“When you can’t find your little bolt-hole,” Ginger said, “you can find yourself being ripped apart by unhappy circumstances.”
These were, of course, unhappy circumstances, Carter thought. Strange and unhappy and peculiar circumstances.
He opened the door. There was a long carpeted hallway, then the living room, where the three girls lounged. Petals from white roses had fallen prettily over the piano.
“Would you mind helping me find something, girls? I’m looking for a book, a little book.”
“Are you sleepwalking, Daddy?” Annabel asked.
“Why no, no. I thought I’d just come out for a small nightcap and ask you girls this question.” To ask that they come into the bedroom was probably improper. He should wait until daytime. But Ginger never showed up in the daytime.
He went to the refrigerator and pushed a glass against the ice dispenser’s tongue. Radiant ice in long fingers crashed down. He thought of the icicles on the eaves of the buildings at St. George’s. Never had there been such splendid icicles. The boys had broken them off and fought with them on frigid winter mornings. There had been some pretty amazing injuries, but they’d laughed them off in the full throat of boyish exuberance. He had been thinking about St. George’s a lot lately. He wondered if he should move somewhere where there would be ice again. He missed ice, superior ice. He poured scotch into his glass, and everything became less interesting in many ways.
He returned to the girls. “I can’t reach something in my room. I was hoping you could help me.”
“You’re taller than any of us, though, Daddy,” Annabel noted. “Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?”
Her comment seemed strange to him; maybe he didn’t need this drink. He swallowed it anyway.
“What were you-all talking about?” he said. “I could hear your voices.”
“We were talking about Mommy, Daddy, and how none of us has a mother. I was saying how Mommy used to clean up after my throw-up — I was always throwing up, remember? — and there was a little bronze bell by my bed and Mommy would always come when I rang it and she always let me put out the candles after dinner with one of those little candle snuffers. One was a silver cone and one was a little beehive and I was trying to remember other things because it was my turn. Alice didn’t want her turn.”
“Well, those are very pleasant things to remember, honey,” Carter said. Ginger had never allowed Annabel to put out the candles and in fact hadn’t spoken to the child for an entire week when somehow the beehive candle snuffer had found its way into the play yard and Annabel had flattened it with her tricycle. As far as the throw-ups, Carter did recall stuffing a number of towels into the washing machine one winter season, but mostly a psychiatrist had dealt with the situation.
“Would you girls come into my room for a moment?” he said. “Just a moment.”
But of course Ginger wasn’t there. What had she done to his mind! She’d taken part of it and was gnawing on it like a sandwich. He saw what the girls saw as they looked around the room, his rumpled bed, the scattered books, the empty glass beneath the lamp, the rings the glass had made. The room was decidedly giving the wrong impression.
Beyond the large window a coyote sauntered by with the neighbor’s Siamese cat in its jaws. Only Alice saw it.
“What’s out there!” Carter exclaimed.
But Alice wouldn’t say, for Annabel’s sake, although she couldn’t conceal her interested approval.
Oh, the stubborn girl, Carter thought.
The coyote paused to rearrange the cat in its jaws, and Alice discreetly pulled the blinds.
“I was thinking of clearing out of this room, cleaning it out,” Carter said. “What do you think?”
“Daddy, it’s after midnight,” Annabel noted. “And you just changed this room around last week.”
“I was thinking of doing a little more to it, like tearing it down completely. Just whacking it off from the rest of the house.”
“You could put in a wildlife pool,” Alice suggested.
“Yes!” Carter said. “Then maybe they’d stop using our pool. Do you think they’d honor the distinction?” Carter was all for making distinctions. If Ginger would just make a distinction or two, principally between the requirements of the dead and the needs of the living … but Ginger’s mind, or whatever it was, made no distinctions, although a certain sloppiness was occurring in her style, a worrisome blurring of boundaries. She had used the phrase “Your ass is grass” the other evening, for one thing. How could one’s ass be grass? One’s days, of course, that was another matter entirely. However bibulous Ginger had been before, when she was alive, she had always been viciously articulate. She had always been witty and destructively unique. But he half expected her to scream, “I’m gonna smack your butt!” any evening now, or “Get your butt over here!” like an overextended toddler-laden woman in some shopping mall. It would be sad, really, if Ginger were reduced to screaming “Oh, my God!” over everything.
“A wildlife pool would be a great idea,” Alice said. “Just knock this whole room down.”
“Daddy, you can’t be serious!” Annabel said.
The girls stood around him, a puzzled triad. The Three Fates plying their ghastly shears, although only one did that. Atropos … Atropos … What were the others named? Klotho! He was cheered to remember. Klotho. But on the last one he still drew a blank.
“So many books in here,” Corvus mused.
“Yes, I like to read,” Carter said. “Sometimes I read all night. Please, take any you’d like.”
But of course she wouldn’t. The girl wanted nothing, he could see it in her eyes. It must be fearful to want nothing; it wasn’t as fulfilling as it sounded. She must feel sickeningly hobbled all the time. Yet she didn’t look anxious, any more than she looked indifferent.
“What can’t you reach, Daddy?” Annabel said.
The liquor had been spreading nicely through Carter, but it had now — and he couldn’t pretend otherwise — stopped. He continued to watch Corvus as though she were about to do something startling or inspirational. He realized he was holding his breath, then began thinking of Ginger again. They say that with people who die suddenly, you should tell them right away they’re dead or there’ll be trouble and misunderstandings on both sides. But he had apprised Ginger of the fact immediately, he was sure of it. Oh, that dreadful night, they’d both been tanked, and after the accident there had been all this discussion about the restaurant having dumped grease on the highway in the past, getting rid of it in the middle of the night, and causing accidents, but none, before this, fatal. Grease, grease, grease — that’s all anyone was talking about with the ambulance still wailing in the distance. And that stupid sign pulsating over everything: THEY’RE TOO BIG TO BE SHRIMP. The evening was preposterous. Really, Carter couldn’t blame Ginger for not taking it seriously.
He was in a sort of trance, during which the girls had discreetly left. Carter felt shaken. It was as though he had invited them all in to watch him be sick. He feared he would no longer enjoy quite the same stature in the house, that of the carefree but intelligent and reliable adult, someone who could be expected to be reading sensibly and artfully in his room at night yet could nevertheless be counted on should an emergency arise, someone who knew how to spend money and still had a future. Of course there had been the deer-in-the-swimming-pool incident, but that had been an exceptional evening. His liver hurt.
He went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. By now it was after two o’clock. The hours between two and dawn were like a gift that only a few unwrapped, a puzzling, luminous gift. He pushed the pillows up against the headboard, lay down, and stared straight ahead. What did those girls do all night? He should know, he should be more responsible, offer more guidance, but he was just a drunk widower in love with a yard boy. He got up and pulled the blinds back. The dark shuddered, as though he’d interrupted it.