A piercing scream sounds in Annie’s ears, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s not in fact coming from her but from the smoke detector in the ceiling. She checks the oven, seeing the smoke billowing from the door. “Shit,” she says, snatching the oven mitts and retrieving the smoking lasagna. She drops the pan into the sink and turns on the water.
“Seems you got a lot on your plate right now,” Sheehy says. He drains his coffee mug and sets it on the counter. “I gotta say, Mrs. Statler, I admire your faith in your husband. Sure hope this turns out the way you want it to.”
Chapter 34
Sam doesn’t know if he should wake up or stay in the dream, although he can see the advantages to each option. Option one: in the dream, he’s with Annie, in Manhattan, on the corner of University Place and Washington Square Park, five days after he’d asked her to marry him on the front porch of the house for sale in Chestnut Hill. She’d finally said yes, in a text, three hours earlier. Okay fine, she wrote on her way into class. I’ll move to the country and marry you. He was waiting outside Studebaker Hall an hour later. “Honest to god, you’re a walking Nicholas Sparks novel,” she said when she saw him. They sat in silence on the subway back to his apartment, arms linked, lost in the idea of what they were about to do. Emerging from the subway, Annie stopped at the table of a man selling hats and chose something with fake fur around the face. “To prepare me for life on the prairie,” she told the man, handing him a twenty.
Option two: if he wakes up, he can learn what that noise is. A painfully grating noise that’s been assaulting him for the last few hours.
He decides to stay asleep, but then the dream changes, and he’s not on the sidewalk with Annie anymore. He’s walking down a neon-orange hall at Rushing Waters, heading toward his mother’s room. Something tells him not to, but he opens the door anyway. Margaret is alone, sitting in her armchair, waiting for him.
“I don’t want to be here,” he says.
“Of course you don’t, sweetheart,” she says, smiling, her voice like it used to be, before the disease. “Only place you want to be is staring at a reflection of yourself.” She starts to laugh. “You left your wife.”
“No, I didn’t,” he says.
“Yes, you did, Sam. I knew you would. We all knew you would.”
“I didn’t leave her!” Sam screams.
The scraping stops.
A bright light goes on overhead and Albert appears, hazy, shards of yellow paper stuck to his sweatshirt, a shiny knife in his hand.
“Two more hours, Sam,” Albert says, shoveling pills into Sam’s mouth. “Go back to sleep.”
*
Sam’s limbs are immovable, his head aches.
There’s a warm light to the room, and he forces himself to stay awake and pay attention. Something has changed.
He’s in a different room. He raises himself on his elbows, his hips stiff under the weight of the casts, and takes a better look. He’s in the same single bed. The same floral curtains are drawn in front of what he assumes is the same boarded-up window. In the corner of the room, that’s the same closet door.
It’s the yellow wallpaper. It’s been torn from the walls.
He flops back on the mattress, elated. “It’s working,” he whispers. The plan is working. Do what Paul Sheldon did, in Misery: befriend the motherfucker.
Two days now, Sam’s been buttering him up, trying—in the lucid moments between the pills Albert forces upon him every few hours—to earn his trust so he can figure out what the fuck he wants. He wants to kill you. Sam squeezes his eyes shut, sending the thought back into his subconscious. No. If that’s what he wanted, he would have done it already.
He wants to be close to you.
His skin crawls, imagining Albert up here, listening. It makes sense now, at least, how Albert always seemed to know when Sam finished work. Even on the days when Sam tried to slip out, making sure the door didn’t slam behind him, Albert would be there, smiling from the porch, holding two glasses in his hands.
Sam’s been racking his brain for any details Albert’s shared about himself. He tended to zone out as Albert nervously rambled; what he mainly remembers is that Albert knows a surprising number of useless facts about the family who built his house, and that he volunteered at the Chestnut Hill Historical Society as a tour guide.
The cut on Sam’s head is throbbing, and his legs are itching inside his casts. He wants to go out to dinner with Annie and have a hot shower. He wants to understand what this guy wants, so he can give it to him and get out of here.