Jill
A FEW GHOSTS
March 25, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
THERE WAS LITHIUM, benzodiazepines, and God only knew what else. Something clamped shut deep inside Jill.
The dayroom at St. Elizabeth’s was full of people who would not look at her and that was fine. She didn’t want to look at them either. She noticed that the hallways were narrow and dirty but that did not bother her. It didn’t bother her when Elmore told her that he was filing for divorce because he couldn’t afford the expense of an insane wife who couldn’t even take care of their son. She did think, silently, that it was vastly inappropriate of him to bring it up at this particular time, but then, his emotional compass had swung to some bizarre new bearing lately. It was remotely pleasing not to have to worry about that anymore. It didn’t bother her when Brian came and begged her to say something, nor did it cheer her when she heard her sister Megan, who had a doctorate in molecular biology, raging at the doctor in a slightly hoarse voice, so Jill knew she was smoking again and that, like everything else, it was her fault.
She started talking after her mother and father came to visit her, because their visit perked her up considerably. But when she told Brian he just looked alarmed, particularly when she went into detail about the visit. So she did not mention the other two visitors at all.
* * *
Jill saw her parents, Sam and Bette Dance, when she opened her eyes one night, soon after she was admitted. Dimmed lights revealed a clock on the wall that said 2:17 A.M.
Footsteps passed the open door. The rattling wheels of a cart grew loud and then soft; an impassive female voice paged Dr. Hogart for the third time.
Sam and Bette leaned over her, looking worried. Jill was not surprised. It seemed to her as if they had just been gone for a while. Of course they would visit her in the hospital.
She wakened more fully, and realized that she was not dreaming. She tried to speak, urgently, but couldn’t. Something that sounded like bllg came out. She felt as if she were pinned underwater.
Bette wore a minimalist blue evening dress that revealed fit arms and shoulders. The pendant hanging from a chain around her neck was a simple design, and glinted like her short, silvery hair in the dim light.
Sam, in a completely uncustomary suit and tie, took her hands. “Jill, I’m sorry.”
Bette bent down and hugged her, pressed her cheek against Jill’s. “You’re not crazy, Jill.” Her voice was strong and fierce. “We came as soon as we heard. We were at a party at McMillan’s, and got on the Underground, and—”
“Shhh,” said Sam. “Someone might hear you. And we shouldn’t talk about anything sensitive.”
A sensitive party? wondered Jill. She felt a distant impulse to giggle. She later realized that their unconventional way of getting from a fashionable party in London to a hospital room in the United States, probably from a different timestream, when there were people who might be able to trace them through that action, was what Sam meant by sensitive.
“I don’t care,” said Bette, although she lowered her voice. “This is my girl they’ve got here.” She turned and lifted the IV bag, squinted. “What is this crap?” She shut off the IV.
Sam said, “Bette! You’re not a doctor.”
“Well, this one should lose her license.”
“Maybe Jill needs fluids.”
“Not if the fluid is full of this much lithium and all kinds of other junk. No wonder she can’t talk! It’s a wonder her heart is still beating!”
Jill struggled to speak once again, but could not. Tears of frustration welled from her eyes and trickled down to her ears. Part of her wanted to laugh—I have tears in my ears from lying in my bed at night thinking of you. She couldn’t move, couldn’t get up, couldn’t hug them. Where have you been? Stay here!
“Listen carefully, Jill,” said Sam. “Until we knew about particle physics, we didn’t know this was possible. But it’s dangerous.”
What is this? Jill tried to ask. What is it?
Bette picked up her chart, which was clipped to the end of the bed. “Sam, this is 1991. Wink didn’t tell us that!” She blinked. “So much time … just gone … we’ve got to leave!”
Sam kept talking to Jill, his voice low and urgent. “Now we know that it is possible, but we don’t know all that much about it. It’s difficult to … move around. There are other forces at work. Other people who want to know what’s going on, and we keep finding things out—”
What things?
“We have to go, Sam. Now.”
As Bette yanked on his arm, Sam said, “Read my notebooks, Jill. If you still have the house you still have them.” He looked very old, and very tired. “I love you.”
Bette bent down, gathered Jill up with strong arms, and crushed her face to Jill’s, so that her muffled voice was close to Jill’s ear. “I love you so! And I’m so, so sorry. We’ll be back.”
“Bette, you can’t promise that.” Jill heard anguish in Sam’s voice.
“I promise, Jill,” she said in a firm voice. “I promise that we’ll be back.” She kissed Jill.
