And so, more than fourteen years later on a snowy night, I knew with conviction that Gwyneth had not been dropped into my lap by Lady Luck. She and her love for me were one of the infinite number of ways that things might have been, but now they were what was, by virtue of countless decisions that she and I had made, moment by moment throughout our lives, which we could never hope to track in retrospect.
I could only lose her if, from this moment forward, I made wrong choices, or if she made them. But I would take those odds rather than the odds that luck offered.
63
IN THE MAIN ROOM OF MY SUBTERRANEAN HOME, Gwyneth moved along the shelves, reading the titles on the spines. “I knew there would be books, and I knew what the character of them would be.”
Her presence here was the most magical turn of events in this night of myriad wonders. Gladness expressed itself in my covered countenance, in my voice, manner, action. The girl was fully aware of my happiness, and she delighted in my delight. I could not take my eyes off her, and in respect of that, she did not turn her eyes toward me.
“Your courage humbles me,” she said.
“Courage? Not really. I’m a coward by necessity. We always had to run from any threat.”
“To live in these cramped spaces, without sun, for eighteen years, the last six without company, and always with the expectation that there would never be more than this, to endure that and not be driven mad … Sanity in such circumstances takes more courage than I possess.”
With that, she gave me a somewhat different perspective on my life, and I didn’t know what to say.
She said then, “What do you want to take with you, Addison?”
“Take with me?”
“What’s most precious to you? Don’t leave it here. After we go, you won’t ever be coming back.”
I couldn’t fully comprehend her meaning, and it seemed that I must have misheard what she said. “Not coming back? But where would I live?”
“With me.”
“You mean in the apartment with the piano?”
“No. We’re not going back there, either. That’s over. All of it is over. We’re moving on to something new.”
Until then, I would not have thought that great happiness could coexist with fear, but the latter came upon me without fading the former. I found myself trembling, not in either dread or rapture, but in a kind of neutral expectation.
“We have a lot to do in the next few hours,” she said. “So hurry and decide what you don’t want to leave behind, and let’s be going.”
Trust, I told myself, and I did trust.
Pressed between two books on one of the shelves, an envelope contained a photograph, a simple snapshot, that I never wanted to be without. From between the front cover and the endpaper of a special book on another shelf, I withdrew an index card on which Father had printed words of special meaning to me. I slipped the card into the envelope and tucked the envelope into an inside pocket of my jacket.
I followed Gwyneth to the passageway that led from the hammock room—which was also my kitchen—and there I paused to look back. I had lived more than two-thirds of my life in those windowless rooms, and for the most part they had been years of contentment and hope. I felt as though ten thousand conversations between Father and me were recorded on those concrete walls and that if I could only sit quietly and attentively enough, with adequate patience, they would replay for me. Nothing in this world, not even the most mundane moments of our lives, is without meaning, nor is any of it lost forever.
In leaving, I had neglected to turn off the lamps. I considered going back through the rooms to extinguish them, but I didn’t. I left them aglow, as the lights in a shrine are never put out. Following Gwyneth, I allowed myself to imagine that the bulbs in those lamps would prove to be blessed with uncanny life and that if, a thousand years from now, some adventurous explorer of storm drains were to come across that haven, he would be welcomed by lamplight, by books perfectly preserved, and would know that in this humblest of places, in ancient times, many treasured hours had been passed in happiness.
64
SNOW SHEETING THROUGH THE HEADLIGHTS, THE streets vacant except for the laboring plows, the people of the city sequestered in their warm and civilized rooms, the wind keening across the windshield and along the passenger door beside me …
Gwyneth drove a route familiar to me, and only minutes after we set out, her cell rang. She glanced at the screen, put the phone on SPEAKER, and said, “I would pray that Simon haunts you forever, but he deserves his rest.”
“How touching that you should care so much for a useless burnt-out boozer who couldn’t even keep from pissing his pants at the end.”
Ryan Telford’s voice was throatier than before, and in spite of his cocky words, he sounded shaken.
When she said nothing, Telford pressed into her silence: “You were right that he didn’t know where you have a ninth apartment. The only useful thing we got from funky Simon was how he came to know you in the first place.”
Gwyneth stiffened but still did not speak.
“He saved a little girl from death in a Dumpster, probably so drunk at the time, he didn’t know what he was doing. And because he saved her, you saved him. Your weakness, Miss Mouse, is that you’re a sentimental little bitch.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he said, “With the Internet, it’s easy to find an old news story.”
He paused. The sound he made suggested that he was straining at something, a weight that was difficult to lift or the lid of a jar too tight to unscrew. He muttered a curse.
Gwyneth waited.
The curator said, “The newspaper story and follow-ups tell me the hospital where the girl was treated, how she became a ward of the court, how she was in a coma, a vegetative state. Then the stories end. There’s like a press blackout or something, nothing about her fate. Did she die? Is she still alive, with the brain of a carrot?”
