Lost
STAVE ONE
Somebody Else in the Vehicle
said the attorney-type into his cell phone. He wiped the wet from his face. “There must be. It's in the carpool lane.” He listened, squinting, and motioned to Winnie: Stop. Don't open the car door yet . Already, other drivers were slowing down to rubberneck. “Where are we, Braintree, Quincy? On 93 north, anyway, a half mile beyond the junction with 128. Yes, I know enough not to move anyone, but I'm telling you, you'll have a hell of a time getting an ambulance through, what with rush hour—there'll be a backup a mile long before you know it.”
He listened again. Then, “Right. I'll look. Two or more, maybe.”
Returning from a few quiet days on Cape Cod, Winifred Rudge had missed her turnoff west and gotten stuck on the JFK toward Boston. Woolgathering, nail biting, something. Focus was a problem. Late for her appointment, she'd considered the odds: in this weather, what were her chances of being ticketed for violating the diamond lane's two-riders-or-more rule? Limited. She'd risked it. So she'd been at the right place on the downgrade to see the whole thing, despite the poor visibility. She'd watched the top third of a white pine snap in the high winds. Even from a half mile away, she'd noticed how the wood flesh had sprung out in diagonal striations, like nougat against rain-blackened bark. The crown of the tree twisted, then tilted. The wind had caught under the tree's parasol limbs and carried it across three lanes of slow-moving traffic, flinging it onto the hood and the roof of a northbound Subaru in the carpool lane. The driver of the Subaru, four cars ahead of Winnie, had braked too hard and hydroplaned left against the Jersey barriers. The evasive action hadn't helped.
Winnie had managed to tamp her brakes and avoid adding to the collection of crumpled fenders and popped hoods. She had been the first out in the rain, the first to start poking through dark rafts of pine needles. Mr. Useful Cell Phone was next, having emerged from some vehicle behind her. He carried a ridiculous out-blown umbrella, and when he got off the phone with the 911 operator he hooked the umbrella handle around a good-size tree limb and tried to yank it away.
“They said don't touch the passengers,” he yelled through the rain.
Afraid her voice would betray her panic, she didn't even like to answer, but to reassure him she managed to say, “I know that much.” The smell of pine boughs, sap on her hands, water on her face. What was she scared of finding in that dark vehicle? But the prime virtue of weather is immediacy, and the wind tore away the spicy Christmas scent. In its place, a vegetable stink of cheap spilled gasoline. “We may have to get them out, do you smell that?” she shouted, and redoubled her efforts. They could use help; where were the other commuters? Just sitting in their cars, listening to hear themselves mentioned on the WGBH traffic report?
“Cars don't blow up like in the movies,” he said, motioning her to take a position farther along the tree trunk. “Put your back against it and push; I'll pull. One. Two. Three.” Thanks mostly to gravity they managed to dislodge the thing a foot or so, enough to reveal the windshield. It was still holding, though crazed into opacity with the impact. The driver, a fiftyish sack of a woman, was slanted against a net bag of volleyballs in the passenger seat. She didn't look lucky. The car had slammed up against the concrete barrier so tightly that both doors on the driver's side were blocked.
“Isn't there someone else?” said Winnie. “Didn't you say?”
“You know, I think that is gasoline. Maybe we better stand off.”
Winnie made her way along the passenger side of the car, through branches double-jointed with rubbery muscle. The rear door was locked and the front door was locked. She peered through pine needles, around sports equipment. “There's a booster seat in the back,” she yelled. “Break the window, can you?”
The umbrella handle wasn't strong enough. Winnie had nothing useful in her purse or her overnight bag. The cold rain made gluey boils on the windows. It was impossible to see in. “No car could catch on fire in a storm like this,” she said. “Is that smoke, or just burned rubber from the brake pads?” But then another driver appeared, carrying a crowbar. “Smash the window,” she told him.
“Hurry,” said Cell Phone Man. “Do they automatically send fire engines, do you think?”
“Do it,” she said. The newcomer, an older man in a Red Sox cap faded to pink, obliged. The window shattered, spraying glassy baby teeth. As she clawed for the recessed lock in the rear door, Winnie heard the mother begin to whimper. The door creaked open and more metal scraped. Winnie lurched and sloped herself in. The child strapped into the booster seat was too large for it. Her legs were thrown up in ungainly angles. “Maybe we can unlatch the whole contraption and drag it out,” said Winnie, mostly to herself; she knew her voice wouldn't carry in the wind. She leaned over the child in the car's dark interior, into a hollow against which pine branches bunched on three sides. She fumbled for the buckle of the seat belt beneath the molded plastic frame of the booster. Then she gave up and pulled out, and slammed the door.
“I'll get it,” said Red Sox Fan, massing up.
“They said leave everybody where they were,” said Cell Phone, “you could snap a spine and do permanent damage.”
“No spine in her,” said Winnie. “It's a life-size Raggedy Ann doll, a decoy.”
The emergency services arrived, and Winnie, valuing her privacy, shrank back. The fumes of the spilled gasoline followed her back to her car. She sat and bit a fingernail till she tore a cuticle, unwilling to talk to the police. To her surprise, the traffic began crawling again within fifteen minutes. The police never noticed that she was another illegal driver doing a solo run in the carpool lane.
And then, despite her missed exit, the snarl-up, the downpour, the rush hour, she wasn't late after all. Damn.
“Someone's been here before us,” observed the older woman in the mulberry windcheater, pocketing the keys. She flopped her hand against the inside wall to knock a light switch. The air was stale, almost stiff. A few translucent panels overhead blinked, and then steadied. Winnie noted: It's your standard-issue meeting room. It proves the agency's fiscal prudence and general probity. A few tables with wood laminate, sticky with coffee rings. Fitted carpets of muddy rose, muddier in the high-traffic zones. Folding chairs pushed out of their congregational oval. As if whatever group that met here last night had cleared out with rude speed.
“Someone's been here, but not the cleaning crew,” said the woman. “They don't pay me for housekeeping. Oh, well, come in, and we'll set ourselves up by ourselves.” A veteran in the social work world, wearing one of those grandmotherly rain hats like a pleated plastic freezer bag. She wriggled out of her jacket, which was a bit snug, and she smiled sourly. Her nylon sleeves hissed as they slithered.
