Familiar Spirit

Chapter Three

On Saturday morning Sarah left the Marchants’ early, while Pete and Beverly were getting breakfast ready.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “I may as well go now. I told Brian I’d be there first thing. We’ll get started—don’t hurry.”

Their silence was sympathetic and said more than words. Sarah hurried away before they could suspect her mood. The prospect of seeing Brian again had lifted her spirits higher than they had been in the past two weeks. She had tried to bury the fantasy of winning him back, but it would keep poking up its seductive face.

As she drove the few blocks to Brian’s house, Sarah hoped she wasn’t too early. She wouldn’t mind catching Brian still in bed—she would have loved such a psychological advantage—but not if Melanie was there with him. It was a relief to see only the blue truck parked in the driveway. But, Sarah reflected, Melanie probably wasn’t any more eager than she was to meet her.

Sarah still had her key, so, heart thudding, she opened the door without knocking, and entered the tiny foyer which rose almost immediately into a flight of steps. Suddenly aware of herself as an intruder, she made herself stop at the bottom of the stairs, and called out Brian’s name.

His head appeared at once, looking down over the railing, the slightly shaggy fair hair falling forward in a soft aura around his face. “Hi,” he said. “Come on up.”

Something in her chest seemed to tighten at the sight of him, and she was already short of breath before she had mounted the first of the steep stairs. Brian took a step backwards when she reached the top, and Sarah felt that slight, flinching movement like a slap. All right, so she wasn’t allowed to touch him. She bit back a nasty retort and just looked at him.

“Pete and Bev will be here soon. Pete can help you carry my couch down. I thought I’d get started sorting out my books and records from yours.”

Brian turned and gestured at boxes stacked against the far wall. “I already went through and separated your books and your records, and most of them are in those boxes. The rest of your books are still in your black bookcase.”

Your, your, yours. Each time he said it it was like another little cut. Ours was dead now. Ours meant something else. She wondered if it was Melanie who had put him up to the sorting job—it wasn’t like him to be so organized. She wondered what he had thought, what he had felt, as he went through their mingled possessions and divided them up.

“You’ll probably want to look through and make sure I didn’t miss anything,” Brian said. “And there’re some records I wasn’t sure about . . . things we bought together. If I kept any you especially wanted, just say.”

“That’s all right. You’re the one who mostly listens to records.” Didn’t he know she didn’t care? Had he stopped understanding her so completely, so abruptly? She wanted to weep. His careful, distant politeness and steady refusal to meet her eyes hurt her more than she had expected. The fantasy that had sent her over here in high spirits had dissolved, and she had no anger to protect her. Here in this familiar room, where they had lived together, the distance he maintained—Brian, who had always been so ready to please her—seemed especially unnatural, almost a sacrilege.

“Shall I start loading some of these boxes onto the truck?”

She was sure he spoke only to break the silence, which might have seemed too close to intimacy. She shrugged hopelessly. “Put them in my car. It’s not locked.” She watched as he bent and lifted a heavy box, seeing the fabric of his blue shirt stretch taut across his broad back. She had to look away quickly, to keep from crying. When she heard him walking slowly, heavily down the stairs, she roused herself and looked around the tiny apartment for things which were hers.

Some were easy. The dishes were hers, and most of the flatware. The glasses with superheroes on them belonged to Brian. One skillet and one saucepan were hers, the other two were his. The beanbag chair and floor lamp had been with her since dormitory days. The good stereo system and color television were Brian’s; the old black and white set, two speakers, a radio and the blender were hers.

Other things could not be so easily categorized. They were gifts, or had been bought together, and the sight of them brought back vivid memories of other times. The onyx bookends and ashtray from Mexico—the Rackham print—the armchair they had clumsily attempted to re­upholster—the “Risk” and “Diplomacy” games—the hideous table lamp made to look like an orange cowboy boot—

They belonged to the apartment, to a time and a place, not to either Brian or Sarah but to something intangible now vanished, the relationship between them. Sarah could not imagine the ugly table lamp in another house, even her own house, but she did not want to leave it to Brian knowing that it would then become a part of Melanie’s life, a part of her personal mythology. She chewed her lip, feeling like Solomon about to divide a baby. This for Brian, this for me, this to go, this to stay . . .

She found the photograph beneath the Art Deco cigarette case Brian had bought once on impulse. For just a moment, lulled by the familiar surroundings, Sarah simply looked at it, trying to remember the dark-haired, thin girl with the strained smile. One of her friends? One of Brian’s? And then she knew. It must be Melanie.

Brian came back into the room at that moment, slightly out of breath, and she glared at him, and waved the photograph in the air.

