DOUGLAS CLEGG

BREEDER

 
 
 
 
 PROLOGUE
 
 THE SCREAMING HOUSE
 
 1.
 
 April 1968
 
 The girl could still taste the kerosene on her lips.

 Her name was Nadine and she had been feverish for the past four nights. The decision had not been made by her, but by her lover. She hadn't wanted to go through with it; she had no energy to resist. Just the throbbing pain, the leaking blood. If she'd been coherent, this seventeen-year-old girl would've told them that her baby was going to be all right, that she knew the baby would be all right, even if she herself died. She was not afraid of death if it meant her baby would breathe and grow.

 She lay down in something cool and hard like stone, a large basin. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and soap; the odor of kerosene and vinegar still lingered. The perfume of death or of birth? Above her were the most beautiful dark eyes she'd ever seen, so warm and cool at the same time; eyes that looked into her to find the root of this pain, this illness. Her own vision wavered, and the world around her became transparent, empty, as she tried to look beyond this shadowy room, through these beautiful eyes into another existence, into a dream where there was no pain. She saw no faces in the room, only eyes, only hands, only lips curling in smiles and anger.

Someone above her, a white hand, wiped her brow with a cold, wet hand towel. Nadine shivered; it was like ice on her forehead. These people surrounding her in this small room were no more substantial than the dreams she had at night: she thought she could pass her hand through them like ghosts. Who was here with her? Who would help with the birth of her child?

A man, her lover she thought, said, "The whole fucking block's going up. What the hell's this going to do to property values?"
 

But the man to whom the beautiful eyes belonged, the man who watched over her as the spasms hit, grasped her hand as she tried to pass her fingers through him. "Have faith, your child shall be born." His large black hand seemed to swallow hers alive like a hawk devouring a fish. She felt his pulse - a pounding drum. It beat steadily, hopefully against the ever weakening sound of her own heart.

 Where was her mother? Her mother had promised to stay with her. To hold her hand the way this man held her hand. Her mother's hand was warmer than this man's, warmer and softer, open, unfolding. Her mother was there among the smoky shadows, but why wasn't she beside Nadine now? Why would a mother hide from her daughter?

 Her lover, out in that misty darkness of the room, muttered, "Jesus, do you think this could go a little faster?"

 "Baron Samedi," Nadine gasped. It was a plea; the pain was clutching the baby inside her, the room was dislodging itself from the earth and running away, her womb would burst with overripe, fermented fruit. "Baron Samedi, I pray . . ."

 Her lover whispered, "I'm not going to wait around here for some lunatic to shoot out the window!"

 "Please," Nadine gasped to the woman she could not see who stood above her. Her ribs were chafing against her skin as if they longed to break free of her.

 She knew then that she was going to die. She wasn't scared, not with the man with the dark eyes holding her, leaning toward her. They called him Baron Samedi, guardian of the graveyards and the dead. She did not believe, not like her mother believed, but if it saved her baby, Nadine would, if he could save her baby . . .

 The man above her grinned. His teeth seemed huge, but that was her fever. His teeth seemed to be coming down for her, down for her baby, down to find the place inside her where her baby's heart beat.

 Her lover screamed, "Fucking animals is what you are!"

 Then her mother (She's here! She's with me! She will protect me!) screamed, "My baby, what you doin' to my baby girl?"

 Then Nadine felt and heard nothing.

 Her breathing stopped and what little life there was in her empty body ran out in a warm, red pool from between her legs.
 
 2.
 
 April 1989
 
 "Maybe it's a blessing in disguise," Hugh whispered. "Maybe it's just as well. Scout."

 Rachel knew that he wasn't about to do his Let's Pretend line: Let's Pretend, Scout, that you're the mommy and I'm the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, an acre of kiddos, and I'm coming home from work at the end of a hard day and you're exhausted and we sit up and read them bedtime stories 'til they fall asleep . . . Nope, Let's Pretend went out the window when you got a miscarriage in the family. A blessing in disguise. She'd cried for three weeks over this particular blessing, soon followed by a therapist, two group sessions a day for three weeks, a psychiatrist, a brief (and less than heavenly) flirtation with antidepressants. She still kept the leftover pills in a shoe box beneath the bathroom sink on the off chance that she might get the urge to jump out a window again. It had been great fun, if useless, getting all the medical attention over what she basically felt was a fact of Normal Life (lots of nice folks have miscarriages, although Rachel herself didn't seem to know any of them). And even if she did start crying every time she saw babies, or when she accidentally wandered into the baby supply area of Dart Drug and caught herself buying Pampers, or in Safeway picking up Gerber's baby chicken. Only her work seemed to keep her from forgetting what Hugh had called "a minor glitch."

