In the Night Room

so pretty, it almost hurts to look at you.” She turned again to Tim. “Sit yourselves down, I’ll get you some tea or coffee, and you can tell me about your book.”

In the end, seated on the firm Huntress sofa with a cup of excellent coffee before him, unhappy Willy steadily sipping from a glass of Coke, he could never be sure what Diane Huntress made of his confused description of the book he claimed to be researching. The word “tactful” turned up, as did “respectful.” As he blathered, he began to think that this was a book he could actually write, forgetting that he had no patience for the kind of detailed research it would involve. If he tried to write such a book, it would consist mainly of leaps into the dark, a number of them noticeably ungainly.

“I’m sure it’ll come into better focus when you’ve worked on it awhile,” Mrs. Huntress said. “I have to be completely honest with you and tell you that I don’t think you or anyone else should write a book about Lily.”

“Then you’re being very generous, letting me talk to you.”

“Lily isn’t going to do anything to stop you, so I think it’s my duty to see that you understand her as well as possible. If you want to talk to her in person, which she is willing to do under certain conditions, you’ll get an idea of the life she has now, but that idea won’t be good enough—it won’t be enough, period. She asked me to tell you that she’s willing to meet with you for an hour, but that nothing she says to you can be quoted in your book.”

“You don’t want me to meet her, do you?”

“Let me tell you about Lily Kalendar.”

Hearing those words at last, Tim sensed a movement on the other side of the room and glanced past Mrs. Huntress to see what it was. His heart stopped. In her Alice dress, April lay on a vibrant rug no larger than herself, her cheek resting on a hand, looking intently at him. Having been seen, she pushed herself upright, got to her feet, and stepped backward, never taking her eyes from him. Tim knew that it was she who had led him to this place, that he might hear out the woman who had known Lily Kalendar best. She wanted him to do more than hear: she was commanding him to listen.

You have to know a few things about me first, Diane Huntress said. My father built the Sundown Community, which is what we used to call this area, in the forties, and he placed it in this basin because he wanted it to be at one remove from the outside world. He graded Sundown Road himself and he built that little plaza and the bandstand at the bottom. The whole thing was his idea. We never had any money, but that didn’t bother us. My father really didn’t care about money. Originally, all the people who lived here knew one another, and we used to have these communal meals, and there’d be singing, and people would play their instruments, and we’d dance. We had this sense of shared ideals, a shared vision. Nothing ever stays the same in this world, especially communities like Sundown. A lot of new people were moving in by the time Guy Huntress and I got married.

We were busy—Guy was a housepainter, and I came along and did the detail work. I worked as a waitress, too. We started going places together, spending what little we had on things we came across and liked instead of on hotels and fancy meals. We discovered we couldn’t have children, and that was a blow. And Guy didn’t want to adopt. But one day he said, You know, we could give back to the community by taking in a foster child. That way, at least we’d have a kid around the house. I thought it was a great, great idea, the greatest. We got in touch with Social Services, they put us in touch with Georgia Lathem, and that’s how we got our first three foster children. One after the other, not all together.

Sally, Rob, and Charlie. Wonderful kids. Screwed up as hell when we first got them, but basically okay. A little antisocial, you know, shoplifting, mouthing off, testing the rules. All the normal stuff. What we did with those kids, we thought was what everybody would do. Now, to Georgia Lathem and them, what we did was special. So when they had an unusual case come in, I guess they thought of us first. We go down to Karadara Street, we go into Miss Lathem’s office, and sitting there like a little wet cat is this child named Lily Kalendar. What we didn’t know about Lily and her background would fill volumes, let me tell you.

This one is going to be trouble, Guy said. This one is going to break your heart, he said. Are you sure you want to do this? Her first day in the Foundlings’ Shelter, Lily peed on the floor and tried to stab another kid with a pencil. Her second day, she lit a fire in the game room. She barely talked. She was like a little savage. Sure I’m sure, I told my husband. This kid Lily, this little monster, she’s going to be my project, because you know what? I love her already.

And I did. I did love that child. I saw something in her, maybe what you saw in that picture, Mr. Underhill. I saw a terribly damaged little girl who felt everything that happened everywhere. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Underhill? The spirit in there, it might have been scared and angry and half-poisoned, but it wasn’t selfish.

She was angry. Lily was the angriest child I ever met—no, the angriest person I ever met. The first thing I had to do was let her know that she could have all that anger and still feel safe. Once we got through that stage, I was pretty sure we could begin to make a human being out of the girl. She still talked in baby talk half the time, and she pronounced her name Wiwwy, because she couldn’t say the letter l. Wiwwy hate, Wiwwy bite. You know how many times I heard that? Other times, she rolled out curse words so terrible a superstitious person would say she was possessed. She was possessed, but by herself, not the devil.

When she got wild, I’d roll her up in a blanket and lie down on the ground with her and hold her until she stopped screeching. I had to toilet train her, the way you do a three-year-old. We had messes I won’t describe, but they were awful. And, of course, she’d never been to school a day in her life, but when she came to see that I was going to stick with her no matter what she did, or how terrible she acted, she calmed down enough for me to get some textbooks and readers. The point was, I wasn’t going to leave her, and I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was just going to do everything I could to make her feel better.

At first, she was always running away! She’d slip out of the house when my back was turned and take off, but she was so terrified of everything, everything meant so much to her, that she could never get very far. I found her hiding behind the bushes, lying flat under cars. Weeping her head off. Terrified to go any farther, terrified of coming back. She’d scream her head off when I carried her home, but she clung tight, she didn’t struggle. No night room, she said, no night room for Wiwwy, and I’d tell her right back, Honey, we don’t have a night room, you don’t have to worry about it. So what was a night room?

Separately, Timothy Underhill and Willy Patrick felt a succession of shocks like that of an electrical pulse zigzagging through their bodies and, like a pinball, lighting up whatever it touched.

I called up Georgia Lathem, said Diane Huntress, and asked her, and what she told me just about peeled my scalp off. That terrible, terrible man built a horrible room onto his house, and he didn’t put any lights or windows in there, all he put in there was a big wooden bed! With, like, handcuffs on it, restraints. And to be frank, Mr. Underhill, he raped his little girl on the bed—that was his punishment for her leaving the house. Well, I knew she’d been abused, but I hadn’t known it had been as bad as all that.

You see, he didn’t want her to leave the house because he didn’t want anyone to know about her. She had no birth certificate, which gave us problems I’ll tell you about later. Officially, Lily Kalendar didn’t exist. He kept that child as his toy, Mr. Underhill, and he beat her and starved her, because that was his version of love. When I learned that, I knew I was in for a long siege, and so I was.

After a while, I discovered the one thing that calmed her down. I read to her. It was like I had a charm, like I waved a magic wand over her. When I sat down next to this raging little thing and started to read, it never took her more than a couple of minutes to quiet down, stick her thumb in her mouth, and listen to the story. Oh my God, she was so adorable then. I must have read the same ten books over and over a thousand times, Goodnight Moon and Ping and Make Way for Ducklings and The Runaway Bunny. I can still see her, lying on the floor with her chin in her hands, drinking in every word I said. Concentrating, concentrating, concentrating. When I saw that, I knew hope—hope can just about strike you dead, so you have to take care with it, but Lily’s ability to concentrate made me feel that sunlight had just entered a very, very dark room.

And the other thing was, she was smart. She remembered everything we read, word for word, and once we moved past those ten books, she really demanded that what we read was stuff worth reading. I tore through that little library my father established down there on Sundown Plaza. Six books every week, and Lily was pretty vocal about what she wanted me to read to her and what she didn’t. We had about six months when all she wanted were