The Wanting Read online

  What the hell—all he seemed to hear these days was the noise of straws rattling quietly in the wind. A maze of straws strewn with the names of dead kids. And all of it, every single item of information inside his head, was nebulous.

  What possible connections could there be between three deaths over a lengthy period of time?

  Pelusi went back to hauling drawers open.

  “Caskie, Caskie, Caskie,” he muttered to himself. “I don’t see anything filed under that name, Jerry.”

  “Did Miles Henderson take any records with him when he retired?” Metger asked.

  “He might have. I don’t see why he would, though.”

  Metger gazed around the office. It was a sterile room whose walls were covered with various charts of a nutritional nature. Two unlit X rays hung like a pair of underexposed photographs. A stethoscope lay curled on Pelusi’s desk.

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. There doesn’t seem to be anything here under the name of Caskie. Sammy or otherwise.”

  Somehow Metger had known there wouldn’t be—maybe there had never been any Sammy Caskie. Or any family known as Caskie for that matter. It wasn’t a name he had ever heard around town.

  “Try Hann. Robert Hann,” Metger said. “Date of death, 1955.”

  Pelusi shrugged, moving from one cabinet to another.

  Metger said, “I thought you people had everything on computer these days.”

  “Not in Carnarvon,” Pelusi answered. He fished through a drawer, flicking files back and forth as he searched. “You did say 1955?”

  Metger nodded. He stared at the physician’s back. Shadows formed in the folds of the white coat as Pelusi rummaged, small dark ripples crossing the material.

  “I always meant to get these things in order,” the physician said. “But one gets drawn into other tasks. More important ones. And so the filing system remains inadequate.”

  Metger walked over to the window.

  The surface of his skin felt cold. Somewhere in his mind he heard what sounded to him like the ticking of a clock, muffled, as if it were running down in a room he couldn’t quite locate. Three kids, one of whom might not have existed. And nothing else, Jerry. Nothing else.

  Lou Pelusi slammed a drawer shut. There was a metallic echo in the office.

  “Sorry,” the physician said.

  “No file on Robert Hann.”

  “No file.”

  Metger turned from the window. All at once this office seemed too bright to him, impossibly white, bleached of all color.

  “Since I know for sure that Robert Hann existed, and since I also know that he must have received medical treatment here at one time, how do you explain the fact that you don’t have any records for the kid? How the hell do you explain that, Lou?”

  “It might have been misfiled—”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “Or you might have the date wrong.”

  Metger leaned against the desk. He picked up the stethoscope and slapped it up and down against the palm of one hand. Simple mysteries, he thought. Dead kids who never existed. I dream, therefore I am deluded.

  “Do me one last favor,” he said.

  Pelusi was smiling, but it was an uncertain expression, a look that seemed ready to slip from his face, as though it were a mask. “I’m pushed for time, Jerry.”

  “One last thing. Okay? Ackerley. Anthea. Date of death, 1973.”

  Pelusi, with a show of subdued reluctance, went back to his cabinets. He looked stark against the murky green metal of the boxes. Now, as he opened and closed drawers, he made a great deal of angry noise. At last he turned to face Metger. He didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t tell me,” Metger said.

  “Where the hell are you getting those names, Jerry?”

  “I’m beginning to ask myself that one, Lou.”

  “There’s no record of any one of the three. Are you sure they ever came here for medical treatment?”

  “I’m pretty sure they passed this way at least once,” Metger said.

  “Well.” Pelusi was wearing his smile again. “Like I said, Miles Henderson didn’t leave a legacy of neatness around here.”

  Metger hesitated before he moved toward the door. He surveyed the rows of cabinets, remembering a similar collection in Miles Henderson’s study. What was hidden in that terrible room? If he were to go back there, what would he find? Ghosts locked away inside metal coffins, he imagined. Ghosts that rattled because he, Metger, was shaking them where they lay.

  “If you could give me a hint of what it is you’re looking for …” Pelusi had an expectant look on his face now.

  “I wish I could,” Metger said.

  He reached the door, opened it, gazed out into the corridor. A nurse passed in front of him, smiling at him casually. Then she was gone, leaving a scent of perfume in the air.

  “Thanks anyhow, Lou,” and Metger glanced back inside the room. He had a sudden strong urge to get home, see his wife, put his ear against the protuberance of her belly and listen for the unborn kid’s movements.

  Pelusi was seated behind his desk now, his hands clasped together, his manicured nails as white as the walls that pressed in around him.

  “See you, Jerry,” the physician said.

  Lou Pelusi reached for the telephone, let his hand drift across its smooth plastic surface lightly, didn’t pick it up. He was assailed by the feeling that Metger was going to come inside the room again quite unexpectedly and start asking more questions.

  So many questions.

  He listened to the silences of his office as if beneath the surface of quiet there lay a clamor of unintelligible sounds ready to rush in at him.

  Another man in his position might have gone home, packed his bags, and left Carnarvon for good. The problem was—where would he go? He had joined a club whose membership demands were rigid—silence and loyalty were part of the unspoken oath.

  Where could he go?

