In the Night Room

“Certainly,” said Tim, impressed by Philip’s display of restraint.

“Now that that bit of awkwardness is over, will you tell me about this project of yours?”

“Yes,” Willy said. “Please be as explicit as possible. I’d love to know more about your project.”

“You’re full of curiosity today,” Tim said. “Unfortunately, I can only describe what I know at the moment. I can’t predict the future.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Philip asked.

“I mean,” Tim said, “that I can’t describe what hasn’t been created yet. No doubt God had the same limitation.”

“All right, describe what has been created.”

“Before he does, could you please get me another glass of Coke? I’m awfully thirsty.”

“Of course, Willy,” Philip said, giving her a slightly curious look, and made the round-trip to the kitchen in less than a minute. He handed her the glass and said, “Please, Tim.”

“Okay,” Tim said. “I hope you won’t object to this, Philip. I’ve been trying to write a book about Joseph Kalendar’s daughter.” Remembering the appalling figure that had glared down at him from the top of the street, Tim felt the necessity to employ a considerable degree of caution in what he said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what you said in lost boy lost girl.”

“Your neighbor Omar Hillyard led me to think her father murdered her. Hillyard was just making inferences based on what he saw at the time. But he wasn’t watching the Kalendar house full-time, and he could have missed a lot.”

“Wait a second. Is this book fact or fiction?”

Willy laughed. “That’s the question I always want to ask him.”

“Philip,” Tim said, not very kindly, “anyone who believes in the virgin birth and the performance of miracles, not to mention walking on water, shouldn’t be so quick to make that distinction.”

Philip immediately retreated. “I suppose that’s an excellent point.” Then he changed the subject. “By the way, you might be interested in hearing that Mr. Hillyard passed away two days before Christmas, last year.” Philip stared at Willy, who was tilting the last of her second drink into her mouth. “Anyhow, Kalendar had a real daughter—you’re sure of that.”

“Oh, I know he had a daughter,” Tim said, failing to mention that his primary source of information was Cyrax, a citizen of Byzantium who had been dead for six hundred years. “I just assumed she was dead, so I never bothered to do any research about her. In my book, she had been killed; that’s all I cared about. In real life, she was taken into the child-care system, and she wound up at the Foundlings’ Shelter. The question is, what can she be today? Is she even still alive? Was she ever put into foster care? Did she ever go to college? Is she in prison? A mental hospital?”

“I bet she never broke into any warehouses,” Willy said, darkly.

“I mean, what kind of life can you have after a childhood like that? How healed can you be?”

Philip shook his head and regarded Tim with what looked a great deal like fond resignation. “You never give up, do you?”

“What do you mean by that?” Tim found himself unreasonably rankled by his brother’s words.

“Childhood, healing, childhood trauma . . . sound familiar?”

“I’m not writing about myself, Philip,” Tim said, irritated.

“I didn’t say you were. But you’re not exactly not writing about yourself, either, are you?”

“You’re not my brother,” Tim said. “My real brother is hiding in the attic.”

“I know why you say that, believe me. I wish I could have been more like this—like the self China let me discover—with Nancy and Mark. Those regrets are astoundingly painful.” Philip seemed to travel inward again, and he clasped his hands and lowered his head, perhaps in prayer. “Yes. They are.” Then he looked back up at Tim. “Did you know the Kalendar place is going to be torn down next Wednesday? The view from my backyard is going to improve by a hundred percent.”

“The Kalendar place is in your backyard?” Willy asked. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s across the alley,” Philip said. “Ever since Ronnie Lloyd-Jones got arrested, people have been coming over here to look at the place. Some of them take souvenirs, can you believe that? Souvenirs! Well, the taxes aren’t being paid anymore, and the neighbors stopped cutting the lawn, and now you get these disaster ghouls wandering around. Because of all that, there was a petition to raze the place, and it went through.”

“How do you feel about that?” Tim asked.

The grim satisfaction visible in Philip a moment earlier hardened into a darker, flintier emotion that had nothing to do with pleasure. His face tightened; his eyes fired darts. Every bit of grief and rage he had been holding down leaped upward within him, and Philip became a little frightening. “You know how I feel about that? I’d like them to demolish that place, turn it into splinters, set the splinters on fire, and shoot the ashes into outer space.”

He glared at Tim as if awaiting a challenge.

“After that, I’d like guys with shovels and nets to dig up every inch of ground over there and sift through it, just in case they might have missed anything. They’d dig right down to the subsoil, six feet, eight feet, and sample everything. Then you’d have this big rectangular hole in the ground. It would look like a mass grave, which is exactly what it would be. I’d fill it with gasoline and set fire to it, that’s what I’d do. I’d have a big, purifying fire, a tremendous blaze. When it burned out, I wouldn’t care anymore—they could bulldoze all the earth back into the scorched hole and turn it into a gerbil farm.”

Philip stood extremely still for a moment, contending with the emotions he had just unleashed. A little stiffly, he turned to Willy. “Excuse me, young lady. My son’s body was never found. It might have been buried over there. It probably wasn’t, but it might have been. God is helping me through this time, but every now and then the situation gets the better of me.”

“I’m so sorry about your son,” Willy said. “I thought I lost a child, too, so I have some idea of what you have been going through.”

“Your child was returned to you?” Philip asked, his interest engaged. “Unharmed?”

“Yes,” Tim quickly said. “Willy was very lucky.”

“My god wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “My god seemed to make things worse.” She patted the pocket where she had stuffed the candy bars. “Is there a bathroom on this floor?”

Philip told her how to get to the bathroom next to the kitchen. When she had left the room, he turned to Tim with an expression that seemed poised between appreciation and accusation. “Tim, how old is that girl, really?”

“Thirty-eight,” Tim said.

“That can’t be true. She’s somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five.”

“That’s how she looks. She’s still thirty-eight.”

Philip appeared ready to dispute this assertion, but he let it go. “You met at a reading? And you volunteered to drive her here? You don’t do things like that. What did she say to you?”

“It wasn’t anything she said, Philip. Call it a whim.” Tim regretted bringing Willy to Superior Street. He had known introducing her to his brother was a terrible idea, yet he had done exactly that, and now he had to deal with the results.

“I can’t ignore the evidence of my senses. You show up here with this stunning young woman who acts like a kitten around you, and with whom you, supposedly a middle-aged gay man, obviously have some kind of erotic connection, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”

Tim improvised. “Okay. Willy is Joseph Kalendar’s niece—she was his brother’s daughter. That’s why she went to my reading. And I thought I should bring her here for a lot of reasons. Something happened, and we clicked. Right away, there was this great attraction between us.”

“You’re actually sleeping with her?”

Tim could not tell if Philip was aghast or thrilled. “Philip, in all honesty, this is none of your business.”

Philip was not to be deflected. “I work with teenagers. I can tell when people have been going to bed