The World Ends at Five & Other Stories (11 page)

The author only stared, as if waiting for another question.

“Have you seen someone? You know, a . . . a doctor?”

The author stood; he heard the rustle as the girl also rose from her seat. “I’m done here.”

“Do you have a name?” he asked the girl as he headed off to the kitchen. His assistant was showing the interviewer the door; he could hear the intermittent squawking punctuated by his assistant’s smooth replies.

“What do you care? Why not just let me go?”

The girl had been increasingly sullen about the whole thing. But what was he supposed to do about it exactly? “I don’t suppose an exorcism would work,” he said, pulling open the fridge in search of soda.

“You can’t exorcise something that isn’t there,” said the girl.

“You know, you keep saying you’re not here, but then . . . if you weren’t here, where would you be?” asked the author as he extracted a 2-liter and pulled a glass from the cabinet. “I mean
,
is there somewhere you want to get back to?” When the girl didn’t answer, he asked, “Well, where were you before this?”

“Nowhere,” she said. “My name is Melinda by the way.”

Melinda didn’t remember anything before the book signing.

“But where did you come from?” the author persisted as he walked through the old Victorian, back towards his office that overlooked the garden. “I don’t know any Melinda. I couldn’t have just dreamed you up in the middle of a book signing!”

Melinda trailed in his wake, as if dragged along unwillingly like a cat on a leash. “All I know is that you’re the reason I’m here, and you’re the only one who can make it so I’m not.”

“Aha! So you admit to being here!”

Melinda grunted in exasperation. “Look, let’s not split hairs.”

“But your nature makes a difference. You seem to be able to sit in chairs and lean against things, and yet you don’t carry anything solid.” Before hiring a part-time assistant to handle his fan mail, the author had attempted to put Melinda to use. But they’d discovered she couldn’t pick up, hold, or carry anything.

“It’s your fault,” Melinda said again.

“How?” demanded the
author.
“How is it my fault?”

“Because it’s your imagination! Of course you can picture me leaning against things, sitting places! But you can’t make something imaginary interact with what’s real!”

She had a point, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

He didn’t give interviews any more, and he didn’t do book signings, and he hadn’t written more than a few short stories in the passing months. Melinda continued to hover somewhere just outside his vision as he sat at his desk, staring at the computer screen.

“Why couldn’t you be my muse?” he muttered. “Make yourself useful.”

Melinda turned from where she’d been staring out the window. “What?”

“Nothing.”

They’d long since come to an impasse. Sour and sullen, Melinda stalked around like a caged thing, hardly speaking except to exchange sharp words with him. It was like being stuck in a bad marriage, or so the author imagined. His personal experience in that area was limited.

“But you can imagine it, can’t you,” Melinda said dully.

“You want a divorce?” the author asked in a brittle attempt at humor.

“I think your brother and sister should come for another visit.”

The author sighed. Both his older brother and sister phoned regularly, neither of them able to disguise the growing concern in their voices. They invited him for holidays—he always refused—and then conspired once to both come and spend a week with him. The author had only seen Melinda once or twice the whole time.

“Where did you go that week?” he asked Melinda.

She shrugged. “It was better, wasn’t it? They were here and everything seemed normal, didn’t it?”

A pang of guilt shot through the author. He didn’t want Melinda to feel worthless, he realized, and he didn’t want to consign her to the void by forgetting about her. She’d been with him so long now.

But it had been getting more and more difficult to live with her.

“Maybe
I
want a divorce,” the author mused. Which was stupid, of course, because Melinda was only . . . Sneaking a look at her, he decided she had to be sixteen or seventeen now. She was taller, and her red hair had grown longer so that it came halfway down her back. Did imaginary people age?

“I’m whatever you picture me as, remember?” she asked, turning. He hated that she could read his mind. “A minute ago I was wearing jeans, now I’m in slacks,” she pointing out.

He started. It was true. She wore a powder blue sweater and wool slacks in pale grey. And now she was easily twenty.

“More like a daughter,” he muttered. “You should move out, start a life of your own. Except you can’t, can you?”

“You know what I want?” Melinda said suddenly, facing him now as she leaned against the windowsill. “I want to go somewhere. Somewhere you’re not.”

The minute she said it, a bright light flashed behind the author’s eyes; it felt like he’d been struck by lightning. He pressed his thumb between his eyebrows, where a headache had been born. It was radiating out to his ears now; they burned as he squinted against the brightness that refused to go away.

“He’s coming around.”

The author jerked involuntarily and found his arms and legs restrained. “Melinda? Where’s Melinda?”

The face of his older sister Anne appeared over him, her lipstick too red and her hair dyed an improbable blonde. “Who?”

“Melinda! You know, the girl!”

Terri’s face appeared next, along with a glimpse of that ugly lavender suit jacket. She still owned that thing? “Dan . . .”

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You dropped me after that book signing.”

The women exchanged glances over him. “Okay, Dan,” Terri said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was at home, writing. Trying to, anyway. And Melinda, she said—”

“Dan, you collapsed at a book signing. They think you may have had a minor stroke, so just—”

“I haven’t done a book signing in over a year!” he insisted. “Not since that night. Remember? The burrito?”

“You did have a burrito,” Terri agreed.

“And you were so mad that I kept—”

“No one’s mad at you, Dan. We’re just worried,” Anne said. “Keith is coming, and Mom and Dad.”

