Читать книгу Only the Women Are Burning - Nancy Burke - Страница 13

“There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.” - Vincent Van Gogh

Chapter 5

Saturday arrived with ragged edges of tension. I’d had my lions in the house dream again. The dream had visited often since childhood. In the dream I was at my childhood home in the midst of a party surrounded by extended family. But sliding quietly among the guests were lions, pawing up the stairs, lying on the floor in the living room. In my heart was panic. Nobody else seemed disturbed by their presence. I was shushed when I tried to bring anyone’s attention to the danger. I urgently opened bedroom doors to lure them in and closed them off from the rest of the family. There were too many. Outside they roamed the neighborhood too. I knew they could pounce at any moment. The fear awakened me and relief flooded me with wakefulness. Returning to sleep took a long time.

I left the house and ran around the park, my shins smarting from the impact. I stopped in my tracks when a deer, silent and still, came into view in a brief stand of trees. A lone doe. Eyes on me. How unexpected. How beautiful and peaceful. Its grace was contagious. At my slowed approach, it headed up the gentle slope to a driveway on the road above the park and disappeared. I slowed to a walk for a final loop, returned to the house, and noted the twins in front of the television for the ritual of Saturday morning cartoons. Lila slept on weekend mornings, often until ten, and I did not see Pete so assumed he was showering, which is what I did in the hallway bathroom before I returned to our bedroom to dress. I called through the door and announced that I would be gone for a few hours, would he see to the girls’ breakfast and clean up the kitchen. He asked, “What do they eat?” and that simple question was salt on a wound. I didn’t tell him cereal and bananas and orange juice and a vitamin or that they sometimes enjoyed a warm cup of tea with milk and only a tiny bit of sugar. I simply said, “Ask them.”

“Where will you be?” he asked.

“Not here,” I said.

There were always homeless people at the library, a woman with a very large backpack, a man, long beard on a narrow face with a bright smile of white teeth with one gap where he stuck the tip of his tongue, as though it could fill up that empty space. He brought to mind my dreams of losing teeth I consistently had after Banhi died. In those dreams, it was always a healthy molar, white, clean but loose, and sliding out where my fingers were trying to keep it in place. Out it fell, leaving a gaping hole filling rapidly with purple blood.

He sat, gap-toothed, greeting the few early library patrons. She, the woman, was not at her usual place on the cinderblock wall. I saw her backpack, a pair of shoes, black, low, laced-up boots, piled there against the wall where she always sat. They were sometimes inside the library, at tables, with magazines or newspapers flat out in front of them, side by side, like a couple. It was odd to see him and not her. I’d never spoken to her, or him, but I did now.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Gone, gone, gone,” he said.

“Is she nearby?”

“Gone, gone, gone.” His hands were up above his shoulders, straight out in front. His face turned toward the sky. “Gone.”

Ten feet away, I could smell the stench of him as he moved his arms. I stepped back. His face contorted and he shouted, spit forming at the corners of his mouth. “Those shalt be for fuel to the fire; thou shalt be no longer remembered; for I the Lord have spoken it.”

He fell to his knees and bowed his hands to the ground. I left him there, repeating his words, lifting his arms and eyes to the sky, and, with other library patrons, I stepped through the now unlocked door, full of self-reproach for having stirred this in him. His words rattled me. Her absence rattled me. She was always here when he was. Now only her possessions remained, like Ann’s yesterday. His outburst, was it his way of saying he’d seen something? Had she been a victim also? Pressing him did not seem like a good idea.

I wanted a book. I wanted to lose myself in a story on a bench in the park, but we were not supposed to be outside. I selected a Margaret Atwood novel and checked it out at the desk.

It was peaceful at the library. It brought me back to my student days, all the hours of study, surrounded by shelves. I didn’t stay. In a moment I was passing through the plaza again, the woman’s things still not claimed by her. In a flash of unexplained benevolence, I returned to the circulation desk and asked if anyone had seen her.

“No. We actually let the police know she is missing. We are worried. If you do happen to see her, please call Sargent Finn at the Hillston station.”

“How long?” I asked.

“How long what?”

“Since she’s been seen,” I said.

The circulation librarian turned to her colleague at the reserve desk. “When did you last see Helene?” she asked.

“Day before yesterday,” said the brunette with very pink eyeglasses framing her brown eyes.

They exchanged a look that contained a sudden dawning. “Oh, God,” said the first one.

“It fits the pattern,” I said.

“Wouldn’t the police put this together?” asked the reference librarian.

The first one left the desk and lifted the phone. She explained, “He can’t really speak to us. Or he won’t. She does all their talking. They might link her disappearance to the women who died in the fires. It may be nothing, right? But well, let’s leave it to them to find out.”

I decided I’d leave it to them. Heffly and his men or this Sergeant Flynn could put this together without me. I wanted to get away from this and from my own terror and my anxiety for the morning. If I didn’t, I might burst into flame myself. On my way to my car I walked near her things, searching for gray ashes like I’d seen under Ann Neelam’s clothes. Her gap-toothed friend intercepted me, waved in my face, and shouted as though I were a thief. I backed away without finishing my search.