Other rectangles of light kicked on. Outside, obscured by the reflections flaring in the broad plate glass, a few more couples emerged from cars. Women huddling under the arms of their husbands, the human forms smudged into anonymity by the rain. The observable sky seethed in slow motion over Wellesley, Needham, and this patch of Newton.
Winnie, on edge because of the accident, because of the challenge of the day, hung back in the doorway for as long as she could. She pictured the Weather Channel's computer-graphic impression of the storm. Moisture trawled in from the Atlantic, unseasonable icebox Arctic air sucked down over the Great Lakes, a continental thumbprint of weather, fully a thousand miles broad. A thumbprint slowly twisting, as if to make the undermuscle of the world ache.
She harvested the details; that was what she was good at. That was all she was good at. Anyway, that was what she was there for, and no apologies. She noticed that, as more fluorescent tubes kicked on, everything became more manufactured, more present, the shadows cowed and blurred by multiple light sources. This Styrofoam coffee cup fallen on the carpet. This chair turned on its side, FF scrawled in Magic Marker on its seat.
By the moment the leader grew more cheery and despotic. She brisked about. Winnie and the other supplicants hung back: this wasn't their terrain, not yet. Over their chairs they hung their London Fog knockoffs, their L. L. Bean Polartec parkas, and, in one instance, a retro fox fur suffering from cross-eye. “A little bit of leftover Hurricane Gretl, they tell us,” said the leader. She addressed the spatter against the windows. “You. Stop that. It's supposed to be too late in the season for you. So long. Scram.”
Thunder blurted, a distant throat-clearing of one of the more cautious gods.
The leader was undaunted. She made her way past the bulletin boards shingled with curling color photographs. Hands on hips as she surveyed the detritus of discarded handouts, crumpled napkins, spilled sugar. “Look at this mess. A group of Forever Families having their quarterly meeting, I bet.” In one corner, toddler-size furniture squatted on its thick limbs. The leader swooped, collecting things. She stepped on a stuffed monkey, and it complained with a microchip melody playing, inevitably, “It's a Small World, After All.” Winnie turned away, busying herself with a small notebook and a pen.
“If you help yourself to that old coffee, be it on your own head,” said the leader. “I'm telling you. Nobody even bothered to put the milk away overnight. Do they pay me to be the mother to the world? They do not. But I'll do a fresh pot in a minute. You, you can't listen to me? You can't wait? Go ahead. Be my guest.”
The balding young man with his hand on the lever of the thermos said in an apologetic murmur, “Sorry. I'm groggy. I didn't sleep all night.”
“Caffeine addiction. Let me take a note.” This was only pretend terrorism, since the leader followed up with a pretzel of a smile. “Name tags, name tags?” she went on. “People, please, as I get the brew going, find your name tags, people. We're starting late, but that's okay: the rain, the traffic, we're not all here. I'm not all here. Name tags, people. Here's mine, I'm Mabel Quackenbush, or I was last time I checked.”
Winnie frowned. Surely she'd been incognito in her application? She'd meant to be Dotty O'Malley, a favorite alter ego she adopted on bowling nights. But there was her badge, staring out at her amidst the Murrays, the Pellegrinos, the Spencer-Moscous:
W. Rudge
Obediently W. Rudge slapped the gummy-backed label to her Tufts sweatshirt, but she arranged her drenched scarf to conceal her name. Then she took a place in the circle of chairs as near the back as she could. When they were all settled, the leader said, “I'm the Forever Families coordinator for today. Mabel Quackenbush, from the Providence office. We had twenty-three registrants. I don't know where everyone else is . If I could get here, anyone could. Believe me, I-95 was no treat thanks to Hurricane Whosie. I left at seven and we crawled .” Mabel Quackenbush embroidered the uninteresting story of her journey. A warm-up and a stalling tactic, as new arrivals tiptoed in, shook the wet off their coats, and settled in their chairs.
The room became close. A mothball fug aspirated off damp woolens. Winnie wanted to see who the rest of the registrants were, but she looked at their reflections instead, at the streaked imprecise flatnesses in the windows.
Out of the many-colored earth
That eats the light and drinks the rain
Come beauty, wisdom, mercy, mirth,
That conquer reason, greed, and pain.
John Masefield, if she remembered correctly, who linked reason with greed and pain. Or was it de la Mare? There was that habit again—some people did it with pop songs—of giving one's life a soundtrack. In her case, snippets and sound bites of doggerel.
Don't diagnose reason, greed, or pain, she corrected herself: simply observe the symptoms.
Mabel Quackenbush turned her head this way and that, ducklike. She knew her job. She drew folks in. The skin on her chin was loose, an unbaked cinnamon roll. Behind her half-lenses her eyes blinked, as if with slow washes of albumen. She was beginning to look earnest. Please God, no opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.
She tried to nip that crankiness in the bud. Winnie, she said to herself, go easy on these folks. Be fair. You haven't been here ten minutes yet. Don't you cut them into pieces. Let them do it to themselves, if they're going to.
“Nine-fifteen, and we're still missing, let's see, five couples,” said Mabel, counting. “Well. Latecomers will have to fend for themselves. Now. So .” She had fanned piles of photocopies at her feet. She peered down at them dubiously, and then said, “First things first. The name thing, the round-the-room thing, a word or two: who you are, where you've come from this morning, anything personal you want to share about why you're here. No pressure.”
Winnie shrank into her sweatshirt. In Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Alice could smallify herself by sipping from a tube of something that said DRINKME, but in real life you only shrunk inside.
“Chat,” ordered Mabel Quackenbush.
The couple hunched in their folding chairs at Mabel Quackenbush's left was required to start. Joe and Cathi Pellegrino. (Durham, New Hampshire.) Joe talked, Cathi saturated a Kleenex until shreds of it clung to her cheeks. Four stillbirths. Four .
Next, Cookie and Leonard Schimel. (Braintree, Massachusetts.) Leonard had the limp, Cookie had the fox fur. Leonard a legal practice, Cookie the ache that derives from a hysterectomy. They both had money, but only Leonard had style.
Then came the Spencer-Moscous. (Brookline with summers in Provincetown.) A gay couple. Geoff was a recording technician for Channel Five and Adrian taught fourth grade. The Pellegrinos, the Boudreaus, the Murrays, and the Schimels glanced warmly at the Boys.
