In the Night Room (18 page)

Then she saw him take in the blurry bloodstains on her shirt. He understood what they were, and that final detail seemed to lock some other understanding into place. Willy moved forward, now beyond wondering what she might say to him, and saw an amazing series of expressions flow across his face: disbelief, shock, love, fear, and total recognition. He said,
This can’t be happening. Is your name Willy?

He knew her name. By extraordinary, unrepeatable means, Willy had found her way to the one person who could both make sense of her life and save it, and when she spoke, it was from the center of her soul. “I think I need your help. Do we know each other?”

23

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Cyrax told me yr gr8 moment comes 2nite, but he never said that it would scare me silly. Well, he added that I would have to do rite & b strong & brave, so I guess he knew what he was talking about. Two completely contradictory impulses fought for control of my body: I wanted to put my arms around her, and I wanted to scram, to get out of there as fast as possible. Then Reason intervened to inform me that I was being ridiculous. This, Reason insisted, was merely a coincidence, albeit a coincidence of a very high order. Willy, this Willy, if that in fact was her name, had slipped into the room at the same moment that “Lucy Cleveland” slipped into the pages of my book. And because I had never imagined my heroine’s face in specific detail, this woman’s resemblance to fictional Willy Bryce Patrick was all in my head.

Reason, of course, had no idea what it was talking about.

It’s 4:30 in the morning. Willy finally fell asleep about half an hour ago. As far as I can tell, we’re safe here. A discreet look around the motel’s parking lot found not a trace of Faber’s silver-gray Mercedes. (About this, more later.)

To go back to the bookstore: after our first words, Willy said, “You seem like someone I’ve known for a long time. It’s the strangest thing—as soon as I saw you, I felt that you were of enormous importance to me.”

This did nothing to support my shaky belief that her appearance, in both senses, was no more than a kind of coincidence.

“You know my name,” she said. “Willy. You said it.”

“Is that really your name?”

“Maybe you know me from my work?” she said. Her next words demolished all hope that the world was still ticking on in the old manner. “Willy Patrick. Willy
Bryce
Patrick?”

She looked utterly charming, which made things much worse. I could just about feel the earth separating beneath me. In a second I was going to be in free fall.

“This is very embarrassing,” she said, and hesitated. “I don’t usually go up to other authors and say crazy things to them. Actually, I hardly ever meet other authors. Except, well, for . . .”

Instead of a name, what came out of her mouth was a muffled whisper. “I’m sorry,” she said in a voice only slightly more intelligible, and raised her clasped hands to her eyes.

I guess that was my moment of decision, right then—when she stopped talking and let that name hang in silence before both of us. I could say what I did say, or I could have pretended that I didn’t know what she was talking about. In the end, though, I had no choice at all.

“Except for Tom Hartland,” I said. The building around me, the miles of books in that building, the cars and streetlamps on Broadway quietly held their breath.

Willy dropped her hands and gave me a look so overflowing with mingled relief and sorrow that it was all I could do not to take her in my arms.

“Did you know him?”

The walls of the building had not collapsed, the floor was still beneath my feet, and the traffic continued to move up and down Broadway. Everything and everybody breathed on, and so, with a breath of my own, I stepped deeper into the fiction I would eventually have to unmake.

“I knew Tom Hartland,” I told her. “And I know he was close to you.” For the moment, that was as far as I could go. “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”

She turned her head at the arrival within our charged perimeter of Katherine Hyndman, who broke in with an aggressive mimicry of harmless confusion that was clearly nothing of the kind.

“There seems to be some kind of problem,” she told Willy. “I can’t find your books. Nor can I find your name in our database. Where it ought to be, don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” Willy said. “Maybe you’re not spelling my name right.”

“B-R-Y-C-E P-A-T-R-I-C-K? Willy, W-I-L-L-Y?”

“That’s right, but—”

“And the title was
In the Night Room
? Which supposedly won the Newbery Medal?”

The expression on her face summoned Willy’s strength. “This is absurd. I have written three books. They’re all in print. The last one won the Newbery. If you don’t have my books on your shelves, you’re not doing your business very well, and if they’re not in your database, your computer needs to be brought up to date.”

Katherine turned to me. “I looked both in
Books in Print
and at the Newbery website—”

“I’m
on
the Newbery website!” Willy said. “What are you trying to say?”

“Ms. Hyndman looked in the wrong books,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

I grabbed the bag full of money with one hand and Willy Bryce Patrick’s elbow with the other.

When we reached the escalator, Willy a foot or two before me, she said, “I have to ask: how did you know Tom was dead? You said you
knew
him.”

I gestured for her to get on the escalator. When she did, she looked up at me and, both giving information and asking it, said, “You should know that the men who killed him are out there looking for me.”

“I know all about them,” I said. “You can pretty much take for granted that I understand what’s going on.”

“Tom called you on his cell phone, didn’t he? It’s so strange that he never told me he knew you so well.”

Instead of responding to that, I pulled out my cell phone, dialed 411, and asked for my publicist’s home telephone number.

“Who’s Brian Jeckyll?”

I shushed her. At home in Larchmont, Jeckyll answered. He was not entirely pleased to hear from me. Authors who call publicists, especially authors who call publicists who are at home in Larchmont, almost always want to complain about some fresh insult to their egos. Authors tend to be demanding, selfish, and easily wounded—just ask anyone in publishing. Brian Jeckyll became even less pleased with me when he heard what I had to say.

“You want to skip the reading in Boston and reschedule all those radio interviews? Are you out of your mind?”

“Probably,” I said. “And if I told you what is going on, you’d certainly think so. But what you have to know is that I’m going to drive to Millhaven, and I’m leaving tonight.”

In unison, Willy and Brian Jeckyll said, “Millhaven?” I was as surprised as they by what I’d said.

