Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
TASHA PLAYFULLY BUMPED AGAINST JOHNNY with a burlesque swing of her hips in the hallway before they entered the bedroom.
His distaste at feeling Mazelle’s robe tickling his nose while Tasha pressed against him immediately gave way to the thrill of taboo.
This was his grandmother’s robe. They were about to sleep in her dying room.
A strange mood overtook Johnny when Tasha closed the master bedroom door behind them and took off the robe, hanging it on the golden hook on the closet door.
Although he could still imagine Mazelle’s hospital bed against the wall, not the more elegant king-size bed that had replaced it, the generously sized room flushed him with the excitement he always felt in new bedrooms with Tasha.
A room away from home was a promise of privacy, a break from numbing routine, maybe a touch of the illicit—especially since she’d been pretending to be someone else at dinner.
They could be two strangers who’d met at the revamped Bear Creek Lodge.
He was a director, and she was a producer.
Oh no, they seem to have double-booked this room.
As Tasha turned on the art deco stained glass lamp that cast a gold-red glow, Johnny saw his wife with fresh eyes.
She mourned the loss of her dancer’s ropiness from her thirties, but damn, he loved those hips and ass that time had gifted her.
He appraised her as she bent over to rifle through her overnight bag on the settee in front of the bed.
Under her long Spelman College T-shirt, her yoga-style denim pants clung to contours he’d forgotten.
He was already hard. Might have been hard since she bumped against him in the hallway.
Goddamn, that felt nasty. But also—none of the old wraiths touched him in Tasha’s company.
The medicine bottles that had crowded Mazelle’s bedside table the night he told her he wanted her to die were a phantom image he swept from his mind.
The blinds on the window across the room were wood-toned now, not the same ones that had swayed when he imagined something slithering past them.
Every trigger he’d been afraid he would take with him to his own deathbed melted away with Tasha’s curves.
Tasha’s touch. Had this been the cure all along?
Tasha felt the release too. They rolled on the rose-colored bedspread like two high school students pretending to do math homework.
His ardor for Tasha felt focused and hungry, his jeans pinching.
He yanked his jeans off, freeing himself, then his hands rediscovered the thrill of Tasha’s skin—his palms supplicants to ass and hips and breasts that had grown a cup size in fifteen years.
Had time remade her into this flesh goddess, or was she already filling out from her pregnancy?
Tasha writhed beneath him like an eel, fanning her fingers across his back, scratching him almost enough to hurt, as if she were still role-playing.
But it wasn’t that—she tasted different, held a slightly new scent between her thighs.
She was still Tasha, but when she was pregnant, she always… changed. And he liked the change.
The girls were upstairs sharing a large room with its own fireplace, a universe away. So when low moans escaped from Tasha under his touch, or he gasped and arched his back, their lovemaking sounds seeped into the thick cedar walls, silenced. Their secret.
“Guess what?” Tasha whispered afterward as they cuddled close under the covers.
“What?” he said, playing along with her fairy-tale voice. Bopping the tip of her nose.
She beamed at him, her forehead glistening in the dim lamplight. “We’re having a baby.”
“Fuck—that’s incredible,” he said, beaming back.
If he could remake their past, this was how they would have celebrated the day of the pink double lines.
No dry mouth or racing heart. No need to force their smiles, both of them feeling caught in a new future they weren’t sure they wanted, but afraid to say so.
A part of him had felt unlinked from Tasha for weeks—until now.
He grieved those wasted weeks, but tonight was a reunion. Better late than never.
Johnny and Tasha kissed until they slept.
Tasha didn’t usually know when she was dreaming—but this time it was obvious. It didn’t feel like an ordinary dream: She was watching a movie unfold.
But she was the star.
Tasha was riding in a red Cadillac convertible with the top down, waving to Black families lined up to cheer for her in a street parade in Los Angeles of old: passing vintage automobiles so shiny they were blinding in the fierce sun, men sporting hats, and women in dresses hanging long past their knees.
She had a driver—Grady: The name came to her—good-natured and fatherly, most of his prematurely graying hair shaved off, but a clipped white beard.
As in a lucid dream, Tasha willed herself to seek out the rearview mirror, where she expected her image to be muddied and indistinct, usually a sure sign she was dreaming.
