the sweat from between her breasts. It was crazy, that’s all; but still she’d find Linette and bring her home.
On one side of the narrow bed Linette lay fast asleep, snoring quietly, her hair spun across her cheeks in a shadowy lace. She still wore the pale blue peasant’s dress she’d had on the night before, its hem now spattered with candle wax and wine. Lie leaned over her until he could smell it, the faint unwashed musk of sweat and cotton and some cheap drugstore perfume, and over all of it the scent of marijuana. The sticky end of a joint was on the edge of the bedside table, beside an empty bottle of wine. Lie grinned, remembering the girl’s awkwardness in smoking the joint. She’d had little enough trouble managing the wine. Aurora’s daughter, no doubt about that.
They’d spent most of the day in bed, stoned and asleep; most of the last evening as well, though there were patches of time he couldn’t recall. He remembered his grandmother’s fury when midnight rolled around and she’d come into the bedroom to discover the girl still with him, and all around them smoke and empty bottles. There’d been some kind of argument then with Gram, Linette shrinking into a corner with her kinkajou; and after that more of their laughing and creeping down hallways. Lie showed her all his paintings. He tried to show her the people, but for some reason they weren’t there, not even the three bears drowsing in the little eyebrow window in the attic half-bath. Finally, long after midnight, they’d fallen asleep, Lie’s fingers tangled in Linette’s long hair, chaste as kittens. His medication had long since leached away most sexual desire. Even before The Crash, he’d always been uncomfortable with the young girls who waited backstage for him after a show, or somehow found their way into the recording studio. That was why Gram’s accusations had infuriated him—
“She’s a friend, she’s just a friend—can’t I have any friends at all? Can’t I?” he’d raged, but of course Gram hadn’t understood, she never had. Afterwards had come that long silent night, with the lovely flushed girl asleep in his arms, and outside the hot hollow wind beating at the walls.
Now the girl beside him stirred. Gently Lie ran a finger along her cheekbone and smiled as she frowned in her sleep. She had her mother’s huge eyes, her mother’s fine bones and milky skin, but none of that hardness he associated with Aurora Dawn. It was so strange, to think that a few days ago he had never met this child; might never have raised the courage to meet her, and now he didn’t want to let her go home. Probably it was just his loneliness; that and her beauty, her resemblance to all those shining creatures who had peopled his dreams and visions for so long. He leaned down until his lips grazed hers, then slipped from the bed.
He crossed the room slowly, reluctant to let himself come fully awake. But in the doorway he started.
“Shit!”
Across the walls and ceiling of the hall huge shadows flapped and dove. A buzzing filled the air, the sound of tiny feet pounding against the floor. Something grazed his cheek and he cried out, slapping his face and drawing his hand away sticky and damp. When he gazed at his palm he saw a smear of yellow and the powdery shards of wing.
The hall was full of insects. June bugs and katydids, beetles and lacewings and a Prometheus moth as big as his two hands, all of them flying crazily around the lights blooming on the ceiling and along the walls. Someone had opened all the windows; he had never bothered to put the screens in. He swatted furiously at the air, wiped his hand against the wall and frowned, trying to remember if he’d opened them; then thought of Gram. The heat bothered her more than it did him—odd, considering her seventy-odd years in Port Arthur—but she’d refused his offers to have air conditioning installed. He walked down the corridor, batting at clouds of tiny white moths like flies. He wondered idly where Gram had been all day. It was strange that she wouldn’t have looked in on him; but then he couldn’t remember much of their argument. Maybe she’d been so mad she took to her own room out of spite. It wouldn’t be the first time.
He paused in front of a Kay Nielsen etching from Snow