Invisible Boy (38 page)

And now that she was sitting beside me, I didn’t want to confess that I’d been calling her dozens of times a night for the
last few days, like a smitten stalker.

“Are you testifying today?” I asked.

“Not yet. I came with some things for Angela, to leave next door.”

At the jail.

“Can I get you a cup of water, dear?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

We were quiet for a minute, but it wasn’t quite a companionable silence. I watched her fiddle with the clasp on her purse,
then stop. She seemed to be trying to work up her nerve toward something.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

She gripped the purse tighter.

Making up her mind.

“Miss Dare,” she said at last.

“Please,” I said, “call me Madeline.”

“This might not be the time, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk with you about.”

“The trial?”

“In a way, I suppose,” she said. “Nothing to do with your testimony, of course.”

“I’ve already finished with that.”

“And I don’t need to know anything you said. It’s just…”

I waited.

“I so want to do the right thing, Miss Dare. And I’m not sure what that is.”

Cate was walking across the lobby, toward us.

“Would it help to talk about it?” I asked.

“It would,” said Mrs. Underhill. “I was hoping that you might come by to visit again. When you’re feeling better.”

Maybe it was the peppermint, or just getting some fresher air, outside the courtroom’s stale closeness, but my queasiness
had passed.

And maybe Cate could give us a ride.

“How about right now?” I asked.

We pulled into a parking spot right out front, chez Underhill. The noon sky was phlegm-colored, with tracer-bullets of sleet
zipping down at a hard slant. We got out and Cate opened the front gate, holding her arm out for Mrs. Underhill to grip as
they picked their way along the icy front walk, chatting about recent doctor’s appointments they’d had.

I followed along behind them, considering again the block’s bizarre aesthetic, each split dwelling a study in Manichaean duality.

If you’d picked the fifty most disparate houses on the planet, chainsawed them in half clean down the middle, and shaken them
all up like ginormous Yahtzee dice, you still couldn’t have jammed the pieces back together this randomly without the aid
of blindfolds
and
secret-CIA-mind-control-experiment-quality hallucinogens.

To me, the discordance acted as a mild nauseant, but each whitened yard was neat, every house in good repair, and Mrs. Underhill
knew her neighbors. Here was community, and pride of ownership, while I was but an hourly-wage transient in a rental apartment
riding the coattails of someone else’s lease.

I ducked my head against the sleet, bits of cold wet grit sliding down to melt between the collar of my overcoat and the back
of my neck. Ten paces ahead was a haven of sustenance and sympathy—the exact things for which I’d spent a lifetime yearning—and
I wondered if Teddy hadn’t felt the same every time he came up this walk.

It was a long way from here to a welfare motel, but I didn’t wonder how his mother got there.

Entropy nips at all of our heels, and my own family’s descent had been no less spectacular, or rapid. The same forces that
pulled Angela’s toward LaGuardia took my mother from deb parties to the verge of food stamps, my father from the floor of
the Stock Exchange to a VW camper behind the Chevron station in Malibu.

The thesis-statement lyric of our family anthem:
Papa was a rolling stone; wherever he parked his van was his home.

Any difference between me and Teddy was one of degree, not substance. The margin for error was thinner here, and he didn’t
get a scholarship to his mother’s boarding school.

I flipped up my overcoat’s collar, shivering at the foot of the stoop as Mrs. Underhill’s keys jangled against her front door.

When the neighbor boys’ curtains twitched apart for surveillance, I smiled, raising my unbroken arm to wave hello.

Mrs. Underhill got the door open, and I followed her and Cate into the front hallway once I’d stomped the sleet off my shoes
and wiped them clean on the doormat.

“Well, dear, I’m lucky,” I heard Mrs. Underhill saying, as she and Cate moved into the kitchen after hanging up their coats.
“Dr. Wilson gave me a clean bill of health again just last week. Now my friends, they all have cholesterol pills and heart
pills and who knows what-all for their blood pressure. The only medicine in this house is aspirin and Band-Aids, but I don’t
even use
those
more than once a year.”

