Not that this was the same. Far from it.
He wanted desperately to turn and watch his wife's sleeping form, to watch her chest rise and fall, her features silhouetted in the barest golden glow from the illumination coming in through the window from the streetlight. Michael wished he could reach over and caress her face, even perhaps lean down and kiss her forehead, or the spot just behind her jaw where she had a tiny mole.
But he did not dare to turn toward her, did not dare to even look at her. For they were not alone in the room.
In the far, shadowy corner, untouched by the dim golden glow and yet somehow containing her own faint illumination, was the lost girl. She had been standing there for more than two hours, silently watching him. Michael refused to look at her now, but earlier he had not been able to stop himself. Maybe the doctor was right and it wasn't drugs or a brain tumor; maybe he was just losing his mind. He wanted to watch her, to see her. And so he stared at the little blond girl standing there in the darkness. She only watched him, and she wept silently, fear etched upon her features. But fear for herself or for him he couldn't tell.
Time had passed since he had last looked over at her. From his position he could see the digital readout on the cable box on top of the television. It was going on two in the morning. Perhaps by now she had gone.
But he shivered under his covers, and gnawed his lip harder. For he knew she was still there. He could
feel
her.
Come find me.
She had not spoken the words. Even her tears were shed in silence. But still, Michael heard them in his head, an echo of the first time she had spoken.
Now he lay in his bed and he waited. Waited for the dawn. It was a long way off, but he knew he would not sleep. He had a powerful hope that when the sun rose, its light would somehow disperse the image of the girl in the shadowed corner of the room. Until then, he would not look. And he would not . . . absolutely not . . . wake Jillian.
What frightened him most was not that he might have a brain tumor, or even the prospect that he was losing his mind, though that was certainly terrible. What froze him there in his bed was the fear that whispered through his head and shivered up his spine, the fear that neither of those things was true. That if he woke Jillian up and told her to look into the corner, she would not tell him he was imagining things. His greatest fear was that he would wake Jillian and she would see the girl.
And that would make it all real.
So Michael lay there, very still, listening to Jillian breathe, and praying that she would sleep until morning.
And that the morning would make a difference.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jillian was long gone by the time Michael dragged himself out of bed the next morning. The sky was chalk white, the daylight pale and wan where it washed through the windows. Nothing fell from the sky. Not a raindrop, nor a hint of hail or sleet. On the street outside the Dansky home, the world looked too quiet, too empty, as though some silent apocalypse had taken place during the night.
True to the vow he had made to himself, the darkness outside his window had lightened to an impossible indigo and then the night had begun to bleed into morning before he had finally fallen asleep. Jillian had shaken him awake less than an hour later, and Michael recalled muttering something to her about needing to sleep, about working at home today. Now he glanced at the clock and saw the digital numbers burning an accusatory red atop the television: 10:47
A
.
M
.
Just a few hours' sleep. Not nearly enough.
But the day was wasting, and there was something he needed to do. Something of vital importance. The appointment that his doctor had set up for him with the shrink wasn't until next Wednesday. Which might as well have been a hundred years away, to his mind. An eternity separated now from then.
Michael stretched, muscles in his back and neck popping. He pulled off the white T-shirt that he had worn to bed and tossed it into the laundry basket beside the long dresser beneath the mirror he and Jillian shared. His reflection revealed gray circles under his eyes and a shadow of stubble on his chin. His face was puffy and he reached up to touch the places beneath his eyes, where the elasticity of his skin seemed to have given way. Staring into his own eyes, he could see an emptiness there, a kind of void where some of the emotion he ought to have been feeling had spilled out. He felt numb, as though an echo was rebounding inside his head. His eyes were dim.
Haunted.
On his nightstand was a full glass of water. Michael and Jillian both took water to bed with them at night, and normally both glasses were nearly empty by morning. But during the night Michael had not taken a sip. He had not dared to reach for the glass.
A splinter of pain punctured his chest, perhaps a little tear in the fabric of whatever he had used to blanket his fear and dread. For a long moment he stared at Jillian's side of the bed. Her glass was empty. The book she was reading—a family drama from Joyce Carol Oates—lay there on top of a copy of the latest
Bon Appétit
. The drawer of her nightstand was open and a pair of cotton French-cut panties had been left sticking out, like the top tissue in a Kleenex box. She had been in a hurry this morning. Had she been running late, or just in a rush to get to work?
