'When are you going home?' she asked.
And Billy, who expected to leave Northeast Harbor tomorrow morning and to walk in his own front door not much later than ten o'clock tomorrow night, answered: 'It'll still be a week or so, hon. I want to put on some more weight first. I still look pretty gross.'
'Oh,' Linda said, sounding deflated. 'Oh, okay.'
'But when I come I'll call you in time for you to get there at least six hours before me,' he said. 'You can make another lasagna, like when we came back from Mohonk, and fatten me up some more.'
'Bitchin'!' she said, laughing, and then, immediately: 'Whoops. Sorry, Daddy.'
'Forgiven,' he said. 'In the meantime, you stay right there at Rhoda's, kitten. I don't want any more yelling between you and Mom.'
'I don't want to go back until you're there anyway,' she said, and he heard bedrock in her voice. Had Heidi sensed that adult bedrock in Linda? He suspected she had - it accounted for some of her desperation on the phone last night.
He told Linda he loved her and rang off. Sleep came easier that second night, but the dreams were bad. In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn't Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.
'Purpurfargade ansiktet,' it said in a whining, inhuman voice, and Billy had awakened, trembling, in the cold gray Atlantic-seacoast dawn.
He checked out twenty minutes later and had headed south again. He stopped at a quarter of eight for a huge country breakfast and then could eat almost none of it when he opened the newspaper he had bought in the dispenser out front.
Didn't interfere with my lunch, though, he thought now as he walked back to the rental car. Because putting on weight again is also what it's really all about.
The pie sat on the seat beside him, pulsing, warm. He spared it a glance and then keyed the engine and backed out of the slanted parking slot. He realized that he would be home in less than an hour, and felt a strange, unpleasant emotion. He had gone twenty miles before he realized what it was: excitement.
Chapter Twenty-seven. Gypsy Pie
He parked the rental car in the driveway behind his own Buick, grabbed the Kluge bag which had been his only luggage, and started across the lawn. The white house with its bright green shutters, always a symbol of comfort and goodness and security to him, now looked strange - so strange it was really almost alien.
The white man from town lived there, he thought, but I'm not sure he's come home, after all - this fellow crossing the lawn feels more like a Gypsy. A very thin Gypsy.
The front door, flanked by two graceful electric flambeaux, opened, and Heidi came out on the front stoop. She was wearing a red skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Billy couldn't remember ever having seen before. She had also gotten her hair cut very short, and for one shocked moment he thought she wasn't Heidi at all but a stranger who looked a little like her.
She looked at him, face too white, eyes too dark, lips trembling. 'Billy?'
'I am,' he said, and stopped where he was.
They stood and looked at each other, Heidi with a species of wretched hope in her face, Billy with what felt like nothing at all in his - yet there must have been, because after a moment she burst out, 'For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!'
He felt a smile surface on his face - inside it felt like something dead floating to the top of a still lake, but it must have looked all right because Heidi answered it with a tentative, trembling smile of her own. Tears began to spill down her cheeks.
Oh, but you always did cry easy, Heidi, he thought.
She started down the steps. Billy dropped the Kluge bag and walked toward her, feeling the dead smile on his face.
'What's to eat?' he asked. 'I'm starved.'
She made him a giant meal - steak, salad, a baked potato almost as big as a torpedo, fresh green beans, blueberries in cream for dessert. Billy ate all of it. Although she never came right out and said it, every movement, every gesture, and every look she gave him conveyed the same message: Give me a second chance, Billy - please give me a second chance. In a way, he thought this was extremely funny - funny in a way the old Gypsy would have appreciated. She had swung from refusing to accept any culpability to accepting all of it.