In the Night Room

course, you’d have to know her name. Lily Huntress, M.D.

That is by no means everything Diane Huntress told Timothy Underhill and his beloved creature Willy Patrick as they sat entranced upon her sturdy sofa, but it covers most of the high points. When time unlocked and resumed its flow, and the cars once again spiraled up and down Sundown Road and mailmen again jolted forward in their carts, Tim felt as though, unlike the journey that had brought him to Mercedes Romola, Diane Huntress’s had concluded in a completely unexpected place.

“Is she married?” he asked.

“Married? Good Lord, no. She’ll never marry. She’ll never write a book, either.”

“Is she happy?”

“I don’t think Lily understands the concept of happiness—it’s like a foreign language to her. She suffered greatly, and now she helps children, that’s her life. I think she thought of it as the most beautiful thing she could do. That’s the way her mind works.”

“Does she work with other doctors in a practice?”

“She works alone. Her practice is in two rooms of her house. She still has days when everything overwhelms her and she has to cancel all her appointments and reschedule her patients. She locks herself in her private rooms and deals with it. She knows I’d come in a second, but she doesn’t call me. She doesn’t call anybody.”

“What you did,” Tim said, “was like a miracle. It was a miracle. You rescued her.”

“She let me rescue her. I’ll tell you what I did, and I’m very clear on this. I hung in there. That’s what I did. I hung in there.”

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

“Well, you got some things right,” Willy said.

“I didn’t really get anything right,” I said. We were driving back toward the hotel, ringing with the emotions that had flowed through Mrs. Huntress’s living room. “Except you, I guess. I missed the boat with Lily, but with Willy I did just fine.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“How do you feel?”

“Light. Full of honeycomb spaces. It’s okay. I don’t mind. It doesn’t really hurt anymore.”

“It used to hurt?”

“Your whole body feels like one big funny bone, all over.”

“You never complained,” I said.

“I wish I were like her,” Willy said. “She sounds absolutely amazing.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t want to be like her. It’s much too complicated.”

“In contrast to the simple, sunny history you gave me.”

“You had the same childhood, with the same father,” I said.

“You should have made me a pediatrician. And you know what else you did? You made me pretty, but in a stupid way. You saw how she looked as a child. Imagine the way she looks now.”

I thought of the face Lily had had at eleven, compact and alive with a complex, glowing density of feeling, and could not imagine what she must look like now.

Willy unfolded the paper she had been holding since we’d gotten into the car. I didn’t have to look at it to know what was written there in Diane Huntress’s surprisingly calligraphic hand: 3516 N. Meeker Road, Lily Huntress’s address.

“Do you want to go there? I guess I could stand it, if you thought you had to see her, at least. I’d have to stay in the car, though.”

“I don’t know what I want to do,” I said.

“Good. Then let’s go back to the hotel. You have to get ready for your reading.”

“Oh,” I said. “My reading.”

32

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

I don’t want to write anything here about my reading at the New Leaf bookstore; the memory is embarrassing enough without reliving it. I stumbled through the stuff I’d selected, the Q&A was all right, I signed a pile of books. China Beech turned up, and I liked her. She’s a small, nice-looking woman with a face in which underlying honesty is at war with its superficial prettiness. That’s the only way I know how to put it. She is younger than I had expected, about forty, and extremely nice looking, and it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t give a hang, and after a couple of seconds you’re so aware of her basic warmth and goodness that you don’t really notice how she looks. She wears a little lipstick, that’s all. When we were introduced, China took my arm and said, “Philip told me you believed him when he wrote you that I was an exotic dancer. Meaning a stripper. You must have had horrible visions of me!”

“Well,” I said, “it did seem an unusual choice for Philip.”

“It would have been. But the only man I intend to strip for is your brother.”

For some reason, that remark left me in a state of mild shock. Then I went ahead and gave the worst reading of my life, unable to think about anything but Lily Kalendar, Lily Huntress.

After the disaster had ended, Willy and I went out for drinks and dinner with Philip and China at an old hangout of mine called Ella Speed’s. The only memorable thing that happened during dinner was something Willy said after I told Philip that she was a writer: “In an alternate universe, I won the Newbery Medal.”

Back in our hotel room, I thought Cyrax might have some last-minute instructions, so I plugged Mark’s computer into the hotel’s online service and discovered that although my gide had nothing new to say to me, my in-box was jammed with messages from the newly dead. I deleted them all without reading them. Willy pretended to read A Far Cry from Kensington, which she had picked up at the bookstore—literally picked up, I fear, because she had no money of her own and had not asked me for any—while keeping her eye on me. I paced from the living room into the bedroom, stopped off in the bathroom to see what I looked like in the mirror, and paced back into the living room, where I paced some more.

“I can’t take it anymore,” I said. “I can’t stand it.”

“I can’t stand watching you act this way,” Willy said. “What’s it?”

“Do you still have that piece of paper?”

Her face went soft and vulnerable. She knew exactly what piece of paper I meant. “I stuck it in this book.”

“Do you think she might have deliberately given us the wrong address?”

“Diane Huntress? Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. To protect her? Is there a phone book in the desk drawer?”

Willy uncoiled herself from the sofa, moved to the desk, and found a Millhaven directory in the drawer. “Do you want me to look it up for you?”

I knew how little she wanted to do that, and I loved her for making the offer. I held out my hand for the book. “She’s probably not even in it.”

She was, though, as I should have known. A pediatrician can’t have an unlisted number, not even if she’s like Lily Huntress. There she was, on page 342 of the Millhaven telephone directory, at 3516 N. Meeker Road, with a telephone number anyone could dial. It was staggering, like looking through a window of the house next door and seeing a unicorn.

Willy dared to rest her hand on my shoulder. “You want to go there, don’t you? You want to talk to her.”

“I don’t know what I want,” I said, “but I have to go there, at least. I have to see her house, get some idea of how she lives.”

“Why don’t you call her? It’s not that late.”

“I can’t call her.” If I called Lily Kalendar, and she answered the phone, I thought, the sound of her voice would reduce me to a heap of smoking ashes. This was not something I could say to Willy. “I guess I’m too shy.”