“We really do have to go,” said Sam. He gave Jill a long hug, a short kiss, and held both of her hands for a moment while gazing at her as if to remember, Jill thought. And she looked on them as if it were her last look, gathering their dear faces into herself.
Bette and Sam stood facing Jill, arms around one another’s waists, and looked at her for seconds that, for Jill, were stripped of everything except their shared gaze. Then Bette pulled Sam from the room. Jill heard Bette’s heels and Sam’s heavier tread recede down the hall.
Come back, she shouted, with the voice in her head that didn’t make it to her lungs, her vocal cords, the voice that was so submerged she couldn’t even open her mouth.
But the intensity of her interior cry finally forced her mouth open. She sobbed: deep, hoarse, alien sounds that took all the air in her lungs. She could not stop. She didn’t want to.
A nurse came in. She turned off a beeping sound, frowned, and said, “Don’t you dare touch your IV line again or I’ll tie down your hands.” She opened the line and left.
She remembered then that she’d had another visitor, earlier, before Mom and Dad. She had no idea what time he had been there, of course. He had looked vaguely familiar to her semi-dreaming, drugged mind.
He sat in the chair in the corner. His short beard was grayish, perhaps, but most of his face was shaded with a fedora with the brim snapped down over his left eye, so that she could see only the right one, appraising and somewhat sympathetic. Shadows obscured any details of what looked vaguely like a government-issued uniform. His ankle rested on his right knee as he sprawled back in his chair, so one muddy, well-used boot was visible in the sliver of light from the doorway.
She went over it in her mind after he got up and left, which was as soon as she tried to sit up. A loud, medical beep signaled that she had pulled something loose.
He had a long stride. One, two—and he was out the door.
“Hey,” she heard from down the hall. “Who are you?” Then someone—presumably that same nurse—paged security. “Dr. Yellow to third floor east, please.”
As Jill sank back onto the bed, she realized that, despite the drugs, her heart was beating very fast. She rather thought she had seen him earlier that same evening, after they had done the evening bustle to get her battened down for the night, and dimmed the lights. Or maybe it had been some other time … so hard to remember …
She closed her eyes and tried to memorize him, but he rapidly became entangled with a long-ago cartoon of Popeye and Brutus fighting, and then she was back in limbo, and then Mom and Dad showed up.
When the third man came, she screamed.
* * *
I was born in 1950, Jill wrote in her imaginary journal. The War was over, at least on paper. Germany had been divided in a series of ad hoc agreements.
She started over again, in her head. She could not write a real journal because she did not want anyone else to read it.
She was lying in her hospital bed, one ear on a pillow. She pulled another pillow over her head to block out the television sounds. She went over and over them again, each time from the beginning, to set them in her mind.
She continued.
I was born five years after the end of the War, and its shadow lingered. I knew it had been a terrible War and an exciting War and that its end released the world in a burst of great light. I gathered that we were now living in a wonderful time, The Future, where an image of superimposed ellipses illustrated the font of all being, The Atom, and that all would be good, henceforth and evermore, because the War had been fought, the War had been won, and the War was over.
But the War was still there.
The War was in the chairs, rounded and tucked in the lines of the thirties, the years when War was accreting like leaves in a headlong stream, lodged against implacable economic and political rocks. The War was in the black-and-white photographs of my father in uniform on my parents’ dresser. It was on the bookshelves and in the acrid pages of old newspaper clippings I found in trunks, in the books I found and read at my paternal grandparents’ house—books like Boots and her Buddies, or Nina and Skeezix, illustrated by pictures of German and Japanese spies with narrow, ominous mustaches, wearing spectacles that blanked out their eyes, war propaganda for kids. It was in movies, where black-and-white spies played out their games on mysterious trains and in narrow dark streets that seemed the epitome of Europe, where the ominous two-toned siren of the Gestapo signaled deportation and death.
Walter Cronkite narrated The Twentieth Century on television. Tiny puffs of smoke emerged from rolling valleys; troops marched; the Prudential Company’s impressive logo, the Rock of Gibraltar, announced its sponsorship, and my father watched, always leaning against a doorway, never sitting down, gleaning information about what he had been through. Winston Churchill’s great tomes proclaimed themselves boldly on the Danish Modern bookshelf he built in his basement workshop: The Gathering Storm, Their Finest Hour, The Hinge of Fate. By day, Danny and I writhed like movie soldiers beneath hibiscus bushes and hid behind sandboxes in our backyards, carrying machine guns and avoiding Germans. At night, when a tiny bedside light illuminated the fine, old well-polished bedstead with carefully turned down, smooth sheets at the house of my maternal grandparents, the War was in the shadows, sharp and deep, and on the lace-covered dresser where a picture of the two sons who had died in the war, Keith and Jerry, forever smiled, boys in overalls, holding between them a string of striped bass.
