tomorrow. Then I’m done.”
“But what if he calls after that?”
“I’ll redirect him to you. I don’t care about Anderson. Neither do you, though I can see that it’s interesting that Bill’s odd mood maybe dates from around the time he received the check from Cranfield’s will. I’m giving you twenty-four hours as a favor, and because you showed me something it’s possible I need to know. After that, I’m going home. If I’ve got real problems, then it’s there that they’re going to be solved.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I do appreciate it.”
“Good. So buy me another beer.”
Our waitress seemed to have been abducted, and so Fisher went up to the bar to deal direct. I watched him as he handled the girl there, saw the flash of his artless smile, and realized that in the end I’d wound up joining his game after all. He came back soon enough, and we set about doing what two men in a bar in a strange town usually do.
We got drunk.
Sometime later we were in Fisher’s hotel. It was sort of in downtown but had little else to recommend it. Amy wouldn’t have set foot in there, put it that way.
The guy behind the bar was an asshole, by which I mean he wouldn’t serve us. So we went upstairs. Fisher’s room was large and frank in its rectangularity and had a window over yet another of the city’s ubiquitous ground- cover parking lots. I looked out over this as Fisher turned on a couple of lights. People came and went with greater regularity than the need to park usually requires. Most of them didn’t even have cars. Had I been in need of an easy drug collar, instinct told me the lot would be a good place to start. After a few moments, I spotted the seller, recognizing him instantly. Not because I’d seen him before but because I knew his type. The subspecies. Thin, pale, pinch-faced, with short, dark hair like a pelt, the kind of man you’ll see emerging nonchalantly in the early hours from a car he’s just broken into. Without morals, guilt, or empathy, culturally imbecilic. Ratlike, perhaps, though rats are actually far more noble, a species whose reputation we’ve sullied to provide a cheap symbol for members of our own, the ones prepared to gnaw their way into anyone else’s life in the hope of an easy score.
The minibar was well stocked and proved willing to accommodate us. Fisher and I sat on opposite sides of the room, in its two armchairs. The walk had been cold and long. It was after eleven, and it had occurred to me to send a text message to Amy. I wasn’t sure what. Something short. Preferably something nice. I knew I should probably not do this, at least not without a clearer intention in mind, and I’d already made the decision not to. Twice. But the idea evidently didn’t feel it had been dealt with as it wished, and it refused to get out of my head. If things got much later, she’d be in bed.
I sat there, arms hanging over the side of the chair, head tilted back, not knowing what to do, feeling tired but as if I would never sleep.
“How come you don’t have kids?” Fisher asked after a while.
“Amy works hard,” I said, feeling bad.
There was another silence. Then Fisher spoke again. “I dream of her,” he said.
I was confused. “Who?”
“Donna.”
I struggled for a moment, then realized who he was talking about. I tilted my head down to look at him. “From school? The girl who killed herself?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I guess it’s going to crop up. From what I could tell, it changed your life.”
“It did,” he said. “But you don’t get it. I never used to think about her at all. What happened was bad, sure. I was screwed up over it for a while.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that,” he said, with a very brief smile. “You told me back then, and I was grateful. To be frank, if we hadn’t had the conversation at the track that afternoon, I probably wouldn’t have remembered you at all. My point is, after a while I came to terms with what Donna did, realized I couldn’t be held responsible for her choices. I was a kid, I was probably kind of dumb and definitely too full of myself—but neither of those is actually a crime, right? I didn’t do anything to lead her on and certainly nothing to make her kill herself. I saw a therapist for a couple years while I was at college, and I gradually stopped feeling bad about it. I got on with my life. It was a pretty good life.”
“Was?”
He ignored me. “She didn’t cross my mind for years at a time after that—and when she did, it was like some story I’d been told, one that had a moral I’d already absorbed and didn’t need to hear again. Then one night about a year ago, I dreamed about her.”
He stared down at his hands. The light in the room was low, but it looked to me as if they were trembling.
“I dreamed I came home from work early, and the house was empty. I wasn’t worried—I knew that my kids would still be in kindergarten and my wife would be at the store or having coffee with the neighbor. I had papers to go through, and so I went into the den. But after a while I thought I could hear water running. I couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. Finally I realized it was upstairs. That’s very odd, because I’m alone in the house, so I go to the bottom of the staircase. I look up.” His face twitched. “And a shadow crosses the hallway at the top of the stairs.”
“Did you go up?”
“Of course. It’s a dream, right? It’s all about me going up those stairs. I ran up them, in fact, because the shadow…it was pretty low on the wall. I have two little kids, and I’m worried. Scared. I run up the stairs convinced one of them is in trouble, and when I get to the top, the sound of the water is much louder. I run to the end of the hallway, and the door to the bathroom is closed. I pull at the handle, but I can’t open it. I know there’s no lock on the door—we had it taken off when the kids got old enough to shut themselves in. I kick it. I can hear someone inside, someone making a sound, no words, just a noise like they’re frightened, and I know it’s one of my kids. And I’m so desperate that I take a step back and throw my shoulder at the door, and suddenly it has no resistance and I go tumbling into the bathroom.
“There’s no one in there. No water in the tub. The room’s exactly as it should be. All my wife’s shampoos in ten neat rows. Line of books above the john. A green plastic whale full of little kiddy toys for bathtime. Everything’s fine. But then I hear this tiny click.
“I walk back out into the hallway, and one of the doors ahead falls open, just a bit. I reach for the handle, but suddenly I don’t want to open it. The door’s ajar enough that I can see through into my daughter’s bedroom, a patch of carpet and a slice of wall. And I see a shadow fall across it, but this time it’s too big for a child, and I hear the crib rustle as if someone has pulled aside the bedspread and climbed in, curled up into the space, and I don’t understand how I know this, but I know that person is naked and she’s waiting for me—but it’s only when I start to push the door open that I realize it’s going to be Donna lying in the bed.”
He stopped abruptly. “And by then it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
He shook his head, as if either I should know already or he just couldn’t say. “And since then I can’t get her out of my head. I have that dream every couple weeks, sometimes more. Each time the door gets a little wider before I wake up. And I know that if it’s ever wide enough for me to see her face, then I won’t wake up. That I’ll step in and she’ll be lying there smiling and the door will close and I’ll never get out again.”
I wasn’t sure what I could say. “We’re getting older,” I tried eventually. “Today’s too muddy and confusing, and so you retreat to when it all seemed simpler, even if it actually wasn’t.”
He let out a short, harsh laugh. “What she did wasn’t simple.”
“I know, but…”
“There’s something else. The dream kept coming back. I was exhausted, couldn’t focus at work.”
“Did you talk to anyone about it?”
“Not really. I never told my wife about it. I was so over the whole thing by the time we met. And…you know, when something’s really in your head, if you tell someone else about it and they don’t get it, don’t understand its weight, you feel even worse for opening your mouth and blabbing your dark secret. So…”
He stopped again. Outside the window a police car went by, siren blaring. I imagined the dealer and his clients scattering like frightened mice, to return within minutes.