But there she was: in a fur wrap, her ears spangled with shiny baubles, her face painted for a fashion magazine.
But wait—was that her face she saw? Or was it Mazelle’s?
A bark behind her. Tasha turned and saw a smallish white dog in the back seat, fur a bit grimy and matted.
The dog’s stubby tail wagged frantically as it turned in an excited circle, nearly losing its balance.
But she knew this dog… didn’t she? Had she seen him in a photograph, or had she seen him dance… ?
“Scout!” Tasha said, recognizing him. “How did you get here? Where have you been?”
Certain knowledge tickled her: Scout was gone. The dog in this car couldn’t be Scout. Dogs didn’t live for nearly thirty years—did they? (Wasn’t it much longer than thirty years?) And he looked unchanged, exactly as he had looked the day she…
A white hole flared in Tasha’s mind, the burgeoning memories swallowed whole. Because they weren’t her memories, she realized. They were someone else’s.
“Stop,” she said to the driver, already forgetting his name. (Grady?) He didn’t move or look at her, so she raised her voice. “I want to stop!”
She wanted him to stop the car—no, stop everything.
Stop the dream. Stop the foreign memories flooding her, making her feel dizzy.
Tasha used every trick she had learned since childhood to force herself to wake up from a dream, trying to pinch herself, staring at her frightened face in the mirror again: Wake up. Wake up. WAKE UP.
She saw movement in the mirror behind her. White fur, but it wasn’t Scout anymore because it was too big—snuffling closer—mouth hinging open to reveal sharp teeth as long as her fist—
Tasha sat up with a gasp stolen from her dream, wrenched back into the waking world.
All sunlight was gone, replaced by unmarred darkness.
She was in Mazelle’s bed, sitting up straight in the chilly room, sweat cold on her face and neck.
She was breathing in pants after a nightmare for the first time since she saw A Nightmare on Elm Street far too young, convinced that Freddy Krueger was stalking her in her dreams. A looming feeling of peril had followed her again.
Her hands shook against her thighs as she slowed her breathing.
Tasha was afraid she would wake up Johnny—until she noticed that Johnny was already sitting up in the shadows, his feet swung across the edge of the bed, halfway to standing.
Even in only the dim porch light barely reaching their window, the alertness of his bearing told her he had been awake first. Something was wrong.
“What is it?” Tasha whispered.
“Did you hear that?” Johnny said.
Tasha only heard the residual drumming of her own heart pulsing in her ears. “What?”
“Something’s in the kitchen.”
Tasha reached for the night table to turn on her cell phone, which was reduced to a clock and night-light: two in the morning. “One of the girls?” she said. The more she spoke aloud, the further her dream retreated, softening her rigid limbs. She rubbed sleepiness from her face.
A loud clattering clawed past their soundproof wall from the neighboring kitchen.
Something rolled rhythmically on the tile floor, making a racket with every turn before it slowly quieted to silence.
One of the metal mixing bowls they had used to serve the chips at dinner?
Bumping and scurrying came next, in a short burst. Then silence again.
It didn’t sound like the girls. Tasha remembered Johnny’s phrase: He’d said something was in the kitchen, not someone.
The noises were frenetic and scattered, the way Imani’s temper tantrums had echoed through the house, her rage inchoate as she threw shoes in her room.
But Imani wasn’t having a temper tantrum now. She wouldn’t do that here—only at home.
“Shhh. Stay here,” Johnny said, and leaped from the bed.
He disappeared into the dark, so Tasha shined her phone’s dim screen light toward him enough to see him open a narrow closet behind the hook on the door, where Mazelle’s robe swung.
He pulled out what she thought was a broomstick at first—but it was a rifle!
Johnny stood on his tiptoes, reaching for a closet shelf.
“Turn on the flashlight,” he said, and she switched on the brighter light while he spoke because she’d had the same idea. She wanted to be sure of what she was seeing.
“A gun? What if it’s the girls—”
The gun sounded multiple clicks as he loaded it, enough to make her jump.
His fingers were moving fast across the weapon, with confidence, such an unlikely sight that she could still be dreaming.
But guns don’t kill ghosts. The thought appeared, unwelcome.
Tasha shivered in her nightshirt, which was too thin despite its long sleeves.
“I won’t shoot the girls.” Johnny’s voice was concentrated calm. “Hand me that light, Tash.”