From Hell to Breakfast Page 12

  Later, when the door finally opens, it’s not how either expected it to happen. “Hello?” says a timid voice on the other side. “Why is this door locked?” She seems to be talking to herself, with the hesitation of a person who thinks she’s alone but isn’t sure.

  “We’re locked in.”

  There’s a pause, a startled one. “Oh. Okay.”

  “Can you let us out?”

  The woman seems afraid to open the door. It’s the middle of the night, after all. “Just a second let me get my husband.” They hear her feet going up the steps. A few minutes later a heavier set of feet slog down and a drowsy man in sweats opens the door. “It happened to you too, huh?”

  The cop walks up the stairs with him, trading hostage accounts. Dracula’s laundry is almost at the end of its second spin so he stays to empty the washer. The woman comes back down with a hamper and seems embarrassed to find him.

  “Sorry. I have a baby. I’m up all hours.”

  “No problem,” says Dracula. The shirt comes out of the wash clean. And smelling of flowers. Harsh and virulent. “I’ll get out of your way,” he says.

  Out in the vestibule the bat is gone. Now he wants to know what is in that room that wasn’t there before. But Dracula will have to wait. He can hear the woman thumping clothes into the washer. As he goes up the stairs the bookcase looms hazardously. Dracula goes out into the night.

  Upstairs in the apartment Lucinda is back in bed. Dracula has a handful of wet clothes to hang. While he is putting them all on the shower rod he thinks of the time he and she met in that other room, by chance. How they stood in there together. How he claimed the door was already open when he came down. Then the cop stood in the doorway glowering. How the next time he went in he found in the corner a bucket of dirty blood. He sipped from it, just to verify. As he stood there he tried to channel a feeling of horror or release, but neither came.

  Now he hangs up the shirt, expunged of its evidence. He had experienced more of both of those feelings just last night—horror and release—in the parking lot with those teenagers. He’s still thinking about that, erratically and wincingly. How all he did was lift one knee to the gut of the kid and he spurted out a funnel of vomit, the splatter of which had gotten on Dracula’s shirt. He hadn’t noticed it right away because a moment before a wet snow had begun to dump from the sky, like a flap of wind had opened a pocket on them, and all these sopping hands were suddenly slapping them soggy. The girl had screamed and hurled something at the same time, which hit the pavement with a clack and whacked against the kid’s head. It was basic self-defense, Dracula thought, rolling the kid out from behind his back tire. The kid had lunged out like an off-balance baby and Dracula simply lifted his knee. The knife wasn’t in the equation at all. Now the kid was gulping air on the pavement right under the truck wheel and Dracula had to heft him out of the way before he could go anywhere, all with the girl screaming at him to stop. This was where he must have dropped it. Then the waitress and a guy in a grubby apron came barging out just as the kid sat up out of a roll and got to his knees.

  “Help! He hit him!” the girl cried. Dracula held his palms up in the air and stepped calmly toward the driver’s door of his truck. The cook reluctantly trotted out, seemingly unsure if he should approach Dracula or help the kid, and then he decided on helping the kid, who was staggering to his feet and veering over to the back of an old white Dodge. The girl scurried after them.

  “Hey—no—stop!” the waitress said to Dracula. “You!”

  The cook tried to steady the kid and they both slumped down onto the trunk, then the cook stood back as the girl leaned forward. Dracula jammed the key in the ignition. A dark gush of fluid spewed over the trunk and the kid spasmed in a deep, convulsive silence. Everybody saw it. Everybody stilled. “Oh my God,” rasped the girl. “What is that? Is that blood?” The ignition ground up the rest of her words. As he barreled out of the lot the waitress took it upon herself to chase after him, pulling off one of her shoes and tossing it right into his grille. It banged and flopped against the metal for several miles and then seemed to tear free. He drove for a while in silence. It seemed like nothing like that had ever happened to him. He kept tearing in gauzy breaths of labored air. He tried to contemplate the significance of that.

