Stranger in the House (13 page)

“Thanks,” she called after him. Anna could hear him going through the house and the sound of the front door closing behind him. She sat in her chair, her hands resting limply in her lap. She was afraid to close her eyes, even though she was exhausted. She was afraid to see it again in her mind’s eye: Rambo, dangling there; the hideous color of death; the bulging tongue and eyes.

“Ugh…” She made a retching sound and forced herself to her feet. She did not want to sit alone there, thinking. She felt a sudden, urgent need to talk things over with Thomas. They had not really had a chance to talk yet. There had been the police, the reporters, the hospital, and Paul, all afternoon. Thomas had been quieter than usual, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking. As tired as she was, Anna felt that she had to explain it all to him now and make him understand.

Anna walked through the house to the staircase and trudged slowly up the steps. The door to their room was open, and the soft light of the bedside lamp spilled out into the hall. The house was quiet. Tracy wasn’t even blasting her boombox, stunned into silence by the strange events of the day. Anna walked quietly into their room.

Thomas stood by the bureau, his shoulders sunken, running his fingers over the back of the silver brush. The sight of him caused an aching in her throat, and Anna started toward him, ready to slip her arms around him from behind and rest her cheek on his broad back. But as she walked across the room, she saw the packed suitcase, standing at the foot of the bed. She stopped short. “Tom,” she said.

He turned to face her, putting the brush down on the bureau top.

“What’s this?” she asked incredulously. “Tom, what are you doing?”

He walked stiffly to the nightstand and picked up the book that was lying there. Then he unzipped the front pocket on his suitcase and shoved it in. “Packing,” he said.

Anna sank down on the bed and sat on the edge, struck speechless for a moment. Then her words came in an urgent rush. “Tom, I don’t blame you for being angry. But we have to talk. I probably should have told you what I was going to do. Believe me, I agonized over it. I wanted to tell you; but he threatened me and said I would never find out if I brought you, or the police, or anyone else into it, and I couldn’t take the chance.”

“I’ve heard the story,” said Thomas in a dull voice. “All day.”

“It’s not a story, Tom. It’s the truth,” said Anna.

“Okay. It’s the truth.”

Anna leaned toward him. “But, darling, I’m still sorry. Can’t you forgive me for not telling you?”

“You don’t need to explain,” said Thomas. “I understand why you did it.”

Anna spread her hands. “Then what’s this all about? Why are you packing?”

Thomas was silent for a few moments, and then he turned to face her, his eyes like ice-covered pools of pain. “Because it’s endless, Anna. I can’t take it.”

“What’s endless? What do you mean?”

“You. Your preoccupation with Paul. All those years he was gone, all the searching, and the phone calls, and the newspaper stories. All the times I felt you were only half with me, I didn’t complain. But when I heard that the boy was coming back, I thought it might end. I thought you might finally let go of this…obsession. Only it’s worse than ever.”

Anna felt indignation flare at his accusation. “How can you say that? An obsession. I had to search for my son. I couldn’t just say, ’He’s gone,’ and forget about him. I couldn’t have lived with myself. Is that what you expected me to do?” Thomas did not answer or meet her gaze.

“And when Rambo approached me and said he knew something of life-and-death importance about Paul, yes, I had to find out what it was.”

“For Paul’s sake,” Thomas interjected in a flat voice.

“Yes,” said Anna. “That’s right. I had to try to protect him.”

“And what about Tracy and me? What if something had happened to you?”

“Well, I intended to be careful. It seemed that there was never any real danger to me.”

“A criminal on the run. A lunatic…”

“I was desperate. I had to know what it was that Rambo was hiding. He said our son was in danger….”

“Listen to yourself, Anna,” he cried. “Don’t you see? No sacrifice is ever too great for Paul. First it was the searching. Then it was Rambo. Now you’ve taken it into your head that the boy is sick, and it will be a round of doctors. And then what will it be after that? Where does it end, Anna?”

