“When is the last time you saw them, the last time you can remember having seen them?”
And Hannah has to stop and think, chews intently at a stubby thumbnail and watches the clock on the psychologist’s desk, the second hand traveling round and round and round. Seconds gone for pennies, nickels, dimes.
Hannah, this is the sort of thing you really ought to try to get straight ahead of time, she thinks in a voice that sounds more like Dr. Valloton’s than her own thought-voice. A waste of money, a waste of time …
“You can’t remember?” the psychologist asks and leans a little closer to Hannah.
“I kept them all in an old cigar box. I think my grandfather gave me the box. No, wait. He didn’t. He gave it to Judith, and then I took it after the accident. I didn’t think she’d mind.”
“I’d like to see them someday, if you ever come across them again. Wouldn’t that help you to know whether it was a dream or not, if the stones are real?”
“Maybe,” Hannah mumbles around her thumb. “And maybe not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“A thing like that, words scratched onto a handful of stones, it’d be easy for a kid to fake. I might have made them all myself. Or someone else might have made them, someone playing a trick on me. Anyone could have left them there.”
“Did people do that often? Play tricks on you?”
“Not that I can recall. No more than usual.”
Edith Valloton writes something else on her yellow pad and then checks the clock.
“You said that there were always stones after the dreams. Never before?”
“No, never before. Always after. They were always there the next day, always in the same place.”
“At the old well,” the psychologist says, like Hannah might have forgotten and needs reminding.
“Yeah, at the old well. Dad was always talking about doing something about it, before the accident, you know. Something besides a couple of sheets of corrugated tin to hide the hole. Afterwards, of course, the county ordered him to have the damned thing filled in.”
“Did your mother blame him for the accident, because he never did anything about the well?”
“My mother blamed everyone. She blamed him. She blamed me. She blamed whoever had dug that hole in the first goddamn place. She blamed God for putting water underground so people would dig wells to get at it. Believe me, Mom had blame down to an art.”
And again, the long pause, the psychologist’s measured consideration, quiet moments she plants like seeds to grow ever deeper revelations.
“Hannah, I want you to try to remember the word that was on the first stone you found. Can you do that?”
“That’s easy. It was follow.”
“And do you also know what was written on the last one, the very last one that you found?”
And this time she has to think, but only for a moment.
“Fall,” she says. “The last one said fall.”
4
Half a bottle of Mari Mayans borrowed from an unlikely friend of Peter’s, a goth chick who DJs at a club that Hannah’s never been to because Hannah doesn’t go to clubs. Doesn’t dance and has always been more or less indifferent to both music and fashion. The goth chick works days at Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s, selling Doc Martens and blue hair dye only a couple of blocks from the address on the card that Peter gave her. The place where the party is being held. La Fête de la Fée Verte, according to the small white card, the card with the phone number. She’s already made the call, has already agreed to be there, seven o’clock sharp, seven on the dot, and everything that’s expected of her has been explained in detail, twice.
Hannah’s sitting on the floor beside her bed, a couple of vanilla-scented candles burning because she feels obligated to make at least half a half-hearted effort at atmosphere. Obligatory show of respect for mystique that doesn’t interest her, but she’s gone to the trouble to borrow the bottle of liqueur; the bottle passed to her in a brown paper bag at the boutique, anything but inconspicuous, and the girl glared out at her, cautious from beneath lids so heavy with shades of black and purple that Hannah was amazed the girl could open her eyes.
“So, you’re supposed to be a friend of Peter’s?” the girl asked suspiciously.
“Yeah, supposedly” Hannah replied, accepting the package, feeling vaguely, almost pleasurably illicit. “We’re chess buddies.”
“A painter,” the girl said.
“Most of the time.”
“Peter’s a cool old guy. He made bail for my boyfriend once, couple of years back.”
“Really? Yeah, he’s wonderful,” and Hannah glanced nervously at the customers browsing the racks of leather handbags and corsets, then at the door and the bright daylight outside.
“You don’t have to be so jumpy. It’s not illegal to have absinthe. It’s not even illegal to drink it. It’s only illegal to import it, which you didn’t do. So don’t sweat it.”
Hannah nodded, wondering if the girl was telling the truth, if she knew what she was talking about. “What do I owe you?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” the girl replied. “You’re a friend of Peter’s, and, besides, I get it cheap from someone over in Jersey. Just bring back whatever you don’t drink.”
And now Hannah twists the cap off the bottle, and the smell of odor is so strong, so immediate, she can smell it before she even raises the bottle to her nose. Black jelly beans, she thinks, just like Peter said, and that’s something else she never cared for. As a little girl, she’d set the black ones aside—and the pink ones too—saving them for her sister. Her sister had liked the black ones.
She has a wine glass, one from an incomplete set she bought last Christmas, secondhand, and she has a box of sugar cubes, a decanter filled with filtered tap water, a spoon from her mother’s mismatched antique silverware. She pours the absinthe, letting it drip slowly from the bottle until the fluorescent yellow-green liquid has filled the bottom of the glass. Then Hannah balances the spoon over the mouth of the goblet and places one of the sugar cubes in the tarnished bowl of the spoon. She remembers watching Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder doing this in Dracula, remembers seeing the movie with a boyfriend who eventually left her for another man, and the memory and all its associations are enough to make her stop and sit staring at the glass for a moment.