At last he remembered why she was in a hurry. Jillian wanted to leave the office early tonight to get home in time for dinner with Bob Ryan and whichever of his political cronies were joining them. An image flashed through Michael's mind of Ryan at the masquerade that night. The gunslinger. The Man With No Name. And the guy had the cold, flinty eyes for the role. Perhaps he looked more like Clint Eastwood's costar in those old movies, Lee Van Cleef, than like Eastwood himself. But that was better, in a way. For in Michael's mind, Bob Ryan would always be remembered in that outfit, would always be the cruel-eyed, hawk-nosed Lee Van Cleef.
Michael realized that Bob Ryan frightened him a little. Not for real. Not in any way that meant something. But the man was intimidating.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, Jilly.” For Jillian, he would be back here and dressed and ready to go to dinner by six o'clock. But the time between now and then belonged to Michael.
Or, really, to Michael's obsession. If he ever hoped to overcome it, he was going to have to find that girl. To find that house.
Even with the pallid daylight that filled the bedroom, Michael had managed to avoid looking into
that
corner thus far. The corner where the ghost of the lost girl had stood throughout the night, watching him. Crying. Pleading with him in silence. Now, though, he did look.
The corner was empty.
The house was empty, except for him.
Michael let out a long breath and nodded to himself. He stepped out of his underwear and tossed it into the laundry basket as well, then went to the TV and turned on CNN. A woman in Louisiana had driven her car off a bridge and into a river, with her seven-year-old son, and her five-month-old baby strapped into a car seat in the back. The seven-year-old boy had saved the baby and swum to safety. The mother had drowned. According to police, the boy reported the mother declaring that there was too much evil in the world and that the three of them would be better off in God's hands.
A still photograph of the boy came up onscreen. His eyes were wide and his sandy blond hair was tousled. He wore a grin, as though he had just been surprised. Michael wondered how long it might be before he smiled like that again.
When the next story came on, about the current standings in the NFL, he felt relief, as though he had been set free of the sadness of the story before it. With the television on the house was not so quiet and he did not feel as lonesome. But that was the irony of television. Too many people considered it a friend, but it was a friend that lacked the courtesy not to tell you what you didn't want to hear.
His body smelled stale. He turned the volume up on the TV, then went into the bathroom and turned the water in the shower to its hottest setting. Steam began to fog the room moments later, clouding the mirror over the sink. The drone of CNN voices combated the noise of the shower. He was glad for the voices, and for the steam. When he stepped in and closed the glass door of the shower stall, he kept his gaze fixed on the interior wall and did not look out into the bathroom.
Michael Dansky had never been claustrophobic, but of late he had grown hesitant to enter enclosed spaces. His shower was brief, and he hurried out of the bathroom, dripping onto the carpet as he dried off in front of the television set, letting the news story about some political imbroglio distract him.
After the long, sleepless night, he wanted very much to be out of his house. But he was not foolish enough to believe that things would return to normal once he was out the door. The world had been twisted up, and it would take more than a new day to fix it.
He did not bother to shave. Once he was out of the shower, it felt as though he was being propelled, as though he was on fast-forward. Michael put on blue jeans and shoes, a fresh T-shirt, and a hooded New England Patriots sweatshirt that would probably not be warm enough.
As he went out of the house through the door that led from the kitchen to the garage, he noticed a note from Jillian on the kitchen table. There was a big heart drawn on it. Michael did not even slow down to figure out what the note said. Something about dinner with Lee Van Cleef, he was sure. But he would be back in time for that. It would be getting dark at that point, though, and he hoped that Jillian came home before nightfall.
He didn't really want to be in the house by himself when it got dark. The first time he had seen the girl it had been in his office, with the sunlight shining outside. But at night it was more difficult for him to believe that it was all in his head, all his imagination.
I
T WAS A WORK DAY FOR
for most people, so the traffic was light, but the roads weren’t completely deserted. So much for his personal apocalypse. He drove out Old Route 12 but went directly to his destination without stopping. It would be better to start from the beginning, back where it had all begun.
The Wayside Inn was not open for lunch on weekdays. Michael parked at an odd angle in the center of the lot and climbed out of the car. There were no other vehicles there but he went up to the front door anyway. Some invisible tether inside his chest seemed to guide him, as though there was an anchor here, as though he might grab hold of one end of his lifeline and follow it out to the point where his whole world had fallen apart. Michael was an optimist by nature. And still a young man. But not so young and not so optimistic that he believed anything could be that simple. Life did not work that way. If you broke something, you had to fix it. There was no going back and undoing it.
Especially if it was a human thing. A life. A friendship. A trust.
A mind.
So there was no magic to be found here. But perhaps if he could follow that tether back out to the place where it had all gone wrong, if he could retrace the steps he had made that night, he could set his mind and heart at ease. And if he could, then maybe the lost girl, regardless of whether she was a ghost or an obsession, would stop haunting him.
