“I’m eating for two,” Willy said. “What kind of potatoes come with that?”
She devoured her enormous meal in no more time than Tim required to eat his hamburger and half of the French fries that came with it. The other half wound up on Willy’s plate. When the worst of her hunger had been satisfied, she asked, with the air of one entering extremely dangerous territory, “What do you think about what just happened, anyhow?”
“I think she’s more like her father than anyone has ever recognized,” he said. “But what she’s done with it is extraordinary.”
“I bet you wish you could have seen her face.”
“To tell you the truth, Willy,” he said, “the thought of looking upon that woman’s face fills me with terror. What do you think about what happened?”
“I’m scared,” Willy said. Her face rippled, and her cheeks turned chalky and white. “I’m lost, and I’m frightened. She was scary, but you are, too.”
His heart and stomach both quivered. “How could I be scary to you?” he asked, fearing that tears would erupt from his eyes, from even his pores.
“You had to see her, didn’t you?” She could bear to look at him for only a second longer.
When they returned to their little suite, Willy went immediately into the bedroom and closed the door.
Tim sat down before Mark’s computer, downloaded his e-mail, and discovered another twenty messages without domain names. Their subject lines said things like Need to Hear from You and Explain What Is Happening! and This Is All Wrong!! These, too, he deleted without remorse or hesitation. These sasha would have to find their way without him. A message from Cyrax remained. When opened, it offered him this rigorous and mocking consolation:
deer buttsecks,
with every step 4-ward, every step up,
something new is lost or forsworn.
this IS a process of loss
reed ’em & weep, LOLOL
(foul & flawed & week tho u r,
u must face yr loss 2 come!)
do not FLINCH! do not QUAIL!
do not BACK AWAY! the PRICE
must bee PAID!!! u have luvd,
now u must looze yr love & bid
gud-bye, old soldier. this 2 is death.
33
Brian Jeckyll had rescheduled all of Tim’s drive-time interviews for 6:30 to noon on Thursday morning, and at 6:00 A.M., Tim reluctantly unpeeled himself from sleeping Willy, rose from their bed, used the bathroom, and, freshly showered, dressed himself in Gap khakis, a blue button-down shirt, and a black, lightweight jacket. With ten minutes to spare, he went downstairs, bought two Danishes and a cup of coffee, and returned to his room. He had polished off the first Danish by the time the telephone rang, right on schedule. Ginnie and Mack were calling from their radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the first thing they wanted to know was if he’d ever had any supernatural experiences.
“I don’t really know how to answer that, Mack,” Tim said. “How about you?”
After Ginnie and Mack came Zack and the MonsterMan of Ithaca, New York, who wondered aloud how weird you would have to be to write a book like
“Are they always like that?” she asked.
“You see why they’re so much fun to do.”
“They always ask the same questions, over and over?”
“It’s more like I give the same answers, over and over.”
“Why do you do that?”
“They’re the only answers I know,” he said. “I have to go back to bed now. I need some sleep.”
“Sleep for half an hour, and I’ll order a room service lunch.”
He looked down at the white bag, into which her right hand was dipping. It seemed to be less than a third full.
Forty-five minutes later, when the waiter rolled his cart into the room, Willy quietly opened the bedroom door and found Tim writing in his journal.
During lunch, I tore a page out of my notebook and wrote out, in block caps, WCHWHLLDN, and asked Willy if it meant anything to her. Chewing, she looked over, thought for a second, and said, “Sure. It’s simple.”
“What does it mean, then?”
“Just put in the vowels. I’m not going to do it for you.”
“Is there supposed to be a Y in there?”
“Hah! You decide.” Her mood changed, and her eyes, looking a bit swollen, swung toward me. “I sense that today is a big day for the home team. What are we going to do?”
I took a couple of slow breaths. “Could you stand to look at that house again?”
“The one behind your brother’s, where I had Lily Kalendar’s childhood?”
Willy knew exactly which house I meant. She closed her eyes and made internal judgments I could only guess about. Maybe she measured the spaces in the honeycombs and counted hummingbird wings. Her eyes opened, and she said, “Yes. It’s not going to shock me, this time. Actually, we have to go there. I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“I hope you’re going to tell me. I’ve never really understood what you could do, much less were supposed to do.”
“I’m sure that’s the truth,” she said, taking up my confession with a kind of forgiving bitterness that lifted me off the hook even as it sank the barbs deeper into me. “You never understood what I was going to do, but you should have. You even wrote it, you idiot.”
“Where?”
“As if I’d tell you. No, it was in what you
What I didn’t write? This baffled me, but I kept my mouth shut.
Willy knew perfectly well that I had failed to understand: that I had failed
“Of course I remember that conversation.”
“Then remember what you told me. I was going to be healed.”
Even more baffled than the first time, I asked, “Did I say that?”
“No. I said it, just now. But it was what you meant.”
And she was right, that was what I had meant—that Willy Patrick was to be healed. I understood it now.
