NORMAL LIFE
"What book?" Hugh asked, cradling the phone between his chin and scrunched-up shoulder -he propped the refrigerator door open with his right leg bent at the knee, and with his hands managed to move around all the jars of pickles and jams that Mrs. Deerfield had given them. On the other end of the line, the clerk at the bookstore said, "Diaries of an Innocent Age by Standish, Mr. Adair. You ordered it in June, but it was hard to locate -the company who published it has been out of business for ten years. We finally got it, though. It just took a little longer than usual."
"Oh, right," Hugh said absent-mindedly -he found what he was looking for, a half-empty Miller Lite behind the orange juice carton. "I pretty much forgot about it -I'll be down sometime today." When he hung up the phone, he sniffed at the bottle of beer -it had gone flat. He'd opened it and put it in there the day before the trip to the beach. They'd been back a few days, so what did he expect? But he'd gone eight days without a drink of any kind, on his best behavior at the beach, for Rachel's benefit. And the beach had been trying, particularly after the accident with the car and the cat. With Rachel crying, Penny Dreadful crying, and Hugh feeling miserable and then the rain and the late start in the noontime traffic congestion; with Rachel, her eyes red, saying that they should just turn the car around and go home, wondering how Mrs. Deerfield would ever forgive them… Hugh had craved a drink like a pregnant woman craves pickles. Then the beach was overcast most of the time (and still he managed to get a painful sunburn which no amount of Solarcaine seemed to help -his nose continued to peel, and they'd been back three days), and Rachel was too listless, almost withdrawn over the cat's death, to want to go out to a restaurant. So at night they sat in the motel room and ate junk food and watched bad TV. Hugh had a terrific case of constipation the whole time, and was a Metamucil junkie by the last day -he favored the orange-flavored kind in the small easy-to-toss-away packets; it reminded him of Fizzles from his childhood, dropping the Metamucil in the glass of water and having it hiss and sputter into this utilitarian punch. But this punch was even better than Fizzles or Metamucil. He held the bottle up and took a long, lingering drink of beer. Flat Miller Life ain't so bad. He chugged down the rest and set the bottle on the counter. No, better trash it. Don't need to get her upset over an old beer. He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed it out. No sign of roaches beneath the sink. No mousedoody behind the plastic trash can.
"Scout!" he called up the stairs. She didn't answer.
"Honey, I'm going to run down to Kramer Books for a sec. Can I pick up anything?"
After Hugh left for the store, Rachel lay back on their bed. She was still exhausted from the trip, and then had plunged right back to work and it felt like jumping in the cold Atlantic that first day of the trip. The week back had passed slowly even with all the work she had to catch up on, and the weekend had taken forever to arrive. But then even Saturday was not perfect: one of her famous migraines had come on suddenly in the afternoon, so she lay on top of the covers, the shades drawn, the lights out. Her skin burned; everytime she scratched her arm, more skin flaked off on the bed. The pain and nausea were unrelenting.
But even with the pain, she smiled.
She knew it was too soon to tell, and it's just my overactive imagination, that and this migraine, but I am never ever late like this, it's always like clockwork, always, the only time this has ever happened before was when it happened.
How many times had they made love in the past ten days?
Twelve? Thirteen times? What are the chances? Oh, God, but I'm imagining things. You can't know you're pregnant until a month or two afterwards, this is just wishful thinking… but Scout, you knew before, you knew that somewhere inside you there was a little sphere just hopping with new life. You knew then, and you thought so immediately, and you were right. It wasn't Let's Pretend, it was real, it was Normal Life.