I found a free hanger for my overcoat in the hall closet, picturing my own Prozac, Excedrin, Advil, and Alka-Seltzer Plus
stockpiles back on Sixteenth Street—not to mention the boatload of painkillers I’d happily scarfed down for my busted arm,
and
the communal bong—feeling like a total wuss.

I’d probably blow every penny I ever earned on over-the-counter crap from Duane Reade and die young anyway.

I looked out the kitchen window, past the frilly white net curtains. The sleet had turned to snow, falling thick and fast.
I decided I should tell Cate to go on home before the roads got too bad, but now she and Mrs. Underhill were exchanging notes
on home remedies for stomachaches.

Before there was a pause in conversation, the feisty old lady turned to me. “Now you said back at the courthouse you hadn’t
eaten anything, speaking of digestion. I’m going to fix you a sandwich, unless you’d rather have some soup? I have tomato
or chicken noodle.”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Underhill,” I said. “I’m really not that hungry. Thank you anyway.”

She crossed her arms and shook her head. “Hungry or not, you
look
downright peaked. And it’s wintertime.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I said.

“Don’t be silly—it won’t take me but a minute. I made the chicken soup yesterday, and the pot’s in the Frigidaire. I just
have to heat it up. We’ll all three have a nice bowl, with some crackers.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Cate. “May we help you with anything?”

“Why don’t you both just sit down right here and keep me company?” said Mrs. Underhill, motioning toward her kitchen table
and chairs.

The old red wall-phone rang as she was putting the soup pot on the stove. She lit the burner and then asked us to excuse her
for a moment so she could take the call. “Hello?”

I turned to Cate, worried that maybe Mrs. Underhill wanted to talk to me in private. “I don’t want to keep you. It looks like
that snow’s getting pretty bad. I’m fine getting the train home.”

“This is she,” said our hostess, into the phone.

Cate said, “I wouldn’t mind a little soup. Unless you need privacy?”

“Hello?” Mrs. Underhill jiggled the phone’s hook twice, then replaced the receiver. “Must be the storm.”

I suddenly had to pee, desperately. “May I use the bathroom?”

The doorbell rang.

“Grand Central
Station
,” said Mrs. Underhill, smiling at us. She asked Cate to mind the soup, pointing me toward the staircase in the front hall.
“First door on your right, dear.”

I jogged upward, footsteps muffled by the shag carpeting. I turned right past the open door of her bedroom, catching a glimpse
of a neatly made four-poster.

The door’s chimes went off again and Mrs. Underhill’s muttered “Goodness’ sakes, hold your horses!” echoed up the stairwell
as I reached the landing.

I heard her say, “I’m sorry, Donald, but I have company right now,” as I closed the door behind me.

The bathroom was all powder-blue and frilly, with a bowl of apple-pie-smelling potpourri on the windowsill. I peed for like,
forever—which was weird as I’d only had a glass of water since my morning coffee—then tried to figure out how to wash my hands
without mucking up the perfectly folded little hand towels, or the flower-shaped guest soaps displayed in a curvy glass jar
beside the sink.

I rinsed my left hand in hot water, then waved it around.

Maybe a little air-dry, over the heating vent?

I walked toward the room’s small, high window, hoping for a blast of warmth from the register beneath it, and glanced outside
at the backyard below.

There was a triangular trail of bootprints along the whitened ground, each dark oval already blurring under fresh snowfall.
Someone had walked from the neighbors’ side of the house to a sagging old garage at the lot’s rear, then back to the house
directly below me.

The outbuilding’s door wasn’t closed all the way, and a burst of wind pushed it wider, in a swirl of snowflakes.

I gripped the windowsill, damp knuckles of my left hand going white. Before the door had swung closed again, I’d caught a
flash of dull gold: the prow of a huge old American sedan, front bumper hanging crooked, chrome grille smashed in. The car’s
roof was white vinyl.

My right arm gave a twinge of recognition inside its cast.

No tire tracks. Why would someone go out to the garage in a blizzard, and what did they want with
this
side of the house afterwards?

