THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 19 page

Even on this stretch, in the midst of the ugly hamburger joints and the seedy wooden barrooms and the new apartment buildings towering over boarded-up shopfronts and deserted gas stations, it was his old, verdant, and softly beautiful town. He loved even the weeds exploding in the cracks. The grass grew rich and green on the neutral ground. The crepe myrtle trees were covered with frothy blooms. He saw pink crepe myrtle and purple crepe myrtle, and a red as rich as the red of watermelon meat.

“Look at that, will you!” he said to the driver, who had been talking on and on about the crime, and the bad times here. “The sky’s violet, it’s violet just like I remembered it, and goddamnit, all these years out there I thought I imagined all this, I thought I colored it in with a crayon in my memory, you know.”

He felt like crying. All the time he’d held Rowan while she’d cried, he’d never shed a tear. But now he felt like bawling, and oh, how he wished Rowan were here.

The driver was laughing at him. “Yeah, well, that’s a purple sky all right, I guess you could call it that.”

“Damn right it is,” said Michael. “You were born between Magazine and the river, weren’t you?” Michael said. “I’d have known that voice anywhere.”

“What you talking about, boy, what about your own voice,” the driver teased him back. “I was born on Washington and St. Thomas for your information, youngest of nine children. They don’t make families like that anymore.” The cab was just crawling down the avenue, the soft moist August breeze washing through the open windows. The street lamps had just gone on.

Michael closed his eyes. Even the cab driver’s endless diatribe was music. But for this, this fragrant and embraceable warmth, he had longed with his whole soul. Was there anyplace else in the world where the air was such a living presence, where the breeze kissed you and stroked you, where the sky was pulsing and alive? And oh God, what it meant to be no longer cold!

“Oh, I am telling you, nobody’s got a right to be as happy as I am now,” Michael said. “Nobody. Look at the trees,” he said opening his eyes, staring up at the black curling branches.

“Where the hell you been, son?” asked the driver. He was a short man in a bill cap, with his elbow half out the window.

“Oh, I’ve been in hell, buddy, and let me tell you something about hell. It’s not hot. It’s cold. Hey, look, there’s the Pontchartrain Hotel and it’s still the same, damn, it’s still the same.” In fact, it looked if anything more elegant and aloof than it had in the old days. It had trim blue awnings, and the old complement of doormen and bellmen standing at the glass doors.

Michael could hardly sit still. He wanted to get out, to walk, to cover the old pavements. But he’d told the driver to take him up to First Street, that they’d double back to the hotel later, and for First Street he could wait.

He finished the second beer just as they came to the light at Jackson Avenue, and at that point everything changed. Michael hadn’t remembered the transition as so dramatic; but the oaks grew taller and infinitely denser; the apartment buildings gave way to the white houses with the Corinthian columns; and the whole drowsy twilight world seemed suddenly veiled in soft, glowing green.

“Rowan, if only you were here,” he whispered. There was the James Gallier house on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, splendidly restored. And across the street the Henry Howard house, spiffed up with a new coat of paint. Iron fences guarded lawns and gardens. “Christ, I’m home!” he whispered.

When he first landed he had regretted getting so drunk—it was just too damned hard to handle his suitcase and find a taxi—but now he was past that. As the cab turned left on First Street and entered the dark leafy core of the Garden District, he was in ecstasy.

“You realize it’s just the way it used to be!” he told the driver. An immense gratitude flooded him. He passed the fresh beer to him, but the driver only laughed and waved it away.

“Later, son,” he said. “Now where are we going?” In the slow motion of dream time, it seemed, they glided past the massive mansions. Michael saw brick sidewalks, the tall stiff magnolia grandiflora with their shiny dark leaves.

“Just drive, real slow, let this guy here pass us, yeah, very slow, until I tell you to stop.”

He had chosen the most beautiful hour of the evening for his return, he thought. He wasn’t thinking now of the visions or the dark mandate. He was so brimful of happiness all he could think about was what lay before him, and about Rowan. That was the test of love, he thought dreamily, when you can’t bear to be this happy without the other person with you. He was really afraid that the tears were going to come pouring down his face.

