He was no longer driven by reasoned suspicion, which had availed him little. He was motivated instead by pure and powerful emotion, which was a dangerous but exhilarating path to follow.
| 49 |
Afterward, Maddison switched off the lamp and pressed against him, her head on his chest.
Neither of them spoke for a while. Sometimes no words could translate and well express the language of the heart.
David listened to a night breeze winging down the roof and warbling like doves nesting in the pockets of the eaves.
In a voice hardly louder than a whisper, Maddison said, “I’m a needy creature, Davey.”
“We all are,” he said.
“Me more than most. I need affection. I need it like air. I need to be loved.”
“You are. I love you. I love you very much.”
“I need to be loved every day, every hour. I know so well the loneliness of being unloved. Until you, I’ve been starved for love all my life.”
“Surely not.”
“But I have. Starved. And now I can’t get my fill. Until you, life was . . . a horror.”
The word unsettled him because she spoke with such sincerity.
“Horror? For a girl with your mind, your heart, your charm? How could that ever be?”
For a while, she seemed to be listening to his heart. Then she said, “Loneliness, enduring fear, a sense that society has gone mad and I’m falling, falling through the madness of it. That’s horror enough for me.”
He thought of the thirty-two photographs in her bedroom in the house on Rock Point Lane, which had seemed like evidence of a fan’s obsession. In the light of the word horror and what else she had just said, he wondered if that collection might be something else altogether, something cleaner than obsession, instead an expression of desperate hope. A coldness coiled through David, a chill of responsibility, that she should vest in him all her aspirations.
“I feel safe here,” she said. “Only here. With you. I feel so safe. Tell me it’s forever.”
“I’ll never leave you. This is what I want. It’s all I want.”
“So then say it.”
“Say what?”
She raised her head from his chest to look at him. “Say this is forever, you and me.”
“This is forever.”
“Say it again.”
“This is forever.”
“It better be.”
“It is.”
She searched his eyes. Lowered her head to his chest once more. “It better be. I won’t have anything less. It better be forever.”
Her breathing changed as she drifted off to sleep.
He loved her. He needed her no less than she needed him. Even if there would be no end to the mysteries of her, even if the truth of her remained beyond knowing, she was his destiny. He had sworn his love for her, and he was no longer a callow and confused youth who failed to understand what accommodations and sacrifices a vow demanded. There could be no going back on such a promise, not if he hoped to repair his damaged self-respect. From this night forward, even the most startling revelations must be absorbed, adjusted to.
The latest discovery, during their lovemaking, was that Maddison—though a decade too young to be Emily—had a perfectly symmetrical, flat, golden birthmark the size of a quarter about an inch below her navel.
He remained awake for another troubling hour as Monday became Tuesday, as the world turned through more darknesses than the mere absence of the sun. And then he dreamed.
He is in the house on Rock Point Lane, where the digital clocks in the kitchen appliances are blinking zeros. Suddenly he’s stricken by a fear that the clocks have been counting down to the moment of his death, that his time is up, that a black-robed Reaper will at any moment appear to harvest his life. When he consults his watch, the face of it is blank, without numbers or checks, and the hands are still, pointing to where the number 12 should be, though it is neither noon nor midnight. His heart racing, he hurries room to room through the ground floor, seeking clocks with time still on them, but there are none. Surely there will be bedside alarm clocks. He climbs the stairs, searches the three bedrooms. They are clockless. In Maddison’s room, she stands naked by the bed, regarding him solemnly, and she wears no wristwatch. The thirty-two frames contain no pictures of him, as if he has never existed to be photographed. In terror, he flees the house and is in his Porsche, southbound. He glances at the dashboard clock, which is blinking zeros. When he looks up, no highway lies ahead, only a terrible blackness, a night without moon or stars or sky, and he accelerates into oblivion.