Stranger Things Happen (5 page)

Rachel said, "It's getting dark. He can call a taxi." Carroll
looked at her, hurt, and she frowned at him.

"He'll stay in the back room," Mrs. Rook said. "Come and have
another glass of wine before you go to bed, Carroll." She grinned
at him in what might have been a friendly fashion, except that at
some point after dinner, she had removed her dentures.

Rachel brought him a pair of her father's pajamas and led him
off to the room where he was to sleep. The room was small and plain
and the only beautiful thing in it was Rachel, sitting on a blue
and scarlet quilt. "Who made this?" he said.

"My mother did," Rachel said. "She's made whole closetsful of
quilts. It's what she used to do while she waited for me to get
home from a date. Now get in bed."

"Why didn't you want me to spend the night?" he asked.

She stuck a long piece of hair in her mouth, and sucked on it,
staring at him without blinking. He tried again. "How come you
never spend the night at my apartment?"

She shrugged. "Are you tired?"

Carroll yawned, and gave up. "Yes," he said and Rachel kissed
him goodnight. It was a long, thoughtful kiss. She turned out the
light and went down the hall to her own bedroom. Carroll rolled on
his side and fell asleep and dreamed that Rachel came back in the
room and stood naked in the moonlight. Then she climbed in bed with
him and they made love and then Mrs. Rook came into the room. She
beat at them with her leg as they hid under the quilt. She struck
Rachel and turned her into wood.

As Carroll left the next morning, it was discovered that Flower
had given birth to seven puppies in the night. "Well, it's too late
now," Rachel said.

"Too late for what?" Carroll asked. His car started on the first
try.

"Never mind," Rachel said gloomily. She didn't wave as he drove
away.

#

Carroll discovered that if he said "I love you," to Rachel, she
would say "I love you too," in an absent-minded way. But she still
refused to come to his apartment, and because it was colder now,
they made love during the day, in the storage closet on the third
floor. Sometimes he caught her watching him now, when they made
love. The look in her eyes was not quite what he had hoped it would
be, more shrewd than passionate. But perhaps this was a trick of
the cold winter light.

Sometimes, now that it was cold, Rachel let Carroll drive her
home from school. The sign beside the Rooks' driveway now said,
"Get your Christmas Trees early." Beneath that it said, "Adorable
black Lab Puppies free to a Good home."

But no one wanted a puppy. This was understandable; already the
puppies had the gaunt, evil look of their parents. They spent their
days catching rats in the barn, and their evenings trailing like
sullen shadows around the black skirts of Mrs. Rook. They tolerated
Mr. Rook and Rachel; Carroll they eyed hungrily.

"You have to look on the bright side," Mr. Rook said. "They make
excellent watchdogs."

#

Carroll gave Rachel a wooden bird on a gold chain for Christmas,
and the complete works of Jane Austen. She gave him a bottle of
strawberry wine and a wooden box, with six black dogs painted on
the lid. They had fiery red eyes and red licorice tongues. "My
father carved it, but I painted it," she said.

Carroll opened the box. "What will I put in it?" he said.

Rachel shrugged. The library was closed for the weekend, and
they sat on the dingy green carpet in the deserted lounge. The rest
of the staff was on break, and Mr. Cassatti, Carroll's supervisor,
had asked Carroll to keep an eye on things.

There had been some complaints, he said, of vandalism in the
past few weeks. Books had been knocked off their shelves, or
disarranged, and even more curious, a female student claimed to
have seen a dog up on the third floor. It had growled at her, she
said, and then slunk off into the stacks. Mr. Cassatti, when he had
gone up to check, had seen nothing. Not so much as a single hair.
He wasn't worried about the dog, Mr. Cassatti had said, but some
books had been discovered, the pages ripped
out. 
Maimed
, Mr. Cassatti had said.

Rachel handed Carroll one last parcel. It was wrapped in a brown
paper bag, and when he opened it, a blaze of scarlet and cornflower
blue spilled out onto his lap. "My mother made you a quilt just
like the one in the spare bedroom," Rachel said. "I told her you
thought it was pretty."

