Читать книгу The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 21

When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.

At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.

After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”

That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.

“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”

“Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”

I looked out at the street and then at the sofa, to which I pointed. “Can I sleep there?”

“The bed would be more comfortable.”

“Well, sleeping with your parents, a parent, whatever, it’s for scared little kids, it’s little-kid stuff.”

“When did it become little-kid stuff?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. A while ago, weeks ago maybe. I mean, I’m nine.”

Sometimes it seemed that she could look right into my head and read my thoughts, as if my forehead were glass and my brain a neatly printed scroll. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetie?”

She never lied to me, but I didn’t always measure up to her when it came to truth-telling, although this wasn’t lying, not really. I intended just to withhold the truth from her for a few hours, until Mrs. Lorenzo gathered the courage to go downstairs to her apartment in the morning.

“See, the sofa is … cool. Not kid stuff.” I sounded so lame, and I could feel the blush burning in my cheeks, but one of the benefits of dark skin is that a blush can’t give you away even to your perhaps psychically gifted mother. “The sofa is like an adventure. You know? The sofa is righteous.”

“All right, Mr. Jonah Kirk. You may sleep on the sofa, and I’ll lie awake all night worrying about how soon you’ll want to drive a car and date grown women and go away to war.”

I hugged her. “I’m never going away anywhere.”

“You go strip your bed and put on clean sheets for Donata. I’ve got to dash downstairs and get her pajamas and some other things she needs. She just falls to pieces at the thought of going back there even if I’m with her.”

Here at the front of the building, they hadn’t heard the ruckus in the alleyway, Tilton kicking the Dumpster and cursing.

“You shouldn’t go there alone.” When she gave me an odd look, I said, “I mean, not this late.”

“Late? It’s twenty past nine and it’s just downstairs. If this was a work night, sweetie, I’d be coming home alone hours later, just me with a pretend gun in my purse.”

“Well, but Mr. Lorenzo died down there.”

Although we were speaking softly, she glanced toward the kitchen and lowered her voice further. “He didn’t die of disease or anything, Jonah. And in this family, we believe there’s only one ghost this side of Heaven, and it’s the holy one.”

Having committed myself to withholding the news of my father’s return until Mrs. Lorenzo was able to go home, I felt that the manly thing would be to stay the course and not complicate the situation by dumping my fears onto my mom when she still had to help Mrs. Lorenzo get through the shock of being widowed. It made sense at the time. A great many things make sense when you’re nine years old that appear senseless years later. As justification, I can only say that during the eventful summer of 1966, I became concerned for the first time about behaving in a manly fashion, no doubt out of fear that if I didn’t discipline myself, I might wind up like my father, a perpetual adolescent.

“Now go change those sheets,” Mom said, “and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She left the front door ajar, and I ran to it and listened to her going down the stairs. When I heard her cross the first landing, I eased the door shut and, just in case Tilton was out there, locked it to prevent him from coming in behind my back. I hurried into my bedroom and tore the sheets off the bed and carried them to the hall closet where the laundry basket was kept and grabbed the spare set of sheets and raced back to my bedroom and made the bed. I returned to the front door and stood on my toes and barely managed to look through the fish-eye lens—nobody out there—and opened the door and stood on the threshold and waited for my mom.

She seemed to be taking forever. I didn’t believe there was a ghost in the Lorenzo apartment. And they had taken away the body, so there couldn’t be a zombie like in the voodoo-in-the-city TV movie that I’d had to turn off. But Mrs. Lorenzo, confused and hurting, might have left her door unlocked, and maybe my father had gone in there for God knows what reason, and then my mother had walked in on him. The rest would be total horror movie.

Maybe the manly thing would be to grab a butcher knife from the kitchen and go down to the second floor to check on my mother, but I couldn’t imagine what I’d say to Mrs. Lorenzo, who was in the kitchen crying again, when I burst in there and snatched the butcher knife out of the drawer. She might think I’d gone mad and meant to kill her, and that would be one shock too many, and she’d have a stroke, and then they’d haul me off to prison or the nuthatch or wherever they took crazed and dangerous boys.

I heard footsteps ascending. They sounded like the footsteps of one person, and they didn’t seem to be those of someone with a gun to her head or a knife to her throat. I stepped inside, eased the door almost shut, as my mother had left it, and hurried to the window.

When Mom came through the door, she had a little travel case in which she had packed Mrs. Lorenzo’s things. She closed the door and locked both deadbolts. She said, “You better put on your peejays and brush your teeth, honey. It’s getting late.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You’ll need a blanket for the sofa.”

“It’s warm enough.”

“To protect the upholstery.”

“Oh, yeah. Got it.”

Minutes later, I was lying on a blanket, on the sofa, in my pajamas, with one of the pillows from my mother’s bed. The front windows remained open because we didn’t have air-conditioning, and traffic noise rose from the street. I could hear my mom and Mrs. Lorenzo talking in the kitchen, but I couldn’t catch enough words to make sense of what they were saying. They were taking a long time, longer than I expected, and I grew anxious about not being able to keep a watch on the street. Later, I would learn that Mom gave Mrs. Lorenzo a few Benadryl and then insisted that they each have a large glass of red wine, which I guess seemed just the right thing to an Italian lady like the widow. When they finally left the kitchen, I pretended to be sleeping, and I pretended all the time that they used the bathroom and dressed for bed. When my mother came to the sofa and whispered good-night and kissed me on the cheek, I lay there with my mouth open, breathing through it, making a soft snoring sound. Before she turned away and switched off the lights and went to her bedroom, she said, “My angel,” which made me feel lowly and deceitful and the very spawn of Tilton Kirk, even though I knew that my motives were good and my heart sincere.

Lying there in the dark, with the glow of the city invoking ghostly shapes from the familiar objects in the living room, I waited until I thought Mom and the widow might be asleep before I got off the couch and felt my way to one of the windows. The flow of traffic had diminished, and there were fewer pedestrians, as well. I didn’t see my father, but the longer I knelt at the window, with my arms folded on the sill, the more it seemed to me that of the people who walked past or drove by, every one of them appeared suspicious. More than suspicious. There had been another old movie I’d watched about two-thirds of before turning it off. Instead of zombies, the bad guys had been seed-pod people from another world, and they had duplicated real people and had taken their place; you couldn’t tell them from the people they imitated except that they had no real emotions.