The Bookman's Wake (9 page)

I
opened my eyes to the ringing of the telephone. It was five
after three by the luminous clock on the table beside me: I
had been asleep almost five hours. Par for the course, I
thought, staring into the dark where the phone was. I let
it ring, knowing it couldn’t be for me, but it kept
on until I had to do something about it. When I picked it
up, Eleanor was there in my ear.

“I’m coming over. Is that okay?”

“I don’t know…what’ll your
parents say?”

But she had hung up. I rolled over and sat on the bed.
When five minutes had passed and she hadn’t arrived,
I groped my way to the window and looked across at the
house. It was dark except for a faint light on the side
facing away from me. Soon that too went out—someone
in a bathroom, I thought—but then another light came
on in the opposite corner. Something moved in the yard: I
couldn’t tell what as I tried to see through the
rain-streaked glass, but it looked like some critter
standing under the window had moved quickly back into the
darkness. A deer maybe, or just a mirage thrown out by a
brain still groggy from too little sleep. But I
hadn’t forgotten about Eleanor’s stalker and I
sat on the sill and watched the yard. The light went out
and again I swam in an all-black world. I sat for a long
time looking at nothing.

At ten to four I decided that she wasn’t coming
and I went back to bed.

I heard a sharp click somewhere, then a bump.
There she is
, I thought. But nothing happened. The drumming of the rain
was the only reminder that I could still think and I could
still hear. The minutes stretched toward the dawn. There
was not yet a hint of light, which, given the clouds
covering the state, was at least ninety minutes away. Again
a light flashed. This one brought me up with a
start—it was here in my room, inches away. As my eyes
focused, I saw that it was the extension button on the
telephone— someone had picked up the phone downstairs
in the printshop and was having a conversation at four
o’clock in the morning. This went on for some time,
at least two minutes, then the line went dark. I rolled out
of bed and went to the door, opened it, and listened down
the circular staircase.
Nothing
. No sound, no light, not a hint of movement anywhere.

I lay on the bed staring up into the dark. Eventually,
though I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I began
to doze off.

It was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream. I
was drifting, somewhere between worlds, when my eyes
flicked open and I knew she was there. “Hey,” I
said, and I felt her sit beside me on the floor. I reached
out and touched her head: she had laid it across her folded
arms on the bed. “Thought you’d never get
here.” She still didn’t speak: for several
minutes she just lay there under my arm, her breathing
barely audible above the rain. Then she said, “I
didn’t come because I felt stupid. I am stupid,
waking you up in the middle of the night.”

“It’s okay, I was awake anyway,” I
lied.

“The truth of the matter is, I’ve just been
through the loneliest night of my life. It got so desolate
I thought I’d die from it.”

There was a long pause. She said, “I keep thinking
that maybe my mom and dad can help me when I get like this,
but they can’t. I know they love me, but somehow
knowing it just makes the loneliness all the stronger. Does
that make any sense?”

“You’re not their little girl anymore.
You’ve lost something you can’t ever get back,
but you haven’t yet found what’s gonna take the
place of it in the next part of your life.”

“The next part of my life,” she said with a
sigh.

I could hear the pain in her voice. “I’ll
help you,” I said, “if you’ll let
me.”

She seemed to consider it. “Just talk to me, help
me get through the night. I know you want to sleep and
I’m being a thundering pain in the ass. But you have
no idea how much it would help, Mr. Man from Nowhere, if
you’d just talk to me for a little while.”

“Listen and believe it. There’s nothing
I’d rather do, right this minute, than talk to
you.”

“Oh, Janeway.” Her voice got thick, and
broke. “I hurt so bad. I hurt so bad and I
can’t talk to anyone.”

“Talk to me.”

“I don’t know, maybe somebody like you,
who’s just passing through and doesn’t know me.
I can’t talk to Mamma and Daddy, there’s just
too much in the way. I don’t know what it is, we
can’t get past the facts of the matter and get down
where the real trouble is.”

“What are the facts of the matter?”

“How completely and beyond redemption I’ve
fucked up my life.”

“Maybe it just seems that way.”

“I’ve done a stupid thing. Don’t ask
me why, it was just insane. I felt compelled, like I had no
choice. Then they said I’d done something worse, and
one thing led to another and I did do something
worse…only it wasn’t what they said I’d
done. But they locked me up for it, and now they want to
lock me up again, maybe for years. If they do that, I will
kill myself, I swear I will. I couldn’t live in a
cage.”

