At a signal from the old man, Terrance disengaged himself from Michael Searle. He helped the old man down from the bed and into his dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Then Terrance did an astonishing thing: he picked the old man up and carried him across the room as though he were bearing a large child. The old man’s head nodded onto his chest, but when they reached Michael Searle, his thin, cracked lips broke into a smile of lascivious satisfaction. Michael Searle looked down at his feet, his body shaking violently. Before the old man and Terrance were out of the room, Michael Searle retched miserably on the floor.
Olivia, who had barely moved during the ordeal, sat up to lean forward. In the room’s paltry light, she looked small among the bank of pillows, even younger than she had sitting between her parents. I would have expected to see hate or disgust in her eyes when she looked at the man who hadn’t been able to protect her. But I only saw pity.
The door shut with a soft click, the way it always did when Terrance left a room.
The scene before me disappeared, and the room looked just as it had the day before.
Except.
In the corner beyond Olivia’s jewelry table, I saw Eva. Her hair dripping, her mouth sad, the pink playsuit clinging to her little body. My heart broke to think she might have witnessed that which I’d just seen.
“Eva, baby.” I held out my hand to her. She didn’t move, but in seconds she was gone again.
With her withdrawal—and the disappearance of all I had seen—I felt a great ebbing of my strength. My legs felt weak, but I did not faint. Where my strength had been, there was only tremendous weariness. I sank onto a delicate bentwood chair beside the door between the two rooms and waited.
Sitting there, I began to doubt what I’d seen. I had no proof that Olivia’s rape had been anything more than a hallucination. Was I so desperate to excuse myself for what had happened to Eva that I was able to imagine the unimaginable? Perhaps what Press seemed to suspect was true: grief and guilt were poisoning my mind.
The sounds of the house eventually returned. Distant footsteps, voices above me and on the outdoor stairs not far from the morning room’s windows. The door from Olivia’s room into the hall was closed now, though it had been open when I was in the gallery with Nonie. Somehow it was a relief. Proof that someone had closed the door—and I was sure that that someone had been Terrance, either in this time or the time I’d seen. It didn’t matter which. It felt to me like time was folding in on itself. Its passage marked nothing on Bliss House.
And if all those things had indeed been real?
Terrance. How could Terrance have participated in such a horror? If confronted, would he use the excuse of war criminals everywhere? I was just doing my job. (I had an idea who the other man, the one who had taken Olivia, was, but it was too terrible to comprehend at that moment.) But to confront Terrance, or even to demand that he be forced from the house, I would have to tell Press what I’d seen and how I’d seen it. Press had already told Rachel that I wasn’t doing well. Who else had he been talking to about me? Tales of visions would only make things worse.
I was beginning to understand why Bliss House was so feared. The things that happened here couldn’t leave. They lasted forever within these walls, repeating, repeating, and repeating themselves forever, with each repetition deepening the torment of the souls trapped here.
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair, resting my head against the wall. I could feel the pulse of the house in my head.
Eva was still here.
If all of those things were true, then Eva would always be here in Bliss House. I could never leave.
I can barely describe how difficult it was to rouse myself from that chair in Olivia’s room and go on with the day. Even as I picked up my smiling, innocent son from his crib, I held him gingerly as though I might defile him with what I had witnessed. Suddenly grateful for his purity, I squeezed him to me and covered his head with noisy kisses until he began to struggle. I never wanted to let him go. With a feeling of manic joy, I took him to Nonie’s room and we watched her finish her packing. I wanted to be with the two of them forever, protected from everything ugly and vile by their sweetness. As we said our good-byes in the front drive, Terrance waited, holding open the passenger-side door of the Ford that he and Marlene used. Oh! How hard it was to look at that falsely benign face. To know that he’d been party to Olivia’s rape. Yes! That was the word, for although she hadn’t run, it had been obvious that it was against her will. Rape was a word that was rarely spoken by people I knew. There was Titian’s painting, Rape of Europa, and so many versions of the Rape of the Sabine Women. But the word didn’t mean the same thing: Olivia hadn’t been abducted. She’d been brutally violated. Her injuries weren’t just physical. They were soul-deep.
“You’re not to worry.” Nonie’s face was serious but she was distracted, already thinking of my father and what awaited her in Clareston. “Everything will be fine, Lottie.”