Cell: A Novel (11 page)

“It would.”

“I’m so scared,” she said. “Do you think it will get better tomorrow, in the daylight? The being scared part?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must be worried sick about your wife and little boy.”

Clay sighed and rubbed his face. “The hard part is trying to come to grips with the helplessness. We’re separated, you see, and—” He stopped and shook his head. He wouldn’t have gone on if she hadn’t reached out and taken his hand. Her fingers were firm and cool. “We separated in the spring. We still live in the same little town, what my own mother would have called a grass marriage. My wife teaches at the elementary school.”

He leaned forward, trying to see her face in the dark.

“You want to know the hell of it? If this had happened a year ago, Johnny would have been with her. But this September he made the jump to middle school, which is almost five miles away. I keep trying to figure if he would have been home when things went nuts. He and his friends ride the bus. I
think
he would have been home. And I think he would have gone right to her.”

Or pulled his cellphone out of his backpack and called her!
the panic-rat suggested merrily… then
bit.
Clay felt himself tightening his fingers down on Alice’s and made himself stop. But he couldn’t stop the sweat from springing out on his face and arms.

“But you don’t know,” she said.

“No.”

“My daddy runs a framing and print shop in Newton,” she said. “I’m sure he’s all right, he’s very self-reliant, but he’ll be worried about me. Me and my. My you-know.”

Clay knew.

“I keep wondering what he did about supper,” she said. “I know that’s crazy, but he can’t cook a lick.”

Clay thought about asking if her father had a cell phone and something told him not to. Instead he asked, “Are you doing all right for now?”

“Yes,” she said, and shrugged. “What’s happened to him has happened. I can’t change it.”

He thought:
I wish you hadn’t said that.

“My kid has a cell phone, did I tell you that?” To his own ears, his voice sounded as harsh as a crow’s caw.

“You did, actually. Before we crossed the bridge.”

“Sure, that’s right.” He was gnawing at his lower lip and made himself stop. “But he didn’t always keep it charged. Probably I told you that, too.”

“Yes.”

“I just have no way of knowing.” The panic-rat was out of its cage, now. Running and biting.

Now both of her hands closed over both of his. He didn’t want to give in to her comfort—it felt hard to let go of his grip on himself and give in to her comfort—but he did it, thinking she might need to give more than he needed to take. They were holding on that way, hands linked next to the pewter salt and pepper shakers on Tom McCourt’s little kitchen table, when Tom came back from the cellar with four flashlights and a Coleman lantern that was still in its box.

8

The Coleman gave off enough light to make the flashlights unnecessary. It was harsh and white, but Clay liked its brilliance, the way it drove away every single shadow save for their own and the cat’s—which went leaping fantastically up the wall like a Halloween decoration cut from black crepe paper—into hiding.

“I think you should pull the curtains,” Alice said.

Tom was opening one of the plastic sacks from the Metropolitan Cafe, the ones with DOGGY BAG on one side and PEOPLE BAG on the other. He stopped and looked at her curiously. “Why?”

She shrugged and smiled. Clay thought it the strangest smile he had ever seen on the face of a teenage girl. She’d cleaned the blood off her nose and chin, but there were dark weary-circles under her eyes, the Coleman lamp had bleached the rest of her face to a corpselike pallor, and the smile, showing the tiniest twinkle of teeth between trembling lips from which all the lipstick had now departed, was disorienting in its adult artificiality. He thought Alice looked like a movie actress from the late 1940s playing a socialite on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had the tiny sneaker in front of her on the table. She was spinning it with one finger. Each time she spun it, the laces flipped and clicked. Clay began to hope she would break soon. The longer she held up, the worse it would be when she finally let go. She had let some out, but not nearly enough. So far he’d been the one to do most of the letting-out.

“I don’t think people should see we’re in here, that’s all,” she said. She flicked the sneaker. What she had called a Baby Nike. It spun. The laces flipped and clicked on Tom’s highly polished table. “I think it might be…bad.”

Tom looked at Clay.

“She could be right,” Clay said. “I don’t like us being the only lit-up house on the block, even if the light’s at the back.”

