The water sluiced over her shoulders and down over her breasts and stomach. She felt a river running down her back and between her buttocks, felt the hot water beating hard on the back of her neck, knew she’d be red there when she got out, reached behind herself and turned the dial further toward HOT.
She groaned with commingling pleasure and pain.
In front of her closed eyes, the baby. Beautiful. Rose smiled.
She took the child in her arms and held it to herself, felt the water running down between the baby’s skin and her own, savored the heat of the infant’s tiny body against her breast.
Its mouth found her nipple and the baby began to feed, making soft sounds. Rose cradled the tiny life in her arms and rocked gently back and forth, humming a song she’d heard in the car last night before she had—
Rose started from the episode and gasped.
The hot water had run out and freezing cold water flowed over her. She grappled frantically for the knob and shut the water off, snatched a purple towel from the towel-bar and wrapped it around herself, shivering.
* * *
Later, she walked along the shoulder of the road, her bag slung over one shoulder. Inside was the quilt, neatly folded, and a single change of clothes, purchased from a Wal-Mart with the money from the dead man’s wallet.
Rose didn’t know what she was doing, just knew that she had to move. It didn’t feel right here anymore, though she didn’t understand why. Always in the past she’d stayed as long as possible in one place; when you didn’t know when someplace new to stay would come along, you stretched what you had as far as it would go. It was part of the loose code by which she’d lived so much of her life, a code that had allowed her to live as long as she had.
And that’s why she knew what she should do now: head back to the beach house. But still, here she was, walking away from safe, reliable shelter. Why? This was stupid, reckless. She didn’t do things like this, never had. But then, things had been changing recently, hadn’t they?
For as long as she could remember, there had been an insistent, constant pulling deep inside of her, almost a yearning, as though she were magnetized in some abstract, unidentifiable way, drawn to something. Even as a girl, when she’d lived first at the orphanage and then at any number of foster homes, she had felt the pull, the urge to leave the place where she was and make her way out into the world. But if she was being honest with herself, it had always been more than that. The urge hadn’t been simple wanderlust; it had been more pointed, more specific.
She could remember one time in particular, when she had been living with a nice family in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, when the urge to bolt had been almost too strong to resist. A girl of only eight or nine at the time, she had come from school each day to the sprawling suburban home her foster parents owned, dropped her books in her room, and then made herself a snack in the well-stocked kitchen.
This was years before the changes going on inside of her had advanced to the point where she could no longer enjoy food. Back then, as a little girl, she loved the taste of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, marshmallow fluff, grapes and oranges, apple juice. Living in the new foster home, it had become her ritual to arrive home, deposit her belongings in her room, and immediately make something to eat and devour it at the kitchen counter.
Until one day, when she never got out of her bedroom.
Putting it back together in her mind later on, Rose imagined that the fugue—if that’s what it was—took her just after she dropped her books on her bed, since they were there, neatly stacked, when she finally got around to homework that evening. Instead of heading downstairs for her snack, however, she had felt drawn to the window, not to anything in particular, not to something she had seen or heard, but to something she felt deep inside of her body. Or rather, to something she very pointedly did not feel. It had been as if a part of her was missing—had always been missing—and was calling out to her to come find it, to unite with it.
This was a sensation with which she had become familiar over the months and years of her childhood, but in the past the killing—whether of a stray cat or dog or even, once, a homeless man in a local park—had always held it at bay. This time, however, the feeling had been stronger, more potent, totally enthralling.
Hours later, her legs and back aching with a dry, throbbing heat, she had come back to herself standing slightly bent, forehead pressed against the glass of the window, eyes unfocused, staring not at anything in the front lawn or in the street, but at something far beyond. The incident had scared her, but not in any way that would have stayed with her if it had been an isolated event. It wasn’t.
As the days went by, Rose found herself drawn to the windows in her room, and at school. When her foster mother took her on trips to the supermarket, she would wake from a trance when the car jolted to a stop, forehead firmly pressed to the car window, head aching from the vibration of the car’s engine through the glass.
Gradually, she took to sitting outside on the front porch of the house since the ache—and if it hadn’t been a physical ache at first, it grew into one quickly—abated the slightest bit when she stepped out of the house, as if whatever it was that had captivated her was rewarding her for even this miniscule progress toward it.
It was at this same time that the need to kill had also advanced from a compulsion to an obsession. Where once she had been a child—a dark child, certainly, one who needed to keep secret her forays into the back alleys and woods—she began to recognize within herself an essential difference from everyone else around her. And this was when the need to run, to move, move, move had truly set upon her, and it had never gone away.
A car swished by on the highway, stirring a brief dust storm. Rose squinted her eyes and covered them with a hand, coughing a little as the dust got in her throat. This life, she thought. This goddamned life. There had to be more than this, didn’t there? Had to be something else, something new, something better. Even the simple techniques she’d developed in order to keep herself alive were failing her now, and that was somehow the ultimate insult.
