Dinner Along the Amazon (34 page)

Nobody watched her while she finished.

Instead, they each one welcomed the anaesthetic that prevented, if only for the moment, the idea that hope itself—anticipation—had disappeared for all of them into the Amazon region along with Jackman Powell.

Michael looked with a dreadful panic at Olivia.

Louellen Potts—the briefest of his dreams—got up to leave the room.

“It’s time to go,” she whispered, having lost her voice in Fabiana’s recitation. “Late,” she said. And went upstairs to collect her coat.

3:00 a.m. and Grendel made a tour of the house, making his presence known to all the mice and to all the ghosts who haunted the dark, including the dark at the edge of everyone’s dreams. Finally, he settled at the foot of the stairs, intermittently waking to stare out the open door through the screen at the sidewalks sparkling with rain—and to listen to the droning in the den, which to Grendel was like a cave, inhabited by bears or perhaps by giant, cave-dwelling birds whose wings were lifted in constant repetition, casting their immense shadows across the floor towards his paws. Michael’s curtains. He eyed them with a careful wariness. He never completely slept. When there was thunder, the piano would echo its dying reverberations and the cello, in its corner, would hum a low, solemn note. The crystal prisms that hung from the candlesticks also sang and the dying fire in the grate made another song and the floorboards creaked in the faraway sun room and the windows sighed all over the house.

His ears hurt—chewed in a week old battle—and his gums were tender, having been torn. All along his back, he ached. No position was comfortable.

Everyone had gone upstairs—and he was alone. All the food—anything of real interest—was locked away. Except…

One bone, he remembered—put down by Michael under the kitchen table.

Grendel got up and fetched the bone and brought it back to the foot of the stairs. All through the next hour, he held it tenderly between his paws and wrecked it—very slowly—with his chipped and broken teeth.

The sound of gnawing—bone against bone—was all that could be heard. That, and the sluicing of the rain. And Olivia’s voice, as she lay in the bed with her gaze on the patterns running down the walls.

“Michael…?”

She was smiling.

Far in the Amazon region, a pin dropped.