Taltos

Four

THE MORGUE WAS small, filthy, made of little rooms with old white tile on the walls and on the floor, and rusted drains and creaking iron tables.

Only in New Orleans, she thought, could it be like this. Only here would they let a thirteen-year-old girl step up to the body and see it and start to cry.

“Go out, Mona,” she said. “Let me examine Aaron.” Her legs were shaky, her hands worse. It was like the old joke: you sit there palsied and twisting and someone says, “What do you do for a living?” and you say, “I’m a ba-ba-ba-rain surgeon!”

She steadied herself with her left hand and lifted the bloody sheet. The car had not hurt his face; it was Aaron.

This was not the place to pay him reverence, to remember his multiple kindnesses and his vain attempts to help her. One image perhaps flared brightly enough to obscure the dirt, the stench, the ignominy of the once-dignified body in a heap on the soiled table.

Aaron Lightner at the funeral of her mother; Aaron Lightner taking her arm and helping her to move through the crowd of utter strangers who were her kin, to approach her mother’s coffin; Aaron knowing that that was exactly what Rowan wanted to do, and had to do-look upon the lovely rouged and perfumed body of Deirdre Mayfair.

No cosmetic had touched this man who lay here beyond distinction and in profound indifference, his white hair lustrous as it had always been, the badge of wisdom side by side with uncommon vitality. His pale eyes were unclosed, yet unmistakably dead. His mouth had relaxed perhaps into its more familiar and agreeable shape, evidence of a life lived with amazingly little bitterness, rage, or sinister humor.

She laid her hand on his forehead, and she moved his head just a little to one side and then back again. She figured the time of death at less than two hours ago.

The chest was crushed. Blood soaked the shirt and the coat. No doubt the lungs had instantly collapsed, and even before that, the heart might have been ruptured.

Gently she touched his lips, prying them apart as if she were a lover teasing him, preparing to kiss him, she thought. Her eyes were moist, and the feeling of sadness was so deep suddenly that scents of Deirdre’s funeral returned, the engulfing presence of perfumed white flowers. His mouth was full of blood.

She looked at the eyes, which did not look back at her. Know you, love you! She bent close. Yes, he had died instantly. He had died from the heart, not the brain. She smoothed his lids closed and let her fingers rest there.

Who in this dungeon would do a proper autopsy? Look at the stains on the wall. Smell the stench from the drawers.

She lifted the sheet back farther, and then ripped it aside, clumsily or impatiently, she wasn’t sure which. The right leg was crushed. Obviously the lower portion and the foot had been detached and put back into the wool trouser. The right hand had only three fingers. The other two had been severed brutally and totally. Had someone collected the fingers?

There was a grinding sound. It was the Chinese detective coming into the room, the sound of dirt under his shoe making that awful noise against the tile.

“You all right, Doctor?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m almost finished.” She went round to the other side. She laid her hand on Aaron’s head, and on his neck, and she stood quiet, thinking, listening, feeling.

It had been the car accident, plain and savage. If he had suffered, no image of it hovered near him now. If he had struggled not to die, that too would be unknown forever. Beatrice had seen him try to dodge the car, or so she thought. Mary Jane Mayfair had reported, “He tried to get out of the way. He just couldn’t.”

Finally she drew back. She had to wash her hands, but where? She went to the sink, turned on the ancient faucet, and let the water flood over her fingers. Then she turned off the faucet and she shoved her hands in the pockets of her cotton coat, and she walked past the cop and back out into the small anteroom before the drawers of unclaimed corpses.

Michael was there, cigarette in hand, collar open, looking utterly wasted by grief and the burden of comfort.

“You want to see him?” she asked. Her throat still hurt, but this was of no importance to her whatsoever. “His face is all right. Don’t look at anything else.”

“I don’t think so,” said Michael. “I never was in this position before. If you say he’s dead and the car hit him and there’s nothing for me to learn, I don’t want to see him.”

“I understand.”

“The smell’s making me sick. It made Mona sick.”

“There was a time when I was used to it,” she said.

He drew close to her, gathering the back of her neck in his large, roughened hand, and then kissing her clumsily, wholly unlike the sweet and apologetic way he had kissed her all during her weeks of silence. He shuddered all over, and she opened her lips and kissed him back, and crushed him with her arms, or at least made an attempt to do so.

“I have to get out of here,” he said.

She drew back only a step, and glanced into the other room, at the bloody heap. The Chinese cop had restored the covering sheet, out of respect perhaps, or procedure.

