In the Night Room (27 page)

“All right, describe what has been created.”

“Before he does, could you please get me another glass of Coke? I’m awfully thirsty.”

“Of course, Willy,” Philip said, giving her a slightly curious look, and made the round-trip to the kitchen in less than a minute. He handed her the glass and said, “Please, Tim.”

“Okay,” Tim said. “I hope you won’t object to this, Philip. I’ve been trying to write a book about Joseph Kalendar’s daughter.” Remembering the appalling figure that had glared down at him from the top of the street, Tim felt the necessity to employ a considerable degree of caution in what he said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what you said in
lost boy lost girl.
”

“Your neighbor Omar Hillyard led me to think her father murdered her. Hillyard was just making inferences based on what he saw at the time. But he wasn’t watching the Kalendar house full-time, and he could have missed a lot.”

“Wait a second. Is this book fact or fiction?”

Willy laughed. “That’s the question I always want to ask him.”

“Philip,” Tim said, not very kindly, “anyone who believes in the virgin birth and the performance of miracles, not to mention walking on water, shouldn’t be so quick to make that distinction.”

Philip immediately retreated. “I suppose that’s an excellent point.” Then he changed the subject. “By the way, you might be interested in hearing that Mr. Hillyard passed away two days before Christmas, last year.” Philip stared at Willy, who was tilting the last of her second drink into her mouth. “Anyhow, Kalendar had a real daughter—you’re sure of that.”

“Oh, I know he had a daughter,” Tim said, failing to mention that his primary source of information was Cyrax, a citizen of Byzantium who had been dead for six hundred years. “I just assumed she was dead, so I never bothered to do any research about her. In my book, she had been killed; that’s all I cared about. In real life, she was taken into the child-care system, and she wound up at the Foundlings’ Shelter. The question is, what can she be today? Is she even still alive? Was she ever put into foster care? Did she ever go to college? Is she in prison? A mental hospital?”

“I bet she never broke into any warehouses,” Willy said, darkly.

“I mean, what kind of life can you have after a childhood like that? How healed can you be?”

Philip shook his head and regarded Tim with what looked a great deal like fond resignation. “You never give up, do you?”

“What do you mean by that?” Tim found himself unreasonably rankled by his brother’s words.

“Childhood, healing, childhood trauma . . . sound familiar?”

“I’m not writing about myself, Philip,” Tim said, irritated.

“I didn’t say you were. But you’re not exactly
not
writing about yourself, either, are you?”

“You’re not my brother,” Tim said. “My real brother is hiding in the attic.”

“I know why you say that, believe me. I wish I could have been more like this—like the self China let me discover—with Nancy and Mark. Those regrets are astoundingly painful.” Philip seemed to travel inward again, and he clasped his hands and lowered his head, perhaps in prayer. “Yes. They are.” Then he looked back up at Tim. “Did you know the Kalendar place is going to be torn down next Wednesday? The view from my backyard is going to improve by a hundred percent.”

“The Kalendar place is in your backyard?” Willy asked. “
He
didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s across the alley,” Philip said. “Ever since Ronnie Lloyd-Jones got arrested, people have been coming over here to look at the place. Some of them take souvenirs, can you believe that? Souvenirs! Well, the taxes aren’t being paid anymore, and the neighbors stopped cutting the lawn, and now you get these disaster ghouls wandering around. Because of all that, there was a petition to raze the place, and it went through.”

“How do you feel about that?” Tim asked.

The grim satisfaction visible in Philip a moment earlier hardened into a darker, flintier emotion that had nothing to do with pleasure. His face tightened; his eyes fired darts. Every bit of grief and rage he had been holding down leaped upward within him, and Philip became a little frightening. “You know how I feel about that? I’d like them to demolish that place, turn it into splinters, set the splinters on fire, and shoot the ashes into
outer space.
”

He glared at Tim as if awaiting a challenge.

