I went into the bathroom and began filling the tub, as I had once filled it in my sleep. She would sleep through it all if I could get enough warm water before the generator quit entirely. I wished I had a bath-toy to give her in case she did wake up, something like Wilhelm the Spouting Whale, but she’d have her dog, and she probably wouldn’t wake up, anyway. No freezing baptism under a handpump for Kyra. I was not cruel, and I was not crazy.
I had only disposable razors in the medicine cabinet, no good for the other job ahead of me. Not efficient enough. But one of the kitchen steak knives would do. If I filled the washbasin with water that was really hot, I wouldn’t even feel it. A letter T on each arm, the top bar drawn across the wrists —
For a moment I came out of the zone. A voice — my own speaking as some combination of Jo and Mattie — screamed: What are you thinking about? Oh Mike, what in God’s name are you thinking about?
Then the thunder boomed, the lights flickered, and the rain began to pour down again, driven by the wind. I went back into that place where everything was clear, my course indisputable. Let it all end — the sorrow, the hurt, the fear. I didn’t want to think anymore about how Mattie had danced with her toes on the Frisbee as if it were a spotlight. I didn’t want to be there when Kyra woke up, didn’t want to see the misery fill her eyes. I didn’t want to get through the night ahead, the day that was coming beyond it, or the day that was coming after that. They were all cars on the same old mystery train. Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it. I raised my arms. In the medicine cabinet mirror a murky figure — a Shape — raised its own in a kind of jocular greeting. It was me. It had been me all along, and that was all right. That was just fine.
I dropped to one knee and checked the water. It was coming in nice and warm. Good. Even if the generator quit now, it would be fine. The tub was an old one, a deep one. As I walked down to the kitchen to get the knife, I thought about climbing in with her after I had finished cutting my wrists in the hotter water of the basin. No, I decided. It might be misinterpreted by the people who would come here later on, people with nasty minds and nastier assumptions. The ones who’d come when the storm was over and the trees across the road cleared away. No, after her bath I would dry her and put her back in bed with Strickland in her hand. I’d sit across the room from her, in the rocking chair by the bedroom windows. I would spread some towels in my lap to keep as much of the blood off my pants as I could, and eventually I would go to sleep, too.
Bunter’s bell was still ringing. Much louder now. It was getting on my nerves, and if it kept on that way it might even wake the baby. I decided to pull it down and silence it for good. I crossed the room, and as I did a strong gust of air blew past me. It wasn’t a draft from the broken kitchen window; this was that warm subway-air again. It blew the Tough Stuff crossword book onto the floor, but the paperweight on the manuscript kept the loose pages from following. As I looked in that direction, Bunter’s bell fell silent.
A voice sighed across the dim room. Words I couldn’t make out. And what did they matter?
What did one more manifestation — one more blast of hot air from the Great Beyond — matter?
Thunder rolled and the sigh came again. This time, as the generator died and the lights went out, plunging the room into gray shadow, I got one word in the clear: Nineteen.
I turned on my heels, making a nearly complete circle. I finished up looking across the shadowy room at the manuscript of My Childhood Friend. Suddenly the light broke. Understanding arrived.
Not the crossword book. Not the phone book, either.
My book. My manuscript.
I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already. And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down nineteen, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript — in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.
On page nineteen of My Childhood Friend, Tiffi Taylor — the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting — was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:
FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19
over that way, I was sure of it,’ she said, ‘but
when I couldn’t see her anywhere, I went to
look in the hot tub.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘What I
saw made me feel like screaming, Andy — Karen was
underwater. All that was out was her hand . . . the
nails were turning purple. After that . . . I guess I
dived in, but I don’t remember; I was zoned out.
Everything from then on is like a dream where stuff
runs together in your mind. The yard-guy — Sanborn —
shoved me aside and dived. His foot hit me in the
throat and I couldn’t swallow for a week. He yanked
up on Karen’s arm. I thought he’d pull it off her
damn shoulder, but he got her. He got her.’
In the gloom, Drake saw she was weeping. ‘God.
Oh God, I thought she was dead. I was sure she was.’
I knew at once, but laid my steno pad along the left margin of the manuscript so I could see it better. Reading down, as you’d read a vertical crossword-puzzle answer, the first letter of each line spelled the message which had been there almost since I began the book: owls undEr stud O
Then, allowing for the indent next-to-last line from the bottom: owls undEr studIO
Bill Dean, my caretaker, is sitting behind the wheel of his truck. He has accomplished his two purposes in coming here — welcoming me back to the TR and warning me off Mattie Devore. Now he’s ready to go. He smiles at me, displaying those big false teeth, those Roebuckers. ‘If you get a chance, you ought to look for the owls,’ he tells me. I ask him what Jo would have wanted with a couple of plastic owls and he replies that they keep the crows from shitting up the woodwork. I accept that, I have other things to think about, but still . . . ‘It was like she’d come down to do that errand special,’ he says. It never crosses my mind — not then, at least — that in Indian folklore, owls have another purpose: they are said to keep evil spirits away. If Jo knew that plastic owls would scare the crows off, she would have known that. It was just the sort of information she picked up and tucked away. My inquisitive wife. My brilliant scatterbrain.
Thunder rolled. Lightning ate at the clouds like spills of bright acid. I stood by the dining-room table with the manuscript in my unsteady hands.
‘Christ, Jo,’ I whispered. ‘What did you find out?’
And why didn’t you tell me?
But I thought I knew the answer to that. She hadn’t told me because I was somehow like Max Devore; his great-grandfather and my own had shit in the same pit. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was.
And she hadn’t told her own brother, either. I took a weird kind of comfort from that.
I began to leaf through the manuscript, my skin crawling.
Andy Drake rarely frowned in Michael Noonan’s My Childhood Friend. He scowled instead, because there’s an owl in every scowl. Before coming to Florida, John Shackleford had been living in Studio City, California. Drake’s first meeting with Regina Whiting occurred in her studio. Ray Garraty’s last-known address was the Studio Apartments in Key Largo. Regina Whiting’s best friend was Steffie Underwood. Steffi’s husband was Towle Underwood — there was a good one, two for the price of one.