Bookman's wake

I could almost feel the satisfaction and joy of getting it set up here in working order, and I said something to the effect.

“Yeah,” Crystal said, “even I can’t deny that.”

“You can’t put a label on it,” Rigby said.

“Somehow you mean more to each other,” Eleanor said, “after you’ve done something like that.”

A sudden silence fell over the table. The evening was over, and I knew that, once again, I was not going to bust her. I didn’t know why—it certainly wasn’t Poe anymore—but I was ready to live with it, whatever happened.

“You’ll find a lot of books over there if you’d like to read,” Crystal said. “Sorry there’s no TV.”

I made a so-who-needs-it gesture with my hands.

“Breakfast at six-thirty,” she said. “That’s if you want to eat with us. I’ll rustle you up something whenever you come over.”

She walked me to the door, leaving Eleanor and her father alone at the kitchen table. On the porch she took my hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she hugged me tight and disappeared back into the house. I stood on the porch listening to the rain. The night was as dark as it ever gets, but I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my back. There would be no bust, no handcuffs, no force. I watched my five grand grow wings and fly away into the night. Half the puzzle was finished.

Now that I knew what I was not going to do, I thought I could sleep.

9

I opened my eyes to the ringing of the telephone. It was five after three by the luminous clock on the table beside me: I had been asleep almost five hours. Par for the course, I thought, staring into the dark where the phone was. I let it ring, knowing it couldn’t be for me, but it kept on until I had to do something about it. When I picked it up, Eleanor was there in my ear.

“I’m coming over. Is that okay?”

“I don’t know…what’ll your parents say?”

But she had hung up. I rolled over and sat on the bed. When five minutes had passed and she hadn’t arrived, I groped my way to the window and looked across at the house. It was dark except for a faint light on the side facing away from me. Soon that too went out—someone in a bathroom, I thought—but then another light came on in the opposite corner. Something moved in the yard: I couldn’t tell what as I tried to see through the rain-streaked glass, but it looked like some critter standing under the window had moved quickly back into the darkness. A deer maybe, or just a mirage thrown out by a brain still groggy from too little sleep. But I hadn’t forgotten about Eleanor’s stalker and I sat on the sill and watched the yard. The light went out and again I swam in an all-black world. I sat for a long time looking at nothing.

At ten to four I decided that she wasn’t coming and I went back to bed.

I heard a sharp click somewhere, then a bump. There she is , I thought. But nothing happened. The drumming of the rain was the only reminder that I could still think and I could still hear. The minutes stretched toward the dawn. There was not yet a hint of light, which, given the clouds covering the state, was at least ninety minutes away. Again a light flashed. This one brought me up with a start—it was here in my room, inches away. As my eyes focused, I saw that it was the extension button on the telephone— someone had picked up the phone downstairs in the printshop and was having a conversation at four o’clock in the morning. This went on for some time, at least two minutes, then the line went dark. I rolled out of bed and went to the door, opened it, and listened down the circular staircase. Nothing . No sound, no light, not a hint of movement anywhere.

I lay on the bed staring up into the dark. Eventually, though I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I began to doze off.

***

It was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream. I was drifting, somewhere between worlds, when my eyes flicked open and I knew she was there. “Hey,” I said, and I felt her sit beside me on the floor. I reached out and touched her head: she had laid it across her folded arms on the bed. “Thought you’d never get here.” She still didn’t speak: for several minutes she just lay there under my arm, her breathing barely audible above the rain. Then she said, “I didn’t come because I felt stupid. I am stupid, waking you up in the middle of the night.”

“It’s okay, I was awake anyway,” I lied.

“The truth of the matter is, I’ve just been through the loneliest night of my life. It got so desolate I thought I’d die from it.”

There was a long pause. She said, “I keep thinking that maybe my mom and dad can help me when I get like this, but they can’t. I know they love me, but somehow knowing it just makes the loneliness all the stronger. Does that make any sense?”

“You’re not their little girl anymore. You’ve lost something you can’t ever get back, but you haven’t yet found what’s gonna take the place of it in the next part of your life.”

“The next part of my life,” she said with a sigh.

I could hear the pain in her voice. “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you’ll let me.”