Threshold (11 page)

Almost three months since the first night that Sadie Jasper slept with Deacon Silvey, and the first time that’s all it was. She slept in his bed, lay very still and listened to his uneven breathing, the desperate sounds that people lost in nightmares make. Smelled his sweat and watched the restless flutter of his eyelids, wishing she could see, could know the images rolling wild through his head. She held him because that’s all he asked her to do, Hold me, Sadie, just fucking
hold
me tonight, okay? and somewhere near dawn he awoke suddenly, sat up straight, gulping air like a junky with a syringe full of adrenaline pouring into his heart, gasping like a drowned man coming back to life. Sadie groggy, confused, trying to force herself awake, and What’s wrong, Deke? What’s wrong? but he was already out of bed, already across the room and the bathroom door squeaking open. Deacon? and no answer but the water gurgling from the faucet into the ruststained sink, staccato lampcord click and then a white, white light like rubbing alcohol in her eyes.

Stumbling across the bedroom, stubborn shadows and her eyes trying to adjust to the light spilling out of the bathroom and she stubbed a toe against the edge of his chest of drawers. And then she was standing beside him, his face in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, face so pale, sickpale, scaredpale, cold water dripping from his chin and the end of his nose, dripping from his hair. No idea what to say to a face like that, what would comfort or console, and so she didn’t say anything at all. Stood silent beside him and waited while he stared into his own frightened eyes, his own green eyes gone mad, madman’s intensity in that stare, and “Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck me, fuck me,” and when she touched his arm he flinched.

“It’s just
me,
Deke,” but no sign that he understood, that he’d even heard her, and he turned away from the mirror, turned and stared at the big cast-iron bathtub, stared
into
the tub, and by then Sadie was staring, too, straining to see whatever could drain the last, stingy bit of color from Deacon’s face, bitterhard Deacon Silvey who never showed anything he didn’t want you to see. A sound from his lips a lost child might make, and he sank to his knees beside the tub and began to cry.

“It’s Elise, isn’t it?” she whispered, fearful, tentative whisper, and for an answer he slammed both fists into the side of the tub, furious blows that should have shattered his knuckles, but only left his hands bruised and bleeding.

“Get away from me, Sadie,” he growled. “Get the hell away from me right this goddamned minute,” and she shook her head no, reached instead for his injured hands and turned her back on the bathtub. Whatever it was he saw in there nothing meant for her, probably nothing meant for anyone anymore. His skin so cold, dead man’s hands, and she rubbed them, friction to bring him back, kicking and screaming if that’s the way it had to be.

“Was it a dream, Deke? Did you have a dream about Elise or . . .” and pausing then because she knew how dangerous the words would be, how thin the ice beneath them, between them, was becoming.

“Was it a dream, or is she
here?
”

And his face like crystalperfect condemnation for a moment, crazy, burning face like a holy man confronted with some blasphemy too terrible to forgive and there could be only punishment.
He’s going to kill me,
she thought, no other way she could imagine an end to that expression, release from that rage, and then he closed his eyes and squeezed her hands tight, squeezed so hard it hurt, and he was shaking his head, the fire gone from his face as quickly as it had come. But she knew that he had let nothing go, had only pulled it all back inside himself somehow.

And before the moment was gone, before he’d smothered the last sparking embers, she asked the question again, the fury on his face all the proof she needed that it had been the
right
question; a hiss through Deacon’s clenched teeth like steam, then, demon breath to scald, and he slowly opened his eyes, fresh tears escaping and rolling down his stubbled cheeks.

“You really think there’s any goddamned difference?” he asked. “You really think that matters?”

“No,” she said, pulling him closer to her, arms around him now, circle of her arms to bind him and keep him safe. “I don’t think there’s really any difference at all.”

For almost two months, Sadie has been trying to write a novel; not a very good novel, she knows that much, of that much she’s absolutely certain, but something inside her that wants out. No matter that it’s nothing anyone will ever want to read, that when she finally finds the place where the story ends, all the pages will go into a box and the box will go under her bed or onto the top shelf of a closet, because she has no intention of ever letting anyone read it, no delusions of agents or publishers, no fantasies of an audience.

This makes it
her
book, and if she’s deluded herself about anything it’s that this fact somehow makes the writing of it more pure, more genuine, unsullied by the things that other people might want to read, or might not want to read.

Pecking it all out on a temperamental old Macintosh SE II that she found in a Dumpster behind an accounting firm on Morris Avenue, actually found the thing; no mouse in the Dumpster, but it wasn’t that hard to shoplift one. So she sits in the cold whitegray light of the computer screen and pecks with two fingers, left and right index fingers because she never learned to type, and the Mac hums and sometimes it makes angryrude R2D2 noises for no apparent reason. Plugged into an outlet in one corner of Deke’s bedroom, sitting on the floor between the bed and a stack of the science-fiction novels he reads; and that’s where she writes, legs crossed, slouched like a vulture over the keyboard, and Deacon keeps telling her she’s going to wind up with a pinched nerve or carpal tunnel syndrome, some office monkey yuppie shit like that if she doesn’t move the Mac to the kitchen table and sit in a chair while she writes. But Deacon’s kitchen smells too much like his refrigerator, like the ancient gas stove, so she’s content with her nappy patch of carpet.

