She tried to think of what to say. Through the pause, the sound of a truck in the lot, its backing-up beepers punctuating the sound of wind: delivering more babies to the loading dock?
“I’m sure you’re not here to plunder other people’s stories,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “This is serious business. I hope I don’t have to ask you to leave.”
Winnie said, “No, you don’t. I’m legit. I filled out all the forms. I’m just doing a book about adoption. A novel, that is. The smallest bit of real detail makes the biggest difference. My character is off to Central Europe to adopt a child. I take notes”—she brandished her spiral-bound notebook in a jaunty manner—“I’m a compulsive note taker. Everything hits home eventually. I could do some good for the industry, you know.”
“Have you published anything?” asked Mabel doubtfully, in the same voice with which she had asked the couples if there were other children at home.
“Sadly, nothing you’d have heard of,” said Winnie. W. Rudge’s children’s chapter books came out with pleasant regularity but little fanfare. Her only adult publication, The Dark Side of the Zodiac, was a trashy self-help succès de scandale, brought out under the name of Ophelia Marley. It was her cash cow, to the extent she had one, though its udders were going dry.
Mabel Quackenbush stood up. “The head staff must be in by now, unless the storm has kept them home. I’ll run upstairs and have a quick powwow. In the meantime, let’s get going on a role-playing assignment. You too,” she said blithely to Winnie. “Might as well soak it up before we get the security guard to come break all the bones in your typing fingers. Now, people, count off, one two three.”
They did. Winnie was a one. She joined a smaller circle with Adrian Moscou, Leonard Schimel, Diane Boudreau, and Malachy Fogarty. Group one was told to act out this scenario: You’ve got a Precious One in the kitchen and an Original Mother shows up with documents proving the prior relationship. What do you do, dear?
“I’d be a mess. I admit it. I’d just weep,” said Adrian Moscou. “Then call FF for advice, probably. Weep some more.”
“You litigate,” said Leonard Schimel. “Nothing like it. You litigate fast you litigate hard you don’t let up. Take out a restraining order. I have connections.”
“What’s the problem?” said Diane Boudreau. “I’d invite an Original Mother in. Put on a pot of coffee. The more open the better. I intend to let our child know the full scoop, soon as he or she can understand English. You can’t keep this stuff under the rug.”
“Are you mad?” said Malachy Fogarty. “An Original Mother? I’d turf the bitch out. She gave up the child, didn’t she? I’d get a gun.” They would have laughed had he not sounded as if he meant it.
Attention turned to Winnie, who hadn’t spoken. She shrugged, and said, “Since I’m not here to adopt, I don’t need to play this game, no matter what Mabel says.”
“But this scenario, it’s like story writing,” said Adrian. “Isn’t this your job? You should be good at inventing what to do.”
“I should be very good at it, shouldn’t I?” she said. “But I can’t open that door, I can’t see that scene. I can only write the scenes I can see.”
“You have to play,” said Diane Boudreau. “Or we’ll trade you to another group.”
“I’ll record our observations. I’ll report to everyone else. I’m good at that.”
Mabel Quackenbush was taking her time upstairs. They sat in a stalemate for a few moments, listening to the laughter and then the more careful discussion from the other two groups. Then to the rain beating yet more heavily across the parking lot, against the glass.
“Good thing they’re not doing Hallowe’en tonight,” said Diane after a while. “Think of those little kids walking out in this weather! So dangerous.”
“Little plastic skeleton masks dripping with rain,” said Adrian. “I like it. Adds verisimilitude, wouldn’t you say, Winifred? Corpses liquefy, you know. That’s why they plant so many trees in cemeteries. Soak up the juices.”
“Cheery,” said Diane.
“Geoff and I are going to a party tonight,” he said. “The job is to come as the person you’d most like to be haunted by. Geoff has the easy costume, he’s doing Bruce Springsteen from Born to Run. White T-shirt, jeans, cap. Helps that he has the body for it too,” he added, smugly proud. “Who wouldn’t like to be haunted by the Boss?”