“What’s she so scared of?”

Brian gave her a wary look and came no closer, although Sarah could see by the way his hands moved that he was longing to snatch the precious picture away. “She doesn’t like being photographed.”

“Is that all? My God, she looks terrified, not just uncomfortable. All huge eyes, and that grimace, and the way she’s standing, kind of clutching herself—”

“All right, Sarah, that’s enough.”

“Is that what you like? Scared little girls? Is that what you need to feed your ego? Didn’t I shiver enough when you turned out the light?”

“Stop it. You don’t even know her.”

“I don’t need to. I’m talking about you.” She dropped the photograph onto the table. “Let’s have a little truth session here. I don’t want any more about how you didn’t mean it to happen, or how much she needs you, I want—”

“Yes, it’s always what you want, isn’t it?” he said bitterly.

Their eyes met, and Sarah felt a shock. He was not distant now; the old current was in the air between them again.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything was always on your terms—I could adapt or get out. I felt like I was always running after you, trying to please you, trying to tempt you to stay a little longer.”

“You could have told me how you felt.”

“Yeah, sure. And had another lecture about my possessiveness and your need for independence, and how you were afraid to be dependent on anyone, especially me. Yeah, afraid,” he said, his tone heavily ironic.

Sarah’s skin was prickling all over with shame, and with hope. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. She moved a step closer to him, saw he noticed, saw that he didn’t back away. “You did make me happy, Brian. I’m sorry if I didn’t tell you that enough. I thought you’d realize . . .”

“It’s all right,” he said wearily. “It’s all over now.”

No. She wanted to shout, but restrained herself. “It isn’t. It doesn’t have to be.” He must feel the attraction that charged the air, she thought. He must. If they could both let go at the same moment, their bodies would take over, come together, never to be parted again.

“We just didn’t understand each other well enough,” Sarah said. “I know now—I’m not afraid to admit I need you.” She rejoiced to see the pain flicker in his eyes.

He shook his head hard. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s too late for that. I don’t . . . Things have changed.”

She realized he didn’t want to bring up Melanie’s name, and she felt another surge of hope. “Things haven’t changed that much. Not between us.” She took another step closer and laid her hand on his arm. She felt him jump, but he didn’t pull away. They looked into each other’s eyes. Distantly, Sarah was aware of the sound of a car pulling into the driveway outside, but she was preoccupied by more immediate sensations, and willing Brian to kiss her.

There was a knock on the open door below, and Pete’s voice: “Hello . . . Marchants Movers at your service!”

Brian jerked away as if he’d been shot.

Sarah reached for him. “I’ll tell them to go away,” she whispered. “I’ll say we don’t need them . . .”

But Brian moved away, not letting her touch him, and showed himself at the top of the stairs. “Come on in, Pete,” he said in a voice that was nearly normal.

Sarah made herself move, although it was like managing a clumsy robot. She crouched on the floor and began fumbling in a box of books, to appear to be busy when Pete and Beverly came up.

After that, Brian kept his distance. Their eyes met only once, by chance, and Brian broke that brief contact as swiftly as if it had burned him.

It was odd to see Brian in her new house—odd because it was wrong. He didn’t belong here in her refuge. Seeing him move through the rooms of the house she had rented, his boots loud on the bare wooden floors, his familiar voice echoing as he asked where she wanted the couch, Sarah found it too easy to fall into old patterns of thought, to forget what had just happened between them, to imagine all was right with the world and he was moving into this house with her. She had to stop herself from asking his advice on the placement of furniture. His opinion didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to live here, or even visit her here. She told herself that again and again, hurting herself, trying to get used to the pain. He would go away, and these walls would not know him again. Only she would—and as she gazed at Brian, unable to stop herself, Sarah imagined that he was leaving behind an image on the air which would remain to haunt her in the lonely nights to come. She would turn a corner, she thought, and catch a sudden glimpse of him; hear the distant echoes of his voice; and listen, heart pounding, as she waited for his return. Already, Brian was a ghost in her house.

The tears were too near the surface. Abruptly Sarah left her supervisory position and went outside. She walked around the house to the front, eyes on the ground, breathing slowly and deeply. She looked away from the weedy ground to the trees, and then up at the overcast sky. The day was cloudy and warm; the air moist and soft against her bare arms and face. A rainstorm, and colder weather, were expected that night. Sarah walked across the open expanse of ground, leaving the house and sheltering trees behind. A single tree, a low, spreading mesquite, stood at the far southwestern corner of the lot. She approached it, and then turned and looked up at her house.

