Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

“Well, I mean, Daddy, that hardly seems to be the situation here,” said Andy, in his irritating, faraway voice.

Abruptly Mr. Barbour got up, with his club soda in his hand. He wasn’t allowed to drink because of the medicine he took. “Theo, I forget. Do you know how to sail?”

It took me a moment to realize what he’d asked me. “No.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. Andy had the most outstanding time at his sailing camp up in Maine last year, didn’t you?”

Andy was silent. He had told me, many times, that it was the worst two weeks of his life.

“Do you know how to read nautical flags?” Mr. Barbour asked me.

“Sorry?” I said.

“There’s an excellent chart in my study I’d be happy to show you. Don’t make that face, Andy. It’s a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know.”

“Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.”

“These smart remarks of yours are very tiresome,” said Mr. Barbour, although he looked more distracted than annoyed. “Besides,” he said, turning to me, “I think you’d be surprised how often nautical flags pop up in parades and movies and, I don’t know, on the stage.”

Andy pulled a face. “The stage,” he said derisively.

Mr. Barbour turned to look at him. “Yes, the stage. Do you find the term amusing?”

“Pompous is a lot more like it.”

“Well, I’m afraid I fail to see what you find so pompous about it. Certainly it’s the very word your great-grandmother would have used.” (Mr. Barbour’s grandfather had been dropped from the Social Register for marrying Olga Osgood, a minor movie actress.)

“My point exactly.”

“Then what would you have me call it?”

“Actually, Daddy, what I would really like to know is the last time you saw nautical flags showcased in any theatrical production.”

“South Pacific,” said Mr. Barbour swiftly.

“Besides South Pacific.”

“I rest my case.”

“I don’t believe you and Mother even saw South Pacific.”

“For God’s sake, Andy.”

“Well, even if you did. One example doesn’t sufficiently establish your case.”

“I refuse to continue this absurd conversation. Come along, Theo.”

vii.

FROM THIS POINT ON, I began trying especially hard to be a good guest: to make my bed in the mornings; to always say thank you and please, and to do everything I knew my mother would want me to do. Unfortunately the Barbours didn’t exactly have the kind of household where you could show your appreciation by babysitting the younger siblings or pitching in with the dishes. Between the woman who came to look after the plants—a depressing job, since there was so little light in the apartment the plants mostly died—and Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, whose main job seemed to be rearranging the closets and the china collection—they had somewhere in the neighborhood of eight people working for them. (When I’d asked Mrs. Barbour where the washing machine was, she’d looked at me as if I’d asked for lye and lard to boil up for soap.)

But though nothing was required of me, still the effort to blend into their polished and complicated household was an immense strain. I was desperate to vanish into the background—to slip invisibly among the Chinoiserie patterns like a fish in a coral reef—and yet it seemed I drew unwanted attention to myself hundreds of times a day: by having to ask for every little item, whether a wash cloth or the Band-Aids or the pencil sharpener; by not having a key, always having to ring when I came and went—even by my well-intentioned efforts to make my own bed in the morning (it was better just to let Irenka or Esperenza do it, Mrs. Barbour explained, as they were used to doing it and did a better job with the corners). I broke off a finial on an antique coat stand by throwing open a door; twice managed to set off the burglar alarm by mistake; and even blundered into Mr. and Mrs. Barbour’s room one night when I was looking for the bathroom.

Luckily, Andy’s parents were around so little that my presence didn’t seem to inconvenience them very much. Unless Mrs. Barbour was entertaining, she was out of the apartment from about eleven a.m.—popping in for a couple of hours before dinner, for a gin and lime and what she called “a bit of a tub”—and then not home again until we were in bed. Of Mr. Barbour I saw even less, except on weekends and when he was sitting around after work with his napkin-wrapped glass of club soda, waiting for Mrs. Barbour to dress for their evening out.

By far the biggest issue I faced was Andy’s siblings. Though Platt, luckily, was off terrorizing younger children at Groton, still Kitsey and the youngest brother, Toddy, who was only seven, clearly resented having me around to usurp what minor attention they got from their parents. There were a lot of tantrums and pouting, a lot of eye rolling and hostile giggling on Kitsey’s part, as well as a baffling (to me) upset—never fully resolved—where she complained to her friends and the housekeepers and anyone who would listen that I’d been going in her room and messing around with the piggy-bank collection on the shelf above her desk. As for Toddy, he grew more and more disturbed as the weeks went by and still I was there; at breakfast, he gaped at me unashamed and frequently asked questions that made his mother reach under the table and pinch him. Where did I live? How much longer was I going to stay with them? Did I have a dad? Then where was he?

