Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Fourteen

1

The day before they left, Jeanne Fauve took her daughter Laura aside and said in a whisper, “Where are you going from here?”

They stood in the parlor with the faded Persian rug and the relentless tick of the mantel clock. The air was still and dry; the furnace was humming. Upstairs, Michael and Karen were busy packing.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Up to Burleigh, maybe—see what we can find out.”

“I think,” her mother said, “if you’re determined to do this, what you need is to talk to Tim.”

Laura said, “You know where he is?”

“Not really. But we got this from him at Christmas… maybe it’s useful to you?”

Jeanne took the card from the pocket of her quilted housecoat. It was not a Christmas card, just an ordinary postcard, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air, and the white buildings on the hills beyond it like some painter’s dream of a city.

It was the only communication she had received from her son in the past ten years.

Laura accepted the card from her mother. She turned it over and read the message there. Merry Christmas was all it said, but she recognized the handwriting—after all these years—as Tim’s. The message was mysterious; she could not discern either sincerity or irony in it.

But there was a return address there, too, crabbed and small at the top of the card. Someplace in San Francisco.

Laura looked up somberly.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Be careful,” her mother said.

2

That last night in the old house in Polger Valley, Karen stayed up and wrote in her journal.

Rustle of cold wind at the window, scratch of pen on paper.

I think about Daddy, she wrote.

The pen hesitated on the page.

She wrote, I carry him inside me and I have carried him inside me longer than I knew.

He means well, she wrote.

But then she scratched it out.

She wrote, We think we live in a place or we know a person or we have a parent, but it isn’t true. We are those things. They build us. They’re what we’re made of.

I’m made out of Willis, Karen wrote. I see him in the mirror more often than I like. I hear his voice in my voice.

She discovered that her hand was shaking.

She wrote—bearing down hard with the point of the Bic—I think about Michael, too.

Michael is made out of me.

And in this dangerous thing we have begun– dear God, she wrote, I wonder if that is enough.

She closed the journal and was about to switch off the small desk light when Laura said, “Wait.”

Karen turned abruptly. “You scared me … I didn’t know you were awake.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.”

They were alone in the room with midnight snow heaped on the windowsill and the faint, far hum of the furnace. Karen wore a quilted robe over her nightgown; Laura was tucked up under a comforter.

“Been quite a visit,” Laura said.

Karen smiled. “Hell of a visit.”

“Foundlings,” Laura said.

“Gypsies,” Karen said.

“That’s us.” Laura sat up in bed hugging her knees. “Have you looked in the bottom drawer?”

Karen frowned. She had never been especially fond of surprises. And she was tired. But she opened the big drawer slowly.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“You remember them, too?”

From among the toys Karen picked out the pink, fleshy baby doll. It was tiny; it was naked; dust had infiltrated the pores of the plastic.

“Baby,” she said. She looked at Laura wonderingly. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“None of it was ever a dream. That’s the scary part, isn’t it?”

Karen explained about the dream she had dreamt periodically almost all of her life, the house on Constantinople and Tim’s doorway into that cold industrial city. Laura nodded and said, “That’s more or less how I remember it. Tim was always the explorer. Still is, maybe.”

She replaced the doll where she had found it. There was something unpleasant in the feel of the plastic. “You think we can find him?”

“I think we have to try.”

“You think he still hates us?”

“You think he ever really did?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. The question troubled her. “It’s been so long …”

She yawned in spite of herself.

“Hey, me, too,” Laura said. “Bedtime. Long drive in the morning.”

But they left the light burning through the night.

3

Willis helped Karen carry the last bag out to the car.

Jeanne stood on the porch with a heavy cloth coat clutched around her. It was a cold day but clear; the sky was a deep winter blue. Everybody had said goodbye; everybody had waved. Michael and Laura were huddled in the car now; the engine was running impatiently.

Willis hesitated with his hand on the open lid of the trunk. His eyes were inscrutable behind his bifocals.

He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder. He said, “You understand why I did it?”

She knew instantly what he meant by that. The fear, she thought, the not-talking… and the beatings.

She nodded once, uncomfortably.

Willis said, “But that’s worth jack shit, right? Understanding doesn’t make it better—right?”

She regarded him in his checkerboard winter jacket and his hunting cap, his gray Marine-cut sideburns and his stubbled cheeks.

“No,” she said sadly. “It doesn’t.”

