“Come on out,” Mary said again, and she heard the hinges of the bathroom door squeak.
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
Bang bang.
It was not the noise of gunfire. It was the noise of a fist knocking on a door. Mary took her finger off the trigger. The knock came again, louder and more insistent. Her front door, she realized. She walked into the other room, the Colt still in her hand, and she peered furtively out the window. Two pigs stood there, and a pig car was out in the parking lot. She stood at the door, and she steeled her voice and said, “What is it?”
“Police. Would you open your door, please?”
Take it easy, she thought. Control. Control. The pigs are at the door. Control. Mary turned the lock and unhooked the chain. She kept her gun hand out of sight as she opened the door, and she peered out through the crack at the two pigs, one black and one white. “What’s the problem?”
“We’ve had a call about a disturbance of the peace,” the black one said. He clicked on a penlight and shone it into Mary’s face. “Everything all right here, ma’am?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“One of your neighbors called in to complain,” the white pig told her. “Said there was a lot of yellin’ comin’ out of your apartment.”
“I…was having a nightmare. I got loud, I guess.”
“Would you open the door a little wider, please?” the black pig asked. Mary did, without hesitation; her gun hand was still hidden. The black pig played his penlight over her face. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Ginger Coles.”
“That’s her!” Shecklett shouted from the doorway of his apartment. “She’s crazy as hell, I’m tellin’ you! You oughta lock her up before she hurts somebody!”
“Sir? Would you keep your voice down, please?” The black pig said something quietly to the white one, and the white pig walked over to Shecklett’s door. Mary could hear Shecklett muttering and cursing, and she kept her gaze fixed on the black pig’s eyes. He took a pack of Doublemint gum from his jacket pocket and offered her a stick, but she shook her head. He popped one into his mouth and began to chew. “Nightmares can be weird, huh?” he asked. “They’re so real, I mean.”
Testing me, Mary thought. “Yeah, you’re right about that. I have really bad nightmares sometimes.”
“They must be bad if they make you shout so loudly.” The penlight drifted across her face again.
“I was a nurse in Vietnam,” Mary said.
The penlight stopped. Hung splashed across her right cheek for a few seconds. Then it went off with a small click.
“Sorry,” the black pig said. “I was too young to go, but I saw Platoon. Must’ve been hell over there, huh?”
“Every day.”
He nodded, and put his penlight away. “We’re finished here, Phil,” he said to the white pig. “Sorry to have bothered you, ma’am,” he told Mary. “But I hope you can understand why your neighbor called this in.”
“I can, yes. I usually take sleeping pills, but I didn’t get my prescription refilled yet.”
“She’s crazy!” Shecklett insisted, his voice getting strident again. “Allatime hollerin’ and raisin’ the devil!”
“Sir?” The black pig walked to Shecklett’s door. “Sir? I asked you to stop shouting, didn’t I? This woman is a Vietnam veteran, and you ought to have some consideration for that fact.”
“Is that what she told you? Shit! Make her prove it!”
“You going to settle down, sir, or are we going to take a ride in our car?”
There was a long silence. Mary waited, her hand tight around the .38’s grip. She heard the black pig talking to Shecklett, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then his door closed hard, and the two pigs came back to her door. “I think everything’s understood now,” the black one told her. “Good night, ma’am.”
“Good night. And thank you so much, Officers,” she said, and she closed the door, relatched it, and put the chain on. Behind the door, she said through clenched teeth, “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.” She waited, watching out the window until the pigs had driven away, and then she went to the wall between her apartment and Shecklett’s and she put her mouth against the paneling and said, “I’m going to fix you when I go. Going to fix you, hear me? Going to cut your eyeballs out and make you choke on them. Hear me, you old shit?”
She heard Shecklett coughing back in his bedroom. He made a ragged, gasping sound, and the toilet flushed again. Mary walked back to her own bedroom, and she switched on the light and stood looking down at the dead baby on the floor.
Its head was cracked and dented in, but there was no blood, no brains leaking from the skull. A doll, she thought. It’s a doll. She picked the doll up by one leg, and she took it to the Heaven Box in the closet. Then she stood for a long time staring down at the other broken dolls, a pulse beating at her right temple and her eyes glazed over like pond ice.
All of them. Dolls. Not flesh and blood. Rubber and plastic, with painted eyes. They couldn’t love her because they weren’t real. That was the answer, and it stunned her that she hadn’t seen it before. As much as she wanted them to be real, as much as she birthed them and fed them and gave them love, they were not real. She could see them as being flesh and blood in her mind, yes, but she eventually put them to death because she knew all along they were only rubber and plastic.
