We Are Here (44 page)

Container loads of supplements were on the way. A vast bounty of advice about the best ways to maintain your body and mind during pregnancy had been downloaded (okay, the web was good for that stuff ), with further hard-copy manuals expected any day in the mail. The attic room was nearly done and … would be finished soon.

She shelved the questions that came from that last point, sticking to a decision made as she’d brushed her teeth that morning, and contented herself with the bottom-line declaration that Dawn and David’s babies would be born into an orderly world, inside and out.

Of that, my embryonic beings, have no doubt.

She decided she could call the classroom done. All the art equipment was where it were supposed to be, bar a couple of crayons on the counter, which she’d tidy on the way out; chairs were under tables; circle time mats in a neat pile; and there was picture of a face on the door.

Dawn did a double take.

The door to the classroom was made of wood and painted a cheerful green except for a glass panel in the upper half. A sheet of paper was stuck to this, the kind she handed out many times a day for pupils to inexpertly mark in one way or another.

This one had also been marked, but it didn’t look like it had been done by a child. The face was rendered in black crayon—an irregular oval, a few lines inside evoking eyes, nose, and ears, a hooked one below that looked something like a smile.

As she looked more closely, however, she saw the lines were labored and ragged, drawn far more arduously than their freedom implied, as if even holding the crayon had been a struggle.

Dawn had seen a lot of face drawings. One of the first exercises she gave pupils each year was a self-portrait. The amount you could tell about a child—signs ranging from the level of competence and dexterity to the use of color, and even the size of the face relative to the page—was remarkable. She’d never seen one like this, though. Strong, flowing lines suggested long and unkempt hair—whereas children tended to render it either as unfeasibly neat or in wild scribbles. The facial expression, though technically a smile, was not one you’d want to see coming at you. The eyes were too knowing. The line of the mouth seemed cruel.

Dawn knew that any child who’d seen a countenance like this in real life needed an appointment with the school counselor. Urgently. It was horrible.

She took it down. None too gently, either—the top of the sheet tore, leaving a fragment still attached with the blob of tack that had been used to put it up there.

But by whom, and when? Dawn hadn’t left the classroom since the end of school. Had somebody sneaked in and stuck it up when she wasn’t looking? Would that even have been
possible
?

Dawn went to the window. For a moment the playground was empty, and then she saw Jeff—school handyman, gardener, general factotum—in the distance, going about his endless tasks. He didn’t glance over and of course it wouldn’t have been him.

Neither could Dawn imagine any of the older kids doing this. It was a good school. Sneaking into a classroom behind a female teacher’s back and putting up a picture … that was pretty creepy.

She turned from the window. And let out a shriek.

There were three pictures on the blackboard now.

All were faces. Two obviously female, the other male. One of the women’s faces was substantially rounder than the other. The expressions were muted and blank. Whoever had drawn them hadn’t been trying to imbue them with life. They’d been trying to say something else.

A threat.

The door was shut. It would have been impossible for anyone to open it without her noticing, much less get to the blackboard and stick pictures up in a neat row.

Dawn looked at the opposite corner of the classroom.

The library was arranged in a four-foot-high bookcase, behind which was an area two feet deep. This was where she left her bag and sweater during the day, the closest she had to a backstage area.

It struck her now that it was also big enough, just about, for someone to hide. For a person—a smallish person—to have lurked, darting out while she’d been looking at Jeff to stick the papers to the board before scurrying back again.

Maybe big enough. Just about.

Dawn knew the sensible thing to do was run to the door, get Jeff, and have him to come take a look—but this was her classroom, dammit. If some older kid got away with something like this, then …

She put the drawing in her hand down on the counter and squared up to the opposite corner.

“Okay—who’s back there?” Her voice was clear and strong. It was met with silence.

You’re going to be a mother
, Dawn reminded herself.
Now is the time to start making sure you don’t take any shit
. “Seriously, this isn’t funny. Come out here.”

Still nothing. No quiet, explosive giggling or the intake of breath you might expect from a little prankster who’d realized the game was up.

Abruptly Dawn decided the hell with it and walked over.

There was no one behind the bookcase.

She blinked, not realizing how convinced she’d been that she’d find someone there until she didn’t.

Someone tapped her in the middle of the back.

She whirled around. The classroom was empty. Of course. She would have heard the door—it was impossible to open it without a loud click. It must just have been a twitch between her shoulder blades, a reaction to discovering nothing behind the library bookcase.

Except … Dawn knelt and picked the black crayon off the floor. She straightened and looked over toward the counter near the door. There were two other crayons there now. Hadn’t there been three before?

She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure
enough
, anyway.

She saw that there were no longer any pictures on the blackboard. Moving in a calm and sedate manner, and electing to leave any stray crayons wherever they damned well were, Dawn left the classroom.

She locked the door and walked toward the lot without a glance back.

She sat in the car for ten minutes before turning the ignition. By then she’d worked it all out.

She was pregnant. Duh. Everybody knew the hormones screwed with your head. She knew damned well that she’d seen the pictures—but there was seeing and
seeing
. You saw things in daydreams and imagination, too. It didn’t mean they’d actually been there. If the pictures were no longer in the classroom, then they could not have been there in the first place.

Weird. Yes. But … explained.

She’d tell David about it, of course—but not right away. He’d been very twitchy since he got back from New York, a lot more Eddie Moscone than usual. Dawn wasn’t sure how he’d react to the reveal that pregnancy hormones might be messing with his wife’s head more than was probably normal.

Not to mention that when the time came for a big talk, there was something else they needed to discuss, something a lot more concrete. She didn’t want that water muddied with this.

