House Next Door Page 17

  Marguerite Condon said, “Nita’s doing just fine too, aren’t you, Nita? We’re going Monday and get her hair done, and then we’re going some place nice and expensive for lunch. It’s time she got out of the house for a little while.”

  She squeezed Anita’s arm fondly, and Anita smiled again, peacefully and agreeably. But she said no more, and I didn’t either. It was as if she were suspended in air and time, unmarked by anything that had happened to her before, unsurprised by the present she found herself in. It seemed the unsullied peace of the very young, not that of a mature woman who had wrenched and wrestled peace for herself out of an overpowering world. I knew too it was a peace born of drugs. She seemed caught in an aspic of drug-quietness. And it lasted four more days.

  On a Tuesday in the third blistering week of July I was on my hands and knees in the upstairs bedroom that would become my office snaking a steel measuring tape along the wall. I was at home because the whole office had worked through the weekend and until near midnight the night before on a crash campaign for a new urban complex that had just netted and boated its first major tenant, a multimillion-dollar Eastern cosmetics firm, and wished to tell the breath-holding world about it as soon as possible. I had directed the team that put the campaign together, and gave my tired flock the next day off. I was thinking, at the moment when Anita Sheehan came stumbling and pounding onto the patio, how lovely and peaceful it was going to be, working in my new office in the treetops, mapping out my proposals and programs judiciously and at my own leisure. Razz slept in a square of sunlight under one of the dormers, and Foster lay on his side at the other end of the tape, giving it a desultory, heavy-footed swat when I moved it and it whipped past him. When Anita’s voice tore into the afternoon, both cats started up violently, and fluidly reassembled themselves into the ancient, classic crouch of cats in danger, ears skinned back to skulls, tails swelling. I stayed where I was for a moment, my nails digging into the carpet, my heart stopping for a sickening interval and then jolting on crazily. And then I scrambled to my feet and half ran, half fell down the stairs and through the kitchen to the patio door.

  She stood against the door, head hanging down, breath whistling in her throat, still knocking, knocking. I fumbled at the lock and threw open the door. She fell into my arms, crying and laughing, laughing with a tear-strangled, bubbling sound that I still hear when I cannot sleep at night. A drowning laugh. We stumbled together backward into the kitchen, and I held her away from me so I could see her face. It was radiant, blurred with a wild and almost mystic joy.

  “He’s alive!” she cried, her head thrown back, tears flooding from beneath her closed lids. “He’s alive! Toby is alive, he’s alive, he’s going to come home, he’s alive! He’s all right!”

  “Anita—Anita. What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that my son is alive! I’m saying that it was somebody else we buried; it was all an awful, awful horrible mistake! He’s alive! Oh, my dearest God in heaven, my son is coming home!”

  She collapsed into my arms again, sobbing terribly and laughing. Mindlessly I pulled her into the den and dropped her onto the sofa. How many women have I done this for now, I remember thinking mildly in the middle of the whirling nothing-numbness that fogged my mind and stopped my speech and dragged at my limbs. What must I do for this one? What is this she is telling me?

  The kitchen door slammed again and Marguerite Condon was in the room, struggling for breath, her face stark and old with terror. We looked at each other.

  “Get on the phone and call her doctor,” she gasped. “Quick. And call Buck.”

  She went to the woman on the sofa and sat down beside her and put her arms around her. She held her close.

  “Baby, baby, baby,” she crooned, tears starting in her own eyes. “Honey, baby, please, please try and get hold of yourself. You imagined it, darling, you imagined it—don’t do this to yourself. Don’t start thinking he’s coming back. Sweetheart, Toby died, Toby is dead. He’s dead. We buried him, you remember—Nita, you’re going to destroy yourself with this.”

  Anita Sheehan shook her head against her cousin’s shoulder, no, no. She struggled to free herself from the older woman’s arms. She got her head free and looked at me, frantic with the effort to talk through the tears and laughter. I stood rooted with the sheer hideousness of the moment, the pain of her joy. She is quite mad, I thought, mildly and clearly again. Finally and forever mad, now.

