Moth

“What then?”

“I’m not sure. We’ve talked about a treatment center up here, or some kind of halfway house. She may want to come back to New Orleans. Right now, it’s still one-day-at-a-time time.”

“You will let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks, Lew. Keep me posted.”

“I will.”

“You need anything? Money?”

“I’m fine.”

“Let me know if you do. Guess I’ll owe you a few dozen lunches when you get back.”

“You’re on.”

I sat looking at the phone for a while, finally dialed again but when Clare’s answering machine came on the line, hung up.

A minute or two later I called back and told the machine: “It’s Lew, Clare. I’m in Memphis. I found Alouette. Sorry I haven’t called, but I have been thinking of you.”

After hanging up again, I realized that I should have left my number and thought about calling back, but decided to put it off till morning.

I pulled out my notebook and looked up Richard Garces’s home number. His machine came on the line, its recorded message in rapid-fire, oddly staccato Spanish, but then Garces himself broke in with “Rick.”

I told him who it was and he said, “Hey,” stretching it out like a yawn, “good to hear from you.”

He’d spoken with Mickey Francis from the hospital and was up to date on pretty much all of it.

“I need some help, Richard. Advice, really.”

“You’ve got it.”

“What’s Alouette’s legal situation?”

“Shaky-as it always is when contentions of mental health are part of the package. Of course in this case there’s really no established history of mental health problems, and the girl is in her majority.”

“If her father doesn’t know by now, he will soon enough. I’m expecting lawyers to swoop down on her like a pack of crows.”

“I’ll have to check to be sure. Laws could be different there; a lot of them are, since everything here is based on the Napoleonic Code. But there’s no formal charge as far as the courts are concerned, right? No talk of sanity hearings, anything like that?”

“None.”

“That would probably be the way he’d want to go. Claim that the girl was financially dependent, stress her runaway status, abandonment of the baby and its subsequent death. That’s all public record. The lawyers could lean hard on her overdose as a suicide attempt. After that, mostly it would depend on the judge. Down here, I could pretty much call it according to whose court it was set for. There, I just don’t know. But they’d probably get some kind of exclusionary ruling. Commitment to one of the diagnostic centers for observation, possibly, or mandatory court-monitored therapy.”

“Is there anything we could do to counter it?”

“This isn’t science we’re talking, Lew. Not even law, really-and law itself is unpredictable enough. More like magic where the correspondences are skewed and whatever rules there are, keep changing. Let me do some checking. I’ll get on the network and see what I can turn up. I have some contacts scattered around up there. I’ll get back to you. May be a while. The girl able to sit up straight and say what she wants?”

“Yes. Once she decides.”

“She look okay?”

“Yeah. A little shopworn.”

“Good. That counts for a lot. Okay, let me fire up the circuits and read some smoke. Where you gonna be?”

I gave him my phone number and said if I missed him, which was likely under the circumstances, I’d check back with him sometime tomorrow.

I hung up and sat remembering light gouging at my eyes.

Once years ago, surfacing briefly in a diner during a week-long drunk, I found Mephistopheles himself sitting across from me in the booth, pouring Tabasco sauce into his coffee. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We talked a while (I remember the waitress coming by to ask if I needed anything, and a couple of times to ask if I was all right, and some other people staring over at us), I declined his offers, and he left, telling me to keep up the good work.

Naturally, I later used the whole thing in a novel.

Tomorrow morning, too, I would call the university, try to mend that tattered sail as best I could, if it were mendable at all. Then Clare. Hoping for wind and calm seas.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I found her standing at the side of the two-lane highway near a gas-station-and-foodstore crossroad, wearing the cotton dress and navy pumps.

My phone had chirred that morning at eight. Crickets were devouring the Superdome, then there were incoming missiles. The door to my elevator wouldn’t close despite a formless something lurking out there in shadow. When my beeper went off, the thing tracking me turned its head suddenly, tipped by the sound-then the sound was only a phone.

Someone’s hand went out and got it.

“Mr. Griffin?”

I admitted it.

“Doris Brown, at the hospital. I’m one of the nurses on Three East. We were wondering if you’d seen Alouette.”

I came suddenly awake.

“Not since last night. I brought her back about nine-thirty.”

“The nurse on duty remembers her coming back, but somehow she never logged back in. And when Trudy made a bed check about two A.M., Alouette was gone.” She turned her head away, coughed. “I’m sorry we’ve been so long getting in touch with you, but we had trouble locating a number for you. You have no idea where Alouette is, then?”

“No.”

“Will she contact you, do you think? Or is there someone else she might get in touch with? Her hospitalization became voluntary upon release from the jail ward, of course, but we’re concerned.”

“I understand.”

“You’ll let us know if you hear from her?”

“I will.”

I hung up and stood in the shower a long time, turning the water ever hotter as I adjusted. I’d been awake much of last night, finally falling into agitated sleep just as dawn’s fingers tugged at the sill. A sleep in which restless dreams billowed soft and soundless as silk parachutes and dropped away.

I’d spent those hours preceding my shabby, ragged symphonie fantastique remembering an incident, itself almost dreamlike, from years ago.

Every teacher has stories of students who suddenly give way under pressure. They start coming in during office hours all the time for no discernible reason, they just one day vanish and are never seen again, they disrupt class with objections and urgent queries or sit in the back and never speak, the essays they turn in have little to do with the subject and everything to do with themselves.

Oddly enough, in all these on-again, off-again years, I’d really had only one instance.