When Telford paused again, Gwyneth handed me the phone to hold, so that she could drive with both hands, and she accelerated.
The curator grunted, made that straining-to-lift sound again, and then took a couple of deep, shuddery breaths. “Remember I told you two of Goddard’s guys, they now work for me, they’re ex-cops?”
“I remember.”
“One of them knows these people who are tight with the judge in the news story. In fact, they have a hammerlock on the good judge. They can call him day or night, ask for anything, and he’ll pretend to be delighted to help no matter how much shit they throw at him.”
Gwyneth took a corner so suddenly and so fast that I was thrown against the passenger door and almost dropped the phone.
Telford said, “This time, Judge Gallagher didn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to please them. He just had to tell them what happened to the girl, the one the court records call Jane Doe 329.”
“Don’t touch her,” Gwyneth said. “Don’t.”
The curator seemed to strain at something again, and I imagined that he must be tied to a chair and struggling to be free of his bonds, though that made no sense.
He said, “If you don’t come here, I’ll do to Jane Doe 329 what I promised I’d do to you five years ago. She doesn’t raise my flag as high as you do, little mouse. She’s pale and she won’t even be aware of how good I am when I jam it to her.”
“She’s a child.”
“But she’s pretty enough, and they’ve fed her right, exercised her every day, so she does have nice enough muscle tone.”
“I’m on my way,” Gwyneth said.
“For her sake, I hope so.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“You sure that’s enough time?”
“Twenty minutes,” she insisted.
“Twenty-one will be too late.”
He terminated the call. I pressed END on Gwyneth’s phone.
“You have the Mace,” she said. “I have the Taser.”
“They’ll
have guns.”
“We have momentum.”
“I saw my father shot down.”
“Hope for a little luck.”
“There’s no such thing as luck.”
“No,” she said. “There’s not.”
65
THAT WE SHOULD MEET IN THE WHIRL OF LIFE THAT spins more people apart than together, that we should find in each other so much that was compatible, that we should lift each other out of doubt and out of weakness into conviction and strength, that we should fall in love in spite of being unable to consummate it physically, a love that was of mind for mind, heart for heart, soul for soul: This rare gift was priceless. And the elaborate chain of cause and effect from which it arose exceeded in intricacy and in beauty the most exquisitely decorated Fabergé egg, or a hundred of them.
To preserve that love and to have years in which to explore a fraction of its passageways and sanctums, we must now make not one wrong decision, either of us, but do from moment to moment the right thing in the most effective manner.
We passed a plow that must have broken down. Its rooftop beacon shone bright, but the waves of yellow light were pent up and stilled in one glowing ball. Headlights doused, driver’s cab deserted, door hanging open, engine quiet, flakes melting on its still-warm housing, the big vehicle canted on a curbside ridge of compacted snow.
Minutes later, in a residential neighborhood, I wondered at the number of houses with windows aglow. In a few instances, people might have forgotten to switch off their exterior Christmas lighting before going to bed, although of the fraction of houses decorated for the season, light issued from the windows of fully half, their occupants evidently still awake, as were the residents of many other homes. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the real dark night of the soul was always three o’clock in the morning, and those sixty minutes between three o’clock and four were reliably and literally the darkest in the city. Not this night.
On the street lined with bare-limbed maples, cars at curbside and mounds of plowed snow allowed no place to park. Gwyneth killed the engine, set the brake, and we got out of the Rover in the street directly in front of the yellow-brick house, leaving one lane open for traffic.
The gate in the wrought-iron fence, the porch steps, the door, each salient point on the final approach seemed full of threat, as the cold wind and the snow at our backs pressed us to cross the threshold and enter whatever hell lay beyond. Telford knew we were coming. There could be no hope of stealth.
Before Gwyneth rang the bell, I said, “Maybe this is the time, this once, in spite of who we are, maybe this is the time to call the police.”
“Telford has nothing to lose now. If he sees police, he’ll pull the pin and blow it all up. And what kind of police might come? Can we hope they’ll be the kind who take an oath seriously? And will they come at all? On this night of all nights, will they still answer a call? From here on, Addison, we’re alone, we’re all alone, everyone alone. We’ll be late in two minutes.”
She rang the bell.
When no one responded, she opened the door, and we went inside, where Walter lay dead in the archway between the foyer and the living room. He had been shot more than once.
Lamps lit the living room, the candle at the shrine to the Holy Mother flickered, the voices on TV spoke in soothing tones—Walter and his sister had been watching it at this hour—and Janet lay in a lake of blood, having died a slower death than had her brother.
Her brutal murder long behind her, the lost wife, Claire, smiled eternally in the two photographs framed in chased silver.
Gwyneth’s Goth makeup couldn’t fully conceal her anguish. The thick mascara colored her tears as black as her grief.
The newsreader on the TV said something about a moratorium on all international air traffic in and out of the United States, but we couldn’t consider his breaking news because the stairs commanded our ascent, as the steps to the gallows call forth those condemned.
