Лоуренс Блок - Ariel

“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “I’m fine.”

The next day was a Saturday. Roberta slept later than usual, waking up groggy with a Valium hangover. She had awakened during the night in spite of the pills she’d taken before retiring, then took more pills to get back to sleep. As a result the Valium blurred the memory of the brief interval when she had been awake. She knew she had seen the ghost for the third successive night, but that was about as much as she could recall.

When she got downstairs, David showed her the morning paper.

She had trouble taking it all in. But the paper screamed out its news and David kept filling in the blanks for her, telling her what he had learned from the radio news. Some twelve hours previously, Jeffrey Channing had shot his wife and his two young daughters to death. Then he had attempted to set fire to their house, but the fire had evidently gone out of its own accord. After lighting the fire he had gone to his car, where he had placed the barrel of his gun in his mouth and fired a single shot into his brain. Death, according to reports, had been instantaneous.

That afternoon Ariel sat in her room trying to read a novel about a teenage girl’s struggle to overcome compulsive overeating. She couldn’t seem to focus on the story. She put the book down and switched on Erskine’s tape recorder to listen to the duet tape.

She turned the volume high, and for a while she was able to lose herself in her own music, but then the volume made the music sound wild and out of control and it bothered her. Once she had adjusted the controls she found herself unable to get back into the music.

She let it play, got out her diary, uncapped her green pen.

Why do I keep thinking he was my father?

I know better. He was Greta and Debbie’s father and they’re dead now. He killed them. I wonder if they knew what was happening. It said they were found in their beds, but were they asleep when he did it? Maybe he killed them first and put them in their beds.

I wonder if they saw the gun first and thought it was a toy.

It’s not my fault!

He would have killed me. He followed me and he made me get in the car and he had the gun along and he meant to kill me. He even pointed the gun at me.

Then he put it in his mouth. That’s how he killed himself finally, with the gun in his mouth.

How could he do that?

It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything but save myself.

I am all alone in the house now. David was up first and then when I got up I heard him telling Roberta. I was on the stairs. They didn’t even know I was there. He went out and then I thought she was on the phone or something because I was in my room and I heard her talking. I went halfway down the stairs again and discovered she was talking to herself. About David and me and about him and about wasting her life.

I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying. It’s really weird, hearing a person talk to herself. It’s like they’re a character in a play. You don’t expect anybody to do that in real life.

A lot of things happen that you don’t expect.

I wanted to get something to eat but I didn’t want to see her, so I came back up here and waited until she left the house. When her car pulled away I went down and had breakfast.

She even left the dishes in the sink. Something she never does. I washed them and put them away. Don’t ask me why. She’ll never notice anyway.

Last night I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid of what I would dream. But all that happened was I had a wonderful dream of music. I dreamed a whole piece of music from beginning to end, and I remember part of me knowing I was dreaming and knowing that when I woke up I would be able to play the entire piece.

Then when I did wake up I didn’t even remember the dream, and then I did, but I couldn’t remember anything about how the music went. Maybe I’ll dream it again and it’ll stay with me.

I didn’t tell Erskine what happened. I called him this morning to tell him that Channing killed his family and himself, but he told me instead. He read the paper. I thought of telling him about being in the car with him but not what happened, but instead I decided not to say anything. What is the point of telling anybody?

Erskine is with his parents today. An old aunt of his mother’s is sick and they are all three of them driving up to visit her. Erskine just about had a fit when he found out that was how he would be spending the day. First of all he hates his aunt. She is ugly and terrible and tends to pinch him, which he detests. Plus she lives in the country outside of Georgetown and there are always bugs and crawly things in her house. I said there wouldn’t be bugs this time of year but he says in her house it makes no difference and they are there year round.

Plus we were going to check out flutes today in the pawnshops on Commercial Street that he knows about. We want to see if I can play a regular flute and if I like it, because with multiple tracks and all it might be interesting to use different flutes. We want to see if I like another flute as well as I like my flute and we want to find out how much they cost.

Either we’ll go after school during the week or wind up waiting until next Saturday.

It helped to keep moving. Roberta had discovered that as soon as she left the house. The Valium took the edge off things, making them easier to bear, and activity kept her body busy so that she didn’t live so completely in her mind.

The marketing had to be done, and today she threw herself into it with a vengeance, getting caught up in the deliberate mindless routine of pushing a shopping cart up one aisle and down the next. She liked having to make simple meaningless choices, accepting this brand-name item and rejecting that one, saying yes to this soap powder and no to that liquid bleach. It all had a calming influence j upon her, suggesting that there was indeed order in the universe, that life flowed upon certain predictable currents.

If there was order, surely there was also chaos. What could be more chaotic than what Jeff had done? She could see now, although she had not seen it at the time, that he had been acting strangely, that he had been under severe mental and emotional strain. But murder and suicide, slaughtering his family and then taking his own life—

She loaded the groceries into her car, drove to the beauty parlor. It was the routine things that kept you going, she thought. The shopping, the hair appointment, the household chores. Getting dinner on the table, getting the beds made. She hadn’t made her bed this morning, hadn’t even done up the breakfast dishes.

She braked at a stop sign, ducked ashes from her cigarette. The ghost, she thought, had come to warn her of Jeff’s death. She had first seen it three nights in succession before Caleb died. Then it had not appeared again until it had made another trio of appearances. Perhaps, she thought, there was pattern in everything, order even in chaos.

She wouldn’t have to see the ghost again. It had come three times and Jeff was dead and it would not come again, and soon the house would be sold and she would never have to wake up again to see that damn woman hovering in the corner of the room.

At the beauty parlor she had an impulse to have something wildly different done to her hair. She felt the need for a change. But she decided to give herself until her next appointment to think about it.

There was no rush. And by then they might even have a buyer for the house.

When she turned into Legare Street she wanted to keep right on driving, to zoom past that looming old mausoleum and never set foot in it again. No more creaking stairs, no more sounds in the walls, no more cold damp brick underfoot, no more windowpanes rattling in the wind.