“I have that reading at New Leaf Books, remember, on Wednesday the tenth? My brother is getting married on Friday the twelfth, and I’ll stay over for that. Everything after the thirteenth can stay the way it is. And that’s about ninety percent of the tour you set up.”

In the end I agreed to do the most important of the radio interviews, scheduled for the morning of Thursday the eleventh, by phone from the Pforzheimer Hotel, which was where I always stayed when I was in my hometown.

Willy was staring at me the way a new immigrant stares at the Statue of Liberty. I opened my arms, let her step into me, and closed them around her. Nestled against me, her head resting on my breastbone, her arms embracing me light as foam, hair fluffed by the towel, shirt still damp enough to print dark stains on my own, was a person to whom I had given life. No matter how impossible the situation,
here she was,
as predicted by Cyrax, and I had to deal with her.

So I have these questions: can fictional characters live out ordinary human lives, or does their existence have a term of some kind? What happens when they die? Does their entry into our world mean that their histories are now part of our history? (What happened in the bookstore indicates that it doesn’t. Willy’s name isn’t in
Books in Print,
and her only Newbery Medal is the one I gave her.) And according to Cyrax, I have to take her back to Millhaven, but what am I supposed to do with her when I get there? Cyrax also said something about a great sacrifice—I don’t like this. It seems obvious, but I can’t stand the conclusion Cyrax seems to be leading me toward.

And my God, do I introduce Willy to Philip?

What else did Cyrax tell me? From what I remember, that I had created a second Dark Man and merged him with Kalendar—true enough, since I thought of Mitchell Faber as a sort of more presentable, less psychotic Kalendar.

My biggest question, though, was how I was to let Willy know exactly what she was. If she’d understood our relationship, her appearance in my life would have been even scarier and more unsettling than it was. As things are, I have to take care of her while slowly letting her figure things out.

“It’s uncanny, how much you remind me of Tom,” she said as we stood wrapped together to the right of the escalator on the ground floor.

“We had a lot in common,” I said.

“Look, Mr. Underhill, you have to tell me how you knew he was dead. You
have
to. It’s scary—can’t you understand that?”

“I sort of figured it out when I saw you.”

And she stepped in and abetted the lie I had just told her. “Oh, you were expecting
him.
No wonder you looked so dumbfounded. If you recognized me right away, he must have talked about me a lot.” A tremendous range of expressions crossed her face. “I’m still in such
shock.
I saw these two men who work for my fiancé, his name is Mitchell Faber—I saw these men, Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka, running down the street, and Roman Richard had a gun, and right after I got into the taxi, he
shot
Tom. Tom’s blood got on my shirt. The cab took off, took off, it took off like a rocket . . .” She started to sob.

“I bet it did,” I said, and held her more tightly. My heart hurt for her; I felt like weeping, too.

“It just feels like I can trust you with everything . . . with anything. . . . You make me feel so much safer.”

“Good,” I said. “I want you to feel safe with me.” At that moment, I would have run into a burning building to rescue Willy Patrick.

“My fiancé killed my husband,” she said. “And he killed my little girl, too. How’s that for a nasty surprise? Mitchell Faber. Did Tom ever mention him to you?”

“Once or twice. But please tell me this, Willy: how did you get from . . .” I realized that I could not say 103rd Street, not now. “From wherever you were with your cab driver to here? It happened during that storm, didn’t it?”

“What happened doesn’t make any
sense.
They were chasing me, Giles and Roman Richard—they got out of Mitchell’s car and started running down the street—I got blown over, and I flew
through
the wind—and my feet hit the sidewalk right in front of your poster.”

That was the best answer I was likely to get: she was blown out of one world and into another. It must have happened when that gigantic thunderclap sounded—right after I did my dumb stunt and had everyone click their heels together. It occurred to me that April had somehow opened a space for Willy, and that she had done it for my sake. In some sense, April had
given
Willy to me. Then I saw the hand, or at least the style, of Cyrax in all this, and wished I hadn’t.

“I felt like a leaf being shot through a tunnel.” Her body went extraordinarily still, as a bird’s does when it is cupped in your hand. “I was crazy for a while, you know. Maybe I’m going crazy all over again.”

Willy leaned back without losing contact. Her short, scrappy blond hair looked as though a Madison Avenue hairdresser had devoted hours to it, and her face filled with emotion. Early in my book, I had written that she looked like a gorgeous lost child, but I had not understood how beautiful she actually was. What could have been superficial prettiness had been deepened by sorrow, fear, intelligence, effort, imagination, and steadfast, steady application of her capacity for response and engagement. I knew that kind of work; I also knew that I had not done right by her. She was a more considerable being than I had taken her for. When I looked down at her face and into her eyes, I also understood part of the reason why I had to take her with me—this lost girl was supposed to be lost in Millhaven. Once I took her there, she was not supposed to come out again.

So I can never pretend, can never say, that I didn’t understand that from the beginning.

“I feel as though I’ve known you for the longest time,” she said. “Is that true for you?”

“Yes, like I’ve been living with you for months.”

Her shaggy head dropped to the center of my chest again, and she tightened her embrace around me. I could feel the tremble in her arms.

Then she released me and backed away. “You want to hear another weird thing? You’re the author I read when I’m—”

“Depressed?”

I had surprised her again. “How did you know that?”

“I hear that a lot. I’m literary Zoloft, I guess.”

She shook her head. “I don’t read you because you’re going to cheer me up. It’s another condition altogether.”

While I was speculating about what that might be, which included wondering why I did not already know, I noticed something related to the most important question I’d asked earlier, about the term of her existence.

“Willy,” I said. “Look at your shirt.”

She looked down. Her shirt had dried to the extent that her bra was no longer visible beneath it, and its color was the bright, unbroken white of a movie star’s smile.