The Fogartys didn't smile. Winnie practiced summing them up in a remark: they look as if they spend their highway hours inventing biographies of anthropomorphized meadow animals who all end up as roadkill.
“W. Rudge,” said Maisie Quackenbush.
“Here,” said Winnie.
“W? Wanda? Wilma?”
“W.” Oh, all right. “Winifred.”
“And you hail from?” said Mabel, as if Winnie were a slow contestant on a talk show who somehow had slipped through the screening process and needed prodding.
“Came up from the Cape this morning, but I live in Jamaica Plain,” said Winnie. “Unmarried.”
Mabel, waiting for more, glanced at some papers. When the silence lengthened, she said, “Well, glad to meet you, Wini- fred.” She put the stress on the last syllable, which seemed unnecessarily hostile.
The wives inched nearer to their husbands, grateful for them. To her right, the Boys grinned at Winnie with a solidarity she didn't feel. She tried not to notice, and turned inquiringly to the next pair.
Murray, George and LouBeth. (Billerica, Massachusetts.) Infertility of a private nature.
The Boudreaus. (Weston, Massachusetts.) Their two young children had died of smoke inhalation when a Guatemalan au pair forgot to check the lint trap. Hank Boudreau had insisted on trying again, but Diane was too far into the Change.
The room got quiet. Someone cleared her throat. Someone crossed and uncrossed his legs. Despite her best intentions, Winnie found herself thinking that Diane Boudreau had sacrificed any claim to pity by being such a shameless bottle blonde.
Finally, the Fogartys. Malachy Fogarty, previously of Dublin. (Currently Marblehead.) Mary Lenahan Fogarty was unsettlingly petite, a clutch of narrow limbs in a wraparound skirt and three sweaters. “Postanorexic,” she confessed, “with all that that entails.”
“And so, the theme of the day,” said Mabel in a quieter voice, taking off her glasses and tasting the tip of the earpiece before putting them on again, “is loss. We all suffer from loss, or we wouldn't have come today. Simple as that. But no matter which loss has brought us here, what Forever Families does is recovery . Recovery of the possibilities of life. Knit the wounds and heal the scars and do something for someone else. And maybe, accidentally, for ourselves. Now: here's the commercial.”
Every business has its lingo. Wounds, scars, recoveries. The lanolin blather of the compassion industry. But Winnie allowed that though Mabel Quackenbush looked as if she'd take no prisoners, at least she was up-front about the sales pitch.
At first Winnie scribbled some notes. Mabel had the spiel down cold. Mission statement, Commonwealth accreditation status, history. Forever Families operated in nine states as well as the District of Columbia. It had been profiled in Boston magazine three years ago. Copies coming around.
But then Winnie's mind wandered. She watched the ripples of rain sliding down the smoked glass. Curtaining the reflections of the eager and frightened faces. She found herself capable of being easier on her fellow applicants when studying them in glass.
The vacant-wombed wives. The husbands. Winnie supposed that the Brookline Boys, technically not really husbands, were mid-to late thirties, but the other fellows in the room were midforties at least, and Malachy Fogarty older still. Each husband was bigger than his wife, each husband sat back in his chair as his wife leaned forward, each husband looked prosperous and wary. Each wife looked nuts.
Sunk low in the guts of the building, a furnace began to hum louder, as if trying to drown out Mabel's pitch for Forever Families over other local agencies. The infomercial won. Mabel blinked at them with mercy in her eyes, mercy overlaid by a proper respect for the cash of clients shopping in the baby market.
Winding down, she intoned, “For most of you, there is a Precious One in your life. Maybe already born. Out there. Waiting. You've already taken the first step. Congratulations on brooking our hurricane, which Forever Families scheduled to winnow out the sheep from the goats. Now let's have our coffee, shall we? Fifteen minutes, people. When we come back, I'll give you the skinny on the legal angles of international adoptions, we'll review issues of health and welfare, we'll do some other fun and games. Then after our lunch break, we'll have our visit by a Forever Family, the Stankos from Pepperell. They have three Precious Ones from Moldova.”
Suddenly Mabel Quackenbush looked exhausted, as if she'd rather be home tucking into a Sara Lee coffeecake than sorting papers with the tips of her shoes. “Stretch, now. Scatter and chatter. Look at the displays.”
Winnie wasn't much of a coffee drinker, but as the only solo registrant she was a natural target for a social worker on the prowl. So Winnie hid in a herd of other bleary registrants and lined up for a cup of lukewarm water flavored with coffee stains. When she'd dumped enough sugar in it to make it tolerable, she headed for the hall, hoping to stand outside in the covered walkway and light a cigarette. But one of the Boys ambushed her by the coatrack.
“Are you a Scrooge or a Cratchit?” he said.
She flinched and laughed, blushing. She didn't want to talk to anyone. Was this Geoff or Adrian? They both reeked of the benignity that middle-class professional gay men seemed to prize these days. “I'm a humbug, if that's what you mean,” she went on, trying to be honest, though it wasn't her strong suit.
Unforgivably forward, he reached out and opened her scarf so it spread across the bosom of her sweatshirt. Within the latticework of the intertwined sprigs of red-berried holly was stamped the image of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig dancing with Christmas cheer. Eight, ten, a dozen pairs of Fezziwigs, cavorting in perfect synchronization.
“It's the famous illustration, I recognized it,” he said. “I read A Christmas Carol to my fourth-graders every December. I know the Fezziwigs when I see them.”
This silly Bond Street scarf, a Christmas present from John Comestor some years back. “I can't remember if you're Geoff or the other one,” she said, to change the subject. “You put your sweater on over your name tag.”
“Adrian. Adrian Moscou.”
“Of the Spencer-Moscous.”
“Oh, that. Boy, you sound appalled. Not that I blame you. That's Geoff's thing. He's the one in the family way. But Geoff and I didn't sign up as a hinged name, not today. Too risky, considering what's at stake. Our Precious One . I suppose the Forever Families staff ran our Social Security numbers through a computer check, because Spencer-Moscou is how the phone company lists us.”
“Creepy,” said Winnie. That must be how Forever Families got her real name. W. Rudge. She had signed up as Dotty O'Malley, hadn't she? These days her memory wasn't reliable.
“It is creepy,” said Adrian Moscou cheerfully. “Well, it's a creepy day. Hurricane Gretl—whoever heard of a hurricane this late in the year? More proof of global warming, I guess. Now, are you going through this process on your own or is there a partner waiting in the parking lot?” Meaning, probably, was she a dyke.