The cab driver started talking again. He had never really stopped talking. Now he was talking about the Redemptorist Parish and how it had been in the old days, and how it was all run-down now. Yeah, Michael wanted to see the old church. “I was an altar boy at St. Alphonsus,” Michael said.

But that didn’t matter, that could wait forever. Because, looking up, Michael saw the house.

He saw its long dark flank stretching back from the corner; he saw the unmistakable iron railings with their rose pattern; he saw the sentinel oaks stretching out their mammoth branches like mighty and protective arms.

“That’s it,” he said, his voice dropping senselessly and breathlessly to a whisper. “Pull over to the right. Stop here.” Taking the beer with him, he stepped out of the cab and walked to the corner, so that he could stand diagonally opposite the house.

It was as if a hush had fallen over the world. For the first time he heard the cicadas singing, the deep churning song rising all around him, which made the shadows themselves seem alive. And there came another sound he had forgotten completely, the shrill cry of birds.

Sounds like the woodland, he thought, as he gazed at the darkened and forlorn galleries, shrouded now in early darkness, not a single light flickering from behind the high narrow and numerous wooden blinds.

The sky was glazed and shining over the rooftop, soft and shot with violet and gold. It revealed starkly and beautifully the farthest end column of the high second gallery and, beneath the bracketed cornice, the bougainvillea vine tumbling down luxuriantly from the roof. Even in the gloom he could see the purple blossoms. And he could trace the old rose pattern in the iron railings. He could make out the capitals of the columns, the curious Italianate mixture of Doric for the side columns, Ionic for the lower ones set in ante, and Corinthian for those above.

He drew in his breath in a long mournful sigh. Again, he felt inexpressible happiness but it was mixed with sorrow, and he was not sure why. All the long years, he thought wearily, even in the midst of this joy. Memory had deceived in only one aspect, he reflected. The house was larger, far larger than he had remembered. All of these old places were larger; the very scale of everything here seemed for the moment almost unimaginable.

Yet there was a breathing, pulsing closeness to everything—the soft overgrown foliage behind the rusted iron fence blending in the darkness, and the singing of the cicadas, and the dense shadows beneath the oaks.

“Paradise,” he whispered. He gazed up at the tiny green ferns that covered the oak branches, and the tears came to his eyes. The memory of the visions was perilously close to him. It brushed him like dark wings. Yes, the house, Michael.

He stood riveted, the beer cold against the palm of his gloved hand. Was she talking to him, the woman with the dark hair?

He only knew for certain that the twilight was singing; the heat was singing; he let his gaze drift to the other mansions around him, noting nothing perhaps but the flowing harmony of fence and column and brickwork and even tiny faltering crepe myrtles struggling for life on strips of velvet green. A warm peace flooded him, and for a second the memory of the visions and their awful mandate lost its hold. Back, back into childhood he reached, not for a memory, but for a continuity. The moment expanded, moving beyond all thought, all helpless and inadequate words.

The sky darkened. It was still the brave color of amethyst, as if fighting the night with a low and relentless fire. But the light was nevertheless going. And turning his head ever so slightly to look down the long street in the direction of the river, Michael saw that there the sky was pure gold.

Deep, deep in him were memories, naturally, memories of a boy walking out this street from the crowded little houses near the river, of a boy standing in this very place when evening fell. But the present continued to eclipse everything, and there was no straining to recollect, to impress or to improve the soft inundation of his senses by everything around him, this moment of pure quiet in his soul.

Only now as he looked lovingly and slowly again at the house itself, at its deep doorway, shaped like a giant keyhole, did the impression of the visions grow strong again. Doorway. Yes, they had told him about the doorway! But it was not a literal doorway. Yet the sight of the giant keyhole and the shadowy vestibule behind it … No, couldn’t have been a literal doorway. He opened his eyes and closed them. He found himself gazing trancelike up at the windows of a northern room on the second story, and to his sudden worry, he saw the lurid glare of fire.

No, that could not happen. But within the same instant, he realized it was only the light of candles. The flicker remained constant, and he merely wondered at it, wondered that those within would choose this form of light.

