In the bathroom, I held the strip of paper with the tongs and burned it over the open toilet. Curls of ashes fell into the water, and when no paper was left, I flushed them away.
I left the noisy bathroom-ventilation fan running, put away the tongs and matches, and returned with a can of air freshener, which I sprayed liberally throughout the bathroom. By the time my mother came home from performing at Slinky’s, there would be no slightest scent of smoke to suggest that I’d been playing with fire.
In my bedroom once more, as I approached the open candy tin, I panicked and became certain that another item had been missing from my collection, its absence previously unnoticed: the Lucite heart containing the small white feather. For the past few weeks, I hadn’t been carrying the pendant with me, as I had faithfully done when it was new and still seemed to glow with imminent magic. A sudden flare of intuition filled me with the conviction that in some way I could not understand, the pendant provided ultimate protection, that if the woman had taken possession of it, then I would be defenseless—and doomed.
I shuddered with relief when I found it in the metal box, and I put it, chain and all, in a pocket of my jeans.
By then I had worked myself into a sweat of dread, so that it wasn’t surprising I became obsessed with the missing fabric eye. I had saved it because, considering the eerie way it had rolled along the alley to me in a breeze that affected nothing else, I’d thought it might have some juju in it. When I’d told Fiona Cassidy as much, while she held the tip of her switchblade in my left nostril, she’d regarded me with contempt and declared, You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you? Now I wondered if her mockery had been misdirection, if in fact she saw some power in the fabric eye and had taken it to use against me and my mother.
There have been times during my life when I have wished to be a boy again, not to have the energy and perfect health of youth, but to know once more the innocence and the delight in even the smallest of things that we often fail to feel full strength as the years drift by. What is easy to forget, however, until you apply yourself to the task of memory, is that childhood is a time of fear, as well; some of those fears are reasonable, others irrational and inspired by a sense of powerlessness in a world where often power over others seems to be what drives so very many of our fellow human beings. In the swoon of childhood, the possibility of werewolves is as real as the schoolyard shooter, the idea of vampires as credible as the idea of a terrorist attack, a neighbor possessing paranormal talents as believable as a psychopath.
After putting away the La Florentine box, I searched my bedroom for the fabric eye, which the woman might have concealed somewhere: under the bed, atop the chest of drawers, behind the radiator, in the folds of the draperies, behind the valance above the window, where it would enjoy at least a narrow view of a portion of the room … When I found nothing, I sorted through the contents of drawers and inspected every niche in the closet, because after all, when I went to bed and turned off the lights, it might roll out of concealment to watch over me. Undoubtedly, such an eye would have perfect night vision. Again, I found nothing.
In the hallway, I stood at the threshold of my mother’s bedroom, convinced of the necessity to search it as thoroughly as I had combed through my room. Fortunately, a sense of propriety restrained me from rushing madly into her boudoir.
At just that moment of recaptured sanity, the telephone rang, and I hurried into the kitchen to answer it.
“Jonah,” said Mrs. Lorenzo, “you were supposed to come down here as soon as you got back from the community center. Supper’s going to be ready soon.”
I failed to tell her that I had not gone to the center after I’d learned the woman in 6-C moved out. I don’t know if that qualified as a lie of omission, but at least I was deceiving a neighbor rather than my mother. “I’m on my way now, Mrs. Lorenzo.”
Reluctantly, I left the apartment, locked the door, and went down to spend the evening with the widow.
Not an ordinary Friday. But nothing serious yet.
34
Saturday morning. Breakfast out with my mother. A neighborhood diner on Forestall Street. Pancakes with pineapple and coconut sauce. A rare treat. Great fun. Going places with my mother was always fun. She was always fun.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the purple-eyed witch.
Mom and I took a bus to the planetarium. I loved that place. Planets and stars and galaxies. A new show about meteors, asteroids, comets. It was good. It was interesting. It was interminable.