“Which one of you is going to be the mommy?” she countered.
“Well, neither of us wants to be the daddy,” he said, without taking offense. He shrugged. “I guess we'll just be like the virgin governesses from Victorian novels, and spend our lives in the service of a Precious One who never bothers to learn our names.”
“Innocent and heartless,” said Winnie.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“What James Barrie said children were like. In Peter Pan . Innocent and heartless.” The actual sentence had been gay and innocent and heartless, but Winnie wasn't up to uncorking that line of camp.
The Pellegrinos drifted over. So did Malachy Fogarty, munching antacids. Now for the capsule histories. These folks, free on a workday morning?—they didn't need to adopt children. They needed to share. To get in touch with their inner childlessness. They were the reason Talk Radio wasn't called Listen Radio. Winnie treaded the oily waters with a blank expression, preparing caustic observations to serve John Comestor tomorrow when she got there. He'd love all this. But when the Pellegrinos regrouped to mutter with the Boudreaus, and Malachy Fogarty bolted off, hunting for the men's room, Adrian Moscou said, “I know, you must be the reformed Scrooge, and you're here to adopt Tiny Tim.”
She couldn't bear to be thought of as being sentimental as everyone else here. Tiny Tim indeed. The coincidence of Adrian's lighting on the Scrooge reference was shocking and even upsetting, but really, she thought: Tiny Tim? Anything but . Out of nerves, or pride, she admitted, “I'm not here to adopt a child. Only to observe the process. I've got a novel in progress, and I'm researching. Every little bit helps. You know.”
“Neat,” he said. “Cool. We're the raw material?”
“Well, you have to admit, it's ripe stuff. Baring our souls like this.”
“Embarrassing. But you do what you gotta do. At least it's all in the service of something other than ourselves.”
“That's what we say, anyway,” she said. “Some of us lie to ourselves better than others.” He raised an eyebrow, not sure what she meant. She found she was glad that Mabel Quackenbush was ready to reconvene. She excused herself from Adrian Moscou. When Mabel Quackenbush started the next portion of the program by asking if there were any questions so far, Adrian raised his hand.
“Ms. Rudge here is a writer,” he said. “She's doing research on a book. That makes me wonder about who gets to see our applications? How secure is the private material in our files?”
“Oh, a writer,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “I didn't know, Winifred. How nice.” She had seen everything before and knew how to handle this one. “Would you like to tell us more?”
Winnie wouldn't really. But her cover was blown. She looked everywhere except at Adrian Moscou.
She tried to think of what to say. Through the pause, the sound of a truck in the lot, its backing-up beepers punctuating the sound of wind: delivering more babies to the loading dock?
“I'm sure you're not here to plunder other people's stories,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “This is serious business. I hope I don't have to ask you to leave.”
Winnie said, “No, you don't. I'm legit. I filled out all the forms. I'm just doing a book about adoption. A novel, that is. The smallest bit of real detail makes the biggest difference. My character is off to Central Europe to adopt a child. I take notes”—she brandished her spiral-bound notebook in a jaunty manner—“I'm a compulsive note taker. Everything hits home eventually. I could do some good for the industry, you know.”
“Have you published anything?” asked Mabel doubtfully, in the same voice with which she had asked the couples if there were other children at home.
“Sadly, nothing you'd have heard of,” said Winnie. W. Rudge's children's chapter books came out with pleasant regularity but little fanfare. Her only adult publication, The Dark Side of the Zodiac, was a trashy self-help succès de scandale, brought out under the name of Ophelia Marley. It was her cash cow, to the extent she had one, though its udders were going dry.
Mabel Quackenbush stood up. “The head staff must be in by now, unless the storm has kept them home. I'll run upstairs and have a quick powwow. In the meantime, let's get going on a role-playing assignment. You too,” she said blithely to Winnie. “Might as well soak it up before we get the security guard to come break all the bones in your typing fingers. Now, people, count off, one two three.”
They did. Winnie was a one. She joined a smaller circle with Adrian Moscou, Leonard Schimel, Diane Boudreau, and Malachy Fogarty. Group one was told to act out this scenario: You've got a Precious One in the kitchen and an Original Mother shows up with documents proving the prior relationship. What do you do, dear?
“I'd be a mess. I admit it. I'd just weep,” said Adrian Moscou. “Then call FF for advice, probably. Weep some more.”
“You litigate,” said Leonard Schimel. “Nothing like it. You litigate fast you litigate hard you don't let up. Take out a restraining order. I have connections.”
“What's the problem?” said Diane Boudreau. “I'd invite an Original Mother in. Put on a pot of coffee. The more open the better. I intend to let our child know the full scoop, soon as he or she can understand English. You can't keep this stuff under the rug.”
“Are you mad?” said Malachy Fogarty. “An Original Mother? I'd turf the bitch out. She gave up the child, didn't she? I'd get a gun.” They would have laughed had he not sounded as if he meant it.
Attention turned to Winnie, who hadn't spoken. She shrugged, and said, “Since I'm not here to adopt, I don't need to play this game, no matter what Mabel says.”
“But this scenario, it's like story writing,” said Adrian. “Isn't this your job? You should be good at inventing what to do.”
“I should be very good at it, shouldn't I?” she said. “But I can't open that door, I can't see that scene. I can only write the scenes I can see.”
“You have to play,” said Diane Boudreau. “Or we'll trade you to another group.”
“I'll record our observations. I'll report to everyone else. I'm good at that.”
Mabel Quackenbush was taking her time upstairs. They sat in a stalemate for a few moments, listening to the laughter and then the more careful discussion from the other two groups. Then to the rain beating yet more heavily across the parking lot, against the glass.
“Good thing they're not doing Hallowe'en tonight,” said Diane after a while. “Think of those little kids walking out in this weather! So dangerous.”
“Little plastic skeleton masks dripping with rain,” said Adrian. “I like it. Adds verisimilitude, wouldn't you say, Winifred? Corpses liquefy, you know. That's why they plant so many trees in cemeteries. Soak up the juices.”
“Cheery,” said Diane.