Lord Jack wanted a baby. A son. He had given her a baby, and she had lost the gift. If she did not go to Lord Jack with a baby, he would turn her away. That was the message of the dream. But there was a dangerous flaw here, like a crack in time. Jack’s baby was dead. She had squeezed the corpse out of her body in a gas station bathroom near Baltimore, her stomach lacerated with glass and metal. She had wrapped the little mass of tissue in the swaddling clothes of paper towels and sailed it off into the current. It had been a boy. That’s what Jack had hoped it would be. A boy, to carry his seed into the future. But how could she go to Jack with his son when his son was dead and washed away?
Mary sat on the edge of the bed, the pistol still in her hand, and she struck a Thinker pose. What if. She stared at a dead roach on the floor, lying on its back against the baseboard. What if.
What if she did have a baby boy to take to Jack?
A real baby boy. Flesh and blood. What if?
Mary stood up and paced around the room, the Colt in her grip. She walked from one wall to the other and back again, thinking. A real baby boy. Where would she get one of those? She could see herself going to an adoption agency, and filling out the application forms. Killed six pigs that I know of, she would say. Killed a college professor and a dude who thought he was going to make a movie about the Storm Front. Killed a kid out in the woods, too. But I sure do want a baby boy, sure do.
That was out. Where else could you get a baby?
She stopped pacing. You could get a baby at the same place any mother did, she realized. You could get a baby at a hospital.
Right, she thought sarcastically. Sure. Just go in, shoot up a hospital, and take a kid out of the maternity ward.
Hold it.
I was a nurse in Vietnam.
It was a lie, of course. She’d used it before, and it always worked with the pigs. They were suckers when you mentioned Vietnam. She began pacing again, her mind roaming in fertile fields. A nurse. A nurse.
Costume stores rented nurse uniforms, didn’t they?
Yes, but did the nurses at all hospitals wear the same color uniforms? She didn’t know. If she was going to do this, the first thing would be to find a hospital and check it out. She got the telephone book, and looked up Hospitals. There were a lot of them, when you added in the health centers and clinics, as the directory did. There was a clinic near Mableton. Not big enough, Mary decided. Another hospital, Atlanta West, was maybe a mile or two away. That might do, she thought. But then her gaze fell upon another listing, and she said, “That’s it.”
It was St. James Hospital. An omen of good karma,
Mary thought. A hospital named after Jim Morrison. She checked the address. St. James was over in Buckhead, the ritzy area of the city. It was a good distance from her apartment, but she thought that might work to her advantage: no one would possibly recognize her over there, and those rich people didn’t eat Whoppers. She took a pen and circled the St. James Hospital listing. She had a metallic taste in her mouth; the taste of danger. This was like making plans in the old days, and the thought of taking a baby boy from the maternity ward of St. James Hospital—a rich bitch’s kid, which made it even sweeter—caused her heart to pound and warm dampness to pulse between her thighs.
But she didn’t know if it could be done or not. First she’d have to go to the hospital and check out the maternity ward. Check out the security, where the stairwells were, where the nurses’ station was relative to the exits. Find out what the uniforms looked like, and how many nurses worked on the ward. There were other things that she wouldn’t think of until she was there to see it for herself, and if it wouldn’t work she’d find somewhere else.
It would not be Jack’s son. That baby was dead. But if she went to Lord Jack with the offering of a new baby boy, wouldn’t he be just as pleased? More pleased, she decided. She would tell him that the baby who’d died in her ripped-up belly had been a girl.
Mary put the pistol away. She lay down and tried to sleep, but she was too excited. Twenty days remained before her rendezvous at the weeping lady. She got up, put on her gray sweatsuit, and she went out into the midnight cold to run a mile and think.
4
Thursday’s Child
ON THURSDAY NIGHT AFTER DINNER, THE FIRST OF FEBRUARY, Doug put the newspaper aside and said, “I’ve got some work to do at the office.”
Laura watched him stand up and walk back to the bedroom. Their dinner had been eaten in silence of the stoniest kind. It had been Monday afternoon when she’d driven out to the Hillandale Apartments, and since that day she had seen Doug’s guilt in every movement and heard it in every word. Doug had asked her what was bothering her; and she’d said she didn’t feel well, that she was ready to be unbloated again. That was partly true, but of course only partly; Doug, acting on instincts that had begun to beep like a radar alarm the last few days, did not pursue the point. Laura immersed herself in reading or watching movies on the VCR, her body gathering strength for the rite ahead.
“I’ll be back in about…” Doug glanced at the clock as he shrugged into his coat. “I don’t know. I’ll just be back when I’m through.”
She bit her tongue. David was heavy in her belly tonight, and his kicking was a real irritation. She felt huge and lumpy, her sleep had been racked with bad dreams about the madwoman on the balcony for the last two nights, and she was in no mood for games. “How’s Eric?” she asked.
