Superstition

50

It had started to rain while she was on the train. Now, as she emerged from the station, it was pouring hard and the November dusk was closing in.

There was no sign of a cab anywhere, so she took up her place at the head of the taxi stand under cover of the station forecourt, and waited. She felt little except a strange numbness, a detachment from reality that reminded her of the way her mouth felt after a shot of novocaine at the dentist-still there, but mysteriously untouchable.

It was a defense mechanism, she told herself, while marveling at the fact that knowing something didn't change the way it worked or the effect it had. But if it were not for this strange sense of being there and yet not there at the same time, she knew that the madness hovering on the edges of her consciousness would overwhelm her, and she would disintegrate totally.

A cab swished up and stopped to disgorge a couple who went through to the ticket office, then it pulled around and picked up Joanna. She gave her parents’ address and sat back, hoping the driver wasn't the talkative kind. He wasn't.

She tried to analyze her feelings, to observe and define what was going through her mind, but found it impossible. Everything both conceivable and inconceivable seemed to be happening at once in her imagination, but she didn't know what she was actually thinking. That too, she supposed, was part of the defense mechanism that was enabling her to function well enough and long enough to reach her destination. What would happen when she got there was another question-one that she found herself unable even to contemplate.

The gate to her parents’ driveway was shut, so she paid off the cab and walked to the house. There was a wind coming up, driving the rain at an angle into her face. She lowered her head and pulled up her collar, quickening her pace.

At the door she paused a moment, protected by the small portico, and shook out her hair. For the first time it struck her that maybe they wouldn't be at home. There were lights in the house, but they always left lights on. Then she recognized the thought for what it was-a delaying mechanism to put off the confrontation that she knew was going to be the most painful and traumatic of them all. She rang the bell.

She heard it ring in the distance. Skip began to bark, running toward the door from wherever he'd been-probably asleep by the fire or curled up in his basket in the kitchen. She called his name through the door, but the barking didn't stop and turn into excited whimpering the way it usually did when he recognized someone's voice. She called his name again, but his bark just became more agitated.

A light went on over her head, then her mother's voice came tinnily from the speaker by her shoulder.

“Who is it?”

“Momma, it's me.”

There was a long pause, during which Skip continued to bark, scrabbling at the door now as though trying to claw his way through and attack her. She could hear her mother calling out to him, maybe even coming to get him and hauling him physically away, because his barking became more distant but lost none of its excitement.

She knocked on the door several times and called out, “Momma? Momma, are you there?”

When her mother spoke, it was through the entry phone again. She sounded different now, strained and ill at ease.

“Are you the person who called me earlier?”

“Momma, for heaven's sake, it's me. Let me in-please.”

She could hear Skip's barking through the speaker, but distant and hollow sounding now, as though he'd been locked in somewhere.

“Why are you doing this?” her mother asked. “If you don't go away, I'll call the police-do you understand?”

“Mother, I'm begging you, open the door, look at me, tell me I'm Joanna- please.”

“I am looking at you. And I don't know who you are.”

Joanna turned sharply toward the source of the voice. She had forgotten about the security camera that her parents had installed a year or so ago after a couple of break-ins in the neighborhood. She stared into its impersonal gaze.

“Momma, for the love of God, it's me. Don't tell me you don't know me! Please, just open the door and face me-that's all I'm asking. Open the door and look at me!”

There was a silence. Joanna waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall, for the sound of a key being turned in a lock, a bolt being drawn.

She waited, but she waited in vain. Then she forced herself to wait some more, biting back the anguished cry that was building in her throat, angrily wiping away the tears that had begun to blur her vision. She waited until she could wait no more, and rang the bell again.

When there was no response, she banged at the door a couple of times with the side of her fist and called out to her mother. When there was still no response, she banged harder. The physical effort dispelled the last vestiges of her self-control and freed the panic so far held in check just beneath its surface. She clawed and kicked and battered at the door like a madwoman trying to escape from her locked cell, or like someone buried alive and screaming for release.

But no one answered. She stopped, exhausted, her throat hoarse. It was then that she remembered the dream her mother had described to her months earlier: she outside, hammering at the door to be let in, and her mother cowering terrified inside. There had even been rain, driving rain like now. It was that dream come true.

“Momma,” she cried, her face pressed against the wood, her fist beating out a relentless, steady rhythm to underline her words. “Momma, don't you remember? It's your dream. Remember your dream? The nightmare? You told me I was outside in the rain, and you were too afraid to open the door. There's nothing to be afraid of, Momma. It's me. Open the door, Momma. Please, please open the door…”

A beam of light swept over her. She turned, shielding her eyes as a car came up the driveway at speed. It stopped with a scrunch of tires on the gravel. Doors banged. She heard the static of a radio, and realized that the two figures moving toward her were in uniform. Her mother had called the police as she'd threatened she would.