“Good question,” I said, provoking horrified laughter from Kitsey, who was popular at school and—at nine—as pretty in her white-blonde way as Andy was plain.

viii.

PROFESSIONAL MOVERS WERE COMING, at some point, to pack my mother’s things and put them in storage. Before they came, I was to go to the apartment and pick out anything I wanted or needed. I was aware of the painting in a nagging but vague way which was entirely out of proportion to its actual importance, as if it were a school project I’d left unfinished. At some point I was going to have to get it back to the museum, though I still hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to do that without causing a huge fuss.

Already I had missed one chance to give it back—when Mrs. Barbour had turned away some investigators who had shown up at the apartment looking for me. That is: I understood they were investigators or even police from what Kellyn, the Welsh girl who looked after the younger children, told me. She had been bringing Toddy home from day care when the strangers showed up asking for me. “Suits, you know?” she said, raising a significant eyebrow. She was a heavy, fast-talking girl with cheeks so flushed she always looked like she’d been standing next to a fire. “They had that look.”

I was too afraid to ask what she meant by that look; and when I went in, cautiously, to see what Mrs. Barbour had to say about it, she was busy. “I’m sorry,” she said, without quite looking at me, “but can we please talk about this later?” Guests were arriving in half an hour, among them a well-known architect and a famous dancer with the New York City Ballet; she was fretting over the loose catch to her necklace and upset because the air conditioner wasn’t working properly.

“Am I in trouble?”

It slipped out before I knew what I was saying. Mrs. Barbour stopped. “Theo, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They were perfectly nice, very considerate, it’s just that I can’t have them sitting around just now. Turning up, without telephoning. Anyway, I told them it wasn’t the best time, which of course they could see for themselves.” She gestured at the caterers darting back and forth, the building engineer on a ladder, examining inside the air-conditioning vent with a flashlight. “Now run along. Where’s Andy?”

“He’ll be home in an hour. His astronomy class went to the planetarium.”

“Well, there’s food in the kitchen. I don’t have a lot of the miniature tarts to spare, but you can have all the finger sandwiches you want. And after the cake’s cut, you’re welcome to have some of that too.”

Her manner had been so unconcerned that I forgot about the visitors until they showed up at school three days later, at my geometry class, one young, one older, indifferently dressed, knocking courteously at the open door. “We see Theodore Decker?” the younger, Italian-looking guy said to Mr. Borowsky as the older one peered cordially inside the classroom.

“We just want to talk to you, is that okay?” said the older guy as we walked down to the dreaded conference room where I was to have had the meeting with Mr. Beeman and my mother on the day she died. “Don’t be scared.” He was a dark-skinned black man with a gray goatee—tough-looking but nice-seeming too, like a cool cop on a television show. “We’re just trying to piece together a lot of things about that day and we hope you can help us.”

I had been frightened at first, but when he said don’t be scared, I believed him—until he pushed open the door of the conference room. There sat my tweed-cap nemesis Mr. Beeman, pompous as ever with his waistcoat and watch chain; Enrique my social worker; Mrs. Swanson the school counselor (the same person who had told me I might feel better if I threw some ice cubes against a tree); Dave the psychiatrist in his customary black Levi’s and turtleneck—and, of all people, Mrs. Barbour, in heels and a pearl-gray suit that looked like it cost more money than all the other people in the room made in a month.

My panic must have been written plainly on my face. Maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so alarmed if I’d understood a little better what wasn’t clear to me at the time: that I was a minor, and that my parent or guardian had to be present at an official interview—which was why anyone even vaguely construed as my advocate had been called in. But all I understood, when I saw all those faces and a tape recorder in the middle of the table, was that the official parties had convened to judge my fate and dispose of me as they saw fit.

Stiffly I sat and endured their warm-up questions (did I have any hobbies? Did I play any sports?) until it became clear to everyone that the preliminary chit-chat wasn’t loosening me up very much.

