"Barely an hour a night since the start of October." Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. "The way things are going, I'll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don't know how I'll survive it, I'm barely surviving now."
Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: "How come I've never seen your light?"
"For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine," she said.
"I've been living in the same place for thirty-five years, and I don't need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don't like nosybird questions, and I'm not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation."
Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then Joined in. His arm was still around her? (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away Rap I didn't know and didn't really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.
"You're not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?"
"Nope. Absolutely not."
She nodded, still smiling, "That's all right, then. You never even saw me moving ing around in my living room, did you?"
"No."
"That's because there's no streetlamp in front of my house. But there's one in front of yours. I've seen you in that ratty old wing chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea," I always assumed I was the only one, he thought, and suddenly a question-both comic and embarrassing-popped into his head.
How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?
Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said, "I really couldn't make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don't have to worry about that. Also, I hope you know that if you'd ever started doing anything you wouldn't want people to see you doing, I wouldn't have looked. I wasn't exactly raised in a barn, you know." He smiled and patted her hand. "I do know that, Lois. it's just...
"I was sitting there and you know, it was a surprise. To find out that while I was watching the street, somebody was watching me."
She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said, Don't worry, Ralph-you were just another part of the scenery to me.
He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. "So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? JUST sleeplessness? If that's what it was, I certainly sympathize. There's really no just about it, is there?"
Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. "There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love."
She fell quiet. Ralph didn't prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.
"Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?"
"You go to Litchfield, too?"
"Used to go to Litchfield. He was Carolyn's recommendation.
I'll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits." Her upper lip drew back. "Double-crossing son of a bitch!"
"What happened?"
"I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves-for nature to take her course, as they say.
Not that I didn't try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things."
"Honeycomb?" Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn't help it.
What ' an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day... and it's not even one in the afternoon yet.
"Honeycomb? What about it? Does that help?"
"No," Ralph said, grinning more widely than ever, "doesn't help