"It's beautiful," Carroll said. He snapped the quilt out, so
that it spread across the library floor, as if they were having a
picnic. He tried to imagine making love to Rachel beneath a quilt
her mother had made. "Does this mean that you'll make love with me
in a bed?"

"I'm pregnant," Rachel said.

He looked around to see if anyone else had heard her, but of
course they were alone. "That's impossible," he said. "You're on
the pill."

"Yes, well." Rachel said. "I'm pregnant anyway. It happens
sometimes."

"How pregnant?" he asked.

"Three months."

"Does your mother know?"

"Yes," Rachel said.

"Oh God, she's going to put the dogs on me. What are we going to
do?"

"What am I going to do," Rachel said, looking down at her cupped
hands so that Carroll could not see her expression. "What
am 
I 
going to do," she said again.

There was a long pause and Carroll took one of her hands in his.
"Then we'll get married?" he said, a quaver in his voice turning
the statement into a question.

"No," she said, looking straight at him, the way she looked at
him when they made love. He had never noticed what a sad hopeless
look this was.

Carroll dropped his own eyes, ashamed of himself and not quite
sure why. He took a deep breath. "What I meant to say, Rachel, is I
love you very much and would you please marry me?"

Rachel pulled her hand away from him. She said in a low angry
voice, "What do you think this is, Carroll? Do you think this is a
book? Is this supposed to be the happy ending—we get married and
live happily ever after?"

She got up, and he stood up too. He opened his mouth, and
nothing came out, so he just followed her as she walked away. She
stopped so abruptly that he almost fell against her. "Let me ask
you a question first," she said, and turned to face him. "What
would you choose, love or water?"

The question was so ridiculous that he found he was able to
speak again. "What kind of a question is that?" he said.

"Never mind. I think you better take me home in your car,"
Rachel said. "It's starting to snow."

Carroll thought about it during the car ride. He came to the
conclusion that it was a silly question, and that if he didn't
answer it correctly, Rachel wasn't going to marry him. He wasn't
entirely sure that he wanted to give the correct answer, even if he
knew what it was.

He said, "I love you, Rachel." He swallowed and he could hear
the snow coming down, soft as feathers on the roof and windshield
of the car. In the two beams of the headlights the road was dense
and white as an iced cake, and in the reflected snow-light Rachel's
face was a beautiful greenish color. "Will you marry me anyway? I
don't know how you want me to choose."

"No."

"Why not?" They had reached the farm; he turned the car into
driveway, and stopped.

"You've had a pretty good life so far, haven't you?" she
said.

"Not too bad," he said sullenly.

"When you walk down the street," Rachel said, "do you ever find
pennies?"

"Yes," he said.

"Are they heads or tails?"

"Heads, usually," he said.

"Do you get good grades?"

"As and Bs," he said.

"Do you have to study hard? Have you ever broken a mirror? When
you lose things," she said, "do you find them again?"

"What is this, an interview?"

Rachel looked at him. It was hard to read her expression, but
she sounded resigned. "Have you ever even broken a bone? Do you
ever have to stop for red lights?"

"Okay, okay," he snapped. "My life is pretty easy. I've gotten
everything I ever wanted for Christmas, too. And I want you to
marry me, so of course you're going to say yes."

He reached out, put his arms around her. She sat brittle and
stiff in the circle of his embrace, her face turned into his
jacket. "Rachel—"

"My mother says I shouldn't marry you," she said. "She says I
don't really know you, that you're feckless, that you've never lost
anything that you cared about, that you're the wrong sort to be
marrying into a family like ours."

"Is your mother some kind of oracle, because she has a wooden
leg?"

"My mother knows about losing things," Rachel said, pushing at
him. "She says it'll hurt, but I'll get over you."

"So tell me, how hard has your life been?" Carroll said. "You've
got your nose, and both your legs. What do you know about losing
things?"

"I haven't told you everything," Rachel said and slipped out of
the car. "You don't know everything about me." Then she slammed the
car door. He watched her cross the driveway and go up the hill into
the snow.

