Seize the Night Page 3

  Eleanor was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for breakfast. She was completely naked. As soon as Ally saw her, she knew. “Eleanor?” she said. “Where’s Stan?”

  “Stan?”

  “Ed. Where’s Ed?”

  “Big Ed won’t get up.”

  Ally started for the Hobbits’ bedroom. She was thinking, CPR, trying to remember the proper sequence, the pushes and the breaths—there were more of the one than the other, but how many more? She was thinking, 911, wondering how long an ambulance would take, and where it would even come from, and would she need to give directions, and did she know them. She was thinking: Come back!

  But none of this mattered. Ally knew it on the threshold of the room, when she saw Stan lying half in, half out of the bed, his head and shoulder hanging off the edge of the mattress, the fingertips of his right hand touching the floor. She knew it more deeply when she smelled the shit—at first, she assumed this was coming from Bo, who’d followed her in from the kitchen, but then she saw the dark stain on the sheet tangled around Stan’s waist (like a shroud: she actually thought the words). And she knew it for certain when she got close enough to touch the old man, to press her palm against his pale back, his stubbled cheek, his hand—so cold and heavy and strangely plump when she lifted it from the floor.

  Ally didn’t cry. She didn’t feel the slightest pull in that direction. It was too shocking for tears.

  She did her best to shift Stan back onto the bed. She drew the comforter over him—all the way at first, as she’d seen people do in movies—but then this felt immediately wrong, and she pulled it back down, tucking it under his chin instead. Bo had begun to whimper; Ally herded him from the room. When he kept trying to push his way back in, she grabbed him by his collar and dragged him to the mudroom. She opened the screen door and nudged the dog out into the yard. In the kitchen, Eleanor was still sitting patiently at the table, without any clothes on, waiting for her breakfast to appear before her. Ally fetched a robe for the old woman. It felt good to be in motion, to be accomplishing things that needed doing; it made it easier not to think. She filled a bowl with Cheerios, added a splash of milk, dug a spoon out of the utensil drawer, and set everything on the placemat in front of Eleanor. And then, finally, once Eleanor had started to eat, swaying back and forth, her eyes drifting shut with pleasure, Ally picked up the cordless phone, stepped into the mudroom, and called Dr. Thornton.

  After the doctor arrived, after Ally helped Eleanor dress and guided her to her chair in the aviary, after the coroner came, and the men from the funeral home in their black van, after they’d taken the body away, after Ally made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for herself and Eleanor and Dr. Thornton, after Eleanor lay down in the sunroom for her afternoon nap, the doctor and Ally sat together in the kitchen and tried to decide what ought to be done. Could it really be possible that Stan, who’d gone to such lengths to cradle Eleanor while he was alive, had done nothing to ensure her continued care in the event of his death? Dr. Thornton seemed disappointed to discover that Ally had no answer to this question. Was there a place in the house where Stan might’ve kept a will? Ally couldn’t say. Did he ever mention a lawyer? Not as far as Ally could remember. Had he discussed with her, even casually, what his wishes might be, should he predecease Eleanor? Never. The doctor sagged back in his chair. He said that he supposed he should contact the Vermont Agency of Human Services. The idea seemed to depress him. “The problem,” he said, “is that once we do that, we can’t undo it.”

  Bo was lying on the floor beneath the kitchen table. He struggled to his feet now, shook himself awake. Then he shuffled toward the mudroom. He wanted to go out, Ally knew; he wanted to piss another puddle onto the lawn. Ally rose and opened the door for him, then stood there, waiting for Bo to find the right spot. He crouched like a female dog to empty his bladder; he no longer had the balance to lift his leg. He peed and peed and peed. Ally wondered if there might be something wrong with his kidneys. But this wasn’t her problem now, was it? She was finding it difficult, in her present circumstances, to decide how far her sense of obligation ought to stretch. She opened the drawer that contained this question, then immediately slammed it shut again, flinching from the prospect of delving too deeply, worried that if she tried to draw a line at one particular point, she might discover it was impossible to draw it anywhere. Maybe everything was her problem now.

