Praying for Sleep

driver returned to the truck. Oh, she looks beautiful, Hrubek thought, and couldn’t decide whom he liked best, mother or daughter. The 4x4 turned back onto the highway and a moment later pulled into a driveway or side road a hundred yards west on Route 236. It vanished. He stood for a long moment at the window, then blew hot breath onto the cold glass in front of him, leaving a large white circle of condensation, in the center of which he drew a very good likeness of an apple, complete with leaves and stem and pierced by what appeared to be a wormhole.
     
    Their Maginot Line, four feet high, was starkly illuminated by another sudden flash of distant lightning.
    The women, both exhausted, stepped back from their handiwork as they waited for thunder that never sounded.
    Portia said, “We oughta break a bottle of champagne over it.” She leaned heavily on the shovel.
    “Might not hold.”
    “Fucking well better.” The water in the culvert leading to the dam was already six inches high.
    “Let’s finish taping the greenhouse and get out of here.”
    They stowed the tools and Lis pulled a battered tarp over the depleted pile of sand. She still felt hurt by Portia’s rebuff earlier but, as they strolled back to the house like two oil workers at day’s end, Lis nonetheless had a sudden urge to put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Yet she hesitated. She could picture the contact but not the effect and that was enough to stop the gesture. Lis recalled bussing cheeks with relatives on holidays, she recalled handshakes, she recalled palms on buttocks.
    That was the extent of physical contact in the L’Auberget family.
    Lis heard a clatter not far away. The wind had pushed over a set of aluminum beach chairs beside the garage. She told her sister she was going to put them away and started down the hill. Portia headed up to the house.
    Pausing in the driveway, Lis felt a sharp gust of wind—an outrider of the storm. Ripples swept across the surface of the lake and a corner of the tarp covering the sand snapped like a gunshot. Then calm returned, as if the breeze were a shiver passing through a body.
    In the silence that followed she heard the car.
    The tires crunched on the glistening white stone chips that she and Owen had spread in the driveway last summer during a heat spell. She’d feared then for their hearts under the scalding sun and insisted that they finish the job after dusk. Lis Atcheson knew that the visitor tonight was driving over fragments of premium marble from a quarry somewhere in New England. But for some reason the thought came to her that the sound was of wheels on crushed bone and once there the horrid image would not leave.
    The car moved urgently through the stand of pines through which the serpentine driveway ran. It pulled into the parking area, paused then headed toward her. Blinded by the beams, she couldn’t identify the vehicle, which stopped a dozen yards away.
    Lis stood with arms crossed, her feet separated, frozen like a schoolgirl playing statue. For a long moment neither she nor the driver moved. She faced the car, whose engine was still running, lights on. Finally, before uneasiness became fear, she cleared her throat and walked forward into piercing shafts of white light.

16
    “They haven’t caught him yet?”
    Lis motioned with her hand toward the back door and Richard Kohler preceded her into the kitchen.
    “No, I’m afraid not.” He stepped to the counter and set a small backpack on the butcher block. He seemed quite possessive about it. His thin face was alarmingly pale.
    “Lis, there’s a car—”
    Portia walked into the doorway and paused, glancing at Kohler.
    Lis introduced them.
    “Portia?” Kohler repeated. “Don’t hear that name much nowadays.”
    She shrugged and neither sister said a word about the burdens of being the daughter of a man utterly devoted to the business of fortified wine.
    “I’m going to tape the west windows. In the parlor. That’s where it’ll hit worst.”
    “You’re right. We forgot to do those. Thanks.”
    When she left, Lis turned to the doctor. “I don’t have much time. As soon as we’re finished here, we’re going to a hotel for the evening.” She added pointedly, “Because of Hrubek.”
    It was the moment when he’d tell her there was nothing to worry about, the moment when he’d laugh and say that his patient was harmless as a puppy. He didn’t.
    What he said was, “That’s probably not a bad