Willis said, “I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“If I could help—” But he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there. His hands were limp and motionless.

Karen climbed in the car up front with Laura, and rolled up the window and did not look back. She did not want Daddy to see her, because she was crying, and how had that happened? What sense did that make?

4

Willis stood a long time watching the car disappear up the road.

There was a raw wind coming from the north down the valley of the Polger and his cheeks were red and burning, but Willis didn’t care. He watched the car vanish around the corner from Montpelier onto Riverside, and stood a long time after that, hand up to shield his eyes against the sun, staring down these old row houses toward the far brown ribbon of the Mon.

He was surprised when he felt Jeanne’s hands on his arms, his wife steering him gently up the porch.

“Come in and warm up,” she said.

Her voice was kind. But the cold air lingered, the rooms were all too big, and the shadows were crowded with voices and time.

Interlude
NOVUS ORDO

1

Cardinal Palestrina was introduced to the upper echelons of the Washington diplomatic community, a few of whom were aware of his task here: the German envoy Max Vierheller and a man named Korchnoi from the Court of the Tsar.

Korchnoi drew him aside at a party at a Republican senator’s Virginia estate: led him out to a glassed veranda and lectured him as snow fell beyond the perimeter of the hothouse plants.

“Of course you know,” the Russian legate said in English, “it’s not simply a matter of this weapon or that weapon.” He gestured effusively with a goblet of Aztec wine. “What the Americans are offering is their involvement in the war. Does it really matter what gift they choose to signify it? It’s ceremony. Theater. The important thing is the prospect of an alliance between Rome and America. The infidels are terrified of it.”

“Until recently,” Cardinal Palestrina observed, “the Americans were the infidels.”

“Hardly,” Korchnoi said. “Heretics perhaps. A mongrel nation of Freemasons and Protestants—isn’t that what the clerics say? But the industrial power, the wealth, the military strength… these are things you can see for yourself.”

“Clearly,” Palestrina admitted. “I have no objection to the alliance. Nor does Rome—the Vatican and the Senate are agreed on that. But there’s more at stake than the fortunes of an alliance. You must have read De Officiis Civitatum. Adrian is a realistic pontiff but hardly a pragmatist. If we lend ecclesiastical approval to this project in particular—”

“Pardon me,” Korchnoi said, “but you begin to sound like an ideologue … a Jesuit.”

No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. The Jesuits had a rather more hard-nosed view of political reality. What I am, he thought, is a provincial bishop caught up in affairs beyond his station. I should never have gone to Rome. He might have been happy in some rural parish, vineyards and simple farmers and so on. He might have kept his scholarship down to a less conspicuous level. It was the unwise love of wisdom that had drawn him into ecclesiastical politics in the first place: a sin of pride or hubris.

Cardinal Palestrina was powerfully homesick.

“ Rome and America,” Korchnoi said, his eyes beginning to glaze. ” America and Europe. Think of it… think of it.”

In the morning Palestrina registered a Marconi message at the Vatican Consulate—essentially, that he had arrived and that the intelligence branch of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs had been largely correct in its surmises—and then hired a taxi to carry him to the DRI.

He despised this building. He had official identification now, a photocard clasped to his clothing. He walked from the front gate through the snow to the inner building, the tiny portion of it in which he had learned to navigate. He went directly to Carl Neumann’s office.

“Is Walker still in the building?”

“For a time,” Neumann said. “I thought you’d finished with him.”

“A few more questions.”

“Well, if it’s necessary. We’re happy to cooperate, Your Eminence, as long as circumstances allow. But do understand, we’re approaching something of a cusp with this effort. Can you find the interrogation room by yourself?”

“No,” Palestrina confessed. Humiliating but true.

“I’ll take you there,” Neumann said. “And I’ll arrange for Walker to be waiting.”

Once again, Cardinal Palestrina joined the Gray Man in this cold and windowless cubicle. Walker regarded him with blank expectation.

Palestrina extracted a notebook from his robes. He had jotted down some of the questions he meant to ask. Too, the notebook gave him something to do with his hands … an excuse for avoiding Walker’s eyes.

He felt the hard contour of the chair beneath him. He felt an unpleasant churning in his stomach.

He began, “I want to make sure I have a fair and accurate understanding of what you’ve told me. I apologize if I repeat myself. You were one of three original, ah, products of this research?”

“There were three of us,” Walker agreed.

