“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I could come up with. “We were too young?” I guessed. “Could that have been it?”
“You never trusted my feelings,” she murmured to herself. “I don’t think you ever really believed I liked you.”
“That’s not true at all,” I said. “I did. I did know that. I just . . . wasn’t ready.”
“And you are now? After one particularly volatile session?”
“On the volatility scale I would say that was only about a seven.”
And then after we both tried to smile, I said, “Maybe you never really understood me.” I said this in the same soft voice I had been using since we entered the restaurant. “You say that you did. But maybe you didn’t. Not really.” I thought about this. “Maybe not enough to resolve anything? But that was probably my fault. I was just this . . . hidden person and—”
“Who made it so impossible to resolve anything.” She finished the sentence.
“I want to now. I want to make things work out . . . and . . .” My foot found hers beneath the table. And then I had a flash: Jayne standing alone over a grave in a charred field at dusk, and this image forced me to admit, “You’re right about something.”
“What?”
“I am afraid of being alone.”
You stumble into a nightmare—you grasp for salvation.
“I’m afraid of losing you . . . and Robby . . . and Sarah . . .”
If something is written, can it be unwritten?
I tensed when I said, “Don’t go,” even though this wasn’t meant literally.
“I’ll only be gone a week.”
I thought about the week that had just passed. “That’s a long time.”
“ ‘There’s always summer,’ ” she said wistfully, a famous line from a movie she had made—the elusive love interest who strands the fiancé at the altar.
“Don’t go,” I said again.
She was unfolding a napkin. She was quietly crying.
“What?” I reached for her. I felt the corners of my mouth sag.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me.”
This would be the last dinner I ever had with Jayne.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5
19. the cat
I woke up staring at our darkened ceiling in the master bedroom.
The writer was imagining an intricate moment: Jayne saying goodbye to the children, kneeling on the cold granite of the driveway, a sedan and its driver idling behind her, and the kids were dressed for school and she’d left them so many times before that Sarah and Robby were used to this—they didn’t sulk, they barely paid attention, because this was just business: Mom going nowhere again. (If Robby was slightly more emotional that day in November, he did not reveal it to Jayne.) Why was Jayne lingering when she said goodbye to Robby? Why was she searching his eyes? Why did Jayne stroke his face until Robby pulled back and flinched, Sarah’s fingers still restlessly entwined with her mother’s? She crushed them in a hug, their foreheads touching, the front of the house looming over them with the wall that was a map sprawling across its surface. She would only be gone a week. She would call them that night from her hotel room in Toronto. (Later, at Buckley, Sarah would point at the wrong plane cruising the sky, passing in and out of clouds, and tell a teacher, “My mommy’s up there,” and by then Jayne’s pain would have faded.) Why did Jayne weep on the ride to the Midland Airport? Before Jayne left the darkness of our bedroom, why had I said the words I promise? My pillow was wet. I had cried in my sleep again. Sun was now filtering into the room and the ceiling was lighting itself indifferently in an enlarging diamond, and the umbrellas were still spinning and iridescent halos revolved around me—the remnants of a dream I couldn’t remember—and mid-yawn my immediate thought was Jayne’s gone. What the writer wanted to know was: why was Jayne so frightened the morning of November fifth? Or, more accurately, how did Jayne intuit what was going to happen to us during her absence?
Ignoring everything is very easy to do. Paying attention is much harder, but this is what was demanded of me since I was now the momentary guardian.
It was time to condense things, and because of this everything started moving faster. I now had a list that needed to be checked on the morning of November fifth. The newspaper needed to be scanned for any information about the missing boys. (Nothing.)
It also needed to be scanned for any information pertaining to a murder at the Orsic Motel. (Nothing.)
The last time I dialed Aimee Light’s number was on the morning of November fifth. Her cell phone wasn’t even on anymore.
I checked my e-mail. There were no longer any messages coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks at 2:40 a.m.
I couldn’t tell if the carpeting in the living room was darker. The writer told me it was. But he also said it didn’t matter anymore.
The furniture was still in the same formation I’d known as a child. The writer confirmed this as well, then wanted to inspect the exterior of the house.
When we walked around to the side of the house facing the Allens’, we saw that the wall was still in the process of changing. The salmon pink had darkened and the stucco was pronouncing itself more forcefully in wheeling patterns that were suddenly appearing everywhere. The writer whispered to me: the house is turning into the one you grew up in.
I moved on to the front of the house, where the peeling continued to spread its warning.
The sweet, rank smell of something dead was noticeable immediately.
There was a hedge that aisled the lower half of the northern side of the house and I scanned it until I saw the cat.
It was lying on its side, spine arched, its small yellow teeth locked in a frozen grimace, and its intestines leeched the ground, clinging to the dirt they had poured onto. Its eyes were squeezed tight with what I first thought was pain.