 "It's just as well," Hugh said (had said, would continue to say).

 Rachel hated him for that and also loved him for that; he even promised he would make it up to her, that he would kiss it and make it better, that this was a blow, certainly, no one would deny how tragic it was, but couldn't they turn it around? Couldn't they try to see it as a momentary setback, but in the long run an advantage? Wouldn't there be things to compensate?

 She didn't really hear him say all this. She heard the words the way she would listen to the radio while ironing or eating breakfast. Instead she wondered if she really wanted to be married at all, except to have children; how she could've just lived with Hugh and that would've been enough, except she'd been pregnant, except she'd wanted a child, and now for some reason that child had chosen not to be born of her.

 "Nature took care of it, Scout, it must be for the better. You have to try and see it that way," Hugh droned on, and no doubt her doctor had prepped him on the sorts of lines to feed her, and she loved him for it, and she despised him for these spineless rationalizations, but she loved him, too.

 She loved him because when she didn't love him she hated herself and remembered the other woman, the one who was dead. Hugh's first wife.
 
 Hugh always emphasized that they weren't financially ready for a baby, not yet, his feet weren't on the ground, he still had to try the bar for one more go 'round, his job as a consultant in a tax lawyer's office was only for six months and would be over soon, and how could she really afford to leave her firm so soon, anyway? Just a year or so at the outside and then, yes, a whole litter of babies if you want, so you see it's just as well. Although Hugh wouldn't say babies, because it was a word they both avoided.

 He would blanket her with hugs and kisses while she turned her face into the pillow. It's not a baby, it's just a little sphere, a little subdividing sphere, a glitch in the system.

 Rachel loved her husband then and hated him more than she'd ever hated anyone; and she hated her body for betraying her like that.

 
 * * *
 
 Later, when she was feeling less tired and Hugh brought in a large bowl of ice cream, he told her about the house his father was giving them as a late wedding present.

 Rachel sniffed at the ice cream as if smelling it might make her feel better. What I really want is a cigarette, but I guess I'll just get healthy and fat.

 She was purposefully trying not to act too excited about getting the house. That would kill it if she acted too excited; perhaps her excitement had killed her little sphere, too. Hugh didn't like it when she was enthusiastic; he didn't trust liking anything too much. She said, "See, your dad's coming around, I knew he would."

 Hugh didn't respond. He pretended to read the paper; chocolate ice cream on his upper lip. She knew that he had only accepted the gift as a means of compensating for the miscarriage. This was part of Hugh Adair's sense of fair play, and which Rachel knew was the underlying reason he had trouble with the concept of being a lawyer: fair play was rarely involved. He thrived on frustrating himself. He wanted very little to do with his father, but he would accept the house for Rachel's sake, and then get numerous headaches concerning how miserable he was knowing he'd let the Old Man, as he called his father, buy them this way.

 For a split second Rachel considered that she could avoid a lot of trouble about this wonderful if tardy wedding gift by simply saying, "Oh, Hugh, let's wait until we can really afford a house on our own terms. Let's not have the Old Man lording it over us, let's not compromise our integrity.

 But it was only a split second, and then Rachel came to her senses.

 She put the bowl of ice cream aside. "Our very first house. Is it in a good neighborhood?"
 
 PART ONE
 
 WHERE
 THE HEART IS
 
 JUNE
 
 ONE
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS
 
 1.
 
 She walked ahead of Hugh, through the alley, stepping over broken glass, around a trash heap. This side of the house was in constant shadow, this wall looked more like old plaster than stone, and the only window onto the alley was small and bricked over. Well, who wants to look out their window and see an alley full of trash and the wall of the next building over, anyway? When she reached the Hammer Street side of the house, facing the park, she waited for Hugh. In the park she saw a little boy and girl playing what seemed to be a game of freeze tag: Where was their mother? How could a woman let her children run through a city park like that all by themselves? This wasn't the worst or the best neighborhood in Washington, D.C., but it was getting better; even so, how could anyone take a chance like that?