“Dad died last year! You and Keith came to take me to the funeral because you thought I wouldn’t go otherwise.”

His sister’s face went pale, despite her heavy makeup. “Dan, Dad is fine. He and Mom are on their way.”

“But Melinda—”

“Who’s Melinda?” Terri asked.

“The girl!
The one in all the interviews.
The one that doesn’t exist!”

Anne nodded in false understanding. “Okay.”

“She really did leave me, didn’t she?” the author asked, looking between Terri and Anne. “She said she wanted to go somewhere . . .”

“You should rest,” said Terri.

“Why am I strapped down?”

“You were having fits,” Anne said.

“
Not
of the artistic kind,” added Terri.

The author sighed and forced himself to relax against the hospital bed, although the pillows were at an awkward angle that hurt his neck. At some point, he dozed off. When he awoke, his family was there. And Terri was still hanging around.
But no Melinda.

“Well, you’re in all the papers,” Terri said with small satisfaction. “I mean, no such thing as bad publicity, right?”

The author made a noncommittal grunt.

It wasn’t long before the letters and flowers and gifts from fans started rolling in.

“How long do I have to stay here, anyway?” the author asked.

Terri had taken up sentry in the chair beside his bed. “Only a few more days.
Tests and all.
And the fans are practically swooning over the romantic notion of your being ill, so it’s great all around.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Terri went on, without looking up from the magazine she was reading. “That Melinda girl you kept talking about. She was at the signing? She sent you a burrito, but the hospital wouldn’t let me bring it in to you, so I ate it.”

The author sat up; they’d finally removed his restraints once it had become clear that he wouldn’t suffer any more “fits.” “She was here?” he asked.

Terri shrugged. “I didn’t see her. It just came with a note, with a pile of other crap from your fans.”

“I thought they were readers.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, where’s the note?”

Terri snorted and slapped the magazine down. “You are such a pain. You think I’m going to dig through all that to find one smelly note?”

“Smelly?” the author asked.

“Well, it came with a
burrito
, didn’t it?”

“Then . . . shouldn’t it be easy to find? I mean, can’t you just sniff it out or something?”

Terri stalked out of the room, and he didn’t see her again for a full day. But when she came back, she had the note.

Sorry for the headache. Hope this squares us.

~Melinda

A day later, the results from various scans showed a tumor in the author’s brain. “That’s Melinda,” he said. “She saved me, you see. By giving me the headache and sending me here for testing.”

“Uh-huh,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a long road ahead of you.”

“You’re going to take her out of me, aren’t you?” the author asked. “I won’t remember her, will I?”

The note had proved that Melinda was still somewhere—somewhere the author wasn’t, which is what she had wished for. But if they operated on him, she really would be gone for good.

He said as much to his family. “Dan, you
have
to have this operation,” Keith told him. Keith, ever reasonable, had become the spokesperson for the family. “You can’t go around with a tumor in your head.”

“I did say I wanted a divorce,” the author admitted. “But I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought, I don’t know, maybe I’d see her now and then? Maybe she’d go have a good life elsewhere?”

No one seemed to have an answer for that.

“But will he still be able to write?” was all Terri really wanted to know. Which went a long way towards pissing Keith off.

“Well, what good is he to you if he’s a vegetable by the time it’s all over?” Terri asked.

In the author’s opinion, if Keith hadn’t been a gentleman, he’d probably have socked her one.

“I’m going to write, and I’m going to be fine,” the author said. “It’s Melinda I’m concerned about.”

“What is she, your muse?” asked Terri.

“Not really. I mean, I actually couldn’t write much once she turned up.”

“Then good riddance! You don’t need any hurdles, Dan. You’ve got enough to worry about.”

Sometime after the initial operation, the author awoke to a dim room. But not empty. “Hello?” he asked, but it hurt because his throat was hot and dry.

The figure leaning against the windowsill stirred and came to stand at the foot of his bed. “Do you know me?” she asked.

The author considered the question carefully; he had been brought up to believe it was best, as a rule, to think things over before speaking. “No,” he finally said.

The girl nodded, clearly satisfied. “Then I’ll be on my way.” She moved towards the door, and although she wore heels and the floor was linoleum, her footsteps made no sound.

“Where?” the author asked, because suddenly it seemed important.

The girl smiled over her shoulder. “Wherever people are in need of burritos, I suppose.”

Her response stirred something in the author’s memory, but he couldn’t quite reach the other side of the chasm that seemed to have opened up inside him. “I do know you, don’t I?”

“It might be more accurate to say that I know you,” said the girl. “Or that you once knew me.”

“I won’t see you again?”

“No. And you won’t be sorry for it, either,” she said. There might have been more, but at that moment Anne stuck her head into the room.

“You’re awake,” Anne said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Where did she go?” the author asked.

“Who?”

“The girl. She was just here.”

Anne shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone. Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”

The author thought about that. “Maybe . . .”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Anne said as she pushed all the way into the room now and came to sit on the edge of the author’s bed.

“It seemed very real,” said the author.

“Maybe it would make a good story,” suggested Anne.

The author nodded. But he was getting sleepy again. There was another operation to come, and other kinds of therapy . . . He wasn’t entirely sure how these things worked. There had been someone . . . she would have known, could have explained it, but . . . she was gone now.