  “Colquitt, I talked to him! I talked to him on the telephone! Not five minutes ago! It rang, and I picked it up, and it made that sound, you know, like when it’s coming from far away—that same sound it’s been making. That’s what it’s been all along, only he hasn’t been able to get through until now—and of course, it was coming from far away, because it’s overseas, you see. And I said, ‘Hello?’ and Toby said, ‘Ma?’ He always calls me Ma, and he said, ‘Ma, I need you, Ma, I want to come home—’ And then we got cut off, there wasn’t any more, but, oh, don’t you see? I talked to him, it was Toby, and if I talked to him, then of course he’s all right, and it’s all been a horrible mistake. He’s been missing in action, of course, a prisoner somewhere, and he’s escaped, and if he’s somewhere there’s a phone, then we can find him! I’ve got the operator tracing the call. We’ll find out where he is and go and get him. Buck will know what to do.”

  “Make those calls!” Marguerite hissed at me, and I fled into the kitchen and fumbled at the telephone. Buck Sheehan’s number at work had been written on the pad that hung beside the wall phone ever since the night of the television movie incident. It was written in Virginia Guthrie’s house too, and in Claire Swanson’s. I dialed, blank with fright. A girl’s voice told me that Mr. Sheehan was in a meeting but would call me back when he got out.

  “Get him,” I said in a thin, silly voice, and in a moment he answered.

  “Buck? It’s Colquitt Kennedy. Buck, you’d better come home. Come to my house. There’s been…something else with Anita. Can you call her doctor and get him here? Or I will if you’ll give me his number—”

  “I’ll call him,” he said. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  He did not ask me what was wrong.

  I have never been able to fully reconstruct the next half hour. I simply do not remember much of it. There are flashes—Marguerite with her head drooping over the dark head of her cousin as Anita talked and laughed and wept and talked again. Me in a dreamlike sprint next door, up the stairs of Anita’s house to her bathroom to snatch the vial of blue tablets from the medicine chest, where Marguerite said they would be, and pounding back down the stairs. This bathroom looks like a sea cave, I remember thinking dreamily. Like Merlin’s crystal cave. It celebrates water. Clever Kim.

  I have a clear and endless moment caught in my mind of standing over the two women on the sofa while the older, whimpering in anguish and concentration, tried to force the younger to swallow the pill. She must have done it, though Anita kept pushing the glass away, showering water over both of them, saying over and over in that high keen of joy, “No, I have to be clear for when the operator calls back. No, we have to go back to my house now. She said she’d call me back. No. Maggie, no.”

  But the pill had obviously found its mark, because when Buck came running into the den and my mind clicked into gear again, Anita was huddled in her cousin’s arms, sobbing peacefully and quietly, hiccuping a little like a tired child, her face misty with joy. Marguerite Condon held her and cried silently.

  The doctor was with Buck. They must have met in our driveway. I saw the two cars there a little later, angled crazily, doors still open. He was a short, wiry, sandy-haired man—a very young man, I thought dimly, to wade into battle against this enormity. He went straight to Anita Sheehan, looked at her for a moment, and then said to Buck, “Let’s get her upstairs.” To me he said, “May we?,” and I nodded wordlessly. They raised her from the sofa, and I could hear her on the stairs, supported between them, beginning her terrible catechism about the phon
e call, about her son’s voice. They made soothing sounds back, but I could not make out the words. A door closed, and there were no more sounds. I looked at Marguerite Condon.

  “Can you tell me about it?” I said. “Would you like a cup of coffee or something?”

  “No. No, thank you. No, I can’t tell you anything, except that I heard the telephone ring, and before I could get to it I heard her make this shrill, awful noise, and I ran upstairs and she was sitting beside the phone staring up at me, and then she told me that she had just talked to Toby and he was alive. I just—I couldn’t do anything for a minute, and then she picked up the phone and very coolly dialed the operator and asked her if she could trace the overseas call that had just come in to that number. And then she put the phone down and stared at me for a minute—her face was just transformed, just shining with this awful intensity—and before I could even move she was out of the room and down the stairs and on her way over here. Apparently she is convinced that she has talked to Toby and that he is alive. I don’t know what will happen to her now.”