“After that, I’d like guys with shovels and nets to dig up every inch of ground over there and sift through it, just in case they might have missed anything. They’d dig right down to the subsoil, six feet, eight feet, and sample
everything.
Then you’d have this big rectangular hole in the ground. It would look like a mass grave, which is exactly what it would be. I’d fill it with gasoline and set fire to it, that’s what I’d do. I’d have a big, purifying fire, a tremendous blaze. When it burned out, I wouldn’t care anymore—they could bulldoze all the earth back into the scorched hole and turn it into a gerbil farm.”

Philip stood extremely still for a moment, contending with the emotions he had just unleashed. A little stiffly, he turned to Willy. “Excuse me, young lady. My son’s body was never found. It might have been buried over there. It probably wasn’t, but it might have been. God is helping me through this time, but every now and then the situation gets the better of me.”

“I’m so sorry about your son,” Willy said. “I thought I lost a child, too, so I have some idea of what you have been going through.”

“Your child was returned to you?” Philip asked, his interest engaged. “Unharmed?”

“Yes,” Tim quickly said. “Willy was very lucky.”

“
My
god wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “
My
god seemed to make things worse.” She patted the pocket where she had stuffed the candy bars. “Is there a bathroom on this floor?”

Philip told her how to get to the bathroom next to the kitchen. When she had left the room, he turned to Tim with an expression that seemed poised between appreciation and accusation. “Tim, how old is that girl, really?”

“Thirty-eight,” Tim said.

“That can’t be true. She’s somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five.”

“That’s how she looks. She’s still thirty-eight.”

Philip appeared ready to dispute this assertion, but he let it go. “You met at a reading? And you
volunteered
to drive her here? You don’t do things like that. What did she say to you?”

“It wasn’t anything she said, Philip. Call it a whim.” Tim regretted bringing Willy to Superior Street. He had known introducing her to his brother was a terrible idea, yet he had done exactly that, and now he had to deal with the results.

“I can’t ignore the evidence of my senses. You show up here with this stunning young woman who acts like a kitten around you, and with whom you, supposedly a middle-aged gay man, obviously have some kind of erotic connection, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”

Tim improvised. “Okay. Willy is Joseph Kalendar’s niece—she was his brother’s daughter. That’s why she went to my reading. And I thought I should bring her here for a lot of reasons. Something happened, and we clicked. Right away, there was this great attraction between us.”

“You’re actually sleeping with her?”

Tim could not tell if Philip was aghast or thrilled. “Philip, in all honesty, this is none of your business.”

Philip was not to be deflected. “I work with teenagers. I can tell when people have been going to bed together. You’re having sex with Joseph Kalendar’s niece. You and Willy, you
remind
me of teenagers.”

“We’re very fond of each other.”

“I’ll say,” said Philip.

Both of them heard the closing of the bathroom door. “Have you any idea of what you intend to do with this relationship?”

“I wish I did.”

Entering the room, Willy sensed a measure of the intensity that had just flared. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?”

“I was just telling my brother that he’d better take good care of you,” Philip said. “If he doesn’t, you let me know about it.”

“Don’t worry about me. I think I’ll just disappear.”

Tim said that they’d better be going.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Philip said.

Tim looked up, bracing himself for another assault on his character or his morals.

“Would you like to borrow Mark’s laptop? I know you’re an e-mail demon, and I can’t use it—it reminds me too much of Mark. The thing is just sitting up there in its case. Let me get it for you, and you can use it in your room.”

“That’s a great idea, Philip. Thanks.” According to an entry in Tim Underhill’s journal, Mark Underhill’s computer had once shown him a miraculous vision—a vision of Elsewhere—and he loved the idea of once again putting his hands on the object, so imbued with his nephew’s memory, that had given him his treasure.

Philip went upstairs and came back down holding a black computer case by its handle.

“These things are so small, and they hold so much. Mark spent hours on it, sending messages back and forth, looking up I don’t know what . . .” With a dense, compacted facial expression, Philip thrust it at Tim. He was not loaning out his son’s computer, Tim saw; he was getting it out of the house by giving it away.

Philip rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. For a moment he looked almost as adolescent and self-conscious as one of his charges. The direct, probing look he gave Willy erased this impression.

“Come with me, Willy. I want to show you something.”

“Show her what?”

Already on her feet, Willy looked from brother to brother.

“Willy ought to see the view from my backyard, don’t you think?”