Nobody asked Adrian what thrill he was going as.
“Isn’t the idea of haunting that you don’t get to choose who does it to you?” said Diane.
“We’re haunted by the IRS, bloody ghouls,” said Malachy. “Half the reason I want to hire a kid is to get the adoption tax credit and the dependent child credit.”
They tittered unconvincingly. Adrian turned to Winnie. “So who would you choose to be haunted by, in your wildest fantasies?”
“I’m a writer, I spend too much time with literary fantasies as it is,” she demurred. But she admitted to herself, she was taken with that image of kids trick-or-treating in their costumes, an early snow coating them. Not bad. Troubling and calming at once. The snow making ghosts of every pint-size witch and hobo and ballerina. She scratched a few words on her pad.
When Mabel Quackenbush got back, she looked terse, the last Soviet apparatchik. “You. Sorry. They ran you through the computer. They said you have to leave. No discussion.”
The group bristled slightly, though was it on Winnie’s behalf or not?
“Bummer,” said Adrian, daring to show his hand, anyway, bless him. “What gives?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Winnie, “never mind. I’ll clear out.”
“You can check in at the front office if you want the reasons,” said Mabel. “Awfully sorry, dear.” She looked ready for a fight.
She walked Winnie to the door, a kind of senior citizen bouncer. In a lower voice she said, “They know who you are. They left me a note in my box, but I didn’t see it because I was late, what with the rain and all. You applied under a pseudonym? Why? You should have guessed they don’t allow that.”
“I’m sure there’s been some mistake,” said Winnie, blathering slightly, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m going abroad tomorrow anyway. I can use the time to pack. And the roads are only going to get worse.” She picked up her things and tried not to move too hastily. She didn’t look at Mabel as she left.
Winifred W. Rudge, out at her car a half hour before lunch, thinking: how small, how touchy everyone in there is. How could that be? Does being unlucky in the egg and sperm department erase all personal dignity? Who needs to write fiction anymore?
But it wasn’t them; this she knew. It was her own eyes, seeing things crabbed and phony; it was her own ears, set to discriminate in favor of the ludicrous and not the humane. This was part of her problem. It was what had given her the bleak vision to create The Dark Side of the Zodiac, it was what made acid-edged gossip with John Comestor so much fun. When, really, what was so terrible about Mabel Quackenbush pitching daddy-woo and mommy-lust at childless people, if small kids got connected with families? Beware becoming superior, she said to herself. Or desiccated. Or dead.
She fumbled with her car keys, hoping that no one inside the Forever Families stronghold was watching her exile. She began to be aloof, seeing herself as if from five feet away. Not with a cinematographer’s eye, framing everything, calibrating the apertures, roasting the scene with lamplight—but seeing herself as a middle-aged writer, struggling with money, frightened about the future. What does the working novelist look like, when she gets in a car on a rain-snowy afternoon in a Boston suburb? A writer handicapped in her profession by a limited capacity for sympathy?
The wind tore the door out of her hand; the hinges creaked. The storm moved on. Her hair seethed. Suddenly she undid her ridiculous scarf and let it blow away, a surrender flag of latticed green and red, the dancing Fezziwigs sent winging out over the concrete retaining wall, flagging down the traffic crawling on a snow-choked Route 128.
r /> Beaky, she said of herself; a nose like an iron doorstop. Firm flat cheeks. A small bluish dot on one nostril that looked like ink, but was some residue of imploded capillary, the result of a magnificent nosebleed when she was twelve. Not tall, not dumpy, neither slender nor stout. A serviceable body shape, shy of glamour, though not yet quite fallen.
“Why did you blurt out about being a writer?” she said aloud. Her words in a string following the scarf. “Did you guess Adrian would squeal on you? Did you hope so? Were you trying to get kicked out?”
Safely in the car, patting rain off her forehead with a handkerchief, she added, “And since when are you talking to yourself?”
But you’re a writer. That’s what you do. You just usually don’t do it aloud.
