“I'm as sane as you are,” Anderson said through the door. “I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and I've got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can't quite remember and I'm hungry as a bear and I know I've lost too much weight… but I am sane, Gard. I think you may have
times before the day's over when you wonder if you are. The answer is, we both are.”
“Bobbi, what's happening here?” Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.
“I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what's under it,” Anderson said through the door. “Feel like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Bobbi.”
“I'm glad to have you here, Gard,” she said. “I had a bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren't doing so good.”
Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. “No pain, no strain,” he said. “I'll make some breakfast.”
“Thanks, Gard.”
He walked away then, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how many times he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.
He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.
“Where's Peter, Bobbi?”
“What?” she called over the drumming shower.
“I said, where's Peter?” he called, raising his voice.
“Dead,” Bobbi called back over the drumming water. “I cried, Gard. But he was… you know…”
“Old,” Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. “It was old age, then?”
“Yes,” Anderson called back over the drumming water.
Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.
Gard scrambled eight eggs and fried bacon on Bobbi's grill. He noticed that a microwave oven had been installed over the conventional one since he'd last been here, and there was now track lighting over the main work areas and the kitchen table, where Bobbi was in the habit of eating most of her meals-usually with a book in her free hand.
He made coffee, strong and black, and was just bringing everything to the table when Bobbi came in, wearing a fresh pair of cords and a T-shirt with a picture of a blackfly on it and the legend MAINE STATE BIRD. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel.
Anderson surveyed the table. “No toast?” she asked.
“Make your own frigging toast,” Gardener said amiably. “I didn't hitchhike two hundred miles to buttle your breakfast.”
Anderson stared. “You did what? Yesterday? In the rain?”
“Yeah.”
“What in God's name happened? Muriel said you were doing a reading tour and your last one was June 30th.”
“You called Muriel?” He was absurdly touched. “When?”
Anderson flapped a hand as if that didn't matter-probably it didn't. “What happened?” she asked again.
Gardener thought about telling her-wanted to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her… and didn't. There would be time for that later.
Maybe.
“Later,” he said. “I want to know what happened here.”
“Breakfast first,” Anderson said, “and that's an order.”
Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time-she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young-no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry-as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest-and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.
And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.
He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.
“Gross, Bobbi.”
“In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.”
“What do they do after a good lay? Fart?”
Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.
Smiling a little, Gardener said: “Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.”
Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.
“No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.”
But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.
“You looked around,” Anderson said. “I remember telling you to do that-just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.”
“What thing?”
“If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.”
So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.
“And somewhere in the middle of all that,” he said, “you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably… and you've written some good ones.”
Anderson was nodding, pleased. “Thank you. I think it is, too.” She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. “You want that?”
“No. I
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
She took it and made it gone.
“How long did it take you to write it?”
“I'm not completely sure,” Anderson said. “Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.”
Gard smiled.
“I'm not joking, you know,” Anderson said.
Gardener stopped smiling.
“My time sense is pretty fucked up,” she admitted. “I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time-sequential time-seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So… a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.”
Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “Bobbi, that's impossible,” Gardener said finally.
“If you think so, you missed my typewriter.”
Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.
“If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?”
She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.
“I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.” She smiled at Gardener's expression. “I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service… that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long… let's see… four days ago. That I do remember.”