I leaned my forehead against the cold glass, trying to peer straight down Mrs. Underhill’s brick siding.

The window’s outer sill blocked my line of sight down the wall itself, but there was something on the ground about a foot
away from the house: a twist of colored wire, lying bright against the snow.

The toilet cistern finished refilling, its ball-cock float rising to shut off the flow of water. The echoing tiled room went
quiet.

I exhaled, then pushed gently off the windowsill with my left hand to stand up straight again, careful not to shift my weight
too suddenly.

My breath had fogged the glass, but I didn’t need to see anything else.

The guy wearing those boots had cut the phone line.

And if the murmur of voices I could hear through the floor was any indication, he was now directly below me, inside the kitchen
with Mrs. Underhill and Cate.

I crept along the edge of the tub toward the bathroom door, weight on the balls of my feet so I wouldn’t make the floor creak.

It seemed like an hour before I was close enough to reach for the door handle, holding my breath and listening for another
long moment before twisting it slowly open.

I tried to picture the view up the stairwell from the hallway below.

Will he see this door moving if I open it?

No, Mrs. Underhill’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. I was safely down the hallway, out of sight.

The voices got a little louder.

And he’s definitely in the kitchen. Straight down.

I eased the door outward a few inches, willing it not to squeak.

The murmurs became voices, distinct.

“Donald, I’ve told you there’s no one else here.” Mrs. Underhill. “Miss Ludlam drove me home today, after I went to see Angela.”

“Angela’s in court.”

A man’s voice. One I knew.

Might want to lock that door, you know? Keep the boogeyman away.

“Yes, that’s right.” Mrs. Underhill again.

The man said, “You can’t go in yet. Not your turn to testify.”

“I took some vitamins to the jail so she’ll have them tonight. For the baby.”

I opened the door farther and slipped out into the hallway, my back to the wall beside the staircase.

“There’s
three
of you in this house,” said Donald.

Had she told me the names of the neighbor boys? Was he wearing boots?

“Donald, you’re scaring me now,” she said, voice quavering. “My
heart
…”

“Where’s the other one?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I need my
medicine
.”

“The one with the busted arm, she was out front with you before,” he said.

“Madeline went home,” said Cate. “She’s not feeling well.”

“Not out the
front
door,” he said, “and I can see she didn’t go out the back way. Only one who walked on that snow is me.”

Fuck
.

“I’m having a spell come on. I need my pills from upstairs.” Mrs. Underhill’s voice sounded weak and dizzy.

“I can get them,” said Cate. “Just tell me where they are.”

I heard her chair scrape back along the kitchen’s spic-and-span old linoleum.

“Don’t you
move
!” Donald’s voice again.

I heard something slam down, and the walls vibrated.

Had he hit one of them?

“All right,” said Cate, calm and steady. “I’ll just stand right here.”

“Donald, let her just go upstairs. I need my pills from my bedside table. The doctor says, if I get excited—”

“The
other
one’s upstairs, that what you mean?” he asked, his voice much louder now.

“Madeline went home,” said Cate. “We told you that.”

Mrs. Underhill’s bedroom door was open, three feet away. I edged along the hallway, thankful for its thick shag carpeting.

The bedroom floor was bare hardwood, except for a braided rag rug beside the old four-poster bed. If I made the joists squeak,
we were all fucked.

I held my breath and stepped across the threshold, then stopped to listen.

“Donald, please, I just need one pill. Then I’ll talk to you about whatever you want.” Mrs. Underhill started panting, sounding
as though she were on the verge of tears.

I took three more steps, then opened the drawer of her bedside table.

There weren’t any pill bottles inside. She’d told me and Cate the truth, earlier, about not needing medication.

The drawer contained a small white prayer book instead. And a Luger pistol her husband must have brought back as a souvenir
from the war.

I blew off God and took the gun, relieved as hell to discover that she kept it loaded, though I couldn’t imagine someone her
size firing a nine-millimeter without getting knocked down by the recoil.

“Donald,”
said Mrs. Underhill, “how dare you bring a gun into this house when I practically raised you up?”