“Geoff and I are going to a party tonight,” he said. “The job is to come as the person you'd most like to be haunted by. Geoff has the easy costume, he's doing Bruce Springsteen from Born to Run . White T-shirt, jeans, cap. Helps that he has the body for it too,” he added, smugly proud. “Who wouldn't like to be haunted by the Boss?”
Nobody asked Adrian what thrill he was going as.
“Isn't the idea of haunting that you don't get to choose who does it to you?” said Diane.
“We're haunted by the IRS, bloody ghouls,” said Malachy. “Half the reason I want to hire a kid is to get the adoption tax credit and the dependent child credit.”
They tittered unconvincingly. Adrian turned to Winnie. “So who would you choose to be haunted by, in your wildest fantasies?”
“I'm a writer, I spend too much time with literary fantasies as it is,” she demurred. But she admitted to herself, she was taken with that image of kids trick-or-treating in their costumes, an early snow coating them. Not bad. Troubling and calming at once. The snow making ghosts of every pint-size witch and hobo and ballerina. She scratched a few words on her pad.
When Mabel Quackenbush got back, she looked terse, the last Soviet apparatchik. “You. Sorry. They ran you through the computer. They said you have to leave. No discussion.”
The group bristled slightly, though was it on Winnie's behalf or not?
“Bummer,” said Adrian, daring to show his hand, anyway, bless him. “What gives?”
“It doesn't matter,” said Winnie, “never mind. I'll clear out.”
“You can check in at the front office if you want the reasons,” said Mabel. “Awfully sorry, dear.” She looked ready for a fight.
She walked Winnie to the door, a kind of senior citizen bouncer. In a lower voice she said, “They know who you are. They left me a note in my box, but I didn't see it because I was late, what with the rain and all. You applied under a pseudonym? Why? You should have guessed they don't allow that.”
“I'm sure there's been some mistake,” said Winnie, blathering slightly, “but it doesn't matter. I'm going abroad tomorrow anyway. I can use the time to pack. And the roads are only going to get worse.” She picked up her things and tried not to move too hastily. She didn't look at Mabel as she left.
Winifred W. Rudge, out at her car a half hour before lunch, thinking: how small, how touchy everyone in there is. How could that be? Does being unlucky in the egg and sperm department erase all personal dignity? Who needs to write fiction anymore?
But it wasn't them; this she knew. It was her own eyes, seeing things crabbed and phony; it was her own ears, set to discriminate in favor of the ludicrous and not the humane. This was part of her problem. It was what had given her the bleak vision to create The Dark Side of the Zodiac , it was what made acid-edged gossip with John Comestor so much fun. When, really, what was so terrible about Mabel Quackenbush pitching daddy-woo and mommy-lust at childless people, if small kids got connected with families? Beware becoming superior, she said to herself. Or desiccated. Or dead.
She fumbled with her car keys, hoping that no one inside the Forever Families stronghold was watching her exile. She began to be aloof, seeing herself as if from five feet away. Not with a cinematographer's eye, framing everything, calibrating the apertures, roasting the scene with lamplight—but seeing herself as a middle-aged writer, struggling with money, frightened about the future. What does the working novelist look like, when she gets in a car on a rain-snowy afternoon in a Boston suburb? A writer handicapped in her profession by a limited capacity for sympathy?
The wind tore the door out of her hand; the hinges creaked. The storm moved on. Her hair seethed. Suddenly she undid her ridiculous scarf and let it blow away, a surrender flag of latticed green and red, the dancing Fezziwigs sent winging out over the concrete retaining wall, flagging down the traffic crawling on a snow-choked Route 128.
Beaky, she said of herself; a nose like an iron doorstop. Firm flat cheeks. A small bluish dot on one nostril that looked like ink, but was some residue of imploded capillary, the result of a magnificent nosebleed when she was twelve. Not tall, not dumpy, neither slender nor stout. A serviceable body shape, shy of glamour, though not yet quite fallen.
“Why did you blurt out about being a writer?” she said aloud. Her words in a string following the scarf. “Did you guess Adrian would squeal on you? Did you hope so? Were you trying to get kicked out?”
Safely in the car, patting rain off her forehead with a handkerchief, she added, “And since when are you talking to yourself?”
But you're a writer. That's what you do. You just usually don't do it aloud.
She hunched over the wheel, hating herself for being such a mess. Peering as the rain turned to snow and back again, she went skidding and sliding east on Route 9, and she watched the sky skid and slide above. The gray towers of Huntington Avenue and South Huntington loomed out of the laid-paper texture of the day's damp atmosphere.
The car was down to a crawl by the time she got to Huxtable Street, and she scraped a neighbor's fencepost as she slalomed into her parking space. But her mood had lifted, revived by the promise of seeing her cousin tomorrow. She'd tell him about the gay teacher picking up on the scarf; John would appreciate that. What would she say if John asked her why she'd liberated the scarf? Well, she wouldn't tell him she had done so. Let Scrooge and all that—that pastness of life—let it go, let it blow off.
She made her way cautiously up the wooden steps of the semidetached house. Shabby, shabby, unornamented, unconsoling. Home. And then as she fit her key into her lock, she paused, even though the cold rain flecked against her face—remembering the opening lines of A Christmas Carol . Scrooge's first intimation of his dark epiphanies:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Scrooge, having scorned relatives and employees and the filthy poor alike, headed home full of sour stomach, and twisted his key in his lock, and saw the door knocker turn into Marley's face with—she knew it well— a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. . . .
There was no knocker on her door. But she sensed a jolt of presence, or imagined she did. Maybe nothing more than a field mouse who had come into the house due to the unseasonable snow. She bent over and peered through the flap of the mail slot. Like many who make their living exploiting the public's appetite for magic, she was a stone-hearted rationalist. She didn't expect to peer into a void of any sort—no trap of stars and galaxies—no wispy haunted otherworld. Rather she worried about surprising some neighborhood felon out to relieve her of stereo and computer components. But there was nothing, just the cold heavy air of an unoccupied house. A light was on in the kitchen, bronzing the wall on which she had stenciled blurry and unconvincing pineapples. The pineapples winked out and returned. Power surge in the storm? The dishcloth lay crumpled on the braided rug where, several days earlier, late and hurrying, she'd dropped it.
She twisted the key in the dead bolt, then in the lower lock, and pushed open the door. Readying herself for the melodic ding that would ring for thirty seconds until she had punched in the code. She was knocked against the doorjamb, but not by an intruder, just by surprise. The wrong amplified alarm was kicking on. The other one. The “This is not a test” siren.