“None of us can. That’s not really
living.”

“But some people survive. I couldn’t even do
that, not if we’re talking about years.” She
shook her head: I felt the movement. “No
way.”

Gently, I prodded her. “What did you
do?”

She was a long time answering, and at first the answer
was no answer at all. “I can’t tell you
either.”

“I won’t judge you.”

“It’s not that. There are pieces of the
story missing. Without them I just look like a
fool.”

“Take the chance. Maybe I can help you find the
pieces.”

“No one can. None of it makes sense. I’m
like that guy in
The Man Without a Country
, I’ve got no roots, nothing solid to hold on to. I
love my parents but I have an awful time talking to
them.”

“Everybody does. It means you’re one hundred
percent normal.”

She chuckled, a sad little noise. “And all the
time I thought I was crazy. I have the worst time trying to
talk to them. And I know I’ve got to, I don’t
think I can let another day pass without doing that. But
how can I?”

“Try it out on me first.”

She didn’t say anything. I let her alone for a few
minutes, then I nudged her arm. “What happened to
you?”

“I was in New Mexico,” she said at once, as
if she’d been waiting for me to ask it one more time.
“I got in trouble…I can’t tell you about
that. But I’ve been carrying it around for weeks now.
If I don’t tell somebody…”

I gave her a little squeeze: nothing sexual, just
friendly encouragement,

“That’s where I picked up my stalker, in
Taos.” Again she tried to lapse into silence. But
then she said, “I had a room there. I’d come
home and things would be moved.”

“Ransacked?”

“No…but yeah, maybe. I had the feeling
he’d done that, been through all my stuff and then
put it all back, just so. But he’d always leave one
little thing out of place, something obvious like
he’d wanted me to see it. Once he left a cigarette,
still burning in a Styrofoam cup. He wanted me to know
he’d just left. Then he started with the phone. It
would ring late at night and I’d hear him
breathing…or humming that song.”

“You told me before: you knew what he
wanted.”

“He told me. But I can’t explain it now, so
don’t ask me.”

“Explain what you can.”

“I felt like something evil had come into my life.
I’d turn a corner and he’d be there, right in
my path. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes were all sunken
and he had holes in his face, deep pits across both cheeks.
Scared me deaf and dumb. I can’t tell you what it was
like. I’d walk down to the phone booth and call home
and he’d come up behind me, rip open the door, and
stand there staring. He said he could kill me, right there
at the telephone—
kill you and go up to North Bend and kill your mother
too
. God, I just freaked. Then one night he got into my room
when I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning there
was a dead…rat…on the bed beside me. And I
really freaked.”

I was listening to her words, trying to figure how and
when this had all happened. It had to be sometime after the
first Jeffords break-in, but before the second. Whatever
else her stalker had done, he’d pushed her onto that
next level of desperation. She had failed to get what
she’d gone after at the Jeffords place—what the
stalker also wanted—and had gone back for another run
at it. Then what?

Then she took it on the lam: jumped bail, struck out for
home. “So how’d you get back here?” I
asked. She had driven her car, she said in that flat tone
of voice that people use when you ask a stupid question.
But I was trying to get at something else, something she
couldn’t yet know about. “What roads did you
take?” I asked, and she laughed and wondered what
possible difference it could make. “I came across the
Sangres, up the Million-Dollar Highway to Grand Junction,
then took the freeway home.”

Slater had lied about her coming through Denver. He had
probably lied about other things as well. The pockmarked
man sounded like someone I had met quite recently, and my
whole involvement felt suddenly dirty.

I couldn’t get her to say any more.
“I’ve already said too much,” she said.
“If I keep on, I’ll feel worse than ever. Maybe
I should just take poison and save us all the
grief.”

“That, of course, would be the worst thing you
could do.” I calculated my next line and said it
anyway. “I hope you’re not one of those people
who turn suicidal on me.”

“Have you known people like that?”

“One or two. It’s always tragic, especially
when they’re young.”

“I saw you looking at the scar on my arm. Back in
the restaurant.”

“No use lying about it. I couldn’t help
noticing.”

“Well, you’re right. I did that to
myself.”

“Why?”