“You're just being silly," she said aloud, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the drapes. Her head was throbbing, but she didn't really mind. From Diaries of an Innocent Age, by Verena Standish:
…Winthrop Park was, in those days, quite a fashionable residence, although there were still lingering traces of its bohemian beginnings: they said a woman at the Bram estate ran a blind down at the corner, mainly for coloreds and sailors, although this was all rumor and I never saw a sailor or a colored, unless that colored was a member of one of my or my neighbor's staffs…
Hugh sipped his beer. Verena, you old white supremacist bastion, I'm willing to bet you were not well liked by many people. I'm willing to bet if it weren't for your daddy's money… Hell, just like me, Verena, you and I are part of the same class, ain't we? But I'm willing to bet that, just like me, if someone scratched your surface, you'd be as common as a whore. Hugh skimmed the pages. Verena, in her tedious eighties while writing her life story, went on ad nauseam about the lost, refined qualities of fin de sicle society. Hugh thought: you fucking debutante, Verena, you had everything served to you on a silver platter, you lived in one of the most fascinating times of history. You and me, Verena, you and me. For me, the best prep schools, the best college the Old Man could buy my way into, a pretty damn good law school (although not as good as the one Ted got into, and certainly not as good as the Old Man's), summers in Europe and the Caribbean. Hugh lifted the beer in a silent toast. Here's to the girls who do, Verena, although I guess you're one of the girls who never did. He finished the bottle; there were three left in the six-pack he'd picked up at the liquor store on Nineteenth Street. Flipping pages through the thick diary. Get to our house, lady, I don't want this shit about the glorious days before these times of Sodom and Gomorrah. I want specifics: the wallpaper, the size of the rooms.
He read:
…Draper House was small by the standards of my upbringing. Its narrow passages were no match for the stately halls of my father's Hudson River estate, a home which I grew to miss terribly. But my husband, Addison, was no doubt relieved to be out from under the wing of a rather demanding father-in-law, and the children seemed to enjoy the carriage rides around the park and the contact with so many other children being a daily occurrence rather than something reserved for planned weekends. Emmie and James were just reaching the point in childhood where everything seems an adventure, and if I had only had some inkling of the tragedy to come, I suppose I would have been more strict with them, I would have observed the goings-on in the house more carefully.
But as I write this, for the first time, nearly fifty years later, I realize what a vain and foolish young woman I was, a woman barely thirty who believed that children should be seen and not heard, and that all matters of education and social carriage should be left in the hands of a competent governess. I have no one to blame but myself for the tragedies that befell my children, for not seeing when I should have seen and not hearing when I should have heard. But the house itself, Draper House, was as much to blame, I think, as anything. For it was the house itself that brought about the deaths of my young children.
What gives a bad place its intention?
For Rachel, the migraine came and went in a few hours. She became restless, wandering down to the living room and then to the turret room. The wallpaper was in the same shambles they'd left it in before the trip, and the room seemed washed out in the bright sunlight. That word HOUNFOUR was still up on the wall. Hugh sat over in the window seat, reading; he didn't notice her as she came in. She saw the beer beside him, and it didn't really bother her as much as it normally would have. He could have a drink now and then if he wanted to. It was no big deal. She just didn't want him drunk, because daddys shouldn't be drunk.
Rachel wanted to tell him what she was thinking (Let's Pretend, Hugh, that you're the daddy and I'm the mommy) but Hugh seemed so involved with the book he'd bought.
"Is it any good?"
He glanced up. "Scout," he said as if waking from a nap; he made a motion to hide the bottle.
Rachel shrugged her shoulders. "Is that the Verna Standish book?"
"Verena, Scout. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I'm just into the part about this house. Headache gone?"
"I just needed to close my eyes for a little while. See if she has anything about our walled-up vanity."
"Will do."
"I'm thinking of going out. You just going to read?" Hugh nodded.
"Maybe I'll give Sassy a call. You think something like a housewarming party would be out of line -maybe next week or something?"
"I don't know. We've lived here what, a couple of months?
Is it too late for that kind of thing? I mean, what would Miss Manners have to say?"
"Any excuse for a party. We could plan it for Labor Day weekend, unless everybody we know is going away -but I doubt it. The weather will be miserable still so people will be up for a party and it's not like we've had anybody in. Maybe we can finish this room next weekend if we work together. I have an idea for a Laura Ashley pattern I saw, but see if there's anything about the patterns in the book. Would she have something like that in there? Maybe about that vanity, too, and then my big strong husband can knock it down with his sledgehammer of the gods." Rachel went over to his tool box, stepping over scattered wrenches, to his sledgehammer.
