House of Windows Page 3

  The bathroom door clicked open, and at long last Veronica emerged. She had replaced the short brown dress she'd worn to dinner with a long plush robe the same cream color as the towel turbanning her hair; she'd also replaced her contacts with a small, rectangular pair of glasses; her earrings, I noticed, still caught the light. "Okay," she said as she took up her seat on the couch, folding her legs as she reached forward for her glass of wine. She took a long drink from it. "Like I said, this is a pretty weird story. I won't say even I don't believe it, because I was there and I saw it. It's more that I don't want to believe it, if that makes any sense. It will. I read that story of yours—the one about the mummy, or whatever you'd call it—so I'm thinking that you'll at least have an open mind about what I'm going to tell you. What's so funny?"

  "I'm sorry," I said, "it's just that, when people learn I write horror stories, they tend to one of two reactions. Either they tell me they don't read them—don't like them, usually—or they feel compelled to tell me one of their own. I wonder if the same thing happens to mystery writers, or romance writers?"

  "Right," Veronica said. "Even before Roger—even before his disappearance, I was trying to arrange what was happening to us into some kind of coherence, into a narrative that would make sense. After he was gone, it became a kind of obsession with me. No matter where I was or what I was doing—driving the car, watching TV, doing laundry, teaching a class—I would be going over what had happened, drawing connections among what seemed to be unrelated events, inferring motives and reactions, sometimes inventing scenes that I knew had to have taken place. For about a month—it was the first Christmas after Roger was gone—I wrote everything down. I spent day after day filling marble notebooks. I think I topped out at about four hundred pages of very tiny script, and I still hadn't come to terms with everything we'd been through. I still didn't understand it all. Every now and again, I go back to those notebooks; I revise them: crossing some words and sentences out, adding others in the margins, and in-between lines. By now, I'm not sure they're legible to anyone but me; their pages look more like some kind of abstract art than they do writing.

  "Just now, in the shower, I was thinking about where to begin, wondering if I could take a short cut to the end. I was remembering the last full night Roger and I were together. About three in the morning, Roger left the bed and went outside. He was sleepwalking, which wasn't such a big deal—he'd been up at three to wander the house for weeks. This was the first time he'd walked out the front door, however, so I followed him. He walked around the house a few times, then stopped at the back lawn. Although it was the middle of summer, the air was freezing cold, winter-cold. Fifteen feet from where we stood, our breaths making white plumes, there was darkness. Not the normal dark of three a.m., but solid black, truncating the yard from right to left in front of us. It was the source of the tremendous cold, as if someone had erected an enormous wall of black ice behind the house.

  "By this point, I was not as shocked at the sight of a huge black curtain hanging in my backyard as I otherwise would be. A lot of weird, which is to say, completely terrifying, stuff had been happening. Still, I moved closer to Roger, who was staring into the blackness as if he could distinguish something in it. 'There it is,' he said.

  "I said, 'What is it?'

  "'It's mine.'

  "I didn't think I'd heard him. 'What?'

  "'Me.' He continued gazing into the blackness.

  "'You're yours?' I asked.

  "'It's mine,' he said, and I understood him. 'Oh,' I said, 'you mean this.'

  "'Me.'

  "'It's yours and it's you.'

  "'Where's my boy?'

  "'Ted?'

  "'We're supposed to work on his slider,' Roger said, hesitated. 'He never comes to see me.'

  "'Ted.'

  "Now Roger turned to me, although his eyes were blank. 'Do you know my boy?'

  "'Not really.'

  "'He used to be so good. We used to have such a time together. Not anymore.'

  "'What happened to him?'

  "'He died.'

  "For reasons that had become important by then, I asked, 'How did he die?'

  "'I locked him away,' Roger said. 'Threw away the key. Then he died.'

  "'And he's still locked away?'

  "From the corner of my eye, I saw movement. The wall of blackness had shifted, rippled as if it really was a gigantic curtain. If every square inch of my skin hadn't already been rigid with the cold, the sight of that shifting would have brought it out in instant goosebumps. Through the blackness, I thought I could see something—was that a person standing there? It was, a tall figure that seemed to be both behind and inside the curtain. I looked away. Now I was afraid, fear surging up the middle of my back, sending my heart galloping. I looked at Roger, who hadn't responded to my last question.

  "He shrugged. He said, 'I have to assume. He won't tell me anything. He won't speak to me at all.'

  "I didn't want to, but I glanced at the black wall. The shape there was drawing closer, growing more definite. My mouth was dry. 'Roger,' I said, 'Ted—"

  "Roger's face twisted, and he was shouting. 'Where is he? What have you done with him? Where's my little boy? Where is my little boy? Where is my little boy?'"

  Part 1: Mutual Weirdness

  Instead of enormous black curtains hanging behind my house (Veronica said), begin with someone banging on my apartment door so loud it woke me out of a deep sleep. Beside me, Roger was already sitting up. I said, "Roger, what?" and checked the digital clock on the nightstand. Three a.m. Roger slid out of bed, stood up. I asked, "What is it?"

