Mr. Murder

from her.

By unspoken agreement, she and Marty stretched out side by side on the same queen-size bed. The thought of being separated by even a few feet was intolerable.

One bedside lamp was lit, but he switched it off. Enough light came through the door from the adjoining unit to reveal the larger part of their own room. Shadows attended every corner, but deeper darkness was kept at bay.

They held hands and stared at the ceiling as if their fate could be read in the curiously portentous patterns of light and shadow on the plaster. It wasn’t only the ceiling; during the past few hours, virtually everything Paige looked at seemed to be filled with omens, menacingly significant.

Neither she nor Marty undressed for the night. Although it was difficult to believe they could have been followed without being aware of it, they wanted to be able to move fast.

The rain had stopped a couple of hours ago, but aqueous rhythms still lulled them. The motel was on a bluff above the Pacific, and the cadenced crashing of the surf was, in its metronomic certainty, a soothing and peaceful sound.

“Tell me something,” she said, speaking softly to prevent her voice from carrying into the other room.

He sounded tired. “Whatever the question is, I probably don’t have the answer.”

“What happened over there?”

“Just now? In the other room?”

“Yeah.”

“Magic.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Marty said. “You can’t analyze the deeper effects that storytelling has on us, can’t figure out the why and how, any more than King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he did.”

“We came here shattered, frightened. The kids were so silent, half numb with fear. You and I were snapping at each other—”

“Not snapping.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Okay,” he admitted, “we were, just a little.”

“Which, for us, is a lot. All of us were . . . uneasy with one another. In knots.”

“I don’t think it was that bad.”

She said, “Listen to a family counselor with some experience—it was that bad. Then you tell a story, a lovely nonsense poem but nonsense nonetheless . . . and everyone’s more relaxed. It helps us knit together somehow. We have fun, we laugh. The girls wind down, and before you know it, they’re able to sleep.”

For a while neither of them spoke.

The metrical susurration of the night surf was like the slow and steady beating of a great heart.

When Paige closed her eyes, she imagined she was a little girl again, curled in her mother’s lap as she had so seldom been allowed to do, her head against her mother’s breast, one ear attuned to the woman’s hidden heart, listening intently for some small sound that was not solely biological, a special whisper that she might recognize as the precious sound of love. She’d never heard anything but the lub-dub of atrium and ventricle, hollow, mechanical.

Yet she’d been soothed. Perhaps on a deep subconscious level, listening to her mother’s heart, she had recalled her nine months in the womb, during which that same iambic beat had surrounded her twenty-four hours a day. In the womb there is a perfect peace never to be found again; as long as we remain unborn, we know nothing of love and cannot know the misery that arises from being deprived of it.

She was grateful that she had Marty, Charlotte, Emily. But, as long as she lived, moments like this would occur, when something as simple as the surf would remind her of the deep well of sadness and isolation in which she’d dwelt throughout her childhood.

She always strived to ensure that her daughters never for an instant doubted they were loved. Now she was equally determined that the intrusion of this madness and violence into their lives would not steal any fraction of Charlotte’s or Emily’s childhood as her own had been stolen in its entirety. Because her own parents’ estrangement from each other had been exceeded by their estrangement from their only child, Paige had been forced to grow up fast for her own emotional survival; even as a grammar-school girl, she was aware of the cold indifference of the world, and understood that strong self-reliance was imperative if she was to cope with the cruelties life sometimes could inflict. But, damn it, her own daughters were not going to be required to learn such hard lessons overnight. Not at the tender ages of seven and nine. No way. She wanted desperately to shelter them for a few more years from the harsher realities of human existence, and allow them the chance to grow up gradually, happily, without bitterness.

Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them. “When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and relatives would live or die.”

“Hard to believe it’s almost two years Vera’s been gone.”

Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.

Marty said, “Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all kinds of ways. But—did you notice?—those who seemed to deal best with their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading novels.”

Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had been Paige’s dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about her. The week Vera was hospitalized—first disoriented and suffering, then comatose—had been the worst week of Paige’s life; nearly two years later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the final hour, as she’d stood beside Vera’s bed, holding her friend’s warm but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear: I love you, I’ll miss you forever, you’re the mother to me that my own mother never could be.

The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige’s memory, in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the layout and furnishings of the ICU visitors’ lounge in dreary specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.

He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because ... because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”

“The medicine of hope,” she said thoughtfully.

“Or maybe I’m just full of shit.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I am, yes, probably at least half full of shit—but maybe not about this.”

She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think if some university did a long-term study, they’d discover that people who read fiction don’t suffer from depression as much, don’t commit suicide as often, are just happier with their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human-beings-are -garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with fashionable despair.”

“Dr. Marty Stillwater, dispensing the medicine of hope.”

“You do think I’m full of shit.”

“No, baby, no,” she said. “I think you’re wonderful.”

“I’m not, though. You’re wonderful. I’m just a neurotic writer. By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time too full of themselves ever to be wonderful.”