“And the other two escaped.”

“Yes.”

“They bore children.” “Yes.”

“You killed those two, but the children survived.”

The question seemed to trouble Walker. “The killing,” he said, “was a mistake. I’ve admitted to that. I was punished for it. I had sorcels to bring back Julia and William, but it was the children we were most interested in. But the children weren’t there! And William wouldn’t say where they’d hidden them! So I reached out …”

The Gray Man faltered.

Cardinal Palestrina said, “You killed them both– with your own hands?”

“I sent them home,” Walker said primly. “Certain parts of them. But of course you can’t be in two places at once.” He shook his head. “It was very bloody.”

Cardinal Palestrina closed his eyes briefly.

He said, “You were instructed to do this?”

“No,” Walker said. “I told you—I was punished for it.”

“And you couldn’t simply recover the children yourself?”

“They were too young to follow. They had no—” He seemed to search for a word. “No song. I couldn’t hear them.”

“But I assume you were able to trace them at a later date.”

“When they began to exercise their talents.”

“But you didn’t bring them back.”

“We wanted to make certain. No more mistakes.

We understood… Mr. Neumann explained… work like this takes time. There are spells that are best developed slowly. They come to maturity. But we planted the seed,” Walker said, “when the children were very young.”

“The seed?” Cardinal Palestrina asked.

“Bindings,” Walker said.

“Bindings of what nature?”

“Vanity and anger and fear.” The Gray Man smiled to himself. “A mirror, the kingdoms of the earth, her firstborn son…”

“Spells that would come to fruition in the future,” Palestrina interpreted.

“Yes.”

“Can you see the future?”

“No. But there are people here in the building who can. One of our other projects. ‘As through a glass, darkly’—you know the expression? We rely on their advice. It isn’t infallible but in this case it seems to be accurate.”

“The sorcels are coming to fruition.”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Oh yes.”

“And you’re certain you can recover the third generation—the male child?”

“He’s the one you want,” Walker said. “I can bring him back.”

Cardinal Palestrina looked up from his notes. “One other thing… something you said at our last session, something I didn’t understand. You mentioned that you had help. What did you mean by that?”

Walker—his face old and lined but still disturbingly childlike—beamed at Cardinal Palestrina. “His name,” the Gray Man said, “is Tim.”

Cardinal Palestrina stood to leave the room, hesitated a moment, and finally turned back. An unscheduled question had occurred to him; he wasn’t sure how to ask it.

Or whether he should. An Antiochene bishop from Malabar, visiting Rome for some ecumenical event, had once confided in Palestrina his belief that the profoundest of the venial sins was longing. As pride is the sin of the angels, longing is the sin of the clergy. Then, Cardinal Palestrina thought, I must be guilty.

He said, “What you call the plenum … is it infinite in extent?”

“There are worlds upon worlds,” Walker said. “An infinity. That’s what they tell me.”

“But surely you can’t see it, or feel it, or whatever you do—not all of it?”

“No. Not all of it. And I can only travel where they go. But sometimes I dream of other places.”

Palestrina whispered, “Is everything out there– everything we could imagine?”

“Maybe,” Walker said.

“Is—” But the Cardinal was embarrassed by his own question. “Is God out there?”

The Gray Man smiled faintly. “God is everywhere… isn’t he?”

“And Paradise?” Palestrina said. “A world where mankind never fell from grace? The Garden, Mr. Walker? Is that out there too?”

Walker laughed.

“If it is,” he said, “I’ve never found it.”

Cardinal Palestrina turned away before Walker could see him blushing; the door clattered shut with a shocking finality.

2

Walker watched in bewilderment as the Papist emissary left the room.

He was inclined to like Cardinal Palestrina, who seemed like a well-meaning person. But he was disturbed by the Cardinal’s nervous tics, his expression of barely restrained queasiness. And now this business about Paradise. It was not something Walker had encountered before, least of all in the corridors of the DRI.

Lacking other instruction, Walker returned to his own room deep in a subcellar of the Institute, down a corridor where sweating pipes ran overhead.

Walker’s room contained a carpet and a framed photograph of the Rocky Mountains; a spring-mattress bed with a thin cotton blanket; and a television set with a round, bulky tube on a gooseneck swivel. He used the television sparingly. There was never anything to watch but the government channel, news and public affairs and a few shabby variety shows. Of these, Walker preferred the news. He liked the maps, the animated arrows darting across the Mediterranean toward Sicily. He liked the aerial photos of Turkish cities as European aircraft flew over them, props whirling, bombs tumbling like confetti.

