gotten torn.
By the time Tommy was sleeping, the dogs had calmed down again and were sleeping too. I couldn’t. I sat up all night worrying about that damned message, about what would happen to Tommy and the dogs if anything ever did happen to me, about all kinds of crap that I usually don’t let myself think about.
Come the morning, I felt like I’d crawled up out of a sewer. You know what it’s like when you pull an allnighter? Your eyes have this burning behind them, you’d kill for a shower and everything seems a little on edge? I saw about getting breakfast for everyone, let the dogs out for a run, then I told Tommy I had to go back downtown.
“You don’t go out today,” I told him. “You understand? You don’t go out and you don’t let anybody in. You and the dogs play inside today, okay? Can you do that for Maisie?”
“Sure,” Tommy said, like I was the one with bricks for brains. “No problem, Maisie.”
God I love him.
I gave him a big hug and a kiss, patted each of the dogs, then headed back down to Grasso Street with Rexy. I was about half a block from Angel’s office when the headlines of a newspaper outside a drugstore caught my eye. I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared at it. The words swam in my sight, headlines blurring with the subheadings. I picked up the paper and unfolded it so that I could see the whole front page, then I started reading from the top.
GRIERSON SLAIN BY SATANISTS.
DIRECTOR OF THE CITY’S NEW AIDS CLINIC FOUND DEAD IN FERRYSIDE
GRAVEYARD AMID OCCULT PARAPHERNALIA.
POLICE BAFFLED.
MAYOR SAYS, ‘THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.’
“Hey, this isn’t a library, kid.”
Rexy growled and I looked up to find the drugstore owner standing over me. I dug in my pocket until it coughed up a quarter, then handed it over to him. I took the paper over to the curb and sat down.
It was the picture that got to me. It looked like one of the buildings in the Tombs in which kids had been playing at ritual magic a few years ago. All the same kinds of candles and inverted pentacles and weird graffiti. Nobody squatted in that building anymore, though the kids hadn’t been back for over a year. There was still something wrong about the place, like the miasma of whatever the hell it was that they’d been doing was still there, hanging on.
It was a place to give you the creeps. But this picture had something worse. It had a body, covered up by a blanket, right in the middle of it. The tombstones around it were all scorched and in pieces, like someone had set off a bomb. The police couldn’t explain what had happened, except they did say it hadn’t been a bomb, because no one nearby had heard a thing.
Pinpricks of dread went crawling up my spine as I reread the first paragraph. The victim, Grierson.
Her first name was Margaret.
I folded the paper and got up, heading for the post office. Franklin was alone behind the counter when I got inside.
“The woman who died last night,” I said before he had a chance to even say hello. “Margaret Grierson. The Director of the AIDS Clinic. Did she have a box here?”
Franklin nodded. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? One of my friends says the whole clinic’s going to fall apart without her there to run it. God, I hope it doesn’t change anything. I know a halfdozen people that are going to it.”
I gave him a considering look. A half dozen friends? He had this real sad look in his eyes, like ...
Jesus, I thought. Was Franklin gay? Had he really been just making nice and not trying to jump my bones?
I reached across the counter and put my hand on his arm. “They won’t let this screw it up,” I told him. “The clinic’s too important.”
The look of surprise in his face had me backing out the door fast. What the hell was I doing?
“Maisie!” he cried.
I guess I felt like a bit of a shit for having misjudged him, but all the same, I couldn’t stick around. I followed my usual rule of thumb when things get heavy or weird: I fled.
I just started wandering aimlessly, thinking about what I’d learned. That message hadn’t been for me, it had been for Grierson. Margaret, yeah, but Margaret
Better it had been me, I thought. Better a loser from the Tombs, than someone like Grierson who was really doing something worthwhile.
When I thought that, I realized something that I guess I’d always known, but I just didn’t ever let myself think about. You get called a loser often enough and you start to believe it. I know I did. But it didn’t have to be true.
I guess I had what they call an epiphany in some of the older books I’ve read. Everything came together and made sense—except for what I was doing with myself.
I unfolded the paper again. There was a picture of Grierson near the bottom—one of those shots they keep on file for important people and run whenever they haven’t got anything else. It was cropped down from one that had been taken when she cut the ribbon at the new clinic a few months back. I remembered seeing it when they ran coverage of the ceremony.
“This isn’t going to mean a whole lot to you,” I told her picture, “but I’m sorry about what happened to you. Maybe it should’ve been me, but it wasn’t. There’s not much I can do about that. But I can do something about the rest of my life.”
I left the paper on a bench near a bus stop and walked back to Grasso Street to Angel’s office. I sat down in the chair across from her desk, holding Rexy on my lap to give me courage, and I told her about Tommy and the dogs, about how they needed me and that was why I’d never wanted to take her up on her offers to help.
She shook her head sadly when I was done. She was looking a little weepy again—like she had when I told her that story before—but I was feeling a little weepy myself this time.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I thought you’d take them away from me.” I surprised myself. I hadn’t lied, or made a joke. Instead I’d told her the truth. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
“Oh, Maisie,” she said. “We can work something out.”
She came around the desk and I let her hold me. It’s funny. I didn’t mean to cry, but I did. And so did she. It felt good, having someone else be strong for a change. I haven’t had someone be there for me since my grandma died in 1971, the year I turned eight. I hung in for a long time, all things considered, but the day that Mr.
Hammond asked me to come see him after school was the day I finally gave up my nice little regulated slot as a citizen of the day and became a part of the night world instead.
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, trying to fit into the day world—I’d probably never fit in completely, and I don’t think I’d want to. I also knew that I was going to have a lot of crap to go through and to put up with in the days to come, and maybe I’d regret the decision I’d made today, but right now it felt good to be back.
Bridges
She watched the taillights dwindle until, far down the dirt road, the car went around a curve. The two red dots winked out and then she was alone.
Stones crunched underfoot as she shifted from one foot to another, looking around herself. Trees, mostly cedar and pine, crowded the narrow verge on either side. Above her, the sky held too many stars, but for all their number, they shed too little light. She was used to city streets and pavement, to neon and streetlights. Even in the ‘burbs there was always some manmade light.
The darkness and silence, the loneliness of the night as it crouched in the trees, spooked her. It chipped at
