At Anna Gardner's house, Jenny had just finished getting Hillary fed and to bed. Aaron was up watching television. Jenny was emotionally wrung out from the trip, and was half wishing that Joe had accepted her offer to turn around and go home. Not this place, but our real home, back in Baltimore. She had been aware when they'd planned this trip that it might be stressful, but she had had no idea how exhausting it would be. Jenny was used to carrying the brunt of the labor, after having practically raised her five siblings, so working at the Weekly, raising the kids, and keeping house were the norm, but when she had to coddle Joe, too, sometimes it drove her a little nuts. She had been hoping for a brief vacation, these four days, but given both the internal and external weather, it was beginning to look like this patching up of family bonds would be a whole new career.
She went downstairs and plopped down on the sofa beside Aaron. A mindless comedy was on the tube about a family which had the kinds of problems you could solve in thirty minutes or less; it was relaxing. She fell asleep and then awoke again. The same show seemed to be on; she glanced at Aaron. He looked over, too, and smiled.
She felt warm.
"What time's it?" she asked.
He shrugged. "How should I know?"
"Where's your watch?"
"Upstairs."
"I think it's late."
"It can't be. This show's over by nine thirty."
"Okay," she said, and fell asleep again without wanting to. Her whole body seemed to fall down on feathers. She heard the voices from the television as if in a newly born dream.
When she awoke again, the television was still on. The room was dark but for the blue and white flashes from the TV screen. Jenny rubbed her eyes. Aaron was no longer on the sofa with her. Where he'd been sitting, the crease from his body as if he'd only moments ago gotten up from the cushion. She yawned and stood up. Rain battered the windows; lightning sounded like bombs blasting over the river. She sleepily walked to the kitchen. Poured herself a glass of water and drank it. She looked out at the lit porch, the rain, the flashes of lightning.
Something was moving outside, just beyond the porch light. Something like several men hunched together, forming one large shadow in the rain.
It's the lightning.
She checked the kitchen clock. It was only quarter to ten. Not all that late for Joe to be out with his friend. Again, she looked through the window. The shadow of something passed, fluttering, across the incandescent lightbulb on the porch.
The light went out.
My imagination, she thought. But Jenny was not given to wild imaginings or to seeing things that weren't there. She was sometimes too practical, too commonsense oriented, but not given to seeing specters where there weren't any.
"You need to replace the bulb on the front porch," she would tell Joe in the morning, "It burned out last night in the storm." She would tell that to him, and then it would seem silly that she had ever been scared about some kind of shadow on the porch that had covered the lightbulb.
The lightning flashed. It reflected out on the river and illuminated the night.
And there, on the porch, stood a teenager, she thought, maybe a very young man, his hair white and snaking out from his scalp in a static wind, his naked torso tattooed with swirling designs. He was looking directly at her in the darkness of the kitchen, trying to shout over the crash of thunder.
Jenny Gardner suddenly felt cold, as if her body temperature had dropped several degrees in just a few seconds.
Aaron couldn't sleep through the thunder, as much as he tried, pulling the pillow over his head. His usual solution to this was to go bother Hillary—in some respects he had never gotten over the idea that she was his own private toy, to tease and annoy to his heart's content. He slipped out of bed and padded over to the guest bed.
He sat at the edge of the bed, staring at the shadowy form of his sister in the dark, the occasional flashes of lightning illuminating the room. "Hey, Pipsqueak."
Hillary woke up, annoyed, making her snarfling noises.
"I said hey, Pipsqueak."
"What you want?" she asked in her authoritarian princess voice. "Leave me alone."
He giggled. For a baby, she was so haughty when it came to him. "I can't sleep. You want to play some games?"
She shook her head. "I tired."
"We can play hide and go seek," he said.
Then, a flash of lightning lit up the room, and Aaron thought he saw someone on the other side of the window, a boy just like him, with his eyes wide, his skin blue, his hair matted.
Anna Gardner slept soundly, until the lightning was so bright that it jolted her awake. She sat up, feeling her heart racing a mile a minute, and reached for the pills at her bedside table.
As she reached, she felt a chill—someone had opened the window, rain was pouring in.
Her pills were not there, and as she groped around the table in the dark, someone grabbed her hand.
It was as if she'd stuck her hand into a hornet's nest.