Michael stared at the drawers lining the opposite wall. Bodies inside made the abominable smell. She looked. There was one drawer partly open, perhaps because it couldn’t be closed, and she could see the evidence of two bodies inside, the brown head of one facing up, and the molding pink feet of another lying directly on top of the first. There was green mold on the face, too. But the horror was not the mold; it was the two stacked together. The unclaimed dead, as intimate in their own way as lovers.

“I can’t …” said Michael. “I know, come on,” she said.

By the time they climbed into the car, Mona had stopped crying. She sat staring out the window, so deep in thought she forbade any talk, any distraction. Now and then she turned and threw a glance at Rowan. Rowan met the glance and felt the strength of it, and the warmth. In three weeks of listening to this child pour out her heart-a lovely load of poetry which often became simply sound to Rowan in her somnambulant state-Rowan had come to love Mona completely.

Heiress, the one who will bear the child that will carry on the legacy. Child with a womb inside her, and the passions of an experienced woman. Child who had held Michael in her arms, who in her exuberance and ignorance had feared not at all for his battered heart, or that he might die at the pinnacle of passion. He hadn’t died. He’d climbed out of invalidism and readied himself for the homecoming of his wife! And now the guilt lay on Mona, far too intoxicating, confusing all the mighty doses which she had had to swallow.

No one spoke as the car moved on.

Rowan sat next to Michael, in a little heap against him, resisting the urge to sleep, to sink back, to be lost again in thoughts that flowed with all the steadiness and imperturbability of a river, thoughts like the thoughts that had gently overlaid her for weeks, thoughts through which words and deeds had broken so slowly and so gently that they had hardly reached her at all. Voices speaking to you over the muffling rush of water.

She knew what she meant to do. It was going to be another terrible, terrible blow for Michael.

They found the house alive. Guards surrounded it once again. That was no surprise to any of them. And Rowan required no explanations. No one knew who had hired the man to run down Aaron Lightner.

Celia had come and had taken Bea in hand, letting her “cry it out” in Aaron’s regular guest room on the second floor. Ryan Mayfair was in attendance, the man always prepared for court or church in his suit and tie, speaking cautiously of what the family must do now.

They were all looking at Rowan, of course. She had seen these faces at her bedside. She had seen them pass before her during her long hours in the garden.

She felt uncomfortable in the dress that Mona had helped her choose, because she could not remember ever seeing it before. But it didn’t matter nearly as much as food. She was ravenously hungry, and they had laid out a full Mayfair-style buffet in the dining room.

Michael filled a plate for her before the others could do it. She sat at the head of the dining table and she ate, and she watched the others moving here and there in little groups. She drank a glass of ice water greedily. They were leaving her alone, out of respect or out of helplessness. What could they say to her? For the most part, they knew very little of what had actually taken place. They would never understand her abduction, as they called it, her captivity and the assaults that had been made upon her. What good, people they were. They genuinely cared, but there was nothing they could do now, except leave her alone.

Mona stood next to her. Mona bent and kissed her cheek, doing this very slowly, so that at any time, Rowan might have stopped her. Rowan didn’t. On the contrary, she took Mona’s wrist, pulled her close, and kissed her back, loving the soft baby feel of her skin, thinking only in passing how Michael must have enjoyed this skin, to see, to touch, to penetrate.

“I’m going upstairs to sack out,” Mona said. “I’ll be there if you want me.”

“I do want you,” she said, but she said it in a low voice so that Michael perhaps wouldn’t notice it. Michael was at her right, devouring a plate of food and a can of cold beer.

“Yeah, okay,” said Mona. “I’ll just be lying down.” There was a look of dread in her face, weariness and sadness and dread.

“We need each other now,” Rowan said, speaking the words as low as she could. The child’s eyes fixed on her, and they merely looked at each other.

Mona nodded, then left, without even a quick farewell to Michael.

The awkwardness of the guilty, Rowan thought.

Someone in the front room laughed suddenly. It seemed that no matter what happened, the Mayfairs always laughed. When she had been dying upstairs, and Michael had been crying by her bed, there had been people in the house laughing. She remembered thinking about it, thinking about both sounds in a detached way, without alarm, without response. Drifting. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

Michael finished off the roast beef and the rice and gravy. He took down the last of the beer. Someone came quickly to put another can by his plate, and he picked this up and drank half of it immediately.

“This is good for your heart?” she murmured. He didn’t respond.