Two red-brick chimneys thrust out of the black roof. Sarah frowned in surprise. She hadn’t noticed them before. Two chimneys, but no fireplaces. Then she remembered that odd, jutting corner in the living room, and the surprising shallowness of the kitchen pantry. The old fireplaces must have been covered up. A pity, but probably for the best, she thought. An old wooden house like this one would be a fire-trap.

As she began to walk back towards the house, Sarah noticed something else. There were windows at ground level, two of them on the front of the house, the glass grimed and revealing nothing, half-hidden by the bushes which crowded around the house below the high porch. She paused at the foot of the steps, remembering Valerie’s parting comment about a cellar. Perhaps she should have a look at it, but the idea of exploring a dark, damp, dirty space beneath her house was not immediately appealing. While she considered it, the front door opened and Pete came out onto the porch and looked down at her.

She mounted the steps to meet him, seeing the concern on his face. “Just surveying my domain,” she said lightly. “I just noticed there are chimneys, so there must have been a fireplace or two here back in the good old days.”

“The good old days,” Pete echoed. “Do you suppose this was a farmhouse? It was probably still outside the city limits in the Thirties, or whenever it was built. By the way, I noticed that your back steps aren’t too sturdy—the wood is pretty old, and one of the steps looks like it’s about to go. You should probably replace it.”

“I suspect the number of things wrong with this place will mount up as I get to know it better,” Sarah said. But her voice was cheerful. The thought of getting to know the house, finding out what repairs had to be made and then dealing with them was somehow appealing. It would give her something new to think about, something to keep herself occupied.

It didn’t take long to move, and by the time Sarah had made her last trip from Brian’s apartment it was still early in the day. Brian hurried away with obvious relief, eager for a friendlier environment, but Beverly and Pete stayed on, helping Sarah clean the house and put things away. They worked until after dark, papering drawers, unpacking dishes, nailing up bookshelves and filling them with books, helping Sarah plan and believe in her future in this house. When they finally rested, too hungry and tired to go on, the house was beginning to look lived-in. Only the bedroom was untouched, since Sarah had no furniture for it.

“You might as well come back and sleep at our place,” Beverly said, rubbing her face and leaving dirty marks on it.

Sarah shook her head. “I want to stay here, now that I’m moved in.”

“But you don’t have a bed!”

“I can sleep on the couch.” Sarah began to prowl the living room, assessing the look of her things in this new place. “I’ll check the newspaper ads tomorrow and find some sort of cheap bed, and I might be able to find a chest of drawers and other things at a garage sale.”

“But until you do, you stay with us,” Beverly said firmly.

Sarah shook her head, equally firmly.

“Let’s get some dinner,” Pete said. His voice was brisk, on the edge of impatience.

“Food!” Beverly said triumphantly, wagging a finger at Sarah. “You don’t have any food! What are you going to do about breakfast?”

“There’s a twenty-four-hour Safeway a few blocks up Thirty-fifth. I can get whatever I need there.”

“It would be so much easier . . .”

Pete grasped his wife by one arm and pulled her to her feet. “It would be so much easier to argue this over dinner,” he said. “How does Mexican food sound?”

But even after a stupefyingly large meal at El Rancho, Beverly did not give up. As they stood in the parking lot between their two cars, saying goodnight, Beverly launched her final attack.

“Sarah, just follow us home and we’ll have a few more beers and watch Saturday Night Live.”

“Thanks,” Sarah said. “But all I want to do is go to sleep.” Although she had left the heavy work to the men, her muscles ached slightly from the exertions of the day; she was full of food and pleasantly weary.

“But you can sleep at our place.”

“Honey, Sarah knows what she wants to do,” Pete said. He put one arm around Beverly. “We just spent the day helping her move in—and now you won’t let her move in.”

“I have to make the move some time, and it might as well be tonight,” Sarah said. “I’ve slept on the couch before—it’s comfortable enough. And all my things are there—I’d worry about them if I left them. I’ll be very cosy there, surrounded by all my things, in my own house—really.” She smiled.

Pete looked at Sarah intently, his face seeming even more gaunt in the harsh streetlights. “Just as long as you know,” he said quietly. “That you’re always welcome. Always. Even if that means you come knocking on our door in the middle of the night.”

Once again Sarah felt close to tears, but this time for a different reason. She felt their concern, their affection, like a net she could fall into, fearlessly letting go. She struggled a moment and then said lightly, “God forbid I should ever have to. I’ll be all right.”

“I know you will,” said Pete. For a moment Sarah thought he would step forward to embrace her, but the moment passed, and his arm only tightened around his wife. Pete and Sarah had always been awkward with each other physically, touching only through words. Beverly was the conductor between them, able to hug and kiss and freely express her emotions.