 The oaks had burst with heavy green branches, and there was a breeze; the heat hadn't exploded yet as it would in just a week or two. It was a quiet street. That was good. Just after rush hour and the sound of traffic from two streets over was just white noise. A jogger went by and waved, and Hugh came up behind her and said, "I saw a rat in the alley."

 "Good. If he stays outside the house we'll all get along fine."

 She hadn't looked at the house yet.

 Our house.

 She wanted Hugh to be with her, she wanted to see it clearly, she wanted it to be as if she had closed her eyes and then opened them to see our house. They'd driven by it three times before, she'd jogged by it once, but more to gauge the neighborhood, get a feel for the potholes and what parking was like along Hammer Street. When she'd glanced at the house before she'd just thought of it as a house, not as our house.

 Rachel Adair turned with her husband and faced the house that was now theirs.
 
 2.
 
 Rachel's first sight of the front of the house in Northwest Washington was not a pleasant one: a middle-aged black woman, a bag lady from the park with her grocery cart full of trash, was squatting down near the stone steps urinating on the sidewalk. The woman was fat and moved like a Jell-O mold, wiggling down on her haunches - she pissed a stream that would apparently flow right to Rachel's Reeboks. Rachel and Hugh both looked away - up to the turret, across to the park, to the taxi pulled over on the other side of the street. When Rachel glanced back to the house, the bag lady was gone, vanished, and all that remained of her was the drying urine on the sidewalk.

 City living. Rachel forgot about the bag lady and looked at her new home.

 It was a simple nineteenth-century stone house - resembling every other townhouse on that side of Hammer Street, just off Winthrop Park with Kalorama and its embassies on the opposite side of Connecticut Avenue; on the other side, a shady avenue of shabby redbrick buildings that seemed to have been bombed out all the way back to Eighteenth Street. This block was the border between a good neighborhood and a bad one, the shade from the park marking the line between them. The house was gray and tall and thin, with a beard of ivy along its edge; three stories high, the bottom one, almost a basement, a separate apartment. It looked like it had once been a longer house but was sliced at the side just along the turret; the house attached to one side of it was a plain, white box-shaped house, obviously new - someone had torn down part of Rachel's house (our house) on one side, someone had been dissatisfied with their half of the old stone house and decided to build that ugly white thing instead with the chain-link fence in front and that threatening face of a doberman just behind the side glass of the front door.

 "I always dreamed I'd live in a house like this," Rachel said, turning her attention back to her new home. Hugh led the way up the stone steps. Rachel touched the thick carved stone post beside the door: it was cold, and felt good.

 Beside the front door, the brass plaque which her father-in-law had finagled out of the city government: historic houses commission. draper house was built by the architect julian marlowe in 1822. Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous story, "premature burial" in the turret room while residing as a guest.

 "One of the Old Man's vanities," Hugh pointed out. "Poe did stay here when it was a hotel or something, for a weekend, but it's doubtful he wrote any stories while he was here. He probably played some all-night poker games and recovered from hangovers the rest of the time. But the Old Man has always been an ace at perpetrating lies."

 "A house with a name."

 "A full name, too. The Rose Truthful Draper House, the architect's mistress. I've heard old Rosie was a wild one."

 "In what way?" Rachel asked, but at that point Hugh lifted the heavy door knocker and let it fall. It sounded like a hammer coming down on a bullet - Rachel winced at the noise, covering her ears. "Jesus."

 "Sorry, Scout, just testing." Hugh reached in the pockets of his khakis for the front-door key. "How many keys can this place have, you may well ask." He held up a large key ring with several keys dangling from it. He pointed them out: "This one's for the front door, the downstairs hall door, this is for . . . I think the patio, and this one - I don't know, maybe the back gate. I guess we'll find that out. And this little piggy," he jangled a small key, "goes wee-wee-wee all the way home."

 Rachel wasn't listening to him. "Did you hear that?"

 "Huh?"

 "Nothing."

 "Was it a cat? The woman who rents the downstairs apartment has cats, I think. She's either a psycho or a psychic, I get those two confused."

 Yes, Rachel thought, cats mewling for milk, kittens searching for their mother. I'm not going crazy after all. It's not babies. Just because I lost a baby - a sphere - doesn't mean I'm going to hallucinate about it. Cats, yep, sounds good to me.