She looked at her plate. She had finished her portion as well. Downright gluttonous.

Rice and gravy. New Orleans food. It occurred to her that she ought to tell him that during all these weeks she had loved it that he had given her food with his own hands. But what was the use of saying something like that to him?

That he loved her was as much a miracle as anything that had happened to her, as anything that had happened in this house to anyone. And it had all happened in this house, she mused, when you got right down to it. She felt rooted here, connected in some way she had never felt anywhere else-not even on the Sweet Christine, bravely plowing through the Golden Gate. She felt the strong certainty that this was her home, would never stop being that, and staring at the plate, she remembered that day when Michael and she had walked about the house together, when they’d opened the pantry and found all this old china, this precious china, and the silver.

And yet all of this might perish, might be blown away from her and from everyone else, by a tempest of hot breath, breath from the mouth of hell. What had her new friend, Mona Mayfair, said to her only hours ago? “Rowan, it’s not finished.”

No, not finished. And Aaron? Had they even called the Motherhouse to let his oldest friends there know what had happened to him, or was he to be buried among new friends and conjugal kindred?

The lamps burned brightly on the mantel.

It was not yet dark outside. Through the cherry laurels, she could see the sky was the legendary purple. The murals gave off their reassuring colors to the twilight in the room, and in the magnificent oaks, the oaks that could comfort you even when no human being could, the cicadas had begun to sing, and the warm spring air rolled through the room, from windows that were open everywhere around them-here, and in the parlor, and perhaps in the back to the great unused pool, windows open to the garden graveyard where the bodies lay-the bodies of her only children.

Michael drank the last of the second beer, and gave the can the usual squeeze, and then laid it down neatly, as if the big table demanded such propriety. He didn’t look at her. He stared out at the laurels brushing the colonnettes of the orch, brushing the glass of the upper windows. Maybe he was looking at the purple sky. Maybe he was listening to the commotion of the starlings that swooped down at this hour in great flocks to devour the cicadas. It was all death, that dance, the cicadas swarming from tree to tree, and the flocks of birds crisscrossing the evening sky, just death, just one species eating another.

“That’s all it is, my dear,” she had said on the day of her awakening, her nightgown covered with mud, her hands covered with mud, her bare feet in the wet mud on the side of the new grave. “That’s all it is, Emaleth. A matter of survival, my daughter.”

Part of her wanted to return to the graves and the garden, to the iron table beneath the tree, to the danse macabre of the winged creatures high above, making the bold purple night throb with incidental and gorgeous song. Part of her didn’t dare. If she walked out of here and went back to that table, she might open her eyes to discover that a night had passed away, perhaps more…. Something as wretched and ugly as the death of Aaron would catch her again unawares and say to her, “Wake, they need you. You know what you must do.” Had Aaron been there himself for a split second, disembodied and merciful, whispering it in her ear? No, it had been nothing so clear or personal.

She looked at her husband. The man slouching in the chair, crushing the hapless beer can into something round and almost flat, his eyes still settled on the windows.

He was both wondrous and dreadful-indescribably attractive to her. And the awful, shameful truth was that his bitterness and suffering had made him more attractive; it had tarnished him rather marvelously. He didn’t look so innocent now, so unlike the man he really was inside. No, the inside had seeped through the handsome skin and changed the texture of him all over. It had lent a slight ferocity to his face, as well as many soft and ever-shifting shadows.

Saddened colors. He had told her something once about saddened colors, in the bright newlywed time before they knew their child was a goblin. He had said that when they painted houses in the Victorian times they used “saddened” colors. This meant darkening the colors somewhat; this meant somber, muted, complex. Victorian houses all over America had been painted in that way. That’s what he’d said. And he had loved all that, those brownish reds and olive greens and steel grays, but here one had to think of another word for the ashen twilight and the deep green gloom, the shades of darkness that hovered about the violet house with its bright painted shutters.

She was thinking now. Was he “saddened”? Was that what had happened to him? Or did she have to find another word for the darker yet bolder look in his eye, for the manner in which his face yielded so little now, at first glance, yet was not for a moment mean or ugly.

He looked at her, eyes shifting and striking her like lights. Snap. Blue and the smile almost there. Do it again, she thought as he looked away. Make those eyes at me. Make them large and blue and really dazzling for a moment. Was it a handicap to have such eyes?

She reached out and touched the shadowy beard on his face, on his chin. She felt it all over his neck, and then she felt his fine black hair, and all the new coarser gray hair, and she sank her fingers into the curls.