  Twenty minutes later he was in the bland illumination of another town and he stopped at an overnight drugstore to collect himself. He was weak-kneed and clayey inside. The kid would end up in a hospital somewhere and he would probably be fine, he told himself. It was mostly his breakfast-for-dinner, or maybe lunch or afternoon snack, that came out. He would convalesce under the scrutiny of anxious adults—his dad who had traded in his outdated fashions—and he would notice his utter lack of virility. Virility would seem like a strange mirage hovering distantly both behind and ahead of where he now was. He would get back to it someday. Dracula thought this because he was not really thinking about the kid. He was looking at the front grille of his truck, where the broken strap was still lodged in the metal. He tugged it out. Sometimes he thought there was some indifferent antagonist making him feel all his ferocity as if it were the sum of all his failure.

  Then he remembered the other item in his shirt pocket and fished it out. What the girl had thrown, hitting her friend in the head, was a can of mace. As if she thought it was a funny joke, she had drawn flowers and hearts all over it and written on the lid Amory’s Ammo. The poor girl had thrown it at him instead of spraying it. It wasn’t her fault. She would have had to mace her friend to mace Dracula. Isn’t that always the way.

  Now in the bathroom hanging his clothes, he feels as if he is being maced, belatedly. His eyes are smarting and his nose is clogging. As if delivering a punch line the bottle comes tumbling out of one of his pockets. It hits the bottom of the tub with a bang. Sucking in a breath he pokes his head out into the hall and peers into the black burrow of the bedroom. Not a stirring from within. The dark is getting thin in a way he can feel. Dracula picks up the mace and sniffs at it. He washed all his clothes in this. No wonder they smell like hazardous fuel. The bottle seems to be expanding under some internal pressure and leaking a tiny noxious thread of gas at him. A sad assault. Dracula goes with it out the door. In the faded hearts and flowers he holds a last unconscious prayer to innocence. Probably her dad bought it for her.

  Dracula looks at the basement door across the courtyard, which is now showing a black pane of glass. As he stands there it occurs to him that the woman who brought her wash in after him will likely have residual toxins in her rinse water. That is the extent of his menace tonight. Maybe the clothes are for the baby.

  The light in the basement window is off. He thinks of the key, stuck there for someone to find. Then he thinks of the knife, lost and irretrievable.

  This is how late those two kids were out, he thinks, looking down at the bottle. This is how young they were, he thinks, seeing its flowers. This is how unguarded they were. The bottle, now, is ready to explode. Dracula throws it hard, up above the building and whirling out over the other side, to a place he can’t see or hear. Then he goes inside to think about dinner.

  The Prop (Part II)

  Lucinda and Rory are standing at the apartment door. She is lingering just behind, having unlocked it and stepped back, feeling besieged as always by the Russian’s big, baleful window. It looms clean and clairvoyant, taunting her like any pane of blackened glass.

  She keeps thinking of that last conversation with Vanessa. “I can’t believe you quit,” Vanessa said. She was wearing her work shirt.

  Lucinda didn’t tell her why she quit. She still didn’t know why she quit.

  “What’s wrong? You look like shit.”

  The rehearsal had not gone well. Her mother had come and gone with the cage that day, flicking her spare key duplicate in Lucinda’s face. Then the Russian had said something terrible. That was when Lucinda had broken down and told Vanessa about the key.

  “You can go in with me if you want.” Lucind
a clutched her throat.

  “Go in where—into this guy’s apartment?”

  “It’s this thing we have.” She tried not to sound as stricken as she felt. “It’s…” Now she was hardly holding the acid out of her voice. “It’s complicated.”

  “Ooh,” said Vanessa, “kinky.”

  Lucinda winced. She tried not to.

  “I don’t understand,” said Vanessa. “Why do you want to even go in there?”

  They were standing in front of the theater. They had run into each other by accident.

  “Oh my God,” Vanessa said. She flinched her hand up in front of her face. She slanted her eyes drastically down. And that was the end of that conversation. “That’s the guy,” Vanessa said.

  Lucinda looked. “Who? What guy?”

  All she saw was Rory, smacking his way out the theater door, the sleeves of his thermal bunched up over his forearms.

  Vanessa had lowered her chin and turned away, even though Rory was well on his way in the other direction. “Remember that double date? The one I said I fucked and chucked?”

