Horns

He got out. There was nothing else to do.

A black Mercedes he didn’t recognize was parked to one side of the drive, Alamo plates on it. Terry’s rent-a-car. Ig had offered to meet him at the airport, but Terry said it didn’t make sense, he was getting in late and wanted to have a car of his own, and they could see each other the next day. So Ig had gone out with Gle

Of all the people in his family, Ig was least afraid to see Terry. Whatever Terry might have to confess, whatever secret compulsions or shames, Ig was ready to forgive him. He owed him that. Maybe, on some level, Terence was who he had really come to see. When Ig was in the worst trouble of his life, Terry had been in the papers every day, saying that the case against him was a sham, utter nonsense, saying that his brother didn’t have it in him to hurt someone he loved. Ig thought if anyone could find it in himself to help him now, it would have to be Terry.

Ig padded across the turf to Vera’s side. His mother had left her turned to face the long grassy slope, slanting down and away to the old log fence at the bottom of the hill. Vera’s ear rested against her shoulder, and her eyes were closed, and her breath whistled softly. He felt some of the tension drain out of him, seeing her at rest that way. He wouldn’t have to talk to her, at least, wouldn’t have to hear her babble her secret, most dreadful urges. That was something. He stared into her thin, worn, lined face, feeling almost sick with fondness for her, for mornings they had spent together with tea and peanut-butter cookies and The Price Is Right. Her hair was bound behind her head but coming loose from its pins, so that long strands the color of moonglow wandered across her cheeks. He put his hand gently over hers-forgetting for a moment what a touch could bring.

His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot. She was eighty years old and entitled to some things. She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn’t stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills, wife of the big has-been and mother of a showbiz phony and a depraved sex killer. Although Vera supposed that was better than what Lydia had been, a cheap prostitute who’d been lucky to bag a small-time celebrity john with a sentimental streak. It was still a surprise to Vera that her daughter had come out of her Vegas years with a husband and a purse full of credit cards, not ten years in jail and an incurable venereal disease. It was Vera’s privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been-a cheap whore-and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams. These things were always so Freudian. And of course the Williams girl, she had been a frisky little gold digger, had been waving her little tail in the boy’s face from day one, looking for a ring and Ig’s family money. In her short skirts and tight tops, Merrin Williams had been hardly more than a whore herself, in Vera’s opinion.

Ig let go of her wrist as if it were a bare wire that had given him an unexpected jolt, cried out, and took a stumbling step backward. His grandmother stirred in her chair and opened one eye.

“Oh,” she said. “You.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I wish you hadn’t. I wanted to sleep. I was happier asleep. Do you think I wanted to see you?”

Ig felt cold seeping behind his breastbone. His grandmother turned her head away from him.

“When I look at you, I want to be dead.”

“Do you?” he asked.

“I can’t see any of my friends. I can’t go to church. Everyone stares at me. They all know what you did. It makes me want to die. And then you show up here to take me for walks. I hate when you take me for walks and people see us together. You don’t know how hard it is to pretend I don’t hate you. I always thought there was something wrong with you. The screamy way you’d get breathing after you ran anywhere. You were always breathing through your mouth, like a dog, especially around pretty girls. And you were slow. So much slower than your brother. I tried to tell Lydia. I said I don’t know how many times that you weren’t right. She didn’t want to hear it, and now look what’s happened. We all have to live with it.”

She put her hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. As Ig backed away across the yard, he could hear her begi

He walked across the front porch and through the open door and into the cave darkness of the front hall. He had ideas about going up to his old bedroom and lying down. He felt like he could use some time to himself, in the shadowy cool, surrounded by his concert posters and childhood books. But then, on his way past his mother’s office, he heard the sound of shuffling papers, and he swiveled toward it automatically to look in on her.

His mother was bent over her desk, finger-walking through a handful of pages, occasionally plucking one out and slipping it into her soft leather briefcase. Leaning over like that, she had her pinstripe skirt pulled tight across her rear. His father had met her when she danced in Vegas, and she still had a showgirl’s can. Ig flashed again to what he’d glimpsed in Vera’s head, his grandmother’s private belief that Lydia had been a whore and worse, and then he just as quickly discounted it as senile fantasy. His mother served on the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts and read Russian novels and even when she was a showgirl at least had worn ostrich feathers.

When Lydia saw Ig staring at her from the doorway, her briefcase tilted off her knee. She caught it, but by then it was too late. Papers spilled out, cascading to the floor. A few drifted down, swishing from side to side, in the aimless, no-hurry way of snowflakes, and Ig thought of the hang gliders again. People jumped off Queen’s Face, too. It was beloved of suicides. Maybe he would drive there next.

“Iggy,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming by.”

“I know. I’ve been driving around and around. I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve been having a hell of a morning.”

“Oh, baby,” she said, her brow furrowing with sympathy. It had been so long since he’d seen a sympathetic look, and he wanted sympathy so badly that he felt shaky, almost weak to be looked at that way.

“Something terrible is happening to me, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. For the first time all morning, he felt close to tears.

“Oh, baby,” she said again. “Why couldn’t you have gone somewhere else?”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want to hear about any more of your problems.”

The stinging sensation at the back of his eyeballs began to abate, the urge to cry draining away as quickly as it had come. The horns throbbed with a tender-sore feeling of ache, not entirely unpleasant.

“I’m in trouble, though.”

“I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to know.” She squatted on the floor and began picking up her papers and stuffing them into her briefcase.

“Mother,” he said.

“When you talk, I want to sing!” she shouted, and let go of her briefcase and clapped her hands over her ears. “Lalala-la-la-la! When you talk, I don’t want to hear it. I want to hold my breath until you go away.”

She took a great swallow of air and held her breath, her cheeks popping out.

He crossed the room to her and sank down before her, where she would have to look at him. She crouched with her hands over her ears and her mouth squeezed tight. He took her briefcase and began to put her papers into it.

“Is this how you always feel when you see me?”

She nodded furiously, her eyes bright and staring.

“Don’t suffocate yourself, Mom.”

His mother stared at him for a moment longer, then opened her mouth and drew a deep, whistling breath. She watched him put her papers into her bag.