The pavement scuffed under his shoes as he left the Wayside Inn and crossed the lot back to his car. A cold wind eddied down low, and an empty beer can rolled and then tumbled end over end across the tar. Michael paused to watch. The wind hesitated and then gusted several times, teasing the beer can, almost letting it go and then seizing it again, carrying it away.
He glanced once more at the Wayside Inn. In his mind's eye he could see quite clearly the festivities from that night. Jillian, so beautiful in her gown. The glass she had dropped over the banister. Teddy Polito in his Henry VIII costume. And Michael as D'Artagnan. Bowing with a flourish. The feather in that stupid hat.
Escorting Jillian to the car, hoping she wouldn't fall down.
The face of the Wayside Inn was closed, the windows secure, the doors locked, the lights off. The place wasn't dead, though. It was only sleeping.
Back in the car, he turned the key in the ignition and sat a moment while the engine purred. He imagined watching himself load Jillian into the backseat, watching himself back out of the space and then start out of the parking lot. Michael put the car in gear and gave it some gas, picturing his Saturday night self driving off ahead of him. He pulled out of the parking lot of the Wayside Inn, in pursuit of a memory that he hoped would heal him.
In his mind he tried to re-create that night. He could remember Jillian snoring lightly, unconscious on the backseat. Following the same route he had used on Saturday evening, he made his way to Old Route 12 again and started back toward home. More than ever, he could recall with perfect clarity that he had not been drunk when he left the Wayside Inn. At the masquerade, he had had several bottles of Guinness, but Jillian had been the drunk one. He had to look out for her. And he would never have gotten himself drunk when he knew that he had to drive his wife home. No way would he have risked Jillian for another bottle of Guinness.
The tires hummed along the road, now, and Michael's sleepless night was catching up with him. His eyes felt heavy. The chalk white sky had burned away a bit and there was some blue up above. Sunlight gleamed off the hood. He continued to follow his memory.
Here,
he thought.
He blinked and glanced out the windows at both sides of the road. There was an antique-looking gas station coming up on the left, one of the first in the state; the owners cultivated its appearance to make it part service station and part tourist attraction. It was a bit of the local color of living in the Merrimack Valley.
Right about here he had become very drowsy, and the feeling of drunkenness had deepened. His head had felt as though it was stuffed with cotton; even now, days later, with the sun shining and the sky turning blue, he could taste the aluminum flavor in the back of his throat. The memory merged with his lack of sleep and Michael reached out to turn up the radio, tuning it to a hard rock station. Something that would thump along in time with the ache that was beginning to pulse in the back of his skull. He opened the window, letting the cold air in, and continued to pursue the echo of his Saturday night.
Old Route 12 wound lazily through the valley on a path that was fascinatingly circuitous. Nobody would approve such a road in modern times. It would be considered ridiculously inefficient. But with the hills rising up on both sides and the thick woods that banked the sides of the road in many places, it was a peaceful route to travel. Even the small strip malls were bordered by forest. There were houses set back in the trees along the road, and numerous streets branched off of Old Route 12 at varying angles, leading into neighborhoods and developments that could have been used to trace the history of housing in Massachusetts for the past half-century.
His eyelids fluttered. “Shit,” Michael whispered, and he sat up straighter. He drove past a convenience store on the left and instantly regretted it. A coffee or even a bottle of Coke would have been welcome at the moment. Anything with caffeine. He let out a long breath and pushed the fingers of his left hand through his hair.
He forced his mind back to Saturday night again, watching the road ahead. There was a signpost:
ENTERING JAMESON
. The road gently curved to the left, then cut dramatically back in the other direction. It straightened out for a couple of hundred yards. The tires hummed and the engine purred and he nodded to himself as his eyes focused on the turn up ahead. The road turned right again. Straight ahead there were only trees, including a massive oak whose trunk split about ten feet up into a towering wishbone.
Right here. You could have died here,
he thought.
Could have killed Jilly, too.
The effects of the Guinness and whatever else was in his system had gotten the better of him right here. He had closed his eyes and, for just a few moments, had fallen asleep behind the wheel of the car. Now, six days later, with the sun shining on a cold November afternoon, he slowed and took the turn with both caution and attention.
In his mind's eye, he saw what happened immediately afterward. He had regained control of the car, stopped the tires from skidding, gotten the steering wheel straightened out, and then looked up just in time to see the girl on the side of the road. He was too far over, on the soft shoulder. She was silhouetted in his headlights, big eyes and a halo of blond hair, blue jeans and that peasant blouse.