In the Night Room

though she had never been there at all.

“I didn’t want to go to Michigan Produce,” Willy said. “I didn’t want to hear my daughter screaming for help. How could you do that to me?” She levered a big section of cherry pie onto her fork and pushed it into her mouth. “You never understood what kind of person I was. I’m so much better, so much stronger than you thought. All you saw was this weak little woman being pushed around by men.” Her voice wobbled, and she brushed tears away from her eyes. “I suppose I’m not even a writer anymore. I suppose I didn’t have any talent.”

“Not at all. I gave you a beautiful talent, and an imagination so strong that twice you used it to rescue yourself.”

“On the Block and then in the Institute, you mean.” For at least a minute and a half, she ate big forkfuls of pie while crying steadily. Then she wiped her eyes again and looked over at me. “Would you care to know why I’m willing to believe all this bullshit of yours?”

“Please,” I said.

“Do you remember when I went to the bathroom in the Lost Echoes Lodge? After breakfast this morning? It’s nothing out of the ordinary for you, is it? But when I got into the bathroom, it was like I had to tell myself what to do. I couldn’t remember ever using a toilet before in my life. And every time I go to the bathroom now, I marvel at how strange it all seems to me. For the first thirty-eight years of my life, I never used a toilet!”

It was true. She never had, and I had never thought about that. In all of fiction, probably, urination scenes are specific to men.

“I have to sit somewhere else for a while,” Willy said. Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and her eyes seemed half again as large. “Whatever you do, don’t bother me.”

She carried the plate of half-eaten rhubarb pie to the last booth in the line across from the bar. Because just about everybody in the room watched her go, I realized that they had been eyeing us ever since Willy had shouted that I had done a BAD JOB.

The waitress slipped into Willy’s booth and started talking in that earnest manner people adopt when they think they are telling difficult truths. I thought Willy would get rid of her in about ten seconds. It took five. The waitress came scuttling out of the booth, looking like a hen trying to stay ahead of a fox, and everyone else pretended to ignore the drama we had brought to Chicago Station.

It took Willy something like twenty minutes to collect herself and make her way back through the tables in a gunfire of glances questioning and dismissive. (Some of those older ladies thought she deserved every bit of the punishment they assumed I was giving her.) She slid in, extended her arms over the table, and let herself tilt limply back against the dark wood behind her. “I give up,” she said in a defeated voice. “I’m a fictional character. There isn’t any other explanation. You created me. I don’t belong in this world, which is the reason I feel this way—the reason I’m in danger of fading away. Fading out. Put me back in the world where I belong, crummy as it was. In that world I was a person, at least.”

“I can’t,” I said. “That world doesn’t exist anymore. You’re here, and I can’t finish the book.”

“So I’m just going to eat a hundred candy bars every day until unreality finally catches up with me and I disappear.”

I signaled for the check. The waitress moved up to the booth with the deliberation of an ocean liner coming into a narrow port. She slapped the slip of paper down on the table and backed away. I looked at the total and started counting out bills.

“I trust that we have dealt with the big secret,” Willy said. “And I have to admit, it’s a doozy. What’s the little one, the one Tom didn’t want to tell me?”

“Brace yourself,” I said. “Tom knew something that made him worried and unhappy every time you mentioned your daughter. He didn’t want to tell it to you because he thought you’d hate him, or fall apart, or both. He was on the verge of suggesting that you see a good psychiatrist.”

“I’m waiting.” And she was: under the limpness and the weariness she was communicating enough tension to make the air crackle.

“Remember that Holly wasn’t in that photograph of your husband’s body you found in Mitchell’s office?”

She nodded.

“There’s a good reason Holly wasn’t in the photograph. You didn’t have a daughter. You and Jim were childless.”

Willy looked for signs that this preposterous chain of sentences was somehow supposed to be funny, or a trick, or anything but a statement of fact. When she saw no such sign, she got angry with me.

“That’s unspeakable. It’s obscene.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t love you anymore. I never did—how could I love someone capable of saying that to me?”

“What was Holly’s birthday?”

“What difference does that make?” Willy started to scramble out of the booth, and I caught her arm.

“Tell me about her birth. What was it like? Did you have a doctor or a midwife? Home birth, or hospital?”

In her suddenly colorless face, her eyes blazed at me. She stopped trying to fight her way out of the booth. “She was born . . .” Her eyes went out of focus; softly, her mouth opened. “I know this, of course I know it.” She closed her eyes, and I let go of her arm. “Doesn’t my life, this existence of mine, seem pretty stressful to you? When I feel like this, I really can’t remember everything. If you give me a second, it’ll come back to me.”

“All right,” I said. “Let it come back to you.”

Willy opened her eyes, tilted her neck, and looked at various spots on the ceiling, as if hunting for the answer she needed. “Okay. Holly was born in a hospital.”

“Which one?”

She let her eyes drift down to my face. “Roosevelt.”

“Willy, you got that from me. That’s the hospital my doctor sends me to. How much did your baby weigh?”

She went back to searching the ceiling. A couple of seconds later, she licked her lips. “She weighed a normal amount, for a baby.”

“You don’t have any idea of how much that would be, do you?”

She made a rapid, inaccurate calculation. “Ten pounds.”

“Way too much, Willy. Don’t you think it’s odd that you can’t remember giving birth?”

“But I did give birth, I had a daughter.”

“Willy, the little girl who was murdered was a version of your childhood self. She was you. Do you know why you’re named Willy?”

She shook her head.

“In my book, your real name was Lily—Lily Kalendar. You couldn’t pronounce the letter L, so you called yourself Wiwwy, and people thought you were saying Willy. And the name of your hero, your incredibly brave, smart, inventive boy, was Howie Small. Howie equals Holly the way Willy equals Lily. That’s how I got these names—from a little girl’s lisp.”

“My father’s name was Kalendar. You said that was someone’s name. What was his first name?”

“Joseph.”

“Tell me about him.”

“If you look into what you already know, Willy, you’ll find everything you need to know. Lately, Joseph Kalendar has been in my thoughts a great deal.”

“I don’t know anything . . .” She began to protest, but her voice died away. Whatever surfaced in her mind, on loan from mine, disturbed her greatly. The initial look of shock on her face gradually melted into sorrow, and tears filled her eyes again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “How many women did he kill?”

“Six or seven, I can’t remember which.”

“And my brother. And my mother.”

“Probably. No one ever found her body.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Willy asked.

We stepped outside into strong sunlight and moved slowly toward the car. It was like walking someone out of a hospital. She looked at my face. “This is what you know about my father.”