Ariel Read online

  “Are we?”

  “You’ll be home in time for dinner, Ariel.”

  “Home?”

  “With your mother and father.”

  Her heart sank. Of course! Like a fool she had believed what she’d wanted to believe. Erskine had said the man was old enough to be her father and she had believed he was her father. And he’d mentioned knowing her mother, and she’d believed he meant her real mother when all along he was talking about Roberta. Unless—

  “You mean Roberta.”

  He nodded. “Your mother,” he said. “I have my own name for her, you know.”

  “You do?”

  “I call her Bobbie,” he said. His voice was very soft, tender, and Ariel could imagine him murmuring love things to Roberta—to Bobbie—and the idea stirred something in her.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you. For a ride.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You know. On Legare Street.”

  “You can’t go home again, Grace.”

  “My name is Ariel.”

  “There’s no time left, Grace. The captain’s lost at sea and all your little ones have died in their beds. Did you smother them as they slept, Grace?”

  Oh, God, he was crazy. That’s why he’d had that tightness in his voice, just like Roberta. He was as crazy as she was. Maybe even more so.

  Why was he calling her Grace? And what was he talking about? … Little ones, smothered in their sleep … he was talking about Caleb!

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “Miles to go before you sleep, Grace.”

  “I want to get out of here.” Why was there no red light, no stop sign? He was driving too fast. If she jumped out she might break an ankle or a leg.

  “Why did you come to my house, Grace? You should have stayed in the attic.”

  God, she was in the car with a lunatic. And he thought she had killed Caleb, that must have been what he was going on about. Roberta must have been crazy enough to tell him that, and he was crazy enough to believe it, and now she, Ariel, was crazy enough to have gotten in the car with this nut.

  And he was going to kill her.

  She felt a coldness settle on her chest. He was going to kill her, she was going to die. It was punishment, retribution, she couldn’t escape it.

  Because didn’t she deserve it?

  For Caleb’s death. For lighting candles and writing in her notebook. For playing the flute.

  For Graham Littlefield’s ruptured spleen. For Veronica Doughty.

  For blowing out the pilot lights.

  For going to his house on Fontenoy Avenue. For sneaking down the stairs last night and spying on David and Roberta.

  For hearing her own music. For having dreams, and for what she did in her sleep.

  For the mess in Caleb’s room. For the painting on her wall and the expression in the woman’s eyes. For creaking stairs and rattling windowpanes.

  For her eyes. For the shape of her face, and her cool paleness.

  For being adopted—

  He said, “I can’t get away from you, Bobbie.”

  “I’m not Bobbie.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard. “I can’t shake loose. Nothing seems to work anymore. Bobbie, Grace, Ariel—you’re so many different women I don’t know who you are. Lilith? Astarte? Mother Eve?”

  There were shards of glass on the floor of the car. Bits of a mirror, and she raised her eyes and saw that the rear-view mirror had been broken.

  He stopped the car.

  She looked around. They were in the country, with no houses in sight, no other cars passing them. If she got away from him here, how would she even find her way back home? And it was a cold night. She could freeze to death, wandering around and not knowing where she was.

  She huddled against the door, not looking at him.

  For a long moment he said nothing, nor did he move from behind the wheel. With an effort she turned her face to look at him. He had both hands on the wheel and was looking straight ahead, and she saw a tear gathered at the corner of his eye. His face was drawn and he looked as though he had been awake for days and days.

  He said, “It’s all over now.”

  “What is?”

  He looked at her. “Everything has to happen over and over,” he said. “You died a hundred years ago, Grace. Did I know you then? Was I your captain, lost at sea? Or was I some secret lover the world never knew of?”

  If only he would say something that made sense …

  “Who would have thought you’d be back? Last time you killed yourself but this time you won’t do it, will you? Will you?”

  He reached into his pocket and brought out a tiny silver gun.

  Oh, God, she thought. The gun terrified her and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked like a toy, a shiny little cap gun, but somehow she knew it was real. Had a bullet from the gun shattered the mirror? Had another one made that little hole in the window and cracked the surrounding glass? She sniffed the air, trying to detect the odor of gunpowder, but smelled only her own fear.

  She tried the door. It wouldn’t open, he’d locked the doors by pressing something on the dashboard. She tried to raise the button to unlock the door but she couldn’t budge it.

  Oh, God …

  He turned the gun toward her. She didn’t want to look at it but couldn’t keep her eyes from the black hole in its muzzle. He kept the gun pointed at her for a moment, then reversed it, first placing its muzzle against his temple, then sticking it into his mouth. At first she willed him to press the trigger, then found herself praying that he would not.

  Maybe it was a toy—

  As if he’d read her mind, he suddenly took the gun from his mouth and swung it around, aiming at the window of the rear door on her side of the car. He squeezed the trigger, and the gunshot was the loudest sound she’d ever heard in her life. The gunpowder smell reminded her of descriptions of Hell—fire and brimstone and the reek of sulfur. The window was much more severely shattered than the one beside her, and the bullet had made an irregular hole the size of a half dollar.

