In the Night Room (28 page)

31

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Willy cried steadily as I drove to the address the matron had given me. She also ate half a box of Valrhona chocolates, more for the comfort of it, I thought, than in response to her “condition.” She kept her head turned from me, and now and then held up her left hand as a shield to protect herself from my gaze.

“It’s not the way you think it is,” I said. “You’re not
nothing;
you do exist. If I love you, you have to exist.”

“You’re a liar. You love
her,
and you never even met her. But she’s real, and I’m not. You think she’s immense. She’s what I was supposed to be.” I got another angry peek. “You’re sick. You’re twisted. Other people’s pain makes you feel good. You must be in pig heaven right now.”

“Willy, other people’s pain does not make me feel good. It’s that I don’t want to overlook it or pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to do it justice. That’s why you liked reading me when you were depressed, remember?”

She made a dismissive
mmph
sound.

“Do you want to know what I really do like?”

“Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar.”

“I like the space between,” I said. “The space between dreaming and wakefulness. Between imagination and reality. Between no and yes. Between is and is not. That’s where the interesting stuff is. That’s where you are. You are completely a product of the space between.”

“Between
is
and
is not
?”

“Where they both hold true, where they become one thing.”

Evidently, this struck her. She faced forward and she kept her eyes on the windshield. She wasn’t going to look at me, but at least she had stopped looking away.

“That’s so stupid it might actually mean something. Still, I thought I was a real person, and it turns out all along I was only a bad Xerox.”

“That’s completely wrong,” I said. “You’re not even close to being a copy. You’re unique. Willy—”

“Holy shit,” she said, looking ahead.

I snapped my head forward again and, as we drifted through a turn, saw what Mercedes Romola had meant by “an interesting part of town.” The road we were on, and the houses that sprouted up on either side of it, went down into a huge, long, descending spiral that resembled the interior of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. The top of the spiral must have been about two hundred yards across, and down at its bottom lay a grocery store, a movie theater, a bar, a library, a Gap, and a Starbucks around the edges of a little square with a bandstand. It brought to mind a Hobbit world; it was also very pretty. At night, it would have looked extraordinary, with the lights shining around the great swooping curves of the spiral. From the top, the scene suggested a terraced landscape with houses instead of vineyards. That the name of this area was Sundown I had always attributed to its location in the city’s far western reaches. Now I thought that if you lived even a little bit down on the curve, the sun would vanish early every evening.

The Huntress house, about a third of the way down, could have been in any older section of Millhaven. Three stories, dark wood, cement steps leading up to a small porch with a peaked roof: it was no more than a modestly upscale version of the houses on North Superior Street, but the setting gave it a slightly Brothers Grimm aspect.

I parked in front of the house and walked around to Willy’s door. “Admit you’re interested.”

Instead of responding, Willy rammed a Three Musketeers bar into her mouth. I hadn’t seen her pull it out of her pocket, which she must have filled when I was walking around the front of the car. A bright wrapper fluttered to the ground.

“Oh, Willy,” I said, and picked it up. “That’s beneath you.”

Around a mouthful of Three Musketeers, Willy said, “Do you think this lady is going to like you? This lady is not going to like you.”

I hauled her up onto the porch and pushed the bell. A minute later, a stocky woman with a purple cloud of hair and sharp eyes in a big, foursquare face that gave full justice to the mingled pains and joys of seventy-odd years opened the door and released the ghosts of a thousand cigarettes. She reminded me of the Pigtown women of my childhood who had worked on the line in one factory or another, down in the Valley.

We said hello to each other and spoke our names, and I introduced Willy as my assistant. Diane Huntress said something nice about Mercedes Romola’s approval and invited us into her house. It was not what I had expected, nor was she. What that woman said—for the ninety minutes she spoke of Lily Kalendar, it felt like she stopped time. Like Joseph Kalendar, Diane Huntress froze the cars on the street and the kids playing ball and the mailman puttering along in his cart, and anybody else who was in the reach of that smoker’s voice and the things it said. She certainly froze me. Willy never moved, either.

Tim Underhill walked amazed into a setting that declared its inhabitant a dedicated traveler of great taste and curiosity. Treasures adorned the walls and gleamed from the depths of cabinets: African masks and tribal figures; Chinese vases and Greek amphoras; Japanese scrolls; small, ornate rugs; a thousand little things that had been lovingly accumulated over decades. Part of the effect was the implied knowledge that, for all their worth, these objects had been obtained at the lowest possible price by travelers who’d never had a lot of money to draw out of their purse.

On the way to the sofa where Mrs. Huntress wished them to sit, Willy set aside her unhappiness long enough to admire a small tapestry panel shining with silken threads.

Tim wandered past a group of photographs depicting Diane Huntress and a large man with a genial face dominated by a slablike chin standing in jungles, in deserts, before great monuments, beside canals and rivers, at the feet of snowy mountains, in hookah cafés, in crowded bazaars.

He turned to Mrs. Huntress. “Did you ever take Lily Kalendar with you on your trips?”

