Cell

'Hey, guess what?' he said to the dim shape of the girl as Tom's footsteps receded. 'Ole Rafer just put a jump in me, too.' Although he hadn't, not really.

'We have to forgive him,' she said. 'Without that cat, Tom would be just as crazy as the rest of them. And that would be a shame.'

'It would.'

'I'm so scared,' she said. 'Do you think it will get better tomorrow, in the daylight? The being scared part?'

'I don't know.'

'You must be worried sick about your wife and little boy.'

Clay sighed and rubbed his face. 'The hard part is trying to come to grips with the helplessness. We're separated, you see, and—' He stopped and shook his head. He wouldn't have gone on if she hadn't reached out and taken his hand. Her fingers were firm and cool. 'We separated in the spring. We still live in the same little town, what my own mother would have called a grass marriage. My wife teaches at the elementary school.'

He leaned forward, trying to see her face in the dark.

'You want to know the hell of it? If this had happened a year ago, Johnny would have been with her. But this September he made the jump to middle school, which is almost five miles away. I keep trying to figure if he would have been home when things went nuts. He and his friends ride the bus. I think he would have been home. And I think he would have gone right to her.'

Or pulled his cellphone out of his backpack and called her! the panic-rat suggested merrily . . . then bit. Clay felt himself tightening his fingers down on Alice's and made himself stop. But he couldn't stop the sweat from springing out on his face and arms.

'But you don't know,' she said.

'No.'

'My daddy runs a framing and print shop in Newton,' she said. 'I'm sure he's all right, he's very self-reliant, but he'll be worried about me. Me and my. My you-know.'

Clay knew.

'I keep wondering what he did about supper,' she said. 'I know that's crazy, but he can't cook a lick.'

Clay thought about asking if her father had a cell phone and something told him not to. Instead he asked, 'Are you doing all right for now?'

'Yes,' she said, and shrugged. 'What's happened to him has happened. I can't change it.'

He thought: Iwish you hadn't said that.

'My kid has a cell phone, did I tell you that?' To his own ears, his voice sounded as harsh as a crow's caw.

'You did, actually. Before we crossed the bridge.'

'Sure, that's right.' He was gnawing at his lower lip and made himself stop. 'But he didn't always keep it charged. Probably I told you that, too.'

'Yes.'

'I just have no way of knowing.' The panic-rat was out of its cage, now. Running and biting.

Now both of her hands closed over both of his. He didn't want to give in to her comfort—it felt hard to let go of his grip on himself and give in to her comfort—but he did it, thinking she might need to give more than he needed to take. They were holding on that way, hands linked next to the pewter salt and pepper shakers on Tom McCourt's little kitchen table, when Tom came back from the cellar with four flashlights and a Coleman lantern that was still in its box.

8

The coleman gave off enough light to make the flashlights unnecessary. It was harsh and white, but Clay liked its brilliance, the way it drove away every single shadow save for their own and the cat's— which went leaping fantastically up the wall like a Halloween decoration cut from black crepe paper—into hiding.

'I think you should pull the curtains,' Alice said.

Tom was opening one of the plastic sacks from the Metropolitan Cafe, the ones with DOGGY BAG on one side and PEOPLE BAG on the other. He stopped and looked at her curiously. 'Why?'

She shrugged and smiled. Clay thought it the strangest smile he had ever seen on the face of a teenage girl. She'd cleaned the blood off her nose and chin, but there were dark weary-circles under her eyes, the Coleman lamp had bleached the rest of her face to a corpselike pallor, and the smile, showing the tiniest twinkle of teeth between trembling lips from which all the lipstick had now departed, was disorienting in its adult artificiality. He thought Alice looked like a movie actress from the late 1940s playing a socialite on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had the tiny sneaker in front of her on the table. She was spinning it with one finger. Each time she spun it, the laces flipped and clicked. Clay began to hope she would break soon. The longer she held up, the worse it would be when she finally let go. She had let some out, but not nearly enough. So far he'd been the one to do most of the letting-out.

'I don't think people should see we're in here, that's all,' she said. She flicked the sneaker. What she had called a Baby Nike. It spun. The laces flipped and clicked on Tom's highly polished table. 'I think it might be . . .bad.'

Tom looked at Clay.

'She could be right,' Clay said. 'I don't like us being the only lit-up house on the block, even if the light's at the back.'

Tom got up and closed the curtains over the sink without another word.

There were two other windows in the kitchen, and he pulled those curtains, too. He started back to the table, then changed course and closed the door between the kitchen and the hall. Alice spun the Baby Nike in front of her on the table. In the harsh, unsparing glow of the Coleman lantern, Clay could see it was pink and purple, colors only a child could love. Around it went. The laces flew and clicked. Tom looked at it, frowning, as he sat down, and Clay thought: Tell her to take it off the table. Tell her she doesn't know where it's been and you don't want it on your table. That should be enough to set her off and then we can start getting this part out of the way. Tell her. I think she wants you to. I think that's why she's doing it.

But Tom only took sandwiches out of the bag—roast beef and cheese, ham and cheese—and doled them out. He got a pitcher of iced tea from the fridge ('Still cold as can be,' he said), and then set down the remains of a package of raw hamburger for the cat.

'He deserves it,' he said, almost defensively. 'Besides, it would only go over with the electricity out.'

There was a telephone hanging on the wall. Clay tried it, but it was really just a formality and this time he didn't even get a dial tone. The thing was as dead as . . . well, as Power Suit Woman, back there by Boston Common. He sat back down and worked on his sandwich. He was hungry but didn't feel like eating.

Alice put hers down after only three bites. 'I can't,' she said. 'Not now. I guess I'm too tired. I want to go to sleep. And I want to get out of this dress. I guess I can't wash up—not very well, anyway—but I'd give anything to throw this fucking dress away. It stinks of sweat and blood.' She spun the sneaker. It twirled beside the crumpled paper with her barely touched sandwich lying on top of it. 'I can smell my mother on it, too. Her perfume.'

For a moment no one said anything. Clay was at a complete loss. He had a momentary picture of Alice subtracted from her dress, in a white bra and panties, with her staring, hollowed-out eyes making her look like a paper-doll. His artist's imagination, always facile and always obliging, added tabs at the shoulders and lower legs of the image. It was shocking not because it was sexy but because it wasn't. In the distance—very faint—something exploded with a dim foomp.

Tom broke the silence, and Clay blessed him for it.

'I'll bet a pair of my jeans would just about fit you, if you rolled up the bottoms to make cuffs.' He stood up. 'You know what, I think you'd even look cute in em, like Huck Finn in a girls' school production of Big River. Come upstairs. I'm going to put out some clothes for you to wear in the morning and you can spend the night in the guest room. I've got plenty of pajamas, a plague of pajamas. Do you want the Coleman?'