sure that she was really there.
“Dear Ralph,” she murmured in his ear. “Dear, sweet Ralph.”
He felt a stirring in his groin, apparently brought on by the combination of her light perfume and the gentle puffs her words made against the cup of his ear… and then he remembered another voice in his ear. Ed’s voice. I called about your mouth, Ralph. It’s trying to get you in trouble.
Ralph let her go and held her at arm’s length, still smiling.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Helen. I’ll be damned if you’re not.”
“You are, too. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Ralph Roberts, Gretchen Tillbury. Gretchen, Ralph.”
Ralph turned toward the other woman and took his first good look at her as he carefully folded his large, gnarled hand over her slim white one. She was the kind of woman that made a man (even one who had left his sixties behind) want to stand up straight and suck in his gut.
She was very tall, perhaps six feet, and she was blonde, but that wasn’t it. There was something else-something that was like a smell, or a vibration, or (an aura) yes, all right, like an aura. She was, quite simply, a woman you couldn’t not look at, couldn’t not think about, couldn’t not speculate about.
Ralph remembered Helen’s telling him that Gretchen’s husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife and left her to bleed to death.
He wondered how any man could do such a thing; how any man could touch a creature such as this with anything but awe.
Also a little lust, maybe, once he got beyond the “She walks in beauty like the night” stage. And just by the way, Ralph, this might be a really good time to reel your eyes back into their sockets.
“Very pleased to meet you,” he said, letting go of her hand.
“Helen told me about how you came to see her in the hospital.
Thank you for helping her.”
“Helen was a pleasure to help,” Gretchen said, and gave him a dazzling smile. “She’s the kind of woman that makes it all worthwhile, actually… but I have an idea you already know that.”
“I guess I might at that,” Ralph said. “Have you got time for a cup of coffee? Please say yes.”
Gretchen glanced at Helen, who nodded.
“That would be fine,” Helen said. “Because… well.
“This isn’t entirely a social call, is it?” Ralph asked, looking from Helen to Gretchen Tillbury and then back to Helen again.
“No,” Helen said. “There’s something we need to talk to you about, Ralph.”
As soon as they had reached the top of the gloomy front stairs, Natalie began to wriggle impatiently around in the Papoose carrier and to talk in that imperious baby pig Latin that would all too soon be replaced by actual words.
“Can I hold her?” Ralph asked.
“All right,” Helen said. “If she cries, I’ll take her right back.
Promise.”
“Deal.”
But the Exalted amp; Revered Baby didn’t cry. As soon as Ralph had hoisted her out of the Papoose, she slung an arm companionably around his neck and cozied her bottom into the crook of his right arm as if it were her own private easy-chair.
“Wow,” Gretchen said. “I’m impressed.”
“Bug!” Natalie said, seizing Ralph’s lower lip and pulling it out like a windowshade. “Ganna-wig! Andoo-sis!”
“I think she just said something about the Andrews Sisters,” Ralph said. Helen threw her head back and laughed her hearty laugh, the one that seemed to come all the way up from her heels. Ralph didn’t realize how much he had missed it until he heard it.
Natalie let Ralph’s lower lip snap back as he led them into the kitchen, the sunniest room of the house at this time of day. He saw Helen looking around curiously as he turned on the Bunn, and realized she hadn’t been here for a long time. Too long. She picked up the picture of Carolyn that stood on the kitchen table and looked at it closely, a little smile playing about the corners of her lips. The sun lit the tips of her hair, which had been cropped short, making a kind of corona around her head, and Ralph had a sudden revelation: he loved Helen in large part because Carolyn had loved herthey had both been allowed into the deeper ranges of Carolyn’s heart and mind.
“She was so pretty,” Helen murmured. “Wasn’t she, Ralph?”
“Yes,” he said, putting out cups (and being careful to set them beyond the reach of Natalie’s restless, interested hands). “That was taken just a month or two before the headaches started. I suppose it’s eccentric to keep a framed studio portrait on the kitchen table in front of the sugar-bowl, but this is the room where I seem to spend most of my time lately, so…”
“I think it’s a lovely place for it,” Gretchen said. Her voice was low, sweetly husky. Ralph thought, If she’d been the one to whisper in my ear, I bet the old trouser-mouse would have done a little more than Just turn over in its sleep.
“I do, too,” Helen said. She gave him a fragile, not-quite-eyecontact smile, then slipped the pink tote-bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter. Natalie began to gabble impatiently and hold her hands out again as soon as she saw the plastic shell of the Playtex Nurser. Ralph had a vivid but mercifully brief flash of memory: Helen staggering toward the Red Apple, one eye puffed shut, her cheek lashed with beads of blood, carrying Nat on one hip, the way a teenager might carry a textbook.
“Want to give it a try, old fella?” Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.
“Sure, why not? But the coffee-”
“I’ll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,” Gretchen said. “Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?”
“In the fridge.” Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. “They learn fast, don’t they?”
“Yes,” she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. “I can’t get over how easy she is with you, Ralph-she wasn’t that way before, was she?”
“I don’t really remember,” he lied. She hadn’t been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.
“Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay?
Otherwise she’ll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.”
“Roger.” He glanced over at Gretchen. “Doing okay?”
“Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?”
“Just in a cup’s fine.”
She laughed and put the cup on the table out of Natalie’s reach.
When she sat down and crossed her legs, Ralph checked-he was helpless not to. When he looked up again, Gretchen was wearing a small, ironic smile.
What the hell, Ralph thought. No goat like an old goat, I guess.
Even an old goat that can’t manage much more than two or two and a half hours’ worth of sleep a night.
“Tell me about your job,” he said as Helen sat down and sipped her coffee.
“Well, I think they ought to make Mike Hanlon’s birthday a national holiday-does that tell you anything?”
“A little, yes,” Ralph said, smiling.
“I was all but positive I’d have to leave Derry. I sent away for applications to libraries as far south as Portsmouth, but I felt sick doing it. I’m going on thirty- one and I’ve only lived here for six of those years, but Derry feels like home-I can’t explain it, but it’s the truth.”
“You don’t have to explain it, Helen. I think home’s just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.”
Gretchen was nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”
“Mike called Monday and told me the assistant’s position in the Children’s Library had opened up. I could hardly believe it. I mean, I’ve been walking around all week just pinching myself. Haven’t I, Gretchen?”
“Well, you’ve been very happy,” Gretchen said, and that’s been very good to see.”
She smiled at Helen, and for Ralph that smile was a revelation.
He suddenly understood that he could look at Gretchen Tillbury all he wanted, and it wouldn’t make any difference. If the only man in this room had been Tom Cruise, it still would have made no difference.
He wondered if Helen knew, and then scolded himself for his foolishness. Helen was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
“When do you start?” he asked her.
“Columbus Day week,” she said. “The twelfth. Afternoons and evenings. The salary’s not exactly a king’s ransom, but it’ll be enough to keep us through the winter no matter how the… the rest of my situation works out. Isn’t it great, Ralph?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very great.”
The baby had drunk half the bottle and now showed signs of losing interest. The nipple popped halfway out of her mouth, and a little rill of milk ran down from the corner of her lips toward her chin.
Ralph reached to wipe it away, and his fingers left a series of delicate gray-blue lines in the air.
Baby Natalie snatched at them, then laughed as they dissolved in her fist. Ralph’s breath caught in his throat.
She sees. The baby sees what I see, That’s nuts, Ralph. That’s nuts and you know it.
Except he knew no such thing. He had just seen it-had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.
“Ralph?” Helen asked. “Are you all right?”
“Sure.” He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon- string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. “Will you be moving back into the house?”
Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn’t need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen’s now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange.