The Clairvoyants(24)

At my apartment I parked in front of the house, half-expecting Mary Rae to be standing under the elm, but the street was quiet, save a few bands of older trick-or-treaters who probably were planning some mischief. I had hoped to find Del at home, and the porch light was on, but the house rose, hulking and unfathomable over me, its windows all dark. I climbed the staircase and put the car keys under Geoff’s mat. Suzie, on the other side of Geoff’s door, poked her nose at the bottom, sniffing me out. My sweatshirt hadn’t been warm enough, and I was chilled. Inside my apartment I turned on the lamp, put on my warm coat, and lay down on the bed. We’d stopped folding it up every morning, and it had become a landing place for books and bags, a place where we lounged to read or talk. I must have fallen asleep, and I awoke when my cell rang. I answered expecting Del—a plea to come pick her up back at the party or at the local Viking Lanes. Instead, William’s voice filled the apartment, clear and deep.

“Is that you, Martha?” he said.

I sat upright, nervously, his voice ringing out of the phone as if he were beside me. “It’s you,” I said.

He laughed. “Yes, William, from the party.”

He said he was sorry for calling so late, and although I had no idea what time it was, I suspected it must have been past midnight. Del wasn’t home yet, and I was relieved to have the place to myself to talk. William said he was a bit of an insomniac, and he was going to try to wait until morning to call, but there wasn’t anything else of equal importance to do until then. He felt we were connected somehow—though he wasn’t sure why he felt it. My head swam, the confession so intimate I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t let silence be my only reply.

“Maybe there is something unexplainable at work,” I said, and instantly regretted it. “I’m just kidding,” I said, which was just as bad.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not suggesting anything otherworldly.”

I leaned back onto the pillows on my bed. I didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs, but Del burst into the room.

“It’s snowing!” she said.

Out the window, in the streetlight, snow was whitening the branches of the elm. I was so unnerved by William’s call, I didn’t care where Del had been, what she’d done. I kept seeing his eyes on me at the party, and the way his cheeks reddened from the cold.

“Who is ‘D’?” he wanted to know. “And are you ‘M’?”

He was reading off the scorecard, where my sisters and I put our initials. My older sisters and I were competitive miniature golfers and played with our father on a course near his ranch house every summer. I told him I was “M,” the one with two holes-in-one. I didn’t say that “D” was for “Daddy” and not “Del,” who had always refused to play.

Del had turned on the TV and made hot chocolate spiked with Kahlúa. She sat a few feet away from me, shushing me every so often so she could hear, dropping handfuls of candy corn onto the bed for me. I told William I was an art major, and then I told him about my Women and Grief course.

“We listen to tapes of keening women from Ireland and Greece,” I said. “I can barely stand it.”

“I can understand why,” he said.

I tried to explain how it was so awful I wanted to laugh, and how hard it was not to. At that point, Del gave me a look. “My sister says I’m crazy,” I said.

“You’re interesting,” he said.

He said he, too, was an artist, and he taught at the university. A photographer. “Like you,” he said. He’d heard of my work—abandoned places, landscapes—from another professor. I asked him who, surprised, and he brushed this off. “Just another professor in the department.” I didn’t want to seem as if I was encouraging him to gossip, so I let it go.

“I’m just an adjunct,” he said. “I’m hoping to find something more permanent.”

I asked him what his work was like, and he said he’d been inspired by Ted Spagna’s sleep studies. “Something like that,” he said.

All very vague, but at the time his hedging and easy side-stepping hadn’t been obvious to me. I would push him away, ruin it, if I was too inquisitive, but it was difficult to negotiate closeness over the telephone. I was struck, then, that this was something out of the ordinary—a man calling me up in the middle of the night to talk.

“Why abandoned places?” he asked.

I could make out his breathing on the other end, waiting.

“You’ll have to see for yourself,” I said.

Below my window, beneath the elm, Mary Rae waited, though for what I hadn’t yet decided. I wondered how well William had known her, and then decided it was wrong, at this point, to bring her up.

“The places must seem like the women on the tapes,” he said.

“Yes, keening,” I said. We were both quiet for a moment, deciding what to say next.

Del turned off the television and stood in the center of the room. She, too, had put on her coat, and I made a mental note to ask Geoff about the heat.

“Let’s call it a night,” she said.

“It is three a.m.,” William said. He’d heard Del, and it rankled that somehow she had become part of our conversation. “I have class tomorrow. Do you?”