Tim glanced up at Willy. “I explained to him why you said you were a fictional character of mine. Philip knows you’re Kalendar’s niece. From his backyard, you can see your uncle’s house.”

“I guess I should see it before they tear it down and scorch the soil it rested on,” Willy said.

“Excuse me,” Philip said. “I can’t avoid asking this one question. Did you ever meet your cousin?”

“Never even knew she existed.”

“As sick as he was, he must have wanted to protect her.”

“I think this is going to have an uncomfortable effect on me. Would you mind if I had a candy bar?” Out came a Kit Kat and a Mars bar. After a moment’s contemplation under Philip’s fascinated stare, she shoved the Mars bar back into her pocket, broke the Kit Kat in half, unpeeled one of the halves, and bit into it. She held the other half in her left hand. “Lead on.”

In the moment of uncertainty Willy had brought him to, Philip glanced over at his brother.

“Go ahead,” Tim said. “I’m curious about what the place looks like now.”

“It’s a dump.” Philip turned, strode off into the narrow kitchen, and opened the back door.

Willy and Tim stepped through. Philip joined them at the top of the steps down to his barren backyard. The fence Philip had tried to erect between his property and the cobbled alley still drooped over the patchy lawn. However, on the other side of the alley, nothing remained as it had been. Joseph Kalendar’s massive wall had been bulldozed away, revealing the jungly profusion of his old backyard, from which rose the rear wall of his appalling house. The kitchen door through which Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan had broken in could still be made out through the weeds. The crude, clumsy slanting roof of the added room reared up out of the weeds like a huge animal dangerous to awaken.

Willy inhaled sharply.

“The place seems to get uglier with every passing week.”

Because he was looking across the alley, Philip did not see Willy flicker like a dying lightbulb. Tim had turned to her when that sharp, sudden sound escaped her, and before his eyes Willy’s entire body stuttered in and out of visibility. She slumped against the back of the house. Somehow, he managed to catch her before she slid down onto the worn surface of the yard.

“Eat the rest of that candy bar, fast,” he ordered her. “Philip, do you have any sugar?”

“Sure, I guess. I don’t use sugar much anymore.”

Tim asked him to fill a coffee cup with sugar and bring it outside with a glass of Coke.

“Is she a diabetic? She needs her—”

“Get the sugar, Philip. Now.”

Philip vanished inside in a flurry of elbows and knees. Cupboard doors and cabinets opened and closed. Muttering to himself, he came through the door and handed Tim a cup filled with sugar.

“Aren’t you likely to throw her into some . . .”

Tim was seated on the ground, his arm around Willy, pouring sugar into her mouth.

“We had this girl go into insulin shock last year, and—”

“She’s not diabetic, Philip. She has a very unusual condition.”

With a flash of his old, mean-spirited self, Philip said, “Must be restricted to fictional characters, I guess.” Then, seeing Willy take the cup into her own hands and wash another mouthful down with the soft drink, he added, “Seems to be working, anyhow. Should we get her to the hospital?”

“No hospital,” Willy said, a little thickly.

“Tim. You know she belongs in an E.R. Please.”

“I know she does
not.
Back off, Philip.”

He did so, literally, holding up his hands in conspicuous surrender. A few seconds later, Willy stood up and, knowing what was required of her, did her best to look abashed. Gently, almost convincingly, she told Philip that her “condition” could not be treated in an emergency room and that she was grateful for his concern.

“Well, if you say you’re okay . . .” Baffled, he looked back and forth between them, half-understanding that he had missed something important and explanatory.

“We’re on our way,” Tim said. Philip did not acknowledge him. His gaze had settled on Willy, and he looked as though he was capable of standing there for the next couple of hours.

Willy thanked him for the sugar.

“I’ll see you at the reading,” Philip said, without taking his eyes from her.

30

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

She told me what I wanted to hear and she wanted to believe, that the shock of seeing that house had pushed her deeper toward disappearance than she had ever been. She meant that what had happened to her was an exception and that she had her “condition” under control.

Willy passed the next moment that might have tested her, our arrival at the Children’s Home, with perfect equanimity. It looked exactly as she remembered it: a hideous building with a dirty stone facade, narrow windows, and stone steps leading up to an arched doorway. It matched her memory because I had driven past the massive old building a thousand times in my youth.

