Part 30 (1/2)

”Smile everyone,” Irene said, and I did, I looked into her despairing eyes and I smiled.

”Tell about New York, Auntie C.,” Allison enjoined as we began to eat. ”Tell about the stuff you've done.”

”Gosh,” I said, with a quick backward glance at the months since my return: the unrequited pa.s.ses, foiled suicide attempts and baffling forays into the world of PR. In the end, I went with the quota basket, tossing in another thirty cents. ”Drinking,” I said. ”And smoking way too much.”

The girls tossed back their heads-this was the glamorous Aunt Charlotte they adored. ”Remember the time when we slept in your bed, Auntie C.?” Pammy asked. ”When we went to New York?”

”You bet I do,” I said. ”It's been empty ever since.”

Frank s.h.i.+fted skeptically in his chair.

Irene took a note. Auntie C. Auntie C., it said.

[image]

A warm tide of goodwill lifted us from the restaurant and carried us into the parking lot, where we said our goodbyes and promised to speak the next day. Crickets creaked in the fields. Irene drove the Grand Am back along State Street (my night vision still being lousy), whose garish plastic signs were now lit from within. After a few remarks on how well it had gone, we lapsed into silence, our camaraderie loosening, falling away as it often did in the absence of other people, replaced by a mutual knowledge that was deep, but not warm. I wanted to talk about what I'd read in her notebook, to understand what was wrong with her-whether the same thing was wrong with both of us. But the engineering of such an exchange required conversational skills I simply didn't possess.

Back at the Sweden House, I scanned the lot for an idling car. In the lobby, I checked the empty chairs. The air rocked with shouts of plump children cannonballing into an indoor swimming pool that was visible beyond a sheet of Plexiglas.

Sitting together on Irene's floral bedspread, we consulted our schedule for the following day: C. chldhd home 9:00 C. chldhd home 9:00 A.M. A.M., it began, and went on to detail a rigorous itinerary of locations from my past. We agreed to meet at 8:00 A.M. A.M. in the lobby and drive to Aunt Mary's for breakfast. in the lobby and drive to Aunt Mary's for breakfast.

As I pushed open the door to my room, it hissed over a slip of paper. ”I'm outside,” it read.

I sat on my own floral bedspread, flicked the TV on and channel-surfed. Unsolved Mysteries. Unsolved Mysteries. A chef who vanished from the steakhouse where he worked; close-up of a filet left sputtering on a grill. After ten minutes or so, I dropped the volume to a purr, slipped on my jacket and crept from the room with the exhilarating sense of wriggling through a crack, ducking around curtains of picturesqueness, leaving behind an entourage that I was finding increasingly claustrophobic: a breathless narrator mugging for an overhead camera, a lepidopterist bearing tools of death, and of course Irene. Joyfully I tripped along miles of wet-smelling carpet past the blue-white nimbus of a soft-drink machine, down a flight of steps, out a side door and into the parking lot. A chef who vanished from the steakhouse where he worked; close-up of a filet left sputtering on a grill. After ten minutes or so, I dropped the volume to a purr, slipped on my jacket and crept from the room with the exhilarating sense of wriggling through a crack, ducking around curtains of picturesqueness, leaving behind an entourage that I was finding increasingly claustrophobic: a breathless narrator mugging for an overhead camera, a lepidopterist bearing tools of death, and of course Irene. Joyfully I tripped along miles of wet-smelling carpet past the blue-white nimbus of a soft-drink machine, down a flight of steps, out a side door and into the parking lot.

He was leaning against a car, arms folded. Angry though I was at Anthony Halliday, he appeared to me now as a rescuer, the clever mastermind of my escape.

”You came,” he said, as if he couldn't believe it.

We didn't speak. I was trying to ascertain what had changed about the detective, beyond the fact that he was wearing a suit. There was definitely something.

”You were a witness in a case,” he said with exaggerated care. It was the beginning of a speech. ”You were unwilling to talk, so I asked Irene to-”

”All this I know,” I said. And I moved closer to Halliday, not because I found him physically attractive; not because a car was crossing the lot and required that I get out of the way; not because it seemed the most graceful manner of accepting what was obviously meant as an apology. Because I thought I smelled booze on his breath.

And when I'd finished stepping closer, I knew that I did. ”You're drinking,” I said, incredulous.

He relaxed, now that I'd seen it. ”Sorry to disappoint.”

