And then not seeing was worse than seeing, and he moved. The steps to the doorway were slow and enormous, but he made them, turning ninety degrees into the hall, peering into the library, until only the front half was visible. The front window. The shelves of books.
He felt her. Her presence in the room like a scratchy wool blanket draped over his shivering cold body. He could feel her in the room as surely as if she were standing behind him breathing on his neck. He knew this as fact, and now he absolutely had to go all the way.
He took three quick steps, the floorboards creaking as he entered the library. The blood pounded up through him, threatening to blot his vision as it had in the room with the dogs, and he held the phone out to ward off whatever was coming for him. He blinked rapidly, willing the red and black dots clouding his vision to go away.
She was upon him.
She was--
The library was empty.
He was blinking, his heart stuck in an elevator ten stories below its natural position. He smelled cloves and something earthen, a sweet spice in the air, but after a few deep breaths that was gone, too.
'She's not my wife,' he said to the room. 'She's someone else. Someone lost.'
Gone. She was gone. It felt wrong, a let-down. He had been hoping for a confirmation, even if it drove him mad. At least he would have known.
He walked to the window, where Nadia claimed to have seen her. He wanted to deny her space, blot her out. He pulled aside the flimsy silk curtain and looked out to the Grums'.
A bedroom window, lights off.
He almost dialed her again, but what would be the point? He would only wind up scaring her worse than he already had. They'd been talking about Jo. Bad things in the house. Scary stories that were bound to have an effect on a girl in her condition.
'Luther! Alice!' His voice was hoarse, but he heard the whump-ump-ump-ump as the dogs unloaded from the couch and came trotting to the front stairs and the softer padding as they ran up the deep pile carpet runner to greet him, and for a second he was certain it would not be them, it would be her, come back to finish him.
But it was only the dogs. He bent to pet them, to reassure them and himself. When he stood upright he was face to face with the window, and in its reflection, as if superimposed over his face, a pale woman with black hair stared back at him.
He had been wrong about her face, so very wrong because she had no face before, in the room a few nights ago, but now it seemed, yes, even now her face seemed to be forming itself into something very old and something new. The flat, fish-belly white patch under her hair wrinkled and contorted as he heard the swish of her black dress fanning out behind him. Cool air pulled all around him and her starved ovoid visage filled the glass in jarring increments like a poorly edited film. He glimpsed a line of black stubble high on her head where her brow was filling in even as her stilted footsteps drummed across the floor and she fell upon him, her cold calloused hands wrapping around his neck.
22
Conrad, Luther and Alice slept on the high-school football field three blocks away.
When he had felt her cold hands closing around his neck, he'd screamed like a child and fled the house. The dogs had gone nape-hair wild and barking after him. When they reached the field, the dogs ran in wide circles - it was playtime for them. He'd fallen to the grass and thought about what was ruined now - their fresh start, the new life. Maybe that had all been a false hope, perhaps it was never meant to be.
The sky was so much clearer here than in Los Angeles. Without the smog he could see all the constellations he did not know the names of. He knew that Jo was sleeping now, in Michigan. What he had seen in the house could not be his wife. A ghost, an echo, a reflection. Whatever she was, he had seen the impossible and it sickened him to think she was in the house, had maybe been there all along.
He missed Jo that night more than he could remember missing anyone since Holly, and he would have cried himself to sleep if he had not still been in some form of shock. The night was warm and long, full of half-visions every time he nodded off on the grass with the dogs by his side. He dozed on the football field as the air cooled, and he became aware of the orange tint of his eyelids soon after.
He woke on the field and the dogs were gone.
When he had climbed the steps out of the stadium and made his way down the three blocks to Heritage Street and to his front porch, he found them beating their tails against the door.
They wanted to go home. They had no other choice.
After searching the house (feeling and finding nothing out of place) his fear was cut in half, and the thirty-minute hot shower washed most of the other half away. The yesterdays were becoming like dreams, their contents vanishing as quickly as he could forget them. He left messages with the front desk and on her cell, telling her only that he missed her.
He sat in the office thinking about a job. Thought about becoming a father. Wasn't that a job? There had been an article on Salary.com he'd seen a few months back. Some crack team of industry experts added up the hours and skills and decided stay-at-home moms were worth $131,000 a year. Stay-at-home moms had to be a nurse, a chef, a teacher, a driver, and a nanny all in one. Maybe all he had to do was wait for Jo to have the baby and - snap, just like that - overnight he'd be worth $131,000.
Right now house-sitting was not a job. But he had an obligation.
She answered the door, left it open and walked back into the kitchen while he followed her in.
'There was no one there,' he said. He knew she wouldn't come back if he told the truth. He might have imagined it, he told himself. 'I never saw anyone in the library.'
She ignored this, as well as his assertions that Jo was in Michigan and he was not playing games. What would be the point? He confessed that, yes, he had felt something, but that could have been the fear working on his imagination.
'Maybe there was a . . . presence in the house, but if so, that only proves what I've been telling you all along.'
'What's that?' she said, drinking a peach yogurt concoction from the plastic bottle.
'That I could really use your help.'
'I think I've been telling you all along I don't have any answers.'
Conrad nodded. 'What are you doing for dinner? I can cook something, unless you have plans.'
She set the yogurt down and burped. 'No, I don't have any plans.'
'You look like you're doing well. Do you need anything for the baby? The, what, the prenatal vitamins?'
'I don't need anything,' she said.
'Everything was fine when you were there, right? I know it got a little personal at the end there, but I thought we had kind of a nice time. Don't give up so easily, Nadia.'
'You think I'm crazy,' she said, flipping through a copy of US Weekly with a pregnant starlet on the cover.
'No, I don't.'
'You will.'
'No, I won't.'
'Sooner or later every guy calls me a psycho.'
'That's why you've never been in love?' She closed the magazine. 'You're not psycho, Nadia. I know psycho women, and you're not one of them.'
'Thanks.'
Jesus, could he say anything that didn't make this girl roll her eyes? 'Look, I won't bother you. I'll be making teriyaki bowls later.'
'Maybe,' she'd said. 'But probably not.'
He tried to stare her down but she would not budge. He went to his ace in the hole.
'Five hundred now,' he said, placing the bills on the table.
'Two thousand after.' She looked at the money. 'After what?'
'After the rest of it. But no more breaks. We don't have much time.'