The garden was thickening and closing up in the darkness. He would have to rouse himself if he wanted to walk down along the fence and look back into the side yard. He wanted to do it, but the high northern window held him. He saw now the shadow of a woman moving against the lace curtain. And through the lace, he was able to make out a dingy flower pattern on the high corner of the wall.

Suddenly he looked down at his feet. The beer had fallen from his hand. It was foaming into the gutter. Drunk, he thought, too drunk, you idiot, Michael. But it didn’t matter. On the contrary, he felt rather powerful, and suddenly he blundered across the intersection, aware of his heavy and uneven steps, and came to the front gate of the house.

He pushed his fingers through the iron webbing, staring at the dust and debris tossed about on the peeling boards of the front porch. The camellias had grown into trees which towered over the railings. And the flagstone path was covered over with leaves. He stuck his foot into the iron webbing. Easy enough to jump this gate.

“Hey, buddy, hey!”

Astonished, he turned to see the cab driver next to him, and how short he was when he wasn’t inside the cab. Just a little man with a big nose, his eyes in shadow under the bill cap, like a troll of the oaks in this heightened moment. “What are you trying to do? You lost your key?”

“I don’t live here,” Michael said. “I don’t have a key.” And suddenly he laughed at the pure absurdity of it. He felt giddy. The sweet breeze coming from the river was so luscious and the dark house was right here in front of him, almost close enough for him to touch.

“Come on, let me take you back to your hotel, you said the Pontchartrain? Right? I’ll help you get upstairs to your room.”

“Not so fast,” Michael said, “just hang on a minute.” He turned and walked down the street, distracted suddenly by the broken and uneven flagstones, pure purple, too, as he’d remembered. Was there nothing that would be faded and disappointing? He wiped at his face. Tears. Then he turned and looked into the side yard.

The crepe myrtles here had grown enormously. Their pale waxy trunks were now quite thick. And the great stretch of lawn he remembered was sad with weeds now, and the old boxwood was growing wild and unkempt. Nevertheless he loved it. Loved even the old trellis in the back, leaning under its burden of tangled vines.

And that’s where the man always stood, he thought, as he made out the faraway crepe myrtle, the one that went high up the wall of the neighboring house.

“Where are you?” he whispered. The visions hung thick over him suddenly. He felt himself fall forward against the fence, and heard its iron tendons groan. A soft rustling came from the foliage on the other side, just exactly to his right. He turned; movement in the leaves. Camellia blossoms, bruised and falling on the soft earth. He knelt and reached through the fence and caught one of them, red, broken. Was the cab driver talking to him?

“It’s OK, buddy,” Michael said, looking at the broken camellia in his hand, trying the better to see it in the gloom. Was that the gleam of a black shoe right in front of him, on the other side? Again came the rustling. Why, he was staring at a man’s pant leg. Someone was standing only an inch away. He lost his balance as he looked up. And as his knees struck the flagstones, he saw a figure looming over him, peering through the fence at him, eyes catching only a spark of light. The figure appeared frozen, wide-eyed, perilously close to him, and violently alert and focused upon him. A hand reached out, no more than a streak of white in the shadows. Michael moved away on the flags, the alarm in him instinctive and unquestioned. But now as he stared at the overgrown foliage, he realized that there was no one there.

The emptiness was as terrifying suddenly as the vanished figure. “God help me,” he whispered. His heart was knocking against his ribs. And he could not get up. The cab driver tugged on his arm.

“Come on, son, before a patrol car passes here!”

He was pulled, swaying dangerously, to his feet.

“Did you see that?” he whispered. “Christ almighty, that was the same man!” He stared at the cab driver. “I tell you it was the same man.”

“I’m telling you, son, I gotta take you back to the hotel now. This is the Garden District, boy, don’t you remember? You can’t go staggering drunk around here!”

Michael lost his footing again. He was going over. Heavily he backed off the flags into the grass, and then turned, reaching out for the tree but there was no tree. Again the driver caught him. Then another pair of hands steadied him. He spun round. If it was the man again, he was going screaming crazy.

