In the Night Room

that? ‘Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you’re turning into a window, because I just saw right through the top of your right hand’?”

Willy balled up the empty M&M’s packet and threw it into the back seat. “And do you know something? I still want lunch. This isn’t about hunger, it’s about staving off the lightness. It’s like putting gas in the car, that’s what it’s like. Except when I run out of gas, I won’t be there anymore.”

She stared into my eyes with a complicated mixture of fear, bravado, desperation, anger, and trust that filled me with the impossible desire to hold her forever and keep her safe from harm. “How did this happen to me?”

That was her real cry from the heart. Although she was by no means ready for the truth, I had no choice but to answer in a way faithful to her trust.

“Do you remember the bloodstains you had on your shirt when you showed up at my reading?”

“Of course.” Because the blood had been Tom Hartland’s, the question irritated her.

“And you remember what happened to them.”

“They disappeared.”

“Bloodstains don’t just disappear, Willy. Not even bloodstains that go through a downpour.”

“So first the bloodstains, then me? Is that it?” She gazed at me for a moment, thinking. “Are you saying that Giles and Roman Richard are going to start to disappear, too?”

That, at last, gave me an opening I could use. I could have kissed her hand. “Think about this, Willy: why did you ask about them?”

She frowned. “They followed me.”

“Through what? From what, to what?”

Her frown deepened, and her eyes burrowed into mine. She leaned toward me, trying to remember every detail of that strange passage. “Through that thunderstorm. I thought I . . . It sounds crazy. I thought I was flying through a tunnel. Because they were chasing me, they came through the tunnel, too. I guess that’s what happened.”

“And on this side of the tunnel, Willy, do things look the same as they did on the other?”

We passed a little airport on our left, where prop planes sat outside hangars in the sun. I paused at a stop sign, then turned right on Euclid Avenue, waiting for her answer.

“It seems to me that everything’s a little brighter now.”

“Brighter,” I said, stung.

“Hold on. Are you trying to insinuate that . . . No. I won’t even say it.”

She wouldn’t say it, but I knew what it was. The first seed of recognition had just fallen on ground prepared for it by whatever it is you feel when half of your hand disappears and you need six candy bars to bring it back.

“How much brighter?” I asked, unable to let this go.

“Only a little. You want to know the biggest difference? Before I wound up in that bookstore, I had the feeling that someone or something was pulling my strings and making me do things I didn’t actually want to do. And now, I still feel that way, but I know who’s pulling my strings and moving me around. You.”

“Do you like it better this way?”

“Yes. I do like it better this way.” She checked her hands for signs of transparency. “Do you think I’m going to disappear, like the bloodstains?”

“Unless we can fix a mistake I made in Millhaven last year.”

“We’re going to Millhaven to fix something?”

“I know none of this makes sense, Willy, and when it does, if that ever happens, you’re not going to like it much.”

“But why? What are we doing?” Her face began to tremble, and she looked in my eyes for a reassurance she did not find. For about thirty seconds, she fell apart. I would have embraced her, but she fended me off by every now and then removing one of her hands from her eyes and clouting me in the chest. I pulled over to the side of the road.

“I don’t know why I believe you.” Willy wiped her eyes and cleaned her palms by smearing them over the sleeve of my jacket.

“I do, Willy,” I said. “Before we get to Millhaven, you will, too, probably. If I explained it to you now, it would be the one thing you would refuse to believe.”

“I couldn’t have anything to do with a mistake you made last year in Millhaven. I never went near Millhaven last year, and I didn’t know you.”

“What did you do last year, Willy? Can you remember a single thing you did in 2002?”

She shook her shoulders and gave me a scowling, insulted glance. “In 2002, I wrote In the Night Room. That’s what I did that year. You probably don’t know this, but I started the book in a place, a psychiatric community you could call it, known as the Institute, in Stockwell, Massachusetts.”

Now she was daring me to find fault with her, and self-doubt turned her confidence brazen. “It’s a wonderful place, and it did me a lot of good. There was this doctor there, Dr. Bollis. I used to call him Dr. Bollocks, but he was great. Because of him, I could write again.”

“In 2001, I went to a psychiatric community that sounds very similar,” I said. “And the treatment I had there was wonderful for me, too. I could sort of put myself back together.”

She grew a shade less defensive. “So you should understand. What was the reason you came unglued, or wasn’t there anything specific?”

“On September 11, I saw people jump from the World Trade Center. And then the ruin and all the death you could feel around you. It brought back too many traumatic things from Vietnam, and I couldn’t cope anymore.”

“Oh, poor Tim,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes again. “My poor honey.” She shifted sideways and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I wiped my slimy hands on your beautiful jacket.” She rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

“What happened to me was, my family got killed—my husband and my daughter.” She was speaking in a low, soft voice now, and she held one hand cupped against the side of my face. Very faintly, I could feel her pulse beating in the tips of her fingers. “My whole world disappeared. I don’t even remember how I got to the Institute, but it did me a lot of good. It’s funny, you ask about what I remember from 2002, and that’s all there is. Everything else is just darkness, it’s a room I’m locked out of.”

“My place was called the Austen Riggs Center, and it’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My doctor, my main doctor, the one who did me the most good, was named Dr. B——”

She sat up and looked at me in wonder. “That’s almost the same name!”

“And the town, Stockbridge, was home for most of his life to a famous magazine illustrator named—”

“So was Stockwell! I can’t believe this! Our guy was—”

“Norman Rockwell.”

“Norton Postman,” Willy said, and her eyes underwent a subtle change. “This is an amazing coincidence.”

“It certainly is. Norman Rockwell painted hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post, so in a way, you could call him the Post man.”

“But so did Postman,” Willy said. “I didn’t know there were two of these guys.”

“Not to mention two world-famous mental-health facilities in little towns in the Berkshires, and two excellent psychiatrists who practically have the same name.”

Willy tucked her lower lip between her teeth, a gesture that for some reason I would never imagine her making. Maybe I thought it was too girlish for her, but there she was, biting her lower lip, and it didn’t look at all girlish. Willy unpeeled a Mounds bar and began to fend off another attack of lightness.

Ten minutes later, we were walking into the pleasant, air-conditioned space of the Willard Memorial Library, a modern-looking building on West Emerald Street, just two blocks off the main drag. Oh, Emerald Street, I thought, and began to sense the close, hovering presence of my sister. Ever since my stunt in the Barnes & Noble, The Wizard of Oz had been as implicated in her appearances as Alice in Wonderland.

“Atlases?” said the librarian. “Right over there, in our reference room. The atlas shelves are directly to the left of the door as you enter.”

A couple of men read newspapers at a blond wooden desk; two girls in their preteens plowed through copies