“Loneliness,” she said without missing a
heartbeat. “Desolation, the undertow, the barren
landscape. I can’t explain it. The loneliest times
come when I’m adrift in a big city, or here with
people who love me. When I’m really alone, up on a
mountaintop somewhere, I’m fine. I go up to
Archie’s cabin and I can go for a week without seeing
another living soul. The feeling of peace is just
incredible. Too bad we can’t live our lives on
mountaintops. I really like being with people until I
actually am, then I can’t stand them. Maybe I should
try to find Jesus; people say that works, though I
can’t imagine it working for me. I’m just not
spiritually oriented. So I drift. Sometimes I don’t
even know where the road’s gonna take me.”

“Talk to me, Eleanor. You got in trouble in New
Mexico, then you came back here. What happened
then?”

“Nothing. That’s the stupid part of it. I
came fifteen hundred miles and I couldn’t go the last
mile home. Instead I drove out to see Amy. But she
wasn’t home and I couldn’t find her.”

“Who’s Amy?”

“Amy Harper. She was my best friend till she
married Coleman Willis. The cock that walks like a man. Our
relationship got a bit strained after that. It’s hard
to stay friends with someone when her husband hates
you.”

“How could anyone hate you?”

“I wouldn’t go to bed with him. To a guy who
wears his brain between his legs, that’s the last
word in insults.”

In a while I said, “So you went to see Amy but Amy
wasn’t there. You wouldn’t want to kill
yourself over that. Amy’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“People always come back.”

“Maybe so, but I won’t be here.”

No, I thought: you probably won’t be.

“What did you do then?” I said.

“Drove out to my parents’ place. Stood in
the rain watching the house, afraid to come up and talk to
them. God, I’ve never been so alone in my life. Then
I saw them come out and drive off—going to town, I
figured, for the week’s groceries. I went over to the
house and sat on the porch. I wanted to die but I
didn’t know how. I thought if I could just lie down
and close my eyes and not wake up, I’d do it. But
it’s not that easy. It’s impossible, in fact; I
don’t want to
die
, for God’s sake, I never wanted to die. I thought
maybe I could find some peace in the printshop. I used to
do that when I was a little girl. When I’d get blue,
I’d go back in the shop and put my cheek against that
cold press and I could feel the warmth come flooding into
me, especially if there were books back there and if they
were books I loved. I could take a book and hold it to my
heart and the world was somehow less hostile, less
lonely.”

“Did that work?”

“It always works, for a while. But it’s like
anything else that has fantasy at its roots. Eventually
you’ve got to come back to earth. Now I’m
running out of time. Something will happen, today,
tomorrow…some-thing’ll happen and I’ll be
history.”

She pulled herself up on the bed. I heard her shoes hit
the floor.

“Would you do something for me, Mr.
Janeway?”

“If I can.”

“Hold me.”

“I don’t think that’ll be any great
hardship.”

“That’s all I
want…just…just…”

“Sure,” I said, taking her into the cradle
of my arm.

She was shivering. I drew the blanket up under my chin
and the body heat spread around us. Her hair smelled sweet,
as if she had just washed it. I knew I had no business
smelling her hair. She snuggled tight against me and I had
no right to that either. Maybe she’d go to sleep now.
Maybe I could forget she was there, just like the people at
Lakehurst forgot the
Hindenburg
when it was blowing up in front of them. Somewhere in the
night Helen Reddy was singing “I Am Woman” and
I was thinking
you sure are
, to the same driving melody. I had been what seemed like a
very long time without a woman, and this one was forbidden,
for more reasons than I could count.

We lay still on the bed, and slowly the dark gave way to
a pale and ghostly gray. Saved by the dawn. It was
five-thirty: the Rigbys would be getting up for the new
day. I patted her shoulder and rolled out of bed, moving to
the window for a look at the house. It was peaceful and
ordinary in the rainy morning, nothing like the den of
tears I had blundered into last night. I turned and looked
at Eleanor. Her face was a white blur in the half-light:
her eyes, I thought, were open. We didn’t say
anything. I hit the John, and when I came out, she had not
moved from her spot on the bed. I looked out the window.
Someone in the house had turned on a light, the same one I
had seen earlier. I knew then what I was going to do.

“Listen,” I said, still looking out the
window. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
But I never got the words out. A car came out of the misty
woods and up the road toward the house. I felt heartsick
watching it come. Only when it had pulled in behind my
rental and stopped did the cop behind the wheel turn on his
flasher.

It filled the room and colored us a flickery red and
blue. Eleanor lay still as death. Down in the yard, two
county cops had stepped out in the rain. One walked up the
steps, meeting the Rigbys as they came out on the porch.
The other came up the path to the printshop.

“Judgment day,” Eleanor said. “I had a
feeling it would be today.”