But of all people, it was that Englishman, that white-haired fellow in the tweed suit who’d been on the plane.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Michael whispered. But even through his drunkenness he caught the man’s benign face, his reserved and refined demeanor.

“I want to help you, Michael,” the man said, with the utmost gentleness. It was one of those rich and limitlessly polite English voices. “I’d be so grateful if you’d allow me to take you back to the hotel.”

“Yeah, that seems to be the appropriate course of action,” Michael said, keenly aware that he could hardly make the words come out clear. He stared back at the garden, at the high facade of the house again, now quite lost in the darkness, though the sky in bits and pieces beyond the oak branches still carried a latent gleam. It seemed that the cab driver and the Englishman were talking together. It seemed the Englishman was paying the fare.

Michael tried to reach into his pants pocket for his money clip, but his hand kept sliding right past the cloth again and again. He moved away from the two men, falling forward and then against the fence once more. Almost all the light was gone from the lawn now, from the distant encroaching shrubs. The trellis and its weight of vines was a mere hooded shape in the night.

Yet beneath the farthest crepe myrtle, quite distinctly, Michael could make out a thin human shape. He could see the pale oval of the man’s face, and to his disbelieving eye came clear the same stiff white collar of the old days, the same silk tie at the throat.

Like a man right out of a novel. And he had seen these very same details only moments before in his panic.

“Come on, Michael, let me take you back,” said the Englishman.

“First you have to tell me something,” Michael said. He was beginning to shake all over. “Look, tell me, do you see that man?”

But now he saw only the various shades of darkness. And out of memory, there came his mother’s voice, young and crisp and painfully immediate. “Michael, now you know there is no man there.”

Eight

AFTER MICHAEL LEFT, Rowan sat on the western deck for hours, letting the sun warm her, and thinking in a rather incoherent and sleepy way about all that had taken place. She was slightly shocked and bruised by what had happened, rather deliciously bruised.

Nothing could efface the shame and guilt she felt for having burdened Michael with her doubts and her grief. But this was of no real concern to her now.

One did not become a good neurosurgeon by dwelling for very long on one’s mistakes. The appropriate thing, and the instinctive thing for Rowan, was to assess the error for what it was, consider how to avoid it in the future, and then to go on from there.

And so she took stock of her aloneness, her sadness, the revelation of her own need, which had caused her to fall into Michael’s arms, and she took stock also of the fact that Michael had enjoyed comforting her, that it had drawn the two of them together, deeply coloring their new relationship in a wholly unforeseen way.

Then she moved on to thinking about him.

Rowan had never loved a man of Michael’s age; she had never imagined the degree of selflessness and simplicity which was evident in Michael’s most spontaneous words or gestures. She had been unprepared for and quite enthralled by Michael’s mellowness of soul. As for his lovemaking, well, it was damn near perfect. He liked it rough and tumble the way she did; rather like a rape from both sides, it seemed to her. She wished they could do it again right now.

And for Rowan, who had so long kept her spiritual hungers and her physical hungers completely separated, satisfying the first through medicine and the second through near anonymous bed partners, the sudden convergence of the two in one good-hearted, intelligent, irresistibly huggable and charmingly cheerful and handsome figure with a captivating combination of mysterious psychological and psychic problems was just about more than she could handle. She shook her head, laughing softly to herself, then sipping her coffee. “Dickens and Vivaldi,” she whispered aloud. “Oh, Michael, please come back to me. Come back soon.” This was a gift from the sea, this man.

But what the hell was going to happen to him, even if he did come back right away? This idée fixe about the visions and the house and the purpose was destroying him. And furthermore, she had the distinct feeling that he wasn’t going to come back.

There wasn’t any doubt in her mind, as she sat half dreaming in the clear afternoon sun, that Michael was drunk by now and that he would get drunker before he ever reached his mysterious house. It would have been a lot better for him if she had gone with him, to look after him and to try to steady him through the shocks of this trip.

In fact, it occurred to her now that she had abandoned Michael twice—once when she had given him up too soon and too easily to the Coast Guard; and this morning, when she had let him go on to New Orleans alone.

Of course no one would have expected her to go with him to New Orleans. But then nobody knew what she felt for Michael, or what Michael had felt for her.