The bell rang for the end of class. Bang of lockers, murmur of voices out in the hall. “You’re dead, Thalheim,” some boy shouted gleefully.

The Italian guy—Ray, he said his name was—pulled up a chair in front of me, knee to knee. He was young, but heavy, with the air of a good-natured limo driver, and his downturned eyes had a moist, liquid, sleepy look, as if he drank.

“We just want to know what you remember,” he said. “Probe around in your memory, get a general picture of that morning, you know? Because maybe by remembering some of the little things, you might remember something that will help us.”

He was sitting so close I could smell his deodorant. “Like what?”

“Like what you ate for breakfast that morning. That’s a good place to start, huh?”

“Um—” I stared at the gold ID bracelet on his wrist. This wasn’t what I’d been expecting them to ask. The truth was: we hadn’t eaten breakfast at all that morning because I was in trouble at school and my mother was mad at me, but I was too embarrassed to say that.

“You don’t remember?”

“Pancakes,” I burst out desperately.

“Oh yeah?” Ray looked at me shrewdly. “Your mother make them?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she put in them? Blueberries, chocolate chips?”

I nodded.

“Both?”

I could feel everybody looking at me. Then Mr. Beeman said—as loftily as if he were standing in front of his Morals in Society class—“There’s no reason to invent an answer, if you don’t remember.”

The black guy—in the corner, with a notepad—gave Mr. Beeman a sharp warning glance.

“Actually, there seems to be some memory impairment,” interjected Mrs. Swanson in a low voice, toying with the glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. She was a grandmother who wore flowing white shirts and had a long gray braid down her back. Kids who got sent to her office for guidance called her “the Swami.” In her counseling sessions with me at school, besides dispensing the advice about the ice cubes, she had taught me a three-part breath to help release my emotions and made me draw a mandala representing my wounded heart. “He hit his head. Didn’t you, Theo?”

“Is that true?” said Ray, glancing up at me frankly.

“Yes.”

“Did you get it checked out by a doctor?”

“Not right away,” said Mrs. Swanson.

Mrs. Barbour crossed her ankles. “I took him to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian,” she said coolly. “When he got to my house, he was complaining of a headache. It was a day or so before we had it seen to. Nobody seems to have thought to ask him if he was hurt or not.”

Enrique, the social worker, began to speak up at this, but after a look from the older black cop (whose name has just come back to me: Morris) fell silent.

“Look, Theo,” said the guy Ray, tapping me on the knee. “I know you want to help us out. You do want to help us, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“That’s great. But if we ask you something and you don’t know? It’s okay to say you don’t know.”

“We just want to throw a whole lot of questions out there and see if we can draw your memory out about anything,” Morris said. “Are you cool with that?”

“You need anything?” said Ray, eyeing me closely. “A drink of water, maybe? A soda?”

I shook my head—no sodas were allowed on school property—just as Mr. Beeman said: “Sorry, no sodas permitted on school property.”

Ray made a give me a break face that I wasn’t sure if Mr. Beeman saw or not. “Sorry, kid, I tried,” he said, turning back to me. “I’ll run out and get you a soda at the deli if you feel like it later on, how about it? Now.” He clapped his hands together. “How long do you think you and your mother were in the building prior to the first explosion?”

“About an hour, I guess.”

“You guess or you know?”

“I guess.”

“You think it was more than an hour? Less than an hour?”

“I don’t think it was more than an hour,” I said, after a long pause.

“Describe to us your recollection of the incident.”

“I didn’t see what happened,” I said. “Everything was fine and then there was a loud flash and a bang—”

“A loud flash?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant the bang was loud.”

“You said a bang,” said the guy Morris, stepping forward. “Do you think you might be able to describe to us in a little more detail what the bang sounded like?”

“I don’t know. Just… loud,” I added, when they kept on looking at me like they expected something more.

In the silence that followed, I heard a stealthy clicking: Mrs. Barbour, with her head down, discreetly checking her BlackBerry for messages.

Morris cleared his throat. “What about a smell?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you notice any particular smell in the moments prior?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Nothing at all? You sure?”