Always, she had been able to resist the force tugging at her, to moderate its effect. When she began to feel out of control of her own urges, especially the urge to move, she had killed and fed, and for a while the urge abated somewhat. That had changed now. If the pull before had felt like a fisherman reeling her in with a spin-caster, this time it felt like she was being yanked forward by a chain affixed to a bulldozer.
Deep inside, she knew that there was a link between her unease, the impulse to up and leave, and the things she’d been seeing lately. The baby. The visions just before she fell asleep and after she awoke. They were tied together somehow, had to be. As a creature that had lived the lion’s share of its adult life on the road, Rose knew the value of instinct, intuition. She also knew the danger of trusting it too much. Now, she needed to find the middle road between what she felt, the need to move, and what she thought, that leaving when she still had a place to stay for several weeks was a mistake. The compromise, she’d decided: head north, stop at the first place that looked safe, take no chances, then reevaluate.
It felt right. But it felt stupid, too. Rose wanted to slap herself, to climb out of her body and scream at herself. It wasn’t just that she was leaving a safe place, a shelter, it was what her leaving represented. For the first time in her life that she could remember, she didn’t trust herself.
Behind her now, the sound of an approaching car. Rose turned and saw headlights coming, raised a hand and waved. The car passed by, and Rose kept walking.
She caught a ride half an hour later with Big Bob Bartok, a fixture salesman out of Jacksonville, on his way up to Atlanta. He seemed glad for the company, smiled toothily at Rose, looking over at her frequently as if to reassure himself that she was really there. Rose needed the ride, so she played along, smiling back, talking when he stopped. When he said something funny, she touched his leg just above the knee and giggled.
The next time she touched his leg, she saw the bulge in his crotch and sighed inwardly. Men.
They got into Atlanta at around three in the morning, and there was an awkward silence when the salesman pulled his Subaru Outback into the hotel where he was staying. He turned the car off and coughed nervously.
“Don’t worry,” Rose said, putting her hand back on his knee, firmly now, giving a slight squeeze, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t bite.”
* * *
She spent the next day sleeping in the hotel room. Twice during the day she woke from her sleep but felt so miserable that she couldn’t force herself to rise. She had never liked the day, didn’t feel safe during the day, but recently that sensation of insecurity had blossomed into something much more intense, a potent feeling of dread mixed with something she couldn’t quite define but which she understood on a deeper, intuitive level. The closest she could get to putting the feeling into words was that she felt incomplete during the day, out of place. It was as if she was going through the accelerated final stages of a change that had been lingering half-completed for most of her life. Finally and inarguably—and, she felt, irrevocably—she was becoming a creature of the night.
A knock woke her. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. 7:22 PM.
“What?” she called, rolling over and bumping into the cold hunk of flesh that Bob Bartok had become. After killing Bob the night before, she had showered and slipped into a white terry-cloth bathrobe hanging in the bathroom. She stood now and cinched the belt more tightly around her waist.
“You staying another night?” A man’s voice, sounding unhappy. Shit, Rose thought with some alarm, Bartok had paid just for the one night. As far as the desk was concerned, they’d missed the checkout time by half a day.
“No,” Rose called, sitting up. “Give us ten minutes.”
“Five,” the man rumbled, “and only because Bob’s a regular. I should charge you for another night anyway.”
“Fine,” Rose said, “five.”
There was grumbling from beyond the door, but Rose heard footsteps leaving. She stood, dressed quickly, and looked at the corpulent salesman lying on the bed, still dressed in his jeans, flannel shirt, and cowboy boots. The side of his neck was a bloody crater. What was she going to do with him?
“Shit,” she said. She needed to delay their finding him and calling the police for long enough to get out of the immediate area. Looking around, she weighed her options.
Underneath the bed was out. It was one of those modern ones with the drawers built in underneath. No space. Bathroom?
Rose went into the bathroom. There was a small closet that housed a miniature water heater, but there was no way beefy Bob was fitting in there. Bathtub? She tossed that one out immediately. That would give her, what, two minutes? Not nearly enough time to be sure of eluding detection. Something else...
Walking back into the bedroom, wringing her hands, she saw the window and walked over to it, parted the curtains and looked out.
The third-floor room Bob had rented backed on a line of trees. Beyond them, Rose could see the twinkling lights of the highway and McDonalds’ golden arches. But below was dark.
Rose slid the window open and popped the screen out, dropped it, waited for someone to yell up, “Hey, fuckin’ watch it!” or something equally charming. No one did.
Well, okay, she thought.
Bob was heavy, but Rose was strong as five men Bob’s size. She wrapped him in the bloody sheets from the bed and dragged him to the window, heaved him up to the sill where he lay face down, half-in and half-out. Praying that there was nobody staying in the ground floor room directly below, she took the toes of his boots in her hands. She was about to give him the heave-ho when something suddenly occurred to her.
Aware that she was pushing it time-wise, Rose quickly patted the man down, found his keys in his front jeans pocket, his wallet in his back pocket. Almost blew that one, she thought.
