Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

I have to slow him down. The longer I lie here alive, the more time John will have to find me. But I must also prepare for the possibility that he may not find me. That Wheaton will finish his work. First things first, says my father. Get him talking.

When the sun shines noticeably brighter through my eyelids, I make a show of coming awake. “How does it look?” I ask.

“As it should,” Wheaton answers in a clipped voice. He clearly doesn’t recall last night’s conversation with fondness.

Rather than push him, I lie quietly and try not to look at Thalia, who seems several shades paler than she did yesterday.

At length, Wheaton says, “I saw a report on television this morning. If the local anchors aren’t lying for the FBI, you told me the truth last night. About the rapes.”

I say nothing.

A quick glance at me as he paints. “Conrad was raping my subjects.”

“Yes.”

“I’d do anything to change that. But I can’t. I should have known, I suppose. Conrad always had poor impulse control. That’s why he went to prison. But rape is just a symptom of what I told you about yesterday. The plight. If Conrad hadn’t done it, someone else would have. In a different way, perhaps. The husband’s way. But still. They’re all much better off now, your sister included.”

Wheaton steps away from the canvas and studies himself in the mirror. “It’s worse for you that she’s dead, of course, but for her, there’s no more pain. No more helpless wishing, no more subservience.”

If I think about Jane now, I won’t be able to keep it together. “I understand about the plight. I understand the Sleeping Women. But I don’t think you’re telling me everything.”

His eyes flick to me, then back to the canvas as he resumes painting. “What do you mean?”

“Your feelings about women didn’t just come to you out of the blue. They must have been shaped by women you knew.” I have to be careful here. “Maybe the woman you knew best of all.”

Wheaton’s brush pauses in midair, then returns to the canvas.

“I know your mother disappeared when you were thirteen or fourteen.”

He stops painting altogether.

“I know what that’s like. My father disappeared when I was twelve. In Cambodia. Everyone said he was dead, but I never believed it.”

He’s watching me now. He knows I’m telling the truth, and he can’t fight the compulsion to know more. “What did you think had happened?” he asks.

“At first I created all sorts of scenarios. He’d been wounded and had amnesia. He was crippled and couldn’t get back to me. He was held prisoner by Asian warlords. But as I got older, I realized that probably none of that was true.”

“You accepted that he was dead?”

“No. I came to believe something even more terrible.

That he hadn’t come back because he didn’t want to come back. He’d abandoned us. Maybe to be with another woman. Another family. Another little girl that he loved more than me.“

Wheaton is nodding.

“It almost killed me, thinking that. I racked my brain, trying to figure out what I’d done to make him angry enough to stop loving me.”

“It wasn’t your fault. He was a man.”

“I know, but last night, I was thinking – dreaming, really – about you. And I saw a woman. I thought she must be your mother. She was holding a boy and trying to explain why she had to go. I tried to ask her why she would leave you-”

Red blotches have appeared on Wheaton’s face and neck, the way they used to on my sister’s face. He jabs his paintbrush at me like a knife. “She never left me! I was the only thing that kept her alive.”

“What do you mean?”

His face goes through tortured contractions, as though he’s reliving some horrible moment. Then he dips his brush in the paint and goes back to his canvas, almost as if no conversation ever took place.

And then he begins talking.

“I was born during the war,” Wheaton says, painting with absolute assurance. “Nineteen forty-three. My father was in the Marine Corps. He came home on leave after basic training, and that’s when he fathered me. That’s what he thought, anyway. He was a hard man, merciless and cold. Mother couldn’t explain to me why she married him. She only said, ‘Things look different when you’re young.’”

“My mother said the same thing more than once,” I tell him.

“When my father was drafted, she was left alone for the first time since she’d been married. She had two sons, but they were only four and five. It was a liberation. She was free of the cutting voice, the brutal hand, the ruthless insistence of the nights when she protested in vain to the ceiling and the walls, begging God for some reprieve. God had finally answered her prayers. He had sent her the war.”

Wheaton smiles with irony. “A month after my father shipped out for the Pacific, a stranger came to the door asking for water. He had a limp. Some injury or disease had crippled him, and the army wouldn’t take him. He worked for the government, one of the WPA artists’ projects. He was a painter. Mother fell in love with him the first day. She worshiped art. Her prize possession was a book a dead aunt had given her. A big color-plate thing called Masterpieces of Western Art. Anyway, the painter camped nearby for two weeks, and when he left, Mother was pregnant. She never knew where he went, but he said was from New Orleans. He told her that much.”

My God, I say silently.

“I was born two weeks premature.” Wheaton twirls the tip of his brush on his palette. “That made the timing almost work out. It meant Mother could lie about my paternity and get away with it. At least for a while.

“When my father came back from the war, he was different. He’d been captured by the Japanese, and they had done something to him. He rarely talked. He became a sort of religious fanatic. But he was just as brutal – with her and with us.

“He saw immediately that Mother treated me differently from my brothers. She told him it was because I was premature, that I was fragile. He tried to force me to be like the others, but she resisted him. After a time, they came to an arrangement. She bought me a sheltered childhood with subservience. Anything he wanted, he got. His word was law. In daily life. In his bed. Only where I was concerned did her word count.

“My brothers worked the farm and helped him trap when they weren’t in school. My life was different. Mother taught me things. Read to me. Pinched pennies to buy me paint and canvas. She encouraged me to imitate the paintings in her book. My brothers made fun of me, but secretly they were jealous. They beat me when they could get away with it, but that was a small thing. In the summers, Mother and I spent our days in an old barn in the woods. We escaped.”

A look of transcendence comes over Wheaton’s face.

“It stood in a small clearing, surrounded by ancient trees, with a stream flowing beside. Part of the roof had fallen in, but we didn’t mind. The sun fell through the hole in great yellow shafts, the way it does in Gothic cathedrals.”

“What did you paint there?” I ask, even as the answer comes to me. “Did you paint your mother?”

“Who else could I paint? After I outgrew copying from the book, she would bring different clothes from the house, or things she’d bought on a rare trip into town. Things she never showed my father. Gauzy gowns, robes like those the women wore in the classical paintings. Hour after hour I would paint, and we would talk, and laugh, until the shafts of light began to fade, and we began to whisper, putting off until the last second our walk back to the dark little house of rage.”