The noise was so huge that she had to force herself down the hall to the closet where the control unit was mounted. Her four-digit code didn't kill the racket. She punched it in several times, then thumped the keypad until she accidentally hit the right circuit-breaking button. And the next thing that would happen, if the system worked, was that someone from the central office in Nebraska would call and ask her for her code word. If all was well she was to utter the secret signal, at which the Nebraska folk would cancel the request for Boston's finest to send a car. But in the event that a gun was pressed to her back, she was to say some other word instead, and the cops would be there in five minutes.
The phone rang, and she was on it in a flash. She picked up the receiver and snapped, “ Marley, Marley, Marley,it's all right; there must have been a short. We're having a storm here. I tripped it myself. No need to send a squad car.”
No sound on the other end.
“Is that Ironcorp? Ironcorp Security? Are you on speakerphone? Pick up the handset, damn it.”
Silence, then the connection broke. Unmusically a dial tone sawed.
She held the phone in her hand an instant longer, but away from her. Then the shrill triad and the condescending message: “If you'd like to make a call . . .”
“I'd like you to shut up and get out of my life,” she said to the recorded voice, and replaced the receiver with a bang.
Almost immediately the phone rang again. She looked left and right—what if an intruder had been breaking into the house through the basement just as she was letting herself in the front door? What if she wasn't alone in here?
She picked up the receiver and held it out, waiting to hear a voice. No one spoke, but there was a hiss again.
“John?” she said. “Is that you?”
Another pause, then a voice. “Could that be Winifred Rudge?”
“Well, is this Ironcorp Security or not?”
“It's Adrian Spencer-Moscou, Adrian Moscou, on lunch break at Forever Families. Feeling guilty about blowing the whistle on you. Look, I'm really sorry and I hate myself and for punishment I'm—”
“Everything is fine. Did you just call and hang up? You're tying up my line and the police will show up at my door if I don't hang up immediately.” This she did.
Then she waited for the call from Ironcorp Security, or for the Boston police to swing by and check out the suspected breach of her household defenses. Neither of which, in half an hour, had happened. Storm or no storm, someone should at least call, thought Winnie. What am I paying thirty-eight bucks a month for if the system doesn't work? I could be facedown in a thickening glue of my own blood by now, and who would care?
But it took her some time—a noisy cup of tea, slammed cabinet doors, egregious and theatrical cursing—to get up the nerve to go upstairs. In fact, who would care if she got herself murdered or maimed?
To avoid answering that question, she kept on packing. She ordered the taxi for the early morning trip to Logan Airport. Dragged a basket of laundry into the musty basement and put on an underwear load with a little bleach. It looked to be a long afternoon.
She couldn't get it out of her mind that something was there in the house with her, though each room seemed to be filled only with her empty life.
Who would you choose to be haunted by, if you could choose?
Of course there's someone else in this house, she said to herself: it's that pesky Wendy Pritzke again. Wendy and her story. Would it become another exercise in Gothic excess, born of the grimier side of Winnie's sensibility? She could do milk-chocolate children's books on the one hand, arsenic-laced bourbon foreboding on the other. How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies . How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.
Who was Wendy Pritzke? Winnie couldn't quite tell until the book had begun itself. She had details and conundrums, but no amount of random detail could add up to a convincing life. Rather, she believed that it took a convincing life to confer meaning and significance to random details. And she didn't know much about Wendy's life, at this point.
But Winnie doubted that Wendy Pritzke was going to linger in England; Wendy Pritzke was probably lighting out to Mitteleuropa, London being only a pit stop on her trip. Wendy Pritzke heading for somewhere darker than anyplace accessible to the Circle Line. Wendy Pritzke's departure for Romania from Heathrow Terminal Two. Her bad flight over the Channel, the coastal flats of France, the sharp shadowed pockets of Alpine valleys . . .
Don't spend your time on Wendy today, Winnie lectured herself. You're not ready yet, you haven't even left Boston. But a new book took hold as it would and in its own time, and little governing it. When Winnie went down to move over the wash, she carried the portable phone with her in case Ironcorp Security ever got around to responding to the alarm. She also brought a notebook to catch a few sentences or twists of plot, or brief revelations of character if they occurred to her while she fiddled with the lint trap. All she could scrawl, over and over, was Wendy, Wendy: Peter Pan's unromantic friend, his stand-in mother, as if there were something to learn from that.
Since her taxi was ordered for 5A.M ., she got ready for bed early, flumping a hot-water bottle under the coverlet and appreciating the jelly glass with its half inch of McClelland's single malt. She knew that John, expecting an update of her travel plans, would have turned off his ringer and switched on his machine, so she dialed his number without fear of waking him at four in the morning.
But the phone only jangled and jangled, the familiar double ring of British Telecom. The machine didn't pick up.
Heaving herself into bed at last, she turned to set the alarm on the digital clock radio. The gelid blue numerals pulsed.
00:00
00:00
00:00
They were spelling OOOO, OOOO at her, she thought. Odd. So there had been a power cut with the storm; that was probably why the alarm had gone off. But even if the clock lost track of the hour, it usually began to count the minutes again from the moment the power was restored.
00:00
00:00
She fiddled with the back of the clock. She couldn't get it to work. Its innards must have been fried. She had to get up and hunt for a travel alarm. She found one, and checked its battery to make sure the thing wasn't dead. She had no neighbors with whom she was chummy enough to ask for help, no friends left to call even at the respectable hour of 9P.M . So she was glad that the small plastic clock still ticked its time and pipped its alarm responsibly.
But she settled against the pillow knowing that a bad night's sleep was ahead. She was unsettled by everything today, from the accident on the JFK Expressway to the broken alarm. That storm had swept in bad cess. A power outage is a simple thing, but thinking about the emasculation of time:
00:00
00:00
Well, it gave her a clammy feeling in her throat.
Throughout the night, the house shuddered, the furnace gasping emphysematously, the windows bucking in their casings. A shade flapped up suddenly in the study under the eaves. Peter Pan breaking in? She turned away from the noise, not alarmed. Who says he stayed sweet and nonviolent? After all, his mother had closed the window against him. Why wouldn't he come back and slay her? He never grew up, he was lost and still unclaimed, so by these modern days he'd have learned something about kids and guns, in schoolyards and high school cafeterias and railroad tracks. He'd know how to do it.