She lifted Bob’s feet and he went quietly out the window. There was a bat-wing flapping from the sheets as he fell and then a whoofing thump when he hit the grass below, but that was all. No screaming, no yelling. She heard the crunching of leaves and knew he had rolled into the underbrush.
Counting her blessings, Rose flipped the mattress upside down so the bloodstains were hidden and then slipped quietly out of the room and down the back stairs.
* * *
As the sun was just beginning to brighten the eastern horizon, Rose prowled a quiet suburban neighborhood. Finding a safe place to bed-down was always more difficult in the city, and if she didn’t find somewhere soon, she’d end up wandering around, half-addled with the day, just trying not to get hit by a bus.
Ah, here.
The back door of a brick apartment building was wedged open with a book. She entered the building and followed the stairs to the basement.
She glanced around. Not much in the way of cover. Washers and dryers on one side, storage on the other. Rose headed over to the storage area, a ten-by-twenty rectangle sealed off by a chain-link fence. The padlock hanging off the clasp was open.
Rose opened the gate, stepped in, closed it after herself. She found a spot out of sight behind a row of high-piled boxes and lay down, wrapped in the patchwork quilt, the bag of clothes her pillow.
Ten minutes later she was asleep.
Chapter 6
Sitting outside Dr. Barnes’s office, waiting for the first of what was bound to be dozens of check-ups, John worried the edges of the folded sheet of paper he held in both hands. He hadn’t spoken to Connie Pelham in ten years, and he’d gradually come to the conclusion that he would never see her or hear from her again. And now this. He assumed that Connie had sent the letter to his parents’ house and that they’d forwarded it to him—not having spoken to her in so long, she would have no idea how to reach him directly.
Connie’s letter had been short, barely one full page in her neat cursive script. Seeing her writing was nearly as bad as getting the letter in the first place, and John’s mind was flooded with the feel of her, the way she looked and smelled and sounded. Sitting on his lousy futon in his lousy apartment, John had felt an alternate future grab hold of him, one where he had stayed in Boston with the only woman he’d ever truly loved, married her, raised children with her… But that wasn’t the way things had happened, of course. Instead, he had left her crying at an Amtrak station in south Boston, wondering why the one person who was supposed to love her more than anyone else was leaving her behind as if she’d been nothing more to him than a one night stand.
Sitting in the anteroom of Barnes’s office, John unfolded the letter and read it again, his eyes skittering over text he had already memorized.
John,
I can’t really believe I’m writing you this letter, not just because it has been so long since we’ve seen each other, but also because I feel…selfish for doing it. I saw on the news what happened to you, what you did for that girl who got hit by the car, and it was like some connection I’d been trying to make forever finally came together in my mind. Ever since I saw you on that newscast, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you see. And what I’ve finally come to understand is that everything the newspapers and the talking heads on TV are saying about you, all of the hype about how you healed that girl, it’s true.
If I know you, you’re fighting this thing tooth and nail, rationalizing the whole thing in your head as some fluke, some mistake. Before you go too far down that road, please listen to what I have to say, and then to what I have to ask.
A couple of weeks after you and I started dating, my sister Lisa came to stay with me for a few days. Her making the trip up from New Jersey was a big deal, much bigger than I ever let on to you, because a few months earlier she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had been through all kinds of treatment for it—radiation, chemo, the works, and things were starting to look up a little bit. That was when she decided to come visit me at school. The day before she left ho
me, she found out the cancer had metastasized, and my mom and dad wanted to keep her home. The doctors were giving her next to no chance to live. The cancer was just in too many of her organs. She insisted on coming to see me, though. It was only for a couple of days, she said, and she wanted to meet this guy I’d told her so much about. She would go to the hospital when she got back. All she wanted was to see me and have a day or two of peace before starting in on treatment again.
You never knew any of this, but do you remember meeting her? I think you do, and I think you remember winding up that night in the emergency room with the worst flu I’d ever seen. A flu that came out of nowhere, with no warning. I know my sister remembers it; we talked about it last night over coffee.
John, I need you to call me. I believe you saved my little sister that night. I need you to do something for me now. I know how all of this sounds, but I hope you’ll hear me out before deciding I’m crazy.
—Connie
Below her signature was a phone number. John folded the paper again and stuffed it into his pocket, his mind cloudy and reeling. It was all too much. For ten years, he’d kept his memories of Connie partitioned off in a room of his brain that may as well have had DO NOT OPEN: TOXIC stenciled across the door. Still, even as he’d gone about what had come to pass for his life, John knew that a part of him—the part of him that was both the best and, perhaps ironically, the weakest—had wanted to open that door and sort through those memories. Connie in denim cut-offs and a bikini top on the stony Maine beach at Ogunquit, where they’d spent a few passion-filled nights one summer; Connie nestled deep beneath the flannel sheets and down comforter on the bed they’d shared as soft snow drifted down onto the frozen Charles River outside; Connie sitting at the breakfast table in their tiny one-bedroom walkup, doing the crossword from the Globe. Connie…