He understood the political stakes that had brought Cardinal Palestrina across the Atlantic; he understood the war in the Middle East. Walker wasn’t stupid. But—although he understood– Walker simply didn’t care very much. There had always been wars and there would always be wars; there were wars everywhere. War had nothing to do with it. It was the search itself that obsessed him: the nagging sense of presence across those unfathomable distances. The complex, luminous web of magical obligation. A longing for the completion that this effort would bring him: a fulfillment.

Walker believed—although he seldom allowed the thought to become explicit—that he had lost something long ago, and that bringing Karen White’s son Michael back to the DRI would return it to him. What was this lost thing? Well, he didn’t know. Maybe something as ethereal as a scent, a memory, a feeling; or maybe something tangible, a reward. Something he had owned once; something which had slipped away. Walker often had dreams in which he lost his wallet or his hat, and he would wake up groping the bedsheets frantically—it was here, I know it was here somewhere.

But he never permitted himself to dwell on this. If he thought about it too much when he was alone—and he was almost always alone—his eyes would tear, his fists would clench. The DRI surgeons had cauterized most of his capacity for emotion, but the emotions he did feel were capricious and sometimes scalding. He tried diligently to suppress them.

But he wanted that lost thing back.

After dinner in the commissary Walker went to see Tim.

Neumann had given Tim a luxurious room on the third floor, high enough to afford him a view of the city, which was dark now, dark clouds rivering above it. Tim was at the window peering out. Walker, who was not stupid, and who understood the nature of the spells that had been cast over the years, was careful to stand erect, to fix a smile on his face, to assume an air of authority.

Doing so, he caught sight of his own reflection in the window and thought, How old I seem! Of course, he was old. He had lost track of his precise age but he was certainly old enough to be Tim’s father—that was in the nature of things. And Tim was a grown-up man. Not a middle-aged man but not a young man, either. Walker was vigorous but he knew that age and time were pressing him and he hoped he would not die before he recovered the precious thing he had lost.

He said, “You like the city?”

Tim turned to face him.

Timothy Fauve had changed a great deal over the last six months. Now his eyes were clear, his clothes and countenance were clean, he looked healthy. His dark hair was down to his shoulders but it was not matted. He had shaved. His hands were steady.

Tim said, “Hello, Walker.” Added, “I don’t think it’s the kind of place you really like. Let’s say I appreciate it.”

Walker broadened his smile slightly. “You’ve come a long way.”

“About as far as you can go. All kinds of ways.” “We won’t be here much longer. Are you ready?” “I think so.”

This was more tentative than Walker liked. He frowned and saw Tim react with a wince. “You understand how hard we’ve worked to get to this stage.”

Tim nodded vigorously.

“You know what we’ve done for you.”

“Sure I do. Of course.”

“And what’s at stake.”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain you’re ready to finish it?” “Absolutely,” Tim said.

“Good.” Walker relaxed. “How about a game of chess?”

He gave away odds of a vizier and a rook. Walker was a good chess player. Swift, methodical, and clean —he wielded the chess pieces like a surgeon wielding a knife.

Part Three
HOMELAND

Chapter Fifteen

1

They made it back to the California border three days out of Pennsylvania. Laura translated them in and out of a dry, hot world in which the roads were broad, traffic was light, and the horizon seemed always a little nearer. They stopped once at a roadside diner, but the menu posted over the counter was in a cursive script that looked more Persian than English—which implied, among other things, that their money wouldn’t be any good. So Laura took them back onto an interstate and they pulled over at a Stuckey’s outside Kingman, Arizona.

Karen said, “I didn’t know you could do all this.” Her sister shrugged. “Neither did I.” “I was thinking,” Karen said, “it might attract attention.”

“I don’t guess that matters now. There’s attention on us already.”

“It’s a question of time,” Karen said. “Do you get that feeling?”

“I think we should be in a hurry. Yes.”

Karen ordered a club sandwich and a Coke. Michael asked for a hamburger and Laura ordered the salad. Waiting, Karen spread out her hands on the yellowed marble counter. “Things feel different now.”

Laura said, “I know what you mean. I can do things I couldn’t do before.”

“Because it’s more urgent. That’s what I feel—the urgency.”

