In the Night Room (22 page)

“It seems to me that everything’s a little brighter now.”

“Brighter,” I said, stung.

“Hold on. Are you trying to insinuate that . . . No. I won’t even say it.”

She wouldn’t say it, but I knew what it was. The first seed of recognition had just fallen on ground prepared for it by whatever it is you feel when half of your hand disappears and you need six candy bars to bring it back.

“How much brighter?” I asked, unable to let this go.

“Only a little. You want to know the biggest difference? Before I wound up in that bookstore, I had the feeling that someone or something was pulling my strings and making me do things I didn’t actually
want
to do. And now, I still feel that way, but I know who’s pulling my strings and moving me around. You.”

“Do you like it better this way?”

“Yes. I do like it better this way.” She checked her hands for signs of transparency. “Do you think I’m going to disappear, like the bloodstains?”

“Unless we can fix a mistake I made in Millhaven last year.”

“We’re going to Millhaven to
fix
something?”

“I know none of this makes sense, Willy, and when it does, if that ever happens, you’re not going to like it much.”

“But why? What are we doing?” Her face began to tremble, and she looked in my eyes for a reassurance she did not find. For about thirty seconds, she fell apart. I would have embraced her, but she fended me off by every now and then removing one of her hands from her eyes and clouting me in the chest. I pulled over to the side of the road.

“I don’t know why I believe you.” Willy wiped her eyes and cleaned her palms by smearing them over the sleeve of my jacket.

“I do, Willy,” I said. “Before we get to Millhaven, you will, too, probably. If I explained it to you now, it would be the one thing you would refuse to believe.”

“I couldn’t have anything to do with a mistake you made last year in Millhaven. I never went near Millhaven last year, and I didn’t know you.”

“What did you do last year, Willy? Can you remember a single thing you did in 2002?”

She shook her shoulders and gave me a scowling, insulted glance. “In 2002, I wrote
In the Night Room.
That’s what I did that year. You probably don’t know this, but I started the book in a place, a psychiatric community you could call it, known as the Institute, in Stockwell, Massachusetts.”

Now she was daring me to find fault with her, and self-doubt turned her confidence brazen. “It’s a wonderful place, and it did me a lot of good. There was this doctor there, Dr. Bollis. I used to call him Dr. Bollocks, but he was great. Because of him, I could write again.”

“In 2001, I went to a psychiatric community that sounds very similar,” I said. “And the treatment I had there was wonderful for me, too. I could sort of put myself back together.”

She grew a shade less defensive. “So you should understand. What was the reason you came unglued, or wasn’t there anything specific?”

“On September 11, I saw people jump from the World Trade Center. And then the ruin and all the death you could feel around you. It brought back too many traumatic things from Vietnam, and I couldn’t cope anymore.”

“Oh, poor Tim,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes again. “My poor honey.” She shifted sideways and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I wiped my slimy hands on your beautiful jacket.” She rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

“What happened to me was, my family got killed—my husband and my daughter.” She was speaking in a low, soft voice now, and she held one hand cupped against the side of my face. Very faintly, I could feel her pulse beating in the tips of her fingers. “My whole world disappeared. I don’t even remember how I got to the Institute, but it did me a lot of good. It’s funny, you ask about what I remember from 2002, and that’s all there is. Everything else is just darkness, it’s a room I’m locked out of.”

“My place was called the Austen Riggs Center, and it’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My doctor, my main doctor, the one who did me the most good, was named Dr. B——”

She sat up and looked at me in wonder. “That’s almost the same name!”

“And the town, Stockbridge, was home for most of his life to a famous magazine illustrator named—”

“So was Stockwell! I can’t believe this! Our guy was—”

“Norman Rockwell.”

“Norton Postman,” Willy said, and her eyes underwent a subtle change. “This is an amazing coincidence.”

“It certainly is. Norman Rockwell painted hundreds of covers for the
Saturday Evening Post,
so in a way, you could call him the
Post
man.”

“But so did Postman,” Willy said. “I didn’t know there were two of these guys.”