A couple of candy bars, no more; she was pleased by the harmony between the building and her memory of it.

The interior was a test of another kind, for I had invented Willy’s memories out of a generic muddle of institutions I had seen largely in movies. She kept saying things were “in the wrong place” and giving me unhappy glances, as if I had neglected a hypothetical duty to create accurate representations of things that existed outside of fiction. The lounge where she’d dealt with Tee Tee Rowley was on the wrong floor; the Ping-Pong table we glimpsed on our way past the game room was on the wrong side of the room; the dormitory was all wrong, since it had individual rooms instead of being a big communal barrack.

And the “real” Children’s Home in Willy’s mind had no matron, because I had neglected to supply it with an administrative staff. The Children’s Home on South Karadara Street, however, came splendidly equipped with the regal, kindly Mercedes Romola, who welcomed us into her spare little office, sat us down, and spoke the magical words “Mr. Underhill, it appears you are in luck.”

The very sight of Mercedes Romola told Tim that Lily Kalendar’s life could have been very little like the one he had fashioned for Willy Patrick. The matron exuded warmth, practicality, and common sense; she had iron-gray hair, a comfortable skirt and jacket, and a level, intelligent gaze. She was like the perfect fourth-grade teacher, a woman whose natural authority did not inhibit a sense of humor that, in its sly appearances, hinted at the existence of a private life more raucous and freewheeling than could be revealed in the public one. The matron instantly conveyed a sense of solidity and specificity that transferred itself to Lily Kalendar.
Her
life had contained no missing transitions or amnesiac passages: it had been lived minute by minute, in a way that made a pantomime of fiction.

“In fact,” she told him, “you are in luck in several ways. As you would expect, we do not release information concerning our present and former charges without obtaining permission beforehand. And in this case, the special circumstances surrounding the child’s transfer to the shelter, especially the notoriety of her father, make us wish to proceed with a great degree of caution.”

“She was here, though,” Tim said. “Lily Kalendar.”

“She had literally nowhere else to go. As I told you on the phone, she was taken into care at the age of nine. According to her father, the girl’s mother had run off two months earlier, and he could not cope with raising two children. The son was being trained as a carpenter, but the girl gave him problems he couldn’t solve. The caseworkers agreed, and she came to us. Later, we thought he’d sent her away to save her life. And maybe it was the only way he could stop abusing her.”

“I
knew
he loved her,” Willy said.

“What exactly is your role here?” asked the matron.

“Willy is my assistant,” Tim told her. “She’s been very involved with this project.”

“And you say the project is a book about Lily Kalendar. My first question is, will it be fiction or nonfiction?”

“Probably some combination of the two.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Underhill, but what is the point of mixing genres? Doesn’t combining fiction with fact merely give you license to be sloppy with the facts?”

“I think it’s the other way around,” Tim said. “Fiction lets me really get the facts right. It’s a way of reaching a kind of truth I wouldn’t otherwise be able to discover.”

She smiled at him. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m a big fan of your work. I love those books you wrote with your collaborator.”

He thanked her.

“Let’s go back to the subject of your good fortune. As you will surely understand, I have to be very scrupulous. We make our records open to the public, which includes researchers like yourself, only if the person in or formerly in care, or the legal guardian, gives us permission to do so. Your first bit of luck was that one of your readers is the head of this institution. I made two phone calls on your behalf. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s worth two hundred dollars to our Big Brothers Big Sisters program.”

Tim nodded, forcing himself to appear relaxed.

“As a result of these calls, I can give you the following information.” She opened a folder on her desk. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses and peered down. “The Kalendar girl was first taken into care in 1974. The matron in those days was Georgia Lathem, and she made some unusual notations in the girl’s file. It seems Miss Lathem found the girl exceptionally closed off, emotionally numb, prone to acts of violence against the other children, liable to nightmares. She also observed that the girl was extraordinarily intelligent and strikingly beautiful.”