The waitress brought lunch. Karen looked at Michael, who looked at his hamburger. Tides of sunlight bore down through the big green-tinted windows. Everything was still; the air-conditioned air was still. Poised, Karen thought.

“Eat up,” Laura urged. “We ought to get moving.”

It was Karen’s first trip to San Francisco.

Gavin had been here a few times on business. He always said it was a beautiful city. And it was, Karen thought—from a distance. She liked the hills and the old white scalloped buildings; she liked the low clouds racing in from the ocean. But once you got into it, it was a city like any other city, same crowded sidewalks and diesel buses and neighborhoods you had to avoid.

They checked into a Ramada Inn on Market Street. The clerk accepted Karen’s Visa card, but she wondered how much longer she could get away with that. It was an account she had shared with Gavin; now that she was gone, he would probably cut her off.

But there were more immediate things to worry about.

Each of them carried one of the three big suitcases up a carpeted flight of stairs to the second floor. The room was big and smelled faintly musty, but the sheets were crisp and the towels were clean. The bathroom was a temple walled with mirrors.

Laura unpacked the postcard Jeanne had given her. “We could go there tonight. It’s not that far.”

But Karen shook her head firmly. “It’s late already. I’m tired.”

“Well—food and a night’s sleep sure wouldn’t hurt. There’s a coffee shop in the lobby—will that do?”

“I want to shower and turn in early,” Karen said. “You two go, all right?”

Laura hesitated at the door. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. I just need some privacy.”

Michael ordered yet another burger. Laura said, “You’ll kill yourself with that stuff, you know. They shoot the cattle full of hormones. It’s disgusting.”

Michael smiled. “All of a sudden you’re a vegetarian?”

“I just think, if you’re going to eat meat, you should really do it. Big thick steaks from big fat cows. There used to be a restaurant not too far from here that would cook you a steak for a reasonable price. I mean real meat, not gristle and TVP.”

“You used to live around here?”

“ Berkeley. But that was a long time ago.”

“The sixties,” Michael said.

Laura smiled to herself. It always sounded odd when people said “the sixties” like that—like the name of a place, an address. “Yes,” she said, “the sixties.”

Michael took a big bite out of his burger. “You were a hippie?”

“That’s really a dumb word, Michael. I always thought so. It’s a Time magazine kind of word.”

“Well,” he said, “you know.”

She nodded reluctantly. “I guess you could say that’s what I was. A Berkeley hippie, anyhow. I came down to the Haight sometimes. I danced at the Fillmore—I guess that qualifies.”

Michael said, “There was a thing about it on TV a couple of years ago. The Summer of Love.”

Laura’s smile receded. “The Summer of Love was nothing but hype. It was the end of everything. Ten thousand people trying to live in the Panhandle. You know what Haight Street was by the end of the so-called Summer of Love? It was where a lot of homeless teenagers went to get hepatitis. Or VD. Or raped, or pregnant. It was a disaster … everybody was talking about going away.”

Michael said soberly, “Like you did.”

“Yes.”

“You went to Turquoise Beach.”

“Well, that’s where I ended up.”

“Is that what it was like here—I mean when it was good? Was the Haight like Turquoise Beach?”

Laura shook her head emphatically. “The Haight was unique. It was full of all these crazy idealists, poets and saints—there’s no way I can sit here and tell you what it was like. It was like holding the world in your hand. Turquoise Beach is good, you know; it’s the best I could find. But it’s slower there. There isn’t the passion. There isn’t—”

But she found herself faltering.

Michael said, “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

He sat across the table from her, her sister’s child, very eighties in a slash haircut and tight T-shirt. Strange to think that he had not existed in 1967. She thought suddenly, He could be mine, I could have had a child like this one, I could have raised him. Instead I moved away to Never-Never Land… where you can be young forever. Or almost forever. Or until you wake up one day, gray-haired and menopausal.

“I know what it’s like,” Michael said, and he was talking softly now, almost to himself. “Looking for a better world—I can understand that.”

Laura put down her fork. “Do it,” she said. Her appetite was gone. Her voice had hardened. “Do it, Michael. But look hard, all right? Don’t give up too soon.”

Karen showered and then stretched out on one of the big twin hotel beds. The mattress was hard—she had gotten used to the old plush beds back home—but that was all right. She had intended to order something up from room service, but she discovered she didn’t feel like eating. She had opened the horizontal blinds, but there was only the blankness of the parking lot outside.