He stared forward as if he were shocked, and then very cautiously he turned his eyes, without much turning his head, and looked at her.

She withdrew her hand, rising at the same time, and he stood up with her.

There was almost a throb in his hand as he held her arm. As he moved the chair back and out of her way, she let herself brush fully against him.

Up the stairs they went quietly.

The bedroom was as it had been all this time, very serene and overly warm, perhaps, with the bed never made but only neatly turned down so that she could at any moment sink back into it.

She shut the door and bolted it. He was already taking off his coat. She opened her blouse, pulling it out of the skirt with one hand and peeling it off and dropping it to the floor.

“The operation they did,” he said. “I thought perhaps …”

“No, I’m healed. I want to do it.”

He came forward and kissed her on the cheek, turning her head as he did it. She felt the blazing roughness of the beard, the coarseness of his hands, pulling a little hard on her hair as he bent her head back. She reached out and pulled at his shirt.

“Take it off,” she said.

When she unzipped the skirt, it dropped to her feet. How thin she was. But she didn’t care about herself or want to see herself. She wanted to see him. He was stripped now, and hard. She reached out and caught the black curling hair on his chest, and pinched his nipples.

“Ah, that’s too hard,” he whispered. He drew her against him, pushing her breasts right into the hair. Her hand came up, between his legs, finding him hard and ready.

She tugged on him as she climbed up on the bed, moving across it on her knees and then falling down on the cool cotton sheet and feeling his weight come down clumsily on top of her. God, these big bones crushing her again, this swarm of hair against us, this scent of sweet flesh and vintage perfume, this scratching, pushing, divine roughness.

“Do it, do it fast,” she said. “We’ll go slowly the second time. Do it, fill me up,” she said.

But he needed no goading words.

“Do it hard!” she whispered between her teeth.

The cock entered her, its size shocking her, hurting her, bruising her. The pain was gorgeous, exquisite, perfect. She clenched the cock as best she could, the muscles weak and aching and not under her command-her wounded body betraying her.

Didn’t matter. He battered her hard, and she came, giving no cue of cries or sighs. She was thoughtless, red-faced, hands flung out, and then tightening on him with all her might, on the very pain itself, as he drove into her repeatedly and then spent in great jerking motions that seemed to lift him off her and then abandon him to fall into her arms, wet and familiar and loved, desperately loved. Michael.

He rolled off. He wouldn’t be able to do it so soon again. That was to be expected. His face was wet, the hair stuck to his forehead. She lay still in the cooling air of the room, uncovered and watching the slow movement of the fan blades near the ceiling.

The movement was so slow. Perhaps it was hypnotizing her. Be quiet, she said to her body, her loins, her inner self. She half dreamed, in fear, revisiting the moments in Lasher’s arms and, mercifully, found them wanting. The savage, lustful god, yes, he might have seemed that; but this had been a man, and a brutal man with an immense and loving heart. It was so divinely rough, so divinely crude, so utterly blinding and bruising and simple.

He climbed out of the bed. She was certain he would sleep, and she herself knew she couldn’t do it.

But he was up and dressing himself again, dragging clean clothes from the rods in the bathroom closet. He had his back to her, and when he turned around, the light from the bathroom shone on his face.

“Why did you do it!” he said. “Why did you leave with him!” It came like a roar.

“Shhhhh!” She sat up and put her finger to her lips. “Don’t bring them all. Don’t make them come. Hate me if you will …”

“Hate you? God, how can you say that to me? Day in and day out, I’ve told you that I love you!” He came towards the bed, and put his hands firmly on the footboard. He glowered over her, horrifically beautiful in his rage. “How could you leave me like that!” He whispered the cry. “How!”

He came round the side, and suddenly grabbed her by her naked arms, fingers hurting her skin unbearably.

“Don’t do it!” she screamed back, struggling to keep her voice low, knowing how ugly it was, how filled with panic. “Don’t hit me, I warn you. That’s what he did, that’s what he did over and over and over again. I’ll kill you if you hit me!”

She pulled loose and rolled to the side, tumbling off the bed and pushing into the bathroom, where the cold marble tile burned her naked feet.

Kill him! Goddamn it, if you don’t stop yourself you will, you will, with your power you’ll kill Michael!

How many times had she tried it with Lasher, spitting it at him, the puny hatred, kill him, kill him, kill him, and he had only laughed. Well, this man would die if she struck with her invisible rage. He would die as surely as the others she had killed-the filthy, appalling murders that had shaped her life, brought her to this very house, this moment.