She lifted it up.
"Watch your toes, Scout. Old Verena lists everything else about her life -most of this diary's just her laundry list. If she weren't the daughter of such a famous man I doubt this would ever have been published. You see Penny Dreadful yet?" Carefully laying the hammer flat on its side, she gave him a clownishly sad look. "Oh, Hugh, I feel so bad about her cat, I wish you'd use her real name."
"All right, all right, sorry. Penelope Deerfield."
"I'm afraid to run into her -she must hate us, and I don't know what I'd say to her at this point. The trip was fun, just what I needed, but that was like a black cloud hanging over us. I hope the kittens are okay."
It was after six when Rachel met with Sassy Parker for coffee at La Fourchette in Adams-Morgan. They sat outside in front of the restaurant, and Sassy ordered appetizers.
"I am so damned starved, and I have a ton of things to tell you. My news first," Sassy said, "and then when the food comes I'll chow down and you can talk."
"I don't know, I haven't even told Hugh mine yet and I'm about to burst with keeping it in."
"All right, you go," Sassy huffed, "but this means I'll have to talk with my mouth full."
Rachel lowered her chin and raised her eyebrows. She grinned goofily, even though she was trying to be dramatic. She took a deep breath. "I'm," and then blurted in rapid-fire succession, "pregnant -I think I'm pregnant -Shit, I don't know, but I feel like I think I'm pregnant."
"How long?"
"A week?" Rachel winced.
Now it was Sassy's turn to raise her eyebrows. She laughed, but then saw that Rachel didn't think this was funny. Sassy reached across the table and patted Rachel's left hand which was tearing at her napkin.
"Retch, give it a couple of weeks before you feel like you think you're pregnant."
"I really really think I am. I haven't had my period, and I never miss, it's always on time."
"What, were you and Hugh fucking like bunnies at the beach?"
"Well, before the beach, at the beach, on the way home from the beach. Not that the horror stories don't abound, too, the whole time I was thinking about that poor cat. But the sex was terrific."
"And you think the rabbit bit the big one?" Something about Sassy's tone made Rachel feel like she was being mocked.
"I shouldn't have told you, it's too early, I'll jinx it, and you're probably right, I'm probably just being dumb, and maybe I'm off about my period, and I'll start gushing tonight." you are so stupid, Rachel Brennan, to ever tell a secret before it's definite, how many times do you have to learn this in life? Rachel stared at her coffee and watched little swirls of milk dissipate like clouds. This reminded her of a song, but she couldn't remember exactly which song, and she felt depressed that she'd ever gone and opened her big fat mouth.
"I'm not saying you're not pregnant. It’s just a little early to start knitting booties."
"No, this is dumb and it is so typical for me to go off the deep end as soon as I get laid. And we weren't using, you know, condoms or anything, and I don't know… I just feel so… fertile."
"Oh, please, what, were your eggs bubbling around or something?" Sassy laughed.
Rachel managed to smile. "Okay, let's drop it. No, really, let's drop it. I am hoping I am pregnant and I'm being silly and you're being normal, but I don't care. We'll just drop it and then in a month you'll see I was right."
"Fair enough."
"So what's your news, now that you've stuck the pin in my balloon?"
"Well, it's your news, too. Have I got shit for you," Sassy said, "and I've been waiting for you to get your ass back from the beach."
"What's up?"
"I had to scour the archives for stuff on the DuPont Circle and Capitol Hill houses because of the upcoming house tours, and guess what I came across? No, don't even guess, let me tell you, I found reams of shit on your house."
“You're kidding."
"It has quite a spotted history, Retch. And it’s just like me to forget to make copies for you. The file on your house is fat -I can get it to you Monday. You've got to read what's in it."
"A lot's been written about Draper House. I'm surprised it isn't on some house tour. Hugh just bought a book on the house, well, it has some chapters about the house, anyway. You know who Verena Standish was?"
"Chica, I do work for the 'Home' section of the Her-Ex -and she's mentioned a bit in these articles I dug up."
"What do they say?"