As the questioning wore on—the same stuff over and over, switched around a little to confuse me, with every now and then something new thrown in—I steeled myself and waited hopelessly for them to work around to the painting. I would simply have to admit it and face the consequences, no matter what the consequences were (probably fairly dire, since I was well on my way to becoming a Ward of the State). At a couple of points, I was on the verge of blurting it out, in my terror. But the more questions they asked (where was I when I’d hit my head? Who had I seen or spoken to on my way downstairs?) the more it dawned on me that they didn’t know a thing about what had happened to me—what room I’d been in when the bomb exploded, or even what exit I’d taken out of the building.

They had a floor plan; the rooms had numbers instead of names, Gallery 19A and Gallery 19B, numbers and letters in a mazelike arrangement all the way up to 27. “Were you here when the initial blast occurred?” Ray said, pointing. “Or here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take your time.”

“I don’t know,” I repeated, a bit frantically. The diagram of the rooms had a confusing, computer-generated quality, like something from a video game or a reconstruction of Hitler’s bunker that I’d seen on the History Channel, that in truth didn’t make any sense or seem to represent the space as I remembered it.

He pointed to a different spot. “This square?” he said. “That’s a display plinth, with paintings on it. I know these rooms all look alike, but maybe you can remember where you were in relation to that?”

I stared hopelessly at the diagram and didn’t answer. (Part of the reason it looked so unfamiliar was that they were showing me the area where my mother’s body was found—rooms away from where I’d been when the bomb went off—although I didn’t realize that until later.)

“You didn’t see anybody on your way out,” said Morris encouragingly, repeating what I’d already told them.

I shook my head.

“Nothing you remember at all?”

“Well, I mean—bodies covered up. Equipment lying around.”

“Nobody coming in or out of the area of the explosion.”

“I didn’t see anybody,” I repeated doggedly. We had been over this.

“So you never saw firemen or rescue personnel.”

“No.”

“I suppose we can establish, then, that they’d been ordered out of the building by the time you came to. So we’re talking about a time lapse of forty minutes to an hour and a half after the initial explosion. Is that a safe assumption?”

I shrugged, limply.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Staring at the floor. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, and the silence that followed was so long and uncomfortable I thought I might break down crying.

“Do you recall hearing the second blast?”

“Pardon me for asking,” said Mr. Beeman, “but is this really necessary?”

Ray, my questioner, turned. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not sure I see the purpose of putting him through this.”

With careful neutrality, Morris said: “We’re investigating a crime scene. It’s our job to find out what happened in there.”

“Yes, but surely you must have other means of doing so for such routine matters. I would think they had all manner and variety of security cameras in there.”

“Sure they do,” said Ray, rather sharply. “Except cameras can’t see through dust and smoke. Or if they’re blown up to face the ceiling. Now,” he said, settling back in his chair with a sigh. “You mentioned smoke. Did you smell it or see it?”

I nodded.

“Which one? Saw or smelled?”

“Both.”

“What direction do you think it was coming from?”

I was about to say I didn’t know again, but Mr. Beeman had not finished making his point. “Forgive me, but I entirely fail to see the purpose in security cameras if they don’t operate in an emergency,” he said, to the room in general. “With technology today, and all that artwork—”

Ray turned his head as if to say something angry, but Morris, standing in the corner, raised his hand and spoke up.

“The boy’s an important witness. The surveillance system isn’t designed to withstand an event like this. Now, I’m sorry, but if you can’t stop it with the comments we’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”

“I’m here as this child’s advocate. I’ve the right to ask questions.”

“Not unless they pertain directly to the child’s welfare.”

“Oddly enough, I was under the impression that they did.”

At this Ray, in the chair in front of me, turned around. “Sir? If you continue to obstruct the proceedings?” he said. “You will have to leave the room.”

“I have no intention of obstructing you,” said Mr. Beeman in the tense silence that followed. “Nothing could be further from my mind, I assure you. Go on, please continue,” he said, with an irritated flick of the hand. “Far be it from me to stop you.”

On the questioning dragged. What direction had the smoke come from? What color was the flash? Who went in and out of the area in the moments prior? Had I noticed anything unusual, anything at all, before or after? I looked at the pictures they showed me—innocent vacation faces, nobody I recognized. Passport photos of Asian tourists and senior citizens, moms and acned teenagers smiling against blue studio backgrounds—ordinary faces, unmemorable, yet all somehow smelling of tragedy. Then we went back to the diagram. Could I maybe just try, just one more time, to pinpoint my location on this map? Here, or here? What about here?

