The Bone Clocks (58 page)

“And what do we do with that narrow window of time,” countered L’Ohkna, “apart from being butchered, body and soul?”

“That,” I confessed, “I cannot answer. But I heard from someone who may be able to. I didn’t dare refer to this outside 119A, but now we’re all here, lend an old friend your ears …” I produced an ancient Walkman and inserted a BASF cassette.

W
ENDY
H
ANGER
’
S FINGERS
drum on the wheel while four lanes of traffic cross the intersection. She has no ring on her finger. The light turns green, but she doesn’t notice until the truck behind us blasts its horn. She pulls off, stalls, mutters, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Chevrolet, ignition!” We drive off, past a big Home Depot, and soon we’ve left Poughkeepsie behind. I ask, “How long to Blithewood?”

“Thirty, forty minutes.” Wendy Hanger puts a nicotine gum stick into her mouth and her sternocleidomastoideus ripples with every chew. The road winds between and under trees. Their buds are on the cusp of opening. A sign says
RED HOOK 7 MILES
. We overtake a pair of cyclists, and Wendy Hanger musters the courage: “Dr. Fenby, could I … uh, ask you a question?”

“Ask away.”

“This might sound like I’m outta my freaking tree.”

“You’re in luck, Ms. Hanger. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Does the name ‘Marinus’ ring any bells?”

I hadn’t seen that coming. We don’t hide our true names, but neither do we advertise them. “Why do you ask?”

Wendy Hanger’s breathing is ragged. “Dunno how I knew it, but I knew it. Look, I—I—I’m sorry, I gotta pull over.” Around the next bend there’s a timely rest area with a bench and a view of woodland sloping down to the Hudson River. Wendy Hanger turns around. She’s sweating and wide-eyed. Her dolphin air freshener swings in diminishing arcs. “Do you know a Marinus—or
are
you Marinus?”

The cyclists we passed not long ago speed by.

“I go by that name in certain circles,” I say.

Her face trembles. It’s scarred with childhood acne. “Ho-
ly
crap.” She shakes her head. “
You
could hardly’ve been
born
yet. Jeez, I
really
need a smoke.”

“Don’t take your stress out on your bronchial tubes, Ms. Hanger. Stick to the gum. Now. I’m overdue an explanation.”

“This isn’t”—she frowns—“this isn’t some kinda setup?”

“I wish it was, because then I’d know what was happening.”

Suspicion, angst, and disbelief slug it out in Wendy Hanger’s face, but no clear winner emerges. “Okay, Doctor. Here’s the story. When I was younger, in Milwaukee, I went off the rails. Family issues, a divorce … substance abuse. My stepsister booted me out, and by the end, moms were, like, steering their kids across the road to avoid me. I was …” She flinches. Old memories still keep their sting.

“An addict,” I state calmly, “which means you’re now a survivor.”

Wendy Hanger chews her gum a few times. “I guess I am. New Year’s Eve 1983, though, the holiday lights all pretty—Jeez, I was no survivor then. I hit rock bottom, broke into my stepsister’s house, found her sleeping pills, swallowed the entire freakin’ bottle with a pint of Jim Beam. That movie
The Towering Inferno
was on, as I … sank away. You ever see it?” Before I can answer, a sports car storms by and Wendy Hanger shudders. “I woke up in the hospital with tubes in my stomach and throat. My stepsister’s neighbor had seen the TV on, come over, and found me. Called an ambulance in
the nick of time. People think sleeping pills are painless, but that’s not true. I’d no idea a stomach could
hurt
that much. I slept, woke, slept some more. Then I woke in the geriatric ward, which
totally
freaked me out ’cause I thought I’d aged,” Wendy Hanger does a bitter laugh, “and been in a coma for forty years, and was now, like, ancient. But there was this woman there, sitting by my bed. I didn’t know if she was staff or a patient or a volunteer, but she held my hand and asked, ‘Why are you here, Miss Hanger?’ I hear her now. ‘Why are you here, Wendy?’ She spoke kinda funny, like with an accent, but … I don’t know where from. She wasn’t black, but wasn’t quite white. She was … kind, like a … a gruff angel, who wouldn’t blame you or judge you for what you’d done or for what life’d done to you. And I—I heard myself telling her things I …” Wendy Hanger gazes at the backs of her hands, “… I never told anyone. Suddenly it was midnight. This woman smiled at me and said, ‘You’re over the worst. Happy New Year.’ And … I just freakin’ burst into tears. I don’t know why.”

“Did she tell you her name?”

Wendy’s eyes are a challenge.