”Disappoint, h.e.l.l,” I said, ”I've waited months for this.” But it was a bald untruth. I felt crushed, a crus.h.i.+ng disappointment. For him.

He laughed. ”You told me,” he said, a bit haltingly, ”'I'll see you on your way. Back down.'”

”I was bluffing,” I said. ”And anyway, you said you'd see me on my way up.”

”We were right,” he said, and mimed a body shrug, a who's-to-say-what-makes-the-world-go-round gesture that requires either sobriety in the gesturer or drunkenness in the gesturee to work. And Halliday was right, I wasn't drunk. I was rarely drunk anymore. It was technically impossible to lose yourself in drink when a breathless narrator was panting into your ear: She was losing herself in drink, the shroud of her alcoholism having obscured all else She was losing herself in drink, the shroud of her alcoholism having obscured all else ... It was literally sobering. ... It was literally sobering.

Some obscure automotive law apparently required that every rental car in Rockford be a Grand Am. Halliday's was blue. He opened the pa.s.senger door for me. ”I would be honored,” he said, ”if you would join me for a nightcap.”

”I'll drive,” I told him. The blind leading the sloshed.

The nightcap was apparently to be vodka neat, judging from the unopened fifth of Absolut that Halliday cradled in his lap, still in its liquor store bag. As I drove west on State toward the Rock River, I sensed him waiting, ticking off the seconds until he could unscrew the lid. I parked in the lot outside the YMCA-the same lot whose pay phone I had used to call Halliday for the very first time, almost a year ago. It was nearly ten o'clock, but the riverside park was still lively; the Y's doors were open, leaking fluorescent light and a trickle of workout music. Walking north along the path, we pa.s.sed joggers, mostly young men with heads down, sweat dangling like icicles from their faces. Halliday carried his bag discreetly. I felt a grim complicity, walking beside him. The night was humid but cool, the sky full of thick clouds and weird bright light.

Some distance from the Y, we settled on a bench by the water. Halliday opened the bottle and took a long, ravenous swallow of the sort I had seen only in movies, when the booze was actually water; vodka churned, convulsing in the bottleneck, his throat seizing three or four times before he finished, gasping, wincing, and handed the bottle to me.

”Wow,” I said, as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

I took a sip, then held the bottle in my lap, but he took it back. He wanted to hold it. ”Why?” I asked. ”Why now?”

”I felt it. Coming,” he said, teeth chattering, ”Did everything I could. To stop it.”

I rested my eyes across the river on National Avenue, blurred, beautiful houses with little docks reaching into the water. In one I caught the festive stirrings of a party, an aura of white light, streamers of music. ”You were in a hospital,” I said. ”Last August.”

He glanced at me, startled, then lifted the bottle again. It was the sort of drinking you really couldn't watch.

”Why?” I asked.

”Alcohol-” he gasped from his exertions, ”induced psychosis.”

”Meaning ...”

”Midgets with enlarged heads. Climbing out of my toilet. Among other attractions.”

I laughed, he drank. ”So you dried out?” I asked.

He nodded. ”But they were scared. To see me.”

”Your girls.”

He was looking straight ahead, at the river, though I doubted in his state that he could see it. So his daughters were there, I thought, while he raged at the midgets, and I found myself imagining it-how terrified they must have been. ”No,” I said, wresting the bottle from his grasp when he tried to lift it again. ”I want to hear this.”

He went on, speaking with enormous effort as whole sections of his brain began shutting down-I could see it happening, like blocks of light switching off in a skysc.r.a.per. ”Hanna office. Downstairs. Desk, compurr ... nothing. I thought, Wha.s.sisecret?”

”Whose secret?” I asked. ”What are you talking about?” And then I realized that he must mean Z. Always Z. ”What makes you think he had any secret?”

”I thought,” he said, with great effort, ”He can help me ”He can help me.”

”Anthony,” I said. He was trembling, shuddering as the poison raided his bloodstream. I put my arm around him and tried to hold him still. ”How could he possibly help you? What could he say that would make any difference?”

There was a long pause. I felt Halliday struggling physically with some th.o.r.n.y abstraction, wresting it into speech. ”Tell me. Don't. Drink,” he finally gasped.

For a moment the words hung there, golden, strange, and I saw a jerk of clarity in Halliday's eyes.

”See?” I said, taking his hand. ”You already know it.”

But the poison had emptied him, and he reached for the bottle again. I released it, but it lazed from his hand and dropped on the gra.s.s. He struggled to his feet and careered onto the path. ”I hava. Get.”