would drift into the house and come back with something else to eat or another bottle of wine. And Cramer imagined walking out of the gathering night right up to the table.
“Cramer!” Mimi would say, and throw her arms around him. “I was just thinking about you.” Then he would drift into the house and return with a chair of his own. He would watch and listen. That would be enough. He would smile at the right moment, be careful not to drink too fast or too much. He would be attentive-he was good at that. He would leap up to get more fruit or whatever.
“No, let me,” he would say. And Mimi would touch his hand. And then…
And then what?
The mosquitoes didn’t move in until 9:05, and the dinner party broke up only to reassemble inside. Slapping at bugs, Cramer waited most of another hour, drawing as close to the house as he dared, hoping for one more glimpse of her.
Bats escaped from the eaves of the little house and swooshed around him, gorging on the mosquitoes and not making a dent in the population. Still he stayed on, steadfast. It was what he knew how to do. And there was another reason for staying. That old bastard Stooley Peters. Mimi wasn’t alone tonight, but Cramer would stay as long as he could, keeping guard. He would be her guardian if he couldn’t be anything else. This would be the good secret to offset the bad secret. This would be the decent thing he did to compensate for all the wrongness.
It was the next day, Saturday, when tragedy struck. The sun was just going down when she came outside, and to his shock he saw that she was crying. What could have happened? He had been close enough to hear her cell phone go off-that old song by Queen. Was it the man with the foreign-sounding name that made her cry? The one she had dumped? What had he done now, because Mimi was weeping-holding herself and weeping. Cramer wanted to swing down out of his roost and take her in his arms. The sky was still light enough to see her face, and although it was disfigured with tears, it was as lovely as ever. Even more beautiful because it was filled with need. He wanted to kiss her tears away, hold her tight. And it was in that rush of yearning that his foot slipped. He didn’t fall but he swung out for one tense moment, and in grabbing for a handhold, a branch snapped off in his grasp, cracking loudly.
It was all over in a moment. She had not seen him; he was sure of it. But she was aware of his presence. Through the thick foliage of the maple, he saw her looking around. She stopped crying. She was staring up into the trees, sniffing, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. He didn’t dare breathe.
When she spoke, she didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t sound frightened or even angry, but her words were like knives.
“You are a sick person,” she said. “Do you know that? You are really sick.” She walked down toward the snye until she was almost beneath him. “What have we done to make you hate us so much?”
No, not hate.
“You robbed us blind. Wasn’t that enough?”
What was she talking about?
“What is it you want?” She paused, then she let out a long shuddery breath. “Just go away. Please. Leave us alone.”
She didn’t yell. It was exactly as if she were talking to him, except that what she said hurt more than he could bear. Then she sniffed, rubbed her nose, and went back in the house. He didn’t hear the door slam.
Cramer slithered from his branch and stood at the base of the tree breathing hard. What was she talking about? He started toward the house. What the hell was she talking about? He stopped, walked back toward the snye, slammed his fist hard against a tree.
Robbed them blind?
That isn’t what you said about a rock taken from a windowsill. It wasn’t even what you said about a picture in a silver frame. What did she mean? Something else. Something big. And then it came to him and he went cold all over. Stooley Peters.
He’d caught the bugger sneaking around, figured him for a Peeping Tom. Maybe he’d done more. Could he tell Mimi that? Yes. He would walk up to her door right now. But he couldn’t. She’d know he was the one in the tree and she’d hate him.
He took a deep shaky breath. He would deal with this himself-find a way.
He slunk away through the glade, and when he was out of earshot, he ran, whipped and slapped and slashed at by the underbrush, until he arrived at last at the cove where he kept Bunny hidden under a blanket of cedar boughs.
He was bleeding. The back of his hand, his cheek, his left ankle. Angrily he tore off the tendrils of undergrowth still clinging to him. Then he cleared Bunny of her cover, and, grabbing the gunwales, he launched himself out onto the darkening water. He dug his paddle down deep, right into the muck of the Eden, almost spilling himself in his desperate need to escape that horrible place where a girl had said that to him.
You are a sick person. Do you know that? You are really sick.
Not just any girl-the most beautiful girl who had ever talked to him. He thrust his paddle into the water and with all the strength in his shaking body propelled Bunny out into the river. He was crying now. Crying in great sobs. Crying in rage.
“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fucking fair!”
And he was so wrapped up with the unfairness of everything that he didn’t notice what was happening to him.
He was going down.
The boat was filling up with water. From holes all along its keel, the river poured into Bunny, and with every stroke he only drove her farther down into the water. He stopped, midstream, and sat there, sinking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lazar called Saturday from the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was pricey, he said, but in for a penny in for a pound. What does that mean? Mimi wondered but didn’t ask. He sounded almost cheery, as if the terrible joke Mimi’s father had played on him had snapped him out of his stupor. He was in the process of raiding the hospitality fridge in his room for tiny bottles of booze. He had rented a car and driven down the coast to where she wasn’t. And then he had driven back to Halifax.
“A very big lesson,” he said. “A very expensive lesson.”
Mimi kept her lips zipped. She was not going to apologize for what her father had done. But it seemed Lazar wasn’t looking for an apology.
He made Mimi laugh with his running commentary of what the hospitality fridge had to offer in the way of alcoholic diversion. It reminded her of when they first started seeing each other. How he was always explaining how things worked: how subways ran on the energy created by people on treadmills in gyms all over the city; how smog was necessary to hide the hooks that held up the skyscrapers. He would take her to obscure dives he had discovered, where the waiters knew him and treated him like a king and her, like the king’s consort. She could hear that same sense of wound-too-tight fun in his voice tonight. Then he sighed and she expected the worst. But he surprised her. Well, he had always been surprising.
“I have been crazy,” he said. “I thought crazy in love but perhaps, really, just crazy. No?”
She had a lump in her throat. Was this a setup?
“Are you still there?” he asked, his voice gentle. But she couldn’t speak. “If you have hung up,” he said, “I will just keep talking anyway and then tell myself we had this discussion and it’s, as you would say, all good.”
“I’m still here,” she said.
“Good, because I would rather talk to you than to myself, but I wouldn’t blame you for hanging up.”
Mimi swallowed hard. Was this a trap? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…” But she wasn’t sure what she could add. She was sorry in a way and she wasn’t really sorry in another way, but she was confused and wary.
“You have no reason to be sorry,” he said. “This wild-goose chase was not your idea. And even if it was, I gave you no options.” He sighed. “Sophia has left me,” he said.
“You told me.”
“But I only told you half a truth,” he said. “It wasn’t because of you, Meem. It was because of me. I have
