been unfaithful for so long. I thought it was different with you. You know? Different. Ah, of course you know. Well, now I know, too. Crazy, hey?” She heard the sound of another cap being snapped open on another tiny bottle. “A slow learner,” he said, and chuckled sadly.
“Lazar,” she said. “It was fun-at first, I mean.”
He laughed again, a little drunkenly. “At first, yes,” he said, but not unkindly.
“I didn’t want to run away, but I couldn’t think of… You were so…”
“No, don’t remind me!” he said. “It is painful to think of the last couple of months. You were clever to go. You are a clever girl. A talented girl.”
Mimi could feel the tears coming, welling up in her. Relief and release from all that anger. And sadness, too. Sadness at the part she had played in this.
“You will not have to worry about me being a pest anymore.”
“Lazar, I-”
“No. It’s true. I have been a pest. But I have come to my senses, okay? And I am leaving NYU.”
Mimi was on her guard again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. There were rumors in the department. My reputation was… how can I put this delicately?” He laughed. “I cannot put it delicately. Let’s just say, my reputation was catching up to me. So, to save myself the mortification of being dismissed, I have offered my resignation.”
“Lazar, I never said anything-”
“To the dean? Of course, you didn’t. You didn’t need to. I have no one to blame but myself. But all is not lost. I have found work.”
“You have?”
“I’m going to Baylor.”
“Where’s that?”
Lazar laughed. “A good question,” he said. “It’s in Waco, Texas. I have to learn how to say that. It’s Way-co, yes? I did not know this at first.”
“You’re moving to Texas?” Mimi tried to imagine Lazar in a cowboy hat.
“It’s the largest Baptist university in the world,” he said. “Me teaching in a Baptist university. Communication studies. I tell you, my world is… how shall I say this? Changing?” he said. “Yes, that puts a good spin on it. Changing.”
Mimi was shaking with relief. He was moving thousands of miles away. And she refused to feel guilty, and yet “You will be happy?” he asked. She wasn’t sure, but there did not seem to be any malice in what he was saying. “Because it is important to me, after everything, that you are happy. Well, a little bit sad. Yes?”
“Okay,” she said meekly. “But-”
“No but s, Meem. You be happy. That is good. And before I get too ridiculous, let me just say thank you for the good times and say good-bye, you delightful creature.”
And it was over.
Quietly he hung up. And she knew he would not call again. Which is when she started to really cry. She cried so much she thought she would drown the little house, and so she went outside. And then she heard the sound of a branch cracking.
When she spoke to him-the man in the trees, wherever he was-she felt as if she was in some bizarre off-off- Broadway play. The girl who talks to trees. She spoke without fear because, quite frankly, she had nothing left in her. She was emotionally exhausted. And if this monster dropped out of the tree with Jason’s mask on his face and a gleaming meat cleaver in his hand, she would have only laughed in his face.
She went inside and took her little vial of poisonous spray to bed with her. To sleep, perchance to scream.
Her mind drifted in and out of the elevator in the many-floored House of Sorrow. Ding! Regret. Ding! Denial. Ding! Outrage. But finally she dozed off, only to wake suddenly with the words “up there” clanging in her head like a fire alarm.
Up there?
She had heard someone say it. She could almost hear someone saying those two words in her head. “Up there.” For a moment or two she couldn’t figure out why the words seemed so jarring. Then it came to her.
Cramer Lee on the street outside the Hungry Planet, his eyes filled with concern.
No one’s been bothering you up there.
That’s what he had said. But there was a problem with that. A big problem.
She had never told him where she lived.
Was she crazy? Well, there was one way to find out. She flipped on her lamp and looked at her watch. Not even eleven. She crawled across the mattress to the chair where she hung her purse and looked through it until she found the business card with his phone number scrawled on the back. Then she flipped on the lights in the front room and sat at her desk. With the card in front of her, she punched in Cramer’s numbers. Then she leaned on the desk, her eyes staring straight ahead, willing it to be him who answered. It wasn’t. “Hello,” said a sleepy woman’s voice.
And Mimi pushed END. But it wasn’t because she had woken up Mrs. Lee, if that’s who it was. She terminated the call because of something very odd she saw before her on the wall. One of her father’s telephone numbers. A number he had etched over more than once and drawn an elaborate frame around. Beside it were the initials M.L. The number was the same one she had just called.
PART THREE
Sometimes the pain was too much.
He wanted to scream but he couldn’t scream. His mouth felt as if it were wired shut, and so the scream smashed around in his head like some enraged, caged, wild thing, shaking every bone of his skull, exhausting him.
He dreamed.
He was in the tunnel again, a small bag clutched in his teeth. Then he was in the room under where she lay. He took the bag from his mouth and laid it in the corner of the room of dirt, like a good dog returning something to his master. Then he stood, though he could not stand up all the way. He listened, his ear pressed against the roof that was her floor. In his dream he could hear her breathing; resting his palms on the trapdoor, he could almost feel her. It was as if he was holding her up. There was a noise in the room. She was stirring, awake-if he could only reach her. He had to try to explain. He knew what he would say-he’d had a lot of time to think about it. Could he change the past? No. But he could change that small piece of the past that was him-that was still him. He would say something like that. He couldn’t think beyond that. Couldn’t think what she would say, couldn’t reach her, couldn’t “Cramer? It’s all right,” she said, her voice urgent but so quiet, speaking just to him. “Shhh, calm down already.”
He felt-imagined-no, felt her hand on his chest, just lying there. “Shhh. Listen…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cramer woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a drive shaft torquing too high. His eyes snapped open. There were headlights out in the yard. The cops, he thought, almost relieved, as if getting arrested would give his misery some real shape. But by then the screaming motor had crested the steep driveway and was clunking on bad suspension across the yard, and he knew no cop would drive a vehicle in that bad condition.
He slipped out of bed, stepped over the sopping clothes strewn across his floor, and stared out the window. Waylin Pitney’s ghostly panel truck was pulling into its usual place behind the drive shed on the lip of the hill, pulling as far forward as the space allowed to hide the truck from anyone passing by on the road.
Lights were on downstairs. And as soon as the engine was cut, Cramer heard the screen door slam. Mavis