  “Mrs. Condon,” I said thickly and carefully. “Marguerite. There isn’t any possibility at all—I mean, you don’t think she possibly could have—”

  “Oh, my God, no, of course not. Of course not! Toby is dead. Toby is in a grave in Morristown, New Jersey. Don’t you think we’d know if there had been any…mistake? The army checks, they had—dental charts. They—he has been dead for three years now. He is dead, and Anita is out of her mind.”

  “But there was a phone call?”

  “Oh, yes, there was a phone call. But it could have been anybody, Mrs. Kennedy. It could have been the—the—man calling to say the power mower is ready to be picked up. God forgive me, I never thought it was this bad. Not even after all that time she didn’t talk, I never thought it was like this. She really did seem to be getting better, very slowly, but better.”

  “Buck will have to check that telephone call,” I said. “I don’t know how you go about it, but surely somewhere there’s a record of calls, somewhere in some office. Because, don’t you see, if there was a call—a long-distance call—if somebody was playing some kind of ghastly joke or something, that person must be found and punished. This is…not to be borne.”

  “They won’t find anything. There was no joke; who would do a thing like that to Anita? Anita never hurt anybody in her life. There wasn’t anything except some perfectly normal local telephone call, and somewhere some perfectly normal, nice local person is sitting and wondering if Anita Sheehan is crazy. And she is. She is!”

  She began to cry again, the ugly, heartbreaking sobs of someone unused to crying, and I went and sat beside her on the sofa and put my arms around her. After a while she was quiet, and we did not speak. There did not seem to be anything else to say.

  They brought Anita Sheehan back down my stairs then, Buck and the doctor. She must have had an injection of some sort, because she was nearly unconscious, and they were supporting her between them, her feet just brushing the floor.

  “We’re going to take her to the hospital now, Colquitt,” Buck said. “Pacewood. I don’t think it’s far from here. Would you and Marguerite pack some things for her and bring them?”

  His face was still and dead. Just that. Lifeless, like a mask.

  “Bucky, do you have to? Isn’t there any way I could take care of her at home? Couldn’t she stay in her own house?” Marguerite Condon’s face was corrugated with agony.

  “No!” I almost shouted, the words coming from somewhere apart from my mind. “She cannot stay in that house!” I stopped, aghast.

  “It’s out of the question,” the young doctor said briefly. “She’s got to be hospitalized. Later we’ll see. Let’s go, Mr. Sheehan. I didn’t want to give her much of that stuff until we’ve examined her. I don’t know how long she’ll stay calm.”

  Buck gave me a look with something stirring behind it, a brief look that passed over his dead face like wind over water and was gone. They took Anita out of the kitchen, and I heard a car door slam, and then another, and one of the cars drove away. Marguerite Condon wiped her eyes on the tissue I’d given her, and we went across the driveway to pack some things for Anita. Buck’s car still stood in our driveway, its door ajar, the radio purring out a little silver Mozart quartet. I reached in and turned off the radio and closed the door. It was very still and hot and seemed to be no time at all.

  16

  THE FINAL DESTRUCTION of Anita Sheehan was in motion then, and so the next three weeks were, for all of us, borrowed time. But we did not know that, and with the frail, mindless buoyancy of the human animal, we burrowed gratefully back into our own lives and went about our own summer-slowed daily rituals. Marguerite Condon went back to Philadelphia. Walter and I had a party on the patio for Walter’s office staff. The Swansons left for a month on Sea Island, and the Jenningses and their brood departed, Okie-like, for an educational pilgrimage to Washington, Appomattox and Valley Forge. It is an exquisite form of torture that I knew Semmes and the Jennings children hated, but Eloise is adamant about Our Nation’s Heritage, and so they do it every year.

  “She doesn’t really give a shit about those eerie little gnomes absorbing heritage and tradition,” Walter said. “What she’s doing is getting this year’s Christmas card sewed up. Just wait, it’ll be all four million of ’em standing in front of Abraham Lincoln picking their noses.”

  We saw little of Buck Sheehan during the time Anita was hospitalized. He left early each morning to go by the hospital, I knew, and went straight there from his office in the afternoons. Anita was allowed no visitors except Buck, so no one had seen her, and when we called him, he said only, “She’s coming along all right, I guess. She’s on pretty powerful medication, and she sleeps a lot, and she’s in therapy a couple of hours a day. Thanks for calling. When there’s any real change I’ll let you know.”

