In the Night Room

  I fished a twenty out of my pants pocket. She took it from me, then leaned forward and in a low, urgent voice said, “We’re going to talk about what happened to my hand. We both saw that, so it wasn’t some kind of optical illusion. Right?” This last word meant: You know something, and you are going to let me know, too.

  “Right,” I said.

  She sprinted off, no longer able to concern herself with an abstraction like dignity, and I went back to pumping gas. When the tank was full, I moved toward the little white box of the station, expecting to see Willy come through the door carrying a bag containing twenty dollars’ worth of candy bars. She still had not emerged by the time I reached the entrance, and I didn’t see her at the counter when I walked in. The boy at the cash register had H. R. Giger tattoos on his arms and short, dyed-blond hair that he wanted to look artificially colored. Willy was puttering around in the aisles at the back of the store. The boy took his eyes off her to register my entrance.

  “Hey, dude,” he said. “Is that girl with you?”

  “Yes,” I said, and went to the counter to hand over a credit card.

  “Planning on a long trip?”

  At the back of the store, Willy ducked out of sight. I heard the rustle of bags. Her head popped up above the top shelf, and my heart thumped in my chest at this sudden vision—Willy’s floating head. In spite of everything, all my love for her, which had been a bit subsumed under both concern and a kind of mild irritation, returned to me. She said, “I need more money. Come back here, Tim.” At least I had a name again.

  She was trying to keep a grip on about a dozen loose candy bars, individual Reese’s Pieces, a container of Fiddle Faddle, bags of peanut M&M’s, and larger bags of potato chips. My arrival in her aisle caused a lot of Hershey’s bars to slither out of her grasp and land on the floor. Her hands seemed reassuringly solid, but her temperament was sizzling toward hysteria. “Shit!” she whispered to me, once again ducking out of sight of the attendant. “I’m so hungry I can’t hang on to this stuff.”

  “Eat one now,” I said. “Save the wrapper, and we’ll pay for it later.” As I spoke, I started unwrapping one of the Hershey’s bars that had fallen to the floor. Before I finished, she tore it from my hands. The end of the bar disappeared into her mouth, and she bit off about three inches of almonds and milk chocolate.

  “Oh, boy,” she said. She chewed with her eyes closed, and I could see some of the hysteria leave her. It was like watching her pulse slow down. “Dark chocolate would be better, but this is really, really okay.”

  “I’ll get a basket,” I said, and in a moment was back beside her, tossing candy and junk food into a plastic supermarket basket. Willy squatted on her haunches, taking giant, irregular bites out of the Hershey bar almost faster than she could chew.

  “Get me two more Score bars,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Those little deals are wicked, wicked good.”

  “We should get some real food in you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I need a meal. But for some reason, this crap is what I need most right now. That lightness is beginning to go away.”

  “Do you guys need any help?” the boy called out.

  Up at the counter, I unloaded the basket under the increasingly skeptical eyes of the tattooed boy. He dug one hand into his bleached hair and shook his head, half-smiling. I signed a MasterCard slip for $73.37, a nice palindromic number.

  Willy was looking at me with a stony intensity that promised a serious interrogation as soon as we got back in the car, and I asked the boy about the nearest town that had both a decent restaurant and a library.

  “A library?” Willy interrupted the boy’s response.

  “Before we can talk, I have to show you something.” I folded the credit card slip into my wallet and picked up our bag.

  “In a book?”

  “In an atlas.”

  “You still want to know about the library?” the boy asked. “Just stay on 224 out there all the way to Willard. Like the rat movie. It has a library, and you could eat at Chicago Station. They’re famous for their pies.”

  “Ahh, pies,” Willy said.

  Off we go to Willard, which turned out to be a lot nicer than I’d expected. Willard is the sort of place people would retire to, if they had any sense. Like all small cities, it’s on a human scale, and there is more to it than you at first imagine. The streets are spotless, the shop windows shine, and the people say hello to strangers. The only problem in Willard, by which I also mean the drive to Willard, was Willy Patrick. She gobbled down three candy bars in a row—another Hershey’s bar, a Mounds bar, and an Oh Henry!—while all but holding up a finger to let me know I wasn’t getting off the hook this time. Then she tossed the wrappers into the seat well, took out a packet of M&M’s, and while peeling it open said, “Now talk to me, lover boy. No games and no kidding around.”

  “I thought that Hershey’s bar at the gas station made you feel better,” I said.

  “It did, but it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Don’t worry about me getting sick, or anything. I need this gunk, and as soon as I finish these M&M’s, I’ll have had enough. For a while. And then I’ll start feeling light again, and after that, well, I guess, after that . . .”

  Her eyes narrowed; she aimed a finger at my chest. “And after that I guess I’LL START TO DISAPPEAR! I GUESS PIECES OF ME WILL SUDDENLY BE TRANSPARENT!”

  She rammed four or five M&M’s into her mouth and chewed them furiously. A trickle of chocolate drool slipped down the left side of her chin. She smeared it away while keeping her eyes fixed on mine. She swallowed. “I looked at you, and you knew about it. It shocked the hell out of me, but you weren’t even all that surprised. You’d seen it before. So I guess this BIG SECRET of yours turns out to be that I am DISAPPEARING, and now I need an explanation!”