 Then she heard it again, the sound, and for just a second she thought she saw Hugh blink twice having heard the baby crying. But she'd been thinking of babies since the humidity had risen, babies at her breasts, babies at her ankles, babies floating among the clouds. Babies were everywhere she looked. Why does it surprise me that I think I hear them? This is what the doctor said: "You'll notice that everyone has babies except you, you'll think that somehow you're built differently from other women, that you're unnatural, but don't believe it. Miscarriages are as natural as deliveries. Rachel, you lose this one, well, somewhere down the road you'll have another." Yep. Doctor, you play the Let's Pretend game just like my husband does.

 Hugh opened the door to the inner hall. "To the dark tower, Scout."

 But the baby crying: it sounded like it came from beneath the stones of the porch, right beneath her feet.
 
 TWO
 
 INTERIOR
 
 1.
 
 They met the downstairs tenant, Mrs. Deerfield, briefly - Rachel barely got a glimpse of her when the older woman opened her door, leaving the chain on. All Rachel caught of her were blue eyes, pale wrinkled skin, and a shock of blond hair the color and texture of dry hay. And a strong whiff of either cleaning fluid or alcohol. Paint was peeling on the apartment door. We've got our work cut out for us.

 "Just got out of the bath, dears," Mrs. Deerfield said. "Come round to the patio." Rachel shook the damp hand before it slipped back behind the closing door.

 "Veddy British," Rachel said low enough so as not to be overheard.

 Hugh raised his eyebrows. "Like Mary Poppins gone to seed." He unlocked the inner door that led to the upstairs. "Voilą," he said, flinging the door open.

 Rachel went quickly through the house assessing the damage; the dark blue wallpaper in the bathroom which should come down, the track lighting that didn't complement the wonderful nineteenth-century flavor of the house, the layer of grease on the stove and oven. Two bedrooms on the top floor, one bath on each floor, the bannister was a little rickety - would need repair but not right away - the living room was long and with a high ceiling, and that wonderfully large manor house fireplace set like a cave into the wall, the kitchen was small, not much room to turn around in, but the dining room was large, and there was the patio for summer entertaining. She ran up and down the stairs, shouting out to Hugh to come up and see this small room that would be perfect for a den. At the living room, the house twisted in an L, and Rachel clutched Hugh's hand as they went down the narrow hallway.

 "Secret passages," Hugh said.

 "Don't you think this is a weird layout? From the alley it didn't look like it went this way at all."

 "I'm not sure, but I think when the block was divided into separate residences the divisions made their own geometric messes of things."

 "So dark," she said, "when you can just see this place was made for light - they've practically boarded it up." She went and pulled a heavy curtain back from one of the second-floor hall windows. She wrote her initials in the dust on the pane.

 "It's so stuffy - Hugh, come see if you can open this one."

 Leaving Hugh to struggle with the windowpane, Rachel walked towards the room at the end of the hall. The door was shut; Rachel played with the doorknob until it came off in her hand. She set it on the floor. "This must be . . ." She pressed her shoulder up against the door and shoved.

 "Yes!" The door swung open, slamming against the wall. "My favorite: the turret room."
 
 The room was a semicircle, dark and cold even in the hot summer. It reminded her of a dungeon, its airless darkness conjuring up images of torture chamber paraphernalia: thumbscrews, iron maidens, bone-stretching devices, steel fetters. On the other hand, it also reminded her of the basement apartment she and Hugh lived in but without the tacky gold wallpaper. Instead, the room was plastered with tacky dark wallpaper - a design that was supposed to be peacock tail feathers in a paisley swirl, but which looked more like a thousand eyes staring out of a coal mine. The curtains blocking the sunlight were a dusky shade of purple, ragged and moth-eaten, dragging across the dirty floor. She shivered just looking at the room, but her mind was already working: with some white drapes, strip the wallpaper, a paint job, some good old-fashioned scrubbing, it would be the friendliest room in the house. But who the hell wants to do all that work?

 The window was convex and enormous, like a curved screen around the turret; with the curtains drawn back it must take in a panoramic view of the park. Rachel pictured a window seat with cushions - a place to read books and sip tea on Sunday afternoons. Yes, this would be her favorite room.

