Christine

“Shitters.” She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. “He uses it. Arnie.”

“I know.”

We looked at each o her, and her hands found mine again.

“You’re cold,” I said. Another bright remark from that fount of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.

“Yes. I feel like I’ll never be warm again.”

I wanted to put my arms around her and didn’t. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing—and it was awful—was how it seemed more and more that he was dead… dead, or under some weird enchantment.

“Did his brother say anything else?”

“Nothing that seems to fit.” But a memory rose like a bubble in still water and popped: He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster, George LeBay had told me. At least… I don’t think he was. It had seemed that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something more… and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a stranger. What had he been about to say?”

All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went… but it was hard work, pushing that idea.

Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.

I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.

“Did you take Mr LeBay’s address?” she said.

“No.” I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now seemed impossibly far back in time. “But I imagine the Libertyville American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother. Why?”

Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking out into the blinding day. Shank of the year, I thought randomly.

She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones—the sort of cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her belt.

“You said you’d show me something,” she said. “What was it?”

I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started. There was no way to shut it down.

“Go upstairs,” I said, “My room’s the second door on the left. Look in the third drawer of my dresser. You’ll have to dig under some of my undies, but they won’t bite.”

She smiled—only a little, but even a little was an improvement”. “And what am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?”

“I gave that up last year,” I said, smiling back. “'Ludes this year. I finance my habit selling heroin down at the junior high.”

“What is it? Really?”

“Arnie’s autograph,” I said, “immortalized on plaster.”

“His autograph?”

I nodded. “In duplicate.”

She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking at the two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even directed the nurse on where to cut them, Later I bad cut out the two squares, one from the right leg, one from the left.

We looked at them silently: on the right; on the left.

Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. “Those are pieces of your—”

“My casts, yeah.”

“Is it… a joke, or something?”

“No joke. I watched him sign both of them.” Now that it was out, there was a queer kind of loosening, or relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.

“But they don’t look anything alike.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “But Arnie isn’t much like he used to be either. And it all goes back to that goddam car.” I poked savagely at the square of plaster on the left. “That isn’t his signature. I’ve known Arnie almost all my life. I’ve seen his homework papers, I’ve seen him send away for things, I’ve watched him endorse his paycheques, and that is not his signature. The one on the left, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow, Leigh?”

“What?”

I told her. She nodded slowly. “For us.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll do it for us. Because we have to do something, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess so. You mind a personal question?” She shook her head, her remarkable blue eyes never leaving mine.”

“How have you been sleeping lately?”

“Not so well,” she said. “Bad dreams. How about you?”

“No. Not so good.

And then, because I couldn’t help myself anymore, I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a momentary hesitation, and I thought she was going to draw away… then her chin came up and she kissed me back, firmly and fully. Maybe it was sort of lucky at that, me being mostly immobilized.

When the kiss was over she looked into my eyes, questioning.

“Against the dreams,” I said, thinking it would come out stupid and phony-smooth, the way it looks on paper, but instead it sounded shaky and almost painfully honest.