  I took a deep breath and hoped we would soon be driving into Willard. “I did see it once before. Back in Restitution, when you were shifting into the front seat. All of a sudden, I could see through the top part of your right hand. I’m pretty sure Mr. Davy saw the same thing a little bit earlier.”

  “And you didn’t tell me? You decided you needed another secret?”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you,” I said.

  She shook her head in disgust. “I just realized something—you’re weak. That’s why you didn’t tell me. You were afraid.”

  “It kind of took me by surprise,” I said.

  “Me, too! Don’t you think I would have appreciated being told about something like that? ‘Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you’re turning into a window, because I just saw right through the top of your right hand’?”

  Willy balled up the empty M&M’s packet and threw it into the back seat. “And do you know something? I still want lunch. This isn’t about hunger, it’s about staving off the lightness. It’s like putting gas in the car, that’s what it’s like. Except when I run out of gas, I won’t be there anymore.”

  She stared into my eyes with a complicated mixture of fear, bravado, desperation, anger, and trust that filled me with the impossible desire to hold her forever and keep her safe from harm. “How did this happen to me?”

  That was her real cry from the heart. Although she was by no means ready for the truth, I had no choice but to answer in a way faithful to her trust.

  “Do you remember the bloodstains you had on your shirt when you showed up at my reading?”

  “Of course.” Because the blood had been Tom Hartland’s, the question irritated her.

  “And you remember what happened to them.”

  “They disappeared.”

  “Bloodstains don’t just disappear, Willy. Not even bloodstains that go through a downpour.”

  “So first the bloodstains, then me? Is that it?” She gazed at me for a moment, thinking. “Are you saying that Giles and Roman Richard are going to start to disappear, too?”

  That, at last, gave me an opening I could use. I could ha
ve kissed her hand. “Think about this, Willy: why did you ask about them?”

  She frowned. “They followed me.”

  “Through what? From what, to what?”

  Her frown deepened, and her eyes burrowed into mine. She leaned toward me, trying to remember every detail of that strange passage. “Through that thunderstorm. I thought I . . . It sounds crazy. I thought I was flying through a tunnel. Because they were chasing me, they came through the tunnel, too. I guess that’s what happened.”

  “And on this side of the tunnel, Willy, do things look the same as they did on the other?”

  We passed a little airport on our left, where prop planes sat outside hangars in the sun. I paused at a stop sign, then turned right on Euclid Avenue, waiting for her answer.

  “It seems to me that everything’s a little brighter now.”

  “Brighter,” I said, stung.

  “Hold on. Are you trying to insinuate that . . . No. I won’t even say it.”

  She wouldn’t say it, but I knew what it was. The first seed of recognition had just fallen on ground prepared for it by whatever it is you feel when half of your hand disappears and you need six candy bars to bring it back.

  “How much brighter?” I asked, unable to let this go.

  “Only a little. You want to know the biggest difference? Before I wound up in that bookstore, I had the feeling that someone or something was pulling my strings and making me do things I didn’t actually want to do. And now, I still feel that way, but I know who’s pulling my strings and moving me around. You.”

  “Do you like it better this way?”

  “Yes. I do like it better this way.” She checked her hands for signs of transparency. “Do you think I’m going to disappear, like the bloodstains?”

  “Unless we can fix a mistake I made in Millhaven last year.”

  “We’re going to Millhaven to fix something?”

  “I know none of this makes sense, Willy, and when it does, if that ever happens, you’re not going to like it much.”

  “But why? What are we doing?” Her face began to tremble, and she looked in my eyes for a reassurance she did not find. For about thirty seconds, she fell apart. I would have embraced her, but she fended me off by every now and then removing one of her hands from her eyes and clouting me in the chest. I pulled over to the side of the road.

  “I don’t know why I believe you.” Willy wiped her eyes and cleaned her palms by smearing them over the sleeve of my jacket.

  “I do, Willy,” I said. “Before we get to Millhaven, you will, too, probably. If I explained it to you now, it would be the one thing you would refuse to believe.”

  “I couldn’t have anything to do with a mistake you made last year in Millhaven. I never went near Millhaven last year, and I didn’t know you.”

  “What did you do last year, Willy? Can you remember a single thing you did in 2002?”

  She shook her shoulders and gave me a scowling, insulted glance. “In 2002, I wrote In the Night Room. That’s what I did that year. You probably don’t know this, but I started the book in a place, a psychiatric community you could call it, known as the Institute, in Stockwell, Massachusetts.”

  Now she was daring me to find fault with her, and self-doubt turned her confidence brazen. “It’s a wonderful place, and it did me a lot of good. There was this doctor there, Dr. Bollis. I used to call him Dr. Bollocks, but he was great. Because of him, I could write again.”

  “In 2001, I went to a psychiatric community that sounds very similar,” I said. “And the treatment I had there was wonderful for me, too. I could sort of put myself back together.”

  She grew a shade less defensive. “So you should understand. What was the reason you came unglued, or wasn’t there anything specific?”