  Once, he thought, there had been some kind of burning ambition to help the sick. Once, as a premed student, he’d entertained the notion of someday opening a free clinic for charity cases who couldn’t afford to pay for treatment. Once—but all that was gone, buried under the weight of years passing. His humanitarianism had yield to his more secular needs—like money, he thought.

  These days he didn’t even feel much like a doctor. In unguarded moments he thought of himself as something else—a criminal, a form of assassin. After all, what the hell had he done to Stanley Metger? Wasn’t that a kind of assassination?

  He leaned back in his chair, breathing deeply. He tried to find solace in something. He took out his lovely Elgin pocket watch and ran his fingertips over it. There had always been a reassuring quality in material possessions.

  He picked up the telephone. He dialed Theodore Ronson’s home number. The mayor’s answering voice was wheezy, like he’d just come from his exercise machine.

  “Ted. This is Pelusi.”

  “What’s up, Doc?”

  Pelusi frowned. If he’d had a buck for every time he’d heard that question, hell, he wouldn’t be sitting here in Carnarvon, scared the way he was.

  “Our sheriff was just here—”

  “That goddamn busybody,” Ronson said. “That boy’s heading for a fall. What did he want this time?”

  “Certain medical files.”

  “You didn’t have them, of course.”

  Pelusi said, “Fact is, I don’t have them anyway. But Jerry was naming names, Ted. Names. Caskie. Hann. Ackerley.” The physician wiped a globule of sweat from his face.

  Ronson was silent for a moment. “Leave it with me,” he said finally. “I’ll mull it over. It’s my responsibility now.”

  35

  Charlotte said to Louise, “The boy’s gone to bed. Guess he was tired.”

  Louise gazed at the old woman a moment. Dick Summer had one arm around his wife’s waist and the old couple leaned together, seeming to fuse, to meld, somewhere in the middle of their bodies. Louise,
who had the start of a pounding headache, smiled.

  Dick asked, “Nice time? Good food?”

  “Good food,” Max said. He was standing in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his pants.

  Charlotte fussed with her hair a second. She was wearing a pale blue ribbon. “Any time you need us to sit with the boy, don’t you hesitate.”

  “It’s very good of you,” Louise said. She hoped the Summers weren’t going to linger, hoped they wouldn’t hang around waiting for a nightcap or something—she wanted to go upstairs and sleep. Just sleep. In the morning light everything was going to be different.

  “He’s no problem, that boy,” Charlotte said. She raised one hand again to adjust her ribbon. As she did so her skin reflected the light from the lamp behind her head. A smooth, soft glistening.

  Charlotte’s hand.

  Louise looked away—there was a hammer beating inside her skull. She was back in the restaurant, surrounded by what she saw as the fact of her betrayal. No. Not Max. Not you, Max. She turned back to the sight of Charlotte’s hand. A pulse throbbed in her head, loud and terrifying.

  “Going to be taking a trip soon. Better get going,” Dick said. He moved Charlotte toward the door, where Max stepped aside to let them pass. Louise went out into the corridor after the old people.

  “Thanks again,” she said.

  Dick and Charlotte went out on the porch, where they turned around in unison and looked at the Untermeyers in the hallway. Two couples, Louise thought. The one old, the other … middle-aged. Very middle-aged. Wasn’t that the time of one’s life when betrayal struck? Wasn’t that when it was supposed to happen? Husbands strayed. Found younger women. Wives took up tennis and fucked the club pro. Downhill into forced merriment. Looking impending death and darkness right in the eye.

  She went out onto the porch. The Summers started down the steps. There was a bleak moon, yellowy at the edges, hanging above the pines. The night was filled with small currents of electricity, as if out there in the blind darkness all manner of creatures were humming. Louise watched the Summers move toward the trees. Where could they be taking a trip to?

  “Do you need a flashlight?” she called after them.

  “We know this place like the backs of our hands,” Dick answered.

  They turned once and waved and then they were gone.

  Louise went inside, closing the door. The backs of our hands, she thought—and the image of Charlotte’s hand was barely illuminated in her mind, a puzzle of some kind, like something seen through frosted glass. That hand. The skin.

  Max was watching her in the hallway.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “You have a knack for asking inappropriate questions,” she said.

  “You look pale, Louise.”

  “Connie’s rather pale, too, isn’t she?”

  “Why don’t you leave it alone? Why don’t you drop it?”

  “Because it’s like rancid food, Max. The taste keeps coming back. That’s why.”

  Max sighed. He went to the stairs. “I’m going up,” he said. “I’m very tired.”

  Louise watched him go. Her head was filled with tiny smoking fissures, volcanic in the way they burst open. She heard the bedroom door close at the top of the stairs.

  She moved along the hallway. She stepped inside Dennis’s room. The lamp was on.

  The smell of Dick Summer’s bait filled the air—sickly now, sweet as a rotten apple, still strong and objectionable. Louise walked to the bedside table and gazed at the little jar in which Dennis kept the substance.

  The boy, who lay on the bed with his head turned away from his mother, had left the lid off as usual.

  Louise picked it up, put it on the jar.

