Nightlight (2 page)

Dr. Kirby chewed, and sipped coffee.

“But you will wonder why I asked you here.”

“Is there anything we can help you with, Mrs. Lewis?” asked the young man, setting aside his cup and saucer, adjusting the napkin beside him as if it hid a rabbit.

She could not begin to talk about it. After all these years of silence. It was simply too difficult. She could simply announce that she was going to give yet another grant to the hospital, so they could build a new wing for hydrotherapy, or plan a parking lot so their outpatients could park their BMWs closer to the magnolia trees.

But this was not why he was here. To plug the silence, she said, “I don't even know how to begin.”

“Start anywhere you like. At the beginning.”

She saw that he was used to people who had trouble talking. He was experienced in spite of his appearance, his off-the-rack polyblend, and his tattered knit tie. His eyes took her in, and she was pleased that she was looking especially good today. Her hair only slightly gray, and her figure still slim enough to draw attention, quite a bit of it. In her youth, she had been pretty without being beautiful. Now, on her best days, she was a little bit—dare she suggest it to herself?—beautiful. Classical, at least.

She studied her manicure. “The beginning.”

He smiled helpfully.

“Do things have beginnings? Lives do, but lives are altered by things that happened long ago.” She could continue in this vein for a long while. Dr. Kirby would never do anything but fidget. She could bore people, and waste their time, and they would resemble Egyptian masks of the dead, patient and cheerful, and interested in the void that surely—there was no doubt—was filled with promise, like passengers on a plane to Paris. She never bored people, except deliberately.

“We can choose to call a certain event a beginning,” suggested Dr. Kirby.

“My family has always craved secrecy.”

The roses across the lawn swayed in a brief gust.

“My father would be in pain,” she continued, “and no one could tell. My mother kept her silence, no matter how she disapproved. And I carry on the tradition. Being a somewhat prominent family in society made us keep to ourselves. We hungered for a secret life. To avoid scandal, of course. But more than that. To have something no one knew about, something powerful because it was secret.”

Dr. Kirby smiled, as if he knew all about secrets. An exterminator would smile in this way if told about roaches.

Under her beauty, if that's what it was, she was a sick woman. She knew it. She had enough sanity to admit that. She was not raving; she was not dangerous.

Except to one person.

“I am,” she said, “very concerned about my son.”

Sick. She should have gotten help long ago.

Dr. Kirby folded his hands. He seemed unwilling to interrupt her silence. “It's really too cold to be sitting out here,” she said at last.

He did not move, but offered, “Shall we go inside?”

“No. Everything else in the house these days reminds me of my husband. He was”—she had never expressed it plainly before—“a drunk.”

Dr. Kirby's pleasant face waited for her to continue.

“I married him because he reminded me of my father.” That should tell him everything, she thought, but it won't.

“Your son,” he suggested gently.

“Yes. My son.” She watched a black bird listen for worms. How loud the surge of worm through soil must be to a bird. The bird stabbed, and came up empty. “To me this garden has always seemed like the center of the universe.”

“It's very pretty.” Said as if he did not really care for gardens.

“It's not pretty,” she said. “Pretty is superficial. It's beautiful.”

In which case, she realized, she herself could not really be beautiful.

“Did your son enjoy the garden?”

“He spent his entire life here.”

He smiled blandly, not comprehending. Why hadn't they sent someone perceptive? Why did she have to spell everything out? She wanted someone who would see her, see this place, and immediately know her.

“I mean he lived here until he was an adult, and never left this house, this garden.”

“Never?”

“Virtually.” She said the word carefully, wishing she could wrap it around Dr. Kirby's neck. “I mean, and forgive me if I am vague, that this house and this hidden garden were his life.”

He looked around at it through new eyes. He still did not seem concerned. He frowned, though, looking across at the pale roses, and touched the saucer beside him. “So that he never had much contact with the world outside?”

“The outside world,” she corrected. “Because this is a world, too. A small world, but complete. In its way,” she added.

“An inside world.”

