In the night room Page 0,120

to be to write a book like lost boy lost girl. “How weird do you have to be to call yourself MonsterMan?” Tim asked. “We’re all in this together.” There was Vinnie the Vinster of Baltimore, Maryland; Paulie’s Playhouse of St. Petersburg, Florida; the Owl and the Fox, otherwise Jim and Randy, of Cleveland, Ohio (“You really want to make us quiver in our jammy-roos, don’t you, Tim?”); and many more, the Bills and Bobs and Jennys of morning talk radio, each with their seven-minute segments in which they chaffed with each other, updated the traffic reports, and handed off to newscasters with stories about mangled children, traffic accidents, municipal graft, and homicidal snipers. Tim ate his second Danish during a run of commercials in St. Louis, Missouri, and by the time he started to get hungry again had arrived in California, where drive time was particularly intense. (“You’re a well-known writer, you live in New York—tell me, what do you think of our governor?” “He’s a peach of a guy,” Tim said.) At seven minutes past 12:00, he finished his session with Ted Witherspoon and Molly Jackson of Ted and Molly’s Good Gettin’ Up Morning Show, broadcast from downtown Bellingham, Washington, and staggered over to the sofa, where Willy was sailing around London with Muriel Spark.

“Are they always like that?” she asked.

“You see why they’re so much fun to do.”

“They always ask the same questions, over and over?”

“It’s more like I give the same answers, over and over.”

“Why do you do that?”

“They’re the only answers I know,” he said. “I have to go back to bed now. I need some sleep.”

“Sleep for half an hour, and I’ll order a room service lunch.”

He looked down at the white bag, into which her right hand was dipping. It seemed to be less than a third full.

Forty-five minutes later, when the waiter rolled his cart into the room, Willy quietly opened the bedroom door and found Tim writing in his journal.

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

During lunch, I tore a page out of my notebook and wrote out, in block caps, WCHWHLLDN, and asked Willy if it meant anything to her. Chewing, she looked over, thought for a second, and said, “Sure. It’s simple.”

“What does it mean, then?”

“Just put in the vowels. I’m not going to do it for you.”

“Is there supposed to be a Y in there?”

“Hah! You decide.” Her mood changed, and her eyes, looking a bit swollen, swung toward me. “I sense that today is a big day for the home team. What are we going to do?”

I took a couple of slow breaths. “Could you stand to look at that house again?”

“The one behind your brother’s, where I had Lily Kalendar’s childhood?”

Willy knew exactly which house I meant. She closed her eyes and made internal judgments I could only guess about. Maybe she measured the spaces in the honeycombs and counted hummingbird wings. Her eyes opened, and she said, “Yes. It’s not going to shock me, this time. Actually, we have to go there. I know what I’m supposed to do.”

“I hope you’re going to tell me. I’ve never really understood what you could do, much less were supposed to do.”

“I’m sure that’s the truth,” she said, taking up my confession with a kind of forgiving bitterness that lifted me off the hook even as it sank the barbs deeper into me. “You never understood what I was going to do, but you should have. You even wrote it, you idiot.”

“Where?”

“As if I’d tell you. No, it was in what you didn’t write.”

What I didn’t write? This baffled me, but I kept my mouth shut.

Willy knew perfectly well that I had failed to understand: that I had failed her. “Do you remember our conversation in that restaurant in Willard with the nosy waitress?”

“Of course I remember that conversation.”

“Then remember what you told me. I was going to be healed.”

Even more baffled than the first time, I asked, “Did I say that?”

“No. I said it, just now. But it was what you meant.”

And she was right, that was what I had meant—that Willy Patrick was to be healed. I understood it now. Willy had perceived what I had not said about what I was never going to write. That seemed perfect for our situation; it was a kind of summation.

“Only I don’t think it was true,” she said. “It was just what you wanted to believe. You were lying to yourself, because you didn’t want to lie to me. I’m through.