She breathed out, a hard and active exhale. She started the car feeling shaken but confident that the world was broadly okay, and hurrah for that.

She didn’t realize that all the time she’d been tidying the classroom, three people had been there with her—two men, one woman, all of them thin and very tall, sometimes watching from the edges of the room, sometimes behind her, sometimes right up close, surrounding her, grinning, peeking down her blouse.

And she also didn’t know that all three of them were now sitting in the backseat of her car.

As David sprinted up the road toward the school, he saw Dawn’s car coming the other way. He jumped into the street and waved, trying not to look too frantic, trying to make this look like it was a normal thing to do. He could see Dawn through the windshield staring into the middle distance, mind on something else; then he saw her clocking the fact that some idiot was in middle of the road, then finally that the idiot was her husband.

She braked, too hard. The wheels spun and the car skidded toward him. David got his arm out between his body and the car, sidestepping out of the way at the last moment.

He yanked open the passenger door. “Are you okay?”

“What are you
doing
, David?”

He got in. “Has anything weird happened?”

“I could have
killed
you.” He kept staring at her. “David … what? Why are you here? And why are you looking so weird? You’re scaring me.”

“Are you
sure
nothing strange has happened to you? Or around you?”

“David—what’s this about?”

“Didn’t you hear about Talia?”

“Heard
what
, David? I’ve been in the classroom all day, and the last two hours I’ve been marking and …”

She broke off. David kept trying to work what was strange about her. The atmosphere in the car felt wrong, as if there was something that wasn’t being spoken about.

“What?” he said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“
Nothing
. What’s the big deal?”

“Talia’s dead.”

“
What
?”

He pulled his seat belt tight. “Drive.”

“Drive? Where?”

“New York.”

“New
York
? Are you
joking
?”

He looked at her. “Dawn, do I look like I’m joking?”

She drove.

He told her everything.

At first, just what had happened in the days after their trip to the city. Bumping into the man outside Bryant Park and in the train station. The matchbook left outside their house in the night, the same day she’d come back from school to find a pile of small change on the step. The meeting in Kendricks.

Dawn kept trying to interrupt, but he pleaded with her to let him speak until he got it all out.

Then it got harder, because he moved into the realm of lies. He had to start telling her about things he’d misled her over, or hidden by omission. The fact that when he’d hooked up with the guy in the city, it hadn’t been a simple case of meeting an old friend. That this was the same guy who’d bumped into him and come to their town to talk. That David hadn’t come home from the city to make sure he was there in time for the scan, but because
very weird shit
had started happening.

“But …” Dawn interrupted finally. She was piloting the car quickly but with care. That’s why David usually let her drive. She possessed a sense of being in control—of a car, of herself, of life—that he’d never felt. “Who
is
this guy? I thought you said he was a friend.”

David hesitated. Could he tell her this? Could he tell the woman who was carrying his child—children—that he believed a phantom from his childhood had somehow come back into his life?

“It’s difficult to explain,” he said.

“Wait.” She concentrated for a moment, negotiating the car into the fast-moving traffic on the freeway. Then she glanced at him. “Do you love me?”

“Of course,” he said, baffled. “Why do you ask that?”

She told him what had just happened in the classroom. He felt his stomach lurch. He’d known
something
had happened as soon as he opened the car door. That explained the atmosphere, the sense of things unsaid. He hoped it did, anyhow, though her telling it hadn’t dissipated what he was feeling.

“So,” she said. “Am I going nuts?”

“No,” he said. “But what else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No.” She seemed irritable. “But there’s something
you’re
not saying.”

“I’m getting to it,” he snapped. This was going wrong. He could feel it curdling, but he didn’t understand why. He felt a nonspecific crankiness, bad temper, a pervading sense of something dark and broken, a desire to nurture conflict out of curiosity, to see how far it could go—or be pushed. It felt like something black and gleefully bad was creeping up behind, something that wanted nothing less than his misery for all time.

“I know about the manuscript,” Dawn said.

She had decided to see if there was anything she could do to help, she said. She knew he was busy, caught up in the new book. It was the way their relationship always worked—her marshaling the real world, him standing on the ledge outside the window, bringing home the dreams.

So she’d gone upstairs and had a look through his boxes. Pretty quickly it had become clear that he’d want to keep most of it, and he had to decide where it went (because the obvious and only acceptable answer would be “in your study, dude”). By the time she got to the third box she’d lost focus and was peering into it with little more than mild curiosity.

When she spotted the pile of paper, she’d snapped back to attention. How cool, she thought—the manuscript for David’s novel. That shouldn’t to be hidden away in a box. That should be … well, not actually on display (a pile of paper was never going to look acceptable in the living room) but at least safely stowed. She pulled it out and leafed through the first few pages, smiling, before realizing there was something strange about it.

Yes, it was the book, but it was different. Not only in the way a first draft will always be different—the raw material, hacked like a block of stone out of the quarry of random words and events, ready to be shaped into meaning by subsequent drafts—but
wholly
different. David’s handwriting was all over it, in pencil and ballpoint pen, hundreds of corrections and changes. But the stuff underneath, the typed material, not to mention the very paper it was typed on …

“What was it, David? Where did it come from?”

David had been listening without any attempt to speak, eyes on the growing traffic through the windshield, as they came into Newark. He looked down at his hands. Lying hands, hands that …

“It was my father’s,” he said.

“What?”

“The place where I grew up wasn’t very different from Rockbridge. It was called Palmerston, in Pennsylvania. There was a weird shooting there back in the 1990s, but otherwise it was your regular small town. My parents lived there all their lives. They loved each other, but they argued. A lot. Viciously sometimes. One of the things they used to argue about was a little room my father used as his study. It was a hobby. He …”