  The substance had darkened since she’d last seen it. It had changed from a pale brown to something that resembled a dehydrated liver caked with black blood. Along its surface various cracks had developed. She looked closer, inclining her head as she held her breath.

  Deep within the cracks she thought she saw something move. Glistening, white as decay, it moved as if it were agitated by the overhead light. Louise picked up the top and jammed it down into the jar, then stepped back in disgust.

  The substance in the jar was riddled with maggots. Her stomach turned over. Maggots.

  “Dennis?” she said quietly.

  The boy rolled over on his side and smiled sleepily at her. He looked oddly different in the lamplight, his short hair accentuating the contours of his face. He’s growing up, she thought. A warm sense of love coursed through her. This boy. This lovable boy. She sat on the edge of the bed and laid one hand on his forehead. It was warm to her touch.

  “I love you,” she said. And she knew she was at least uttering the one constant sensation in her life.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said. “I guess I fell asleep.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nice evening?”

  “Fine,” Dennis said.

  Louise hesitated a second. “I hate to bring this up, but don’t you think it’s time to put that jar outside? It’s literally crawling. One day it’s going to crawl right out of here anyhow.”

  Dennis raised his head and squinted at the jar. “I guess,” he said. “I could store it under the sun deck.”

  “Anywhere you like, as long as it’s outdoors.”

  Louise glanced a moment at the photograph of the younger Summers.

  “What did you do with the Summers?” she asked.

  “Watched TV.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” the boy said.

  Louise placed one hand flat against the side of her head. Pounding now. She needed to go find aspirin. She found her gaze drawn back to the jar, where a single white maggot was undulating just beneath the lid, hanging to the inside of the glass. It curled, slipped, fell back into the brown mass. She shut her eyes. An image of Connie Harrison floated through her mind—Connie stuck inside the jar with all the rest of the maggots. Connie Harrison! Forty years old and sagging badly! Like hell!

  Dennis was smiling at her. “They’re only baby flies,” he said. “That’s all. They’re not really disgusting.”

  “Ugh,” Louise said.

  “In South America there are natives who consider larvae a delicacy. They like to eat them live.” Dennis sounded cheerful, as if this picture of Indians pigging out on grubs delighted him in some fashion.

  “Don’t go into details,” Louise said. “Just get the jar out of here, first thing in the morning.”

  Dennis sat up, swiveled his body toward the jar. As he reached out to touch it his pajama jacket rode up his spine a little way, laying his back bare.

  There were small pink crisscrossing lines on the boy’s skin.

  “What have you done to your back?” Louise asked. She leaned closer to her son, laying her hand on the boy’s spine. The marks suggested the scratches of fingernails.

  “What’s wrong with my back?”

  “These marks. How did you get these marks?”

  “What marks?” the boy asked. He attempted to pivot his head around to look.

  Louise touched the slender pink lines. “Don’t they hurt?”

  Dennis shook his head. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “What did you do? Have an argument with a pine tree?”

  Dennis laughed. “It must have been when Dick and Charlotte were horsing around—”

  “Horsing around?” Louise couldn’t imagine the Summers horsing around.

  “We were rolling on the floor and they were tickling me. I guess it happened then.”

  “They were tickling you?”

  “Yeah. It was just their idea of fun.”

  “They got carried away, Denny. Obviously.”

  “I guess so.”

  Louise stood up, smoothing the kid’s pajama top back in place. An unexpected shiver went through her—scratch marks on her son’s back. She couldn’t see the Summers getting so
carried away. “Strange games you guys play.”

  “They thought it was funny,” Dennis said.

  “Did you?”

  The boy shrugged. “Kinda.” He had actually been quite frightened by the Summers’ persistent, relentless tickling.

  The Great Communicator, Louise thought. She bent down and kissed the boy on his forehead. “Maybe I ought to put some ointment on your back.”

  “I’m fine. Really. It’s not like they drew blood or anything. Is it? It’s not like I’m going to need a rabies shot.”

  Louise stepped away from the bed. She moved toward the door. Strange games, she thought. She tried to imagine Dick and Charlotte catching Denny and tickling him like that. She couldn’t get the picture in her head.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Night.”

  Louise went into the hallway, closing the door of the room. She looked up the stairs, up to the darkness at the top. She climbed, hesitating only when she reached the closed door of the bedroom. Max. Max and that girl. She turned impossibilities around in her mind. She played with fractured notions—Max and that girl in bed together. Max and the girl holding each other intimately. Little secrets.

  Not Max, she thought. Not my husband.

  She put a small tense smile on her face and opened the bedroom door. Max was sitting up in bed, a book propped open in front of him. He raised his face and looked at her.

  How do we play this scene? Louise wondered. What do we do to smooth out the wrinkles, the awkward little creases?

  She stepped to the bed, sat on the edge of the mattress, gazed at her husband. What she wished for was infinite understanding, an endless capacity to believe in Max. A whole starry universe of trust. The idea of Max and that girl caused everything to collapse loudly in her mind. Worlds shattered. Mirrors were broken. Everything flew away from a cracked center, like debris flying off into mysterious space.

  She licked her dry lips. “Tell me again, Max.”

  “Tell you what?”