  She turned to look at him again. He was still holding the gun but it was hanging loosely in his hand, pointed at the seat between their bodies. The act of firing it had drained some of the tension from his features. His breathing was slow and deep.

  She looked at him and felt herself gathering strength. She thought of how she’d felt last night, after she’d perched on the stairs listening to David and Roberta argue, thought of the unfamiliar feelings she’d experienced later in her room. And the portrait came into her mind, and she made her eyes like the eyes of the woman in the portrait, and with each breath she drew she felt herself growing stronger.

  His grip tightened on the gun. He was pointing it at her again.

  She moved toward him, ignoring the gun now, no longer afraid of it. Her eyes caught his and held them. She put her hand on his knee, ran it up along the inside of his thigh. She felt a quivering in her loins, a melting, a rush of warmth. The gunpowder stench was lost in a heavier scent of musk. Her hand was between his legs now, holding him, and her other hand was under his coat, pressed against his side, clutching at him, and she was leaning into him, her head tilted up and back, her lips slightly parted, her eyes burning bright.

  His shoulders stiffened and he tried to draw away from her. She continued to flow toward him, her mouth reaching for his, and she watched with satisfaction as his eyes glazed and his lower lips trembled. He made a sound, a sigh or a sob, and then his shoulders drooped in surrender even as his arms went around her, clutching her to him.

  Afterward she sat on her side of the car. There was a lingering pain in her loins, and she could tell that her arms and legs would be sore from the awkwardness of their coupling. She had a headache, too, a dull pulsing in her right temple, and her throat was dry and scratchy.

  For all of that, she felt good.

  He was still
holding the gun but she was not afraid of it anymore. He had never released his grip on it, and at times she had been aware of it, the cold metal pressing against the nape of her neck while their bodies tossed together. Now he was turning it in his hands, studying it as if he had never seen it before.

  He looked from the gun to her, his jaw slack, his eyes deeply troubled. “My God,” he said.

  “I want to go home now.”

  He was turning the gun over and over in his hands, looking first at it and then at her.

  She thought of the portrait and gathered strength, thought of the fire that had burned where now she felt only a dull ache.

  “Put the gun in your pocket,” she said. “I want to go home.”

  He did nothing at first. Then he nodded slowly to himself and dropped the gun into his jacket pocket and turned the key in the ignition….

  When she got home Roberta told her she was late. “We were worried about you,” she said.

  “I was over at Erskine’s.”

  “I called there and his mother said you had left. That was a long while ago.”

  “I left something in the schoolyard and I had to go back for it. It’s not that late, is it?”

  “It’s late. I was starting to worry.”

  Why would Roberta worry about her? What did Roberta care?

  “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The next day was a Saturday. Roberta slept later than usual, waking up groggy with a Valium hangover. She had awakened during the night in spite of the pills she’d taken before retiring, then took more pills to get back to sleep. As a result the Valium blurred the memory of the brief interval when she had been awake. She knew she had seen the ghost for the third successive night, but that was about as much as she could recall.

  When she got downstairs, David showed her the morning paper.

  She had trouble taking it all in. But the paper screamed out its news and David kept filling in the blanks for her, telling her what he had learned from the radio news. Some twelve hours previously, Jeffrey Channing had shot his wife and his two young daughters to death. Then he had attempted to set fire to their house, but the fire had evidently gone out of its own accord. After lighting the fire he had gone to his car, where he had placed the barrel of his gun in his mouth and fired a single shot into his brain. Death, according to reports, had been instantaneous.

  That afternoon Ariel sat in her room trying to read a novel about a teenage girl’s struggle to overcome compulsive overeating. She couldn’t seem to focus on the story. She put the book down and switched on Erskine’s tape recorder to listen to the duet tape.

  She turned the volume high, and for a while she was able to lose herself in her own music, but then the volume made the music sound wild and out of control and it bothered her. Once she had adjusted the controls she found herself unable to get back into the music.

  She let it play, got out her diary, uncapped her green pen.

  Why do I keep thinking he was my father?

  I know better. He was Greta and Debbie’s father and they’re dead now. He killed them. I wonder if they knew what was happening. It said they were found in their beds, but were they asleep when he did it? Maybe he killed them first and put them in their beds.

  I wonder if they saw the gun first and thought it was a toy.

  It’s not my fault!

  He would have killed me. He followed me and he made me get in the car and he had the gun along and he meant to kill me. He even pointed the gun at me.

  Then he put it in his mouth. That’s how he killed himself finally, with the gun in his mouth.

  How could he do that?

  It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything but save myself.

  I am all alone in the house now. David was up first and then when I got up I heard him telling Roberta. I was on the stairs. They didn’t even know I was there. He went out and then I thought she was on the phone or something because I was in my room and I heard her talking. I went halfway down the stairs again and discovered she was talking to herself. About David and me and about him and about wasting her life.