One of them turned a flashlight on her. She threw up a hand to shade her eyes.

“Step away from that door.”

She obeyed automatically.

“Turn and face the wall on your left.”

The second voice was a woman's. It was the female officer who now came up behind Joanna.

“Place your hands on the wall and stand with your feet apart.”

Joanna tried to protest that she wasn't carrying a weapon, but the female office snapped at her to shut up while she briskly patted her body up and down.

“Okay, turn around.”

Joanna faced the two cops. Rain dripped from their faces, and she could see they were wearing heavy waterproofs that gave them an awkward, semi-inflated look. The man shone the powerful flashlight in her face again, making her squint.

“You got some ID, lady?”

“No, I…” She was about to explain that she had left everything in a friend's apartment in New York, but saw at once it would be pointless. “No, I don't have any.”

“Who are you and what are you doing on this property?”

“I'm Joanna Cross, and this is my parents’ house.”

She saw a look pass between the cops. The man shook his head as though confirming to the woman that this was a he.

“Get in the back of the car,” he said to Joanna, flicking his flashlight toward the patrol car and indicating she should walk ahead of him. When she was in, he left the door open but stood by it.

Looking past him, Joanna could see that the female cop was now talking to her mother at the front door. Her mother gave a nervous glance in the direction of the pale young woman sitting in the back of the car, and shook her head.

“No,” Joanna heard her say, “I don't know who she is. I've never seen her in my life.”

“Are you quite sure of that, ma'am?” the male cop said, taking a few steps away from the car. “I've met Mrs. Cazaubon when she's been out here with her husband, so I know this isn't her. But are you sure you don't have any idea who this…”

He stopped as another set of headlights swept up the driveway and illuminated the rain like long threads of silver twisting in the night. Joanna didn't register her father's arrival right away. She was too stunned by what she had just heard and was still struggling to absorb its significance. Mrs. Cazaubon!

She heard a car door slam, then her father's voice. “What's going on here? Honey, are you all right?”

Joanna saw her father hurry over to her mother, who, clearly upset, was saying something that she couldn't hear, but which made Bob Cross look over in Joanna's direction, puzzlement written on his face. They gazed at each other across the space between them. There was no recognition on his side, nor any longer the hope of it on hers.

A crash came from the house, and Skip's barking, which had been muffled in the distance, suddenly grew louder as he bounded furiously out of the door. Joanna's father tried to catch him, but he slipped through his hands and began running in circles in the rain, hysterical in the face of all this strange excitement. Both her parents called him furiously, but he ignored them.

Joanna saw her chance. She had hoped that by coming here she would find some haven from the madness that her life had become, but saw now how wrong she was. Her only thought was to escape. She was not yet ready to give up the fight, even though she no longer knew for sure what she was fighting. While both her parents and the cops were distracted by the racing, yapping dog, she slid across the seat of the car and reached for the handle of the far door. She squeezed it gently; it wasn't locked. She was out and running before anybody saw her move.

“Hey, you-! Stop right there!”

She could hear both cops coming after her. She didn't look back and she didn't slow down. They could shoot her if they liked; she didn't think they would, but even that would be better than just giving up. She raced through bushes and trees, down slippery rain-soaked paths and hidden places she had known since childhood, and where there was no way they could follow her in the dark.

After a couple of minutes she thought she'd lost them. She stopped, breathless, hearing nothing but the pelting rain all around her. Then she heard Skip's barking in the distance. He was coming after her.

She started to run again, but in a moment the little dog was snapping and snarling at her heels. She turned and tried to hush him. “Quiet, Skip! Go back! Go back!” But he didn't know her, and his barking grew more frenzied. She knew he would bring the police in a few seconds if she couldn't shake him; she could already see their flashlights angling in the distance through the rain as they tried to figure out where the dog's barking was coming from. She tried running a few steps then turning and trying to chase him off again, but he only redoubled the noise he was making and crouched down, the hair stiff and bristling on his neck, ready to attack her.

Finally she saw a bank of huge old laurel bushes where, as a child, she'd found a secret tunnel through to the woods on the far side. If she could find that again she could probably lose Skip. Like a lot of small dogs he grew less brave the farther he was from his own territory; with luck he wouldn't follow her.

She pushed through, her clothes and hair snagging on branches. She tugged them free and pressed on, until suddenly she found herself in relatively open space.

A soft carpet of moss and leaves cushioned her feet as she ran. With every step the dog's barking and the angry voices of the two cops grew fainter in the distance.