Tom got up and closed the curtains over the sink without another word.

There were two other windows in the kitchen, and he pulled those curtains, too. He started back to the table, then changed course and closed the door between the kitchen and the hall. Alice spun the Baby Nike in front of her on the table. In the harsh, unsparing glow of the Coleman lantern, Clay could see it was pink and purple, colors only a child could love. Around it went. The laces flew and clicked. Tom looked at it, frowning, as he sat down, and Clay thought:
Tell her to take it off the table. Tell her she doesn’t know where it’s been and you don’t want it on your table. That should be enough to set her off and then we can start getting this part out of the way. Tell her. I think she wants you to. I think that’s why she’s doing it.

But Tom only took sandwiches out of the bag—roast beef and cheese, ham and cheese—and doled them out. He got a pitcher of iced tea from the fridge (“Still cold as can be,” he said), and then set down the remains of a package of raw hamburger for the cat.

“He deserves it,” he said, almost defensively. “Besides, it would only go over with the electricity out.”

There was a telephone hanging on the wall. Clay tried it, but it was really just a formality and this time he didn’t even get a dial tone. The thing was as dead as… well, as Power Suit Woman, back there by Boston Common. He sat back down and worked on his sandwich. He was hungry but didn’t feel like eating.

Alice put hers down after only three bites. “I can’t,” she said. “Not now. I guess I’m too tired. I want to go to sleep. And I want to get out of this dress. I guess I can’t wash up—not very well, anyway—but I’d give anything to throw this fucking dress away. It stinks of sweat and blood.” She spun the sneaker. It twirled beside the crumpled paper with her barely touched sandwich lying on top of it. “I can smell my mother on it, too. Her perfume.”

For a moment no one said anything. Clay was at a complete loss. He had a momentary picture of Alice subtracted from her dress, in a white bra and panties, with her staring, hollowed-out eyes making her look like a paper-doll. His artist’s imagination, always facile and always obliging, added tabs at the shoulders and lower legs of the image. It was shocking not because it was sexy but because it wasn’t. In the distance—very faint—something exploded with a dim
foomp.

Tom broke the silence, and Clay blessed him for it.

“I’ll bet a pair of my jeans would just about fit you, if you rolled up the bottoms to make cuffs.” He stood up. “You know what, I think you’d even look cute in em, like Huck Finn in a girls’ school production of
Big River.
Come upstairs. I’m going to put out some clothes for you to wear in the morning and you can spend the night in the guest room. I’ve got plenty of pajamas, a plague of pajamas. Do you want the Coleman?”

“Just… I guess just a flashlight will be okay. Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said. He took one flashlight and gave her another. He looked ready to say something about the small sneaker when she picked it up, then seemed to think better of it. What he said was, “You can wash, too. There may not be a lot of water, but the taps will probably draw some even with the power out, and I’m sure we can spare a basinful.” He looked over the top of her head at Clay. “I always keep a case of bottled drinking water in the cellar, so we’re not short there.”

Clay nodded. “Sleep well, Alice,” he said.

“You too,” she said vaguely, and then, more vaguely still: “Nice meeting you.”

Tom opened the door for her. Their flashlights bobbed, and then the door shut again. Clay heard their footsteps on the stairs, then overhead. He heard running water. He waited for the chug of air in the pipes, but the flow of water stopped before the air started. A basinful, Tom had said, and that was what she’d gotten. Clay also had blood and dirt on him he wanted to wash off—he imagined Tom did, too—but he guessed there must be a bathroom on this floor, too, and if Tom was as neat about his personal habits as he was about his person, the water in the toilet bowl would be clean. And there was the water in the tank as well, of course.

Rafer jumped up on Tom’s chair and began washing his paws in the white light of the Coleman lantern. Even with the lantern’s steady low hiss, Clay could hear him purring. As far as Rafe was concerned, life was still cool.

He thought of Alice twirling the small sneaker and wondered, almost idly, if it was possible for a fifteen-year-old girl to have a nervous breakdown.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told the cat. “Of course it is. Happens all the time. They make movies of the week about it.”