  I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying. It’s really weird, hearing a person talk to herself. It’s like they’re a character in a play. You don’t expect anybody to do that in real life.

  A lot of things happen that you don’t expect.

  I wanted to get something to eat but I didn’t want to see her, so I came back up here and waited until she left the house. When her car pulled away I went down and had breakfast.

  She even left the dishes in the sink. Something she never does. I washed them and put them away. Don’t ask me why. She’ll never notice anyway.

  Last night I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid of what I would dream. But all that happened was I had a wonderful dream of music. I dreamed a whole piece of music from beginning to end, and I remember part of me knowing I was dreaming and knowing that when I woke up I would be able to play the entire piece.

  Then when I did wake up I didn’t even remember the dream, and then I did, but I couldn’t remember anything about how the music went. Maybe I’ll dream it again and it’ll stay with me.

  I didn’t tell Erskine what happened. I called him this morning to tell him that Channing killed his family and himself, but he told me instead. He read the paper. I thought of telling him about being in the car with him but not what happened, but instead I decided not to say anything. What is the point of telling anybody?

  Erskine is with his parents today. An old aunt of his mother’s is sick and they are all three of them driving up to visit her. Erskine just about had a fit when he found out that was how he would be spending the day. First of all he hates his aunt. She is ugly and terrible and tends to pinch him, which he detests. Plus she lives in the country outside of Georgetown and there are always bugs and crawly things in her house. I said there wouldn’t be bugs this time of year but he says in her house it makes no difference and they are there year round.

  Plus we were going to check out flutes today in the pawnshops on Commercial Street that he knows about. We want to see if I can play a regular flute and if I like it, because with multiple tracks and all it might be interesting to use different flutes. We want to see if I like another flute as well as I like my flute and we want to find out how much they cost.

  Either we’ll go after school during the week or wind up waiting until next Saturday.

  It helped to keep moving. Roberta had discovered that as soon as she left the house. The Valium took the edge off things, making them easier to bear, and activity kept her body busy so that she didn’t live so completely in her mind.

  The marketing had to be done, and today she threw herself into it with a vengeance, getting caught up in the deliberate mindless routine of pushing a shopping cart up one aisle and down the next. She liked having to make simple meaningless choices, accepting this brand-name item and rejecting that one, saying yes to this soap powder and no to that liquid bleach. It all had a calming influence j upon her, suggesting that there was indeed order in the universe, that life flowed upon certain predictable currents.

  If there was order, surely there was also chaos. What could be more chaotic than what Jeff had done? She could see now, although she had not seen it at the time, that he had been acting strangely, that he had been under severe mental and emotional strain. But murder and suicide, slaughtering his family and then taking his own life—

  She loaded the groceries into her car, drove to the beauty parlor. It was the routine things that kept you going, she thought. The shopping, the hair appointment, the household chores. Getting dinner on the table, getting the beds made. She hadn’t made her bed this morning, hadn’t even done up the breakfast dishes.

  She braked at a stop sign, ducked ashes from her cigarette. The ghost, she thought, had come to warn her of Jeff’s death. She had first seen it three nights in succession before Caleb died. Then it had not appeared ag
ain until it had made another trio of appearances. Perhaps, she thought, there was pattern in everything, order even in chaos.

  She wouldn’t have to see the ghost again. It had come three times and Jeff was dead and it would not come again, and soon the house would be sold and she would never have to wake up again to see that damn woman hovering in the corner of the room.

  At the beauty parlor she had an impulse to have something wildly different done to her hair. She felt the need for a change. But she decided to give herself until her next appointment to think about it.

  There was no rush. And by then they might even have a buyer for the house.

  When she turned into Legare Street she wanted to keep right on driving, to zoom past that looming old mausoleum and never set foot in it again. No more creaking stairs, no more sounds in the walls, no more cold damp brick underfoot, no more windowpanes rattling in the wind.

  She pulled up in front of the house, killed the engine. Their next house, she thought, would damned well have a driveway.

  It took her several trips to empty the car of groceries. She thought of calling Ariel to help but it was easier to do it herself than to shout over the flute music that filled the entire house. When the last bag was stacked on the kitchen counter she sighed heavily and leaned against a cupboard, trying to catch her breath. She listened to the music and shuddered. How could the child get that much volume out of a tinny little flute?

  She began putting groceries away, but before she had emptied a bag the kitchen started to oppress her. She decided she needed a cup of coffee and a cigarette and went to the stove to put the kettle on.

  And of course the pilot light was out. All three stove-top pilot lights were out, and the oven pilot as well. It seemed to her that the gas smell was heavier than it had ever been and she worried that this time it might be dangerous to light a match.

  It took her two matches just to light the oven pilot. The first went out as she probed within the oven, but the second did the job. She closed the heavy oven door gently to avoid extinguishing the pilot again, then lit the pilot lights for each of the three pairs of burners. Then she tried each burner to make sure they all worked properly.