She looked up. “Now, you see, Miss Lathem and all the rest of the staff would have been quite aware of the Kalendar girl’s background. I don’t mean murder, because in 1974 no one knew about that, but the site inspections had made it pretty clear that the child had been raised by a very disturbed man.

“We are always looking for good foster parents for the children in our care, and Miss Lathem eventually came upon a couple that seemed perfect. Guy and Diane Huntress had successfully fostered three children some years before—they seemed to specialize in turning around some of our most damaged children. Miss Lathem arranged a meeting, the Huntresses agreed to take Lily into their home. Things went on, lots of ups and downs but mainly ups, until 1979, when Guy Huntress unexpectedly died.”

Mercedes Romola looked directly at Tim. “And what else happened in 1979, Mr. Underhill?”

“Joseph Kalendar was arrested for multiple homicides. The police found only a few fragments of the bodies, because he burned most of his victims in his furnace.”

“The Kalendar scandal exploded. Mrs. Huntress feared what might happen to the child in school. It seemed to her that Lily would fare better back here in the shelter. But children can be so cruel—she went through two really lousy years. It’s no fun being an outcast. She was humiliated over and over. Face in the toilet, things like that.”

“What school did she go to?” Willy asked, with the air of one sticking an oar into a swiftly running river.

“While she was with Diane Huntress, Grace and Favor Elementary School in Sundown, Slater Middle School, and Augment High. Why?”

“I was under the impression she went to Lawrence Freeman.”

“The elementary school down in what they used to call Pigtown? Why would you think she went there?”

“Sorry, sorry, my mistake,” Willy said.

The matron looked back at her papers, then glanced up with the suggestion of a smile on her face. “At this point, an unusual event took place. Diane Huntress came in for a talk with Miss Lathem and said she wanted Lily to come back to her as a foster child. In my considerable experience, this kind of thing is more or less impossible. Foster relationships are terminated for all kinds of reasons, some worse than others, but they are never resumed.”

“But she went back,” Tim said.

“She went back. And in her way, she flourished. And when I spoke to her an hour ago, she told me that although she would not assist you in any way during the writing of your book, she would not obstruct you in any way, either. She says she’d be willing to talk to you, on one condition, if you wish to speak to her. On the whole, she’d prefer not to, but the choice is up to you.”

“What’s the condition?” Tim asked.

“That first you meet with Diane Huntress, so that she can decide the next step. Mr. Underhill, do you know what this means?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It means that Lily Kalendar trusts Diane Huntress absolutely. In
spite
of the fact that Diane had returned her to us, and left her here for two awful years. Lily knew why she had done it, she understood. And when she went back to Diane, it was with the feeling of coming home to a mother who had been ill, but now was well again. People like Lily Kalendar, not that there are very many, seldom trust anyone at all. You realize, what happened to that child was immense.
Immense.
”

Underhill felt the word sink into him, widening out as it did. The comprehension of that immensity seemed the point behind everything that had happened since his sister had thrust herself through the mirror to shout her silent command. Even getting close to understanding Lily Kalendar’s experience was the other half of fulfilling Kalendar’s demand: he would acknowledge the bizarre mercy Kalendar had shown his daughter, but he also had to wrap his imagination around the price Lily had paid for his mercy. For a moment, it felt like the task of his life. Then he looked at Willy, and his heart moved at the recognition of her plight. She was listening to a woman talk about the person she had been supposed to be. What could that be like?

“It’s an immensity for me, too,” he said. “How can I arrange the meeting?”

Mercedes Romola’s smile may have been small, but it illuminated her entire face. “I spoke to Mrs. Huntress right after calling Lily, and she is prepared to meet you anytime this afternoon. In fact, this will be your last chance to have her look you over for two or three months. She’s leaving for China with a tour group tomorrow, and after that she’s going to stay with some old friends in Australia. Do you see what I mean about luck, Mr. Underhill?” She wrote something on a white card and slid it toward him. “This is her address. It’s in an interesting part of town. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

Tim yielded to the impulse to kiss her hand, and she said, “We don’t do much hand kissing in Millhaven, Mr. Underhill. But I’m glad to see you have some idea of what is at stake here. If you’re going to write about Lily Kalendar, you’d better make it the book of your life.”