  He obviously did not want to talk, so we did not press it. I thought he must be spending a lot of time with Charles and Virginia Guthrie after he got home from the hospital, because the light from their den that seeps through the woods between our three houses shone later into many evenings than it usually does. I was glad. If anyone could help Buck now it would be Virginia.

  We saw Charles and Virginia at the club one Sunday evening, and we all sat together on the terrace drinking Pimm’s Cups and watching brown children churning in the pool and shrieking like starlings from the diving board. I asked about Anita and Buck.

  “She’s so heavily medicated that it’s really hard to tell how she’s doing,” Virginia said. “The doctor thinks the best way to deal with this delusional thing is just to erase it for a while, let her rest. When she’s stronger they’ll start the serious digging and reduce the medication. She’s going to have to be in intense therapy for a long time. She never really had any of that the other time, and probably should have. But it’s possible that most of it can be done on an outpatient basis. The doctor thinks she may be able to come home in a week or two.”

  I shook my head, no, involuntarily, and Walter asked quickly, “What’s the long-range prognosis?”

  “Nobody can say, really. One good thing is that her condition is acute, a concrete reaction to a specific event or a series of them. It’s not chronic. She’s only been this way after very bad traumas, not continuously. Buck says this doctor thinks those other ‘recoveries’ were too quick, too pat. He thinks there was almost bound to be trouble of this kind.”

  Walter shot a “See there?” look at me, but I said only, “How is Buck?”

  “Well, tired to death of course. Discouraged and let down. Too quiet and too wound up, too tight under the quiet. The other times there was a kind of…hope working there, but I don’t see that in him now. I think he feels horribly guilty that he couldn’t prevent all this, but of course that’s foolish, and I’ve told him so. If he could just let some of it out—but he won’t. He’s strong, though. If she can just begin to show a little improvement, a little respon
se, I think he’ll be all right. He hasn’t said, but I know he’s terrified she’s going to slip back into that horrible catatonia, and never come out of it.”

  “Can that be prevented, do they think?”

  “They think so, with a lot of care,” Virginia said, “but there’s just no telling what could trigger her.”

  The words gave me a dreadful, inexplicable wrench, and I said to Walter, “Let’s go home. I’m uncomfortable in this wet suit.”

  Anita came home two weeks later with the practical nurse the doctor had found for her, and the house next door was quiet. Buck called to say that except for the daily visits for therapy at the hospital, she was not to see anyone, and he hoped we’d understand if they turned into recluses for a while. She was familiar with the nurse, he said, and it was she who drove Anita to the hospital every day. Aside from those visits, she slept most of the time.

  “I know you’re concerned, Colquitt,” he said. “I can’t ever thank any of you enough. When she’s better I’ll let you know, and maybe you can run over for a minute. We’ve been trouble enough for all of you. The rest will do you as much good as it will her.”

  So I saw virtually nothing of Buck and Anita Sheehan. Until the swimming August afternoon that smashed Buck and sent Anita spinning into her final silence, and wrenched the first major block from under our lives—Walter’s and mine, Charles and Virginia’s.

  I stopped at the mailbox, as I always did, when I drove in from work that day. There was the usual welter of bills and circulars advertising lawn and tree services, and three or four letters, and a small, brown-wrapped package. My car’s air conditioner was lackadaisical and ineffective in the swaddling heat, and I had a bag of groceries in the trunk, the frozen food going mushy, and so I did not look at the mail. I thrust it into the grocery bag when I opened the trunk, and took the bag into the kitchen, and put the food into the freezer. I went upstairs and got into shorts and a loose tee shirt, and tied my hair off my neck with a strand of yarn. I went downstairs and turned the air conditioner down to 65 and got myself a glass of Tab, and took the mail into the den to sort it. Razz lifted his head from the cool fireplace tiles and gave me his silent meow, and yawned, and went back to sleep. Foster switched his tail from atop the television set, but did not struggle up out of his twitching cat dreams.