“I don’t remember.” I kept on saying it: partly because I really wasn’t sure, partly because I was frightened and anxious for the interview to come to a close, but also because there was an air of restlessness and distinct impatience in the room; the other adults seemed already to have agreed silently among themselves that I didn’t know anything, and should be left alone.

And then, before I knew it, it was over. “Theo,” said Ray, standing up and placing a meaty hand on my shoulder, “I want to thank you, buddy, for doing what you could for us.”

“That’s okay,” I said, jarred by how abruptly it had all come to an end.

“I know exactly how hard this was for you. Nobody but nobody wants to relive this type of stuff. It’s like—” he made a picture frame with his hands—“we’re putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure out what went on in there, and you’ve maybe got some pieces of the puzzle that nobody else has got. You really helped us a lot by letting us talk to you.”

“If you remember anything else,” said Morris, leaning in to give me a card (which Mrs. Barbour quickly intercepted and tucked in her purse), “you’ll call us, won’t you? You’ll remind him, won’t you, miss,” he said to Mrs. Barbour, “to phone us if he has anything else to say? The office number’s right on that card but—” he took a pen from his pocket—“you don’t mind, can I have it back for a second, please?”

Without a word, Mrs. Barbour opened her bag and handed the card back to him.

“Right, right.” He clicked the pen out and scribbled a number on the back. “That’s my cell phone there. You can always leave a message at my office, but if you can’t reach me there, phone me on my cell, all right?”

As everyone was milling around the entrance, Mrs. Swanson floated up and put her arm around me, in the cozy way she had. “Hi there,” she said, confidentially, as if she were my tightest friend in the world. “How’s it going?”

I looked away, made an okay, I guess face.

She stroked my arm like I was her favorite cat. “Good for you. I know that must have been tough. Would you like to go to my office for a few minutes?”

With dismay, I noticed Dave the psychiatrist hovering in the background, and behind him Enrique, hands on hips, with an expectant half-smile on his face.

“Please,” I said, and my desperation must have been audible in my voice, “I want to get back to class.”

She squeezed my arm, and—I noticed—threw a glance at Dave and Enrique. “Sure,” she said. “Where are you this period? I’ll walk you down.”

ix.

BY THEN IT WAS English—last class of the day. We were studying the poetry of Walt Whitman:

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,

They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again

Vacant faces. The classroom was hot and drowsy in the late afternoon, windows open, traffic noises floating up from West End Avenue. Kids leaned on their elbows and drew pictures in the margins of their spiral notebooks.

I stared out the window, out at the grimy water tank on the roof opposite. The interrogation (as I thought of it) had disturbed me greatly, kicking up a wall of the disjointed sensations that crashed over me at unexpected moments: a choking burn of chemicals and smoke, sparks and wires, the blanched chill of emergency lights, overpowering enough to blank me out. It happened at random times, at school or out on the street—frozen in mid-step as it washed over me again, the girl’s eyes locked on mine in the queer, skewed instant before the world blew apart. Sometimes I’d come to, uncertain what had just been said to me, to find my lab partner in biology staring at me, or the guy whose way I was blocking in front of the cold-drinks case at the Korean market saying look kid, move it, I aint got all day.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?

Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

They had shown me no photographs I recognized of the girl—or of the old man either. Quietly, I put my left hand in my jacket pocket and felt around for the ring. On our vocabulary list a few days before we’d had the word consanguinity: joined in blood. The old man’s face had been so torn up and ruined I couldn’t even say exactly what he’d looked like, and yet I remembered all too well the warm slick feel of his blood on my hands—especially since in some way the blood was still there, I could still smell it and taste it in my mouth, and it made me understand why people talked about blood brothers and how blood bound people together. My English class had read Macbeth in the fall, but only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.

x.

