up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin. Whatever reason I’d had for storing the painting all those years ago—for keeping it in the first place—for taking it out of the museum even—I now couldn’t remember. Time had blurred it. It was part of a world that didn’t exist—or, rather, it was as if I lived in two worlds, and the storage locker was part of the imaginary world rather than the real one. It was easy to forget about the storage locker, to pretend it wasn’t there; I’d half expected to open it to find the painting gone, although I knew it wouldn’t be, it would still be shut away in the dark and waiting for me forever as long as I left it there, like the body of a person I’d murdered and stuck in a cellar somewhere.
On the eighth morning I woke sweat-drenched after four hours’ bad sleep, hollowed to the core and as despairing as I’d ever felt in my life, but steady enough to walk Popchik around the block and come up to the kitchen and eat the convalescent’s breakfast—poached eggs and English muffin—that Hobie pressed on me.
“And about time too.” He’d finished his own breakfast and was unhurriedly clearing the dishes. “White as a lily—I’d be too, a week of soda crackers and nothing but. A bit of sunshine is what you are in need of, a bit of air. You and the pup should take yourselves out for a good long stroll.”
“Right.” But I had no intention of going anywhere except straight down to the shop, where it was quiet and dark.
“I haven’t bothered you, you’ve been so low—” his back-to-business voice, along with the friendly tilt of his head, made me look away uncomfortably and stare into my plate—“but when you were out of commission you had some calls on the home line. ”
“Oh yeah?” I’d switched my cell phone off and left it in a drawer; I hadn’t even looked at it for fear of finding messages from Jerome.
“Awfully nice girl—” he consulted the notepad, peering over the top of his glasses—“Daisy Horsley?” (Daisy Horsley was Carole Lombard’s real name.) “Said she was busy with work” (code for Fiancé around, Stay away) “and to text-message her if you wanted to get in touch.”
“Okay, great, thanks.” Daisy’s big important National Cathedral wedding, if it actually went off, would be happening in June, after which she would be moving to DC with the BF, as she called him.
“Mrs. Hildesley called too, about the cherrywood high-chest—not the bonnet top, the other. Countered with a good offer—eight thousand—I accepted, hope you don’t mind, that chest isn’t worth three thousand if you ask me. Also—this fellow called twice—a Lucius Reeve?”
I nearly choked on my coffee—the first I’d been able to stomach in days—but Hobie didn’t seem to notice.
“Left a number. Said you would know what it was about. Oh—” he sat down, suddenly, drummed the table with his palm—“and one of the Barbour children phoned!”
“Kitsey?”
“No—” he took a gulp of his tea—“Platt? Does that sound right?”
xii.
THE THOUGHT OF DEALING with Lucius Reeve, unmedicated, was just about enough to send me back to the