“—and I mean, my God, didn’t you hear all that shit tonight?”
“You’re not her parent,” Jayne said. “I don’t care if she calls you ‘Daddy,’ but you’re not her parent.”
“But I did hear a teacher tonight tell you that your daughter stands too close to people and talks too loudly and she’s unable to put her thoughts into actions and—”
“What are you doing?” Jayne asked. “What in the hell are you doing right now?”
“I’m concerned about her, Jayne—”
“No, no, no, there’s something else.”
“She thinks her doll is alive,” I blurted out.
“She’s six years old, Bret. She’s six. Wrap your head around that. She’s six.” Jayne’s face was flushed, and she practically spat this out at me.
“And let’s not even get into Robby,” I said. My hands were in the air, signifying something. “We were told he walks around like an amnesiac. That was the word they used tonight, Jayne. Amnesiac.”
“I’m taking them out of that school,” Jayne said, placing the script on the nightstand. “And let’s just stick to your ranting about Sarah. You have thirty seconds, and then I’m turning out the lights. You can either stay or go.” The corners of her mouth were turned down, as they so often had been since I arrived last July.
“I’m not ranting,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Calm down—that’s all this is about.”
“Let’s just talk about this tomorrow night, okay?”
“Why can’t we have a private conversation?” I asked. “Jayne, whatever our problems are—”
“I don’t want you here in this room tonight.”
“Jayne, your daughter thinks that doll is alive—”
(And I do too.)
“I don’t want you in here, Bret.”
“Jayne, please.”
“Everything you say and everything you do is so small and predictable—”
“What about new beginnings?” I reached out for her leg. She kicked my hand away.
“You screwed that up sometime last night between your second gallon of sangria and the pot you smoked and then racing around this house with a gun.” A desperate sadness passed over her face before she turned off the lights. “You screwed that up with your big Jack Torrance routine.”
I sat on the bed a little longer and then stood up and looked down at her in the faint darkness of the room. She had turned away from me, on her side, and I could hear her quietly crying. I stepped softly out of the bedroom and closed the door behind me.
The sconces flickered again as I walked down the hallway past Sarah’s closed door and the door Robby always locked, and downstairs in my office I tried reaching Aimee Light on my cell phone but only got her message. On my computer screen was an e-mail from Binky asking if I could meet with Harrison Ford’s people sometime this week, and I was looking at the screen about to type back an answer when another e-mail appeared from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. This one arrived earlier than usual, and I clicked on it to see if the “message” had changed, but there was only the same blank page. I started to call the bank but then realized that no one would pick up because they were closed by now, and I sighed and just stood up from the computer without turning it off, and then I was moving toward the bed I had become so used to when I suddenly heard sounds coming from the media room. I was too tired to be afraid at that point and I listlessly made my way toward the noise.
The giant plasma TV was on. The movie 1941 was playing yet again—John Belushi flying a plane high over Hollywood Boulevard, a cigar clenched between his teeth, a mad gleam in his eye. As I pressed Mute, I assumed this was a DVD we had bought and that maybe the automatic timer had switched it on. Robby had been watching it last night before Jayne and I left for the Allens’ and he probably hadn’t taken the disc out. But when I opened the DVD player, there was no disc in it. I stared at the TV again, puzzled. I picked up the remote and pressed Info and saw that the movie was playing on Channel 64, a local station. But when I looked through the cable guide for that week the movie wasn’t listed, on that channel or any other; and since Robby had watched it last night I checked the schedule to see if it had been listed for that date. According to the listings it had not been on last night either. And then I remembered passing by Robby’s room on the night of the Halloween party, when Ashton Allen had been sleeping while 1941 blared from Robby’s TV. I checked the cable guide for the thirtieth, and again there was no listing for 1941 anywhere. As I sat in front of the TV, desperately searching for any information about why this particular movie continued playing, I suddenly noticed scratching noises.
They were coming from outside the bay window of the media room.
I immediately turned the TV off and sat there, listening.
And then the scratching noises stopped. After a moment they resumed.
I stood up and started toward the kitchen, the ceiling lights in the living room dimming and flaring on again as I walked beneath them (trying—successfully—to ignore the green carpeting and the realigned furniture). This happened again in the hallway leading to the kitchen, which was dark until the moment I stepped inside, when the lights flickered on. When I stepped back out, the lights dimmed.
When I moved back into the kitchen—they flickered on.
I did this twice, with the same result—an experiment that woke me up slightly.
It was as if my presence was activating the lights.
(Or maybe something is following you—a second thought I did not want to consider at that point.)
From the sliding glass door in the kitchen I stared outside. It was drizzling, but Victor was sleeping on the deck, shivering, lost in a dream, baring his teeth at some unknown enemy, and he didn’t wake up when I unlocked the sliding glass door and walked silently toward the side of the house where the scratching sounds were coming from. But I stopped suddenly when the pool lights flickered on, radiating the water a bright aqua blue, and then just as quickly dimmed, easing the water into blackness. I heard the faint hum of jets coming from the Jacuzzi, and when I looked over it was bubbling, and as if I knew they were going to be there, my eyes scanned to a railing where a pair of the same bathing trunks I had found on Halloween—the ones patterned with large red flowers, the ones from Hawaii that my father had owned—were draped. Steam was rising off them into the cool, damp air as if someone had just taken them off after a dip. I was about to retrieve them (to wring them out, to carry them with me back into the house, to touch them and make sure they were real) when the scratching noises shifted in another direction, farther away but amplified. I ignored the trunks and the wet footprints fading on the concrete surrounding the pool and moved with greater purpose toward the side of the house.
I just stared up helplessly at the great mirage of the peeling wall. The entire wall, from the ground to the roof, was now the color of pink stucco, dwarfing me. The scratching sounds weren’t coming from that wall anymore. That wall had completed itself, I realized, and the peeling was now occurring elsewhere, around front. When I moved past the corner of the house and stood on the lawn, the scratching noises stopped, but only for a moment. They resumed the second I located the patch of paint above my office window that was starting to peel off. In the glare of the street lamps I could see the house actually scarring on its own accord. Nothing was helping it. The paint was simply peeling off in a fine white shower, revealing more of the pink stucco underneath. It was doing this without any assistance. I became entranced by the flecks of paint sifting down onto the lawn and I moved closer to the house, in awe of the widening patch of salmon-hued paint that was revealing itself. There was another house beneath this one. And my memory flashed to a summer day from 1975: I was in the pool, and I was looking up at our house in Sherman Oaks while lying on a raft, and the flash got stronger as I reached my hand to the corner above my office window, stretching my arm as high as it would go, and when I touched the wall of the house on Elsinore Lane I finally made the connection, and it was so simple. Why hadn’t I realized this before?