"Stuff like you wouldn't believe. You're living in some kind of haunted house,"
"Oh, right, there's something about the ghost of a hooker."
"I don't know about a whore, Retch, but I do know about the weirdo drugged-out things that went on there in the sixties and seventies. Some kinky murders, and devil worshipers."
“You're making this up."
"No, it's for real."
"No, you're making this up because you know how easily I get scared by stupid things like this, just like when we were in college and you used to tell me the story about the claw, where the girl heard it scraping at the back of the car, and you had that bunny man story every time we drove over the hills and I kept thinking bunny man would jump out of the woods with his ax and smash the car up. This is going to be like the bunny man story, isn't it?"
"No, Retch, we're talking Charlie Manson meets the girl next door. You know what the papers used to call that place?"
"I give up."
"The Screaming House. Ain't it grand?" At work on Monday, Rachel glared at her desk as if she could melt it with her glance -unfortunately she could not. It was piled high with every memo known to mankind. She had three court dates in the next two weeks, and the briefs weren't even prepared. Her secretary, Carl, had come down with the flu and would be out until, Friday. Gretchen, the blue-faced Slavic blonde with the sweaty palms (leaving damp fingerprints on anything she touched -including the files), was acting as both receptionist and secretary. By 10:30, Gretchen had played fifty-two-card pick-up with the summer clerk's mag cards, and Rachel would've screamed bloody murder except she didn't really care.
Rachel turned on the radio to listen to the local disc jockey tell crude, racist jokes; she switched it off again, and began sucking on a Rolaids. She craved a cigarette, could picture a Virginia Slims, could almost feel it between her lips. But then she remembered what Hugh had told her when they were in law school, "It's like licking out an ashtray." She remembered the X-rays of her father's lungs, and Hugh holding her, entering her which she always enjoyed but which always frightened her just a little because she couldn't control his movement, are-you-there-Hugh Adair?-all this curiously reminding her of the pain she'd felt in her stomach the morning of her miscarriage. Just when she was beginning to re-experience that sense of loss she'd felt (and the loss of not knowing what she was losing -just a tiny sphere mixed with blood), one of her lower front teeth began aching. She felt around the tooth and gum with her tongue and then decided she must be picking up radio waves because the pain vanished.
Rachel settled back down to work -or at least to thinking about work -when five junior associates trooped into her office to bitch about an upcoming meeting. When the other lawyers finally left ten minutes later, Rachel began separating the papers on her desk into three piles, with no rhyme or reason to their divisions other than file folders went in one stack, paper-clipped in another, and stapled in a third. She figured that if one of the partners walked into her office just then he would think she was organized when she was not. And she had no intention of becoming organized. She hadn't gone to law school for organizational skills, after all. Sassy called at noon. "Retch?"
"Hi, Sassy," Rachel sighed into the phone, whisper-singing: "What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in, yes, it's almost like being in deep shit. I hate lawyers."
"It's just a job. Weren't those your exact words? 'When Hugh gets on at a firm I'm going to quit, have babies, and never diet again. It's just a job.'"
“You cold, calculating hardened woman, to turn my own words against me. Have a little sympathy: my secretary's sick."
"Some of us don't have secretaries. You want an ulcer or what? And here I've gone and copied all these articles for you -I stole the file from research without signing out, so I am going to be shot come sunup. And I'm going to send them over right this instant. Retch, will this ever take your mind off your work."
"Okay, send it, but I won't promise to read it, especially if it's scary."
"Chicken!" Sassy cried, hanging up on her. The messenger dropped the manila folder off at two, but Rachel didn't get to it for a week. Sassy called every other day asking if she'd read any of the articles (“You mean, Retch, I pay through the nose to messenger them to you and you haven't touched them?", but Rachel allowed herself to be swamped with work and office gossip in order to make it through the week -on average, she stayed at work until seven at night. She thought about the sphere possibly growing inside her, and one evening she decided: screw it, screw work, time to relax, get the hell away from legalese.
It was a Wednesday evening, towards the end of August. Rachel was not sure what the weather was like outside because she was spending so much time inside her house or office, putting herself into her work more completely than she had all year while Hugh re-wallpapered the turret room.