 "This will be the nursery," Rachel said mostly to herself, thinking Hugh was out of earshot; she said it like a prayer, like she knew it would never come true. She swept stale dusty air back with her left hand; she felt a sneeze coming on. Her wedding ring, loosening with the summer humidity, slid off her finger and clanked to the floor, reminding her again of thumbscrews and chains. She squatted down, balancing herself with one hand on the floor, the other reaching for the ring. She picked it up, but felt a stinging in her thumb: not from an imaginary thumbscrew, however, but from a splinter fresh from the floorboards. She nursed her thumb before plucking the offending bit of wood out from between her thumbnail and skin. A small period of red appeared there, just under the nail. She pressed her thumb against her lips to stop the flow of blood.

 "Oh, Scout," Hugh sighed, sounding defeated; he must've heard her little prayer, her mention of the word nursery, which was innocent enough as words went. Hugh would go and think she was making herself sad again, thinking about the child she hadn't been able to carry. He didn't seem to understand about hope. She wanted to tell him then that she wasn't going to start crying just because she'd thought of a baby-related term. You don't mourn the death of something that's barely eight weeks conceived do you? It's not even a baby, it's just a little sphere.

 Hugh gave up the struggle to open the hall window and came down into the turret room to her.

 Since her miscarriage in the spring, he'd kept emphasizing how right and natural it had been to lose the baby, and how we're not prepared for parenthood, and when it's right we'll know. There were subjects they didn't talk about anymore, jokes they didn't make. Life was becoming a serious business in which spheres did not subdivide into babies.

 Hugh came up to her and drew her to him, enveloped her. She liked that feeling of being inside his arms. It made her think he desired her, and she could momentarily forget that he had ever been in love with anyone else, had begun to raise a family with that other woman - that other woman who was able to give him more than Rachel had been able to. That other woman, four months pregnant, who was dead and buried.

 The other woman (wife, damn it, his first wife - why can't you even admit it?) to whom Rachel was constantly comparing herself. There was Joanna, beautiful, pure, and obviously fertile. And then there's me: making plans to steal her husband away even as Joanna's Volvo was being demolished by a drunken driver. Always, always we pay for our sins - even the not-so-nice Catholic girls who don't really believe in sin, only in stupid decisions.

 Hugh went over to the turret window, his loafers clicking like angry beetles against the echoing floor. He pulled the drapes apart; Rachel heard some of the material rip. Light flooded the room through the snowstorm of dust that blew off the curtains. The sunlight was almost too bright. Rachel squinted for an instant - she'd gotten used to the heavy darkness of the house as they'd been going through it, room to room. "These windows haven't been washed in years. You know how much work we're going to have to put into this house? It's not going to be like the apartment."

 "Good thing. It'll be nice to have something that's ours."

 "Famous last words." Hugh twisted his head around and arched his eyebrows. Hugh Adair could do things like that and it would mean something to her - it was the one thing they'd developed over the past two years, that sort of ESP that came from living with someone. Rachel often wondered if Hugh and his first wife ever had that.

 "Well, it is ours. A gift is a gift." She didn't want her chin to look so set and determined. She didn't mean it as the challenge that Hugh might understand it to be: but there it was, in her chin, in the steady gaze of her brown eyes. Her chestnut brown bangs needed a trim, but she was happy she hadn't gotten one yet. Rachel felt her hair suitably hid her eyebrows which were forming this statement into a question: It is ours, isn't it? You're a lawyer, you know how to be assertive, if you can do it in court you can do it at home.

 Rachel was hoping he wouldn't go off into one of his despairing moods about accepting the wedding gift from his father again. She was glad her father-in-law was going out of his way to prove to them that he did finally approve of the marriage. Rachel kept trying to drum it into her husband's skull that someday he would reconcile himself with his father, and the less he had to regret about his behavior to the Old Man, the better.

 There was a momentary silence in the house as they stood there; silence filtered through dust. Behind the silence and the dust, Rachel wondered what other people thought, what other couples meant when they weren't speaking. "I want to scream." That must be what other couples thought when they had nothing to say, Rachel thought as she watched Hugh's face: the lines that hadn't been there two minutes ago. He's thinking about the sphere, too, but he's not thinking about it the way I am. He's thinking about it with relief. I want to scream but I won't scream because you won't love me if I scream. Someone was honking their car horn in the alley, breaking through the brief silence. She smiled because she didn't want this to be a depressing repeat of the past year. "Do you think that Mrs. Deerfield will still rent downstairs when we move in?"