But she surprised herself by sleeping soundly, only waking a few minutes before the alarm at 4:15A.M . She felt unperturbed and not even very tired. Already mentally shifting over to Greenwich mean time, she hoped.
She finished packing and brought her suitcases to the door. A scrap of paper she must have missed in clearing up the mail on the floor yesterday, a circular. She picked it up and glanced at it before dumping it in the wastebasket. She'd seen its sort a dozen times: a flimsy white card printed in blue ink, posted to “Resident” at 4 Huxtable Street. Mailbox Values asks: Have You Seen Us? Two photos printed beneath, one of a Hawaiian girl with eyes set close and outturned, another of a blond toothy woman in her fifties. Have you seen us? “Over ninety-five children featured have been safely recovered.” Call 1-800-THE-LOST.
She crumpled it up before throwing it out. Then she stood in the window bay so the taxi driver wouldn't honk at that hour. The rain looked snowish again, the street a black hollow, the precipitation white and silver against it. Well-lit city streets at night, especially when empty, look like movie sets. Down Huxtable Street she imagined a small tribe of costumed children, trick-or-treating in the eternal dark. A patient, voiceless throng of ghosts, suited up with rubber masks of Frankensteins and Ronald Reagans, plastic faces of aliens and witches, hobo char. They waited before her house. They did not ring the bell. In their midst the taxi pulled up and stood there, its bumblebee yellow realer than they. She set the burglar alarm. She locked up her house. She didn't know when she'd see the Huxtable Street house again, but she hoped when she came back the story of Wendy Pritzke would be far enough along on paper that it would no longer be haunting her.
She was hunting for a story that was but wasn't the story of Wendy Pritzke.
It was the first time she'd flown to England on a day flight. The flight attendants looked casual, as if this were a busman's holiday for them, and the departure lounge was nearly empty. Winnie half expected to be waved down the jetway without having her ticket or passport checked. The woman who checked her in, a tall lippy redhead whose badge said FRETTA, was yawning even as she made announcements over the PA system.
“This is close to upsetting,” said Winnie. “Why is no one flying today? Is the weather worse than I thought?”
“It's a new route. People are still getting used to it,” said Fretta.
“I fly to England all the time. I've never seen a departure lounge so tomblike. Do you find passengers freaking out when it gets like this?”
“Oh, someone's always freaking out. We're not very busy today, but there are a few more people to check in behind you. Have a nice flight.”
“If the flight is so empty, may I be upgraded without cost to business class?”
“So sorry.” Fretta scanned the lounge for another passenger to check in, and cracked her knuckles.
Winnie found her seat—31K—and, feeling chastised, postponed searching for a better spot. There was hardly anyone in this section of the cabin. Not a squawling baby, not a pair of retirees chattering, no businessmen tap-tapping on their personal computers. Fretta didn't even bother with a tray when she brought Winnie a plastic glass of orange juice. “Here,” she said, as if handing a sippie cup to a toddler.
Winnie shucked her shoes and donned the complimentary sanitary socks. She tortured herself into her assigned seat, feeling crowded even while alone. The rain on the runway made slices of colored light out of Charlestown or Winthrop or whatever town that was across the finger of black harbor. A pretty sight, but distant, and Winnie had scarcely nudged a Robert Louis Stevenson into her mind
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea
when plain rain had shifted once again to slow unnerving snow.
She'd forgotten to order a minicab to meet her at Heathrow. Damn. She might flag down Fretta and find out if the international phone was available, but the hostess was off somewhere, probably yakking with one of her girlfriends or offering the pilots No Doz. Winnie slumped her head against the window, half asleep, aware of how the folded blanket was liable to slip off.
Her first and most important destination was Rudge House in Weatherall Walk, that quiet cul-de-sac on Holly Bush Hill at the very crown of Hampstead. The Rudge family home was recent by English standards, its original rooms dating to the early nineteenth century. Yesterday, really. But in the 1930s the house had been partitioned, and by the time her generation came along to inherit something, the only part left in family hands was the top-floor flat. It might have been Winnie's flat, had her father not died so young, had her father's sister not married a widower with a child, John Comestor. Winnie loved the house and wished her stepcousin John could afford to buy the whole thing back, piece by piece, but he couldn't, and it would be senseless of her to get involved. Nice enough that she had a place to stay, that he put up with his peripatetic faux relative. Especially since the house should have been hers.
From her frequent visits and occasional short-term residencies, Winnie possessed a mental map of modern London. It revolved around Rudge House, just ten minutes from the drafty Heath. Her personal London included libraries, theaters, museums, parks, and a few homes whose memory she treasured for having been the setting of bedroom adventures.
She also had her own more immutable London, an older city of the mind, the one that she had been forming from the age of eight. As for so many Americans it was a literary London. But she didn't care for overheated Bloomsbury. She'd never signposted her internal London for Dickensian inns, nor for the salons of Pope and Boswell. Even the universal allure of Shakespearian England and the Puritan London of Pepys and Milton had not stuck all that much. Winnie's firmest London was a template of childhood reading.
She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird's-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of One Hundred and One Dalmatians started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham's bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.
London was a trove of the magic of childhood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as Winnie had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and a mole were busy messing about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as children do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice's Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.
The memory of the power of this early reading was part of what had prompted her to write for children. The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.
And magic England was endlessly reinvented, modern masters like Philip Pullman and Sylvia Waugh and J. K. Rowling piling it on with their daemons and their Mennyms and their Muggles. All those books with side-by-side worlds, forever springing leaks into one another.
The only Dickens that had ever really appealed to Winnie Rudge was A Christmas Carol . Partly the family legend, to be sure, but also it was the Dickens story most like a children's book. The door knocker as Marley's face! What did Scrooge deserve, if he hadn't shaped up? To be left out of life, beyond the locked windows of the nursery like Peter Pan, or worse—
00:00
00:00
She startled herself awake. The security alarm going off again? No. It was the airplane window; it was streaked with sudsy blood. She wrenched her neck, catapulting away, across the aisle. Or perhaps she had screamed. Fretta the flight attendant poked her head from the galley. “Everything all right, I hope?” she said brightly.
Winnie pointed to the window.
“Oh, that. Ground crew de-icing the plane. A warm substance called glycol or something.”
