“But I’m not coming home,” Suzy said gently. She came all the way down to the last step, which put her on a level with McManus, and she met his eyes with a frail, compassionate dignity. She said, “Take care of yourself, Dave. I’ll be all right.” Abruptly she ducked her head, kissed McManus on the cheek, and started past him toward the kitchen. “Cleaning,” she said, “Floors.”
Later Farrell thought that she might have gotten away with it, except for the kiss. McManus blinked after her and seemed to slump into himself, rubbing his jaw and mumbling, actually beginning to turn away. Then his hand brushed the place where Suzy had kissed him, and without a word, he turned and swung the gun up at arm’s length, pointing it at her back.
Farrell shouted, and Suzy looked back and cried out, “Mother, help me!” The shot sounded like a baseball bat slamming down on the living room floor. Farrell went over the coffee table, but McManus was down before he reached him, clutching his leg and wailing in a kind of terrible gargle. The room smelled of badly burned toast. Suzy started toward her husband, almost stepping on the pistol as she did so, and then halted, as frozen as a deer in headlights, looking past Farrell. Sia was on the stair.
She was wearing a long, flowered dress that hung on her like a tablecloth, and she carried a red plastic comb in her right hand. The air tightened on Farrell as he stared at her, trapping him as if in thrashed, sweated bedsheets. Her face was without expression, her voice small and colorless when she said to McManus, “Stand up. Stand up on your feet.” Her own feet were bare, wide, and quite clearly as flat as bread boards.
“He can’t.” Suzy protested. “He’s hurt himself, he needs a doctor.” She knelt beside the gasping, whimpering McManus, trying to keep his hands from the wound. The small distant voice said, “Stand up,” and Farrell felt the two words grind together like millstones. McManus stopped crying.
“Stand up,” Sia said once more, and McManus climbed upright and stayed there somehow, his open, straining mouth making him look as if he were waiting to belch. The bullet had apparently gone through the calf of his leg; there was comparatively little blood. He moved his lips weakly, saying, “The gun.”
“Go away,” the voice said. “Never come near this house again. Never come near her again. She is under my protection, and if you trouble her, you will die. She is one of mine. Go now.”
Again Suzy declared, “Oh, he can’t, don’t you see he can’t walk? We have to call a doctor.” But Sia gave no sign of having heard; she moved her disheveled head slightly, and McManus, as if on wires, made a single lurching hop toward the door. His face was as white and wet as cottage cheese, and the reek of his pain burned in Farrell’s nostrils.
A plump figure appeared in the living room doorway, trailed by a tiptoeing Briseis. Farrell recognized the man as one of Sia’s more wistful clients. He said, “The front door was open, so I just,” peering at the scene with a ruminant’s unfocused near-interest. Nothing in his round, freckled face, puckered thinly like an aging balloon, suggested even momentarily that he smelled gunpowder or saw the smashed lamp or any blood.
Farrell, Suzy, and McManus gaped silently at him, but Sia nodded calmly, saying in her normal voice, “Hello, Robert, just go on along.” She stepped aside to let him by, and he went up the stairs without looking back. No one spoke or moved until the door of Sia’s office rattled overhead.
Suzy went to support McManus, but he pushed her away violently, summoning all his numbed vitality to make himself step toward Sia. Over his shoulder he said to Suzy, “You better go on up there, baby, the man’s waiting.” Farrell fully expected to see him lunge barehanded up the stairs at Sia; his voice was slow with pain, and with the loneliness of great hatred, and he looked at Sia fearlessly. “One of yours,” he said. “Yeah, I bet she’s picked up a few new tricks since you’ve had her. Hey, I’d pay to learn them, I can pay.”
The good leg buckled under him—though Farrell saw nothing that could have made him slip—and he crashed to his knees before Sia at the foot of the stair. Sia neither moved nor spoke. Farrell smelled wet earth, wet crushed grass, something like coffee, something like the fur of a dead animal. He heard a whimpering, took it first for Briseis, and then understood that the sound was happening in his own throat. He could not make it stop.
This was nothing like the reflected image he had seen of the huge woman with the dog’s head. Sia herself was hardly there at all; she seemed to thin and dwindle almost to transparency, even in Farrell’s mind. But for one truly unbearable moment—one instant in which names for things had not yet been invented—he was more aware of her presence than he ever had been of his own. He felt her breathing in the stairs and in the old floor under his feet; she surrounded him with her walls and her rooms, moving in the stones of the fireplace, looking at him from the pieces of the broken lamp, speaking in the sunlight’s darting scrawl across the living room rug. Beyond the house, there was only more of her, no least refuge inside himself, for she was that place, too, laughing in his bones, teasing his atoms to make them rattle in the dark like dice. However he turned, he fell toward her, terribly content.
Beside him, McManus crouched lower and lower, his limbs spraddling as if a great foot were crushing him to earth. As Farrell watched, the weight seemed to release him, and he rose slowly and half hopped, half hobbled toward the front door, drawing in his breath with every step. Suzy started to follow, but the woman on the stair looked at her, and she put her hands to her mouth and went into the kitchen. Farrell heard McManus stumbling and cursing wearily under a window, and then the sound of the Pontiac’s engine.
“I couldn’t see what happened,” he said. “With the gun.” Sia smiled at him in mild puzzlement. Farrell said, “She called you mother.”
Sia plucked at the front of her dress, the nervous habit of a heavy woman. “I must go up to poor Robert,” she said. “He will spend half our time now apologizing for coming in without knocking. Such a strange arrogance they have, the timid ones; how they peep at themselves.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, having had a cold for two days.
Farrell watched her hoisting herself up the steps one at a time, pausing on the landing to sigh angrily, as she always did. Briseis came to shove her muzzle into his hand, and Farrell petted her, saying absently, “It’s all right, don’t be scared.” But Briseis smelled the gunshot and the blood, and she simply lay down flat, too overcome by human confusions even to whine. Farrell said, “Don’t think about it, that’s all. Just be a dog, that’s what I’m doing.” He took her outside to sit on the front steps, where she found her favorite ragged beach towel and killed it several times, while he played some of Henry VIII’s songs for her.