Anna stared at him for a moment, about to protest, and then she shook her head. “It doesn’t end,” she said quietly. “My concern for my own son—that will never end, any more than my concern for you and Tracy would end….”

Thomas snorted. “Concern. Is that what you call it?” He stalked over to the closet, pulled open the door, and quickly inspected its contents.

Anna rose from the bed and shook her head in disbelief. “You know, have you ever stopped to think that maybe it’s you who’s being unreasonable? Ever since we heard that Paul was coming home, you’ve been withdrawn. You won’t talk about it. You never once showed any real happiness about it. This should have been the best moment of our lives. Our own child coming back to us. Why don’t I feel that from you?”

Thomas looked at her with tired, bleak eyes. “He’s a stranger, Anna. He’s someone we don’t even know.”

Anna stared at him. “How can you say that?” she whispered. “That boy is your son.”

Thomas shook his head and slammed the closet door. “To me, he is a stranger. I can’t pretend to love him. I don’t feel anything for him.”

Shocked by his words, Anna could not speak for a moment. Slowly she recovered her voice. “Then maybe you should go.”

Thomas walked over to his suitcase and zipped up the front pocket. Then he picked up the handles. “I can’t help it,” he said. “That’s the way I feel.”

“Well, go then. Go,” she said. She grabbed the bedroom door and pulled it open. “You don’t belong here.”

Thomas hesitated and then, carrying his suitcase, he walked out. Anna heard his footfalls, descending the staircase. “How could you?” she said softly as she stared at the empty doorway.

The sound of harsh voices filtered down the hallway through his bedroom door, but Paul could not hear what they were saying. He sat huddled up in the chair beside his bureau, his arms wrapped around his knees, which were pulled up to his thin chest. The only illumination in the room was the moonlight coming through the window, throwing the objects in the room into monstrous shadows.

Once, when he was younger, he and another boy had stumbled onto a body in the woods. The man was a hobo. They found him not far from the remains of a dead campfire. It was wintertime, and the hobo’s rags had not been enough protection from the cold of the mountains. Paul had never been able to forget the sight of that stiff body, curling up into itself, the tattered clothes fluttering slightly over the man’s blue limbs, the eyes and mouth open and frozen into an expression of resigned terror. Every time he tried to imagine his father hanging in a motel room, he kept picturing that dead man in the woods. He could see his father’s mouth open, like that, the stream of invective and religious ramblings silenced forever. Those agitated, angry eyes staring, fixed into eternity. Paul wondered uneasily if despite all his preaching, Albert Rambo would end up in heaven. If there was such a place, Paul suspected his father could get there only through the intervention of his mother.

But no, they both were kidnappers, doomed to be punished. And now they both were dead. He tried to decide if it was his fault that they were dead. The thought made him feel weak and woozy. They were gone, though. Both those people who had been his parents. And Sam was gone, too. Every trace of the life he had known seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth.

Although he felt that he should, he could not feel sad about the death of his father. Not the way he had felt when his mother died. But he did feel afraid. For as long as Albert Rambo had been alive, there had been someone who knew who he was. Now, with his father gone, he was truly alone. Alone with these people. The Langes. He was Paul. Their son. It was as if his life were a huge lie, and now he was forced, for the rest of his life, to live in that lie.

But even as he emitted a sob at that terrifying idea, he thought again about how Anna, the mother, had gone to meet Rambo with money, just to try to find out about him. It seemed like a kind of stupid thing to do, in a way. But Paul felt a tiny spot of warmth in the pit of his stomach when he thought of it. For a second the yawning loneliness lifted, and then it descended again.

T
homas drummed his fingertips on the surface of Gail Kelleher’s cocktail table. “Thanks for inviting me over,” he said. “I guess I needed to see a friendly face.”

Gail tucked her legs under her and leaned back into the cushions of her plush sectional sofa. She took a sip of wine and gazed at him over the rim of her glass. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad you called me.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d be home. I just took a chance. I figured a girl like you would be…I don’t know…busy.”

