Pierce was not, at this night hour, in the dim blank-windowed church at prayers with the brothers. He was seated again in the confessional-like telephone cubby. When the bells ceased he lifted the handset and after a moment's pause dialed a number, not Rosalind Rasmussen's this time. He told the operator that he wanted to reverse the charges. And when the phone was lifted and answered there, he heard the operator ask, Will you accept the charges?
"Yes. I'll accept the charges."
"Hi,” Pierce said then.
"Hey. It's you."
"It's me."
"I thought you wouldn't call. That you couldn't. Except emergencies."
"Well."
"It's not an emergency?"
"No. No emergency."
Silence. She had a way—always had—of leaving phone conversations, going silent, having nothing to say it might be, or pondering or distracted. Unafraid that her interlocutor might think she'd gone, or was mum from hostility or impatience.
"So I had a little breakthrough,” he said at last. She didn't respond, and after a while he said, “I was wrong about it. The book. I had, well, an insight. I think. Today."
"Good. How is it there?"
"It's okay."
"Just okay?"
"I don't know if I can make it. The whole two weeks."
"What."
"Prayer. Bells, every three hours. At every meal we listen to tapes, about meditation. This murmuring."
"Doesn't sound so bad."
"I kind of dread it. I shrink from it. I may be having an allergic reaction to Catholicism. After all."
She laughed. Pierce could hear cries and hilarity in the deep far-off, where she was.
"Like hives,” he said. “I didn't expect it. How are the girls?"
"Jeez, Pierce, they're great. They're so great. You know I went to the doctor yesterday..."
"Yes and what..."
"And he remembered back when they were toddlers and I went to him for a physical and he asked was I getting any exercise. You remember? And I said well gee no not really, and then I said well actually I do. I lift weights. Yeah. Their names are Vita and Mary."
As though cued, Pierce heard the two children racing by, Doppler effect of their cries approaching and receding.
"They're still up?” Pierce said. “It's like nine o'clock."
"Courtney got them in bed but they wouldn't sleep. When I got back from work they'd just nodded off and the car woke them up. Courtney says."
More distant happy shrieking from her world. She wasn't going to tell him more about that visit to the doctor. “How's Axel?” he asked.
"He's okay. He misses you. When you're gone he walks around as though he's trying not to make noise, you know? And he's got this face. The Ghost Butler. Trying to help and not be there at the same time."
"Oh gee."
"He scares the girls. He tries so hard."
"I'll be back soon."
"No,” she said firmly. “You stick. No running home. You do this job. It's what we agreed. Peace and quiet for free. A ... what do they call it? Recourse? Defeat?"
"Retreat.” A room in the Retreat House, plain meals, counseling (optional) and silence. Give whatever you feel you can. A mountaintop in the wooded hills. Perfect, he'd thought, for the job he had to do, the last hard push on Kraft's book, get it to its ending, his house a little loud and crowded, his office at school too. “I don't know. I just don't know."
"Well."
"Can I speak to the girls?” Condemned man asks for a little pity.
"Um sure,” she said. “If they will."
He heard her call out: Kids, it's Daddy. And his heart filled. He heard a confused thunder, thump of feet, and one was shouting in his ear, Vita, joke-chiding him not very intelligibly even as her sister took the phone from her and spoke carefully.
"Daddy?"
He could see clearly the big instrument held to her ear, her hand around it, the missing teeth in her smile.
"Hi, girls. Yes it's me."
"What are the monks doing, Daddy? Are they making jam?"
"Maybe, hon, but it's kind of late. Do you want me to bring you some jam?"
"Are they scary?"
"Nah.” The one pictured on the labels of their proprietary jam jars sort of was, cowled and faceless, stirring his witch's brew: Pierce had showed the girls before he left. The name of their order could be a little unsettling too, it just occurred to him.
"You said you couldn't talk."
"I can. They can't."
"I hope you have a nice time, Daddy."
"Thanks, Mary."
Vita yelling her encouragement too, from too far away.
"Yeah, thanks to you, Vita, too. I love you both."
Pierce's wife, whose name was called Roo, took back the phone.
"That was nice,” he said.
"Yeah. Now get back to work,” she said. “You wuss."
III
CARCER
1
When Pierce returned from Europe to the Faraway Hills it was March, almost a year's trip around the sun since he had first moved there from New York City. He had no home here now, though, as he had had then; no job, no car, no reason to be here instead of elsewhere. He came by bus, of course, all the way to Blackbury Jambs, where the two rivers—the Blackbury and the Shadow—meet in a Y: a fertile valley one way, a rocky tumbled woodland the other.
Leaving his bags where he had unshipped them, at the little store where the bus stopped, he walked out River Street to the bridge over the Shadow. He passed the Blackbury Jambs Free Library, and the Donut Hole. He remembered many things. He thought that wherever he went, for however long, the places of this town and its outlying regions and its rivers would be for him a Memory Palace, or maybe a Stations of the Cross (Jesus Falls for the Third Time). But actually that wouldn't be so, it only seemed so then.
Across the bridge, he turned down the river road toward Bluto's Automotive, as Rosie Rasmussen had instructed him to do, for Gene the manager kept a few old cars for rent cheap, Gene's Rent-a-Ride. Then in a large old and smelly but not necessarily unsafe sedan (a Firebird) he went back the way he had come and out along the roads to Littleville. All along the road forsythia was springing from what had seemed to be anonymous shaggy hedges, twiggy and snow covered when last he had seen them. No one passed him, no one came up behind. He found himself driving even more slowly than he was wont to do, as though in a funeral procession of one. He looked around himself to see what was changed, and what was still the same; but it was (we all know it) the observer who had changed, and stayed the same.
He reached the Winterhalter gateposts, and turned in there. Up on the rise was the big custard-colored house with its chimneys and gables, and here the road to go downward to the small model of it, servants’ quarters or guesthouse, where he had lived. His poor old car, already sunken like a beached boat in new grass. Astonishing: the green fuses of what must be a hundred, a thousand daffodils had come out before the house and over the lawn, whose existence he hadn't suspected. Never suspected. He felt he would weep. More astonishing: the door stood ajar.
In the first hard freeze of the winter, the gimcrack jury-rigged water system that had supplied the bungalow from a well on the hill had frozen up, and Pierce had abandoned the house, draining the pipes and mopping out the toilet as best he could, carrying away what counted with him as valuables and leaving the rest; both banished and in flight. He wrote a letter to the Winterhalters in Florida, to tell them he wouldn't be watching over their house as he had promised to do, failing them as they had failed him (Pierce, it's not your damn fault, Rosie Rasmussen said).