She went over it again and again, etching it into her mind, so she would not forget. They wanted to sweep everything from her with these drugs, but that was wrong. She had to remember.
She had to remember everything.
No one else did. But that was her fault too. No one else could.
Things were better now, she supposed, than they would have been otherwise, as if histories were shifting toward the more positive end of an unseen spectrum. The Palestinians had not been moved wholesale from their land, and had been paid well for the huge tracts where European Jews could settle in what was now Palestine-Israel. But she could also remember a war in 1967, when Israel took great swaths of land with weapons the U.S. had given them. Now, in this timestream, there were still disagreements, but the Middle East was not a festering powder keg.
The African Union, formed in 1964, elected and sent delegates to a Pan-African Congress, which seemed forever mired in bickering. This was not surprising, because the African population contained many more cultures and languages than Europe, but much progress had been made, progress being defined as decreasing territorial, cultural, and religious disputes, healing the injustices and exploitation caused by colonialism, and increasing health care and education. But that legacy was so strong that much of Africa was still mired in deadly civil wars, large-scale ethnic murders (the term “ethnic cleansing” disgusted Jill), disease, and subjugation of women and children.
Germany had not been divided, post-war, and the Soviet Union had not sucked the life out of countries around its border in rough approximation of Hitler’s original plan for Germany’s use of those same countries.
In the United States, in the wake of victory, Roosevelt had been able to pass a strong civil rights bill in 1946.
But—why? How had this happened?
How was it that she could remember a far different world? Why did she think that she had had a hand in creating this world?
It was easy to take their point of view: She was crazy.
The problem was that she knew she was not.
The roots of this timestream lay in whatever her mother, Bette Elegante, and her father, Sam Dance, had done during the 1940s, and she did not know what it was.
She only knew that whatever they had done had birthed, somehow, this slightly different, slightly better world, which slid a new history into her past. Had this world existed parallel with that other world, in which Roosevelt died in his fourth term, Truman had ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Germany was divided, and John F. Kennedy was murdered? Or had she, with one, decisive, wild action, wrenched that old history onto a new track, one that neatly provided a past for everyone, except her, that was perfectly consistent?
Or was she, really, delusional? Maybe her mother had been a perfectly normal WAC, rather than a spy; her father a perfectly ordinary ordnance engineer, rather than someone who knew more than he could say.
If so, why did that old past insist on itself, cling to her, aggravate her, heap upon her such real sorrow and such real responsibility?
If her parents really were alive, somewhere or somewhen, why did they not help her?
It had something to do with the war. She knew nothing of her mother’s life during the war.
She returned to her journal. From the top, now.
I was born in 1950 …
Jill
WELCOME TO THE FUN HOUSE
April 5, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
“YOU’RE ALWAYS ANGRY,” said Jill to Elmore.
She had been in St. Elizabeth’s for a couple of weeks. She and Elmore were eating lunch in the cafeteria.
“That’s right.” He was sitting, right now, but sideways to the table, as if poised to jump and run. Elmore hardly ever sat down when he came, no matter where they were. He even stood in their joint therapy sessions, leading Jill to note that he seemed crazy too. She hoped that the therapist noticed.
Elmore shoveled potato salad into his mouth. His thin, pale face was set off by the perfect, expensive cut of his thin, pale hair. He took a bite of his hot dog. “Everything is falling apart.”
“And it’s my fault.” Jill said this not as an accusation, but as if it were a fact. She believed it to be true.
“You got it.” He wiped his hands on his napkin and threw it on the table. “I can’t handle all of this. Taking care of Stevie. Running the house. Scheduling employees at the bookshop, which we don’t need to keep. A lot of extra work for nothing. I paid the store’s insurance—it was almost overdue—and the utility bills, but I didn’t order anything. There are already too many books there. And God only knows how much the employees are stealing.”
“Right. Naturally, I hired a bunch of thieves.”
“You’re such a bleeding heart. Jane is a slacker—always late—”
“She’s taking care of her father.”
“Doesn’t matter. If we’re not open on time, we lose customers. I fired her.”