“Not to mention two world-famous mental-health facilities in little towns in the Berkshires, and two excellent psychiatrists who practically have the same name.”

Willy tucked her lower lip between her teeth, a gesture that for some reason I would never imagine her making. Maybe I thought it was too girlish for her, but there she was, biting her lower lip, and it didn’t look at all girlish. Willy unpeeled a Mounds bar and began to fend off another attack of lightness.

Ten minutes later, we were walking into the pleasant, air-conditioned space of the Willard Memorial Library, a modern-looking building on West Emerald Street, just two blocks off the main drag.
Oh, Emerald Street,
I thought, and began to sense the close, hovering presence of my sister. Ever since my stunt in the Barnes & Noble,
The Wizard of Oz
had been as implicated in her appearances as
Alice in Wonderland.

“Atlases?” said the librarian. “Right over there, in our reference room. The atlas shelves are directly to the left of the door as you enter.”

A couple of men read newspapers at a blond wooden desk; two girls in their preteens plowed through copies of the same Harry Potter book in a dead-serious race to the end. Diffuse light filtered in through the high windows and hung evenly throughout the large room. Separated by four empty seats, an old man and a high school student leaned over the keyboards of computers as if listening to voices.

I swung open the glass door to the reference room, and Willy followed me in. To my left, three tall shelves of outsized atlases stretched off to the far wall. We were alone in the room.

“Do you have a favorite atlas?” I asked Willy.

“The Oxford, I guess,” she said. It was the one I used.

I pulled the Oxford
Atlas of the World
from the lowest of the three shelves and slid it onto the nearest table. “Let’s get one more, for backup.”

“Backup?”

“You’re going to want a second opinion.”

After a little searching I found the National Geographic
Concise Atlas of the World
and placed it beside the Oxford. Balanced on one hip, Willy watched me with her hands behind her back, seeming to glow with the light of her own curiosity.

I gestured to the chair placed before the books, and she sat down and tilted her head to look up. The expression on her face made me feel as though I was just about to strangle a puppy. I leaned over the table and pushed the National Geographic toward the center of the table, leaving the Oxford
Atlas of the World
in front of her.

I asked Willy where she had been living before she fled to New York.

“Hendersonia, New Jersey.”

“See if you can find it.”

Giving me a suspicious glance, she flipped to the index on the last pages of the atlas. I saw her trace her finger down the long list of the
H
’s, going from Hampshire, UK, quickly down to the place names beginning with
He.
And here were Henderson, AR, Henderson, GA, Henderson, KY, and Henderson, NV. Where Hendersonia should have been, she found only Hendersonville, TN, and its namesake in North Carolina.

She frowned at me. “It must be too small to put in the index.”

“Oh,” I said.

She held up a finger, this time telling me that inspiration had struck, and flipped backward to the
A
’s. Her finger went down the list to Alpine, NJ, and when she had the page and coordinates she turned more pages until she came to the one she wanted and moved her finger along the lettered squares until it intersected with the proper numerical one.

“It’ll be in here,” she said, and motioned me forward.

I put a hand on her shoulder and bent down. Willy’s finger circled around until it hit upon Alpine, from whence she drew it in a southerly direction, apparently without any significant success. She leaned over, put her face an inch from the complex, colorful map, and scoured it with her eyes.

Willy looked back around at me and pulled down the corners of her mouth. “This is nuts. Give me another one of those books.”

I slid the National Geographic in front of her.

“That first atlas was stupid. It’ll be in here.” Her eyes skittered over my face, looking for clues. “Won’t it?”

“Do you think I’d ask you to look if I thought it would be?”

She pulled back her head and frowned. With the same expression on her face, she opened the book at the index and flipped pages until she came to the
H
’s. The frown increased as she once again had the experience of moving from Henderson to Hendersonville with no stop at a place called Hendersonia.

“This is impossible,” she said, without modulating her voice. “It’s absurd. They erased an entire town from these atlases.”

Back in the general part of the library, Willy looked at the computers and said, “Hold on.” She went up to the desk. “May I use one of those computers?”

