Ghost Moon (24 page)

CHAPTER 35

IT POURED DOWN RAIN ALL THE NEXT DAY and far into the night. Sitting in the big recliner next to his mother’s hospital bed, his hand holding hers as she slept the deep, drugged sleep of the desperately ill, Seth thought that the sorrowing dark skies and silvery sheets of water were a perfect metaphor for his mood. His mother would be dead soon, if not today then tomorrow, or the day after that.

Dead. There was surely no more final word in the English language.

And there was nothing he could do to save her. Earlier that day, he’d had to make the heart-wrenching decision, and sign the papers, that would stop them from putting her on life support.

On the front of her medical chart had been placed a little sticker, with the words
No Code
scrawled under it. It was hospital jargon to alert all personnel that the patient had a ‘‘Do Not Resuscitate’’ order.

It was all so matter-of-fact.
He
had been outwardly matter-of-fact when signing the papers, when he had felt like his heart was being ripped from his chest.

He was a thirty-seven-year-old grown man, a father himself, and yet the thought of his mother dying made him feel like a scared little boy.

Just before he had left with Ira at about eleven P.M., Father Randolph had pulled Seth aside and counseled him to pray.

‘‘I think it’s time to ask for God’s help for your mother, Seth’’ were Father Randolph’s exact words. They’d been in the hall outside his mother’s room. The nurses had warned them all that whether she appeared unconscious or not, Callie might still on some level be able to hear everything that was said in her presence.

Seth had snorted. ‘‘Hell, Father, you think I
haven’t
prayed? I’ve prayed until my knees were numb, and she’s still suffering. It’s the damnedest thing. My mother never harmed a living creature in her life, and she’s suffering.’’

Father Randolph looked at him with compassion. ‘‘You prayed for her to get well, didn’t you?’’

‘‘Of course I prayed for her to get well. What else would I pray for?’’ Seth was scared, and angry with it. ‘‘In there is living—no, make that dying—proof that God doesn’t answer prayers.’’

Father Randolph’s voice was sorrowful. ‘‘Seth, I firmly believe that God does answer all prayers. But one of the hardest things that we, as people of faith, have to learn is that sometimes, when He answers, the answer is no.’’ He put a hand on Seth’s shoulder. ‘‘When I pray for your mother, I ask God to wrap her in His love, and take her into eternal life with Him in His own good time.’’

Then Father Randolph bade him good night, with the promise that he would be back first thing in the morning.

Now Seth twisted and turned in the vinyl chair, trying without success to get comfortable, unwilling to let go of his mother’s hand in case she should somehow be able to sense his touch. It was around one A.M., and the hospital had settled down for the night. The room was illuminated only by the glow of the monitors and the incongruously cheerful lights on that damned little Christmas tree that Olivia, seconded by Father Randolph, had insisted be kept lit. The atmosphere was hushed, and except for the occasional squeak of a nurse’s shoe or the rattle of a cart in the hall, all was quiet outside the room. But inside was a different matter. Every sound seemed to be magnified: the drip of medicine from the IV bag into the tube that led into his mother’s arm, the whir and pulse of the machines that monitored her heart and breathing, the restless shuffling of her feet as they shifted almost constantly beneath the bedclothes.

She’d been moving her feet like that for almost half an hour.

The convulsive way her feet moved scared him almost as much as the rattle of her breathing. Both were something new.

He looked at her face, drawn by some sixth sense, to find that her eyes were open and she was looking at him. Seeing her awake, and apparently aware, for the first time all day so surprised him that for a moment he blinked at her without speaking.

‘‘Hey,’’ he said softly, recovering. She smiled at him, tightening her fingers around his hand. Once a sturdy woman, she was now so frail that her body made only the smallest of mounds in the bedcovers. Her eyes were sunken, her face skeletal beneath dry, yellowing skin. To his knowledge, she had not eaten solid food since being admitted to the hospital. He was conscious of a sudden strong urge to feed her, to run out to the vending machines in the hall and buy candy bars and sodas and force her to eat.

As if he could save her like that.

Her gaze moved over his face as if she would memorize every feature. Her voice, when she spoke, was scarcely louder than a whisper. ‘‘Remember when you were little, how you used to like to pick me flowers all the time? We had all those gardens, all those flowers— roses and amaryllis and peonies, all so lush and beautiful—and what you’d always pick were the dandelions out of the yard. You’d come and give me this handful of scraggly weeds, which you thought were the most beautiful flowers on earth. And you know what? I thought they were the most beautiful flowers on earth, too, because you gave them to me.’’ Her eyes smiled into his.