Gail smiled ruefully. “Out dancing till dawn and drinking champagne out of a slipper,” she said.

Thomas shrugged. “Something like that,” he said.

“Let’s see,” she said, throwing her head back as if she were reading something off the ceiling. “This past weekend I met a guy for a drink whom I knew from college. He had three stingers in a row and tried to maul me in the cab on the way home. I ended up in bed with a good mystery. One day I did my laundry and met my girl friend for a hamburger down the street. Yesterday I watched a baseball game on TV. Pretty glamorous, no?” She smiled at him, raising one eyebrow.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “I pictured it differently. You’re so attractive. And you’re single.”

“Oh, I meet a lot of men,” she said. “Not many that I really like. They all seem to be preoccupied with their investments and their sound systems. It’s rare to meet someone who is really warm. That you feel you can talk to…”

Thomas looked up at her and felt a tingling sensation at the intensity of her glance. He quickly looked away and gazed around the modem, elegantly appointed apartment. “I like your place,” he said, although he felt a little out of his element in the sleek decor. He glanced again at Gail, who was barefoot and dressed in a V-neck summer dress that seemed to have only one button holding it closed at the waist.

“It’s about time you got over here,” she said lightly. “Want a glass of wine?”

“Yeah, okay,” he said nervously.

He watched her as she walked over to the ice bucket on the bar, picked up a wineglass, and filled it, “You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” she said. “You just said on the phone that you were spending the night in the city.”

Gail walked back to the sofa and handed him the glass. Then she settled down beside him, somewhat closer than she had been before.

Thomas stared into the pale liquid in the glass. “I…I left home,” he said, feeling, as he said it, like a small boy who had run away and was trying to appear to be brave.

“What happened?” she asked, watching him closely.

“Well, you probably heard about Anna’s finding the kidnapper at the motel and all….”

“It was on the news,” said Gail.

Thomas sighed. “I don’t know. I just couldn’t take any more,”

“Why did she do that?” Gail asked. “It was such a crazy thing to do.”

Thomas felt himself shrink from the harshness of her judgment. He felt an instinctive urge to defend his wife. “She’s been under a lot of pressure lately. She can’t seem to stop thinking about the boy.”

“It sounds kind of sick to me. I don’t know how you’ve put up with it for as long as you have.”

Thomas sighed and stared at his hands, which were clasped together. He did want to talk about it, and he knew that Gail was only trying to take his side in it; but he could not bring himself to say all the things that he felt about it. He felt guilty, talking about Anna that way. He felt only a kind of inchoate need for comfort. He had the urge to reach over and touch the smooth, tanned skin on Gail’s arms.

As if she had read his mind, Gail put a hand on his forearm, and Thomas gazed down at it. He started to speak several times and then stopped. “When Paul showed up on Friday…” he said. Then he shook his head and frowned. “He doesn’t look anything like he used to.” Thomas could feel a sob welling up inside him that he wanted to stifle at all cost. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I feel so far away from him….”

Gail tilted her head to one side. “It’s been rough, hasn’t it?”

Thomas was silent for a few minutes. Then he shook his head. “I’m terrible company tonight,” he said. He finished his wine and put the glass down on the table. “I’d better be getting over to the hotel.”

Gail put her glass down beside his and moved over to him. As she came near him, he could see her bare breasts inside the plunging neckline of her dress.

“You don’t have to stay at a hotel,” she said.

Thomas looked up into her eyes, which were dark and deep and full of sympathy for him.

“I’m glad you came to me,” she said softly.

Thomas closed his eyes and swallowed. Despite the air-conditioning in the room, he was suffused with heat. He could feel her fingers burning into his arm. With a groan he reached out for her.

Sprawled on the bed in her rumpled clothes, Anna groped across the quilt for the familiar mound of Thomas’s body and came awake, grasping a wad of the cotton mosaic in her fingers. Turning her head, Anna gazed at the undisturbed bedclothes beside her. The shafts of sunlight which fell on her made her wince, her eyes grainy from the angry tears of the night before. At least, she thought, the awful night was over.