Carroll called in sick all the next week. The heating unit in
his apartment wasn't working, and the cold made him sluggish. He
thought about going in to the library, just to be warm, but instead
he spent most of his time under the quilt that Mrs. Rook had made,
hoping to dream about Rachel. He dreamed instead about being
devoured by dogs, about drowning in icy black water.

He lay in his dark room, under the weight of the scarlet quilt,
when he wasn't asleep, and held long conversations in his head with
Rachel, about love and water. He told her stories about his
childhood; she almost seemed to be listening. He asked her about
the baby and she told him she was going to name it Ellen if it was
a girl. When he took his own temperature on Wednesday, the
thermometer said he had a fever of 103, so he climbed back into
bed.

When he woke up on Thursday morning, he found short black hairs
covering the quilt, which he knew must mean that he was
hallucinating. He fell asleep again and dreamed that Mr. Rook came
to see him. Mr. Rook was a Black Lab. He was wearing a plastic
Groucho Marx nose. He and Carroll stood beside the black lake that
was on the third floor of the library.

The dog said, "You and I are a lot alike, Carroll."

"I suppose," Carroll said.

"No, really," the dog insisted. It leaned its head on Carroll's
knee, still looking up at him. "We like to look on the bright side
of things. You have to do that, you know."

"Rachel doesn't love me anymore," Carroll said. "Nobody likes
me." He scratched behind Mr. Rook's silky ear.

"Now, is that looking on the bright side of things?" said the
dog. "Scratch a little to the right. Rachel has a hard time, like
her mother. Be patient with her."

"So which would you choose," Carroll said. "Love or water?"

"Who says anyone gets to choose anything? You said you picked
water, but there's good water and there's bad water. Did you ever
think about that?" the dog said. "I have a much better question for
you. Are you a good dog or a bad dog?"

"Good dog!" Carroll yelled, and woke himself up.

He called the farmhouse in the morning, and when Rachel
answered, he said, "This is Carroll. I'm coming to talk to
you."

But when he got there, no one was there. The sight of the
leftover Christmas trees, tall and gawky as green geese, made him
feel homesick. Little clumps of snow like white flowers were
melting in the gravel driveway. The dogs were not in the barn and
he hoped that Mrs. Rook had taken them down to the pond.

He walked up to the house, and knocked on the door. If either of
Rachel's parents came to the door, he would stand his ground and
demand to see their daughter. He knocked again, but no one came.
The house, shuttered against the snow, had an expectant air, as if
it were waiting for him to say something. So he whispered, "Rachel?
Where are you?" The house was silent. "Rachel, I love you. Please
come out and talk to me. Let's get married—we'll elope. You steal
your mother's leg, and by the time your father carves her a new
one, we'll be in Canada. We could go to Niagara Falls for our
honeymoon—we could take your mother's leg with us, if you
want—Ellen, I mean—we'll take Ellen with us!"

Carroll heard a delicate cough behind him as if someone were
clearing their throat. He turned and saw Flower and Acorn and their
six enormous children sitting on the gravel by the barn, next to
his car. Their fur was spiky and wet, and they curled their black
lips at him. Someone in the house laughed. Or perhaps it was the
echo of a splash, down at the pond.

One of the dogs lifted its head and bayed at him. "Hey," he
said. "Good dog! Good Flower, good Acorn! Rachel, help!"

She had been hiding behind the front door. She slammed it open
and came out onto the porch. "My mother said I should just let the
dogs eat you," she said. "If you came."

She looked tired; she wore a shapeless woolen dress that looked
like one of her mother's. If she really was pregnant, Carroll
couldn't see any evidence yet. "Do you always listen to your
mother?" he said. "Don't you love me?"

"When I was born," she said. "I was a twin. My sister's name was
Ellen. When we were seven years old, she drowned in the pond—I lost
her. Don't you see? People start out losing small things, like
noses. Pretty soon you start losing other things too. It's sort of
an accidental leprosy. If we got married, you'd find out."

Carroll heard someone coming up the path from the pond, up
through the thin ranks of Christmas trees. The dogs pricked up
their ears, but their black eyes stayed fastened to Carroll. "You'd
better hurry," Rachel said. She escorted him past the dogs to his
car.