She seemed to consider it. “Just talk to me, help me get through the night. I know you want to sleep and I’m being a thundering pain in the ass. But you have no idea how much it would help, Mr. Man from Nowhere, if you’d just talk to me for a little while.”
“Listen and believe it. There’s nothing I’d rather do, right this minute, than talk to you.”
“Oh, Janeway.” Her voice got thick, and broke. “I hurt so bad. I hurt so bad and I can’t talk to anyone.”
“Talk to me.”
“I don’t know, maybe somebody like you, who’s just passing through and doesn’t know me. I can’t talk to Mamma and Daddy, there’s just too much in the way. I don’t know what it is, we can’t get past the facts of the matter and get down where the real trouble is.”
“What are the facts of the matter?”
“How completely and beyond redemption I’ve fucked up my life.”
“Maybe it just seems that way.”
“I’ve done a stupid thing. Don’t ask me why, it was just insane. I felt compelled, like I had no choice. Then they said I’d done something worse, and one thing led to another and I did do something worse…only it wasn’t what they said I’d done. But they locked me up for it, and now they want to lock me up again, maybe for years. If they do that, I will kill myself, I swear I will. I couldn’t live in a cage.”
“None of us can. That’s not really living.”
“But some people survive. I couldn’t even do that, not if we’re talking about years.” She shook her head: I felt the movement. “No way.”
Gently, I prodded her. “What did you do?”
She was a long time answering, and at first the answer was no answer at all. “I can’t tell you either.”
“I won’t judge you.”
“It’s not that. There are pieces of the story missing. Without them I just look like a fool.”
“Take the chance. Maybe I can help you find the pieces.”
“No one can. None of it makes sense. I’m like that guy in
“Everybody does. It means you’re one hundred percent normal.”
She chuckled, a sad little noise. “And all the time I thought I was crazy. I have the worst time trying to talk to them. And I know I’ve got to, I don’t think I can let another day pass without doing that. But how can I?”
“Try it out on me first.”
She didn’t say anything. I let her alone for a few minutes, then I nudged her arm. “What happened to you?”
“I was in New Mexico,” she said at once, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask it one more time. “I got in trouble…I can’t tell you about that. But I’ve been carrying it around for weeks now. If I don’t tell somebody…”
I gave her a little squeeze: nothing sexual, just friendly encouragement,
“That’s where I picked up my stalker, in Taos.” Again she tried to lapse into silence. But then she said, “I had a room there. I’d come home and things would be moved.”
“Ransacked?”
“No…but yeah, maybe. I had the feeling he’d done that, been through all my stuff and then put it all back, just so. But he’d always leave one little thing out of place, something obvious like he’d wanted me to see it. Once he left a cigarette, still burning in a Styrofoam cup. He wanted me to know he’d just left. Then he started with the phone. It would ring late at night and I’d hear him breathing…or humming that song.”
“You told me before: you knew what he wanted.”
“He told me. But I can’t explain it now, so don’t ask me.”
“Explain what you can.”
“I felt like something evil had come into my life. I’d turn a corner and he’d be there, right in my path. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes were all sunken and he had holes in his face, deep pits across both cheeks. Scared me deaf and dumb. I can’t tell you what it was like. I’d walk down to the phone booth and call home and he’d come up behind me, rip open the door, and stand there staring. He said he could kill me, right there at the telephone—
I was listening to her words, trying to figure how and when this had all happened. It had to be sometime after the first Jeffords break-in, but before the second. Whatever else her stalker had done, he’d pushed her onto that next level of desperation. She had failed to get what she’d gone after at the Jeffords place—what the stalker also wanted—and had gone back for another run at it. Then what?
Then she took it on the lam: jumped bail, struck out for home. “So how’d you get back here?” I asked. She had driven her car, she said in that flat tone of voice that people use when you ask a stupid question. But I was trying to get at something else, something she couldn’t yet know about. “What roads did you take?” I asked, and she laughed and wondered what possible difference it could make. “I came across the Sangres, up the Million-Dollar Highway to Grand Junction, then took the freeway home.”