“Be my guest,” said the librarian. “By law I am required to inform you that using the Internet to violate any state or federal laws is prohibited. Now that I’ve done that, I’ll have to see a driver’s license and have you sign this form.”

It was a limitation of liability form, and I signed it as soon as I produced my driver’s license.

Willy pulled me toward the seat beside the teenaged boy. When she sat down, he gave her a classic double take. Then he noticed me and turned back to the images of severed limbs on his monitor. Willy motioned me closer and whispered, “I know it’s on MapQuest, because I’ve looked at it a couple of times since I moved there.”

“Give it a whirl,” I said.

Willy quickly reached MapQuest.com and typed “Hendersonia” and “NJ” into the address boxes. She clicked on Search. In seconds, the screen displayed a message reading, “Your search for
Hendersonia
in
NJ
didn’t match any locations.”

While she was busy being frustrated, I sat down at the computer next to the old man, logged on, and waited only a second before a blue rectangle appeared on my screen. As I’d feared, Cyrax wanted to let me know what was on his mind.

u must tell her what she is & speed to yr Byzantium, 4 u must pay the dredful price in sacrifice of the being u made. CO-RECK yr error & yr crime. it will b terrible & yet it must b done & U MUST DO IT! as I luv u, buttsecks, I cannot ignor the CHAOS u brought to our REALM and yrs & for this U MUST PAY IN KIND—U OPENED THE WEDGE, NOW U MUST CLOSE IT!

oh, what does gentle Cyrax demand of u?

FIND the real Lily Kalendar! See what she is! Understand the deep complexity of her self & her position, so u know what u got WRONG! payment must be made!

I logged off and slumped in the chair. Payment must be made, he said. Wasn’t it being made, in full measure, by the heartbreaking woman at my side?

“No, that’s wrong,” Willy said. I heard real distress in her voice. The boy risked another peek at her. “It was there before!” She shook her head. “What’s happening to me?” She stared at the screen for a moment, then said, “Hold on, hold on, I’m going to try one more thing.”

This time, she typed in “Stockwell” and “MA.” The same “Your search” message appeared on the monitor. “It isn’t there? There’s no Stockwell? Okay, I’m trying one more thing, and then I quit.”

She went to Google and typed in “Charles Bollis, MD,” and told the service to search the Web. What came back was the question “Do you mean Charles Boli’s, MD?” and a link to a site that provided oncology information from somewhere called Charles County.

Her face had turned white.

“Let’s get out of here, Willy,” I said. “You need about three candy bars and a bag of M&M’s, and both of us should have lunch.”

“What were you looking at?” she asked me.

I told her I was checking my messages.

When we got back into the car, Willy dove into the bag and pulled out a handful of candy bars. After she wolfed the first one down and had gone through half of the second, she said, “I’m learning how to handle this condition, whatever you call it, and I can keep it under control. I
think.
” She demolished the rest of her candy bar, picked up a third—a 100 Grand bar—and removed the wrapper with a single downward stroke. “But I also think it is time for you to let me in on these big secrets of yours, because I really have to know what the HELL is going on.”

I turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll try to explain over lunch. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us, but after what just happened, there’s a chance that you’ll believe me.” I looked at her and started driving back to the center of town, which is where I thought I probably would find the restaurant mentioned by the boy at the gas station. Willy was chewing a cud of chocolate, peanuts, and caramel and regarding me with a mixture of confusion, anger, and hopefulness that I felt penetrate into my viscera, if not my soul. “Because, and this is a promise, you wouldn’t have believed me before this.”

“The town I live in doesn’t exist—at least not in
this
universe! I remember stuff that
you
remember! I didn’t go Lawrence Freeman Elementary School, and I didn’t have Mrs. Gross as my second-grade teacher. You did, but I didn’t. What would happen if I tried to call the Institute? It wouldn’t have a number, would it? Because it isn’t there. Just like Dr. Bollis.”

“To look on the bright side, there isn’t any Baltic Group, either.”

“But Giles Coverley and Roman Richard still exist, and I’m sure they’re still trying to find us.”