She was feeling, in spite of the work, in love with life again, the way she'd been in school: the sphere inside her subdividing, Hugh being relatively productive, Hugh seeming to be happy, and work taking over whenever she began to feel the slightest twinges of melancholy. The firm was still holding an organizational meeting down the hall in the conference room, but Rachel was beginning to feel physically sick over the proceedings and went back to her office and her messy desk feeling like she would collapse across it. She looked out her window, across at the Madison Hotel; usually, if she was lucky, someone would be undressing in front of their window without noticing the offices across the street. It was a cheap form of entertainment, but she felt pretty cheap this evening.
She leaned back in her chair and turned her attentions to the news clippings from The Washington Post, the old Washington Star-News, The Washingtonian Magazine, as well as the rag Sassy worked for, The Herald-Examiner.
CHAMBER OF HORRORS IN NORTHWEST
oct. 12, 1969 -The bodies of seven women were found buried beneath a house in the Winthrop Park area of Northwest Washington, following an investigation into the bizarre group of individuals who had occupied the block. None of the women have yet been identified, although it is thought that they may have worked as prostitutes in the surrounding neighbor hoods. Three of the women appear to have been bled to death using some kind of medical apparatus, and there are indications that the other four were buried alive in concrete…
SEX SLAYINGS CONNECTED TO DEVIL WORSHIP
oct. 23, 1969 -A group calling itself the Disciples of the Last Circle have claimed responsibility for the torture and killing of seven women in the Winthrop Park area. The Herald-Examiner received this letter from the self-proclaimed spokesman of the group, a Mr. Swampgrass Rainbow.
Dear Pigs, Our Lord Lucifer has arisen from his chains. We take the sacred mushroom and glorify his name. Kiss my a-, you suckers. Life is dream and dream is life, and we see the stained glass bleeding down the walls.
We did not slice the entrails from the piggies, we set them free and their blood which is sacred to our Guru, the Horny One. The girls were to be His brides and the mothers of His children. The Devil is America in Nam. We drank napalm and saw it was good. You are just puppets of the pigs who run the fascist world. Imperialist running dogs crapped on the lawn of the world.
Sincerely in the Name of the Tortured, Swampgrass Rainbow, Unholy Light Priest of the Disciples of the Last Circle
p.s. pigs
We sliced them open because they begged us to, because they wanted Him inside them, they wanted to bring it into the world.
Mr. Rainbow, whose real name is Mark Podesky of College Park, Maryland, was taken in to custody early this morning, although at press time, no charges had been formally brought against him. Mr. Rainbow was charged in 1968 with possession of drugs, and resisting arrest. One district police officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, told this reporter, "This sounds like something out of Rosemary's Baby, doesn't it? Except we got a half-dozen Mia Farrows cut up like the Black Dahlia, and a bunch of drug-crazed hippies walking around like zombies, and you know something? This used to be a ritzy neighborhood -all changed. It isn't just the LSD, and it isn't just all this sex going around, you know, those are just symptoms. It's the bomb, I think."
EXORCIST VISITS WINTHROP PARK "HAUNTED" HOUSE
oct. 31, 1970 -Just over a year ago, the name of a certain house in Northwest Washington became a place of nightmares. Draper House. Built by the architect Julian Marlowe in the 1800s, a man known for his bizarre architectural style known as "marlowisms," which involved numerous entries to rooms so that someone in the dining room could get to the bedroom, for example, without ever going through the kitchen or living room. Marlowe is of course most famous for the Edith Glasscock House in Newport News, Virginia, which the reclusive Miss Glasscock had him develop over a period of twenty-five years. Draper House's most famous residents were Addison and Verena Standish, from the 1880s to the turn of the century. According to Fay Randolph, the noted "exorcist" of Manhattan whose recent book of essays, By Demons Possessed, was published to international acclaim, Draper House's murky reputation began long before the recent tragedies of the young women's deaths.