In the upper hallway, we passed the open door to the children’s bedroom, where the nurse named Cora had been brought to be murdered with them. There were no children there now, no nurse. They had gone and left their bodies behind them.
In the room where the nameless girl received care, Ryan Telford sat on the edge of the bed in which Cora should have been sleeping. He bent forward with his forearms on his thighs, hands between his knees, a pistol gripped in them. He looked up as we entered the room and smiled, but there was no humor in his smile, only the feverish glee of a rabid jackal.
66
TELFORD’S HAIR HUNG AS WET AND LANK AS IF HE had just stepped from the shower, but this was the greasy wetness of sour sweat. In his pale glistening face, the centers of his bloodshot eyes appeared less like black irises than like portals to the lightless realm of his mind. His ham-pink lips were overlaid with gray, as if he had gone for a touch of Goth himself.
“Little mouse, you’re a masturbation fantasy.”
“You’re not,” she said.
“Who’s the masked man, Kemosabe?”
“Don’t you recognize him, the hood and all? He’s Death.”
“I don’t think Death goes skiing.”
His voice was as throaty as on the phone, and perhaps weaker.
“You don’t look well,” Gwyneth said.
“I would agree.”
Soaked with sweat, his shirt clung to him, and his pants were spattered with blood, but the blood wasn’t his.
Moving to the nameless girl’s bed, looking across it at Telford, Gwyneth said, “You were in Japan.”
“The Far East isn’t good for business anymore.”
“So you came back ahead of schedule.”
“Not soon enough.”
Concerned that we were now surrounded, I asked, “Where are your two … associates?”
“Bastards spooked and ran.”
“After slaughtering a family,” I said.
“That doesn’t faze them. But I have one of my moments, and they run away like little girls.”
“Moments?”
That mirthless smile again. “You’ll see.” Gwyneth put her contact Taser on the nightstand.
“I’m not up for it, either,” Telford said, and put his pistol aside on the bed where he sat.
She said, “When did your symptoms start?”
“A little light-headed late morning. Slight queasiness midafternoon. Fever by dinnertime. Then wham.”
“It goes fast.”
“Express train.”
In my recent trips to the library, I had not read newspapers. Fragments of things heard on TV in the past two nights suddenly coalesced in my mind, and I understood why I had seemed to be missing some subtext in Gwyneth’s conversations with Edmund Goddard and the archbishop.
I have always been of the world but little in it. In this case, the price of isolation was ignorance.
Gwyneth began to put down the safety railing on her side of the girl’s hospital bed.
“Better not touch her,” Telford advised.
“I’m taking her out of here.”
“I’ve touched her. Pretty much all over. Sweet thing. Succulent. She’ll die of it now.”
Gwyneth pulled back the sheet and blanket. The sleeping girl’s pajamas had been disarranged.
I looked away.
“Couldn’t manage more than touching,” the curator said. “But it was lovely—the sharing.”
Abruptly he wrapped his arms around himself and doubled over, almost toppling from Cora’s bed. He made that keening noise, as if he were straining to lift a heavy weight, but it was a more tortured sound and went on longer than when he’d been on the phone. He looked as if he were coming apart inside and was trying desperately to hold himself together. Something that didn’t look like vomit and that smelled worse drooled from his mouth.
Having one of his moments.
Gwyneth leaned over the bed, adjusting the girl’s pajamas. “Addison, in the nightstand drawer, you’ll find a bottle of alcoho
l, a package of cotton pads, and adhesive tape. Please set them out for me.”
I did as she asked, glad to be useful. I worked with my left hand, keeping the little pressurized can of Mace in my right.
When Telford recovered, he sat up straighter and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The tears on his eyelashes and those sliding down his face were tinted with blood. He looked around as if trying to recall the nature of this place and how he had gotten here.
Gwyneth withdrew the plastic cannula from the vein in the girl’s left forearm and let the drip line dangle from the bag of fluid that hung on the IV rack. She said, “I don’t think this is necessary, but just in case,” and with alcohol, she swabbed the point of insertion from which she’d withdrawn the cannula.
Having oriented himself, Telford said, “What’re those stitches in her side?”
“We had the feeding tube taken out two days ago,” Gwyneth said.
“I didn’t like the look of them. Turned me off. Otherwise, she’s a tender little thing. A bit sloppy from lying around all this time, but all in all, prime enough.”
“She’s a child.”
“How prime does it get?”
Gwyneth placed a cotton pad over the puncture in the forearm and taped it down.
Turning quarrelsome, Telford said, “Hell’s bells, the bitch is brain-dead and contaminated. What’re you doing? What’s the use? Why do you care anyway?”
“She’s special,” Gwyneth said.
Picking up the pistol that he had claimed to be too weary to use, he said, “How’s she special?”
Instead of answering him, she pulled the blanket off the bed and threw the top sheet back, so that it draped over the footrail, exposing the girl in her pajamas, head to foot.
“How’s she special?” Telford repeated.