There was a grinding sound. It was the Chinese detective coming into the room, the sound of dirt under his shoe making that awful noise against the tile.
"You all right, Doctor?"
"Yes," she said. "I'm almost finished." She went round to the other side. She laid her hand on Aaron's head, and on his neck, and she stood quiet, thinking, listening, feeling.
It had been the car accident, plain and savage. If he had suffered, no image of it hovered near him now. If he had struggled not to die, that too would be unknown forever. Beatrice had seen him try to dodge the car, or so she thought. Mary Jane Mayfair had reported, "He tried to get out of the way. He just couldn't."
Finally she drew back. She had to wash her hands, but where? She went to the sink, turned on the ancient faucet, and let the water flood over her fingers. Then she turned off the faucet and she shoved her hands in the pockets of her cotton coat, and she walked past the cop and back out into the small anteroom before the drawers of unclaimed corpses.
Michael was there, cigarette in hand, collar open, looking utterly wasted by grief and the burden of comfort.
"You want to see him?" she asked. Her throat still hurt, but this was of no importance to her whatsoever. "His face is all right. Don't look at anything else."
"I don't think so," said Michael. "I never was in this position before. If you say he's dead and the car hit him and there's nothing for me to learn, I don't want to see him."
"I understand."
"The smell's making me sick. It made Mona sick."
"There was a time when I was used to it," she said.
He drew close to her, gathering the back of her neck in his large, roughened hand, and then kissing her clumsily, wholly unlike the sweet and apologetic way he had kissed her all during her weeks of silence. He shuddered all over, and she opened her lips and kissed him back, and crushed him with her arms, or at least made an attempt to do so.
"I have to get out of here," he said.
She drew back only a step, and glanced into the other room, at the bloody heap. The Chinese cop had restored the covering sheet, out of respect perhaps, or procedure.
Michael stared at the drawers lining the opposite wall. Bodies inside made the abominable smell. She looked. There was one drawer partly open, perhaps because it couldn't be closed, and she could see the evidence of two bodies inside, the brown head of one facing up, and the molding pink feet of another lying directly on top of the first. There was green mold on the face, too. But the horror was not the mold; it was the two stacked together. The unclaimed dead, as intimate in their own way as lovers.
"I can't ..." said Michael. "I know, come on," she said.
By the time they climbed into the car, Mona had stopped crying. She sat staring out the window, so deep in thought she forbade any talk, any distraction. Now and then she turned and threw a glance at Rowan. Rowan met the glance and felt the strength of it, and the warmth. In three weeks of listening to this child pour out her heart--a lovely load of poetry which often became simply sound to Rowan in her somnambulant state--Rowan had come to love Mona completely.
Heiress, the one who will bear the child that will carry on the legacy. Child with a womb inside her, and the passions of an experienced woman. Child who had held Michael in her arms, who in her exuberance and ignorance had feared not at all for his battered heart, or that he might die at the pinnacle of passion. He hadn't died. He'd climbed out of invalidism and readied himself for the homecoming of his wife! And now the guilt lay on Mona, far too intoxicating, confusing all the mighty doses which she had had to swallow.
No one spoke as the car moved on.
Rowan sat next to Michael, in a little heap against him, resisting the urge to sleep, to sink back, to be lost again in thoughts that flowed with all the steadiness and imperturbability of a river, thoughts like the thoughts that had gently overlaid her for weeks, thoughts through which words and deeds had broken so slowly and so gently that they had hardly reached her at all. Voices speaking to you over the muffling rush of water.
She knew what she meant to do. It was going to be another terrible, terrible blow for Michael.
They found the house alive. Guards surrounded it once again. That was no surprise to any of them. And Rowan required no explanations. No one knew who had hired the man to run down Aaron Lightner.
Celia had come and had taken Bea in hand, letting her "cry it out" in Aaron's regular guest room on the second floor. Ryan Mayfair was in attendance, the man always prepared for court or church in his suit and tie, speaking cautiously of what the family must do now.
They were all looking at Rowan, of course. She had seen these faces at her bedside. She had seen them pass before her during her long hours in the garden.
She felt uncomfortable in the dress that Mona had helped her choose, because she could not remember ever seeing it before. But it didn't matter nearly as much as food. She was ravenously hungry, and they had laid out a full Mayfair-style buffet in the dining room.
Michael filled a plate for her before the others could do it. She sat at the head of the dining table and she ate, and she watched the others moving here and there in little groups. She drank a glass of ice water greedily. They were leaving her alone, out of respect or out of helplessness. What could they say to her? For the most part, they knew very little of what had actually taken place. They would never understand her abduction, as they called it, her captivity and the assaults that had been made upon her. What good, people they were. They genuinely cared, but there was nothing they could do now, except leave her alone.
Mona stood next to her. Mona bent and kissed her cheek, doing this very slowly, so that at any time, Rowan might have stopped her. Rowan didn't. On the contrary, she took Mona's wrist, pulled her close, and kissed her back, loving the soft baby feel of her skin, thinking only in passing how Michael must have enjoyed this skin, to see, to touch, to penetrate.
"I'm going upstairs to sack out," Mona said. "I'll be there if you want me."
"I do want you," she said, but she said it in a low voice so that Michael perhaps wouldn't notice it. Michael was at her right, devouring a plate of food and a can of cold beer.
"Yeah, okay," said Mona. "I'll just be lying down." There was a look of dread in her face, weariness and sadness and dread.
"We need each other now," Rowan said, speaking the words as low as she could. The child's eyes fixed on her, and they merely looked at each other.
Mona nodded, then left, without even a quick farewell to Michael.
The awkwardness of the guilty, Rowan thought.
Someone in the front room laughed suddenly. It seemed that no matter what happened, the Mayfairs always laughed. When she had been dying upstairs, and Michael had been crying by her bed, there had been people in the house laughing. She remembered thinking about it, thinking about both sounds in a detached way, without alarm, without response. Drifting. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.
Michael finished off the roast beef and the rice and gravy. He took down the last of the beer. Someone came quickly to put another can by his plate, and he picked this up and drank half of it immediately.
"This is good for your heart?" she murmured. He didn't respond.
She looked at her plate. She had finished her portion as well. Downright gluttonous.
Rice and gravy. New Orleans food. It occurred to her that she ought to tell him that during all these weeks she had loved it that he had given her food with his own hands. But what was the use of saying something like that to him?
That he loved her was as much a miracle as anything that had happened to her, as anything that had happened in this house to anyone. And it had all happened in this house, she mused, when you got right down to it. She felt rooted here, connected in some way she had never felt anywhere else--not even on the Sweet Christine, brave
ly plowing through the Golden Gate. She felt the strong certainty that this was her home, would never stop being that, and staring at the plate, she remembered that day when Michael and she had walked about the house together, when they'd opened the pantry and found all this old china, this precious china, and the silver.
And yet all of this might perish, might be blown away from her and from everyone else, by a tempest of hot breath, breath from the mouth of hell. What had her new friend, Mona Mayfair, said to her only hours ago? "Rowan, it's not finished."
No, not finished. And Aaron? Had they even called the Motherhouse to let his oldest friends there know what had happened to him, or was he to be buried among new friends and conjugal kindred?
The lamps burned brightly on the mantel.