“What?”
He shrugged.
“You used to be a bleeding heart.”
He glared at her. His glasses were gray, like his eyes. His shirt and suit were immaculate, as usual, and tailored in Hong Kong. His face was no longer the face of the young man that she’d married—expressive, committed, kind. This face gave nothing away that the enemy could use—in court, in the office. Or, thought Jill, to his wife or his child.
“Why do you keep saying that?” He sounded genuinely irritated.
“Our newspaper—” she began, but stopped, remembering that she’d shown him one of his old editorials a few months ago and he’d just said, “I wrote this? I never believed this crap.”
Now, Elmore said, “It’s no wonder that Stevie is confused. You talk about things that never happened.”
“I need to see him. He needs to see me.”
“No. You only encourage him. Miss Sally—you remember his teacher’s name, don’t you?—says that now he’ll only answer to the name ‘Whens.’ Whens? What kind of a name is that, Jill, for chrissakes? Is that what you call him?”
“I have the same problem as Miss Sally. He won’t answer to anything but Whens.”
“You could call me Winnie,” said Stevie-Whens, while helping his mother fold clothes. He picked out his own small jeans, shirts, and underwear and folded them with great concentration, his yellow fluff of hair illuminated by winter sunlight coming through the window, his glasses sliding down his nose.
“Don’t you have enough names?”
“Well, this would be like calling me Whens, except that people wouldn’t think it was so strange. Abbie calls me Whennie now, and it almost sounds like Winnie anyway. Winnie is a real name, like Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“Stevie is a real name too.”
“It’s a real name, but it’s not my real name.”
“I just don’t understand this Whens stuff.”
His surprised eyes were magnified by his glasses. “You don’t remember? You named me.”
“I named you Stephen Dance-Wentworth.”
“No, you were sleeping and I was sleeping with you because of a bad dream and I woke up because you were crying and yelling. So I tried to wake you up and you did wake up and you hugged me and said, ‘You are my Whens. You are all my Whens.’ Then you fell asleep and you weren’t crying. I like it. It just makes so much sense. You’re always saying When-You’re-Older. When-You’re-Bigger. Even though I’m almost five. I’m really just a lot of Whens.”
She laughed. “I never did that. You’re making it up.”
“No, I’m not,” he said, smoothing a striped T-shirt like a fussy store clerk. “And you know it.”
She didn’t say anything. She did know it.
“Jill? I’ve got to get back to work. Here’s a napkin. Stop crying. Wipe your face. Jeez. I bet you can’t even find your way back to your own room.” Then he was gone.
Eventually, an orderly helped her stand, took her back to her room, and gave her a pill.
* * *
“So why am I better than Hitler, again?”
It was May first. Jill was with her assigned therapist, Nancy.
Nancy’s sleek brown hair curved obediently around her face in a precise oval, and fell forward and back, each hair in perfect unison with the rest, as she bowed her head, looked at her watch, then raised her head and looked at Jill again. Jill found the precise movements of her hair fascinating.
“Jill? Hello? We have five minutes.”
“I’m glad that you don’t believe me.” Of course, Jill had only told Nancy anything because she knew she wouldn’t be believed. She hadn’t told anyone about the man she’d scared off by screaming.
His face, as he’d observed her, was deeply shadowed, but his SS uniform, Gestapo-gray, and the death’s head clearly affixed to the cap just above the visor, were unmistakable.
Her scream had at least brought the doctor, in minutes, and a big adjustment in her meds. She wasn’t at all sure if he had been real, or just a dream. It certainly wasn’t like her to scream. That bothered her almost as much as the memory of the man. She definitely wanted to put that embarrassing, scary moment behind her.
No, she wasn’t going to talk about that clear sign of deep insanity. They would just say she’d read too many books about the war, and she really did want to go home.
Nancy sighed. “Let’s look at the facts, Jill. You do have many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people are able to hide extremely horrific events from themselves. This disorder doesn’t always stem from war. Originally, it was called ‘railroad spine.’ Victims of early train crashes reported strange psychological and physiological symptoms for years. Victims of sexual abuse, people who’ve been in some kind of accident—there can be many causes. People have the ability to tamp these events deep down into their subconscious, but the memory of them can emerge in sudden, startling ways. Or, they know that these things have happened—like a car wreck—and seem to resume normal life, but are psychologically damaged. You seem to fit some of the diagnosis criteria. The problem is, no one but you believes that another timestream”—Nancy smiled briefly—“existed before this one. Think about all the questions you have to answer, all the things you have to explain, in order to make that true. What happened to all those other lives, those people in the other timestream?”
