He thought he probably could. He began to squeeze, then decided against it and dropped the cat to the floor, where it scampered off toward the living room, unaware how close it had been to death. It would be more fun for Kate to find the cat in the house again and have her wonder how it got back in.
Henry returned to the guest room, slid under the bed, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t tired, but long ago he’d figured out how to get himself to fall asleep at almost any moment. He imagined himself floating down an enormous river. In front of him were all the people he knew who’d been born before he was, growing older as they floated, and sinking one by one below the surface as time, or disease, or just bad luck, caught up with them. Around him were the people his age, the sheep he’d gone to high school with in Stark, the entitled kids from college who acted like they’d live forever, his workmates and clients, all of them treading water hard in the middle of their lives, just trying to stay afloat. And behind him were those younger than him, the ones being born, new bodies trying to enter the slipstream, growing more multitudinous as the people in front of him thinned in their ranks. Once the image was clearly in his mind—a phalanx of human bodies with Henry in the middle, moving constantly toward the front—he allowed himself to sink below the surface of the water so that all he saw were the legs churning in the froth of the moving river. And like a snapping turtle that pulls a baby duck down underneath the surface of a pond, Henry knew that he could take hold of someone’s legs and bring them down to the dark, cold river bottom, where he could breathe but they could not.
Thinking this, he’d fall asleep. And never dream.
Chapter 33
Henry stayed under the bed until Kate left the apartment. It was around noon.
Kate had gotten up early, before dawn. The reappearance of the cat had clearly freaked her out. She’d yelled “Hello, there!” into the apartment; then, a little later, she’d turned the lights on in the guest room for ten seconds. He had held his breath, wondering if he was going to see her head dip down below the bedspread, but it hadn’t happened. She turned the light back off, and for a few hours Henry could hear her moving through the apartment.
Then it was quiet for a while, and Henry wondered if she’d gone back to sleep, or maybe even left. Then voices—someone was at the door. Kate’s distinctive, accented speech, and another woman’s. An older woman with a raspy bark. He worried briefly that it was a detective, that Kate had called to have the place searched, but then the voices stopped, and shortly afterward, he heard the front door close. He was pretty sure Kate had left. Sure enough to slide out from under the bed.
He stood, knees popping, then swung his arms around to get the joints working properly. He rolled his head on his shoulders, then slipped from the room. He was fine. Kate was gone. He could sense it in the air of the apartment.
He washed his face in the guest bathroom, then changed his shirt, making sure to apply an extra amount of odor-free antiperspirant. If he was going to live here with Kate for a while, it was important that he smelled as neutral as possible. In the kitchen, on one of the top shelves, Henry found a half-filled box of Rice Chex. He filled a bowl, then covered them with the small amount of Kate’s skim milk that he felt he could get away with stealing. The cereal was stale, but reminded him of Corbin. The last time he’d had Rice Chex had probably been their weekend together in New Essex, years and years ago. He hadn’t had any since.
He washed out the bowl and returned it to its place, then wandered the apartment, forming a plan. He went to look at Kate’s sketchbook, wanting to study the picture she’d drawn of him again, but it wasn’t under the bed. She’d taken it with her.
He remembered the storage unit down in the basement. Even though he had his lockpicks, he went to the kitchen drawer where he knew Corbin kept spare keys. He grabbed the one with the label that said storage and went down