Mad Love (24 page)

Other
than Mrs. Bobot’s mutterings about the stupidity of men, and other than the honking of impatient drivers who wanted Mrs. Bobot to either go faster or get out of the way, the ride back to the apartment was silent. Neither Realm nor I said a word. We’d never seen Mrs. Bobot so upset. She clung to the steering wheel like a woman hanging off the edge of a cliff. It may have looked like we’d called a truce, but beneath the surface my blood boiled, and as soon as we got out of Mrs. Bobot’s range of hearing I was going to KILL REALM!

Once the car was parked, we hurried into the apartment building. The unmistakable, succulent, salty smell of Archibald’s Sunday pot roast had filled the building’s every nook and cranny. Archibald, who’d been sweeping the foyer, leaned the broom against the wall. “What’s everyone doing back so early?” Teary-eyed, Mrs. Bobot stormed right past him and up to her apartment. “Dinner’s at five,” he called. The slam of her bedroom door reverberated down the stairs.

The truce ended. “Go get the envelope!” I yelled at Realm.

“Fine! But you said that you’d write as many letters as I want. If you go back on that, I’ll tell everyone what I know.”

“Really, Realm?” I got right in her face. “Are you really going to blog to all your friends that my mother’s insane? Is that
really
what you’re going to do?”

“Alice,” Archibald scolded. “Your mother’s not
insane
. You should never use that word.”

“What word will you use, Realm? Crazy? Mad? Nuts?” My face felt like it was on fire. “What will you blog? Belinda Amorous, the famous romance writer, is a
lunatic
?”

Realm glanced self-consciously at Archibald, then put her hands on her hips. “If you write those letters, then I won’t have to blog anything. It’s your decision.”

“No, Realm, it’s
your
decision. You’re the one who sat at my mother’s desk and read her personal papers. You’re the one who took Errol’s notes. You’re the one making all the threats.” I clenched my fists until they ached. “You know, maybe you deserve to be as miserable as you are.”

“Alice?” Archibald stepped forward but I waved him away.

“Look at her. She’s starving herself because she hates herself. And she wants us to feel sorry for her. Well, guess what, Realm? I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t even care about you. Everyone has problems and some are much bigger than feeling like your parents don’t love you.”

That last sentence hung in front of me like a banner. I stepped away from Realm. The words had flown out, propelled by anger, so they didn’t count—did they? I tried not to notice the shame in Realm’s eyes. But I did notice it, and I recognized it. God, I knew exactly how she felt. Every cell in my body knew. So many years of wondering if my mother loved me. Of convincing myself that she didn’t.

A sort of suffocating sound came out of Realm, then she fled up the stairs. Archibald stood silently behind me, but I didn’t turn to look at him. Oscar the cat meowed and wound around my feet, but I didn’t bend to pet him.

“Realm!” I called. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

A few doors slammed, then Realm was back, standing at the top of the stairs. “Here. Take the stupid envelope!” With a grunt, she hurled it at my head. I lunged and caught it in both hands. A sense of relief almost brought me to tears as I hugged it to my chest. Finally, one thing would go right. I’d make one thing right.

Realm wiped tears from her eyes. Her body seemed to shrink beneath the layers of clothing that she wore like armor.

“I take it that’s what you were looking for,” Archibald said quietly.

I nodded, then looked up the stairs, but Realm had gone.

That’s when a cab pulled up out front and Reverend William Ruttles limped up the front steps and into the foyer. “Never been so humiliated in all my life,” he announced, shaking his cane in the air. “Irreparable damage to my reputation. Irreparable.” Then he marched into his apartment, and his own bedroom door slammed shut.

“I don’t know what’s going on with everyone around here. And now we’ve got a storm coming.” Archibald picked up Oscar the cat. “We’d better not lose power because I’ve been working on that roast all day. Dinner’s at five,” he said again, then walked into his apartment and gently closed the door.

