Open Curtain, The by Evenson Brian

Author:Evenson, Brian [Evenson, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Novel, Fiction
ISBN: 1566891884
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

5

Later she could not remember how things became serious. There had been Christmas together and then she had seen him a few more times, and then he had fought with his mother and had shown up distraught, kissing her for the first time. And then suddenly he was living in her house without either of them really having talked it over. Both of them were chaste still and sleeping in separate rooms, but clearly on the way somewhere neither her aunt nor his mother nor the Church would approve of. By that time, trying to puzzle out how it had all happened, it seemed too late to turn back.

Besides, she was not sure she wanted to turn back. Left from her days in the hospital was the residual sense of connection to him, though in the first few weeks of living with him she realized she knew him hardly at all. There was an oddness to him, strange ticks, a tendency to lie about things that couldn’t possibly matter, even at times a certain transient coldness she quickly began to classify as his moods. There were whole days she never saw him, days he spent completely out of the house or locked in the room he’d claimed, her sister’s old room. Days too when she found him in the utility room staring at the clippings of the murders.

“Do you want me to take those down?” she asked, but he shook his head.

Other days, he was charming, sweet. He would make dinner with her, sit on the couch with her, take her tentatively in his arms and embrace her, but it never went further than a few awkward kisses. She wondered if there was something wrong with him, sexually. But he seemed normal enough in other ways. Maybe he was simply chaste. As a Mormon, she tried to convince herself, that was something she could admire and respect. Perhaps he was just saving himself for marriage.

They were mostly cordial to one another, polite even, even if at times he was a little abrupt. A few days after he moved in, she gave him a key to the front door, working it off a ring kept in her father’s dresser drawer. He began to come and go at will, sometimes waking her when he came stumbling past the couch at three or four in the morning smelling of smoke or dirt, never explaining. After the first few times of not questioning him about it, she felt her chance to speak had passed. Instead she tried to train herself to wake up right after Letterman, go up to her own bed before he came in. It was easier sleeping in her own bed once someone else was living in the house.

“Do you miss your mother?” she asked him, a few weeks after he had moved in, both of them sitting on the couch.

“No,” he said simply.

She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. They sat watching TV. “I miss mine,” she finally said.

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