  Back in the kitchen, the doctor was still slumped in his chair. It made Ally feel sad, seeing him like this: so defeated. She wanted to cheer him up, to reassure him that things were going to be okay, even though this obviously wasn’t the case. Stan was the keystone; without him, the arch collapsed, and without the arch, the roof must fall. Ally could see no point in pretending otherwise.

  “Can you handle her for a few days?” Dr. Thornton asked. “On your own?”

  “Of course,” Ally said, trying to sound more upbeat about this prospect than she actually felt. She didn’t know what the doctor imagined might change in the coming days. Whether it was today or tomorrow or next week or the one after that, someone was going to come and take Eleanor away.

  “I’ll stop by in the morning to check on things,” the doctor said. “And you can call me anytime.”

  Ally thanked him. There was an awkward moment at the door, when it seemed like he thought she might expect a consoling hug. Maybe she did, too—she felt herself leaning toward him and only managed to regain her center of gravity an instant before the point of no return. The doctor touched her shoulder, gave her something between a pat and a squeeze. Then he was gone.

  If Ally had been at any risk of imagining she might be able to fill the vacancy Stan had left behind—that she might find a way to keep watch in the house until death came to claim Eleanor in her turn—the remainder of that first day alone there would’ve cured her of all such illusions. Ally couldn’t understand how Stan had managed on his own for so many years. Eleanor had a habit of wandering. She was always shifting from one room to the other, searching for something, though if you asked her what it was, she was never able to remember. Sometimes she’d drift outside: she’d head to the aviary and try to drag open the barn’s door, or start to shuffle down the drive toward the road, or just stand on the lawn, staring at the steep hill beyond the barn with an air of concentrated attention—a deep sort of listening—that Ally always found slightly spooky. With Stan around, it had seemed easy enough to keep track of her. But now, as soon as Ally glanced away, Eleanor would vanish. For some reason, she kept taking Bo out and tying him by a length of rope to the hitching post at the far edge of the lawn. Ally would have to go out and free the poor dog, and while she was doing this, Eleanor would turn on the stove, or take off her clothes again, or remove all the food from the refrigerator and stack it neatly on the kitchen floor.

  “Where’s Ed?” she kept asking. “Have you seen Ed?”

  It didn’t matter how Ally answered; whatever she said was immediately forgotten. So there seemed no point in struggling to communicate some version of the truth. Instead, Ally told Eleanor that Ed had gone to the store, that he was resting, or showering, or out for a long walk. And no matter where she said he was, the same questions would be asked a moment later.

  “Where’s Ed? Have you seen Ed?”

  It was a relief when the sun finally began to set. They had soup for dinner (Where’s Ed?), and then Ally helped Eleanor take a bath (Have you seen Ed?), and brush her teeth (Where’s Ed?), and pull on her nightgown (Have you seen Ed?), and climb into bed. It was then that things got tricky again. Every time Ally turned out the light and tried to leave the room, Eleanor would get up and follow her (Where’s Ed? Have you seen Ed?). Ally assumed the old woman would eventually grow tired of this dance—that if Ally could just persuade her to lie motionless in the darkness for a handful of minutes, sleep would come and lay hold of the old woman. But it wasn’t working that way: it was Ally who was growing tired. Finally, in desperation, when Eleanor yet again asked if she’d seen
Ed, Ally answered: “I’m Ed.”

  “You’re not Ed.”

  “Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be Ed?” This little experiment might have ended here, had Ally not detected the slightest flicker of uncertainty in Eleanor’s expression. Ally seized on it, stepping to the big bureau against the wall. She dragged open the top drawer, then the drawer beneath it, searching till she found a clean pair of Stan’s pajamas. She took off her shorts and T-shirt and pulled on the pajamas while Eleanor watched from across the room. “Come on, love,” Ally said, imitating Stan’s voice as closely as she could. “Time for bed.”