“Precisely.”

“And you are telling me that your family had many inside worlds.”

She was impressed. He was paying attention. She continued, “But I am not seeking help for myself.”

“You are worried about your son.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Where is your son now?”

She whispered: “I don't know.”

“You're no longer in contact with him?”

She blinked her eyes clear. “To put it very mildly.”

“What makes you think something is wrong?”

She couldn't tell him about the dream. She couldn't tell him about the locked boxes. She couldn't tell him about the one other sort of help she knew well, the services of a locksmith.

She couldn't tell him how her father, dead for years, had seemed alive in this house, night after night.

She couldn't tell him the truth about Len.

3

When there is no light, the branches and the leaves of trees exude a light of their own. Through their skin. Through the membrane of nothingness that covers everything. Every twig. Every leaf.

But the best places were these, where the secret, buried people waited. Their long wait made a light breathe from the earth. The light filled the trees. My eye would not be able to see the light. But the light was there, and I would trap it, as hands trap the moth.

I climbed a wall, and balanced there, cradling the camera. I fell, and rolled, and now I was among the waiting strangers.

I had been hesitating to come here for years. But He kept calling. Come. Just for a visit. Take pictures of the place where I wait. My quiet kingdom. You know how much I love you.

Even now I trembled. I wept as I used to weep. Please, I used to pray. Please leave me alone.

But this was just a visit. See how the strangers lay in their great pleasure that I was among them now. My eyes could not see them where they rose from their secret places, and stood gazing at me.

Please leave me alone, I wept.

But they watched me. He has been waiting a long time, their silence said. See how He loves you.

My hands were trembling, but I clung to the camera, the thing I knew could see them. The lens was more subtle than the eye. I told myself: I'll take a few pictures, and then I can go. Just a few pictures.

That's right, He said, from His secret home, far across this field of stone monuments. This first visit you can take just a few pictures. Seal them up in your camera, and take them home. We have time. I have waited so long for you to visit me.

Just a few pictures. Then I'll be done, I thought. I had always preferred this sort of light. I was winning prizes for the way I could make starlight look. But no one knew why I had been learning to coax light out of places where the eye could not see.

It was so I could crouch here, now, and aim the camera. Just three or four, and then I can go.

The camera was a solid mechanism. It made its pleasing click. It was my usual wide-angle lens, and it was capturing the place, and all its secrets, there was no question of that.

Come closer.

I crept across the cold grass, but then stopped myself. This was enough. I had done enough. It was only a visit. Now you will leave me alone.

I don't like us being apart like this, He said, that voice from the secret place. Come closer.

I closed my eyes. I did not move.

Please. Please leave me alone.

4

Paul clipped his pen into his pocket, and shrugged into the gray tweed jacket he knew made him look anonymous. Waiters like bland customers, and tend to make the sort of cheerful mistakes they avoid in the face of memorable diners. Drinks arrive that had not been ordered, the steak shows up done too well, or bleeding raw, if the waiter forgot you as soon as he saw your face.

His pants fit him well. He had not gained weight on this job, to his mild surprise. He had not developed an ulcer, either, which was more surprising. He ran a comb through his hair, and answered the phone absentmindedly, thinking it was the paper reminding him that they needed nine inches by tomorrow afternoon, one of those secretaries Ham hired and fired regularly, for mysterious reasons.

“Is this Paul Wright?”

He leaned against the wall. Someone about to beg to be reviewed, or, worse, to curse him for having said the worst possible things. He put professional distance into his voice. “Speaking.”

“This is Mary. Your aunt.”

He had mistaken the nervous, fluttery quality of the voice. He was delighted to hear from her. It had been so long since—and then he was quiet for a moment, remembering that it had been seven years since Uncle Phil's funeral. Time, he said brightly, had simply flapped its wings.

He was about to inquire how his cousin Len was doing, but her urgent voice interrupted him. “I need your help,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Anything I can do.”

“I can't really tell you over the telephone,” she said.

