It was nearly midnight before the third cup of Tension Tamer tea finally began to take effect and Hannah felt drowsy enough to walk into the bedroom and lie down. She closed her eyes and almost instantly she was dreaming, drawn back into the shadowy images of her past.
She was eleven years old. Randall’s age. She was a thin girl with thick blond hair that embarrassed her because everyone was always touching it as though it was community property, like the belly of a pregnant woman. Strangers standing behind her and her mother in the grocery store checkout line might reach out and stroke Hannah’s golden curls. So lovely, they would say, like spun gold, the tresses of a fairy-tale princess. And Hannah cringed, wanted to hide, wanting to shave it off.
Seeing it now in her mind, part dream, part memory. The long-ago moment still simmered in her cells, unspooling before her now with all the detail of the actual event. Though she knew it was not real, knew she was dreaming it again, half-awake inside the dream, trying to interpret the images as she was seeing them.
Hannah was eleven years old, wearing pink pajamas, rising early on a Sunday morning in January, she went to her parents’ room to see if they were awake. She pushed open the door and peered through the crack and saw her parents making love in the king-size four-poster bed, the same bed she slept in now, the same bed where she lay dreaming.
Hannah stood in the doorway and listened to the bed creak and watched them make love. She knew what they were doing. Martha Keller had already explained about sexuality. A straightforward talk with a pad of paper and drawings of a flaccid penis and an erect one. Both of them giggling at times, because it was funny, the whole thing, mother and daughter talking about that absurd object, that penis, how it changed, what it did. The big secret exposed. Hannah was fine with it. Ready for what was to come, her body’s budding. Ready, eager, not shy at all. There were girls at school who were already there at eleven. Breasts, their periods. So when she saw her parents making love, the one and only time this happened, she was not shocked or upset.
But she stood there and watched because she had never seen her mother this way. Martha Keller on top of her father. Sitting up, her large breasts swinging loose from side to side as she rode up and down her father’s shaft. Up and down again and again with her eyes closed. Controlling this love-making. And her father lay nearly still, his eyes also shut, head rocked back in the pillow. And Hannah could not stop watching.
For her mother was in charge, so obviously asserting herself in a way that she never did in public. Martha Keller was a quiet homemaker, willing to let Ed run the show, slow to reveal herself to strangers, quiet, holding back. Everything Ed Keller was not. Her wide-shouldered, athletic, tall husband, a federal prosecutor, an outdoorsman, brimming with confidence, maybe even a little arrogance. This man with enough strength to hold up a thrashing five-foot barracuda with one hand, a great sleek silver monster, holding it up beside the boat for the two of them to admire while he extracted the hook from its jaw with his free hand.
But there in the bed, her father was clearly powerless beneath Martha Keller’s hips, grinding against him, pressing him down. Her father moaned and Hannah stood in the doorway absorbing this moment, this revelation of female power. This insight into her mother and into her father as well, their secret agreement, the thing that pleasured them both.
Then the dream changed, and Hannah at eleven became Randall at eleven. Her son was standing in her current doorway, watching her sleep, watching her dream in the big four-poster bed where long ago her parents had made love. Her son stood there for a moment staring at her, then he turned away from her sleeping form and padded through the dark house to his bedroom. The dream followed him like a camera watching from above. Watching Randall lie down in his own narrow bed and cover himself with sheets and blankets, lying face-up, peering into the blackness.
And this was no longer her regular dream, not the recurrent pleasure of visiting with her parents, witnessing again their secret dynamic, her mother’s enthralling power. This was her son lying in his bed, where suddenly there was a dark angel standing above him, a faceless vampire with a wide cape spreading out like giant wings, a stranger hovering over her son, lowering himself closer and closer to his frail sleeping form.
Hannah knew it was a nightmare. Knew it as she swam upward to the surface of her sleep, kicking and clawing, and took a sharp gasp as she broke through into the air. Knew it was false, an image concocted by the phantom inside her, that creative maestro who spun together the day’s anxieties with the powerful currents from her past. She knew all this, but that knowledge did not keep her heart from knocking out of rhythm or keep her from pushing herself up from her bed and hurrying through the living room and down the dark narrow corridor to Randall’s room and throwing open his door.
He was at his computer. A blue halo surrounding him.
“Randall,” she said.
His hands froze on the keys.
He turned his head and looked back at her.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Talking to Stevie.”
“At two in the morning, Randall?”
“Stevie doesn’t sleep much either.”
She came forward and stood at his shoulder.
Randall moved his mouse and clicked and the white panel that held a few dozen lines of typing disappeared.
“Why did you do that, Randall?”
“Do what?”
“You know what I mean. Why did you delete that screen?”
“We were talking about computers, that’s all. Stevie’s twelve. He’s a lot better at programming than I am. He’s a prodigy.”
“Are you hiding something from me, Randall?”
“No.”
His voice was shrill, uncertain. For of course he was hiding something. Just as every child concealed from their parents the secret kingdoms they inhabited, the universe they were convinced that only they fully understood.
She squatted beside his chair. In the metal birdcage Spunky dug deeper into the layer of shredded newspaper.
“Randall,” she said. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you. Can you do that?”
He shook his head.
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
“That’s not what Dr. English thinks. She believes you’re worried about something. Something very specific.”
He stared ahead into the undersea screen-saver image. Big hammerhead sharks and dazzling schools of iridescent clownfish cruised by a forest of sea fans and elk horn coral. A stream of bubbles trickled up from the bottom of the screen.
“I want to talk about what’s frightening you, Randall.”
He got up from his chair and stepped around her, careful not to brush against her body, and he went to his bed and lay down. He was wearing his red-and-yellow-striped pajamas. There was a glass of water on the table beside his bed. Faintly glowing stars decorated his ceiling.
She stood up and went over to his bed and sat down on the edge.
Randall crossed his arms against his chest and stared up at the greenish stars. There were a couple of moons up there too. Saturn with its rings.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The code in your book, the thing about house painters. It’s beginning again. You went to see the FBI guy, you’re going to start digging around, being a detective.”
“Randall, I’m not going to lie to you. Yes, I’m going to dig around a little, try to see what this is all about.”
He shook his head, clamped his mouth.
“Wouldn’t you feel better if the killers were caught?”
“No!”
“Yes, you would, Randall. Because then you wouldn’t have to worry anymore. It would all be over. Don’t you want that?’
“It won’t be over. It won’t ever be over. You won’t let it.”
She reached out to comb a wisp of hair from his eyes but he wrenched away from her touch.
She sat still on the bed, hands in her lap.
“Sometimes, Randall, the only way for a wound to heal is to open it up, clean it out, disinfect it. And that hurts, I know it does. It seems like torture to touch a place so sore you can barely stand it. But that’s the only way to cure some wounds. Otherwise they can go on festering forever, hurting and hurting all your life.”
“You’re not going to stop, you’re never going to stop.”
He rolled away from her, onto his side, and buried his head beneath the pillow and began to whimper.
She sat there for a long while, running her hands along his back, the knobby length of his spine. His sobs sent spasms through his body. Weeping with such force and abandon she could barely endure it She spoke his name softly again and again until his crying finally tapered away to a few last hiccups, and she bent down and held him in her arms, rocking him until his breathing eased into the quiet regularity of sleep.
When he loosened his grip on the pillow, Hannah sat up and drew it off him, lifted his head and tucked the pillow beneath. She bent close and touched her lips to his damp, fevered cheek, the salt of his drying tears. She listened for a moment to his muffled snore, the sweet drone of his oblivion. Then rose and walked back to her bedroom where she lay down again and stared into the dark.