and cried. Their fingers and lips smacked with grease.
The worst dream was this: going back in time, to the double-wide in Hinton with the hole in the kitchen floor. She’d forgotten all about the place until she found herself standing inside it. Then it all came back: the white, diamond-shaped adhesive paper meant to look like linoleum; the pine cabinets so filthy with grime they’d been soft; the Murphy bed she’d shared with Betty; that musty scent of dead field mice, whose source she’d never been able to detect but which had permeated all her clothes, so that at school, the townie kids had held their noses.
“Please, no. I don’t like it here,” she whispered in the old kitchen. Her sleeping body spoke the words, too. They circled 14B, and woke the stained-glass birds.
In the closet behind the old-fashioned string mop, she found the man in the three-piece suit. His skin had thinned, and through it she saw the eggshell ridges of his bones. It occurred to her that he might not be a man at all. He might be The Beviary: ever-changing and relentless.
“Did you bring me here?” she asked him. “I don’t like remembering. I’m not that girl anymore. That girl is dead, and I hate her.” He turned his back and faced the corner of the closet, like a little boy who’s been bad. With his fingers, he began to scrape the wall: Scritch-scratch!
From the darkness, the audience laughed. The sound was canned, and without humor. Their black eyes glistened in the dark.
“Fine. Be that way,” she told him as she shut the plywood closet door and mated the hook to its eye latch, locking him inside. “This isn’t for you, so you’re not allowed to watch.”
Then she sat down at the kitchen table. Out the window, was a dirt road that stretched for miles, and along the cul-de-sac were more RVs and autumn trees red as fire. Hinton, 1992. She’d been sixteen years old when she lived here, and Betty cut up the floor. It had hit her worse than most other things Betty’d done, though in retrospect, it shouldn’t have.
The first time Betty’s red ants arrived, they’d been living in a white clapboard house in Wilmette. Betty had been a beauty back then. Miss Cornhusker, 1980. Blond hair, deep dimples, and the kind of curvy saunter that strangers had followed with their eyes. Roman Lucas would have cut off his hands for her if she’d asked. Given enough time and boredom, Audrey had no doubt she would have asked.
Still, they’d been happy. Two bedrooms, a study full of Betty’s medical illustrations, a darkroom for Roman’s pictures. Audrey had slept in a dressing closet off the main bedroom where the deep pile carpet had warmed her toes. After they fell asleep, she’d sometimes crawled into their room and slept on the floor, pretending she was their dog.
And then one night, Betty painted every wall and ceiling of their two-bedroom house rust red. Audrey had been five years old, and in her imagination, she’d pictured it like a possession, in which the ants that had infested their untended lawn began to swarm. They’d crawled though the cracks in the back door, then marched like a living red carpet into Betty’s studio. Thrashing and swiping, she’d tried to fight them off, but they’d stolen inside her ears and nose and mouth, then chewed their way underneath her skin. Infected, she’d painted life as she saw it. Her canvases, the bed, the walls, the ceiling, the whole house, squirming with red.
The next time it happened, Audrey was six. Betty took off without a note or even a phone call. She’d left the oven baking, so the lamb got burned to char. The smoke ruined the new corduroy couch and killed their pet parakeets, Harold and Maude. Their curled feet had pointed up. A week later, a short, skinny man with a half-eaten Slim Jim sticking out of his shirt pocket dropped Betty off at the curb, then peeled away in a clunking blue Hyundai. By then the red-ant manias had burned out and turned their characteristic black. Betty was so tired she’d had to crawl to the front door, where Roman had found her and carried her to bed.
Creeping, creeping. Things got worse in the in-between. The unused tea service tarnished. Arguments supplanted back rubs and scotch. Dinner became soggy, micro-waved Stouffer’s pizzas and Hungry Man pies. Harold and Maude’s cage stayed empty and hanging, months-old bird shit stuck