Insomnia (25 page)

‘She was so pretty,’ Helen murmured. ‘Wasn’t she, Ralph?’

‘Yes,’ he said, putting out cups (and being careful to set them beyond the reach of Natalie’s restless, interested hands). ‘That was taken just a month or two before the headaches started. I suppose it’s eccentric to keep a framed studio portrait on the kitchen table in front of the sugar-bowl, but this is the room where I seem to spend most of my time lately, so . . .’

‘I think it’s a lovely place for it,’ Gretchen said. Her voice was low, sweetly husky. Ralph thought,
If she’d been the one to whisper in my ear, I bet the old trouser-mouse would have done a little more than just turn over in its sleep
.

‘I do, too,’ Helen said. She gave him a fragile, not-quite-eye-contact smile, then slipped the pink tote-bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter. Natalie began to gabble impatiently and hold her hands out again as soon as she saw the plastic shell of the Playtex Nurser. Ralph had a vivid but mercifully brief flash of memory: Helen staggering toward the Red Apple, one eye puffed shut, her cheek lashed with beads of blood, carrying Nat on one hip, the way a teenager might carry a textbook.

‘Want to give it a try, old fella?’ Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.

‘Sure, why not? But the coffee—’

‘I’ll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,’ Gretchen said. ‘Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?’

‘In the fridge.’ Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. ‘They learn fast, don’t they?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. ‘I can’t get over how easy she is with you, Ralph – she wasn’t that way before, was she?’

‘I don’t really remember,’ he lied. She hadn’t been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.

‘Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay? Otherwise she’ll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.’

‘Roger.’ He glanced over at Gretchen. ‘Doing okay?’

‘Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?’

‘Just in a cup’s fine.’

She laughed and put the cup on the table out of Natalie’s reach. When she sat down and crossed her legs, Ralph checked – he was helpless not to. When he looked up again, Gretchen was wearing a small, ironic smile.

What the hell, Ralph thought. No goat like an old goat, I guess. Even an old goat that can’t manage much more than two or two and a half hours’ worth of sleep a night
.

‘Tell me about your job,’ he said as Helen sat down and sipped her coffee.

‘Well, I think they ought to make Mike Hanlon’s birthday a national holiday – does that tell you anything?’

‘A little, yes,’ Ralph said, smiling.

‘I was all but positive I’d have to leave Derry. I sent away for applications to libraries as far south as Portsmouth, but I felt sick doing it. I’m going on thirty-one and I’ve only lived here for six of those years, but Derry feels like home – I can’t explain it, but it’s the truth.’

‘You don’t have to explain it, Helen. I think home’s just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.’

Gretchen was nodding. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just like that.’

‘Mike called Monday and told me the assistant’s position in the Children’s Library had opened up. I could hardly believe it. I mean, I’ve been walking around all week just pinching myself. Haven’t I, Gretchen?’

‘Well, you’ve been very happy,’ Gretchen said, ‘and that’s been very good to see.’

She smiled at Helen, and for Ralph that smile was a revelation. He suddenly understood that he could look at Gretchen Tillbury all he wanted, and it wouldn’t make any difference. If the only man in this room had been Tom Cruise, it still would have made no difference. He wondered if Helen knew, and then scolded himself for his foolishness. Helen was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

‘When do you start?’ he asked her.

‘Columbus Day week,’ she said. ‘The twelfth. Afternoons and evenings. The salary’s not exactly a king’s ransom, but it’ll be enough to keep us through the winter no matter how the . . . the rest of my situation works out. Isn’t it great, Ralph?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very great.’

The baby had drunk half the bottle and now showed signs of losing interest. The nipple popped halfway out of her mouth, and a little rill of milk ran down from the corner of her lips toward her chin. Ralph reached to wipe it away, and his fingers left a series of delicate gray-blue lines in the air.

Baby Natalie snatched at them, then laughed as they dissolved in her fist. Ralph’s breath caught in his throat.

Except he knew no such thing. He had just
seen
it – had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.

‘Ralph?’ Helen asked. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Sure.’ He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon-string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. ‘Will you be moving back into the house?’

Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn’t need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen’s now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange. Helen’s, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.

And her own helplessness,
Ralph thought.
That infuriates her even more
.

‘I’m going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer,’ Helen was saying. ‘Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actually buys it – and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark – the money goes into an escrow account. That account will be divided according to the decree. You know – the divorce decree.’

Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.

‘You’re telling me two things,’ he said. ‘That you’re going ahead with the divorce and that you’re still scared of him.’

