When she couldn't stand the quiet from the other side of the wall any longer she got up, put her clothes back on, and went outside to look at the stars. There, sitting on the curb, she found Roland, with the not-dog at his side. She wanted to ask how he had gotten out of his room without her being aware of it (the walls were so thin and she had been listening so hard), but she didn't. She asked him what he was doing out here, instead, and found herself unprepared for both his answer and for the utter nakedness of the face he turned to hers. She kept expecting a patina of civilization from him-a nod in the direction of the niceties-but there was none of that. His honesty was terrifying.
"I'm afraid to go to sleep," he said. "I'm afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me."
She looked at him steadily in the mixture of light: that which fell from her room and the horrible heardess Halloween glare of the parking-lot arc sodiums. Her heart was beating hard enough to shake her entire chest, but when she spoke her voice sounded calm enough: "Would it help if I lay down with you?"
He considered this, and nodded. "I think it would."
She took his hand and they went into the room she had rented him. He stripped off his clothes with no sign of embarrassment and she looked, awestruck and afraid, at the scars which lapped and dented his upper body: the red pucker of a knife-slash on one bicep, the milky weal of a burn on another, the white crisscross of lash-marks between and on the shoulderblades, three deep dimples that could only be old bulletholes.
And, of course, there were the missing fingers on his right hand. She was curious but knew she'd never dare ask about those.
She took off her own outer clothes, hesitated, then took off her bra, as well. Her breasts hung down, and there was a dented scar of her own on one, from a lumpectomy instead of a bullet.
And so what? She never would have been a Victoria's Secret model, even in her prime. And even in her prime she'd never mistaken herself for tits and ass attached to a life-support system.
Nor had ever let anyone else-including her husband-make the same mistake.
She left her panties on, however. If she had trimmed her bush, maybe she would have taken them off. If she'd known, getting up that morning, that she would be lying down with a strange man in a cheap hotel room while some weird animal snoozed on the bathmat in front of the tub. Of course she would have packed a toothbrush and a tube of Crest, too.
When he put her arms around her, she gasped and stiffened, then relaxed. But very slowly. His hips pressed against her bottom and she felt the considerable weight of his package, but it was apparently only comfort he had in mind; his penis was limp.
He clasped her left breast, and ran his thumb into the hollow of the scar left by the lumpectomy. "What's this?" he asked.
"Well," she said (now her voice was no longer even), "according to my doctor, in another five years it would have been cancer.
So they cut it out before it could... I don't know, exactly-metastasizing comes later, if it comes at all."
"Before it could flower?" he asked.
"Yes. Right. Good." Her nipple was now as hard as a rock, and surely he must feel that. Oh, this was so weird.
"Why is your heart beating so hard?" he asked. "Do I frighten you?"
"I... yes."
"Don't be frightened," he said. "Killing's done." A long pause in the dark. They could hear the faint drone of cars on the turnpike. "For now," he added.
"Oh," she said in a small voice. "Good."
His hand on her breast. His breath on her neck. After some endless time that might have been an hour or only five minutes, his breathing lengthened, and she knew he had gone to sleep. She was pleased and disappointed at the same time. A few minutes later she went to sleep herself, and it was the best rest she'd had in years. If he had bad dreams of his gone friends, he did not disturb her with them. When she woke in the morning it was eight o'clock and he was standing naked at the window, looking out through a slit he'd made in the curtains