“My point exactly.”
“You talked about Painting Woman, once.”
“What?”
“You used to draw. Paint.”
“No. I never have.” Not in this world. It was dangerous: What she drew came true. Suddenly, she agreed with everyone: She must have been absolutely nuts to mention this. It was nobody’s business but her own, as the old tune went.
“It might be a good idea to try it out again. It might help unite these disparate parts of your personality.”
“Fix my railroad spine.”
“Do you want to get better?”
“Of course,” she said, belatedly remembering that this woman had to sign off on her release. “I could try doing some art stuff. Sure. Take a drawing course or something.”
“From what I understood, you are rather beyond that.”
Damn. What had they given her, Sodium Pentothal?
Nancy changed the subject abruptly. She often did. “I’m glad you’re using makeup again.”
“My sister Megan put it on. I’m going back to work pretty soon. Whenever I’m ready, they told me. I still need to defend my dissertation.” Jill laughed. “Megan seemed to think that makeup would get me in the right frame of mind. Maybe it does. A mask.”
“You’ll be working at the World Bank, right?”
“Mmm-hmm. In charge of an international school project. You know what happens without me. Things fall apart.” Her mouth trembled and she grabbed a Kleenex.
“Just remember, Jill. You are just the manager of some people who work at the World Bank. You are not in charge of the entire world and all of time. And—let me ask you a question. You still haven’t told your brother and sister exactly why you’re here, right?”
“My husband committed me.”
“Don’t be obstinate. I know your husband committed you. But underlying all of this—your guilt, your disturbance, your actions—is one belief. You need to tell them what that is.”
“I don’t see how I can.”
Nancy looked at her deadpan with cool blue eyes. “What if it’s true? Mightn’t they suspect? Don’t they deserve to know? Shouldn’t you apologize?”
Jill got up to leave.
“Thirty seconds. Answer my question. Don’t they?”
Jill said, her hand splayed over her chest, “My heart is pounding very hard.” Then she fled down the hall.
She ran to one of the dayrooms, where catatonics shuffled about, two old men played checkers, and a young woman sang, quite beautifully, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” over and over and over again, accompanying herself on a well-worn piano. She did this every day, while Jill watched the Golden Arrow of Breath relaxation tape from the tape library, which she had memorized, finding she enjoyed this form of self-hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming.
Jill sprawled on a couch, closed her eyes, and tried to remember whether or not she had told the therapist about the Infinite Game Board, but she couldn’t. If she had, she hoped that Nancy had not made a note of it.
She didn’t think that Brian and Megan remembered the Game Board at all. It had been swept from them like the childhood toy they’d all thought it was, at first, found in the huge, old attic on a rainy day, with a strange surface that changed constantly. They had found a few games that worked.
Found? She snorted aloud, but of course, no one in the dayroom noticed. Most likely, the game had tailored itself to their level. It was Q, in another, earlier incarnation: potent, seductive, and revelatory. She knew that now. They had hidden it from their parents, naturally, since it was so much fun, but after a while it gave them visions of future histories—holocausts, flames, wars—that made them, literally, ill. Eventually, Jill had sequestered it for herself, and told Brian and Megan that it was lost. Her ideas for her ten-minutes-of-fame comic book, Gypsy Myra, which featured a tall, fierce woman with long, black, curly hair, who wore long gypsy skirts, played gypsy violin, and told the future, sprang from the board. She hadn’t the faintest idea how it worked. And finally, the board had shown her the scenario she had first made into an underground comic book in 1968, after King and Robert Kennedy were murdered. The board, and Gypsy Myra, showed her that her brother might die in Vietnam. It showed her how—where—to change that history, how to hitchhike into time. The board had led her to Dallas, five years in the past of that time line. Somehow her father had followed her, rescued her, and they emerged …
Here. Back in 1968, but a 1968 in which Jack Kennedy had not died, nor his brother Robert, nor Martin Luther King Jr.
A 1968 in which Brian and Megan accepted that their mother had disappeared in 1963, rather than living with them in Halcyon House, working on her doctorate in education, and opening a Montessori school in a large back room of the house.
Her memories of that time, were, not surprisingly, vague, shifting, like dreams that, when you wake up and try to recall the specifics, evaporate.
