“She’ll be okay, Linda.”
“She will?”
“She’ll be living with someone else inside of a month.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say. That is a hell of a thing to say.”
“Why is it? I almost didn’t say it for just that reason, but why not say it? I’m not saying it to her, for God’s sake. But why shouldn’t I be saying it to you? It’s what she needs; it’s the best thing for her. I don’t know if either of them loved the other but even if they did. Do you think she’s going to wear black? Do you think she should?”
“She was saying just tonight that she couldn’t imagine anyone living alone.”
“Well, I can. God, can I imagine living alone.” She shuddered at the bitterness in his voice. “But I can’t imagine Tanya living alone. Can you?”
“No, I can’t.”
“She’ll be all right. That’s all that matters.”
“Yes, it’s all that matters.”
They walked the rest of the way without speaking, entered the building, climbed the stairs. When they reached the floor where he and Gretchen and Robin lived, he hesitated only an instant before continuing up the stairs with her. She meant to say something but let the moment pass.
At her door he said, “I wish I could come in.”
“Tanya’s in there.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“We couldn’t talk with her in there. I didn’t think you meant—”
“Well, in a way I probably did, as far as that goes. I’m in a mood myself, Linda, or I wouldn’t be talking like this. Do you want to know something? That one night—”
“Peter, please let’s not talk about it.”
“Just let me say this. It was the best thing in my life. I’m serious, maybe I haven’t had so much of a life but it was the best thing in it—”
“Peter—”
“but sometimes I wish it never happened. I miss you, Linda.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Oh, shit. Come on. Everything’s changed.”
“I’m going inside now, Peter. I have to. I’m tired, and I want to be able to wake up when Tanya wakes up. I’m going inside now.”
“All right.”
“And you’d better go downstairs.”
“I don’t know which I want more. To go in there with you or to not go back downstairs. It’s getting so bad lately, Linda.”
“Oh, Peter.”
“Oh, hell. I really pick the perfect nights to lay my trips on other people.” He flashed a sudden brightening grin, then turned and was gone.
Tanya was sleeping soundly in the middle of the bed. Linda moved her over to one side and the girl did not even stir in her sleep. Linda got in beside her, her body rigid, thinking how bad everything was and how tense she felt. But then the tension began to drain from her and she realized that at this moment she felt nothing, nothing at all. It was all gone and she felt merely exhausted and empty, so empty, and within minutes she was asleep.
Twenty-one
Peter took the stairs quickly. But once he had reached his own floor his steps halted abruptly. It was just a few yards to the door of his apartment, but he took longer to traverse that distance than he had taken descending the stairs. And when he reached the door he stood for several long minutes in front of it.
He couldn’t get the image out of his head. He would open the door and she would be hanging there, her face hideously swollen and discolored. Bill Donatelli had used the Venetian blind cord, and he could see her standing on tiptoes to cut the cord with a kitchen knife, then climbing the rickety ladder-back chair, wrapping the cord first around the light fixture and then around her throat, then kicking the chair away and dangling in midair, feet dancing in midair. God, was her weight enough to strangle her? She was so thin, so fragile. God, she could dance there for an eternity while the cord grew tighter and tighter without every growing tight enough—
He made himself open the door.
For one impossible instant he saw her as he had envisioned her. The suggestion was that powerful. A scream rang in his head, a silent shriek, before his eyes caught hold of reality. There was no body swinging from the ceiling. She was where he always found her these days, sitting in their bed with her knees drawn up. Her skin shone in the dim light that came through the partially open bathroom door.
She said, “I’m sorry, Petey.”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry I’m not dead like the boy upstairs. The painter. Didn’t you paint a little picture of Gretchen dead? Oh, you did, Petey, I know you did. But I would never hang myself, baby. I would find a better way.”
“Gretchen, stop it.”
“Don’t be afraid, Petey. I didn’t do it.”
“Don’t even talk that way.” He stepped into the room, closed and bolted the door. His hands trembling and his heartbeat seemed almost audible.
“Or isn’t that what you’re afraid of? You were afraid I would be alive, Petey, and I am, I am. Poor Petey, coming back to his Gretchen and the bitch hasn’t had the simple decency to die.”
“Stop it,” he said. He closed his eyes, made fists of his hands. “Just stop it.”
And she surprised him by doing just that. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a child’s small voice this time. “I’ll go to sleep now, Petey. I was just waiting for you to come home to me is all. But I’m tired and I’ll go to sleep now.”
And she lay down and closed her eyes at once.
He undressed quickly, turned off the bathroom light; lay down in bed beside her. She did not move or say a word, and her breathing became deep and regular. He knew, though, that she was not asleep. She would feign sleep, but he could always tell her real sleep from the imitation she gave, and he knew that he always fell asleep before her these summer nights. And it would be so again this evening, for already he felt the powerful pull of sleep. He did not even want to sleep now. There were thoughts that he wanted to think, that he had to think, but in spite of them the impulse to sleep drew him like a small boat to a whirlpool.
She was right, of course. He had hoped to find her dead. The wish had fathered the thought, and it had been his desire that gave him that incredibly vivid sight of her hanging as Donatelli had hung, dead as Donatelli had died. He had not consciously realized this before but felt now as though he must somehow have known it all along.
The realization did not make sleep impossible now, did not even postpone its onset more than a matter of seconds. He had recently faced his desire for her death too many times to be overly upset by each new form it took. He wanted her to die not so much out of malice but because nothing but her death would so utterly solve his problems. And it would solve her problems in the bargain, and if anything hers were more blindingly unsolvable than his own. Donatelli’s suicide baffled him. Gretchen’s would seem no more than logical. She had no life at all, at least none worth living. She was constantly miserable with no way out. Why shouldn’t she kill herself — for everyone’s sake?
In the morning he awoke coming out of a dream, a dream that slipped from his memory even as he emerged from the shadow of sleep. At first he thought he had merely found his way from one dream to another. The blinds were drawn, sunlight flooding the room. There was a smell of bacon permeating the room. He looked around and saw that Robin’s bed was made and the piles of dirty clothes that customarily littered the floor had been put away.
When Gretchen emerged, hair combed, wearing a yellow blouse and red plaid skirt, he knew not only that he was dreaming but that the dream was one he did not want to wake up from.
“The coffee’s perking,” she said. “I thought fried eggs this morning, unless you’d rather have them scrambled.”