At ten to four I decided that she wasn’t coming and I went back to bed.
I heard a sharp click somewhere, then a bump. There she is , I thought. But nothing happened. The drumming of the rain was the only reminder that I could still think and I could still hear. The minutes stretched toward the dawn. There was not yet a hint of light, which, given the clouds covering the state, was at least ninety minutes away. Again a light flashed. This one brought me up with a start—it was here in my room, inches away. As my eyes focused, I saw that it was the extension button on the telephone— someone had picked up the phone downstairs in the printshop and was having a conversation at four o’clock in the morning. This went on for some time, at least two minutes, then the line went dark. I rolled out of bed and went to the door, opened it, and listened down the circular staircase. Nothing . No sound, no light, not a hint of movement anywhere.
I lay on the bed staring up into the dark. Eventually, though I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I began to doze off.
***
It was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream. I was drifting, somewhere between worlds, when my eyes flicked open and I knew she was there. “Hey,” I said, and I felt her sit beside me on the floor. I reached out and touched her head: she had laid it across her folded arms on the bed. “Thought you’d never get here.” She still didn’t speak: for several minutes she just lay there under my arm, her breathing barely audible above the rain. Then she said, “I didn’t come because I felt stupid. I am stupid, waking you up in the middle of the night.”
“It’s okay, I was awake anyway,” I lied.
“The truth of the matter is, I’ve just been through the loneliest night of my life. It got so desolate I thought I’d die from it.”
There was a long pause. She said, “I keep thinking that maybe my mom and dad can help me when I get like this, but they can’t. I know they love me, but somehow knowing it just makes the loneliness all the stronger. Does that make any sense?”
“You’re not their little girl anymore. You’ve lost something you can’t ever get back, but you haven’t yet found what’s gonna take the place of it in the next part of your life.”
“The next part of my life,” she said with a sigh.
I could hear the pain in her voice. “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you’ll let me.”
She seemed to consider it. “Just talk to me, help me get through the night. I know you want to sleep and I’m being a thundering pain in the ass. But you have no idea how much it would help, Mr. Man from Nowhere, if you’d just talk to me for a little while.”
“Listen and believe it. There’s nothing I’d rather do, right this minute, than talk to you.”
“Oh, Janeway.” Her voice got thick, and broke. “I hurt so bad. I hurt so bad and I can’t talk to anyone.”
“Talk to me.”
“I don’t know, maybe somebody like you, who’s just passing through and doesn’t know me. I can’t talk to Mamma and Daddy, there’s just too much in the way. I don’t know what it is, we can’t get past the facts of the matter and get down where the real trouble is.”
“What are the facts of the matter?”
“How completely and beyond redemption I’ve fucked up my life.”
“Maybe it just seems that way.”
“I’ve done a stupid thing. Don’t ask me why, it was just insane. I felt compelled, like I had no choice. Then they said I’d done something worse, and one thing led to another and I did do something worse…only it wasn’t what they said I’d done. But they locked me up for it, and now they want to lock me up again, maybe for years. If they do that, I will kill myself, I swear I will. I couldn’t live in a cage.”
“None of us can. That’s not really living.”
“But some people survive. I couldn’t even do that, not if we’re talking about years.” She shook her head: I felt the movement. “No way.”
Gently, I prodded her. “What did you do?”
She was a long time answering, and at first the answer was no answer at all. “I can’t tell you either.”
“I won’t judge you.”
“It’s not that. There are pieces of the story missing. Without them I just look like a fool.”
“Take the chance. Maybe I can help you find the pieces.”
“No one can. None of it makes sense. I’m like that guy in The Man Without a Country , I’ve got no roots, nothing solid to hold on to. I love my parents but I have an awful time talking to them.”
“Everybody does. It means you’re one hundred percent normal.”
She chuckled, a sad little noise. “And all the time I thought I was crazy. I have the worst time trying to talk to them. And I know I’ve got to, I don’t think I can let another day pass without doing that. But how can I?”
“Try it out on me first.”
She didn’t say anything. I let her alone for a few minutes, then I nudged her arm. “What happened to you?”
“I was in New Mexico,” she said at once, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask it one more time. “I got in trouble…I can’t tell you about that. But I’ve been carrying it around for weeks now. If I don’t tell somebody…”
I gave her a little squeeze: nothing sexual, just friendly encouragement,
“That’s where I picked up my stalker, in Taos.” Again she tried to lapse into silence. But then she said, “I had a room there. I’d come home and things would be moved.”
“Ransacked?”
“No…but yeah, maybe. I had the feeling he’d done that, been through all my stuff and then put it all back, just so. But he’d always leave one little thing out of place, something obvious like he’d wanted me to see it. Once he left a cigarette, still burning in a Styrofoam cup. He wanted me to know he’d just left. Then he started with the phone. It would ring late at night and I’d hear him breathing…or humming that song.”
“You told me before: you knew what he wanted.”
“He told me. But I can’t explain it now, so don’t ask me.”
“Explain what you can.”
“I felt like something evil had come into my life. I’d turn a corner and he’d be there, right in my path. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes were all sunken and he had holes in his face, deep pits across both cheeks. Scared me deaf and dumb. I can’t tell you what it was like. I’d walk down to the phone booth and call home and he’d come up behind me, rip open the door, and stand there staring. He said he could kill me, right there at the telephone— kill you and go up to North Bend and kill your mother too . God, I just freaked. Then one night he got into my room when I was sleeping. When I woke up the next morning there was a dead…rat…on the bed beside me. And I really freaked.”
I was listening to her words, trying to figure how and when this had all happened. It had to be sometime after the first Jeffords break-in, but before the second. Whatever else her stalker had done, he’d pushed her onto that next level of desperation. She had failed to get what she’d gone after at the Jeffords place—what the stalker also wanted—and had gone back for another run at it. Then what?
Then she took it on the lam: jumped bail, struck out for home. “So how’d you get back here?” I asked. She had driven her car, she said in that flat tone of voice that people use when you ask a stupid question. But I was trying to get at something else, something she couldn’t yet know about. “What roads did you take?” I asked, and she laughed and wondered what possible difference it could make. “I came across the Sangres, up the Million-Dollar Highway to Grand Junction, then took the freeway home.”