BECAUSE, APPARENTLY, SOMETIMES I woke Andy by thrashing and crying out in my sleep, Mrs. Barbour had started giving me a little green pill called Elavil that she explained would keep me from being scared at night. This was embarrassing, especially since my dreams weren’t even full-blown nightmares but only troubled interludes where my mother was working late and stranded without a ride—sometimes upstate, in some burned-out area with junked cars and chained dogs barking in the yards. Uneasily I searched for her in service elevators and abandoned buildings, waited for her in the dark at strange bus stops, glimpsed women who looked like her in the windows of passing trains and just missed grabbing up the telephone when she called me at the Barbours’ house—disappointments and near-misses that thumped me around and woke me with a sharp hiss of breath, lying queasy and sweaty in the morning light. The bad part wasn’t trying to find her, but waking up and remembering she was dead.

With the green pills, even these dreams faded into airless murk. (It strikes me now, though it didn’t then, that Mrs. Barbour was well out of line by giving me unprescribed medication on top of the yellow capsules and tiny orange footballs Dave the Shrink had prescribed me.) Sleep, when it came, was like tumbling into a pit, and often I had a hard time waking up in the morning.

“Black tea, that’s the ticket,” said Mr. Barbour one morning when I was nodding off at breakfast, pouring me a cup from his own well-stewed pot. “Assam Supreme. As strong as Mother makes it. It’ll flush the medication right out of your system. Judy Garland? Before shows? Well, my grandmother told me that Sid Luft used to always phone down to the Chinese restaurant for a big pot of tea to knock all the barbs out of her system, this was London, I believe, the Palladium, and strong tea was the only thing that did the trick, sometimes they’d have a hard time waking her up, you know, just getting her out of bed and dressed—”

“He can’t drink that, it’s like battery acid,” said Mrs. Barbour, dropping in two sugar cubes and pouring in a heavy slug of cream before she handed the cup over to me. “Theo, I hate to keep harping on this, but you really must eat something.”

“Okay,” I said sleepily, but without moving to take a bite of my blueberry muffin. Food tasted like cardboard; I hadn’t been hungry in weeks.

“Would you rather have cinnamon toast? Or oatmeal?”

“It’s completely ridiculous that you won’t let us have coffee,” said Andy, who was in the habit of buying himself a huge Starbucks on the way to school and on the way home every afternoon, without his parents’ knowledge. “You’re very behind the times on this.”

“Possibly,” Mrs. Barbour said coldly.

“Even half a cup would help. It’s unreasonable for you to expect me to go into Advanced Placement Chemistry at 8:45 in the morning with no caffeine.”

“Sob, sob,” said Mr. Barbour, without looking up from the paper.

“Your attitude is very unhelpful. Everyone else is allowed to drink it.”

“I happen to know that’s not true,” said Mrs. Barbour. “Betsy Ingersoll told me—”

“Maybe Mrs. Ingersoll doesn’t let Sabine drink coffee, but it would take a whole lot more than a cup of coffee to get Sabine Ingersoll into Advanced Placement anything.”

“That’s uncalled for, Andy, and very unkind.”

“Well, it’s only the truth,” said Andy coolly. “Sabine is as dumb as a post. I suppose she may as well safeguard her health since she has so little else going for her.”

“Brains aren’t everything, darling. Would you eat an egg if Etta poached you one?” Mrs. Barbour said, turning to me. “Or fried? Or scrambled? Or whatever you like?”

“I like scrambled eggs!” Toddy said. “I can eat four!”

“No you can’t, pal,” said Mr. Barbour.

“Yes I can! I can eat six! I can eat the whole box!”

“It’s not as if I’m asking for Dexedrine,” Andy said. “Although I could get it at school if I felt like it.”

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. Etta the cook, I noticed, was standing in the door. “What about that egg?”

“Nobody ever asks us what we want for breakfast,” Kitsey said; and even though she said it in a very loud voice, everyone pretended not to hear.

xi.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow—in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable—a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen: Hobart and Blackwell. Ring the green bell.

I lay staring at the ceiling, not wanting to stir. The words were as clear and crisp as if someone had handed them to me typed on a slip of paper. And yet—most wonderfully—an expanse of forgotten memory had opened up and floated to the surface with them, like one of those paper pellets from Chinatown that bloom and swell into flowers when dropped into a glass of water.

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming? Not long before my mother died, I’d woken convinced that a (nonexistent) schoolteacher named Mrs. Malt had put ground glass in my food because I had no discipline—in the world of my dream, a perfectly logical series of events—and I’d lain in a muddle of worry for two or three minutes before I came to my senses.