  “Wait,” said Lucinda. “The fireman?” That was Rory? Rory was a fireman? Vanessa slept with Rory? Somehow that seemed impossible. All of it.

  Vanessa sucked in air. She looked at Lucinda with what seemed a menacing intensity. “I’m not a good person. You shouldn’t be friends with me,” she said.

  Lucinda was thinking of how she herself had not been a good friend. How she had set Vanessa up for some undoing or indecency from Richard and then never looked back. She just kept taking hundred-dollar bills.

  Now she thinks of Rory being a victim of Vanessa’s wiles as she looks at the mass of his back. “He stalked me for like a week after that,” Vanessa had said. “It was a disaster.”

  Rory has muscled his way through the door, and she finds herself a flood of nerves. He’s breathing heavy after hurtling the coffin up the stairs over his head, tottering into rails and risers. He hasn’t said anything to her since rehearsal. Lucinda wonders if he knows about the dinner. Is he just going to expect her to get back in the truck with him after they replace the coffin? She wishes he would say something.

  “Are you getting nervous?” she asks in the doorway.

  Rory gives her a gloomy glance. The coffin is seesawing lightly on his shoulder as he pilots the narrow passage. “What do you mean?”

  “You know—about the performance.” She feels oddly embarrassed trying to make conversation with him. Usually he’s the one talking nonstop at her.

  “No,” says Rory, stalking ahead of her. He humps straight to the closet and plunks the coffin down.

  Lucinda sits back on the bed, letting him make adjustments. Now he has the coffin wedged against the side wall between the clothes rack and the door, where it has to go. Otherwise the lid won’t swing open.

  “Sometimes Vlad comes out of there sweating bullets,” Lucinda says, nibbling her nails, not sure why she’s divulging this. She guesses she’s trying to be nice. “He gets so hot.”

  Rory shakes his head brutely. “Bugs should go find himself a different hidey-hole.” Under his breath he says, “Preferably in hell,” which makes Lucinda feel less friendly. She doesn’t mention to Rory that hell would be even hotter, or that perhaps it is where Dracula has been, because she doesn’t think Rory is really paying attention.

  Rory straightens. His hands hang at his sides. No satisfied hand-swiping tonight, she sees. Lucinda is having mixed feelings. She finds herself sloughing off the bed, wondering what words she will say next.

  “You’re coming, then?” he asks. It’s not exactly a question and not quite an accusation. So he does know. His whole posture is buckled over in a petulant sulk. She’s never seen Rory like this. Lucinda still can’t be sure if it’s because of the dinner invitation or because of what the teacher said to him.

  Strangely, his tone has given her no room for last-minute refusal and she follows him meekly out the door, wondering what his problem is, reminded suddenly of what it felt like to be a child walking a step behind her testy and irascible father. Hadn’t he done things like this? She can’t really remember. Lucinda almost wants to snicker conspiratorially with somebody but she doesn’t have anybody here.

  In the truck, Rory puts on The Ronettes. It’s one of the bands that gets a musical number in the play.

  “Have you been listening to the bands from the play?” says Lucinda. It occurs to her that this is rather academic of him. It’s the sort of thing their teacher is always encouraging them to do.

  Rory jams the truck into reverse and bucks them out of the lot. She doesn’t think he’s going to answer. Then he says, “I like oldies,” and turns the volume knob up.

  The drive is full of the sweet buttery swaths of girl yearning.

  Three songs go by and then they come to a stop outside a row of buildings, each one a slightly different variation of brick. “This is my house,” he says. He gives her a look and reaches across her to unlock the door. Whatever its intentions, it’s an awkward mauling of the space between them. Now he seems embarrassed. “Get out so I can park the car.”

  Rory has pulled in at a bus stop, and after she’s on the curb he swerves out and drives around the nearest corner. She hunches in her parka with a momentary feeling of abandonment, but it’s almost better than being in the truck with him. As she waits she turns and faces the buildings, peering from inside her hood and listening to a bus groan slowly up the street behind her. When the sound has gradually crested and faded away again, she turns to look and sees Rory hurrying up the sidewalk. He lumbers past and walks down steps to the garden-level gate at one of the buildings. It’s the one right behind the bus stop, with soot wafting up the brick walls. A ceramic glossy yellow face sticks its tongue out at them from the door. It’s grimed with diesel exhaust.