Driving home, pleasantly stuffed and a little high on Mexican beer, Sarah felt no regrets. But by the time she had bought a few things at the supermarket, and reached her dark, empty house, she was sober, tired, and feeling the first brush of unease as she remembered that she had no telephone.

Well, I won’t need one, she thought. She was tired enough to sleep soundly through the night, even on the couch and in a new place. She wished, as she walked slowly towards the black house, that she had thought to leave the porch light on. Lightning flickered in the western sky, and Sarah’s spirits rose again at the prospect of a thunderstorm. Nothing could make her feel at home more quickly than to spend a night, cosy and sheltered, while the rain pounded down outside.

Inside with the lights on, reflections in the windows startled her. Curtains, of course. How could she have forgotten about curtains? With the windows set so high, and the house so far from the street, Sarah knew she was safe from any spying eyes, but she didn’t like the flat blackness of the glass; and the dim reflections of herself, moving, which the windows cast back at her, kept tricking her into whirling around in the expectation of discovering she was no longer alone.

Sarah unrolled her sleeping bag across the couch, slipped into the flannel nightgown she usually wore only when she was sick or very cold, and settled down for the night. With the inside lights off, the windows were no longer evil mirrors, but only windows again. There was a streetlight on the corner which faintly illuminated parts of the front room, and every few minutes the lightning flashed. Sarah lay with eyes open for a while, looking at the shapes of leaves and branches outside the window, noticing how the occasional lightning altered them, and waiting for the rain. Sleep arrived before the storm.

Suddenly she woke, feeling that something was wrong. She could hear the gentle sound of rain, but it was not that which had woken her. She had heard something else; a sound from inside the house.

She heard it again: a scuffling, scurrying sound from the floor. Sarah turned her head and saw it.

It was an enormous rat, moving across the floor with a terrible purpose, making straight for her. The small amount of light in the room was enough to show her its large sharp teeth, and the unholy gleam of its tiny eyes.

Sarah struggled to sit up, but she could not move. It was as if she were utterly paralyzed. She realized she could not even feel her body. Only the muscles of her face seemed responsive, and she could turn her head. She had the choice to look at the rat or not to look at it, but no more than that.

The rat had reached the couch now and she heard it scrabbling at the base. In a moment she would feel it on her, and those horrible teeth would close on her flesh. Sarah opened her mouth to scream, knowing how useless a scream would be, in this house where no one could hear—

And she woke, heart thumping wildly and breath sounding harshly in her ears. And she could move. Relief flooded through her, relief beyond words that she was not paralyzed. And there was no rat. It had been a dream.

But as her breathing slowed Sarah could hear another sound. The sound came from within the room, just as in her dream. It was the very same sound she had heard in her dream, in fact—a scuffling, scratching noise. The sort of noise a rat might make.

The breath caught in her throat, and Sarah sat up and grabbed for the lamp beside the couch. Squinting against the sudden brightness, she looked around the room for the source of the noise. She saw nothing and gradually, as the sound continued, realized that it did not come from within the room, but from the far wall. The noises came from that odd, protruding corner which covered the old fireplace. That made sense, Sarah thought, relaxing slightly at the understanding that there was nothing actually in the room with her. Something—a rat, a bird, a bat—could be trapped in the old chimney.

The noise stopped.

Sarah continued to stare at the wall as she waited for it to begin again, but she was no longer frightened. It would not be a rat like the one in her nightmare, and she was not paralyzed. Real rats could be dealt with easily enough. On Monday she would buy poison and traps. If it became a major problem, she would call an exterminator. Still she hesitated to turn out the light and go back to sleep. She waited to hear the rat again. It was ridiculous, of course, but she had the unnerving feeling that it was waiting her out, holding still and keeping silent until she went back to sleep.

Sarah shivered, realizing that the room was much colder than it had been when she had gone to bed. The cold front must have come in with the rain. She closed the window behind the couch, which she had left partially open, and then turned out the light and burrowed back into the warmth of her sleeping bag.

After the nightmare, sleep was a long time coming, and, when it came, was fragmentary. Nightmare images of rats kept jarring her awake. She heard sounds—or thought she did—and felt tiny claws scraping at the fabric of her sleeping bag. Something was hunting her—the rat was coming to get her. She had to be alert, on her guard. Half-asleep, Sarah moaned and twisted about within the confines of the sleeping bag, trying to escape the rat, trying to order her dreams. Dawn came and filled the room with cold, early light before Sarah finally sank into untroubled sleep.