In the Night Room

In the end I agreed to do the most important of the radio interviews, scheduled for the morning of Thursday the eleventh, by phone from the Pforzheimer Hotel, which was where I always stayed when I was in my hometown.

Willy was staring at me the way a new immigrant stares at the Statue of Liberty. I opened my arms, let her step into me, and closed them around her. Nestled against me, her head resting on my breastbone, her arms embracing me light as foam, hair fluffed by the towel, shirt still damp enough to print dark stains on my own, was a person to whom I had given life. No matter how impossible the situation, here she was, as predicted by Cyrax, and I had to deal with her.

So I have these questions: can fictional characters live out ordinary human lives, or does their existence have a term of some kind? What happens when they die? Does their entry into our world mean that their histories are now part of our history? (What happened in the bookstore indicates that it doesn’t. Willy’s name isn’t in Books in Print, and her only Newbery Medal is the one I gave her.) And according to Cyrax, I have to take her back to Millhaven, but what am I supposed to do with her when I get there? Cyrax also said something about a great sacrifice—I don’t like this. It seems obvious, but I can’t stand the conclusion Cyrax seems to be leading me toward.

And my God, do I introduce Willy to Philip?

What else did Cyrax tell me? From what I remember, that I had created a second Dark Man and merged him with Kalendar—true enough, since I thought of Mitchell Faber as a sort of more presentable, less psychotic Kalendar.

My biggest question, though, was how I was to let Willy know exactly what she was. If she’d understood our relationship, her appearance in my life would have been even scarier and more unsettling than it was. As things are, I have to take care of her while slowly letting her figure things out.

“It’s uncanny, how much you remind me of Tom,” she said as we stood wrapped together to the right of the escalator on the ground floor.

“We had a lot in common,” I said.

“Look, Mr. Underhill, you have to tell me how you knew he was dead. You have to. It’s scary—can’t you understand that?”

“I sort of figured it out when I saw you.”

And she stepped in and abetted the lie I had just told her. “Oh, you were expecting him. No wonder you looked so dumbfounded. If you recognized me right away, he must have talked about me a lot.” A tremendous range of expressions crossed her face. “I’m still in such shock. I saw these two men who work for my fiance, his name is Mitchell Faber—I saw these men, Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka, running down the street, and Roman Richard had a gun, and right after I got into the taxi, he shot Tom. Tom’s blood got on my shirt. The cab took off, took off, it took off like a rocket . . .” She started to sob.

“I bet it did,” I said, and held her more tightly. My heart hurt for her; I felt like weeping, too.

“It just feels like I can trust you with everything . . . with anything. . . . You make me feel so much safer.”

“Good,” I said. “I want you to feel safe with me.” At that moment, I would have run into a burning building to rescue Willy Patrick.

“My fiance killed my husband,” she said. “And he killed my little girl, too. How’s that for a nasty surprise? Mitchell Faber. Did Tom ever mention him to you?”

“Once or twice. But please tell me this, Willy: how did you get from . . .” I realized that I could not say 103rd Street, not now. “From wherever you were with your cab driver to here? It happened during that storm, didn’t it?”

“What happened doesn’t make any sense. They were chasing me, Giles and Roman Richard—they got out of Mitchell’s car and started running down the street—I got blown over, and I flew through the wind—and my feet hit the sidewalk right in front of your poster.”

That was the best answer I was likely to get: she was blown out of one world and into another. It must have happened when that gigantic thunderclap sounded—right after I did my dumb stunt and had everyone click their heels together. It occurred to me that April had somehow opened a space for Willy, and that she had done it for my sake. In some sense, April had given Willy to me. Then I saw the hand, or at least the style, of Cyrax in all this, and wished I hadn’t.

“I felt like a leaf being shot through a tunnel.” Her body went extraordinarily still, as a bird’s does when it is cupped in your hand. “I was crazy for a while, you know. Maybe I’m going crazy all over again.”

Willy leaned back without losing contact. Her short, scrappy blond hair looked as though a Madison Avenue hairdresser had devoted hours to it, and her face filled with emotion. Early in my book, I had written that she looked like a gorgeous lost child, but I had not understood how beautiful she actually was. What could have been superficial prettiness had been deepened by sorrow, fear, intelligence, effort, imagination, and steadfast, steady application of her capacity for response and engagement. I knew that kind of work; I also knew that I had not done right by her. She was a more considerable being than I had taken her for. When I looked down at her face and into her eyes, I also understood part of the reason why I had to take her with me—this lost girl was supposed to be lost in Millhaven. Once I took her there, she was not supposed to come out again.

So I can never pretend, can never say, that I didn’t understand that from the beginning.

“I feel as though I’ve known you for the longest time,” she said. “Is that true for you?”

“Yes, like I’ve been living with you for months.”

Her shaggy head dropped to the center of my chest again, and she tightened her embrace around me. I could feel the tremble in her arms.

Then she released me and backed away. “You want to hear another weird thing? You’re the author I read when I’m—”

“Depressed?”

I had surprised her again. “How did you know that?”

“I hear that a lot. I’m literary Zoloft, I guess.”

She shook her head. “I don’t read you because you’re going to cheer me up. It’s another condition altogether.”

While I was speculating about what that might be, which included wondering why I did not already know, I noticed something related to the most important question I’d asked earlier, about the term of her existence.

“Willy,” I said. “Look at your shirt.”

She looked down. Her shirt had dried to the extent that her bra was no longer visible beneath it, and its color was the bright, unbroken white of a movie star’s smile.

“What happened to Tom’s blood? It was right there!” She spread her neat little hand over the front of the shirt. “Where’d it go?”

“Good question.”

“Tom’s blood,” she said, and shock and fear rose to the surface of her face again. “I want it back. This isn’t fair.” She struggled with her emotions. “No. At least, this way I won’t be so conspicuous to the police. They’re after me, too.” She threw me a look of challenge, asking, Are you up for this, pal? “I don’t get it,” she said, staring back down at the brilliant white of her shirt. “I guess now I’m in Timothy Underhill’s world.”

I had to turn my head to keep her from seeing the tears in my eyes. “We’d better be sure your pursuers aren’t lurking outside when we get into the car.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Mine is in a garage on Canal Street. The one that’s going to take us there is parked right out in front.” She looked a little confused. “My publishers arranged for a car to pick me up and drive me home afterward. Brian’s very good about things like that.”

Willy gave me an odd, dark look. “You didn’t ask me why the police are looking for me. You didn’t even blink.”

Of course I could not tell her that I already knew about the falsified criminal charge. “Things have moved so fast, it never occurred to me.”

“I was accused of something. Bank robbery. It’s ridiculous, but the police are looking for me. I mean, I might