Rafer looked at him with wise green eyes and went on licking his paw.
Tell me more,
those eyes seemed to say.
Vere you beaten as a child? Did you have ze sexual thoughts about your mother?

I can smell my mother on it. Her perfume.

Alice as a paper-doll, with tabs sticking out of her shoulders and legs.

Don’t be zilly,
Rafer’s green eyes seemed to say.
Ze tabs go on ze
clothes,
not on ze
doll.
Vut kind of artist
are
you?

“The out-of-work kind,” he said. “Just shut up, why don’t you?” He closed his eyes, but that was worse. Now Rafer’s green eyes floated disembodied in the dark, like the eyes of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat:
We’re all mad here, dear Alice.
And under the steady hiss of the Coleman lamp, he could still hear it purring.

9

Tom was gone fifteen minutes. When he came back, he brushed Rafe out of his chair without ceremony and took a large, convincing bite from his sandwich. “She’s asleep,” he said. “Got into a pair of my pajamas while I waited in the hall, and then we dumped the dress in the trash together. I think she was out forty seconds after her head hit the pillow. Throwing the dress away was what sealed the deal, I’m convinced of it.” A slight pause. “It did indeed smell bad.”

“While you were gone,” Clay said, “I nominated Rafe president of the United States. He was elected by acclamation.”

“Good,” Tom said. “Wise choice. Who voted?”

“Millions. Everyone still sane. They sent in thought-ballots.” Clay made his eyes very wide and tapped his temple. “I can read
miiiyyynds.”

Tom’s chewing stopped, then began again… but slowly. “You know,” he said, “under the circumstances, that’s not really all that funny.”

Clay sighed, sipped some iced tea, and made himself eat a little more of his sandwich. He told himself to think of it as body gasoline, if that was what it took to get it down. “No. Probably not. Sorry.”

Tom tipped his own glass to him before drinking. “It’s all right. I appreciate the effort. Say, where’s your portfolio?”

“Left it on the porch. I wanted both hands free while we negotiated Tom McCourt’s Hallway of Death.”

“That’s
all right, then. Listen, Clay, I’m sorry as hell about your family—”

“Don’t be sorry yet,” Clay said, a little harshly. “There’s nothing to be sorry about yet.”

“—but I’m really glad I ran into you. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Same goes back,” Clay said. “I appreciate the quiet place to spend the night, and I’m sure Alice does, too.”

“As long as Malden doesn’t get loud and burn down around our ears.”

Clay nodded, smiling a little. “As long as. Did you get that creepy little shoe away from her?”

“No. She took it to bed with her like… I don’t know, a teddy bear. She’ll be a lot better tomorrow if she sleeps through tonight.”

“Do you think she will?”

“No,” Tom said. “But if she wakes up scared, I’ll spend the night with her. Crawl in with her, if that’s what it takes. You know I’m safe with her, right?”

“Yes.” Clay knew that he would have been safe with her, too, but he understood what Tom was talking about. “I’m going to head north tomorrow morning as soon as it’s light. It would probably be a good idea if you and Alice came with me.”

Tom thought about this briefly, then asked, “What about her father?”

“She says he’s, quote, ‘very self-reliant.’ Her biggest stated worry on his behalf was what he rolled himself for dinner. What I heard under that is that she isn’t ready to know. Of course we’ll have to see how she feels about it, but I’d rather keep her with us, and I
don’t
want to head west into those industrial towns.”

“You don’t want to head west at all.”

“No,” Clay admitted.

He thought Tom might argue the point, but he didn’t. “What about tonight? Do you think we should stand a watch?”

Clay hadn’t even considered this until now. He said, “I don’t know how much good it would do. If a crazed mob comes down Salem Street waving guns and torches, what can
we
do about it?”

“Go down cellar?”

Clay thought it over. Going down cellar seemed awfully final to him—the Bunker Defense—but it was always possible the hypothetical crazed mob under discussion would think the house deserted and go sweeping by. Better than being slaughtered in the kitchen, he supposed. Maybe after watching Alice get gang-raped.

It won’t come to that,
he thought uneasily.
You’re getting lost among the hypothetical, that’s all. Freaking in the dark. It won’t come to that.