Anna rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. The memory of Thomas’s words, the vehemence with which he had disavowed their son still stung her. But with the morning and after a few hours of sleep, she felt more incredulity than anger. She had known for a long time that he had held out no hope for Paul’s return. Well, she thought, not to hope was one thing. But he seemed to be saying that he hadn’t even wanted him back. Not at all. It made her feel that there was a whole side of him which she had never known about. She tried to think back, to the point where she had lost track of what he really felt.

In the year or so after Paul had been taken, and she had lost the baby, she would often come awake in the night, jerked from her fitful sleep by a sense of dread that was suffocating, that made the sweat stream from her body. Inevitably he would awaken moments later and turn to her, to encircle her tense, sleepless body in his arms, as if even in his sleep her needs were known to him. His embrace was meant to comfort her, but she could always sense that he was fearful of her dry-eyed grief, and his arms felt like a weight on her. One morning she complained of it to him. After that he still woke, but he would only take her hand, and gradually he learned not to touch her, but would lie there beside her, staring into the night, unable to help, unable to sleep. After a while he got a prescription and took sleeping pills. From then on she awoke alone. She was relieved, actually, to be alone with her thoughts, not to have to answer his unspoken anxieties about her. She would look at him dispassionately, lying there beside her, sleeping like an exhausted soldier, eyes encircled with shadows, mouth open. When had he stopped waiting for Paul? she wondered. Was it then, when he started to sleep?

For her part she had remained a sentry, without consolation, for a long time afterward. When she finally was able to sleep through the night, make love again, resume her life with him, they never mentioned those other times.

There were so many things that they had never talked about, subjects too tender to touch. Now she wondered if they ever would. She felt a stabbing pain in her throat, as if she were being strangled by the painful thought.

First things first, she reminded herself. She had to get ready and get Paul over to the doctor’s office. She was convinced now of his illness, and as much as she feared the verdict, she could not bear to wait. In a sense she was grateful to have a mission of such urgency. It enabled her to get out of bed.

She dragged herself up and slowly shed the wrinkled clothes she was wearing. She grabbed a wrapper, went into the bathroom, and ran a hot shower. The water spilling over her felt good, and she marveled for a second at how such small pleasures were enough to keep a person going. She recalled those days after Paul had gone and she had lost the baby. She would focus on small, pleasurable sensations to lift herself up—the curve of a shell she found at the beach; the feeling of clean sheets on her legs; the blaze of an icicle struck by sun, hanging from the porch roof. These sensations would jolt her, sometimes forcing tears to her eyes, always reminding her that she was alive. The heartache had numbed her but not killed her. As she slowly dressed, she realized she thought that those days were over, that they had ended on the day she learned Paul was coming home. She shook her head, feeling pity for her own hopefulness.

Leaving her room, she noticed that the doors to Paul and Tracy’s rooms were still closed. She went quietly down the stairs, hoping not to disturb them yet. She had a feeling that Paul was dreading this doctor’s appointment, although he had not actually said so. As for Tracy, Anna did not relish the prospect of telling her that Thomas had left. He had always been closer to Tracy than she had. She wished that they would sleep a little longer and give her some time to collect herself.

Anna went into the kitchen and put a few things for breakfast out on the kitchen table. She stopped short, thinking again of Thomas and wondering if he had eaten. He had never been able to take care of himself. He was probably having a doughnut at his desk and drinking black coffee till his hands shook. One thing was true of him: He had never taken for granted the way she took care of him, unlike most husbands she heard about. Anna sighed and poured some milk into a pitcher for the table.

“Mom?”

Anna turned around and saw Tracy, dressed in a T-shirt and running shorts, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. They had not spoken to each other very much since Sunday night, when Anna had gone into her room, but Tracy’s storm of accusations seemed to have eased her anger, as if an infection in her had burst and was draining away. Anna felt a sickening certainty that the news of Thomas’s departure would create a whole new climate of resentment. She placed the pitcher of milk on the table and began to fuss with the gauge on the toaster.

