Demon

Her daughter, Jeanette, who often came to visit with her children, came out of the bedroom. Her face was haggard, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed.

I halted.

“Clay.” Jeanette offered a slight smile, and then her mouth crumpled. She lifted her hand to her eyes, and then pushed her hair back from them.

I stared at her. I could hear someone working in the bedroom and assumed it was her husband, Kevin. My heart took on a ragged rhythm.

“Mom had a stroke.” It came out in a tight squeak. Behind her Kevin emerged from the bedroom.

“No. No.” I was unsure if I said it for her or for myself or out of some strange guilt that I felt settling like a load of boulders upon me. Kevin laid an arm around his wife’s shoulders and reached out with his other to clasp my cold hand in greeting.

“But she went to New York.” I gave Kevin’s hand an absent shake. None of this made sense.

“They took her to the hospital, but she never regained consciousness,” Kevin said.

“What does that mean? What happened?” My hands began to shake. Had I contributed to this in some way? Had I brought undue attention to her by the simple fact of hiding in her prayerful shadow, albeit unwittingly, all these months?

Jeanette laid her hand along my arm, as if she was the one comforting me. “It means God called her,” she said with a tiny smile.

“Why?” I felt like a child.

Her smile, just then, was too much like her mother’s, with that hint of serenity amid obvious pain. “Would you want Mom far from you?”

But I need her here! I wanted to shout. The apartment was collapsing around me, the plants, my new computer, the stairs, into a heap of rubble, of meaninglessness.

Jeanette squeezed my shoulder. “Mom sure loved you, Clay. On her last visit she brought your name up in church, asking for prayer for you. You were on her heart.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She eventually turned away, her hand over her face.

I fell back a step, unable to take it all in. Unable to believe Mrs. Russo would not be back, could not go with me to the tiny Gospel Room, tell me the things I needed to know.

“I have her plants,” I said faintly, stupidly.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all her things. Rob, my brother, is still recovering from his accident. If you wouldn’t mind keeping them—”

“No, no, I don’t mind.” I looked around her apartment. She had packed her carry-on bag there on the table, had given me her perishables standing here in the kitchen, had told me to water the plants until water came out the bottom.

“I’m sorry. If I can do anything to help . . .” I don’t know if I said it more for them or for me.

INSIDE MY APARTMENT, I reeled, grabbed at the back of a dining room chair, the table, the wall. I rushed to my desk. I grabbed the top of that stack of mismatched manuscript pages now numbering in the hundreds and, with a long, full motion, ripped them apart. I dropped the fraying halves, caught some of them as they fell from my hands, and tore them in half again. I grabbed another stack and ripped them, too, catching at the pieces, tearing them and then tearing them again.

“You wanted your memoirs published. I did everything I could, I sacrificed everything! Killer! Murderer!” It occurred to me that anyone hearing me—Jeanette and Kevin, most likely—might think I was crazed. Good. I was.

I grabbed another stack of pages, but before I could rip them into pieces, palsy stilled my arms. The words jumped off the page at me, the forest of Is, and then the question on the very page in my hand: “What does this have to do with me?”

I fell onto the floor against the desk and sobbed, torn half pages and quarter pages slipping over the edge and falling around me like ashes drifting from the sky after a fire. I covered my eyes, great heaves shaking my shoulders. If there was a God, I cried out to him, thinking that only he could understand my keen over the deep that had once been my world.

I STAYED LIKE THAT for a long time. Even once my weeping subsided, I was too exhausted to rub at eyes that had nearly swollen shut.

I had been unable to escape Lucian before. I could not escape him now, even when he had abandoned me. This was purgatory.

No, this was hell.

32

The apartment building I had once considered homey seemed, overnight, dormlike and shoddy. The industrial carpet on the landings was cold and dirty, the mailboxes impersonal despite the nameplates stamped out on a label-maker.

I forgot my morning coffee. I stared at Mrs. Russo’s door, now devoid of coffee cake and chocolate-chip cookie smells, of inspirational music and the sound of visitors. I thought of finding the old e-mail, of risking another message to Light1, of calling him out despite the consequences. Of posting a message on a blog site: “Demon encounter? Ever talked to one? Was his name Lucian?”

But I did none of these things. I decided that when I saw the doctor in three days I would ask for a psychiatric referral, even if I suspected that I was psychologically sound.