No printer, of course, so every single word stored on the hard drive and one blue backup diskette that Deke made her buy at Kinko’s. “Just in case,” he said, because the building’s wiring has seen better days, and how much can you trust a computer you found in the garbage, anyway? She makes herself write at least two whole pages every night, four or five on a really good night, writes while Deke lies on the bed reading Ben Bova or Robert Heinlein, sipping his cheap gin or Thunderbird, and the sound of her two fingers dancing slowly, uncertainly, over the plastic alphabet keys. Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

“When you gonna let me read it?” Deacon asks her once a week, the question like clockwork, and sometimes she shrugs and sometimes it makes her angry and she tells him he can read it when there’s an ice rink in Hell. Always the same mock hurt from Deke, the same pretend affront or indignity, and she likes the way he looks when he isn’t really sulking.

“Well, you can at least tell me what it’s about,” and she tells him that’s even worse than asking if he can read it. An insult, the assumption that what she’s doing can be reduced to a convenient synopsis. “That’s what’s wrong with you,” she says, “you’re a goddamn reductionist.”

“Whoa, girl. Who’s been teaching you all these big fucking words?” and she flings a copy of
Dune
or
Again, Dangerous Visions
at him, something thick with some weight, with some gravity. She rarely ever actually hits him; there’s a jumbled pile of paperbacks on her side of the bed, books that have missed Deke’s head by inches.

“That’s okay,” he says, or “Whatever,” smiles and takes a sip from his jelly glass of liquor, bottle of wine the color of an eggplant or the color of nothing at all. “It’s probably just some of that trashy Lovecraft shit you read. ‘The Moldering Big Toe of Dagon’ or ‘The Whisperer from Behind the Laundry Hamper,’ something like that,” and so she has to throw another book at him.

“You haven’t even ever read Lovecraft, dumb-ass,” and he always rolls his eyes and mutters something condescending, “When you were still watching goddamn
Sesame Street,
kiddo, when you were still into Mr. Rogers and King Friday, Mr. fucking Greenjeans, kiddo.”

“You know, I always thought Mr. Moose was especially creepy, didn’t you?” and “Now you’re trying to change the subject,” he says. Never exactly like that, but never very different, either. Comfortable little ritual, something almost approaching domestic, as close as they’ll probably ever get to domestic. And maybe she
will
let him read it one day, when she’s done. When she’s finished the last sentence, transferred the last muddy thought from her head to the screen, and it’s all there to speak for itself.

Maybe that would prove that she loves him, that it’s not just the sex or a weakness for irredeemable losers, the romance of a life of poverty with an alcoholic of questionable sanity and dubious hygiene. Not just that they saw a ghost together one night a long time ago, saw something in a warehouse once that might have been a ghost, or that they both like Charlie Parker and Joy Division. That would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she’s never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselors were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes, the soft places.

But it would also mean admitting how much of what she’s writing is
about
him, the patchwork bits and pieces she’s learned about him, about Elise’s suicide and why he can’t ever stop loving Chance Matthews. It would mean confessing her own resentment in words more honest than she’s ever had the nerve to say to his face.

And then there are her own bad dreams, the dreams about the mountain, the secret places below the mountain, and perhaps that would be the worst of all.

“It’s starting to rain,” Jerome says, and Sadie glances up from the Yeats, and the old man’s pointing towards the high and shadowy ceiling of the bookshop. “Just thought you might want to know, since I ain’t never seen you carrying an umbrella.”

“Thanks,” she says, her head still lost in Yeats’ cyclical theories of history, marking her place with the ticket stub and returning the volume to its hiding place behind
The Book of Mormon.

“I got an extra one you can borrow, though, if you want it,” Jerome says, and Sadie glances at her Sanrio wristwatch, trying to figure out how it got so late so fast.

“Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”

She follows him back to the register, pays the twelve fifty, plus tax, for the book of ghost stories, and he’s wrapped it in a second bag, plastic grocery bag from the Piggly Wiggly, so it won’t get wet, hands her the umbrella, and she thanks him again. Big umbrella the color of overripe bananas, the color of a banana Popsicle, but at least it’ll keep her dry. The door jingles shut behind her, and she stands for a moment beneath the raggedy bookshop awning, green-and-white canvas stripes, looking out at the stormslick street, up at the sky gone dark as silt and ashes, and the falling rain makes an incongruous sound, like eggs frying in a skillet. Sadie opens the umbrella and sighs when she sees that there’s a giant smiley face printed on the underside, smirking, happy cartoon face to leer down at her while she splashes through the puddles.