together. You’re having sex with Joseph Kalendar’s niece. You and Willy, you
“We’re very fond of each other.”
“I’ll say,” said Philip.
Both of them heard the closing of the bathroom door. “Have you any idea of what you intend to do with this relationship?”
“I wish I did.”
Entering the room, Willy sensed a measure of the intensity that had just flared. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?”
“I was just telling my brother that he’d better take good care of you,” Philip said. “If he doesn’t, you let me know about it.”
“Don’t worry about me. I think I’ll just disappear.”
Tim said that they’d better be going.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Philip said.
Tim looked up, bracing himself for another assault on his character or his morals.
“Would you like to borrow Mark’s laptop? I know you’re an e-mail demon, and I can’t use it—it reminds me too much of Mark. The thing is just sitting up there in its case. Let me get it for you, and you can use it in your room.”
“That’s a great idea, Philip. Thanks.” According to an entry in Tim Underhill’s journal, Mark Underhill’s computer had once shown him a miraculous vision—a vision of Elsewhere—and he loved the idea of once again putting his hands on the object, so imbued with his nephew’s memory, that had given him his treasure.
Philip went upstairs and came back down holding a black computer case by its handle.
“These things are so small, and they hold so much. Mark spent hours on it, sending messages back and forth, looking up I don’t know what . . .” With a dense, compacted facial expression, Philip thrust it at Tim. He was not loaning out his son’s computer, Tim saw; he was getting it out of the house by giving it away.
Philip rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. For a moment he looked almost as adolescent and self- conscious as one of his charges. The direct, probing look he gave Willy erased this impression.
“Come with me, Willy. I want to show you something.”
“Show her what?”
Already on her feet, Willy looked from brother to brother.
“Willy ought to see the view from my backyard, don’t you think?”
Tim glanced up at Willy. “I explained to him why you said you were a fictional character of mine. Philip knows you’re Kalendar’s niece. From his backyard, you can see your uncle’s house.”
“I guess I should see it before they tear it down and scorch the soil it rested on,” Willy said.
“Excuse me,” Philip said. “I can’t avoid asking this one question. Did you ever meet your cousin?”
“Never even knew she existed.”
“As sick as he was, he must have wanted to protect her.”
“I think this is going to have an uncomfortable effect on me. Would you mind if I had a candy bar?” Out came a Kit Kat and a Mars bar. After a moment’s contemplation under Philip’s fascinated stare, she shoved the Mars bar back into her pocket, broke the Kit Kat in half, unpeeled one of the halves, and bit into it. She held the other half in her left hand. “Lead on.”
In the moment of uncertainty Willy had brought him to, Philip glanced over at his brother.
“Go ahead,” Tim said. “I’m curious about what the place looks like now.”
“It’s a dump.” Philip turned, strode off into the narrow kitchen, and opened the back door.
Willy and Tim stepped through. Philip joined them at the top of the steps down to his barren backyard. The fence Philip had tried to erect between his property and the cobbled alley still drooped over the patchy lawn. However, on the other side of the alley, nothing remained as it had been. Joseph Kalendar’s massive wall had been bulldozed away, revealing the jungly profusion of his old backyard, from which rose the rear wall of his appalling house. The kitchen door through which Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan had broken in could still be made out through the weeds. The crude, clumsy slanting roof of the added room reared up out of the weeds like a huge animal dangerous to awaken.
Willy inhaled sharply.
“The place seems to get uglier with every passing week.”
Because he was looking across the alley, Philip did not see Willy flicker like a dying lightbulb. Tim had turned to her when that sharp, sudden sound escaped her, and before his eyes Willy’s entire body stuttered in and out of visibility. She slumped against the back of the house. Somehow, he managed to catch her before she slid down onto the worn surface of the yard.
“Eat the rest of that candy bar, fast,” he ordered her. “Philip, do you have any sugar?”
“Sure, I guess. I don’t use sugar much anymore.”
Tim asked him to fill a coffee cup with sugar and bring it outside with a glass of Coke.
“Is she a diabetic? She needs her—”
“Get the sugar, Philip. Now.”
Philip vanished inside in a flurry of elbows and knees. Cupboard doors and cabinets opened and closed. Muttering to himself, he came through the door and handed Tim a cup filled with sugar.
“Aren’t you likely to throw her into some . . .”
Tim was seated on the ground, his arm around Willy, pouring sugar into her mouth.
“We had this girl go into insulin shock last year, and—”
“She’s not diabetic, Philip. She has a very unusual condition.”
With a flash of his old, mean-spirited self, Philip said, “Must be restricted to fictional characters, I guess.” Then, seeing Willy take the cup into her own hands and wash another mouthful down with the soft drink, he added, “Seems to be working, anyhow. Should we get her to the hospital?”
“No hospital,” Willy said, a little thickly.
“Tim. You know she belongs in an E.R. Please.”
“I know she does
He did so, literally, holding up his hands in conspicuous surrender. A few seconds later, Willy stood up and, knowing what was required of her, did her best to look abashed. Gently, almost convincingly, she told Philip that her “condition” could not be treated in an emergency room and that she was grateful for his concern.
“Well, if you say you’re okay . . .” Baffled, he looked back and forth between them, half-understanding that he had missed something important and explanatory.
“We’re on our way,” Tim said. Philip did not acknowledge him. His gaze had settled on Willy, and he looked as though he was capable of standing there for the next couple of hours.
Willy thanked him for the sugar.
“I’ll see you at the reading,” Philip said, without taking his eyes from her.
30
She told me what I wanted to hear and she wanted to believe, that the shock of seeing that house had pushed her deeper toward disappearance than she had ever been. She meant that what had happened to her was an exception and that she had her “condition” under control.
Willy passed the next moment that might have tested her, our arrival at the Children’s Home, with perfect equanimity. It looked exactly as she remembered it: a hideous building with a dirty stone facade, narrow windows, and stone steps leading up to an arched doorway. It matched her memory because I had driven past the massive old building a thousand times in my youth.
A couple of candy bars, no more; she was pleased by the harmony between the building and her memory of it.
The interior was a test of another kind, for I had invented Willy’s memories out of a generic muddle of institutions I had seen largely in movies. She kept saying things were “in the wrong place” and giving me unhappy
