Innocence

Throughout these two nights together, I had feared that if I pressured her too much to reveal her secrets, I would trigger her social phobia, that she would retreat from me or even terminate our friendship. But now I knew that her life and mine shared points of intersection long before we met, beginning in fact on the night she was born. In light of that puzzling discovery, I resolved to press her a bit more insistently.

“Why are you worried about the last two marionettes?”

“I’m not as worried as I was. We have an appointment at one o’clock. We can’t be late.”

“Appointment with whom?”

“You’ll see.”

I returned to the more essential matter: “Why are you worried about the marionettes?”

She hesitated but did not resort again to silence. “Over time, after to some extent I adopted their image, I gradually came to realize… I’d made them aware of me.”

“Aware of you?”

“Yes.”

“The six?”

“I know what I feel, and I know it’s true. But you don’t have to think it makes sense, that’s okay.”

Perhaps right then was the moment to tell her about the Fogs, the Clears, the music box with mismatched dancers, and my conviction that the marionette in the shop window had been aware of me, too. I almost followed that impulse, but then I said instead, “What is there to fear from toys?”

“They were never toys.”

“All right. But what is there to fear from puppets?”

“I don’t know what, and I don’t want to find out.”

The wind found its strength again and hurled the snow at us so furiously that the flakes, smaller now, ticked faintly against the windshield, as if by virtue of their numbers and persistence, they would pit the glass and eventually dissolve it, so that the storm could claim the interior of the Rover and us, as it had claimed the city’s streets.

A thought occurred to me, and I shared it with her. “Earlier, when we were having dinner. The rapping. In the attic.”

“Air in the water pipes.”

“Are there water pipes in an attic?”

“There must be.”

“Have you gone up there to look?”

“No.”

“Is there a way from your apartment into the attic?”

“A trapdoor in a closet. But it’s held shut with two thick bolt latches, and it’s going to stay that way.”

“If you want, I’ll go up there and look.”

She said calmly but firmly, “No. I’m not going up there, you’re not going up there, no one’s going up there tonight, tomorrow night, or ever.”

55

FOR A BLOCK OR MORE, I LISTENED TO THE METRONOMIC thump-thump of the windshield wipers, which nearly matched the resting pace of my heart, and I listened to the wind, which at times shook the Rover as if to get our attention and compel us to understand what it was striving to communicate with its keening, huffing, and quarrelsome blustering.

Although I counseled myself to let her answer it in her own time, I could not help but ask again the question that she had sidestepped. “When you turned thirteen, why did you use the marionette as inspiration for your Goth transformation?”

“I was timid, and I wanted to look tough. I wanted to look edgy. I was afraid of people, and I thought the best way to keep them at a distance might be to act a little scary.”

Although what she said seemed to be explanation enough, I sensed that she had given me only a partial answer.

She must have known what I was thinking, because she elaborated, though the added words were a continuing evasion. “After I realized that I’d made them aware of me, I could have changed my appearance, gone to some other Goth look. But I knew by then, it wouldn’t matter. They were already aware of me, and they wouldn’t forget me merely because I no longer resembled them. I had opened a door that could never be closed again. I guess now you’re convinced I’m kind of crazy.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

Her cell phone rang. She fished it from a pocket, glanced at the screen, put it on SPEAKER, but said nothing.

For a moment, the line spat out static, but then Telford said, “I know you’re there, little mouse.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

Telford pretended to be confused. “Simon? Simon who?”

“Put him on the phone.”

“You want me to put someone named Simon on the phone?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“You may be right about that.”

“I saw Goddard tonight,” she said.

“What a loser.”

“Goddard knows it’s over. There’s no point to what you’re doing. It’s over.”

“His associates don’t think it’s over. They’ve been a great help to me tonight, and still are.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

“There’s a man here, maybe his name is Simon, maybe it’s not, I can’t say. You want to talk to him?”

“Put him on.”

The line hissed faintly, sputtered, and Gwyneth waited.

At last Telford said, “He doesn’t seem to want to talk. He just lies there on the floor, staring at nothing, his mouth hanging open, a disgusting beard of vomit on his chin, and he doesn’t even try to clean himself up. If this was your Simon, let me tell you, he had no manners, no common sense, no survival instinct. You should hang out with a better class of people.”