“As often as possible,” she said. “Here. Take a look.” She brought him to the far end of the group and indicated a photograph that must have been taken by Guy Huntress, for he was not in it. His wife, perhaps thirty years younger than the woman beside Tim now, stood planted in a meadow rimmed with hills that might have been in Africa. A little blond girl of ten or eleven peeked out from behind her legs with an expression of mingled fear and pleasure on her intense, radiant face that flew straight to the center of Underhill’s heart. To him, the child looked like an exposed nerve—the sensitivity he saw in her dark gray-blue eyes, the planes of her face, the tilt of her head, in even her sunburned skin, moved him nearly to tears.

“Lily hated to have her picture taken,” said her foster mother. “She simply refused, she wouldn’t do it. Maybe she inherited that from her father, because he was the same way.”

“I know,” said Tim, thinking of the black-coated figure silhouetted against the sky at the top of North Superior Street. “I hope that’s all she did inherit from him.”

Something shifted in the way she took him in: it was as if she were imitating the forthright stance in the photograph. “You really want to write a book about Lily, do you?”

Willy wandered up on the other side of Tim. She craned her neck forward and scanned the photo. When she spoke, her voice contained a slightly defeated tone. “She was amazing. I should have known.”

Mrs. Huntress gave her a bemused smile. “Well, you’re very lovely, too, you must know that. In fact, you’re so pretty, it almost hurts to look at you.” She turned again to Tim. “Sit yourselves down, I’ll get you some tea or coffee, and you can tell me about your book.”

In the end, seated on the firm Huntress sofa with a cup of excellent coffee before him, unhappy Willy steadily sipping from a glass of Coke, he could never be sure what Diane Huntress made of his confused description of the book he claimed to be researching. The word “tactful” turned up, as did “respectful.” As he blathered, he began to think that this was a book he could actually write, forgetting that he had no patience for the kind of detailed research it would involve. If he tried to write such a book, it would consist mainly of leaps into the dark, a number of them noticeably ungainly.

“I’m sure it’ll come into better focus when you’ve worked on it awhile,” Mrs. Huntress said. “I have to be completely honest with you and tell you that I don’t think you or anyone else should write a book about Lily.”

“Then you’re being very generous, letting me talk to you.”

“Lily isn’t going to do anything to stop you, so I think it’s my duty to see that you understand her as well as possible. If you want to talk to her in person, which she is willing to do under certain conditions, you’ll get an idea of the life she has now, but that idea won’t be good enough—it won’t be enough, period. She asked me to tell you that she’s willing to meet with you for an hour, but that nothing she says to you can be quoted in your book.”

“You don’t want me to meet her, do you?”

“Let me tell you about Lily Kalendar.”

Hearing those words at last, Tim sensed a movement on the other side of the room and glanced past Mrs. Huntress to see what it was. His heart stopped. In her Alice dress, April lay on a vibrant rug no larger than herself, her cheek resting on a hand, looking intently at him. Having been seen, she pushed herself upright, got to her feet, and stepped backward, never taking her eyes from him. Tim knew that it was she who had led him to this place, that he might hear out the woman who had known Lily Kalendar best. She wanted him to do more than hear: she was commanding him to
listen.

You have to know a few things about me first,
Diane Huntress said.
My father built the Sundown Community, which is what we used to call this area, in the forties, and he placed it in this basin because he wanted it to be at one remove from the outside world. He graded Sundown Road himself and he built that little plaza and the bandstand at the bottom. The whole thing was his idea. We never had any money, but that didn’t bother us. My father really didn’t care about money. Originally, all the people who lived here knew one another, and we used to have these communal meals, and there’d be singing, and people would play their instruments, and we’d dance. We had this sense of shared ideals, a shared vision. Nothing ever stays the same in this world, especially communities like Sundown. A lot of new people were moving in by the time Guy Huntress and I got married.

We were busy—Guy was a housepainter, and I came along and did the detail work. I worked as a waitress, too. We started going places together, spending what little we had on things we came across and liked instead of on hotels and fancy meals. We discovered we couldn’t have children, and that was a blow. And Guy didn’t want to adopt. But one day he said, You know, we could give back to the community by taking in a foster child. That way, at least we’d have a kid around the house. I thought it was a great, great idea, the greatest. We got in touch with Social Services, they put us in touch with Georgia Lathem, and that’s how we got our first three foster children. One after the other, not all together.

Sally, Rob, and Charlie. Wonderful kids. Screwed up as hell when we first got them, but basically okay. A little antisocial, you know, shoplifting, mouthing off, testing the rules. All the normal stuff. What we did with those kids, we thought was what everybody would do. Now, to Georgia Lathem and them, what we did was
special.
So when they had an unusual case come in, I guess they thought of us first. We go down to Karadara Street, we go into Miss Lathem’s office, and sitting there like a little wet cat is this child named Lily Kalendar. What we didn’t know about Lily and her background would fill volumes, let me tell you.

This one is going to be trouble, Guy said. This one is going to break your heart, he said. Are you sure you want to do this? Her first day in the Foundlings’ Shelter, Lily peed on the floor and tried to stab another kid with a pencil. Her second day, she lit a fire in the game room. She barely talked. She was like a little
savage.
Sure I’m sure, I told my husband. This kid Lily, this little monster, she’s going to be my project, because you know what? I love her already.