As for the nature of Michael’s visions, and she thought about these at length, she had no conclusive opinion except that they could not be attributed to a physiological cause. And again, their particularity—their eccentricity—startled her and frightened her somewhat. And there persisted in her a sense of Michael’s dangerous innocence, his naivete, which seemed to her to be connected to his attitudes about evil. He understood good better than he did evil.

Yet why, when they’d been driving over from San Francisco, did he ask her that curious question: had she been trying to throw him some sort of warning?

He had seen Graham’s death when he touched her hand because she had been thinking of Graham’s death. And the thought of it tortured her. But how could Michael construe this to be a deliberate warning? Had he sensed something of which she was wholly unaware?

The longer she sat in the sun, the more she realized that she could not think clearly and that she could not endure this longing for Michael, which was reaching the point of anguish.

She went upstairs to her room. She was just stepping into the shower when she thought of something. She had forgotten completely to use a contraceptive with Michael. It wasn’t the first time in her life she had been so stupid, but it was the first time in many years.

But it was done now, wasn’t it? She turned on the tap and stood back against the tile, letting the water flood over her. Imagine having a child by him. But that was crazy. Rowan didn’t want babies. She had never wanted babies. She thought again of that fetus in the laboratory, with all the wires and the tubes connected to it. No, her destiny was to save lives, not to make them. So what did that mean? For two weeks or so she’d be anxious; then when she knew she wasn’t pregnant, she’d be all right.

She was so sleepy when she came out of the shower that she was scarcely aware of what she was doing. She found Michael’s discarded shirt by the bed, the one he’d taken off the night before. It was a blue work shirt, starched and pressed as well as a dress shirt, which she had liked. She folded it neatly, and then lay down with it in her arms as if it were a child’s favorite blanket or stuffed toy.

And there she slept for six hours.

When she awoke, she knew she could not stay alone in the house. It seemed Michael had left his warm imprint on everything. She could hear the timbre of his voice, his laughter, see his enormous blue eyes peering at her earnestly through the horn-rimmed glasses, feel his gloved fingers touching her nipples, her cheek.

It was too early still to expect to hear from him, and now the house seemed all the more empty in the aftermath of his warmth.

At once she called the hospital. Of course they needed her. It was Saturday night in San Francisco, wasn’t it? The Emergency Rooms at San Francisco General had already overflowed. Accident victims were pouring into the Trauma Center at University from a multicar crash on Highway 101, and there had been several shootings in the Mission.

As soon as she arrived, there was a patient waiting for her in surgery, already intubated and anesthetized, the victim of an attempted ax murder, who had lost a great deal of blood. The intern ran through the history as Rowan scrubbed. Dr. Simmons had already opened. She saw as soon as she entered the ice-box-cold Operating Room that Dr. Simmons was relieved that she had come.

She surveyed the scene carefully as she stretched out her arms to receive the sterile green gown and the plastic gloves. Two of the best nurses on duty; one intern getting sick, the other powerfully excited by the proceedings; the anesthetists not her favorites but adequate; Dr. Simmons having done a good and tidy job of things so far.

And there was the patient, the anonymous patient, mounted in a slump of a sitting position, head bowed, the skull opened, the face and limbs hidden completely beneath layers and layers of green cotton drapery, except for two naked, helpless feet.

She moved towards the head of the table, behind the slumped body, nodding to the few rapid words the anesthetist spoke to her, and with her right foot she pressed down on the pedal that adjusted the giant double surgical scope, bringing into focus the opened brain, its tissues held back by the shining metal retractors.

“What a god-awful mess,” she whispered.

Soft, delicate laughter all around.

“She knew you were coming in, Dr. Mayfair,” said the older of the two nurses, “so she just told her husband to go on and give her another whack with that ax.”

Rowan smiled behind her mask, her eyes crinkling. “What do you think, Dr. Simmons?” she asked. “Can we clean up all this blood in here without sucking out too much of this lady’s brain?”

For five hours, she did not think of Michael at all.

