Help her.
I decided I would at least try.
‘Harold Oblowski Literary Agency.’
‘Come to Belize with me, Nola,’ I said. ‘I need you. We’ll make beautiful love at midnight, when the full moon turns the beach to a bone.’
‘Hello, Mr. Noonan,’ she said. No sense of humor had Nola. No sense of romance, either. In some ways that made her perfect for the Oblowski Agency. ‘Would you like to speak to Harold?’
‘If he’s in.’
‘He is. Please hold.’
One nice thing about being a best selling author — even one whose books only appear, as a general rule, on lists that go to fifteen — is that your agent almost always happens to be in. Another is if he’s vacationing on Nantucket, he’ll be in to you there. A third is that the time you spend on hold is usually quite short.
‘Mike!’ he cried. ‘How’s the lake? I thought about you all weekend!’
Yeah, I thought, and pigs will whistle.
‘Things are fine in general but shitty in one particular, Harold. I need to talk to a lawyer. I thought first about calling Ward Hankins for a recommendation, but then I decided I wanted somebody a little more high-powered than Ward was likely to know. Someone with filed teeth and a taste for human flesh would be nice.’
This time Harold didn’t bother with the long-pause routine. ‘What’s up, Mike? Are you in trouble?’
Thump once for yes, twice for no, I thought, and for one wild moment thought of actually doing just that. I remembered finishing Christy Brown’s memoir, Down All the Days, and wondering what it would be like to write an entire book with the pen grasped between the toes of your left foot.
Now I wondered what it would be like to go through eternity with no way to communicate but rapping on the cellar wall. And even then only certain people would be able to hear and understand you . . . and only those certain people at certain times.
Jo, was it you? And if it was, why did you answer both ways?
‘Mike? Are you there?’
‘Yes. This isn’t really my trouble, Harold, so cool your jets. I do have a problem, though. Your main guy is Goldacre, right?’
‘Right. I’ll call him right aw — ‘
‘But he deals primarily with contracts law.’ I was thinking out loud now, and when I paused, Harold didn’t fill it. Sometimes he’s an all-right guy. Most times, really. ‘Call him for me anyway, would you? Tell him I need to talk to an attorney with a good working knowledge of child-custody
law. Have him put me in touch with the best one who’s free to take a case immediately. One who can be in court with me Friday, if that’s necessary.’
‘Is it paternity?’ he asked, sounding both respectful and afraid.
‘No, custody.’ I thought about telling him to get the whole story from the Lawyer to Be Named Later, but Harold deserved better . . . and would demand to hear my version sooner or later anyway, no matter what the lawyer told him. I gave him an account of my Fourth of July morning and its aftermath. I stuck with the Devores, mentioning nothing about voices, crying children, or thumps in the dark. Harold only interrupted once, and that was when he realized who the villain of the piece was.
‘You’re asking for trouble,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’m in for a certain measure of it in any case,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided I want to dish out a little as well, that’s all.’
‘You will not have the peace and quiet that a writer needs to do his best work,’ Harold said in an amusingly prim voice. I wondered what the reaction would be if I said that was okay, I hadn’t written anything more riveting than a grocery list since Jo died, and maybe this would stir me up a little. But I didn’t. Never let em see you sweat, the Noonan clan’s motto. Someone should carve DON’T WORRY I’M FINE on the door of the family crypt.
Then I thought: help r.
‘That young woman needs a friend,’ I said, ‘and Jo would have wanted me to be one to her. Jo didn’t like it when the little folks got stepped on.’
‘You think?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, I’ll see who I can find. And Mike . . . do you want me to come up on Friday for this depo?’
‘No.’ It came out sounding needlessly abrupt and was followed by a silence that seemed not calculated but hurt. ‘Listen, Harold, my caretaker said the actual custody hearing is scheduled soon.
If it happens and you still want to come up, I’ll give you a call. I can always use your moral support
— you know that.’
‘In my case it’s immoral support,’ he replied, but he sounded cheery again.
We said goodbye. I walked back to the fridge and looked at the magnets. They were still scattered hell to breakfast, and that was sort of a relief. Even the spirits must have to rest sometimes.
I took the cordless phone, went out onto the deck, and plonked down in the chair where I’d been on the night of the Fourth, when Devore called. Even after my visit from ‘daddy,’ I could still hardly believe that conversation. Devore had called me a liar; I had told him to stick my telephone number up his ass. We were off to a great start as neighbors.
I pulled the chair a little closer to the edge of the deck, which dropped a giddy forty feet or so to the slope between Sara’s backside and the lake. I looked for the green woman I’d seen while swimming, telling myself not to be a dope — things like that you can see only from one angle, stand even ten feet off to one side or the other and there’s nothing to look at. But this was apparently a case of the exception’s proving the rule. I was both amused and a little uneasy to realize that the birch down there by The Street looked like a woman from the land side as well as from the lake. Some of it was due to the pine just behind it — that bare branch jutting off to the north like a bony pointing arm — but not all of it. From back here the birch’s white limbs and narrow leaves still made a woman’s shape, and when the wind shook the lower levels of the tree, the green and silver swirled like long skirts.
I had said no to Harold’s well-meant offer to come up almost before it was fully articulated, and as I looked at the tree-woman, rather ghostly in her own right, I knew why: Harold was loud, Harold was insensitive to nuance, Harold might frighten off whatever was here. I didn’t want that. I was scared, yes — standing on those dark cellar stairs and listening to the thumps from just below me, I had been fucking terrified — but I had also felt fully alive for the first time in years. I was touching something in Sara that was entirely beyond my experience, and it fascinated me.
The cordless phone rang in my lap, making me jump. I grabbed it, expecting Max Devore or perhaps Footman, his overgolded minion. It turned out to be a lawyer named John Storrow, who sounded as if he might have graduated from law school fairly recently — like last week. Still, he worked for the firm of Avery, McLain, and Bernstein on Park Avenue, and Park Avenue is a pretty good address for a lawyer, even one who still has a few of his milk-teeth. If Henry Goldacre said Storrow was good, he probably was. And his specialty was custody law.
‘Now tell me what’s happening up there,’ he said when the introductions were over and the background had been sketched in.
I did my best, feeling my spirits rise a little as the tale wound on. There’s something oddly comforting about talking to a legal guy once the billable-hours clock has started running; you have passed the magical point at which a lawyer becomes your lawyer. Your lawyer is warm, your lawyer is sympathetic, your lawyer makes notes on a yellow pad and nods in all the right places.
Most of the questions your lawyer asks are questions you can answer. And if you can’t, your lawyer will help you find a way to do so, by God. Your lawyer is always on your side. Your enemies are his enemies. To him you are never shit but always Shinola.
When I had finished, John Storrow said: ‘Wow. I’m surprised the papers haven’t gotten hold of this.’
‘That never occurred to me.’ But I could see his point. The Devore family saga wasn’t for the New York Times or Boston Globe, probably not even for the Derry News, but in weekly supermarket tabs like The National Enquirer or Inside View, it would fit like a glove — instead of the girl, King Kong decides to snatch the girl’s innocent child and carry it with him to the top of the Empire State Building. Oh, eek, unhand that baby, you brute. It wasn’t front-page stuff, no blood or celebrity morgue shots, but as a page nine shouter it would do nicely. In my mind I composed a headline blaring over side-by-side pix of Warrington’s Lodge and Mattie’s rusty doublewide: COMPU-KING LIVES IN SPLENDOR AS HE TRIES TO TAKE YOUNG BEAUTY’S ONLY CHILD.