She hunched over the wheel, hating herself for being such a mess. Peering as the rain turned to snow and back again, she went skidding and sliding east on Route 9, and she watched the sky skid and slide above. The gray towers of Huntington Avenue and South Huntington loomed out of the laid-paper texture of the day’s damp atmosphere.
The car was down to a crawl by the time she got to Huxtable Street, and she scraped a neighbor’s fencepost as she slalomed into her parking space. But her mood had lifted, revived by the promise of seeing her cousin tomorrow. She’d tell him about the gay teacher picking up on the scarf; John would appreciate that. What would she say if John asked her why she’d liberated the scarf? Well, she wouldn’t tell him she had done so. Let Scrooge and all that—that pastness of life—let it go, let it blow off.
She made her way cautiously up the wooden steps of the semidetached house. Shabby, shabby, unornamented, unconsoling. Home. And then as she fit her key into her lock, she paused, even though the cold rain flecked against her face—remembering the opening lines of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s first intimation of his dark epiphanies:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Scrooge, having scorned relatives and employees and the filthy poor alike, headed home full of sour stomach, and twisted his key in his lock, and saw the door knocker turn into Marley’s face with—she knew it well—a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. . . .
There was no knocker on her door. But she sensed a jolt of presence, or imagined she did. Maybe nothing more than a field mouse who had come into the house due to the unseasonable snow. She bent over and peered through the flap of the mail slot. Like many who make their living exploiting the public’s appetite for magic, she was a stone-hearted rationalist. She didn’t expect to peer into a void of any sort—no trap of stars and galaxies—no wispy haunted otherworld. Rather she worried about surprising some neighborhood felon out to relieve her of stereo and computer components. But there was nothing, just the cold heavy air of an unoccupied house. A light was on in the kitchen, bronzing the wall on which she had stenciled blurry and unconvincing pineapples. The pineapples winked out and returned. Power surge in the storm? The dishcloth lay crumpled on the braided rug where, several days earlier, late and hurrying, she’d dropped it.
She twisted the key in the dead bolt, then in the lower lock, and pushed open the door. Readying herself for the melodic ding that would ring for thirty seconds until she had punched in the code. She was knocked against the doorjamb, but not by an intruder, just by surprise. The wrong amplified alarm was kicking on. The other one. The “This is not a test” siren.
The noise was so huge that she had to force herself down the hall to the closet where the control unit was mounted. Her four-digit code didn’t kill the racket. She punched it in several times, then thumped the keypad until she accidentally hit the right circuit-breaking button. And the next thing that would happen, if the system worked, was that someone from the central office in Nebraska would call and ask her for her code word. If all was well she was to utter the secret signal, at which the Nebraska folk would cancel the request for Boston’s finest to send a car. But in the event that a gun was pressed to her back, she was to say some other word instead, and the cops would be there in five minutes.
The phone rang, and she was on it in a flash. She picked up the receiver and snapped, “Marley, Marley, Marley, it’s all right; there must have been a short. We’re having a storm here. I tripped it myself. No need to send a squad car.”
No sound on the other end.
“Is that Ironcorp? Ironcorp Security? Are you on speakerphone? Pick up the handset, damn it.”
Silence, then the connection broke. Unmusically a dial tone sawed.
She held the phone in her hand an instant longer, but away from her. Then the shrill triad and the condescending message: “If you’d like to make a call . . .”
“I’d like you to shut up and get out of my life,” she said to the recorded voice, and replaced the receiver with a bang.
Almost immediately the phone rang again. She looked left and right—what if an intruder had been breaking into the house through the basement just as she was letting herself in the front door? What if she wasn’t alone in here?
She picked up the receiver and held it out, waiting to hear a voice. No one spoke, but there was a hiss again.
“John?” she said. “Is that you?”
Another pause, then a voice. “Could that be Winifred Rudge?”
“Well, is this Ironcorp Security or not?”
