When Annie was alive, she wouldn’t let him have a drink because she said it interfered with his medicine. But on the way home from Greenwood Lake yesterday, Ned had stopped at a liquor store and bought bottles of bourbon, scotch, and rye. He hadn’t taken his medicine since Annie died, so maybe she wouldn’t be mad at him for drinking now. “I need to sleep, Annie,” he explained when he opened the first bottle. “It will help me to sleep.”
It did help. He had fallen asleep sitting in the chair, but then something happened. Ned couldn’t tell whether he was dreaming or remembering about the night of the fire. He was standing in that clump of trees with the can of gas when a shadow came from the side of the house and rushed down the driveway.
It was so windy, and the branches of the trees kept moving and swaying. He had thought at first that was what caused the shadow. . . . But now the shadow had become the figure of a man, and in his dream he sometimes thought he could even see a face.
Was it like his dreams about Annie, the ones that were so real he could even smell the peach body lotion she wore?
It had to be that, he decided. Because it was just a dream, wasn’t it?
At five o’clock, just as the first light of dawn was pushing past the shade, Ned got up. His body ached from having fallen asleep in the chair, but even worse was the ache in his heart. He wanted Annie. He needed her—but she was gone. He went across the room and got his rifle. All these years he’d kept it hidden behind a pile of junk in their half of the garage. He sat down again, his hands wrapped tightly around the barrel.
The rifle would bring him to Annie. When he was finished with those people, the ones who had caused her to die, he would go to her. He would join her.
Then suddenly he flashed on last night. The face in the driveway at Bedford. Had he seen it or dreamed it?
He lay down and tried to fall asleep again, but he couldn’t. The burn on his hand was getting messy, and it hurt a lot. He couldn’t go to the emergency room of the hospital. He’d heard on the radio that the guy they arrested for the fire had a burn on his hand.
He was lucky he had met Dr. Ryan in the hospital lobby. If he had gone to the emergency room, someone might have reported him to the police. And they would have found out that last summer he had worked for the landscaper who took care of the grounds at the Bedford house. But he had lost the prescription Dr. Ryan gave him.
Maybe if he put butter on his hand it would feel better. That’s what his mother had done once when she burned her hand lighting a cigarette from the stove.
Could he ask Dr. Ryan for another prescription? Maybe he could phone him.
Or would that merely remind Dr. Ryan that hours after the fire in Bedford Ned had showed him a burned hand?
He couldn’t make up his mind what to do.