 "We can't really ask her to move, can we? We'd be doing the kind of thing the Old Man does when he thinks a neighborhood, like this one I might add, is ripe for gentrification. Kick the poor people out and bring on the yuppies." He tended to snap whenever he talked about anyone in his family. The front of Hugh's red T-shirt was blotched with sweat; his sandy blond hair was swept back in a shiny wave across his forehead, softening his aquiline features.

 "You are a yuppie, previously a preppie. The enemy is us. But I think it'll be nice to have someone living beneath us."

 Hugh went back to tugging at the window. "How. Comfortable. Will. You," Hugh grunted in between his attempts, "feel . . . having a woman living in the basement who in her last life was a princess in the lost city of Atlantis?" Again, he gave up his fight with the window.

 "Just great - if she likes the vibes here, and she pays the rent on the first of the month. It won't hurt the budget, will it? And I won't mind the company, either."

 "But," Hugh said jokingly, "I thought you were going to be too busy fixing this place up, and then let's not even mention your conventional seventy-hour workweek."

 "Oh, I know, I know, but there are those coffee breaks. Mom told me that her first few years of marriage she just had lunch with the girls and went shopping," Rachel sighed.

 "Recherche du temps perdu," Hugh chuckled. "This is what law school did for you, it made you want things you can't have."

 For a second, Rachel thought: you asshole. Hugh.
 
 2.
 
 She'd thought that when she first met him - you asshole, back when she was still Rachel Brennan and trying not to flunk out of law school. Although they had not exactly met, formally. She was working on the law review and Hugh edited it. Her father was dying of lung cancer, so she was taking most weekends and going home. This left little time for her law review duties, which included refiling material she used, and the editor, Hugh Adair, sent her a memo:
 
 Ms. Brennan,
 It seems that some of the staff have not been attending to their more clerical duties with regards to the review. Among the neglected dead are filing, returning office supplies to the supply room, and a veritable graveyard of notes which have not been trashed. (Are they valuable? Should we start an archives for your research?) Perhaps if your office skills need sharpening, we can provide a refresher course in orderliness.
 I hope this memo is sufficient.
 Thank you,
 Hugh Adair, Editor-in-Chief
 
 The words that had formed in her mind were not just you asshole, but prick as well.
 Rachel had seen Hugh in a few other classes, but did not know the handsome man with the winning smile was the same geek who wrote the officious memo. She wrote back to him:
 
 Dear Mr. Editor,
 Thank you for the delightful reading. It really made my life, honest. How kind of you to fire such knowing bullets my way. How compassionate of you to take into account the extenuating circumstances of my having to return home on the weekends and some weekdays for my father's last hours on this earth, to say nothing of the fact that a few of us have to work our way through law school while others sit on their asses while daddy pays off all those nasty credit card bills. If you want a secretary, I would be happy to apply for the position assuming, unlike the work many of us do on the review, secretarial work is PAID.

 Again, thank you for such a COMPASSIONATE and MOTIVATING memo. I promise to be a good Girl Scout from here on in.

 Warmly,
 Ms. Brennan
 
 The next day, Rachel received this brief note:
 
 Scout,
 Well, I guess this means lunch is out.
 The Big Bad Editor
 
 This struck her as funny - Rachel had a horrible time bearing a grudge, particularly when in the back of her mind she knew he was right. She had sloppy work habits. She was sure that her only salvation would come in a job where she had her own secretary to handle filing and neatness, because she was a mess. And then a good healthy dose of Catholic guilt had gotten the better of her. She'd been calling Hugh an asshole to everyone within earshot, and she felt bad about it.

 So one Sunday, she returned early from seeing her father, walked right up to Hugh and said: "Lunch would be great."

 "And you are? . . ."

 "A good Girl Scout."

 She immediately saw his wedding ring. That was one of the first things she looked for in a man, that or a tan line where he'd removed the ring. For some reason married men had always been attracted to her, and single men were not interested. Rachel rarely dated.

 "You're married," she said.

 "It's just lunch," he told her. "I'm not only married, I'm, wonder of wonders, happily married. Can't an editor ask one of his staffers to lunch? I promise not to seduce you."
 Too bad, she'd thought.
 