But when the writer forced me to look more closely, I realized that something had pecked them out.
The ground was soaked with blood, and viscera that the Terby had slashed from the cat’s belly were sprayed across the daisied hedge, now hovering with flies.
I imagined that something was witnessing my discovery of the cat, and I whirled around as a sudden flash of black rounded the corner of the house.
The writer promised me this was not something I had dreamt.
But I could not imagine how the Terby had captured the cat.
I could not imagine the doll doing this.
The Terby was simply a prop from a horror movie.
But there was a part of the writer that wanted the Terby to have killed the cat.
The writer could imagine that scene: the doll keeping watch—a sentinel—from its perch on Sarah’s window ledge, the doll spotting the cat, the doll swooping down, the doll grappling with the cat beneath the tightly trimmed hedge, a talon raised, and then what? Did it play with the cat before eventually slashing it in half? Did the thing feed on the cat? Was the last thing the cat saw the contorted face of the bird and above it an empty gray sky? The writer pondered the various scenarios until I stepped in and forced the writer to hope this was not true. Because if I believed that the doll was responsible, the ground I stood on would shift into a world made of quicksand.
But it was too late.
It was at this point that I recognized the cat.
I had seen it the night before.
When its mouth was stained red, and blood from a paw smeared a windowpane.
The mangled thing at my feet belonged to Aimee Light.
I did not tell this to the writer because the scenario he would have come up with—the obstacles he would solve and the world he would make me believe in—was more than I could bear on the morning of November fifth.
So just as quickly as I recognized the cat as Aimee Light’s I immediately forced the thought from my mind before the writer could notice this detail and leap on it, expanding it with a horrible logic until everything surrounding us turned black.
Regardless of whether the Terby had killed the cat, I was determined to get rid of it that day.
I went back into the house to find it.
Marta had taken Robby and Sarah to school. Rosa was cleaning the kitchen.
I assumed that if the Terby was in the house it would be upstairs lying innocently in Sarah’s bedroom.
But the Terby was not in Sarah’s bedroom. This was a discovery I made after a cursory inspection of the room.
The writer told me it was hiding. The writer told me I needed to entice it from the hiding place.
I asked the writer how does something that’s not alive hide itself?
I asked the writer how do you entice something that’s not alive out of its hiding place?
This silenced the writer momentarily. The silence eventually worried me.
The writer was reactivated when I moved to Sarah’s window and gazed down at the hedge and the mutilated cat.
The writer suggested we go to Robby’s room.
I hesitated in the hallway outside Robby’s room and stared at the grooves carved in the bottom of the door, then turned the knob and entered.
The room was pristine.
It was in the neatest condition I had ever seen. Nothing was out of place.
The bed was tightly made. There were no clothes strewn across the floor. The video-game cartridges and DVDs and magazines were stacked in even piles. The Martian landscape of the carpet had been recently vacuumed. There were no empty Starbucks cups lining the top of the minifridge. His desk was immaculate. The pillows on the leather sofa had no indentations on them. Every surface was clean. The room smelled of varnish and lemon.
It was a showroom.
Everything was exact.
And it felt empty.
It was supposed to feel peaceful.
But there had been a concentrated effort to also make it feel benign.
No one had ever lived in it.
There was something horribly wrong about this.
This wrongness drew me toward the computer.
The moon was pulsing on its screen.
Again: hesitation. And then: the need for things to speed up.
Nadine Allen’s anguished theory whirled into the barren room.
The word neverland pushed the writer to reach out and tap the mouse.
The desktop appeared on the screen.
I knew no one was upstairs but I looked over my shoulder anyway.
After tapping “My Documents,” I walked over and shut the door.
When I returned to the desk, on the Gateway’s screen was a list of roughly one hundred WordPerfect documents.
I started perspiring.
As I scrolled to the bottom of the screen I saw there were ten documents that had been downloaded from somewhere.
These files had initials for titles.
The writer was immediately able to attach names to them.
MC could have been Maer Cohen.
Was TS Tom Salter?
EB was Eddie Burgess.
JW: Josh Wolitzer.
CM equaled Cleary Miller.
As I tapped the document for MC suddenly a box flashed on the screen, asking me for a password.
Why would a password be needed to open a document?
Because it doesn’t want to be read by you, the writer whispered.
I scanned the room while the writer wondered what Robby’s password might be.
The writer wondered if there was a way we might find out.
The writer wondered if Marta knew.
I looked up from the computer and caught my image in a full-length mirror.
I was wearing khakis, a red Polo sweater over a white T-shirt and Vans, and I was hunched over my son’s computer, sweating heavily. I took off the sweater. I still looked ridiculous.
I turned my attention back to the computer.
I began typing in words that I thought might mean something to Robby.
The names of moons: Titan. Miranda. Io. Atlas. Hyperion.
Each word was denied access.
The writer had expected this and scolded the father for being surprised.