‘‘I remember,’’ Seth said. He leaned forward so that his face was close to hers. His hand clasped hers strongly. ‘‘You always used to put them in a washed-out jelly glass in the center of the kitchen table.’’

‘‘That’s right.’’ She gave a little choked laugh, then looked at him intently. ‘‘Seth—I want you to know, you’ve been the joy of my life. I have loved you from the moment you were born, and I will love you forever. I couldn’t have asked for a better son. You’ve done me proud.’’

‘‘Mother.’’ Seth choked on the word. His throat closed up, and his eyes filled with tears. ‘‘Mother.’’

She looked at him—and then beyond him, past his shoulder toward something in the corner of the room. Her face lit up all of a sudden, like she’d had a wonderful surprise. Seth even looked around to see who was there, but there was no one. Nothing. Just a round table crowded with plants and flowers.

‘‘Why, Michael!’’ she said, still looking beyond him, her voice stronger than it had been before, almost normal, in fact, and smiled. Then she took a long, slow, deep breath that rattled audibly, closed her eyes, and seemed to sleep.

He never heard her exhale.

‘‘Mother!’’ he said, alarmed, coming to his feet to lean over her. Then, urgently, ‘‘I love you, Mother!’’

At almost the same moment, a monitor sounded an alarm, and there was the rush of footsteps in the hall leading toward the room. Seconds later, the door burst open, and the room began to fill with medical personnel.

CHAPTER 36

THE BEDSIDE CLOCK READ 3:32 A.M., AND Olivia was wide awake. She lay in her bed, in the room next to Sara’s that had once been Belinda’s but now was hers, breathing in and out with quiet concentration, struggling to banish the last fragments of horror left over from the dream.

The scent of White Shoulders was elusive, as it always was when the dream woke her in the middle of the night. She could never be sure whether it was really present, or whether the scent was just her imagination working overtime.

Was it possible to
imagine
smelling a long-out-of-date perfume?

It was not pitch-black inside the room, but near enough to make little practical difference. The pouring rain outside precluded any moonlight from creeping through the curtains, and the only illumination was the digital clock beside the bed. If she lifted her hand and placed it between her eyes and the clock she could see it. Otherwise, she could not.

The dream had come to her the last three nights, each time with increasing intensity. She was starting to dread falling asleep. She knew why it came, of course.

Because she could not get out of her mind the dreadful images conjured up by the story that Seth had told her: her mother, young, healthy, with a beloved child, committing suicide by drowning herself in the lake.

Oddly enough, in the dream, the drowning did not
feel
like a suicide. The emotion that came through was fear, not sorrow.

In the wake of Callie’s hospitalization, the atmosphere in the house was enough to make anyone have bad dreams, Olivia thought, being purposefully rational. Chloe was cranky and manic by turns, Sara was withdrawn, Martha was distracted, and she herself had been hit with so many emotional whammies over the last few days that she felt shell-shocked.

To make things worse, Sara, too, was having bad dreams: The vampire lightning bug king was back. It had apparently exercised such a powerful grip on her imagination that on Friday night she had woken up screaming that it was coming to get her. Last night she had dreamed that it was in her room.

Tonight, though, all had been quiet. Except for her own nightmare, nothing had occurred to disturb her rest. Still, Olivia had found it difficult to sleep.

It did not help knowing that tonight there were only four people in this vast pile of a house: she and Sara in this wing, Chloe and Martha in the other.

The house felt surprisingly empty without Seth and Callie in it.

Olivia took an exploratory sniff, and realized that the scent of White Shoulders, if indeed she had ever really smelled it, had dissipated.

At about that same time, she heard what she was almost certain were footsteps on the gallery. Firm, heavy footsteps that could not by any stretch of the imagination belong to Sara, or Chloe, or even Martha.

A man’s footsteps.

She listened again, carefully, straining to hear over the steady rush of the pouring rain.

But try though she might, she heard nothing more.

Olivia lay in her warm, comfortable bed a moment longer, flat on her back, her hands curled around the topmost edge of the sheet and quilt that covered her, staring toward the curtained windows, listening so hard that her head ached.

She had not imagined those footsteps, she was certain. But who could be out on the gallery in the middle of the night?

Olivia could not have put a name to the fear that suddenly took root in her mind, but it galvanized her. If someone—some man—was on the gallery, she wanted to know who it was.

Three times since moving into this house, Sara had woken up crying that something or someone was in her room.

