“Well, it’s certainly not chosen retirement.” I realized the conversation had taken a rather amusing turn. I’d come primarily to sell her on John Storrow—to shove John Storrow down her throat, if that was what it tookand instead I was for the first time discussing my inability to work. For the first time with anyone. “So it’s a block.”
“I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. I think novelists may come equipped with a certain number of stories to tell—they’re built into the software. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.”
“I doubt that,” she said. “Maybe you’ll write now that you’re down here.
Maybe that’s part of the reason you came back.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Are you scared?”
“Sometimes. Mostly about what I’ll do for the rest of my life. I’m no good at boats in bottles, and my wife was the one with the green thumb.”
“I’m scared, too,” she said. “Scared a lot. All the time now, it seems like.”
“That he’ll win his custody case? Mattie, that’s what I—”
“The custody case is only part of it,” she said. “I’m scared just to be here, on the TR. It started early this summer, long after I knew Devore meant to get Ki away from me if he could. And it’s getting worse. In a way it’s like watching thunderheads gather over New Hampshire and then come piling across the lake. I can’t put it any better than that, except…” She shifted, crossing her legs and then bending forward to pull the skirt of her dress against the line of her shin, as if she were cold. “Except that I’ve woken up several times lately, sure that I wasn’t in the bedroom alone. Once when I was sure I wasn’t in the bed alone. Sometimes it’s just a feeling—like a headache, only in your nerves—and sometimes I think I can hear whispering, or crying. I made a cake one night—about two weeks ago, this was—and forgot to put the flour away. The next morning the cannister was overturned, and the flour was spilled on the counter. Someone had written ’hello’ in it. I thought at first it was Ki, but she said she didn’t do it. Besides, it wasn’t her printing, hers is all straggly. I don’t know if she could even write hello. Hi, maybe, but… Mike, you don’t think he could be sending someone around to try and freak me out, do you? I mean that’s just stupid, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of something thumping the insulation in the dark as I stood on the stairs. I thought of hello printed with magnets on my refrigerator door, and a child sobbing in the dark. My skin felt more than cold; it felt numb. A headache in the nerves, that was good, that was exactly how you felt when something reached around the wall of the real world and touched you on the nape of the neck. “Maybe it’s ghosts,” she said, and smiled in an uncertain way that was more frightened than amused. I opened my mouth to tell her about what had been happening at I IZIR’!FI IZIN IX 1 IN k… x Sara Laughs, then closed it again. There was a clear choice to be made here: either we could be sidetracked into a discussion of the paranormal, or we could come back to the visible world. The one where Max Devore was trying to steal himself a kid. “Yeah,” I said. “The spirits are about to speak.”
“I wish I could see your face better. There was something on it just then. What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But right now I think we’d better talk about Kyra. Okay?”
“Okay.” In the faint glow of the hibachi I could see her settling herself in her chair, as if to take a blow. “I’ve been subpoenaed to give a deposition in Castle Rock on Friday. Before Elmer Durgin, who is Kyra’s guardian ad litem—”
“That pompous little toad isn’t Ki’s anything!” she burst out. “He’s in my father-in-law’s hip pocket, just like Dickie Osgood, old Max’s pet real-estate guy! Dickie and Elmer Durgin drink together down at The Mellow Tiger, or at least they did until this business really got going.
Then someone probably told them it would look bad, and they stopped.”
“The papers were served by a deputy named George Footman.”
“Just one more of the usual suspects,” Mattie said in a thin voice. “Dickie Osgood’s a snake, but George Footman’s a junkyard dog. He’s been suspended off the cops twice. Once more and he can work for Max Devore full-time.”
“Well, he scared me. I tried not to show it, but he did. And people who scare me make me angry. I called my agent in New York and then hired a lawyer. One who makes a specialty of child-custody cases.”
I tried to see how she was taking this and couldn’t, although we were sitting fairly close together. But she still had that set look, like a woman who expects to take some hard blows. Or perhaps for Mattie the blows had already started to fall. Slowly, not allowing myself to rush, I went through my conversation with John Storrow. I emphasized what Storrow had said about sexual equality—that it was apt to be a negative force in her case, making it easier for Judge Rancourt to take Kyra away. I also came down hard on the fact that Devore could have all the lawyers he wanted—not to men tion sympathetic witnesses, with Richard Osgood running around the TR and spreading Devore’s dough—but that the court wasn’t obligated to treat her to so much as an ice cream cone. I finished by telling her that John wanted to talk to one of us tomorrow at eleven, and that it should be her. Then I waited. The silence spun out, broken only by crickets and the faint revving of some kid’s unmuffled truck. Up Route 68, the white fluorescents went out as the Lakeview Market finished another day of summer trade. I didn’t like Mattie’s quiet; it seemed like the prelude to an explosion. A Yankee explosion. I held my peace and waited for her to ask me what gave me the right to meddle in her business. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and defeated. It hurt to hear her sounding that way, but like the cynical look on her face earlier, it wasn’t surprising. And I hardened myself against it as best I could. Hey, Mattie, tough old world. Pick one. “Why would you do this?” she asked. “Why would you hire an expensive New York lawyer to take my case? That is what you’re offering, isn’t it? It’s got to be, because I sure can’t hire him. I got thirty thousand dollars’ insurance money when Lance died, and was lucky to get that. It was a policy he bought from one of his Warrington’s friends, almost as a joke, but without it I would have lost the trailer last winter. They may love Dickie Brooks at Western Savings, but they don’t give a rat’s ass for Mattie Stanchfield Devore. After taxes I make about a hundred a week at the library. So you’re offering to pay. Right?”
“Right.”
“Why? You don’t even know us.”
“Because…” I trailed off. I seem to remember wanting Jo to step in at that point, asking my mind to supply her voice, which I could then pass on to Mattie in my own. But Jo didn’t come. I was flying solo. “Because now I do nothing that makes a difference,” I said at last, and once again the words astonished me.
“And I do know you. I’ve eaten your food, I’ve read Ki a story and had her fall asleep in my lap… and maybe I saved her life the other day when I grabbed her out of the road. We’ll never know for sure, but maybe I did. You know what the Chinese say about something like that?” I didn’t expect an answer, the question was more rhetorical than real, but she surprised me. Not for the last time, either. “That if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them.”
“Yes. It’s also about what’s fair and what’s right, but I think mostly it’s about wanting to be part of something where I make a difference. I look back on the four years since my wife died, and there’s nothing there. Not even a book where Marjorie the shy typist meets a handsome stranger.” She sat thinking this over, watching as a fully loaded pulptruck snored past on the highway, its headlights glaring and its load of logs swaying from side to side like the hips of an overweight woman. “Don’t you root for us,” she said at last. She spoke in a low, unexpectedly fierce voice.