Terror. The stillness, the quietness of the room. She turned slowly and looked through the door and she saw him standing beside the bed, merely watching her.

“I ought to be afraid of you,” he said. “But I’m not. I’m only afraid of one thing. That you don’t love me.”

“Oh, but I do,” she said. “And I always did. Always.”

His shoulders sagged for a minute, just a minute, and then he turned away from her. He was so hurt, but he would never again have the vulnerable look he had had before. He would never again have the pure gentleness.

There was a chair by the window to the porch, and he appeared to find it blindly and choose it indifferently as he sat down, still turned away from her.

And I’m about to hurt you again, she thought.

She wanted to go to him, to talk to him, to hold him again. To talk the way they had that first day after she’d come to herself, and buried her only daughter-the only daughter she’d ever have-beneath the oak. She wanted to open now with the kindling excitement she’d felt then, the utter love, thoughtless and rushed and without the slightest caution.

But it seemed as beyond reach now as words had been so soon after that.

She lifted her hands and ran them back hard through her hair. Then, rather mechanically, she reached for the taps in the shower.

With the water flooding down, she could think, perhaps clearly, for the first time. The noise was sweet and the hot water was luscious.

There seemed an impossible wealth of dresses to choose from. Absolutely confounding that there were so many in the closets. Finally she found a pair of soft wool pants, old pants she’d had eons ago in San Francisco, and she put those on, and on top a loose and deceptively heavy cotton sweater.

It was plenty cool enough now for the spring night. And it felt good to be dressed again in the clothes she herself had loved. Who, she wondered, could have bought all these pretty dresses?

She brushed her hair, and closed her eyes, and thought, “You are going to lose him, and with reason, if you do not talk to him now, if you do not once again explain, if you do not struggle against your own instinctive fear of words, and go to him.”

She laid down the brush. He was standing in the doorway. She’d never shut the door all this while, and when she looked up at him, the peaceful, accepting look on his face was a great relief to her. She almost cried. But that would have been ludicrously selfish.

“I love you, Michael,” she said. “I could shout it from the rooftops. I never stopped loving you. It was vanity and it was hubris; and the silence, the silence was the failure of a soul to heal and strengthen itself, or maybe just the necessary retreat that the soul sought as if it were some selfish organism.”

He listened intently, frowning slightly, face calm but never innocent the way it had been before. The eyes were huge and glistening but hard and shadowed with sadness.

“I don’t know how I could have hurt you just now, Rowan,” he said. “I really don’t. I just don’t.”

“Michael, no …”

“No, let me say it. I know what happened to you. I know what he did. I know. And I don’t know how I could have blamed you, been angry with you, hurt you like that, I don’t know!”

“Michael, I know,” she said. “Don’t. Don’t, or you’ll make me cry.”

“Rowan, I destroyed him,” he said. He had dropped his voice to a whisper the way so many people did when they spoke of death. “I destroyed him and it’s not enough! I … I …”

“No, don’t speak anymore. Forgive me, Michael, forgive me for your sake and my sake. Forgive me.” She leant forward and kissed him, took the breath out of him deliberately so it would remain wordless. And this time when he folded her into his arms, it was full of the old kindness, the old cherishing warmth, the great protective sweetness that made her feel safe, safe as it had when they’d first made love.

There must have been something more lovely than falling in his arms like this, more lovely than merely being close to him. But she couldn’t think what it was now-certainly not the violence of passion. That was there, obviously, to be enjoyed again and again, but this was the thing she’d never known with any other being on earth, this!

Finally he drew back, taking her two hands together and kissing them, and then flashing her that bright boyish smile again, precisely the one she thought sure she’d never receive again, ever. And then he winked and he said, his voice breaking:

“You really do still love me, baby.”

“Yes,” she said. “I learned how once, apparently, and it will have to be forever. Come with me, come outside, come out under the oak. I want to be near them for a while. I don’t know why. You and I, we are the only ones who know that they’re there together.”

They slipped down the back stairs, through the kitchen. The guard by the pool merely nodded to them. The yard was dark as they found the iron table. She flung herself at him, and he steadied her. Yes, for this little while and then you’ll hate me again, she thought.

Yes, you’ll despise me. She kissed his hair, his cheek, she rubbed her forehead back and forth across his sharp beard. She felt his soft responsive sighs, thick and heavy and from the chest.

You’ll despise me, she thought. But who else can go after the men who killed Aaron?