From the depths of Olivia’s subconscious, a memory stirred. Had
she
not dreamed something similar once? Something about a man standing at the foot of her bed? Or had she? The memory, if memory it was and not just a sympathetic projection of what Sara had experienced, slithered away like a snake sliding back down its hole, too elusive to be grasped.

But it left an unpleasant residue behind.

Maybe, just maybe, something—someone—really
was
sneaking into Sara’s room as she slept. Maybe the vampire lightning bug king wasn’t as fanciful as it sounded.

Just considering the possibility made Olivia’s blood run cold.

Throwing back the covers, she got out of bed. Leaving the light off so as not to warn away anyone who might still be outside, Olivia crept into the hall and opened the door to Sara’s room to check on her. Without taking more than a step inside, she could hear her daughter’s regular breathing, and, by the faint, orangeish glow of the small night-light that now burned all night beside her bed, see her huddled shape under the bedclothes. Her kitten—Smokey—was curled up on the quilt next to Sara’s legs, also soundly asleep.

Olivia smiled, looking at that kitten. Sara was so happy to have it, Olivia found herself treating it like a cherished member of the family.

Sara was safe. Olivia’s stomach settled, and only then did she realize that it had been
un
settled, with that funny feeling she got sometimes when she stepped into an elevator and it started to drop too fast.

Okay, so there was nothing in Sara’s room. But she still didn’t think she had imagined those footsteps on the gallery.

Closing Sara’s door behind her, she returned to her own room, crossed to the nearer of the two windows, and pulled the drape aside just enough to permit her to see outside.

All that met her gaze was a wall of charcoal gray. Of course, with the rain falling like it was, what else had she expected to see? Unless someone stood right in front of her window, she was not going to be able to see him unless she stepped through the window.

At the thought, a little shiver of fear ran along her spine. If someone
was
on the gallery, was going out to take a look really a good idea? Olivia hesitated. On the other hand, she was never going to be able to get back to sleep unless she
knew
.

Moving as silently as she could, Olivia unlatched the window, opened it partway, and stepped out onto the gallery.

A rush of rain-cooled air scented with honeysuckle and sodden earth greeted her. Folding her arms across her chest in defense against the unexpected gust, Olivia looked cautiously up and down. The gallery was alive with shape-shifting shadows, its far ends obscured enough to provide dark and secret concealment for all manner of possible intruders. From somewhere to her right came a series of soft, repetitive sounds, the origins of which were lost in the gloom. The mysterious squeaks or creaks or even moans were muffled almost to the point of extinction by the gentle roar of the falling rain.

It occurred to Olivia then that this late at night, with the rain cutting them off from everything around it, the Big House was as isolated as if a hurricane had picked it up and set it down again smack in the middle of the Atchafalaya Swamp.

She should go back inside, right now, and lock her window tightly behind her.

Olivia was just about to take her own advice when she perceived that one of the rocking chairs at the far end of the gallery was moving. Her eyes widened and her lips parted as she realized that the chair was being rocked slowly back and forth. The grating of its rockers against the gallery’s plank floor was the mysterious sound she had heard.

Someone was rocking in the rocking chair
.

She could just make out a dark form blotting out the whiteness of the seat and back and arms of the chair. Thoughts of ghosts and zombies and all kinds of freaky possibilities whirled through her mind, but then she realized that there was something familiar about the sitter’s sprawled posture.

‘‘Seth?’’ she whispered, staring.

There was no answer. The rocking chair continued to move without pause. But somehow, without being sure why it was so, she was certain it was he.

‘‘Seth?’’ She walked toward him, forgetting that she was clad only in her nightgown, her arms crossed over her chest, her bare feet making no sound at all as she padded over the smooth-painted wood. She did not think he was aware of her, because the chair never varied the rhythm of its slow rocking.

Beyond the porch eaves, the rain fell in a dark, translucent curtain. The intermittent gusts of rain-scented air set her blush-pink nylon gown to fluttering about her ankles like wings.

‘‘Seth?’’ It
was
him. Olivia drew near enough to be sure, frowning as she traced with her eyes the hard-set lines of his profile. He was staring out into the darkness where there was nothing to be seen, his fingers curled around the squared wooden edges of the armrests, his feet flat against the floor as he pushed the rocking chair rhythmically back and forth.

Something was wrong. Olivia knew it before she ever reached him.

Resting a hand atop the intricately woven chair back, she looked down at him.

‘‘Aunt Callie?’’ she asked in a dry, constricted voice. He looked up at her then. His eyes glinted at her through the shadows.