 3.
 
 "Penny for your thoughts," Hugh said. He stood in silhouette against the blinding sunlight that filtered through the dust-streaked window.

 Rachel kissed him. I want to scream, she was thinking, but she knew this was not exactly the thought he wanted to hear.

 He held her tightly, and she looked out the dirty window, down on the park where a woman played catch with her three children while their father opened a picnic basket.

 "It's so damn humid." Hugh sounded as annoyed as Rachel now felt.

 Rachel tugged herself free from him. She went over to the other window in the hall. She pulled upwards on the sill, and managed to open the window. "There," she said, looking out over the patio and the alley behind the house, "get some fresh air in here. Hello down there!" she shouted in a singsong friendly voice, and then turning to Hugh, said, "Mrs. Deerfield looks so lonely, let's go down to the patio and be neighborly."
 

 THREE
 
 MRS. DEERFIELD
 
 "You believe in omens?" Mrs. Deerfield asked. Her British accent was like thick clotted cream. Rachel noticed she had trouble pronouncing her l's; it sounded like she'd said "beweev."

 "Good or bad?" Rachel produced a grin which made her feel uncomfortably phony. She had succeeded in dragging Hugh downstairs and outside to examine the split-level patio. Half of the patio was for the benefit of the lower apartment, and was defined by a neat brick rectangle under the wrought-iron staircase. Mrs. Deerfield was sitting at a small table beneath the shade of the stairs, drinking what Rachel thought was tea, but which Mrs. Deerfield assured her was a mug of Kahlua and milk. She offered a mug to Rachel as she came down the stairs ahead of Hugh. Rachel checked her watch: yes, it was only ten a.m. She shook her head to the offer of the liqueur.

 "Well," Mrs. Deerfield said, "this omen is particularly good. My Ramona vomited a hairball."

 The real estate woman had warned them that Penelope Deerfield was an odd bird who had been living in the basement apartment since before First Properties had begun handling it.
 Mrs. Deerfield must've been in her early sixties, and her hair was dyed a golden yellow, worn long to her shoulders as if she were still a young girl. Hugh said later, rather cruelly Rachel thought, "She looks like a drag queen waiting to happen." Her heavily mascaraed eyes were of that clear translucent blue that always seemed to be looking over your shoulder, or through you. She wore a silk dressing gown with a red gold Oriental print, its darted edges revealing a pink calf-length slip beneath.

 Mrs. Deerfield was so short that she appeared to be clinging to the table to keep from shrinking any further, and her hands were small like a child's.

 Rachel pretended to be examining the perimeter of the patio, testing the gray wooden gate for sturdiness. She was afraid if she stared too long at Mrs. Deerfield it would be rude, and yet she was fascinated by the diminutive woman.

 At the mention of the name Ramona, Hugh called down from the iron landing at the top of the stairs, "You have a daughter, then, Mrs. Deerfield?"

 Mrs. Deerfield, ignoring his comment, continued. "Ramona is a Himalayan of distinct breeding, and she rarely has hairballs, but it is a good sign I think that this should happen on the day you will be moving in. I have a talent for the interpretation of such events. Omens, dreams, portents, new landlords. We have a ghost, you know. That's right, one of the early occupants of the house. She's harmless, of course, makes some noise now and again. Rose Draper, it seems, is still waiting for her lover to return home. But ghosts are attention getters, aren't they? Like little children, they just want someone to watch them, to know they exist."

 Rachel nodded pleasantly not understanding what in God's name she was talking about; but just the idleness of the monologue was a delight, nothing about torts, briefs, or depositions. Just pure talk for talk's sake.

 "May I inquire as to my . . . status, in this present situation, Mrs. Adair?" Mrs. Deerfield's voice acquired a curious drop as she spoke, as if she were embarrassed to even be asking such a common question.

 "Call me Rachel, I still have trouble with the 'Mrs. Adair.'" Rachel, feeling odd standing by the back gate, walked over to the small white table that Mrs. Deerfield draped herself across as she poured out more Kahlua in her mug. Rachel sat down uncertainly in a wobbly wire chair.

 "You sure you won't have a cup? It's just like a milkshake. A grown-up milkshake." Mrs. Deerfield lifted her mug.

 "No thanks." Rachel heard Hugh ahem from above.