  “On September 11, I saw people jump from the World Trade Center. And then the ruin and all the death you could feel around you. It brought back too many traumatic things from Vietnam, and I couldn’t cope anymore.”

  “Oh, poor Tim,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes again. “My poor honey.” She shifted sideways and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I wiped my slimy hands on your beautiful jacket.” She rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

  “What happened to me was, my family got killed—my husband and my daughter.” She was speaking in a low, soft voice now, and she held one hand cupped against the side of my face. Very faintly, I could feel her pulse beating in the tips of her fingers. “My whole world disappeared. I don’t even remember how I got to the Institute, but it did me a lot of good. It’s funny, you ask about what I remember from 2002, and that’s all there is. Everything else is just darkness, it’s a room I’m locked out of.”

  “My place was called the Austen Riggs Center, and it’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My doctor, my main doctor, the one who did me the most good, was named Dr. B——”

  She sat up and looked at me in wonder. “That’s almost the same name!”

  “And the town, Stockbridge, was home for most of his life to a famous magazine illustrator named—”

  “So was Stockwell! I can’t believe this! Our guy was—”

  “Norman Rockwell.”

  “Norton Postman,” Willy said, and her eyes underwent a subtle change. “This is an amazing coincidence.”

  “It certainly is. Norman Rockwell painted hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post, so in a way, you could call him the Post man.”

  “But so did Postman,” Willy said. “I didn’t know there were two of these guys.”

  “Not to mention two world-famous mental-health facilities in little towns in the Berkshires, and two excellent psychiatrists who practically have the same name.”

  Willy tucked her lower lip between her teeth, a gesture that for some reason I would never imagine her making. Maybe I thought it was too girlish for her, but there she was, biting her lower lip, and it didn’t look at all girlish. Willy unpeeled a Mounds bar and began to fend off another attack of lightness.

  Ten minutes later, we were walking into the pleasant, air-conditioned space of the Willard Memorial Library, a modern-looking building on West Emerald Street, just two blocks off the main drag. Oh, Emerald Street, I thought, and began to sense the close, hovering presence of my sister. Ever since my stunt in the Barnes & Noble, The Wizard of Oz had been as implicated in her appearances as Alice in Wonderland.

  “Atlases?” said the librarian. “Right over there, in our reference room. The atlas shelves are directly to the left of the door as you enter.”

  A couple of men read newspapers at a blond wooden desk; two girls in their preteens plowed through copies of the same Harry Potter book in a dead-serious race to the end. Diffuse light filtered in through the high windows and hung evenly throughout the large room. Separated by four empty seats, an old man and a high school student leaned over the keyboards of computers as if listening to voices.

  I swung open the glass door to the reference room, and Willy followed me in. To my left, three tall shelves of outsized atlases stretched off to the far wall. We were alone in the room.

  “Do you have a favorite atlas?” I asked Willy.

  “The Oxford, I guess,” she said. It was the one I used.

  I pulled the Oxford Atlas of the World from the lowest of the three shelves and slid it onto the nearest table. “Let’s get one more, for backup.”

  “Backup?”

  “You’re going to want a second opinion.”

  After a little searching I found the National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World and placed it beside the Oxford. Balanced on one hip, Willy watched me with her hands behind her back, seeming to glow with the light of her own curiosity.

  I gestured to the chair placed before the books, and she sat down and tilted her head to look up. The expression on her face made me feel as though I was just about to strangle a puppy. I leaned over the table and pushed the National Geographic toward the center of the table, leaving the Oxford Atlas of the World in front of
her.

  I asked Willy where she had been living before she fled to New York.

  “Hendersonia, New Jersey.”

  “See if you can find it.”

  Giving me a suspicious glance, she flipped to the index on the last pages of the atlas. I saw her trace her finger down the long list of the H’s, going from Hampshire, UK, quickly down to the place names beginning with He. And here were Henderson, AR, Henderson, GA, Henderson, KY, and Henderson, NV. Where Hendersonia should have been, she found only Hendersonville, TN, and its namesake in North Carolina.

  She frowned at me. “It must be too small to put in the index.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She held up a finger, this time telling me that inspiration had struck, and flipped backward to the A’s. Her finger went down the list to Alpine, NJ, and when she had the page and coordinates she turned more pages until she came to the one she wanted and moved her finger along the lettered squares until it intersected with the proper numerical one.

  “It’ll be in here,” she said, and motioned me forward.

  I put a hand on her shoulder and bent down. Willy’s finger circled around until it hit upon Alpine, from whence she drew it in a southerly direction, apparently without any significant success. She leaned over, put her face an inch from the complex, colorful map, and scoured it with her eyes.

  Willy looked back around at me and pulled down the corners of her mouth. “This is nuts. Give me another one of those books.”

  I slid the National Geographic in front of her.

  “That first atlas was stupid. It’ll be in here.” Her eyes skittered over my face, looking for clues. “Won’t it?”

  “Do you think I’d ask you to look if I thought it would be?”

  She pulled back her head and frowned. With the same expression on her face, she opened the book at the index and flipped pages until she came to the H’s. The frown increased as she once again had the experience of moving from Henderson to Hendersonville with no stop at a place called Hendersonia.