and there are no messages, not a word, nothing.”
“All right, all right, poor Deb,” Floria said, hugging her.
“Oh God, I’m going to wake the kids with all this howling.” Deb pulled away, making a frantic gesture toward the door of the adjoining room. “It was so hard to get them to sleep—they were expecting Daddy to be here, I kept telling them he’d be here.” She rushed out into the hotel hallway. Floria followed, propping the door open with one of her shoes since she didn’t know whether Deb had a key with her or not. They stood out there together, ignoring passersby, huddling over Deb’s weeping.
“What’s been going on between you and Nick?” Floria said. “Have you two been sleeping together lately?”
Deb let out a squawk of agonized embarrassment, “Mo-ther!” and pulled away from her. Oh, hell, wrong approach.
“Come on, I’ll help you pack. We’ll leave word you’re at my place. Let Nick come looking for you.”
Floria firmly squashed down the miserable inner cry, How am I going to stand this?
“Oh, no, I can’t move till morning now that I’ve got the kids settled down. Besides, there’s one night’s deposit on the rooms. Oh, Mom, what
did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything, hon,” Floria said, patting her shoulder and thinking in some part of her mind, Oh boy, that’s great, is that the best you can come up with in a crisis with all your training and experience? Your touted professional skills are not so hot lately, but this bad? Another part answered, Shut up, stupid, only an idiot does therapy on her own family. Deb’s come to her mother, not to a shrink, so go ahead and be Mommy. If only Mommy had less pressure on her right now—but that was always the way: everything at once or nothing at all.
“Look, Deb, suppose I stay the night here with you.”
Deb shook the pale, damp-streaked hair out of her eyes with a determined, grown-up gesture. “No, thanks, Mom. I’m so tired I’m just going to fall out now. You’ll be getting a bellyful of all this when we move in on you tomorrow anyway. I can manage tonight, and besides—”
And besides, just in case Nick showed up, Deb didn’t want Floria around complicating things; of course. Or in case the tooth fairy dropped by.
Floria restrained an impulse to insist on staying; an impulse, she recognized, that came from her own need not to be alone tonight. That was not something to load on Deb’s already burdened shoulders.
“Okay,” Floria said. “But look, Deb, I’ll expect you to call me up first thing in the morning, whatever happens.” And if I’m still alive, I’ll answer the phone.
All the way home in the cab she knew with growing certainty that Weyland would be waiting for her there. He can’t just walk away, she thought; he has to finish things with me. So let’s get it over.
In the tiled hallway she hesitated, keys in hand. What about calling the cops to go inside with her? Absurd. You don’t set the cops on a unicorn.
She unlocked and opened the door to the apartment and called inside, “Weyland! Where are you?”
Nothing. Of course not—the door was still open, and he would want to be sure she was by herself. She stepped inside, shut the door, and snapped on a lamp as she walked into the living room.
He was sitting quietly on a radiator cover by the street window, his hands on his thighs. His appearance here in a new setting, her setting, this faintly lit room in her home place, was startlingly intimate. She was sharply aware of the whisper of movement—his clothing, his shoe soles against the carpet underfoot—as he shifted his posture.
“What would you have done if I’d brought somebody with me?” she said unsteadily. “Changed yourself into a bat and flown away?”
“Two things I must have from you,” he said. “One is the bill of health that we spoke of when we began, though not, after all, for Cayslin College. I’ve made other plans. The story of my disappearance has of course filtered out along the academic grapevine so that even two thousand miles from here people will want evidence of my mental soundness. Your evidence. I would type it myself and forge your signature, but I want your authentic tone and language. Please prepare a letter to the desired effect, addressed to these people.”
He drew something white from an inside pocket and held it out. She advanced and took the envelope from