In the night room Page 0,83

passed a little airport on our left, where prop planes sat outside hangars in the sun. I paused at a stop sign, then turned right on Euclid Avenue, waiting for her answer.

“It seems to me that everything’s a little brighter now.”

“Brighter,” I said, stung.

“Hold on. Are you trying to insinuate that . . . No. I won’t even say it.”

She wouldn’t say it, but I knew what it was. The first seed of recognition had just fallen on ground prepared for it by whatever it is you feel when half of your hand disappears and you need six candy bars to bring it back.

“How much brighter?” I asked, unable to let this go.

“Only a little. You want to know the biggest difference? Before I wound up in that bookstore, I had the feeling that someone or something was pulling my strings and making me do things I didn’t actually want to do. And now, I still feel that way, but I know who’s pulling my strings and moving me around. You.”

“Do you like it better this way?”

“Yes. I do like it better this way.” She checked her hands for signs of transparency. “Do you think I’m going to disappear, like the bloodstains?”

“Unless we can fix a mistake I made in Millhaven last year.”

“We’re going to Millhaven to fix something?”

“I know none of this makes sense, Willy, and when it does, if that ever happens, you’re not going to like it much.”

“But why? What are we doing?” Her face began to tremble, and she looked in my eyes for a reassurance she did not find. For about thirty seconds, she fell apart. I would have embraced her, but she fended me off by every now and then removing one of her hands from her eyes and clouting me in the chest. I pulled over to the side of the road.

“I don’t know why I believe you.” Willy wiped her eyes and cleaned her palms by smearing them over the sleeve of my jacket.

“I do, Willy,” I said. “Before we get to Millhaven, you will, too, probably. If I explained it to you now, it would be the one thing you would refuse to believe.”

“I couldn’t have anything to do with a mistake you made last year in Millhaven. I never went near Millhaven last year, and I didn’t know you.”

“What did you do last year, Willy? Can you remember a single thing you did in 2002?”

She shook her shoulders and gave me a scowling, insulted glance. “In 2002, I wrote In the Night Room. That’s what I did that year. You probably don’t know this, but I started the book in a place, a psychiatric community you could call it, known as the Institute, in Stockwell, Massachusetts.”

Now she was daring me to find fault with her, and self-doubt turned her confidence brazen. “It’s a wonderful place, and it did me a lot of good. There was this doctor there, Dr. Bollis. I used to call him Dr. Bollocks, but he was great. Because of him, I could write again.”

“In 2001, I went to a psychiatric community that sounds very similar,” I said. “And the treatment I had there was wonderful for me, too. I could sort of put myself back together.”

She grew a shade less defensive. “So you should understand. What was the reason you came unglued, or wasn’t there anything specific?”

“On September 11, I saw people jump from the World Trade Center. And then the ruin and all the death you could feel around you. It brought back too many traumatic things from Vietnam, and I couldn’t cope anymore.”

“Oh, poor Tim,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes again. “My poor honey.” She shifted sideways and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I wiped my slimy hands on your beautiful jacket.” She rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

“What happened to me was, my family got killed—my husband and my daughter.” She was speaking in a low, soft voice now, and she held one hand cupped against the side of my face. Very faintly, I could feel her pulse beating in the tips of her fingers. “My whole world disappeared. I don’t even remember how I got to the Institute, but it did me a lot of good. It’s funny, you ask about what I remember from 2002, and that’s all there is. Everything else is just darkness, it’s a room I’m locked out of.”

“My place was called the Austen Riggs Center, and it’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.