  Absurdly, it worked. When Ally climbed beneath the sheets, Eleanor did, too. Ally reached to turn out the light, and, as she settled back onto the pillow, Eleanor shifted toward her, resting her head heavily on Ally’s shoulder. Ally’s plan was to wait for Eleanor to drift into sleep and then quietly slip out of the room. But each time she attempted this—with Eleanor softly snoring only inches from her face—Eleanor would startle back awake, clinging to Ally’s arm with surprising strength. “Ed?” she’d cry out.

  “Yes?” Ally would say.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere, love. Go back to sleep.”

  At some point, Bo entered the room. He stood beside the bed, sniffing loudly. Then he turned and shuffled back out. It was hot, especially with Eleanor’s plump body pressed so tightly against her side, and Ally was beginning to sweat through Stan’s pajamas. She’d never be able to sleep here—she was certain of this. For one thing, it was impossible not to remember that this was where the old man had died, in this very bed. Ally thought she could still detect the smell of shit in the room. Or was it the stench of death itself?

  Bo returned. He stood in the darkness beside the bed. Ally reached out a hand to pat him, aiming for the sound of his sniffing, but all she touched was air. It gave her a shivery feeling, as if the dog weren’t actually there. To calm herself, she thought about leaving, planning her escape as if it were something she might actually attempt. She could get up in the morning, feed Eleanor, install her on her chair in the aviary, then climb into the Volvo and go. She knew where Stan had kept the ATM card; she even knew the code—sometimes she’d made withdrawals for the Hobbits as she ran her errands down in town. The car, whatever cash she could get from the bank: that was all she’d need in order to vanish. By nightfall, she could be in Philadelphia, or Buffalo, or Wilmington, cities she’d never visited before, blank slates, new starts. Ally lay on her back in the hot room, wondering if there were people who would do such a thing—no, that’s not true, because of course there were such people: what she wondered was if she herself could ever be that type of person. She was thinking about the Titanic, the listing deck, the band playing, the icy sea. There were men who’d donned dresses, she knew, pretending to be women so that they could claim a spot for themselves in the meager allotment of lifeboats. Ally didn’t want to be like that, but she didn’t want to be left on the deck, either; she didn’t want to stand there in the North Atlantic night, while the ship sank beneath her feet . . . and Mrs. Henderson was making her retie the knots, raising her voice above the wind, telling her to go over and around and then under again, and Ally (always so clumsy with her hands, but all the more so now, her fingers cramping in the cold rain) kept losing hold of the rope. Part of her realized she was dreaming, and it was this part that roused her back into waking, into the Hobbits’ stuffy bedroom, with its faint smell of shit. It was still dark, but later now, and empty—the bed, the room.

  Ally pushed herself into a sitting position. She listened. Softly, in the distance, she could hear someone whimpering. It was faint enough for Ally to think that she might be imagining it—but no, there it was again, louder now, irrefutable. She climbed out of bed, stood in the dark room, trying to find her bearings, to shake off the last vestiges of sleep; she wanted to be certain she wasn’t dreaming. The pajamas clung to her body, heavy with perspiration, smelling of both her and Stan all at once.

  “Eleanor?” she called.

  The whimpering continued. It wasn’t Eleanor, Ally realized: it was Bo. She started out of the room, moved quickly down the hall into the kitchen. The dog was outside, Ally could tell. His whimpering had roused the birds; they’d begun to caw and shriek and whistle in the shuttered barn. Ally was hurrying—across the kitchen, into the mudroom—she didn’t pause to turn on a light, so it was a shock to come across Eleanor, standing there in the darkness, naked again, staring out the screen door toward the lawn.

  “Eleanor?”

  Eleanor held up a hand: “Shh.”