  "I don't know," he said, and went to answer it.

  "Wait," I said, because when is someone hammering on your door at three in the morning ever a good thing? Roger ignored me, crossing the tiny living room to the door, which was jumping under the blows of whoever was on the other side. Now I was out of bed and going for the phone, wondering if I'd be able to dial 911 before myself and my new husband were horribly murdered.

  "Yes, yes," Roger said, unlocking the door. He swung it open, and there was Ted.

  It was the first time I'd seen him in person. His face—he favored Joanne, those same long, horsey features—his face was contorted, red—scarlet—all the way from the bottom of his neck right up to his crewcut. I'd never seen anyone look so angry. In his right hand, he held the wedding announcement I'd sent him. He was in his fatigues, the green ones with the brown and black spots. Roger was not expecting to find his son on the landing in the middle of the night; you heard it in the way he said, "Ted!"

  "I got your message," Ted said—snarled, really.

  Roger didn't know what he was talking about. Did I mention that I hadn't told him about sending Ted our announcement? He said, "What? What message?"

  "This!" Ted shouted, holding up the card as if he was the district attorney and this exhibit A in a capital trial.

  Roger wasn't wearing his reading glasses. He had to hunch over a little and squint to see what Ted was showing him. "Why, how did you get this?" he asked.

  You could see that Ted thought Roger was mocking him. "From you!" he said, jerking the card back.

  "I never," Roger started, and stopped. He'd guessed how the card came to Ted. Instead, he said, "Ted. What is this about?"

  That was the invitation Ted had been waiting for. He said, "This is about you leaving my mother for some teenaged slut. This is about you breaking up a thirty-eight-year marriage so you could get your dick wet. This is about you spitting in the face of the woman who gave her life to you."

  "Now wait just a minute," Roger said, but Ted shouted him down.

  "This is about you bringing dishonor to our family. This is about you making yourself a laughing stock."

  "That is enough!" Now Roger was shouting. He drew himself up to his full height—which still left him a head shorter than Ted. "I am your father, mister, and you will speak to me with respect. My business is my own, and you will respect that as well. I do
not expect you or anyone else to judge me."

  "Respect!" Ted answered. "Like the respect you and your whore showed my mother?"

  "You are speaking about my wife," Roger said, "you had best change your tone."

  "Or what? You'll leave me for another son?"

  "This is ridiculous," Roger said. "You are ridiculous. Your mother and I have been separated for over two years, son, and this is the first you come to see me about this? At three a.m., screaming and yelling? Oh, very good. Exactly the way to impress me with whatever point it is you think you're making."

  "Me?" Ted said. "I was happy to let you ruin your life. Mother's better off without you. But you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? You had to rub my face in it." He brandished the announcement.

  Roger bowed his head and said, "That was a mistake."

  "You're damned right it was!"

  I watched their argument unfold from the bedroom doorway. When Roger opened the door and I saw Ted standing there, I was going to go up to him and introduce myself—for about a nanosecond, until I saw his face and realized this wasn't a surprise visit. Well, it was, but more in the way an ambush is a surprise. I stopped where I was. Probably, I should have gone back to bed, but how could I sleep with the two of them yelling at each other? Things had heated up too fast. Ted's face looked like it wanted to tear itself apart—his whole body was vibrating like a wire—while Roger's hands kept clenching and unclenching. I couldn't believe that two grown men were about to start fighting because of a stupid card—I mean, it was supposed to be a nice gesture.

  With every word they said, though, they edged closer to the moment I was going to have to call the cops. I'd already picked up the cordless and was holding it at the ready. Ted was yelling that this was just like Roger, he'd always thought of himself first, last, and in-between. Roger was yelling back that Ted was forgetting himself, and he'd had just about enough of this adolescent grandstanding. Finally, Roger shouted, "This conversation is over!" and went to slam the front door.

  As he did, Ted stepped forward. The door bounced off his shoulder, back into Roger's hand. "This conversation is over when I say it's over," he said, taking another step. "You are not going to tell me when to leave. I am going to decide when I want to leave."

  Roger pushed him. He tried. It was like pushing a tree. Ted swayed backwards, then forwards, pushing Roger on the return. Roger went over on his butt.

  For Ted, this must have been a fantasy come true. Here he was, able to hold his own with his father. When Roger sat down—hard—Ted's face completely relaxed. It was still beet-red, but he looked more like a guy who'd just been exercising than someone out for retribution. He seemed surprised at how easily Roger had fallen—I think he forgot what he was about to say.

  Before he could remember, Roger threw himself up off the floor and drove his head into Ted's gut. All the breath left Ted—he was like a cartoon character, his eyes big, his mouth a little "o." It was his turn to go down. On the way, he caught Roger's t-shirt and took him with him.

