Linda I think Jeremy’s hurt or in trouble and I don’t know what to do, it says. I can’t lost Jeremy. Help me Linda I don’t know what to do.
Ken Wahl never saw this entry, and neither did anybody else. After writing it, not stopping to correct lost for lose, Steve tucked it back underneath the dress socks he never wore. Then he went out to the kitchen to clean up. They’d had chicken alfredo with noodles. By now he could make it without having to read the instructions on the jar. He turned to chicken alfredo when he wanted to feel secure.
*
Jeremy was awake and restless by midnight. Turning in early had thrown him off. Shifting and turning in bed, he tried unsuccessfully to calm his mind. After a while he gave up.
“Hey, it’s Jeremy,” he said quietly into the mouthpiece, standing in the living room at the wall phone in the dark, wearing the same basketball shorts and undershirt he’d used as pajamas since high school.
“It’s twelve thirty,” Stephanie said. She’d been sleeping.
“Oh,” he said. For him it was still yesterday, all that blood and sun and glass: for her it was only the middle of the night. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK. What is it?”
“I—” Where was he going to start? “You were right about Collins.”
“Collins?”
“The house.” Nothing. “The one from the movies.”
In some places night gets louder in the summertime. Cicadas were buzzing outside, choral, alien. He looked out at the backyard from where he stood, hearing their sound but seeing no motion, just hearing the drone. They attached themselves to trees and sang all summer. When it got cold they’d be gone.
“No, listen,” she said after a long silence, stirring finally free from sleep. “I decided you were right. You know? You were right.”
“I was right?”
“It’s none of our business.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“You said, ‘I don’t want to know.’”
“That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t want to know, but I had to go out to Collins to talk to Sarah Jane, and I—”
“Sarah Jane lives here,” said Stephanie. “She’s right down the street.”
“Well, but no, she doesn’t. She drives in from Collins most days now, when she comes in at all.”
Stephanie laughed. “This is new,” she said.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “She seems kind of worried when she comes in.”
Stephanie was now sitting upright in bed. The San Francisco job was beginning to look like a dead end. She still wasn’t sure how much longer she could really stand Nevada, but when Jeremy’d refused to go adventuring down the county roads, she’d taken it to heart: she wanted adventure, but she didn’t want it to get messy. But it seemed like now it was messy already, and Jeremy was less than a mile away.
“Oh,” she said.
Jeremy felt himself getting ready to do something he wasn’t comfortable doing.
“She’s a nice person. I can’t figure it out. I have to talk to somebody about this,” he said.
He couldn’t see her smiling in the dark, and she calibrated her tone so he wouldn’t be able to hear it, either. “Do you want to come over?” she said.
At one thirty a.m. in Nevada at the very end of spring, his was the only car driving evenly down the side streets, turning cautiously, not even attracting imaginary attention. Jeremy reflected upon the moment as best he could, situated as he was, there at its center. It felt quietly dramatic, inward-turning: an unfamiliar feeling. He settled into it. There was no telling how long it would last.
*
“I still have the charts,” she said. She was at the closet door, in her bedroom, still in her nightclothes: Cyclone Red sweatpants and an oversized Lake Okoboji T-shirt. In a previous lifetime, last winter, this would have made Jeremy feel profoundly uncomfortable, but the events of the day had left him open to unfamiliar positions.
Stephanie’s apartment was just off downtown, on the second floor of a three-story building that predated the Second World War. Steve and Jeremy lived in a ranch home that had gone up at the same time as the rest of the ones surrounding it; at Stephanie’s, he felt acutely conscious of how little he actually knew about other people’s lives, and of several assumptions he’d always carried but never named. You could see the whole of the place as soon as you came in through the front door; there was a fern on a single bookcase, and another hanging from a hook in the window frame, and not much else. Her bed was right in the middle of the room with a collapsible table next to it, like the ones in hospitals. The window looked out onto Sixth Street; he kept stealing glances at the sidewalk below.
Her charts consisted of two notebooks and a large sheet of paper from an artist’s sketch pad with an actual map drawn on it: cut sections from laser printouts were affixed to its edges by paper clips. It was big enough to hang on the wall; its four corners bore faded tape marks.