True Believers(31)

Now he padded into the living room and confirmed his suspicion that Bennis was, indeed, asleep on the couch. She had curled up into a ball against the leather, with one of his own robes bunched up under her head for a pillow. The television was on and turned slightly on its stand so that she could face it directly while lying down. The morning news was playing, with another story about the suicide of that young man at St. Anselm’s Church. Gregor frowned slightly—it had been over a week; the fuss and fumbling had gone on far too long—and wandered back down the hall to his own bedroom to get dressed. His hair was still wet from his shower. His neck was cold. Outside the big living-room window, the world was mostly dark. Sometimes it seemed to him impossible to figure out what to do in these situations. He almost never knew what to do about Bennis at all. Everything he did do was somehow off—not wrong, exactly, but not really right. He wondered if he ought to be satisfied that, in the mess this had become, she had not started smoking again—but he had a feeling that that had more to do with Bennis’s fundamental stubbornness than with him.

Suddenly, on a whim—no, more on a premonition—he went back to the living room to check on her again. He was wearing his boxer shorts and his socks and his shirt and his tie, but the tie was still hanging around his neck like a scarf. He was all too aware of the fact that his big window had no curtain. If Lida Arkmanian happened to come to her window across the street at just this moment, she would catch him in his shorts. The trick was that Lida would not come to her window. She always had her breakfast coffee in her kitchen, which was on the ground floor in the back. Gregor looked at Bennis and hesitated. He had no idea what he had intended to do when he got there. Bennis had not moved. The coffee table she had pulled up next to the couch was littered with debris, but it was the debris of somebody who had stayed up all night to watch the creature features: a coffee cup still half-full; an open bag of Chee-tos, barely touched; a half dozen crumpled paper napkins that looked as if they had been used to wipe up spills. Bennis looked haggard and half-dead, the way she did most of the time these days, but at least she had gotten out of her clothes and put on an oversize T-shirt. A half dozen times over the past three weeks, Gregor had found her still in her knee socks and clogs. He had been able to tell by the dirt on her soles that she had been out walking again.

The invitation from the state was not on the coffee table. That, Gregor realized, was what he had been looking for. In the beginning, when they had first sat down with Anne Marie’s lawyer and he had outlined just how final the situation had become, Bennis had carried that damned invitation with her everywhere, as if she needed it to identify who she was. It hadn’t helped that the governor of Pennsylvania had gone on the air three times in ten days to assure the people of Pennsylvania that this time justice would be done. Anne Marie Hannaford might have escaped execution over and over again for the past ten years, but she wouldn’t escape it one more time. There were no more appeals left to try, no more avenues left to explore. The only chance she had was an order of clemency from the governor’s office, and the governor had no intention of issuing one.

“Do you think she’s evil?” Bennis had asked him, one afternoon, out of the blue, when they had been wandering through a department store looking for a bright red scarf to buy Donna Moradanyan Donahue for her birthday.

It had been the oddest scene: the department-store aisles flanked by counters and shelves full of things that all seemed to be made of something metallic in silver or gold; Bennis in her shop-for-something-expensive uniform of Calvin Klein coat and two-and-a-half inch stacked-heel boots; himself trying desperately not to meet the eyes of saleswomen who had nothing to do in a store that was practically empty. Before Bennis spoke, Gregor had been feeling guilty. Now that they were officially a “couple,” they were expected to buy their presents together—but didn’t that shortchange the people they were buying presents for? Surely Donna deserved a present from each of them, the way she had every year before. At Christmas, Gregor had had to restrain himself from running out at the last minute and buying another whole set of Christmas presents. If he hadn’t been sure that Bennis—already pumped up beyond belief from nicotine deprivation—would have killed him, he would have done it. But things had been better, then. That was before the new date of execution had been set. Anne Marie’s lawyers were still in court. It still looked as if there might be a chance.

Bennis was holding a red scarf in her hands. Gregor would have thought it was just what they were looking for, but he could tell from the way she was fingering it that she didn’t like it.