“Was her name Esther Little, Wendy?”

Wendy Hanger breathes in deep: “She said you’d know that. She said you’d know. But you can’t have been more than a girl in 1984. What’s going on? How … 
Jeez
.”

“Did Esther Little give you a message to give to me?”

“Yes. Yes, Doctor. She asked
me
, a homeless, suicidal addict whom she’d known for all of, like, two or three hours, to pass on a message to a colleague named Marinus. I—I—I—I asked, ‘Is “Marinus” like a Christian name, a surname, an alias?’ But Esther Little said, ‘Marinus is Marinus,’ and told me to tell you … to tell you …”

“I’m listening, Wendy. Go on.”

“ ‘Three on the Day of the Star of Riga.’ ”

The world’s hushed. “Three on the Day of the Star of Riga?”

“Not a word more, not a word less.” She studies me.

The Star of Riga
. I know I’ve known that phrase, and I reach for
the memory, but my fingers pass through it. No. I’ll have to be patient.

“ ‘Riga’ meant nothing,” Wendy Hanger chews what must now be a flavorless lump of gum, “back in my hospital bed in Milwaukee, so I asked her the spelling: R-I-G-A. Then I asked where I’d find this Marinus, so I could deliver the message. Esther said no, the time wasn’t right yet. So I asked when the time would be right. And she said,” Wendy Hanger swallows, her carotid artery pulsing fast, “ ‘The day you become a grandmother.’ ”

Pure Esther Little. “Many congratulations,” I tell Wendy Hanger. “Granddaughter or grandson?”

She looks more perturbed by this, not less. “A girl. My daughter-in-law gave birth in Santa Fe, early this morning. She wasn’t due for another two weeks, but just after midnight, Rainbow Hanger was born. Her people are hippies. But, look, you gotta … I mean, I thought Esther maybe had on-and-off dementia, or … 
Jeez
. What sane person’d beg such a wacko favor off of anyone, least of all an addict who’d just swallowed a hundred sleeping pills? I asked her. Esther said the addict in me
had
died, but that the real me, she’d survived. I’d be fine from now on, she said. She said the ‘Riga’ message and its due date were written in permanent marker, and on the right day, years from now, Marinus’d find me, but your name’d be different and—” Wendy Hanger’s sniffling and her eyes are streaming. “
Why’m
I crying?”

I hand her a packet of tissues.

“Is she still alive? She’d be, like … ancient.”

“The woman you met has passed on.”

The newborn grandmother nods, unsurprised. “Pity. I’d’ve liked to thank her. I owe her so much.”

“How so?”

Wendy Hanger looks surprised, but decides to tell me. “By and by, I fell asleep, and didn’t wake until morning. Esther had gone. A nurse brought me breakfast, and said they’d be moving me to a private room later. I said there must a mistake, I didn’t have insurance, but the nurse said, ‘Your grandmother’s settling your account,
honey,’ and I said, ‘What grandmother?’ The nurse smiled like I was concussed and said, ‘Mrs. Little, isn’t it?’ Then, later, in my private room, a nurse brought a … like a black zip-up folder. In it was a Bank of America card with my name on it, a door key, and some documents. These,” Wendy Hanger heaves an emotional sigh, “turned out to be the deeds to a house in Poughkeepsie. In my name. Two weeks later I was discharged from the hospital in Milwaukee. I went to my stepsister’s, apologized for trying to kill myself on her sofa, and said I was heading east, to try to, y’know, make a fresh start, where no one knew me. I think my stepsister was relieved. Two Greyhound bus rides later, I walked into my house in Poughkeepsie … A house that a real live fairy godmother had apparently given me. Next thing I knew, forty years or more flew by. I still live there, and to this day my husband believes it was a gift from an eccentric aunt. I never told no one the truth. But every single time I turned my key in the lock, I thought of her, I thought, ‘Three on the Day of the Star of Riga,’ and pretty much every hour since I learned my daughter-in-law was pregnant, I’d wonder if I’d run into a Marinus … This morning, holy crap, was I a mess! The day I become a grandmother. My husband told me to stay at home, so I did. But Carlotta, who runs the cab company for us these days, deviced to say that Jodie’d twisted her ankle and Zeinab’s baby was running a fever, so please, please, please, would I go to the station and pick up Dr. I. Fenby? And, y’know, there’s no reason why
you’d
be Marinus, but when I saw you I …” she shakes her head, “… knew. That’s why I was kinda spooked. Sorry.”

Dappled sunshine shivers. “Forget it. Thank you.”

