Death Mask

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN A Painting of Frank

Eleven o’clock chimed. Molly felt too tired to stay up any longer, and so she went to bed — “Although if anything happens, you have to wake me!”

After another twenty minutes, Trevor followed her, and then there were only Sissy and Mr. Boots in the living room, with the cicadas busy singing outside, and the weary ticking of the wall clock.

Sissy went into Molly’s study to see if the painting of Frank was still there. She looked down at it sadly and touched his lips with her fingertips as if she expected to feel him kissing her. One fall day, when they were kicking their way through the leaves, he had said to her, “You were so easy to fall in love with. And so easy to stay in love with.”

“Frank,” she whispered. Then she went back into the living room and sat on the couch so that she could stroke Mr. Boots’s ears while he dreamed of whatever he dreamed of. Not giants, that was for sure. Nor red-faced men with butcher knives and slits instead of eyes.

Sissy slept, and snored without realizing that she was snoring.

She dreamed that she was walking through an underground parking lot, all echoes and shouts and squealing tires, and that she didn’t know which way to get out of it.

“Watch your backs!” she called out, but her voice was thin and strangulated, and she wasn’t sure if anybody could hear her. “There are two of them! Watch your backs!”

She woke up with a jolt. The living room was dark, but the desk lamp in the study was still shining. Mr. Boots stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake up. The wall clock told her that it was ten after two in the morning.

She eased up herself up from the couch and went through to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of ice water from the fridge and drank it all in one, so that she gasped. Outside, the yard was in shadow, although the sky was stained with orange from the city lights. She opened the back door and stood there for a while, listening to the sounds of the night.

As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw somebody underneath the vine trellis. A man, sitting quite still. She slowly lifted her hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle, partly out of fear and partly to make sure that she was really awake. She had never felt a sensation like this before: such a mixture of elation and terror. She didn’t know whether to call out for Trevor and Molly, or to go back into the kitchen and lock the door behind her, or to challenge the man to his face.

But it was the man who spoke first. “Excuse me,” he asked her. “Where is this?” — as if he had fallen asleep on a train journey and just woken up.

Sissy approached him. His face was hidden in the shadows, but she recognized the wave of gray hair.

“Frank?” she said. “Frank — is that you?”

“Where am I? I don’t know how the hell I got here. Is this a dream?”

She sat down beside him. Now she could see that he really was Frank. That lean, angular face. That diamond-shaped scar. He even smelled like Frank, of Boss aftershave, which she had given him for Christmas twenty-four years ago.

“This isn’t a dream, Frank. We’ve called you back.”

“Called me back? Called me back from where?”

“It isn’t easy to explain. But this is Trevor’s house, in Cincinnati.”

“Trevor’s house? What do you mean? You mean Trevor doesn’t live at home anymore? Why?”

“Trevor’s all grown up now, Frank. He’s married, and he has a nine-year-old daughter.”

“Trevor? How can that be? Trevor’s only eleven.”

“You’ve been away, Frank. It’s been twenty-four years.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean, I’ve been away? Where?”

Sissy laid her hand on top of his, but almost immediately he drew his hand back.

“You’ve heard about people in a coma,” said Sissy. “What happened to you, it’s kind of like that.”

“I’ve been unconscious? For twenty-four years? You don’t expect me to believe that?”

“It’s true, Frank. I’ll take you inside to see Trevor, then you’ll believe me.”

Frank didn’t say anything for almost half a minute. The cicadas chirruped on and on, and somewhere in the night, a police siren wailed.

“So who are you?” Frank asked her, at last. “I’m sure I recognize your voice.”

“Lots of things have changed, including me.”

“Sissy?”

“Yes,” she said. She was very close to tears. “Not quite the Sissy you remember, but still the same Sissy.”

Frank stood up, so that the light from the kitchen window shone on his face. Sissy couldn’t believe how young he looked. When he was forty-seven and she was forty-five, she had always thought that both of them were beginning to show the signs of encroaching age.

“Here,” he said, and held out his hand. Sissy took it, and he helped her onto her feet.

“Your hair,” he said. “What’s happened to your hair, darling?”

She turned toward the light. “Not only my hair, Frank.”

He touched her cheek, very gently. There were tears sparkling in his eyes. “I don’t understand,” he told her. “Have I really been unconscious for so long?”

She held his wrist and kissed his fingertips. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have called you back, should I?”

“I still don’t understand. How did I lose consciousness? How come I’m not in a hospital or anything? Twenty-four years, did you say?

He looked around the yard, at the clusters of chirruping cicadas. “This is a dream, isn’t it? This can’t be real. But it feels so damn real.”

“Why don’t you come inside?” said Sissy. “Then I can explain.”

Frank stared at her. “Oh my God,” he said. “This isn’t a dream, is it?”