  Outside, Bo’s whimpering climbed a notch, becoming a sustained sort of yelp. There was pain in the sound, and fear, and helplessness. Ally pushed past Eleanor, out the door. The old woman grabbed at her arm—again with that surprising strength of hers—but Ally wrenched herself free. The dew on the grass felt cold against her bare feet, almost like frost. It was a pleasant sensation, sobering and clarifying: now, at last, she was fully awake. There was a half-moon, hanging just above the barn, but a cloud was moving slowly across its face, which meant the yard was dark enough for Ally to need half a dozen steps to realize that there wasn’t, as she first thought, a child lying in a white dress halfway across the lawn: it was Eleanor’s nightgown, cast aside on the grass. Bo would be tied to the hitching post, Ally knew, and as she approached, she began to hear not only his continued keening, but also a wet slapping, a heavy panting, and what sounded like the flapping of a flag in a light breeze. She could see him then, struggling to rise, falling, struggling up again—this was the slapping sound, his paws churning at the muddy puddle he’d peed into the dirt around the hitching post—he fell, he whimpered, he fell again. “It’s okay,” Ally said. “I’m here. It’s okay, sweetie.” She was reaching to untie the rope from his collar when the moon broke free from its masking cloud, and she saw the thing hanging from his neck. She flinched back with a stifled scream.

  Her first, startled impression was that it was some sort of immense insect, oval shaped, at least a foot long and half again as wide, with something frighteningly spider-like about it, the sense of multiple legs emerging from its central torso. Then Bo fell again, and a pair of wings spread open from the creature’s back; they gave a single flap to stabilize the beast. The wings were shockingly long, with a leathery appearance; Ally could make out the bones beneath the skin, even in the moonlight. There was fur, too: on the creature’s back and legs—brown or black, Ally couldn’t tell which. And the legs (there were six of them, she saw, with a tug of nausea) were prehensile; each of them ended in a monkey-like hand, all six of which were gripping tightly at Bo’s fur. Its head was the size of a grapefruit, its face buried in the dog’s neck: burrowing, feeding.

  Bo made no effort to rise again. He seemed to sense Ally’s presence, and it was as if her arrival had prompted him to relinquish his fight: she would either free him from his tormentor, or he’d succumb.

  The birds continued to cry out in the barn. The parrot was calling: “Ed . . . ! Ed . . . ! Ed . . . !” Another cloud obscured the moon, and Ally felt her panic ratchet upward—the creature was just a shadow now, a deeper darkness against Bo’s black body, its wings going flap, flap. Ally backed away. One step. Then another. Stan had been digging a hole the day before—a rhododendron beneath the kitchen window had died, poisoned, Ally suspected, by Bo’s urine, and Stan had been working all afternoon to excavate its withered remains. He’d left the job half-finished, intending to resume his digging in the morning: the shovel was still leaning against the side of the house. Ally turned, started for it at a run.

  Behind her, Bo let out a long, warbling cry of pain.

  The shovel was exactly where she’d pictured it, waiting for her. She headed back across the lawn, grasping the tool’s handle in both hands, like a baseball bat. The moon emerged again, just as she arrived at the hitching post. Bo had rolled onto his side; she could see his chest rising and falling, could hear him panting. The creatu
re had folded its wings back into its body. Ally watched it open one of its furry hands, then reach and claim a better grip.

  She swung with all her strength.

  Her fear of the creature, her revulsion, seemed to give her strength. The shovel’s blade landed with a loud thump. Bo yelped, kicked his legs. The creature relinquished its hold on the dog. It fell to the ground, instantly righting itself, and turned to face its attacker. Ally had time to register the thing’s face: round and pale and hairless, with a pair of large eyes and what she at first mistook for a flat, simian nose. But then this orifice opened, revealing a set of startling white teeth—sharp and double-tiered—and she realized the thing had two mouths, this smaller one where a nose would normally reside, a few inches above its much larger companion. Both were stretched wide now. Ally could see rows of teeth, a pair of thick pink tongues. The creature shrieked, enraged. Then it spread its wings and leapt into the air, flying straight at her.

  Ally swung again. This time, it was nothing but reflex, straight from the spine, her animal core taking command; she managed a glancing blow that knocked the creature back onto the ground. It was in the air again so quickly that it seemed as if it had bounced off the dirt, like a ball. It was still shrieking. Ally swung, connected; the thing thudded against the earth, sprang into the air once more, and this time when Ally swung, she heard the crack of a bone snapping.