particularly gently.
Rose stands at the opening to the hallway, her eyes on the point where it ends at Miaow's door. The knife dangles heavily in her hand, elongating the smooth muscles in her forearm. Rafferty wants to touch her, but she seems to be at the center of a sizzle of negative energy. If the lights went out, he wouldn't be surprised to see sparks chasing each other over her skin.
'Sooner or later,' he says.
Rose says, 'Later.' He can barely hear her. She shakes her head slowly, as though it weighs a great deal and it hurts her neck to turn it, and then she goes to the couch and sits heavily, leaning forward like someone who's going to put her head between her knees until a spell of faintness passes. Instead she straightens and tosses the heavy steak knife onto the glass coffee table, which has the good sense not to break. She studies the knife for a long moment, looking like she can't remember how it got there. When she shakes her head again, it's a decisive side-to-side snap, bringing herself into the present, and she widens her eyes, blows out a big breath, and opens her big leather bag. She paws through the clutter until she comes up with a pack of Marlboro Lights.
Rafferty goes automatically to the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony and opens it. They've been on what he thinks of as a very limited health program: Rose has been trying to get them to drink their weight in water, and he's been trying to rid the apartment's atmosphere of some of its secondhand smoke. Standing in the flow of humid air from outside, he turns back to her and says, 'I need to know whether we're in danger. For Miaow's sake, especially.'
'Yes,' Rose says. She strikes a match, takes an enormous drag, and holds on to it, then blows it out all at once. 'Yes, if he finds us, we're in danger.'
'What you're not telling me,' Rafferty says. 'What I'm not supposed to ask you about. If I know it, will it help me keep us safer?'
'No. You just need to know that he'll kill me if he gets a chance. And he might try to get me through you and Miaow. But he can't fly or lift automobiles or walk through walls. He can't read minds. He's a guy. He's a very dangerous guy, but he's just a guy.'
Rafferty hears a kind of compressed control in her voice that he's never heard before. She's fighting to keep it steady. 'How good is he at finding people?'
'Good enough that I ran all the way to Isaan, and not to my own village either.'
Rafferty files that for later and says, 'Does he know where your village is?'
'Yes. I told him everything, back then.'
Back when? Rafferty thinks, but he knows the answer. 'He's military.'
'He's worse than military. He's crazy.'
'Always a good combination.' He turns again to look out across the city, glittering with the fraudulent optimism of big cities everywhere.
'Poke?' Rose says. He looks back to see her studying the tip of her cigarette. He waits, despite the fact that she seems disinclined to say anything else. He notices she doesn't have an ashtray and gets the one that's on the counter that separates the kitchen from the living room. He takes it to her and puts it beside the knife, then picks up the knife and carries it over to the counter and puts it where the ashtray was. He's moving, he knows, just to be doing something, just to compensate for the words that aren't being said, and he's about thirty seconds away from rearranging furniture, so he goes back over to the table, pulls the white hassock close to the couch, and sits on it.
'You have to believe me,' Rose says. She is not looking at him, not even near him. She is looking at her knees. 'I never, ever thought this would happen. I was absolutely sure it was over. I was sure he was dead. If he wasn't dead, I knew he'd come back. And I waited for him to come back, for more than four years. Every time I got onto that stage at the King's Castle, I thought I'd see him. Every time I turned a corner on the street, every time I went through a door at night, every time an elevator opened. Every time I went into my own room alone. Every time I saw a crowd of faces, I thought he'd be there. And he never was.' She checks the length of the cigarette in her hand and takes another drag, squinting against the thread of smoke.
'I used to dream that I'd flag down a taxi and get in back, and when the driver turned around, it would be him. I dreamed of a dark village where he was behind every house. He stepped out of mirrors, he bled through walls. He came up at me out of black water. Especially the water. He was always rising toward me through dark water.'
'He, him, him, him,' Rafferty says. 'He's got a name. Howard Horner. Why don't you use it?'
She shakes her head. 'I didn't even let myself think it. For years it was just 'him.' He was less real when I didn't think his name.' She hears herself and almost smiles. 'Like thinking or saying his name would bring him. Village-girl magic.'
Rafferty just waits.
'It took me a long time to let myself get close to you. When you came into the bar, when you started talking to me, I was still waiting. I'd already waited for years, and then, when I knew I wanted to be with you, I waited a few months more. And he still didn't come. So, because I wanted to be with you, I made myself believe he was dead. If I hadn't been able to do that, if I'd thought there was any chance he was alive, I never would have gotten involved with you.'
Miaow says from the hallway, 'This is because of your old job, isn't it?'
'That's right,' Rose says, and sighs heavily. 'It's because I was dancing at the King's Castle.'
'Not just dancing,' Miaow says.
'No, Miaow,' Rose says. She stubs out the cigarette. 'Not just dancing. Thank you for reminding me of that.'
'I thought you went to bed,' Rafferty says.
'You were wrong,' Miaow says. 'I went to my bedroom to drink a Coke and think about getting killed. And I came back out.'
'Well, you might as well come all the way in,' Rose says. 'I'm not going to throw anything at you.'
Miaow trudges in but doesn't get close to them. Instead she hugs the wall as she crosses the room, pulls out one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and sits. She puts the can of Coke down with a sharp sound.
Rose says, 'I'm not contagious, Miaow.'
'Everything was all right,' Miaow says. She sounds like she does when she's working on her lines for the play, as though she's practiced what she wants to say, and she swivels the stool back and forth, not looking at either of them, just getting through it. 'We were all happy. You had your business, Poke was making money from his book. My school was okay, there was the play.'
'There still is,' Rafferty says.
'And now there's this,' Miaow says, finishing her speech as if no one had spoken. 'Just when I think we can finally live like everybody else, without being different all the time. Without anybody chasing us. Without being frightened.'
'You don't have to be frightened,' Rafferty says.
She gives him the look of pure, concentrated scorn that the lie deserves. 'I saw that guy. And there wasn't just one of them. There were two. Maybe there are a lot more.'
'There aren't,' Rose says.
'You can't know that,' Miaow says, and now she's glaring at Rose. 'I heard you talking to Poke. This happened when you were… dancing or whatever you call it. And you worked in the bar four years after the last time you saw him. You've been with Poke for five years now. How do you know he hasn't got a hundred friends by now? How do you know anything?'
Rose leans back on the couch and looks regretfully at the smashed cigarette butt. Miaow's gaze drops to a spot on the carpet about halfway across the room, but her mouth remains a tight line. Rafferty fights the urge to take hold of the conversation, try to turn it away from the black lake that seems to have opened up between them. All his instincts, developed by years of listening as his mother and father sharpened their razors on each other, push him toward trying to find a safe common ground, somewhere they can smile at each other and pretend that nothing happened tonight.
But he can't do it.
'Miaow,' he finally says. 'Nobody is happy about this. But either you can be polite to your mother or you can go back to your room.'
