A Stillness in Bethlehem(99)

The doorbell was a chime that echoed and gonged for long seconds after the button was pushed. Kelley got up, looked around the kitchen and decided to put the manuscript in the refrigerator. She had a friend in Boston who was an aspiring novelist, and he always put his manuscripts in the refrigerator when he went out. Refrigerators survived fires, that was the point. The house could burn to the ground while he was away, but the manuscript would remain intact, protected along with the leftover scrambled eggs. Kelley put this manuscript next to a half-full bottle of Perrier water—Gemma hadn’t been big on abandoning herself to the pleasures of the flesh no matter what they were—and went out into the foyer to answer the door. With her growing nervousness in the house, Kelley had had a growing need to keep the lights on, even in the daytime. Now half the bulbs in the foyer chandelier were dead and she had no way to change them. She didn’t know where to find a ladder tall enough to reach and she didn’t know who to call for help. She brushed aside the feeling that the foyer was too dark to allow her to admit a stranger safely, stepped up to the right hand door of the front double doors and looked through the viewer. On the doorstep was a small blonde girl in an oversized jacket, looking tired.

Kelley stepped away from the door, thought for a moment and then opened up. If she’d been living in town instead of all the way out here—or if she’d been more in contact with the people who were living in town—she might have caught the paranoia everybody else had caught like the latest round of flu. She hadn’t. When she had the door open, she stepped aside and let her visitor in. Then she smiled and said, “Yes? Can I help you? Is there something I can do for you?”

The small blonde girl looked around the foyer, including up at the chandelier. “My name is Candy—Candace. Candace. Never mind. You’d know me as Candy George. If you know me. Do you know me?”

“I know who you are,” Kelley said, thinking that Candy George was disoriented, like someone in shock.

“My name isn’t really Candy George, though,” Candy said. “George is my husband’s name. Reggie George. Reginald. You may not know who he is. Not being from town. You, I mean. You not being from town.”

Kelley closed the door against the wind. “I’ve seen him around,” she said. “Would you like to come into the kitchen? I’ve got the tea kettle on the stove, all ready to go. You look all done in.”

“My real name is Candace Elizabeth Spear,” Candy said. “That’s the name I had when I was born. I can’t do anything about it now. It says Candy George on all the programs for the play and this is the last week. But after it’s over, I can change. And I can change in every other way right away. So I don’t want you to call me Candy George.”

“All right.”

“Call me Candace instead.”

“All right.”

“And I will have tea.”

“Wonderful.”

Kelley turned around and walked rapidly back in the direction of the kitchen, assuming Candy—or Candace, or whoever she was—would follow. She was right. Candy did follow. Kelley put out a chair for her and she even sat down, automatically, as if she had been computer-programmed to respond to certain signals in certain ways. Shock, Kelley decided, was exactly what was going on here. The symptoms were so classic, they could have been a paragraph in the training manual of the women’s center Kelley used to volunteer in down in Burlington. Kelley got out a clean cup and put it on the table. Then she got the sugar bowl out of the cupboard and put that on the table, too. With any luck, she would be able to convince Candy to have her tea with lots of sugar in it, because that was one of the ways you were supposed to be able to treat shock.

The tea kettle began to whistle. The water had been warm before Kelley had put the kettle on the burner, because she’d been warming it up and pouring herself cup after cup of tea all day. Just in case Candy liked liquor better than she liked sugar, Kelley took Gemma’s only bottle—Johnnie Walker Red—and put it on the table. It didn’t go over well. Candy made a face at it and pushed it aside.

“I don’t drink liquor,” she said. “I don’t even drink beer. Alcohol makes people crazy.”

“It certainly makes some people crazy,” Kelley said.

“Let me show you something,” Candy said. She stood up and pulled her sweater up over her head. She undid her blouse and turned around. For one short second, Kelley thought this was the beginning of some weird sexual come-on, but she’d barely had the thought when she saw the reality, and the reality made it very hard to breathe. Then a wave of nausea washed over her and she had to put her head between her knees to keep from throwing up.