  “My sister made that,” he says.

  Lucinda follows him into a low room with a dark, fishy smell. She feels a queasy stirring of dread. Nobody is here. Where is Lauren? The room is lined with tall bookcases topped with dusty vines in white ceramic pots, and a tweed couch faces into the room away from the door. The carpet is a dark amber hue, and there is no noise inside but the subtle churnings of plumbing inside the walls. Rory escorts her past the couch into a little dining alcove and flips on a back porch light at the same time the water cuts off with a clunk. Maybe that’s Lauren. Maybe she’s taking a shower. Lucinda looks out at a small patio cluttered with pieces of tarp-covered furniture. Various wood and gold wind chimes gong and twinkle in an icy stirring of air, and beyond this a weedy patch appears webbed with clotheslines and their shadows.

  Rory goes back to the couch and drops down. Lucinda looks at the wall behind him. It is covered in a random and arresting collection of oil paintings, one of which is a portrait of a horsy-looking woman with a large hooked nose and small eyes set like black pebbles into a deep collar of bone. It appears somehow meant to look both hideous and powerful, and in some unparticular way it reminds Lucinda of her own mother.

  Where is Lauren’s mother? Where is dinner?

  “Lauren’s in the shower,” Rory says, just as Lauren herself comes out, looking pert as a puppy inside an old white bathrobe.

  “Mom’s not here,” she says to Rory, without greeting Lucinda.

  “I know she’s not here. I have to go pick her up. Can I go now?” he says, giving her a leering, obsequious grin.

  She rolls her eyes at him.

  Lucinda is fascinated. This is how they act with each other? She has never really noticed them in class.

  Rory stands up. For some reason the low ceilings make him seem gigantic, like some bulging Nordic deity poised for his music cue. The satin pop celebrity shirt adds to the effect.

  Lauren sashays back into the narrow hallway off the living area and Lucinda follows, uncertainly. Framed photos blot the walls with glints and gleams but it’s too dark to see the people inside them. Lucinda can hear the sound of Rory advancing behind her.

  �
��Is she one of your girlfriends?” This question is bellowed out over her shoulder, and Lucinda turns to find him clogging up the slim hallway, like a blockage in a pipe. She stares for a moment in surprise. What’s he talking about? His shoulders are massive and his bulky dump-truck chest tapers down to a pair of bony legs that could belong to a bird or a girl.

  Lucinda looks back at Lauren, who merely opens the last door in the hallway and disappears through it.

  She turns back to Rory. “Rory,” she says, “what are you talking about?”

  “What do you think?” His voice is menacing and uncertain. For a moment they watch each other and he shakes his head, then unblocks the hall and disappears.

  At the end of the hall Lucinda stands in the doorway Lauren opened. Inside is a bedroom with pastel blue walls and child’s bric-a-brac, and Lauren sits on an iron bed in her robe looking blindly down at a bottle of nail polish. “You want to paint your nails?” Her voice is touchy and loud. She claps the bottle down on the dresser. “I’m going to get dressed.” She gives Lucinda a stony look. “Don’t worry or anything. I’m not going to make out with you. I’ll dress in the bathroom.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Lucinda. Is Lauren a lesbian? Why would that matter? Why is everybody acting like this?

  Lauren sighs. “My brother’s not trying to be a dick. He’s just mad at me.”

  “Okay,” says Lucinda.

  “He’s a good person.”

  “Okay.”

  “He likes you. He—” Lauren shakes her head.

  Lucinda does not know how to take this. He what?

  Lauren stands up to riffle clothes in a duffel bag, pulling out undergarments and that thin, floppy brown tunic again. “He works hard,” she says, walking to the door. Suddenly Lucinda has a thought. Is Lauren doing with her what she had a mind to do with Lauren? Having her over to play matchmaker, to prod her brother into action? “He’s not a loser. That’s not why he lives at home. He works odd hours.”