In the night room Page 0,90
wiped her eyes again and looked over at me. “Would you care to know why I’m willing to believe all this bullshit of yours?”
“Please,” I said.
“Do you remember when I went to the bathroom in the Lost Echoes Lodge? After breakfast this morning? It’s nothing out of the ordinary for you, is it? But when I got into the bathroom, it was like I had to tell myself what to do. I couldn’t remember ever using a toilet before in my life. And every time I go to the bathroom now, I marvel at how strange it all seems to me. For the first thirty-eight years of my life, I never used a toilet!”
It was true. She never had, and I had never thought about that. In all of fiction, probably, urination scenes are specific to men.
“I have to sit somewhere else for a while,” Willy said. Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and her eyes seemed half again as large. “Whatever you do, don’t bother me.”
She carried the plate of half-eaten rhubarb pie to the last booth in the line across from the bar. Because just about everybody in the room watched her go, I realized that they had been eyeing us ever since Willy had shouted that I had done a BAD JOB.
The waitress slipped into Willy’s booth and started talking in that earnest manner people adopt when they think they are telling difficult truths. I thought Willy would get rid of her in about ten seconds. It took five. The waitress came scuttling out of the booth, looking like a hen trying to stay ahead of a fox, and everyone else pretended to ignore the drama we had brought to Chicago Station.
It took Willy something like twenty minutes to collect herself and make her way back through the tables in a gunfire of glances questioning and dismissive. (Some of those older ladies thought she deserved every bit of the punishment they assumed I was giving her.) She slid in, extended her arms over the table, and let herself tilt limply back against the dark wood behind her. “I give up,” she said in a defeated voice. “I’m a fictional character. There isn’t any other explanation. You created me. I don’t belong in this world, which is the reason I feel this way—the reason I’m in danger of fading away. Fading out. Put me back in the world where I belong, crummy as it was. In that world I was a person, at least.”
“I can’t,” I said. “That world doesn’t exist anymore. You’re here, and I can’t finish the book.”
“So I’m just going to eat a hundred candy bars every day until unreality finally catches up with me and I disappear.”
I signaled for the check. The waitress moved up to the booth with the deliberation of an ocean liner coming into a narrow port. She slapped the slip of paper down on the table and backed away. I looked at the total and started counting out bills.
“I trust that we have dealt with the big secret,” Willy said. “And I have to admit, it’s a doozy. What’s the little one, the one Tom didn’t want to tell me?”
“Brace yourself,” I said. “Tom knew something that made him worried and unhappy every time you mentioned your daughter. He didn’t want to tell it to you because he thought you’d hate him, or fall apart, or both. He was on the verge of suggesting that you see a good psychiatrist.”
“I’m waiting.” And she was: under the limpness and the weariness she was communicating enough tension to make the air crackle.
“Remember that Holly wasn’t in that photograph of your husband’s body you found in Mitchell’s office?”
She nodded.
“There’s a good reason Holly wasn’t in the photograph. You didn’t have a daughter. You and Jim were childless.”
Willy looked for signs that this preposterous chain of sentences was somehow supposed to be funny, or a trick, or anything but a statement of fact. When she saw no such sign, she got angry with me.
“That’s unspeakable. It’s obscene.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t love you anymore. I never did—how could I love someone capable of saying that to me?”
“What was Holly’s birthday?”
“What difference does that make?” Willy started to scramble out of the booth, and I caught her arm.
“Tell me about her birth. What was it like? Did you have a doctor or a midwife? Home birth, or hospital?”
In her suddenly colorless face, her eyes blazed at me. She stopped trying to fight her way out