“The Riga message. Does it make sense?”

I should be careful. “Partially. Potentially.”

Wendy Hanger considers criminal networks, the FBI,
The Da Vinci Code
—but smiles, shyly. “Way, way over
my
head, hey? Y’know, I feel … lighter.” She dabs her eyes with her wrists, notices the splodges of makeup, and checks in the mirror: “Holy crap, it’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Can I just, like, fix myself?”

“I’ll take the air, you take your time.” I get out of the car and
walk over to the bench. I sit down, gaze over the stately Hudson River at the Catskill Mountains, egress, transverse back to the car, and ingress into Wendy Hanger. First I redact everything that’s happened since she pulled over. Then I trace the memory cord back forty-one years to a Milwaukee hospital. Redacting memories of Esther hurts, but it’s for the best. The messenger will forget the message she’s carried for so long, and everything else she just told me. At odd moments she may fret over a blank in her memory, but soon a Pied Piper thought will come dancing along and her untrained mind will follow …

W
ENDY
H
ANGER SETS
me down at the daffodil-clustered roundabout on Blithewood’s campus, just below the president’s ivy-veined house. “That
was
a pleasure, Iris.”

“Thanks so much for the guided tour, Wendy.”

“I like to show the place to folks who’d appreciate it, specially on the first real day of spring.”

“Look, I know my assistant paid by charge card but”—I hand her a twenty-dollar bill—“buy a bottle of something silly to celebrate your life as a granny.” She hesitates, but I press it into her hand.

“That’s generous of you, Iris. I will, and my husband and I’ll drink to your health. You’re sure you’re good for the trip back?”

“I’m good. My friend’s driving us back to New York.”

“Have a great meeting, then, and an excellent day, and enjoy the sunshine. The forecast’s patchy for the next few days.” She pulls away, waving, and is gone. I hear myself subaddressed in Ōshima’s plangent tones:
Looking for your Sorority House?

I try to spot him, but see only students crossing the well-tended lawns with armfuls of folders and bags. Four men are carrying a piano.
Ōshima, I just received a sign from Esther Little
.

The front door of the president’s house opens and Ōshima, a slight figure with hands buried deep in his knee-length mugger’s hoodie, emerges.
What sort of sign?

A mnemocrypted key
, I subreply, walking towards the house.
Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow.
I haven’t solved it yet, but I will. Is anyone at the cemetery?
I unbutton my coat.

Only squirrels, humping and jumping
, Ōshima flips back his hood and angles his white-whiskered, septuagenarian Kenyan face to soak up the sun,
until a quarter-hour ago. Take the path leading up to your left from where I’m standing
.

I pass within a few yards.
Anyone we know?

Go and see. She’s wearing a Jamaican head-wrap.

I follow the path:
What’s a Jamaican head-wrap?

Ōshima shuts the door behind him and walks the other way.
Holler if you need me
.

U
NDERFOOT, OLD LEAVES
crackle and squelch, while overhead, brand-new leaves ooze unbundling from swollen buds and the wood is Bluetoothed with birdsong. At the base of a trunk the girth of a brontosaurus’s leg, I find a gravestone. Here’s another, and another smothered by ivy. Blithewood’s campus cemetery, then, is not a regimented matrix of the dead but a wood whose graves are sunk between, and nourish the roots of, these pines, cedars, yews, and maples. Esther’s glimpse was precise:
Tombs between the trees
. Rounding a dense holly tree I come across Holly Sykes, and think,
Who else?
I haven’t seen her since my visit to Rye, four years ago. Her cancer is still in remission but she looks gaunter than ever, all bone and nerve. Her head-wrap is the red, green, and gold of the Jamaican flag. I scuff my feet to let her know someone’s coming, and Holly slips on a pair of sunglasses that conceal much of her face. “Good morning,” I venture.

“Good morning,” she echoes neutrally.

“Sorry to bother you, but I was looking for Crispin Hershey.”

“Right here.” Holly gestures at the white marble stone.

“Short and sweet,” I remark. “Clichéless.”

“Yes, he wasn’t a big fan of flowery prose.”

“And a more peaceful, more Emersonian resting place,” I say, “I can’t imagine. His work is urban and his wit’s urbane, but his soul is pastoral. One thinks of Trevor Upward in
Echo Must Die
, who finds peace only in the lesbian commune on the Isle of Muck.”

Holly inspects me through her dark lenses; she last saw me through a fug of medication, so I doubt she’ll recall me, but I’ll stay prepared: “Were you a colleague of Crispin’s here at the college?”