“Good, I wouldn’t want to wake you up. Did you get my message?”
“No, I got in so late last night I didn’t pick up the messages.” He paused. “You didn’t call at six-thirty to say happy birthday. What’s going on?”
“Maybe you should tell me. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t call me in on this before.” The edge sharpened.
Oh, it was about Milicia. Jason waited for Charles to explode. He did.
“I don’t get it, Jason. Milicia is a friend of ours, a colleague. You met her in our home. The least you could do is keep me informed of a situation like this.” Charles’s voice was tight with anger.
“She came to me professionally, Charles. You know I couldn’t talk to you about that.”
“Milicia called me last night. She was so upset by the way you’ve handled things, she spent half the night with us.” He fell silent, then added, “Brenda told her she could stay over, but Milicia said she couldn’t.”
A heavy accusation hung in the air. Jason didn’t respond.
“Jason, is this true? Are you responsible for having Milicia’s sister arrested for murder?”
“No, she has not been arrested. But she is a very sick woman. And she was brought in for questioning. I was at the police station for hours last night. They wanted a preliminary evaluation of her and didn’t want to send her to Bellevue.”
“I’m just astounded by all this. Milicia is devastated. She’s afraid her sister will go to prison. She blames you for dragging the police into it.”
“Charles, Milicia came to me because she was fearful that Camille was dangerous. Since then two young women have died. Milicia told me she believed Camille was responsible for their murders. What was I supposed to do? I had no choice. Absolutely no choice. Milicia had to go to the police with the information she had. Look, do you have a half hour sometime today? I’ll fill you in.”
“Jesus, Jason, I can’t believe you didn’t call me. Shit. What is this—Wednesday? I have a cancellation at one forty-five. We could talk then.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you halfway. How’s Madison and Seventy-ninth?”
“That’s more than halfway for you, thanks. Ah, Jason, where is she now?”
“Camille? She’s at her home. Oh, and Charles—the suspect is her boyfriend. He had a gun, and apparently there was some kind of shootout.” The words sounded strange in Jason’s mouth. He didn’t know the kind of people who were in shootouts.
“God! Was anybody hurt?” Charles sounded shocked.
“Yes, the suspect and a policeman, as I understand it. I don’t know the nature of their injuries, but Camille has lost her caregiver. She’s going to need a lot of supervision.”
“Should she be hospitalized?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Emma’s alarm clock started ringing. “I’ve got to get going.”
Jason hung up and stretched. He didn’t like the way the bed looked, only a small slice of it mussed, and the rest still made up, the pillows untouched. Twice a week Marta, the cleaning lady he’d had for a dozen years, made the bed for him. The rest of the time he messed it up and left it that way. He kicked the bedcovers off his naked body and pushed them around with his feet. The sun was now pushing in through the blinds, clearly revealing a thick layer of dust on the slats. His body looked slack and soft to him. He was damp with sweat, and his bladder was full. He got up to urinate for the first time in his fortieth year.
63
It was supposed to be better at night. It was always better at night. Depression moved in on Camille in the mornings, rumbling into the city by the bridges and tunnels in a caravan of eighteen-wheelers that pitted and dented the streets so badly, no one was safe negotiating the potholes.
Starting at four or five on bad days, she could feel it coming. She could see in inches, how the blackness of night began to break up into little pieces. And like the night fading away, she disintegrated, too, as unrecognizable bits of herself plunged into the Bermuda Triangle of another dawning day.
Camille was constantly, perpetually afraid. The knot in her stomach pushed up from below, crushing her chest and heart. It was painful to breathe. An animal stuck in her throat, chewed away at her from the inside. Sometimes she saw it as a tapeworm, thick and gray, sometimes as a cloud of poison gas. Today when she shut her eyes, she saw a formless thing, all mouth, eating her heart out. There was nothing in her, no human organs, nothing. Her body was an empty package with a bomb inside. She could hear it ticking away.
Bouck was in the hospital. The doctor told her that, but she didn’t cry. The policewoman at the police station said she couldn’t locate Milicia to take care of her, and they couldn’t keep her there, so they had to let her come home. Still she didn’t cry. She was numb.
The doctor said he would talk to her again so they could figure out what happened.
“When?” she wanted to know.
“Sometime tomorrow,” he told her.
No, she meant, “What happened when? What happened now or what happened a long time ago?”
He didn’t say.
Camille and Puppy came home in a police car. Her heart pounded all the way. A policewoman, big as a house, guarded her in the back seat, then let her out. She opened the doors of Bouck’s building with Camille’s key, then walked behind Camille and Puppy up the stairs.
The pounding in her chest intensified when she saw blood all over the hall floor. There was blood on the walls, too, and sticky tape marking off the places where no one was supposed to go. No one had cleaned the blood up. It left a sick smell in the moldy place.
The bomb inside Camille exploded. She tripped and pitched forward. The policewoman behind her reached out to stop her from crumpling on the floor.
At her touch, Camille started shrieking.
She grabbed the banister, smearing the blood, a shrill sound of pure terror pulsing from her throat. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”
The wall of blue recoiled. “Honey, I’m not going to hurt you—”
Not a second later the other one lunged through the door. “What’s going on?”
It was the one who drove the car, a man. He looked nervous.
Camille screamed, a cop on either side of her. “No, no!”
The power that kept her safe was gone. Bouck wasn’t there to protect her. “Get away from me!” she cried.
Her heart started pounding again. There was blood on her hands. “Where’s Bouck?” she whimpered.
She didn’t know what happened to Bouck. Puppy yelped, trying to jump out of her arms. The wall of blue moved closer.
Camille froze. Bouck must have killed a policeman with one of his guns and left all that blood behind. Or a policeman had killed him. She stared, bug-eyed, at the two cops.
For a moment no one moved. Then the woman said, “It’s okay, honey. No one will touch you.” She cocked her head at the cop by the door and moved away from Camille to show they wouldn’t touch her. Then she looked around the warehouse of the second floor in amazement, but didn’t get any closer to Camille, or say anything about the place.
Camille was too upset to tell her they were redecorating.
It took a long time before she could ask what happened.
The policewoman said she didn’t know. Camille didn’t believe her, didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t go upstairs to the room where she slept, wouldn’t stay on the second floor with all the blood. Finally she went to Bouck’s room, to sit in the bergere she had chosen for him, the new one that he liked.
The policewoman sat by the door in a hard wooden chair she had brought from downstairs, and watched Camille all night. Her eyes didn’t droop. Camille could feel them, wide open, gaping at her. All night she could hear another bomb inside her ticking away.
It was bad, very bad, by morning when the telephone rang. Camille listened to it for a while, not wanting to pick up. By the tenth ring she knew she had to pick up. It might be Bouck calling from the hospital. She reached for