“Hi, darling. When did you get up? I didn’t hear you.”

“Just now,” said Tracy. “Where’s Daddy?”

That was quick, Anna thought. She sighed. “He’s not here.”

Tracy picked up an orange from the basket on the table and started to peel it. “Did he go early?” she asked casually. She pulled out a section and slipped it into her mouth. She watched her mother warily.

Anna could sense the tension in Tracy’s stance. For a second she realized that Tracy knew instinctively that something was wrong. She wondered how the child could be so perceptive, but at the same instant she understood, with a heavy heart, that Tracy had been bred on calamity. She must have a presentiment for it, based on experience. There was no point in trying to conceal the truth from her. Anna sat down carefully in one of the kitchen chairs and laid her hands, palms down, on the tabletop. She was not sure how to begin.

Tracy saved her the trouble. “What happened?” she asked in a matter-of-fact tone, but Anna could hear a tremor in her voice.

“Tracy, your father and I had an argument last night, and he decided to go away for a little while.”

“What do you mean?” Tracy asked incredulously. “You mean, he moved out?”

Anna was poised to deny it. Then her shoulders slumped, and she nodded. “For a little while.” She mitigated the admission.

“What’s a little while?” Tracy cried. “When’s he coming home?”

Anna was silent for a moment. Then she replied, “I don’t know.”

Tracy spit an orange pit into her hand. “You mean, never,” she said.

“I mean, I don’t know.”

“He just left, like that? He didn’t even say good-bye to me.”

“You were sleeping. He didn’t want to wake you. You’ll see him, Tracy. It’s not you he’s mad at.”

“What did you do?” Tracy asked accusingly. Then she blurted out, “I can’t believe this.” Tears spurted to her eyes, and she angrily wiped them away.

Anna stared sadly at her daughter, who was trying to be defiant about this, her latest loss. What have I done to you? Anna thought. “Tracy, I’m sorry. I know you’re going to feel as if I’m to blame, and I know how much you care for him; but I did what I had to do, and I’d do it again if I had the chance. I’m going to try to make your father see that, but if I can’t…well, I don’t know.”

“Did what? What did you do to make him leave?”

Anna considered claiming that it was private. She felt too tired to face her daughter’s reaction and the cementing of her conviction that her mother was to blame for all her misery. But perhaps there had already been too many things kept inside. Anna drew a deep breath.

“Your father was very angry at me for what I did yesterday.”

“What do you mean? For finding that guy?”

“Not for finding him. For going to see him. I went to see him without telling Daddy what I was going to do. You heard the whole thing yesterday.”

“Yeah, I heard it,” she said. “He was going to tell you something about Paul.”

“Yes,” said Anna carefully. “I knew he was wanted by the police but that didn’t stop me. I knew that he wanted money for the information about Paul, and I planned to give it to him. Without telling your father.”

“Is Daddy mad about the money?”

“No, darling. He is mad because he thinks I acted recklessly. He feels that I didn’t give any thought to his feelings, or to yours for that matter. That I just went ahead and did it without caring about the two of you. That’s not true, but he didn’t believe me.”

Tracy inserted another orange section into her mouth and then sucked on it thoughtfully. “I don’t get it.”

Anna looked up at her.

“Did he think we should have come with you? How could we do that?”

“No, he meant that if something had happened to me, I mean, if Rambo had been lying and done something to me…that I just took a dangerous chance…for Paul’s sake.”

Tracy nodded and picked another pit off her tongue. She deposited the pits in her hand into the trash. Then she wiped her hand on her T-shirt. “Yeah, but you had to try to find out what he knew about Paul,” she said simply.

Anna felt momentarily stunned by the unexpected endorsement. She looked up at her daughter with her mouth open. Then she bit her lip. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I thought.” She started to say more but stopped, afraid to break the fragile understanding with a load of explanations.