“A man called,” Calvin said, holding the telephone. He stood in the doorway of Beatrice’s bedroom. “Looking for you. I told him you weren’t home.”
“Why did you do that?” Beatrice asked, as she tugged the telephone away from him.
“He sounded funny,” Calvin said. “He sounded like a creep.”
“He’s a friend,” Beatrice said.
“That man?”
“We talk a lot on the phone.”
“You do?” Calvin stared at her. “You talk to that man?”
“Stop saying that word!”
“What word?” he asked.
In her arms the telephone rang. She flinched, and put it down on her bed.
“Don’t answer it,” Calvin said.
“Of course I’m going to answer it. He’s my friend, he’s trying to reach me.”
“Don’t answer it. Don’t talk to that—” But he wasn’t allowed to say it.
The telephone kept ringing. She curled her fingers around the receiver.
“No!” Calvin said.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Beatrice said, as she felt herself beginning to worry. “He’s not at the front door. It’s just the telephone.”
“I know,” Calvin said. “But please, don’t answer it. I think it would be a bad idea.”
He took her hands into his. They were hot and slightly sticky. Together she and Calvin sat on her bed, watching the telephone ring. By the time it stopped, Beatrice felt afraid.
“Do you think…,” she began, and then couldn’t finish the question.
If he appeared at their front door, she would not know him. Shred, she would know right away, by his beautiful long fingers and uncombed hair, the skeptical arch of his eyebrow, the leather cord he wore around his neck. But the person on the telephone had no face. He was neither straight nor stooped. His breath was not foul; his T-shirt was not clean or dirty; he had no birthmarks. He was neither nineteen nor forty-one. Without a harelip, a pierced ear; without a nose or a chin or a body. She did not wonder. She said only, “Hello.” She said, “Tell me something interesting.” He had a cough.
Her brother was looking at her in a peculiar way. His eyes moved over her face like it was a landscape and he was up in an airplane. His eyes said, I am not coming down there. But still they kept looking for a place to arrive.
Beatrice said, “He’s not very smart.”
“How do you know?”
“His job is mowing lawns,” she said. “He didn’t know what lozenges were. He believed it when I said I played guitar.”
Calvin’s eyes stood still.
“You believed he mows lawns.”
She twitched.
Then she covered her ears and squeezed her lids shut. “Stop staring at me,” she hissed. “Stop talking to me.”
“Sorry,” Calvin said, patting her arm. “Sorry.”
Soft, tiny blows fell on her arms and her shoulders.
“Turn off all the lights,” she told him. “Turn up the radio.”
In the darkness, she opened her eyes. The radio was glowing. And Shred was still talking, announcing songs, disparaging requests, saying, “This one goes out to…”
“Maglite,” Calvin whispered.
It was the most bludgeonlike thing either of them owned. The kind of flashlight that police officers and night watchmen used, the kind that required six enormous batteries, sliding down its cylinder with the cool weight of cannonballs. The Maglite lived inside Calvin’s room, a universe she was no longer so familiar with. She bumped into the umbrella stand that held his historic swords.
“Where are you, Calvin?”
He was crouching underneath the window. She reached out and touched his arm, and felt how he was cradling the flashlight. She acted like a blind person and touched him all over. He was still a citizen in that other country to which she had once belonged: all of a piece, flawless and moist, his chest lightly heaving like a hare’s. From the other room the telephone rang once, and stopped.
“Oh god,” Beatrice said. “Do you think they answered it?”
“I really hope not,” her brother said, and from all around her, she felt the faintest draft seep in, as faint as someone blowing out a candle.
She thought of warning them. But here, on the very top floor of her house, there were no buttons embedded in the walls. Those buttons existed downstairs, in the rooms with the long windows, where her mother and her father lived. From here it was impossible to give warning, to say important things, to speak of danger; it was possible only to be summoned.
They would pick up the phone. They would answer the door.
“Oh god,” she said.
Outside, something stirred. Something rustled through the trees and then stepped out onto the snow.
“Raccoon,” Calvin whispered.
But it didn’t sound like a raccoon, or a wild and mangy cat. It didn’t sound like a hawk alighting on the lawn. She had once believed that she lived among the fir trees and the night-roaming animals, but now she remembered the street that wrapped around one side of their house, the scream of tires as they hit the hairpin curve; she remembered the gas station at the top of the hill, and the telephone booth beneath its buzzing lights. Beside her, her brother softly heaved. She could hear the crunch of footfalls on the snow.
Then Calvin shot up. He was too fast. He threw open the window, and the cold air came tumbling in on them.
“Stop! Don’t move!” he cried.
“No!” Beatrice said, pulling on his leg. “Get down!”
“Kids?” a voice asked from below.
Beatrice stood up in surprise. Pressed against her brother, she peered out into the darkness. Calvin pushed the Maglite’s tender black button, and a beam of light fell into the yard.
A man looked back up at them. He was protecting his eyes with one hand. In the other he held a bright blue duffel bag. He wore a long dress coat, pinned to the lapel of which was the unwieldy fir tree that Beatrice had made in her ceramics class a year before. She could see it even from here.
“Papa?” she said.
“What are you kids doing up?” their father asked, trying to sound mad and quiet at the same time.
“We heard something,” Beatrice whispered back.
“What are you doing
