oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”
He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house, and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.
Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to 70 degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.
There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt floated in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away.
He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.
The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.
In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.
He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (Practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh not that one).
But this was a good town. He could feel it.
He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya…what the hell was her name? The midnight sister. And then he thought of Laura…
It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.
She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother’s big house.
She stood in the cold, which she did not feel any more, or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura’s father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister’s children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look.
Tears prickled in Shadow’s eyes, and he rolled over in his bed.
Wednesday, he thought, and with just a thought a window opened and he was watching from a corner of the room in the Motel 6, watching two figures thrusting and rolling in the semi-darkness.
He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed them to come back to him. He could imagine huge black wings pounding through the night toward him, he could see the lake spread out below him as the wind blew down from the Arctic, breathed its cold on the land, forcing any remaining liquids to become