The porch was empty.
“Bloody kids,” Mavis muttered.
She stood still a moment, looking out. The swollen joints of her elbows had begun to ache again, and the damp didn’t help. But the street slept on, nothing stirring beneath the surface of its uncanny calm. At length, she turned away.
A nice cup of tea, she thought. That’ll set me right.
The kitchen clock read 1:18 when she opened the door, and saw them.
The man who’d saved her, that night in 1943, was Allie Hennenlotter—tall, handsome devil-may-care Allie. He gave her his name, a child and a fresh start in a new country. He also turned out to be just the kind of shiftless drunk Clara’d always said he was. Refusing a battlefield commission because he didn’t want to leave his drinking buddies behind, he dragged her out to Saskatchewan and parked her on his father’s farm while he pursued a series of low-paying jobs he couldn’t hold long enough to send her a quarter of what she and Eileen needed to live on.
Even so, it took her three years to leave him.
She fled to Toronto, losing him in the crowd. When her bruises had faded, she applied herself to the task at hand—raising her child right. Took a secretarial job, upgraded her skills through night classes, fended off intermittent offers of marriage or mistresshood with a bland kind of “company” charm that won few friends but made even fewer enemies. She didn’t make much, but all of it went to Eileen, who never showed the slightest bit of gratitude. Not that she’d really expected her too—like father, like daughter.
They fought daily until Eileen was 16, when she ran away to Montreal, with some cockamamie idea of becoming a ballerina. The postcards, far and few between as they were, retained an ever more strained optimism. Still, Mavis wasn’t a bit surprised when her friend Dorothy’s son Kerry saw Eileen dancing topless in a downtown bar.
It proved there was some form of justices in the world.
After that, she marked all of Eileen’s communications “return to sender.”
* * *
“What—?” Mavis began, and stopped in mid-question.
They reared up in front of the stove, blotting out the kitchen light. One great mass of—no, three; three sloping, shrouded heads. They regarded her eyelessly, without judgement. And the rest all just fell away, a grey, jumbled torrent of something that looked a bit like gauze—stained and stiff-streaked with clotted slime—sweeping almost to her own feet.
Their shadow poured over her, stagnant and cold. She held her breath against the smell. The air grew stale and heavy with moisture, as if before a storm.
Then she screamed, almost as an afterthought, and fled.
They followed, keeping a polite distance. A dull, rustling noise trailed in their wake.
She slammed the downstairs bathroom door on it, and paused, panting.
Minutes passed. Mavis met her own eyes in the mirror and grew steadily calmer. No need to rummage for her pills—this was a dream. Those things simply were not there. Could not be.
Would not be, once she’d gotten a hold on herself.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” she told herself, as deliberately as she could. “There is a God. And there are no monsters.”
Eventually, she opened the door and strode forth.
They parted to let her through, giving her a good head start.
* * *
“It was really inevitable, Mrs. Hennenlotter,” that nice doctor—Evans?—but he’d looked a bit Jewish, really—had assured her. “Your daughter was hopelessly in debt, addicted and alone, but too proud to ask for help. Her note blamed no one. In fact, the last sentence merely expressed a hope that you not be too disappointed in her.”
He went on to confirm the funeral arrangements—closed coffin, no reception, donations to Covenant House instead of flowers.
Mavis thanked him and walked home, passing an inordinate amount of baby carriages for that time of year.
* * *
At work, the girls got together on a card. WEEP A WHILE, THEN MOURN NO MORE/I KNOCK AT LAST ON GOD’S GREAT DOOR, it read.
“If you ever need to talk, dear—” Dorothy said.