 "Well, Rachel, then, the apartment -"

 "Well, I think it would be great if you were able to stay on in your place."

 "About the rent increase . . ." Again that embarrassed dive to the voice, like a child confessing to having wet herself.

 Rachel looked up; she could not see Hugh standing above them, although she saw a bit of his hand clutching the dark, thin bannister. His knuckles were white. "Hugh? There's no increase, is there?"

 Another throat clearing, and Rachel was worried that he might spit. Finally: "No, no. Scout, there's no rent increase. We're all status quo here."

 Mrs. Deerfield reached across the table, patting Rachel on the wrist, "Thank -" but both of them felt it: a shock. Rachel brought her hand away; Mrs. Deerfield kept her arm outstretched. "You're a sensitive."

 "Sometimes too sensitive."

 "No, dear, I mean a sensitive. You're open, to the influence. A small percentage of the world's population is and always has been. Have you ever had any kind of psychic experience?"

 Rachel heard Hugh whisper under his breath, "Sounds like a job interview." She hoped that their tenant didn't hear him. Sitting down on the steps, not bothering to be polite and come join them, he said, "Tell that story your mom always tells."

 "Oh, that's just silly, and anyway I don't think it ever really happened."

 Hugh began speaking for her. "When she was six, in church, she told her mother that the - Scout, you can tell this better than I can."

 Rachel sighed, grinning as if she were embarrassed. "Well, I - oh, this is stupid." But Mrs. Deerfield gazed at her attentively, fascinated. "Well, I wasn't raised really Catholic, but we went to mass at Christmas and Easter, and during one of these Christmas services, I apparently went up to the altar. There was this figure of Mary and the baby Jesus, and I started petting the baby's head and told it not to cry. 'Don't cry, baby Jesus, don't cry.' Something like that. I wouldn't classify that as anything occult."

 Mrs. Deerfield's face became pinched; she nodded her head as if thinking of something else. "When we're in the right place at the right time, and when we are the right person, sensitive to these things, it can happen. I'm of the opinion that these things are perfectly normal phenomena that simply haven't yet been explained."

 Rachel was barely listening to her - she was thinking of that other time. "And then with daddy."

 "Oh, Scout," she heard Hugh's voice as if from a great distance.

 "After he died - two years ago - I was still in law school. I didn't know he was dead; mom didn't even know. I went back to our apartment between classes and this sounds really dumb, but the lazy susan in the pantry started spinning, just a little. And then I saw him - just for a second. Like an afterimage. Like the second before someone leaves a room, and you blink, and they're gone and you're not sure if you saw them or not. I heard him say something, in my head - you know how you know someone so well that your mind can even reproduce their voice? All he said was, 'It's done, sweetie, but mom'll need your help.' I knew he was dead. And then ten minutes later, mom called in tears." Rachel was thinking how much she wouldn't mind lighting a cigarette up right then. What little breeze there had been wafting between the alleyways had died, and she smelled something bad, something decomposing. It must've come from the dumpster out back by the car. The odor of rotting meat. I am not going to start crying. If I start crying, Hugh's going to think I am losing it again the way I lost it over the miscarriage, and I am not losing it. If I keep talking, I will lose it, but if I just shut up like a good Girl Scout . . .

 Mrs. Deerfield perked up suddenly, as if injected with vitality. "You are special, dear, I'm sure of it."

 "I've always thought so," Hugh said from the stairs. Rachel looked back to Mrs. Deerfield and felt such compassion emanating from the woman that she felt okay. The moment had passed. Just don't start talking about hearing babies crying anywhere close by or you will be certifiable.

 Mrs. Deerfield smiled, revealing an impossibly crooked overbite and an enormous gap between her front teeth. Her blue eyes became devilish slits as she said, "You are a nice young couple, aren't you?"

 "What were the former tenants like?"

 "Ooh!" She shivered as if recalling the taste of a particularly sour medicine. "Horrible, unnatural persons, sexual perversions night and day, loud music, parties. It tested me, it certainly did, their friends tramping across my little garden, their foul language, the orgies, and worst of all, Rachel," and at this, she leaned over the table almost knocking the mug and bottle over, clutching Rachel's hand in her own tiny Deerfield fingers, "worst of all, most obscene," Mrs. Deerfield's eyes widened like a television tube warming up from a pinpoint to a nineteen-inch screen, "they hated cats."