I was not aware as I bent over the computer that the door behind me was slowly opening.
The writer assumed that I had closed the door.
The writer even went so far as to suggest that I had locked it.
I held on to the possibility that I had left it ajar.
As I kept uselessly typing in passwords, the door opened itself fully, and something entered Robby’s room.
And just as the writer decided to type in neverland I realized that Nadine Allen had gotten it wrong.
The word wasn’t neverland.
The word was neverneverland.
Neverneverland was where the missing boys were going.
Not neverland but neverneverland.
The writer told me to type it in immediately.
It broke open the password.
And as the screen filled itself with a digital photo of Cleary Miller accompanied by a long letter dated November 3 that began with the words “Hey RD,” another chasm opened in Robby’s room.
(Robert Dennis was RD.)
I froze when I heard clicking noises behind me.
Before I could turn around there was a high-pitched screech.
The Terby was standing in the doorway, its wings outstretched.
It wasn’t a doll anymore. It was now something else.
It stood perfectly still, but something was stirring beneath its feathers.
The presence of the Terby—and all the things it had done—loosened me from my fear, and I rushed toward it.
When I grabbed it with my sweater I expected it to react in some way.
The animatronic lips below its beak parted to reveal a wide, uneven set of fangs that I didn’t know it had.
The black face seized up—its eyes brightly wet—and its feathers started bristling as I threw the sweater over it.
But when I lifted the doll there was no struggle.
Okay, I told myself, Sarah had left it on. It could move around on its own accord. So it walked down a hallway. It entered a room. I hadn’t shut the door. Sarah simply hadn’t turned the thing off before school.
I slowly pulled the sweater off the Terby—it was reeking and felt soft and pliable, and it was vibrating slightly in my hands.
I turned the doll over to switch off the red light in the back of its neck in order to deactivate it.
But when I turned the doll over the red light wasn’t on.
This fact moved me immediately out of the room.
Whatever fear this caused was transformed into energy.
I rushed to my office for my car keys.
I threw the doll into the trunk of the Porsche.
I purposefully started driving to the outskirts of town.
The writer, beside me, was thinking things through, forming his own theories.
The doll wasn’t activated because no one had turned the doll on.
The doll, Bret, had picked up on your scent.
The doll knew you were in Robby’s room and did not want you to find the files.
Just as it had not wanted you to see what was in Robby’s room on Sunday night.
The night it bit you, it had been aiming for the hand the gun was clenched in.
The thing was protecting something.
It didn’t want you to know things.
Something had wanted the doll placed in your house.
You were simply the go-between.
I needed to call Kentucky Pete and find out where he got the doll from.
I told the writer that this would begin to answer all the questions.
Okay: I had bought the thing last August, and August was the month my father died and—
Stop it, the writer interrupted. There is an empire of questions and you will never be able to answer them—there are too many, and they are all cancerous.
Instead, the writer was urging me to head up to t
he college. The writer wanted me to pick up the copy of “Minus Numbers”—the manuscript Clayton had left in my office. This would provide an answer, the writer assured me. But the answer would only lead ultimately to more questions and those were the questions I did not want answered.
It was too early to get ahold of Pete, but I dialed his cell and left a message.
At some point I simply pulled the Porsche over next to a field on a deserted stretch of the interstate.
Outside the sky was divided in half: part of it was an intense arctic blue slowly being erased by a sheet of black clouds. Trees were becoming leafless now. The field was glazed with dew.
I opened the trunk.
The writer told me to take note of the sweater I had wrapped the doll in.
The red Polo sweater had been torn apart during the twenty-minute drive from Elsinore Lane to the field off the interstate.
As I lifted the Terby out of the trunk by a wing, I averted my eyes as the doll began urinating a thin stream of yellow that arced from its black body and splashed onto the highway’s pavement.
The writer urged me to notice the crows lining the telephone wires above me as I hurled the doll into the field where it landed, immobile.
Leaves began lifting themselves off the field.
I could hear the sound of a river, or was it waves crashing against the coastline?
The Terby was almost immediately enveloped in a cloud of flies.
In the distance a horse was grazing—maybe a hundred feet from where I stood—and the moment the flies converged upon the doll, the horse jerked its head up and galloped even farther into the field as if offended by the presence of the thing.
Kill it, the writer whispered. Kill the thing now.
You no longer need to convince me, I told the writer.
The writer disliked me because I was trying to follow a chart.
I was following an outline. I was calculating the weather. I was predicting events. I wanted answers. I needed clarity. I had to control the world.
The writer yearned for chaos, mystery, death. These were his inspirations. This was the impulse he leaned toward. The writer wanted bombs exploding. The writer wanted the Olympian defeat. The writer craved myth and legend and coincidence and flames. The writer wanted Patrick Bateman back in our lives. The writer was hoping the horror of it all would galvanize me.