“Eric? He’s fine, I guess. Why?”
“Does he spend as little time at home as you do?”
“Don’t start that now. You know I’ve got a lot of work, and the day isn’t long enough.”
“The night isn’t long enough, either, is it?” she asked.
Doug stopped buttoning his coat. He stared at her, and she thought she saw a small flash of fear in his eyes. “No,” he replied. “It’s not.” His fingers finished the job. “You know how much it costs to raise a child and send him to college?”
“A lot.”
“Yes, a lot. Like more than a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s today’s rates. By the time David’s ready for college, God only knows how much it’ll cost. That’s what I think about when I have to go to work at night.”
She thought she might either burst into tears or laughter, she didn’t know which. Her face ached to collapse, but she kept her expression calm by force of will alone. “Will you be home by midnight, then?”
“Midnight? Sure.” He pulled his collar up. “Want me to call if I’m going to be too late?”
“That would be nice.”
“Okay.” Doug leaned over and kissed her cheek, and Laura realized he had dashed his face with English Leather. His lips scraped her flesh, and then they were gone. “See you later,” he said. He got his briefcase and headed for the garage door.
Say something, Laura thought. Stop him in his tracks. Stop him from going out that door, right now. But terror hit her, because she didn’t know what to say and—worst of all—she feared that nothing she could say would stop him from leaving.
“The baby,” she said.
Doug’s steps slowed. He did stop, and he looked back at her from a slice of shadow.
“I think it’s going to be only a few more days,” she told him.
“Yeah.” He smiled nervously. “I guess you’re good and ready, aren’t you?”
“Stay with me?” Laura asked, and she heard her voice quaver.
Doug took a breath. Laura saw him look around at the walls, a pained expression on his face, like a prisoner judging the width and breadth of his confinement. He took a couple of steps toward her, and then he stopped again. “You know, sometimes…this is hard to say.” He paused a few seconds and tried again. “Sometimes I see what we have, and how far we’ve come, and… I feel really strange inside, like…is this it? I mean…is this what it’s all about? And now, with you about to have the baby…it’s like the end of something. Can you understand that?”
She shook her head.
“The end of just us,” he went on. “The end of Doug and Laura. You know what I had a dream about last week?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I dreamed I was an old man. I was sitting in that chair.” He motioned to it with a tilt of his chin. “I had a gut and I was balding and all I wanted to do was sit in front of the television set and sleep. I don’t know where you and David were, but I was alone and everything was behind me, and I…I started crying, because that was a terrible thing to know. I was a rich man, in a fine house, and I was crying because—” He had trouble with this, but he forced it out. “Because the journey’s what it’s all about. Not the being there. It’s the fight to make it, and once you get there…” He trailed off, and shrugged. “I guess I don’t make much sense, do I?”
“Come sit down,” she urged him. “Let’s talk about it, okay?”
Doug started to walk toward her. She knew he wanted to come, because his body seemed to tremble, as if he were trying to break away from some force that pulled at him. He balanced toward her for a few precious seconds, and then he lifted his arm and looked at his Rolex. “I’d better go. Got a heavy client first thing in the morning, and there’s paper-work to clear up.” His voice was stiff again, all business. “We’ll talk tomorrow, all right?”
“Whenever,” Laura said, her throat tight. Doug turned away from her and, briefcase in hand, he walked out of the house.
Laura heard the Mercedes’ engine growl. The garage door went up. Before it ratcheted down again, Laura got to her feet. She winced and put a hand to her lower back, which had been hurting since early morning. Her bones ached as she walked across the den, and she picked up the keys to her BMW from the little silver tray. She went to the closet and got her overcoat and purse. Then she walked out—hobbled was more the correct term—to the garage, slid behind the BMW’s wheel, and started the engine.
She had made up her mind that she was going to follow Doug. If he went to work, fine. They would talk about the future honestly, and decide where to go from here. If he went to the Hillandale Apartments, she was going to call a lawyer in the morning. She pulled out of the garage, turned off the driveway onto Moore’s Mill Road, and drove toward the complex, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
As she merged into the traffic on the expressway, she realized what she was doing as if seeing it from a distance, and its audacity surprised her. She hadn’t known she still had any true toughness left in her. She’d thought all her iron had melted in the blast furnace of murder on that hot night in July. But following Doug—tracking him as if he were a criminal—shamed her, and she began to slow the car to take the
next exit ramp off and circle back for home. No, she thought. A stern inner voice, commanding her to keep going. Doug was a criminal. If he had not already slaughtered her heart, he was hacking steadily at it. Savaging their lives together, tearing them asunder, making a mockery of the vows they’d taken. He was a criminal, and he deserved to be tracked like one.