It was two o’clock when she reached home. The house was dark and cold as she expected it to be when she came in. But for the first time since Ellie’s death she did not find herself brooding over Ellie. She didn’t think uneasily and painfully of Graham.

No message on her machine from Michael. She was disappointed but not surprised. She had a vivid image of him staggering off the plane, drunk. It was four o’clock in New Orleans, she figured. She couldn’t ring the Pontchartrain Hotel now.

Best not to think too much about it, she reasoned as she went up to bed once more.

Best not to think about the paper in the safe that said she couldn’t go back to New Orleans. Best not to think about getting on a plane and going to him. Best not to think about Andrew Slattery, her colleague, who still hadn’t been hired at Stanford, and who might be all too happy to fill in for her at University for a couple of weeks. Why the hell had she asked Lark tonight about Slattery, calling him just after midnight, to ask specifically whether Slattery had found a job. Something was going on in her feverish little brain.

It was three o’clock when next she opened her eyes. Someone was in the house. She did not know what noise or vibration had caused her to waken, only that someone else was there. The numerals of the digital clock were the only illumination other than the distant lights of the city. A great gust of wind hit the windows suddenly and with it a shower of glittering spray.

She realized the house was moving violently on its pilings. There was the faint rattle of glass.

She rose as quietly as she could, removed a .38-caliber pistol from the dresser drawer, cocked it, and went to the head of the stairs. She held the gun with two hands as Chase, her cop friend, had taught her to do. She had practiced with this gun and she knew how to use it. She was not afraid so much as angry, deeply angry, and quietly alert.

She heard no footsteps. She heard only the wind, howling distantly in the chimney, and making the thick glass walls ever so faintly groan.

She could see the living room directly below, in the usual glaze of bluish lunar light. Another volley of droplets struck the windows. She heard the Sweet Christine slam dully against the rubber tires fixed along the northern pier.

Quietly she went down, step by step, her eyes sweeping the empty rooms with each curve of the staircase, until she reached the lower floor. There was not a crevice of the house she could not see from where she stood, except the bathroom behind her. And seeing only emptiness everywhere she looked, and the Sweet Christine rocking awkwardly, she moved cautiously towards the bathroom door.

The little room was empty. Nothing disturbed there. Michael’s coffee cup on the vanity counter. Scent of Michael’s cologne.

Looking out once more through the front rooms, she rested back against the frame of the door. The ferocity of the wind slamming the glass walls alarmed her. She had heard it in the past, many a time, however. And only once had it been strong enough to break the glass. Such a storm had never come during the month of August. It had always been a winter phenomenon, coupled with the heavy rains that poured down on the hills of Marin County, washing mud into the streets, and sometimes washing houses off their foundations as well.

Now she watched, vaguely fascinated as the water splashed and spattered onto the long decks, staining them darkly. She could see a frost of drops on the windshield of the Sweet Christine. Had this sudden storm deceived her? She sent out her invisible antennae. She listened.

Beyond the groaning of glass and wood, she heard no alien sound. But something was wrong here. She wasn’t alone. And the intruder was not on the second floor of the house, she was certain of that. He was near. He was watching her. But where? She could find no explanation for what she felt.

The digital clock in the kitchen made a tiny, near imperceptible clicking sound as it rolled over to reveal that the time was five minutes after three A.M.

Something moved in the corner of her eye. She did not turn to stare at it. She chose not to move at all. And gradually, shifting her gaze sharply to the left without moving her head, she took in the figure of a man standing on the western deck.

He appeared to be slight of build, white-faced, with dark hair. His posture was not furtive or threatening. He stood unaccountably straight, arms natural at his sides. Surely she wasn’t seeing this figure clearly, for the clothes seemed improbable to the point of impossibility—formal, and elegantly cut.

Her rage grew stronger, and a cold calm settled over her. Her reasoning was instantaneous. He could not gain entrance to the house through the deck doors. He could not batter his way through the thick glass either. And if she fired the gun at him, which she would have loved to do, shed put a hole in the glass. Of course he might fire a gun at her as soon as he saw her. But why would he do it? Intruders want to get in. Besides, she was almost certain that he had already seen her, that he’d been watching her, and was watching her now.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 565