Pink, medical, watery. Winnie stood up and said, “I hope the restrooms are usable?”
“Oh, yes. We're not cleared for takeoff in this weather, so make yourself comfy.”
She stumbled to the toilet. She wanted the anonymity of takeoff. She wanted another London for a template, not one in which the promises of childhood lived on so adroitly to mock. She sat on the plastic seat and thought about it. Kenneth Grahame wrote about the idylls of childhood in Dream Days and The Wind in the Willows, and his son Alistair's death on a railroad track was probably suicide. One of the original Lost Boys for whom James Barrie had invented Peter Pan had also killed himself. Christopher Milne, the Christopher Robin of his father's tales, whinged in print up until his death. The curse of childhood fancy.
She pushed the lever. Power flush. The two neat ends of the toilet rolls, side by side, flapped their white paper hands at her in the powerful disruption of air, as if waving her back to her seat. This airplane is jinxed, she thought. “The Haunted Loo.” Just my luck.
She dozed fitfully again during takeoff, and only woke when a lukewarm breakfast thing was slung at her by Fretta, who seemed now to resent that the plane was required to carry any passengers at all. Winnie tore at the shrink-wrapped breakfast cheese and managed to spill the indifferent coffee. Later, walking about the cabin to wake herself up and shake the bad feelings down, she stopped to peer out a window in one of the emergency doors. Perhaps the flight was already halfway there, accelerated by Hurricane Gretl. Nothing to see but the anonymity of clouds.
Nothing to see but blue. No islands or boats, no smaller aircraft veering away beneath them. Just three or four thin layers of cloud, unraveling like freshly laundered shrouds between her triple-socked feet and the seamless blue floor of the sea.
Standing still at 550 miles an hour.
Her London would be a way stop, and so she didn't bother to map it in the mind. There were a few friends to see, some last-minute purchases to make. She had Jack the Ripper on her mind, and wanted to look about Whitechapel and Aldgate, in the event there was a book in it for her. With her tendency to cheery morbidity she had fastened on a lane to the north of Whitechapel High Street, a loop of passage called Thrawl Street. None of the nine murdered women had been found there, but it was a central point around which several of the murders could be arrayed. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman, and Mary Kelly. Anyway, the words Thrawl Street appealed to her.
She went back to her seat. While she was gone, a woman had moved into the empty seat across the aisle. A teenage mother in a sequined cowboy blouse, coddling a fussy lump of infant wrapped in butter mint blankets. Where had this mountain mama gotten the cash to fly? She was a one-woman crisis, ringing the call bell every three or four minutes. The bottle, could you warm it? The bottle, it's too warm now, could you try another? Don't you have no apple juice? The mother had a dirty face and wore her exhaustion proudly. Her baby was her license to be demanding. Perhaps no one had ever listened to her whining before.
You had to feel sorry for the sprout, though, and didn't blame it for fussing. How its mother brayed! How big of a deal could it be to crank up the heat in this frigging place? It's, like, freezing .
Thank God for the airline magazine, she thought, diving into it with phony enthusiasm.
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
She woke with a crick in her neck, for the moment thinking, perversely, of Mabel Quackenbush. Mabel giving her the bum's rush out of Forever Families! The indignity. But in her sleepy mind Winnie also thought of another Mabel, the dull friend of little Alice in Wonderland. Alice, frightened at the monstrousness of Wonderland, wondered if she'd been changed in the night, turned into someone different—maybe Mabel, who knew such a very little.
How do you know, waking out of your nepenthean pardon, that you have returned back to the prison sentence of your own individuality, and not someone else's?
The flight came in over Windsor Castle almost a full hour early. Winnie watched with the usual anxiety. Now the landscape was still seen from the air, for one more instant, and now the bare thorny trees around Heathrow were springing up like pop-up figures against the horizon, snapping the third dimension back into the world. It made her feel nauseated and safe at the same time.
She stumbled up the jetway and was herded into the correct immigration line by a stout unsmiling Asian woman buttoned too tightly into a uniform. The immigration officer glanced through her passport, unimpressed by its stamps and seals and page-broad visas, and he said simply, crisply, “Reason for your visit?”
She must not be awake; for a moment she couldn't understand the question.
“Business or holiday?” he continued as if she were drunk, or slow.
“Just passing through.”
He didn't even bother to ask her final destination, but that was fine with her as, in so many ways, she didn't know it.
Since the Piccadilly Line originated at Heathrow she easily found herself a seat. Now there was nothing to do but sit back and wait to see John, and plan out more of the weeks to come, to cram them full of artifice and nonsense, as if the more detail, the more significant. She worked up some jovial remarks so she could enter with a flourish. And the choice of airplane movies! Keeping the sound off, I watched something done by the Muppets—a version of Madame Bovary, near as I could tell .
She changed at Leicester Square and then alighted the Tube at Hampstead Station. She pushed with the evening commuters into the lift that heaved them up, away from the smell of Northern Line burning rubber brake pads, to disgorge them onto Hampstead High Street. From there it was a short slog up the hill at Heath Street and left into Holly Bush Steps, the steep stairs cut into Holly Mount. Winnie's suitcase and leather catchall and computer slowed her down, like physical manifestations of jet lag. Then, around the corner and out of sight of the neighborhood: the house in its secluded half-square, part gracious courtyard and part car park. Brown brick like old puddings, a somewhat squashed-looking fanlight over the door, small bleak flush-framed windows, flecked with the impurities in the glass, and double-flecked with the speckling rain.
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Well, there was the western wind, bringing the first bad breath of Hurricane Gretl, and the small rain too, but nothing would bring that lover back.
She rang the buzzer first, to alert him, and slid her key into the lock. She stepped over a mound of mail on the floor. The stairwell smelled of prawns and Dettol. She paused, fixed her hair, and arranged a less-tired look on her face, and went on up. At the top, a few plastic drop cloths were folded on the carpet by the bristly hedgehog shoe scraper. She pushed open the door with one hand, calling, “Brace yourself; sadly, it's only me.” He was not there at once to help with the luggage; strange. The foyer looked curiously dark and chilly. Struggling with her bags on the threshold, she saw no note on the hall table. Yet the place seemed full of something anticipating her, the way her own house on Huxtable Street had seemed, was it just yesterday? “John?” she said, and went in.