She wanted, desperately, to remember what had happened. She wanted, now, to know how it had happened. What about the Game Board had precipitated a shift in history? That was what her political science studies were all about, at heart. She had hoped they would fill that gap, give her and Brian and Megan, Bette and Sam, without the hard work of remembering …
She wiped away tears and stared at the ceiling, surprised, realizing that before now she had not wanted to remember. It had been too enormous to comprehend. She had wanted to push all that aside, to get on with what people did as they grew up.
So she went to college, got married, started a business, had a baby, pursued her ferocious interest in international politics.
And all that got her was exhausted and crazy. Just goes to show you.
But she was no longer exhausted. Not today. She sat up.
Was she crazy? By all normal measures, yes. Except that she knew that she wasn’t.
So she had to try to figure out, after all these years, what had happened, and why. What was memory, anyway? What was time; what was that elusive subject, history, which she’d studied so long and hard? Megan was working on a memory drug. Maybe there was a reason. Maybe Megan remembered more about the past than she would admit to. Or not as much as she would like to.
And Brian—well, he’d worked hard at blotting everything out. Kind of like her, she supposed, only she used work, while he used alcohol.
The trees outside were fat and green. The streets, she knew, were hot and packed with traffic; the sky was full of smog; evenings released refreshing thunderstorms.
It was spring in Washington, which she always found glorious. The city would heal her, if she would just get out into it.
It was time to leave this place.
* * *
Elmore allowed her discharge mainly, Jill thought, because their insurance had run out and he was tired of paying the au pair he’d hired to take care of Stevie. She hadn’t seen Stevie in a month. Children were not allowed at the hospital.
Elmore went on a tirade as they drove through Washington, but his words were a bit like the trees and houses, things that passed with whooshing sounds and were gone. It was actually kind of funny. Phrases like “Sick of this,” “You’re acting like a child,” “I told you [fill in the blank]” had no meaning anymore. She interrupted his running narrative of her faults.
“You used to be different.”
“What?” He actually turned and looked at her. “She speaks. Okay. I’m trying to listen. But don’t you realize that’s what you’ve been saying about everything this past month? Everything used to be different.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have let them talk me into committing you, but you were … combative. Hysterical.”
“I was?”
He shook his head as the light turned green, and moved the car forward another block. “See? You don’t remember. They told me that it was likely that you would experience more … cognitive breaks … As time went on.”
“Cognitive breaks,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yes. You may be schizophrenic.”
“Hence, lithium?”
“You have to understand, I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do.”
“It’s not right.”
“I know, but—”
“I mean, it’s not right that if I argue with you, you can label it as being combative and say that it’s bad. It’s inconvenient, I know. It takes up your valuable time.” She stirred, restless, feeling as if she would like to jump out of the car.
And run home.
Maybe that was the best thing to do. Just because her last attempt had failed didn’t mean she shouldn’t try again, and succeed. Before that, she hadn’t even known what she wanted.
She said, “What about Stevie?”
“What do you mean?”
“You talked about a divorce at the hospital. In fact, it sounded to me as if you’d started proceedings. Did you send me any papers? I don’t remember. Do I need a lawyer?”
“Jill, we can talk about this later.”
“Where’s Stevie?”
“At preschool.”
“I want to see him.”
“He’ll be home around three.”
“I want to see him now. Take me there.”
“I don’t want you to cause a scene.”
“I just want to see my son.” She was surprised to hear that her voice was firm and strong. Inside, she was trembling, on the verge of tears. She watched Elmore as he pressed his lips together. In a second he would say “No,” as if she were Stevie’s age.
“Elmore. Listen to me. I’m sorry this happened. I understand how unhappy you are with me.”
“It’s not—”
“No, wait. Let me finish. I think you’re right about a divorce. I will keep Stevie. I will—”
“No.”
She continued to talk, slowly, firmly. “You can see him whenever you like. Stevie and I will live at Halcyon House.”
“With what money?”
She laughed. “Well, they actually do want me at the World Bank, although I know that amazes you. And I’ll have the money from selling our bookstore and town house.”
“I don’t want to sell them.”
“I thought you did. But fine. We’ll get everything appraised and you can pay me my half.”
“I can’t afford that.”
“You can make payments. Oh, but we don’t have to talk about it now. I know you’re a little disturbed. There’s Stevie’s school.” She thought a moment. “Maybe you’re right. Let’s not bother the class. Let’s go home. I’ll see him soon.” She turned her face to the open window, hoping that the wind would dry the sweat of her effort from her face before Elmore noticed it.