"The house was built on swampy ground; a well, in fact, runs beneath it -a dry well. Its first occupant was a lady of the evening named Rose Draper, and it is said that in the house of ill-repute which she ran, for senators and congressmen, blackmail and knavery were the rule. She died violently, as do all original residents of such houses, and her death was similar to the famous Fatty Arbuckle case early in this century, although I believe the instrument of death in that case was a broken champagne bottle. In the case of Rose Draper, it was a rather simple kitchen utensil: an apple-coring knife. They say her ghost claps at night, the clap being her alarm to the inamorata that the place is about to be raided, and the clap also being a reference to the disease which she carried to her death.
"The illustrious Verena Standish, daughter of Horace Ashton the famous robber baron, and her husband, the less distinguished political gadfly, Addison Standish, bought the house in the late 1800s when Addison was appointed to a Washington post of no consequence. With them, they brought their two children, and a governess, and here is where the evil qualities of the house came into play. The story goes that the governess went mad and murdered the children in a most grisly fashion. Mrs. Standish herself felt much to blame, apparently because, as a popular diversion of the time, she became intrigued with spiritualism, thinking it a lark. Upon the deaths of her only children, she took an entirely different view, and believed that her playing at table-rappings and ghosts had brought something out of the house, something that was there waiting for such a moment.
"Then, for a stretch of perhaps seventy years, the house lay fallow. Families moved in and out, at one point it became three or four apartments. Then the neighborhood of Winthrop Park began to tarnish, and the less desirable elements began to occupy the neighborhood and, in time, the house. Who knows what evil has been there in the past decade?
We know of these hippies who tortured and murdered girls, but who knows what may have drawn them in? Were they, after all, as their defense attorneys argued unsuccessfully just this summer, pawns of their drug habits? And if so, what showed them the way? What brought them here?" Mrs. Randolph possesses the cherubic face of the eternal child. It is hard to believe that this soft-spoken woman wearing her fair isle sweater and kilt is the same exorcist who cast demons out of the Isaacson twins in Brooklyn two years ago. Sitting with her in her suite at the John Quincy Adams Hotel, one wonders if she enjoys spooking reporters on Halloween.
"Tonight," she says, "I will enter the house and call upon the spirits. I don't believe in the devil, not at least in person. But I do believe that evil exists, I do believe that there are places on this earth where spirits are caught outside the flesh, the same way they are caught, more often, within the flesh. And tonight at Draper House, I will find out their meaning, and if they are, as I believe, evil, I will vanquish them from the house."
FAMED EXORCIST DIES IN FIRE
Nov. 1, 1970 -Fay Randolph, forty-three, author of the recent New York Times bestseller, By Demons Possessed, died last night in a fire in her hotel room in Washington, D.C… believed to be started by the cigarette she was smoking when she fell asleep… Rachel scanned the rest of the headlines:
THE "SCREAMING HOUSE" with the subhead:
Neighbors Heard Girls' Cries Of Terror, But Did Not Find It Unusual For Winthrop Park MAN ARRESTED IN SEX CULT SLAYINGS
WITNESS COMES FORWARD-ESCAPED CLUTCHES OF ALLEGED "KNIFE RAPIST"
SUSPECT SETS SELF AFIRE
CIRCUS OF DEATH: MORE BODIES
UNCOVERED IN WINTHROP PARK
Rachel groaned as she folded the photocopies in half and hurriedly stuffed them into her purse; she'd read them later when her stomach wasn't feeling so upset -much later. She wrote into her date book (without which she would never accomplish a thing):
1. Make list for housewarming party.
2. Get Hugh to look at VW.
3. Groceries: nothing that can't be microwaved. 4. BANK[BANK. TAKE OUT LIFE SAVINGS. (at least 200 bucks)
5. Call to invite people: re: housewarming party: Labor Day weekend.
6. Set up appt. with dctr? Or wait? Re: sphere. Waiting for her train home in the Farragut West station, Rachel felt spooked. The subway platform was deserted, although she heard footsteps from above the escalators, and the lone wind that seemed to herald the next blue line train.
