Not a Creature Was Stirring(110)

Six o’clock. Maybe five after. The foyer was in shadow. It was hard to see the face of the clock.

She got to the step where Teddy and Chris were sitting and stopped.

“Maybe you ought to come in to supper,” she said. “I think Bennis is making something.”

Chris stretched his legs. He looked better now than he had earlier in the day, when that Detective Jackman had found the other candlestick in his room. He had been called in to talk to Jackman and Mr. Gregor Demarkian, and when he had come out he’d looked better than Anne Marie remembered seeing him in years. It made her wonder. Now he seemed to have taken a bath and trimmed his hair and put on a better set of clothes—clothes that looked suspiciously like Bobby’s. They hung on Chris.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“I don’t know how anybody can be hungry,” Teddy said.

Anne Marie turned to him. He looked no different than he ever did, but maybe a little self-satisfied. What could he possibly have to be satisfied about, with Mother dying upstairs?

As if answering her question, Chris said, “Teddy’s changing jobs. He got the news this evening.”

“Changing jobs?” Anne Marie said.

Teddy smirked. “I’m going to Landon College. It’s in Hudson, New York. Just about an hour from the city by train. Much better.”

“Teddy has a friend on the faculty,” Chris said blandly. “A friend who owes him something.”

“He doesn’t owe me anything,” Teddy said angrily. “He just appreciates me.”

Chris smiled. “Teddy’s going to start right after Christmas. It’s not like when you and I were in school. They don’t hold the first semester over until after Christmas vacation any more.”

“The semester starts January sixth,” Teddy said sullenly. “I’m going to have a lot to do between now and then.”

Including attending your mother’s funeral, Anne Marie thought. She didn’t say it. The two of them seemed totally unreal to her, sitting here discussing job changes, sitting here in the dark with that ragged breathing all around them, not noticing it at all. She moved off the step into the foyer, wishing she wasn’t so cold.

“I’m going to have supper,” she said. “I’m starving, and I’m probably going to be up all night. If you two have any decency, you’ll be up all night, too.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense if some of us slept and one of us sat with mother?” Chris said. “I’ll go up and sit with mother now, if you want.”

“I don’t know how you could sleep,” Anne Marie said.

“He’ll smoke marijuana,” Teddy said. “That’s how he always sleeps.”

Chris stood up. “I’ll go sit with Mother, Anne Marie. If you want, I’ll turn that thing off, so you don’t have to listen to it while you eat.”

“No,” Anne Marie said. “Don’t turn it off.”

“Isn’t it driving you crazy?”

“It means she’s breathing,” Anne Marie said.

Chris nodded and went up the stairs. Teddy said, “If I were breathing like that, I’d want myself to stop.”

Anne Marie left him where he was sitting and let herself into the hall.





2


She had expected to find Bennis in the kitchen. When instead she found the kitchen empty—and clean; Bennis cleaned like a servant, when she was done the house looked as if nobody had ever lived in it at all—she went down the back hall to the dining room. She didn’t like being in the back hall. It really was a small space, narrow and low ceilinged. With the sound of Mother’s breathing, the walls seemed to suck in and out.

She let herself through the baize door and found Bennis standing at the sideboard, small and thin and beautiful, the only one of them who had ever made sense. She had poured herself a cup of coffee and was putting too much sugar in it.

“There you are,” she said. “I was beginning to think I’d made all this for myself.”

“All this” was soup and a cold platter for sandwiches. Anne Marie looked at the soup and bit her lip.

Bennis put her coffee cup on the table and sat down. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About things—you know? About Daddy and Emma.”

“I wish you’d turned the lights on,” Anne Marie said.

“I turned some of the lights on. I didn’t want it to be too light. It didn’t fit, somehow.”

“Nothing fits.” Anne Marie got a cup of coffee for herself and took the seat next to Bennis. Then she put the coffee down on her far side and stared at it. “I haven’t been able to think of anything but Mother. Maybe that’s all I ever think about. Mother.”