  That was that. They went at each other full-out, rolling around the floor together, punching and kicking. I didn't bother trying to stop them. The cops took about five minutes to arrive; by which time, Roger and Ted had totaled that part of the apartment. They knocked bookcases over; they smashed the TV; they broke a lamp. It was pretty horrifying; although, I'll tell you, all the time they were pounding one another black and blue, I was thinking that, if this had happened when Ted was seventeen, it probably would've been a good thing. The cops grabbed hold of them and tried to pull them apart, but that didn't work so well. One guy got a black eye for his trouble. He pepper-sprayed the two of them. Have you ever smelled that stuff? God. I can't believe the cops are allowed to use it indoors. Roger and Ted shot away from each other, howling and rubbing their eyes furiously. They were cuffed and hauled down the stairs to the police car. I didn't feel especially bad about that. I knew I'd have to drive over to town hall to bail them out in the morning, but for the moment, it was a relief to have them out of there and in a place where they couldn't hurt themselves. I walked around the apartment opening windows to air the place out, threw an extra couple of blankets on the bed, and tried to go to sleep.

  The operative word being "try." As you can imagine, sleep kept its distance. We hadn't been married a month, yet, and I had just called the cops on my husband because he was fighting with his son, for God's sake. It's pretty hard to drop off after something like that. I would've sat up watching TV, but oh yeah, I no longer had a TV, because my stepson put one of his boots through it while he was grappling with his father. I turned on the bedside light, piled Roger's pillows on top of mine, and did my best to read—Dickinson's poems, if anyone's asking—but I was no more successful at that than I was at unconsciousness. What should have been my favorite poetry was cryptic phrases and too many dashes:

  "One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

  "One need not be a House—

  "The Brain has Corridors—surpassing

  "Material Place—"

  I put the book down, leaned back on the pillows, and closed my eyes.

  I was thinking about going to bail out Roger and Ted in a few hours. I was thinking about everything that had led up to this point.

  Roger told me about Ted the second night he stayed over at my apartment. We were up till dawn talking, telling each other about our lives, our families. For all the time we'd already spent in conversation, it was amazing how little we actually knew about one another's lives. I could've told you Roger's choices for Dickens's top five novels, and his reasons for every ranking, but I still wasn't sure if he had one child or two. I'm sure he felt the same about me. We were sitting at the kitchen table, splitting a bottle of red wine. I had no kids, I said, what about him?

  "One son," Roger said. "Edward Joseph—we call him Ted."

  "How old?"

  "Twenty-eight."

  "What does he do?"

  "He is a sergeant in the United States Army, Special Forces."

  "Wow."

  Roger grunted.

  "So tell me about him."

  For the next couple of hours, Roger did. He began with Ted's fifteenth birthday. There's an age, isn't there? Some point in your teens where you reach critical mass, where everything that's been simmering inside you boils over, and you metamorphose into the stereotypical teenager. Literally the day I turned thirteen, I realized my parents and most of my immediate and extended family were the biggest idiots who'd ever walked the face of the earth. I adjusted my behavior accordingly. It made for a fun few years—fun the way slow death by torture is fun. If you're lucky, you pass out of this stage in a couple of years, but as long as you're in it, you're useless to anyone else except maybe your closest friends.

  Roger had seen this kind of behavior before. We all have, I guess. There are more than enough college students who haven't reached the end of it. On some level, he recognized it for what it was: this typical, almost impersonal response to everything. At the same time, he was deeply hurt by Ted's rejection, and he couldn't separate himself from that hurt, no matter what he knew about its cause. His son had been replaced by a sullen stranger who wore his hair long and over his face, answered every question in mumbles, and wore the same sweatshirt and jeans for days at a time.

  In response, Roger became the disciplinarian. He tried, anyway, because the more he insisted on his rules, the more Ted flouted them. He abandoned his tutors, slacking off at school to the point he was constantly in danger of flunking out. He started smoking a lot of pot, and hung out with the other kids who smoked a lot of pot. He tried to sneak a girl into his room, and when Joanne and Roger caught him, stormed out of the house. He was picked up for shoplifting a couple of times; although Joanne had enough pull to make sure the charges were dropped. Time went on, and his antics worsened. He skipped school for days at a time. He came to dinner drunk or stoned or both. He did his best to hotwire Joanne's car when she refused to let him take it out fo
r the night—but he didn't know what he was doing, and left a mess of cut and stripped wires dangling from under the dash of her Mercedes. Roger wanted to send him to military school—Roger! Can you believe it?—Joanne wanted to send him to a cousin in the south of France. They couldn't agree, so Ted stayed there with them and continued to test the limits. It was Ted's complete lack of interest in anything except getting high and hanging with his friends that really got to Roger. Out and out rebellion, angry, argumentative resistance, a coordinated rejection of his and Joanne's values, that he could've dealt with. You know how he loved to argue. Apathy, however, was beyond him. He did not know how to deal with someone who didn't care. I think Ted must have realized this and seen it as his most effective weapon.