It's those articles about the house. She boarded the train, thankful that there were a handful of people on it, tired workers, some tourists probably heading back to their motels from the Smithsonian. She closed her eyes and tried to think calm thoughts, but her mind kept coming back to those headlines, Screaming House, Devil Worship, Chamber of Horrors. Shit, I'll have to thank Sassy personally for giving me a few more nightmares.
Keeping her eyes shut, she reached up with her fingers and kneaded her temples. Stay away migraine, stay away migraine, migraine you do not exist, you do not have power over me. Headache, I rebuke you!
She heard the conductor call out on the intercom, "DuPont Circle Station, this is a blue line train to Friendship Heights." Rachel saw, sitting in front of her, staring at her, a man she thought she knew. He was tall and slender, wearing a black shirt that stuck to his ribs. He leaned forward in his seat, his hands clutching the bar above the seat in Front of him. His skin was shiny and dark, and his face seemed almost reassuring as if he recognized her, also. On his head he wore a black top hat. His eyes crinkled up into small slits, and he grinned, broadly, and she knew that grin, and she felt hot and cold, chilled, when she remembered where she knew him from: the day she sat at the card table at Mrs. Deerfield's crib, when the face with the teeth came down for her, this was the face of the man from the clamoring place.
He spoke without opening his mouth, and he said, "Let's pretend, Rachel, that you are the mommy?"
Rachel gasped; she felt like she'd just flicked her tongue across a live wire.
But another voice came over the wire, the train's intercom, the conductor's voice again, "This is WoodIcy Park Station, WoodIcy Park," and Rachel realized that she had not opened her eyes yet, not actually, because the man in the black tank top was becoming a static of squiggly lines on a purplish background, and Rachel opened her eyes to normal life and a normal world in which a little boy, standing in the aisle with his mother and sister, leaned over and tugged at her sleeve, saying, "Hey lady, lady, is this the stop for the zoo?" So she had a nightmare that night.
But the nightmare wasn't about a Screaming House; wasn't concerned with a man who had materialized in her mind's eye on the Metro; she did not dream of spheres bursting from her belly. The nightmare was about her father.
He was lying in the hospital bed -she'd never even seen him in that bed, he hadn't wanted her to see him, he hadn't allowed his favorite girl to see him once the end was just two months away. His eyes were sunken as if the fluid had been sucked out of them, his skin was pasty, his lips moved slowly with great effort. Thrust between his lips: a lit cigarette.
"Old habits die hard," he said, coughing. "Took out my lungs, sweetie." His chest was burst open as if he'd swallowed a grenade. Gray tendrils of smoke curled between his dripping ribs. I know this is a dream flashed through her mind. And I want this dream to end.
Now.
Her father lay in the hospital bed.
To avoid looking at the smoldering cavity beneath his neck, Rachel concentrated on his face. Skin brittle as dead leaves. Cracked at the mouth. Cigarette burning orange at the tip. Smoke exhaled through flared nostrils. Voice like gravel underfoot. "Can't have everything in this life, Rachel. You have your work, and I'm proud of what you've done, but you can't deny your body, you can't deny the destiny of every woman to bring life into this world, sweetie, it's only natural." As he spoke, the light in the room dimmed, and she watched the smoke rise through the shadowy air, rise and curl and dissipate.
"No," Rachel said. She was surrounded by darkness.
"What?"
"This isn't you. You never said that."
"Rachel?" he asked.
“You always wanted what was best for me."
"Scout?"
Rachel awoke suddenly -she'd been sitting up in bed, leaning on her elbows.
The fan whirred in the doorway to the bedroom. Perspiration tickled the back of her neck.
"Scout?" Hugh asked again.
"Dreaming," she murmured sleepily.
"Woke up just now. With you staring at me. Like you were scared of me."
"Bad dream. About daddy. Really bad. But I don't know why." Hugh hummed the theme from Jaws. "Nose shark will come and eat up all the bad dreams." He reached over to her, hugging her, kissing her nose, falling off to sleep himself. He smelled like Ivory Soap; sweat; Prell shampoo; an old T-shirt; Johnson's baby powder. Rachel lay there in bed holding herself to her husband, shaking as if from cold.