“It’s Adrian Spencer-Moscou, Adrian Moscou, on lunch break at Forever Families. Feeling guilty about blowing the whistle on you. Look, I’m really sorry and I hate myself and for punishment I’m—”
“Everything is fine. Did you just call and hang up? You’re tying up my line and the police will show up at my door if I don’t hang up immediately.” This she did.
Then she waited for the call from Ironcorp Security, or for the Boston police to swing by and check out the suspected breach of her household defenses. Neither of which, in half an hour, had happened. Storm or no storm, someone should at least call, thought Winnie. What am I paying thirty-eight bucks a month for if the system doesn’t work? I could be facedown in a thickening glue of my own blood by now, and who would care?
But it took her some time—a noisy cup of tea, slammed cabinet doors, egregious and theatrical cursing—to get up the nerve to go upstairs. In fact, who would care if she got herself murdered or maimed?
To avoid answering that question, she kept on packing. She ordered the taxi for the early morning trip to Logan Airport. Dragged a basket of laundry into the musty basement and put on an underwear load with a little bleach. It looked to be a long afternoon.
She couldn’t get it out of her mind that something was there in the house with her, though each room seemed to be filled only with her empty life.
Who would you choose to be haunted by, if you could choose?
Of course there’s someone else in this house, she said to herself: it’s that pesky Wendy Pritzke again. Wendy and her story. Would it become another exercise in Gothic excess, born of the grimier side of Winnie’s sensibility? She could do milk-chocolate children’s books on the one hand, arsenic-laced bourbon foreboding on the other. How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies. How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.
Who was Wendy Pritzke? Winnie couldn’t quite tell until the book had begun itself. She had details and conundrums, but no amount of random detail could add up to a convincing life. Rather, she believed that it took a convincing life to confer meaning and significance to random details. And she didn’t know much about Wendy’s life, at this point.
But Winnie doubted that Wendy Pritzke was going to linger in England; Wendy Pritzke was probably lighting out to Mitteleuropa, London being only a pit stop on her trip. Wendy Pritzke heading for somewhere darker than anyplace accessible to the Circle Line. Wendy Pritzke’s departure for Romania from Heathrow Terminal Two. Her bad flight over the Channel, the coastal flats of France, the sharp shadowed pockets of Alpine valleys . . .
&
nbsp; Don’t spend your time on Wendy today, Winnie lectured herself. You’re not ready yet, you haven’t even left Boston. But a new book took hold as it would and in its own time, and little governing it. When Winnie went down to move over the wash, she carried the portable phone with her in case Ironcorp Security ever got around to responding to the alarm. She also brought a notebook to catch a few sentences or twists of plot, or brief revelations of character if they occurred to her while she fiddled with the lint trap. All she could scrawl, over and over, was Wendy, Wendy: Peter Pan’s unromantic friend, his stand-in mother, as if there were something to learn from that.
Since her taxi was ordered for 5 A.M., she got ready for bed early, flumping a hot-water bottle under the coverlet and appreciating the jelly glass with its half inch of McClelland’s single malt. She knew that John, expecting an update of her travel plans, would have turned off his ringer and switched on his machine, so she dialed his number without fear of waking him at four in the morning.
But the phone only jangled and jangled, the familiar double ring of British Telecom. The machine didn’t pick up.
Heaving herself into bed at last, she turned to set the alarm on the digital clock radio. The gelid blue numerals pulsed.
00:00
00:00
00:00
They were spelling OOOO, OOOO at her, she thought. Odd. So there had been a power cut with the storm; that was probably why the alarm had gone off. But even if the clock lost track of the hour, it usually began to count the minutes again from the moment the power was restored.
00:00
00:00
She fiddled with the back of the clock. She couldn’t get it to work. Its innards must have been fried. She had to get up and hunt for a travel alarm. She found one, and checked its battery to make sure the thing wasn’t dead. She had no neighbors with whom she was chummy enough to ask for help, no friends left to call even at the respectable hour of 9 P.M. So she was glad that the small plastic clock still ticked its time and pipped its alarm responsibly.