‘‘Mother died at one seventeen.’’ His voice was utterly calm. Preternaturally so.

Olivia gasped, her hand flying to cover her mouth.

‘‘Oh, no,’’ she said when she could speak. Tears sprang to her eyes, and began to trickle down her cheeks. ‘‘Oh, Seth, I’m so sorry!’’

‘‘I decided to wait and tell Chloe in the morning.’’ He still spoke in that detached voice. His gaze slid away from her, and the rocking chair began to move again, back and forth, back and forth, in a terrible rhythm of sorrow and control. ‘‘I can’t decide whether I should go ahead and send her to school tomorrow, though. Maybe it would be best to keep on with her normal routine. What do you think?’’

‘‘I think she should stay home. Oh, she’ll be heartbroken. Aunt Callie loved her so.’’ Olivia felt like she had been punched in the stomach herself. She suspected that shock was cushioning the worst of the blow, just as it must be for Seth.

He grimaced. It was the only sign of emotion she had seen from him so far. Olivia knew how close he had been to his mother, knew that he, too, was heartbroken, far more heartbroken even than Chloe would be. As much as Callie had loved Chloe, she had loved Seth more. But being the man that Seth was, the man he had been brought up to be, he was going to try to tough it out.

He would know no other way than to be stoic in the face of grief.

‘‘I stayed until they came to take her away. Walking out of there and leaving my mother in that room with strangers was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’’ He spoke to the rain, the wind, the night. He never looked at her at all.

‘‘Oh, Seth,’’ Olivia said again, helplessly. She leaned down to hug him, her arms sliding around his shoulders as she pressed her wet cheek to his in a gesture of wordless comfort.

‘‘Livvy,’’ he said. Hooking an arm around her waist, he pulled her down onto his lap. She went without protest. His arms slid around her, then tightened almost convulsively. She wrapped her own arms around his neck and buried her face against his shoulder as tears poured from her eyes like the rain beyond the gallery. She cried for him, because he would not. And for Aunt Callie, and herself, and Chloe, and Ira, and for all the others who had loved Callie Archer and would grieve for her, too.

Seth held her while she cried. She could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, the hard muscles of the arms that pressed her close and the thighs upon which she sat, the solid strength implicit in the breadth and length of him. His body was warm and she was freezing. She huddled closer, curling around him, and he patted and rocked and soothed her as if doing so helped comfort him, too.

‘‘She talked to me, a little,’’ he said eventually. ‘‘Just before she . . .’’

His voice broke off, and he inhaled sharply. It was obvious that he could not go on.

Olivia lifted her head from the cradle of his shoulder and looked at him. She was so close—just inches away— that even in the shifting darkness she could tell that his face was taut with sorrow, and his mouth was tight with it. But it was his eyes that were the worst. They were dark and liquid, gazing not at her but out into the night, with the glazed look of a creature in terrible pain.

‘‘Seth,’’ she whispered, and kissed him softly, gently, full on the mouth, meaning to distract him, to offer an antidote to his sorrow. But his reaction caught her by surprise.

His gaze slanted sharply down so that he was looking full into her eyes. One hand came up to cradle the back of her head, and then he kissed her, deeply, ravenously, as if he couldn’t get enough of the taste of her mouth. Her eyes closed, and she made a wordless sound of assent, her arms tightening around his neck as she kissed him back. His fingers burrowed deep into her hair, finally fanning out against the base of her skull. He shifted her so that her head was pillowed against his shoulder, and his kiss deepened until she thought he must be trying to draw her very soul into his mouth. Her body quickened, throbbed. Her pulse kicked in, pounding in her ears. His hand found her breast through the thin nylon of her gown, flattening over it, squeezing, caressing. Her nipple hardened in instant response. Hopelessly on fire for him now, she quivered and gasped her pleasure into his mouth. All thoughts of loss, of grief, of before and after faded, to be replaced by the now.

Now Seth was kissing her, now his hand was on her breast, now her body was quaking with desire. There was nothing beyond this.

His mouth lifted away from hers, and he moved, standing up abruptly with her in his arms. The chair rockers made a scraping sound as they were pushed back across the floor. Seth turned with her, carrying her with one arm around her back and the other beneath her knees, and walked with long, deliberate strides toward the window that she had left open. Her arms were looped around his neck. Her bare feet dangled free.

He took a deep breath as he reached the open window and stopped, looking down into her face.

‘‘Livvy,’’ he said, his voice very quiet and not quite steady. ‘‘If you don’t want me to make love to you, now is the time to say so.’’