I stood alone in the foyer, the wind whistling through a crack in the stained glass window. Clutching the envelope to my chest, my heart pounding, shame washed over me. I’m not sure how long I stood there, trying to figure out how to apologize to Realm, when a shuffling sound made me look up. Errol was walking down the stairs, his footsteps slow, his hand gripping the railing. His white hair didn’t glow. “I’m ready to tell you the rest,” he said.

I needed to push everything from my mind and help Errol.

He settled on my couch. I didn’t have salon girls delivering my meals and I hadn’t been to the store in a while, so I tore open a bag of Cheetos and poured some lemonade. If I’d known that Cupid himself would be visiting my apartment, I would have cleaned up a little, bought some cookies or something. I turned on the computer. My plan was that I’d type while he talked. This would give me the basic framework for the chapters. Then we’d sort through the pages of notes, assigning each to its appropriate chapter so I could weave it in later.

“How come you have so many garden gnomes?” he asked, stepping over one.

“My mom collects things.”

I dumped all his notes onto the coffee table. Lined notebook paper, paper napkins, Post-its—he’d written whenever the memories arose, on whatever paper he could find at the time. Many had been written during chemo, on hospital stationery. The pile was huge. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” I said worriedly. “How far do you want to get today?”

“To the end.” He lay against the back of the couch, his eyelids heavy.

“All the way to the end?” I froze. “Errol?”

“I’m not dying today, if that’s what you’re thinking. I still have time. But I just want to finish this. I’m so tired of carrying this story around with me.”

Maybe he wasn’t dying right then and there, but he sure looked like crap. His hair used to be perfectly white, but now gray flowed from his temples.

I looked worriedly at the pile of notes that covered the coffee table. Errol wanted to finish the story today. “I’ll be right back,” I told him.

That’s how I ended up knocking on her door. When it opened, she glared at me with puffy red eyes.

“What do you want?”

“Realm, I need your help.”

“He’s
really dying?” she’d asked me on the way back downstairs.

“Yes. And this is the only thing he wants before he dies. To get his story written.”

“I can respect that,” she said.

The wind continued to blow, finding its way through cracks in the window frames and drowning out the usual street noise. I set my phone to buzz. “There will be no interruptions,” I said. “I promise. We’ll work until we get to the end.”

Realm sat on the carpet, her legs folded. She didn’t complain about having to help with someone else’s book. She smiled kindly at Errol and even ate a few Cheetos as she sorted through his notes, starting to put them in order. I set my fingertips on the keypad, waiting while Errol collected his thoughts.

“Where did we leave off?” he asked.

“You’d just put henna in your hair and you were going to introduce yourself to Psyche.”

“Right.” He took a long breath, then began his tale.

The first time they spoke, Psyche was carrying eggs to market. “I couldn’t believe how nervous I was,” Errol said. “I told her I was a merchant from a distant island, but the entire time I was near her, I had to hide my hands behind my back because they were shaking. No one had ever made me feel that way.”

Psyche was shy but she allowed Cupid to walk with her that day. Many of the locals had tried to court her over the years, but they’d been old men or simple farm boys and she hadn’t cared for any of them. But here was a young, handsome man from a distant land, telling her stories about his travels, about places she’d only dreamed of. He filled her head with wonder.

“I courted her slowly,” Errol said, sipping some lemonade. “I wanted her desperately, but I wasn’t going to force her to love me, not the way the gods had taught me. I wanted it to be real.”

“I like the way you’re putting yourself into the story,” Realm told him. “I do that sometimes, too. It helps me imagine things better.”

Errol and I exchanged a knowing look.

To keep the gods from becoming suspicious, Cupid continued to do their bidding, but between tasks he’d rush back to Psyche. He brought gifts from distant lands and kept her family’s pantry filled with grain and fresh meat. He learned how to bake her favorite bread, learned how to dance her favorite dance, and how to recite her favorite poem. It was a long courtship and though tempted, he never shot her with an arrow.

While Errol spoke, I typed as quickly as I could. Realm pulled all the notes she could find about the courtship and clipped them together. “Courtship,” she wrote on a Post-it.