‘She’s been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage,’ Gretchen said. ‘Of
course
she’s still scared of him.’ She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal-furnaces.

He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother’s, but otherwise identical . . . like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie’s balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band bell and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen’s and Gretchen’s balloon-strings were also rippling.

And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing,
he thought.
It’s real – whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They’re real and I’m seeing them.

He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.

‘I feel like I’m spending most of my time in an emotional washing-machine these days,’ Helen said. ‘My mom’s mad at me . . . she’s done everything but call me a quitter outright . . . and sometimes I
feel
like a quitter . . . ashamed . . .’

‘You have nothing to be ashamed of,’ Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie’s balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.

‘I guess I know that,’ Helen said,‘but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like,“Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.” And I think I could have gone down the line with that – I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?’

‘No. That’s pretty much what happened, so far as I can see.’

Helen laughed – a jagged, bitter, guilty sound. ‘Don’t try to tell my mother that. She refuses to believe Ed ever did anything more than give me a husbandly swat on the fanny once in awhile . . . just to get me moving in the right direction again if I happened to slip off-course. She thinks I imagined the rest. She doesn’t come right out and say it, but I hear it in her voice every time we talk on the phone.’

‘
I
don’t think you imagined it,’ Ralph said. ‘I saw you, remember? And I was there when you begged me not to call the police.’

He felt his thigh squeezed beneath the table and looked up, startled. Gretchen Tillbury gave him a very slight nod and another squeeze – this one more emphatic.

‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘You
were
there, weren’t you?’ She smiled a little, which was good, but what was happening to her aura was better – those tiny red flickers were fading, and the aura itself was spreading out again.

No,
he thought.
Not spreading out. Loosening. Relaxing
.

Helen got up and came around the table. ‘Nat’s bailing out on you – better let me take her.’

Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.

I’m watching them breathe their last,
Ralph thought.
Oh my God, I’m never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise
.

Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.

Gretchen tapped the face of her watch lightly. ‘If we’re going to make that meeting at noon—’

‘Yes, of course,’ Helen said, a little apologetically. ‘We’re on the official Susan Day Welcoming Committee,’ she told Ralph, ‘and in this case that’s not quite as Junior League as it sounds. Our main job really isn’t to welcome her but to help protect her.’

‘Is that going to be a problem, do you think?’

‘It’ll be tense, let’s put it that way,’ Gretchen said. ‘She’s got half a dozen of her own security people, and they’ve been sending us turn-around faxes of all the Derry-related threats she’s received. It’s standard operating procedure with them – she’s been in a lot of people’s faces for a lot of years. They’re keeping us in the picture, but they’re also making sure we understand that, because we’re the inviting group, her safety is WomanCare’s responsibility as well as theirs.’

Ralph opened his mouth to ask if there had been many threats, but he supposed he already knew the answer to that question. He’d lived in Derry for seventy years, off and on, and he knew it was a dangerous machine – there were a lot of sharp points and cutting edges just below the surface. That was true of a lot of cities, of course, but in Derry there had always seemed to be an extra dimension to the ugliness. Helen had called it home, and it was his home, too, but—

He found himself remembering something which had happened almost ten years ago, shortly after the annual Canal Days Festival had ended. Three boys had thrown an unassuming and inoffensive young gay man named Adrian Mellon into the Kenduskeag after repeatedly biting and stabbing him; it was rumored they had stood there on the bridge behind the Falcon Tavern and watched him die. They’d told the police they hadn’t liked the hat he was wearing. That was also Derry, and only a fool would ignore the fact.

As if this memory had led him to it (perhaps it had), Ralph looked at the photo on the front page of today’s paper again – Ham Davenport with his upraised fist, Dan Dalton with his bloody nose and dazed eyes, wearing Ham’s sign on his head.

‘How many threats?’ he asked. ‘Over a dozen?’

‘About thirty,’ Gretchen said. ‘Of those, her security people take half a dozen seriously. Two are threats to blow up the Civic Center if she doesn’t cancel. One – this is a real honey – is from someone who says he’s got a Big Squirt water-gun filled with battery acid. “If I make a direct hit, not even your dyke friends will be able to look at you without throwing up,” that one says.’

‘Nice,’ Ralph said.

‘It brings us to the point, anyway,’ Gretchen said. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a small can with a red top, and put it on the table. ‘A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare.’

Ralph picked the can up. On one side was a picture of a woman spraying a cloud of gas at a man wearing a slouch hat and a Beagle Boys-type eye-mask. On the other was a single word in bright red capital letters: