy is dead, if after Shacket has slipped into Megan’s bed in the night and shown her what she’s been missing all these years, if still the slut refuses to submit, he will do to her what he did to Justine. Then he’ll set the house on fire and leave for Costa Rica, where there are a lot of hot women, the jungle and the sea and more hot women than he will ever need.