“I understand,” said Paul, although he didn't. Anything could be said to anyone over the telephone. If the CIA wanted to be bored to death, that was its problem, Paul thought wryly.

She invited him to visit her the next afternoon, an invitation Paul accepted with pleasure. He had always liked Aunt Mary, but he had remembered her as less mysterious, a straightforward woman who never minced words. She was plainly disturbed about something, but controlled her voice carefully. She was not on the edge of tears. She was on the edge of something worse. Paul could not guess what. Not hysteria. Not worry. Something worse than worry.

She was afraid of something.

Lise swore as she dragged herself into the Volkswagen. “I got Parker Super Quink on my new wool skirt.”

“It'll wash out,” Paul said, knowing it was exactly the wrong thing to say.

She wanted commiseration, not advice. She folded her arms, and Paul fastened her seat belt for her, knowing the act would seem conciliatory. “I guess it will,” she said at last.

“Tough day?”

“Little things kept going wrong. Broken pencils. Dropped cups. Two cups, not—thank God—my favorite red one, but that nice gray one, the one you used this morning. Smashed to powder when I ran hot water on it.”

“Must have been a secret flaw.”

“Yes. It made a pinging noise, like a string plucked. And it was all over the sink. I was so rattled I snapped another cup off at the handle.” She laughed. “I had the handle in my fingers, but the cup itself waddled across the floor, slopping coffee all over.”

The waiter sized them up immediately, and met the glance of the maitre d', who smiled them into a prime table, near a window, through which Paul watched geraniums shiver in the rain.

Standard East Bay Linen white table cloth, with a small, tufted hole near the tine of his salad fork. A fresh pink carnation in imitation Waterford. Wine list at only a forty-percent markup, the sign of a new restaurant begging business.

“They've made us,” Paul said, flipping open the menu.

“How do you know?”

“Did you see the maitre d' touch the busboy on the shoulder when he spoke to him just now? When was the last time you saw a maitre d' touch a busboy? Panic has gripped the kitchen. It's like a submarine spurting water in there. The chef is putting on a show of courage. The assistant manager is phoning the manager who is due in in half an hour anyway. He'll call the owner. A command center is established by now. We'll get our ice water in seconds.”

The busboy, in his white baggy sleeves, spilled a drop of water no bigger than a nickel. The young man held his breath, and, Paul imagined, calculated bus fare to Tijuana. The maitre d' strutted to greet two other customers, wearing a rictus of courtesy.

“The waiter usually identifies himself by name. ‘Hi, I'm Al, your waitperson.' But he won't now, because he knows it makes me vomit. Or, so I've said. At this point, I've given up.”

The waiter was smoother than the maitre d'. Crinkled his eyes and told them that the Soave was better than the Frascati. “It almost always is,” Paul said when he had vanished. “You know what's grim for me is that it's like eating on a stage in front of dozens of unkind eyes. If I drop Gorgonzola on my tie, they'll put their heads together in the darkness and smirk. My father used to stuff the napkin in his T-shirt. Manners in my family was not sucking the goop out of the inside of our cream puff. This is a modest place. Middlebrow. In the loftier places I feel like a chimpanzee.”

“You always act so suave.”

“I wanted to interview Pete Rose. I dreamed of going to spring training and watching my boyhood heroes hit fungoes. A lot of kids hit imaginary home runs against the garage door. I used to keep score of imaginary baseball games. I like things to be commonsense and on paper. No guesswork. No opinions. Just events, recorded with an unbiased eye toward the truth. Christ, the waiter is consoling the maitre d'. They figure they've lost already. Maybe the chef has had a stroke. This is horrible. We should get up and leave.”

The worst possible thing happened. The maitre d' approached them stiffly and showed his teeth, beginning the Speech of Greeting which always destroyed the last of Paul's appetite, through all its variations in all the various accents he had heard attempt it. The maitre d' extended the good wishes of the owner, and hoped that if anything were needed Mr. Wright would not hesitate to ask: It was the sole desire of the owner that they both enjoy this evening's meal.