She looked at the telephone.

She picked up the receiver, thinking she might call room service after all. But when the hotel operator answered Karen found herself asking for a line out, and maybe this was what she had meant to do all along; maybe this was why she had sent Michael and Laura out on their own.

She called Toronto.

It was the number Gavin had left her all those months ago. She thought, If the woman answers I’ll hang up. But maybe Gavin would be there. Three hours difference, she thought. Back home it was dinnertime. Maybe Gavin was having dinner in his girlfriend’s apartment overlooking the lake. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe the drapes were open and they could see the snow coming down in the darkness over the lake.

She waited through the fourth ring and then the fifth and then her impulse was to put down the receiver, drop it right now, but there was a faraway click and then Gavin’s voice saying, “Hello?”

“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “It’s me.”

Gavin said, “Christ, Karen—where are you?”

“Pretty far away.” But that sounded silly. “In the States,” she added. She didn’t want him to know exactly.

“What the hell are you doing down there?”

“We had to get away.”

“Michael is with you?”

“Sure he’s with me … of course he is.”

“You know you left a righteous mess up here, don’t you? I filed a report with the police. I had to let them into the house. It was strange. All those Mayflower boxes stacked up. It was like the Mary Celeste. And the school’s been calling me about Michael. Have you got him in school, at least?”

“Michael’s all right,” she said defensively.

“Do you have a rational explanation for any of this?”

None that you would understand, Karen thought. “Not really.”

“You had some kind of breakdown, is that it? You took Michael and you left town? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she said.

“You understand this looks very bad. This could weigh against you when it comes to custody.”

She didn’t understand at first. Custody of what? Then it dawned on her. “Gavin, that’s crazy!”

“Obviously it’s not something I anticipated. I mean, I was the one who left. I admit that. But I talked to Diane and it seems to us that Michael might need a more stable home environment.”

“Stable?”

“Rather than being taken out of school and hauled all over the country.” Petulantly: “I haven’t seen him for months, you know. Maybe you think that’s not important to me. But I’m his father, for God’s sake.”

Karen felt cold. She wondered why she had called at all. It had occurred to her that Gavin might be worried. She had wanted to reassure him.

He said, “Tell me where you are. Better yet, tell me when you’re coming home.”

“You can’t just do that,” Karen said. “You can’t just give orders.”

“That’s not the issue, is it? Michael is the issue.”

“You can’t have him.”

“I mean his welfare. His school. His health. I’ll have to tell the police you called.” “Michael is fine!”

But it felt like a lie when she said it. Gavin said, “It’s not me you’re letting down, you know. It’s him.” “He’s fine.”

“All I want is an address. Even a phone number. Is Michael there? Let me talk to him. I—”

But she slammed down the receiver in its cradle.

After dinner Laura and Michael walked a couple of blocks down Market Street. It was late and this was not the greatest neighborhood, but the street was busy with people. A middle-aged man with a Salvador Dali mustache panhandled them for change; Laura gave him a quarter. “God bless,” he said happily. It made her think again of the Haight, of her Berkeley days. Of how much she had lost since then—slowly, without noticing.

Karen was asleep when they let themselves back into the hotel room. “You wash up,” Laura told her nephew. “I’ll take the last shift.”

Ten minutes later the bathroom was hers. She took a long, deliberate shower, the water hot as she could stand it; she washed her hair and toweled herself dry as the steam faded from the mirrors.

The bathroom light was a merciless cool fluorescence and the mirrors were everywhere.

Old, Laura thought.

Look at that woman in the mirror, she thought. That woman thinks she’s young. She moves the way she moved when she was twenty. She thinks she’s young and she thinks she’s pretty.

But she’s kidding herself on both counts.

Shit, Laura thought. It’s just depression and road-weariness and being scared. Hey, she thought, all you have to do is squint your eyes and blur away the wrinkles.

The wrinkles, the sags, the crow’s-feet. Too late, she thought. Too late, too late, too late… you’re old now.

The fairest in the land. Hardly.

Too late for love and too late for children. She had played too long before bedtime and now all the good TV shows were over and the lights were about to go off.

Maudlin, she thought. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Well, she was.

Bed, she told herself. Sleep. A person needs her beauty sleep.

She moved across the faded plush hotel carpet slowly, hearing the creak of her own frail bones in the silent darkness.