you.”
Dena felt wetness on her cheeks and realized she had lost the fight against tears. “Stop it, Troy,” she shouted. “Can’t you see it’s over. We’ve got to—”
“I said don’t play with me!” Troy’s eyes went wild in the light. His shoulder lurched against Jeremy’s dresser, tipping it over and spilling toy trains and Little Critter books onto the floor. Then he was coming at her, swinging the knife from side to side. Dena threw the emptied pistol at him, saw it bounce off his chest. She tried to dodge around him but he caught her with one arm and threw her back onto Jeremy’s bed. He stabbed at her, missing, and she swung the flashlight at his head only to have it batted from her hand. She watched it flying, saw it hit the wall. The light went dark.
Dena slapped out, fingers curled as she tried to find Troy’s face in the pitch black room. Instead, her hand found the knife blade coming down and she screamed as it went through her palm and drove her arm into the mattress.
Troy straddled her chest, pinning her, screaming with her. “Do you know what he did? Do you know? I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch. I’ll kill you.” And Dena knew that Troy wasn’t talking to her anymore, wasn’t feeling his wife struggling beneath him. He was feeling Morgan Keller raping him again.
Abruptly, the knife was wrenched free of Dena’s hand, wringing another scream from an already raw throat. She couldn’t see the blade lifting, but she could feel it. And she could feel Troy’s legs tense as he readied the knife for another plunge. She bucked the lower half of her body upward, her feet finding precarious purchase on the side of Jeremy’s bed. Troy’s balance was poor and Dena’s desperate lurch threw him off onto his side. She slipped from beneath him and bolted for the door, slamming her shoulder into the frame as she went past. She heard Troy coming after her and knew there would be no reasoning with him now. She could think only of getting away, of getting to Jeremy and protecting him.
The stairs loomed and Dena went down them in a stumbling, sliding lurch, grabbing at the handrail in desperate hope of keeping her balance. Somehow she managed it. Troy didn’t. Dena heard him curse and felt his weight as he pitched forward to strike her in the back. She fell, landing on elbows and carpet-burning her cheek. Troy rolled over her, smashing hard against the door, blocking her exit.
Dena’s thoughts danced away from the door, tripped over the 12-gauge that Morgan Keller had dropped in the hall. For a moment she shoved the thought aside—Troy was still her husband—but then she felt the knife again as Troy spun around onto his stomach and slashed through the dark with the blade. A line of agony scorched across her ankle and she threw herself backwards. Her scooting hand struck the shotgun, sent it sliding further down the hall. She scrambled for it, tears on her face, her mouth filled with a steady keening. Troy’s knife slapped into the linoleum where her foot had been an instant before.
Dena’s hands found Morgan Keller, and lying just beneath him was the long length of the shotgun. She grabbed it and spun around, back to the soft wall of Keller’s body. She heard Troy coming, sounding huge and alien in the darkened hall. She screamed at him to stop, screamed that she had a gun. Yet she could hear what he was saying, like a litany. “Kill you kill you kill you.”
She pulled the trigger into the blackness, felt the slam of recoil and heard the awful chunk-thud of a hit. And then she was just shrieking, just shrieking, feeling the horror like a wind swirling over her. Insanity was a hurricane, full of roaring chimes that rang like hyena laughter. She wanted it, could feel her need for it. How easy it would be to fly away. Only one thought stopped her:
Jeremy.
DEATH TURNED AWAY
Was it midnight yet?
Would it ever be?
The thoughts whispered in his mind as the wind whispers through ruins, and they rattled around in his skull like dried peas in a bowl that had been shaken up. Needing answers to the thoughts, the young man in the bed looked up at the ceiling where the time was reflected in foot high orange numerals from the clock on the dresser. It was 11:29 in the evening. Still early. Too early for the visitor he was expecting at midnight.
To pass the time he glanced out the window. The moon bulked hugely above the horizon, its summer light turned to saffron by the orange curtains his mother had chosen for the room. He hated that color, just as he hated this room, as he hated the bed on which he was lying, and the pajamas in which his mother had dressed him. He thought sometimes he hated his mother but he could not be sure. He was certain, though, that he hated himself, the useless thing that he was. But that would all change, would all be better, if midnight ever came.
He twisted under the bed covers as much as he could, nearly stifling in the night’s heat, and finally succeeded in working the sheets down off of his thin body with pained and fumbling fingers. He looked down at his legs. What he would have given to see them strong again. But they were nearly gone.
A glance spared at his arms showed them pale, and thin, and wasted. Soon, they and the legs would be like dried sticks, and he would lie here and only his eyes would move. He would have cursed the disease that chained him down but his curses had long since dried up into dust that clogged his mouth.
If only it were not so hot, he thought. Even the breeze from the window blew superheated, but at least it stirred the air in the room.
He closed his eyes after a while and let his mind drift, trying to escape the room, the heat, his illness. He pictured himself in younger days, skinny dipping in the chill water of Flanagan’s lake with Robert and Danny. He remembered the frozen ice-cream bars that dripped and ran in the summer heat and got sticky all over your hands. Yet they were so icy at first that they stuck to your tongue, and it hurt your teeth to bite them. He thought, also, of his grandmother’s back porch, always so shadowy and cool, and of the tea she would make for him and Danny whenever they came in tired from playing soldiers.
And, as always when he freed his memories, he thought of Theresa, his mind skittering around her name like a dog that had been beaten too often. He had once sworn never to forgive her for leaving him to suffer the illness alone. He had let the anger and pain build up inside of him and had waited for them to bloom, like black flowers from ashes. That had been long ago. He no longer had the energy to sustain those emotions. He only wished she would come back, and knew she would not.
Footsteps in the hallway snatched him from his thoughts. For a moment he hoped they were Joey’s—fourteen and his only friend—but the sound was too light for his brother’s feet. Most people would not have been able to hear those soft shuffles at all, but he heard them. There was nothing wrong with his ears. They seemed even better now that the rest of him was dying. Thank goodness for small favors.
He listened as the feathery steps strayed closer. Go past, he begged. Go on past.
They stopped just outside his door. The old porcelain knob started to turn and the door opened. He glanced at the time. The numerals changed as he watched—11:32—and his mother peeked into the room.
“Are you all right, Frank honey?” she asked. “Need more covers?”
He shook his head but she didn’t seem to be watching.
“My goodness,” she said, coming closer. “You’ve gotten your sheet off. Here, let me tuck you in.”
“No,” he croaked. But his jaws would scarcely move, and his tongue was dry and swollen in his mouth, and nothing came out but a faint expulsion of air.
His mother leaned over him, fluffed his pillow, and pulled
