extravagant ways, likewise the enforced proximity to elaborately fucked-up grunts with names like Ratman and Pirate. There he had witnessed what he took to be the only true hallucination of his life.
Until this morning. What he had seen across the street from the Fireside Diner on West Broadway
Two stubble-faced boys wearing black swerved to move around him.
For a time he was incapable of speech. He could tell himself,
April’s stubborn face, with its implacable cheekbones and tight mouth, reminded Tim of Pop’s uncomprehending rages at what he perceived as April’s defiance. No wonder she had fled into the mirror world of Alice and the Mad Hatter. A tavern-haunting elevator operator at the St. Alwyn Hotel supervised her life, and he found half of the things that ran through her mind unacceptable, irritating, obscurely insulting.
A second and a half later Tim was left with the fact of April’s face, narrower than he remembered, and the smallness of her body, the true childishness of the sister he had lost. All his old love for nine-year-old April Underhill awakened in him—she who had defended him when he needed defending, stuck up for him when he needed a champion, entranced him with the best stories he had ever heard. She, he realized, she should have been the writer! April had been his
He wanted to tell her to get out of the rain.
April stepped forward on the crowded sidewalk, and Tim’s heart went cold with terror. His sister had swum back through the mirror to interrupt him on his way to breakfast. He feared that she intended to glide across the street, grasp his hand, and pull him into the SoHo traffic. She reached the edge of the pavement and raised her arms.
Instead of dragging him through the mirror, April brought her hands to the sides of her mouth, leaned forward, contracted her whole being, and, as loudly as she could, shouted through the megaphone of her hands. All Tim heard were the sounds of the traffic and the scraps of conversation spoken by the people walking past him.
His eyes stung, his vision blurred. By the time he raised his hands to flick away his tears, April had disappeared.
6
Guilderland Road, at the upper end of which lay Mitchell Faber’s expansive, densely wooded property, traversed an area on the southwestern slopes (so to speak) of Alpine, New Jersey, where not long after the Civil War the nearly invisible village of Hendersonia had been surgically detached from the more public borough of Creskill. In all aspects of life save the naming of places, the Hendersons of Hendersonia had presumably cherished obscurity as thoroughly as Mitchell Faber, for they had passed through history leaving behind no more than a scattering of barely legible headstones in the postage-stamp graveyard at the lower end of the road. Farther down the hill, the cement-block bank, an abandoned Presbyterian church, a private house turned into an insurance agency, a video and DVD rental shop, and a bar and grill called Redtop’s made up the center of town. The previous summer, a Foodtown grocery store had taken over an old bowling alley in a paved lot one block south, and Willy promised herself that from now on she would do her shopping there.
She was still finding her way around, still trying to get into a routine. It had been only two weeks since Mitchell had succeeded in persuading her to abandon her cozy one-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street for the “estate.” They were to be married in two months, why not start living together now? They were adults of thirty-eight and fifty-two (a young fifty-two), alone in the world.
When Willy had met Mitchell Faber, he amazed her by knowing not only that her third YA novel,
The prize had been announced four days earlier, but the party at Molly Harper’s apartment was not in her honor, and Willy’s triumph was so fresh, as yet still half unreal, that she felt as though it might be revoked. Willy herself, having yet to emerge from mad grieving darkness, would have run from anything as public as a celebration. She felt only barely capable of handling a dinner party. Some of the people present were aware that Willy had just been honored by the Newbery Committee, and some of those came up to congratulate her. Molly’s friends tended to be too rich to be demonstrative; like Molly herself, many of the women were decades younger than their husbands, thereby generally obliged to exercise a kind of behavioral modification akin to the pushing of a “Mute” button. Added to their characteristic restraint was their response to Willy’s appearance, that of a gorgeous lost child. Some women disliked her on sight. Others felt threatened when their husbands wandered, flirtatiously or not, into Willy’s orbit.
Toward the end of the evening, or shortly after ten o’clock, for these silver-haired men and their gleaming wives never stayed up later than eleven, Lankford Harper, Molly’s whispery husband, left the chair to Willy’s left and within seconds was replaced by a sleek, smooth male animal remarkable for being older than most of the women and younger than all of the men. Energy hummed through his thick, shiny black hair and luxuriant black mustache. Black eyes and brilliant white teeth shone at Willy, and a wide, warm dark hand covered hers. That she did not find this intimacy discomfiting amazed her. Whatever was about to happen, would; instead of feeling offended, Willy relaxed.
—I want to congratulate you on your magnificent honor, Mrs. Patrick, the man said, leaning in. You must feel as though you’ve won the lottery.
—Hardly that, she said. Do you keep up with children’s books then, Mr. . . . ?
—I’m Mitchell Faber. No, I can’t say I’m an expert on children’s books, but the Newbery’s a great accolade, and I
She opened her mouth. —Yes.
—Good title,
—It’s probably too close to Maurice Sendak, but he was writing for a younger audience.
His hand tightened on hers. —Please excuse me for what I’m about to say, Mrs. Patrick. I knew your husband. At times, our work brought us into contact. He was a fine, fine man.
For a moment, Willy’s vision went grainy, and her heart hovered between beats. Ordinary conversation