NOS4A2(74)

Her visitor wore acid-washed jeans, disintegrating to threads at the knees and thighs, and not in a fashionable way either. She had a cigarette in one hand, trailing a pale wisp of smoke. In the other hand was a folder. She had the stringy, twitchy look of a junkie. Vic could not place her but was sure she knew her. She had no idea who the visitor was, but felt in some way she had been expecting this woman for years.

“Someone you know?” Wayne asked.

Vic shook her head. She was temporarily unable to find her voice. She had spent most of the last half year holding tight to both sanity and sobriety, like an old woman clutching a bag of groceries. Staring into the yard, she felt the bottom of the bag beginning to tear and give way.

The junkie girl in the unlaced Chuck Taylor high-tops raised one hand in a nervous, terribly familiar little wave.

Vic opened the car door and got out, came around the front to get between Wayne and the woman.

“Can I help you?” Vic croaked. She needed a glass of water.

“I hope s-ss-ss-sss—” She sounded as if she were hung up on a sneeze. Her face darkened, and she forced out, “So. He’s f-f-fuh-free.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Wraith,” Maggie Leigh said. “He’s on the road again. I think you sh-sh-should use your bridge and try to f-f-f-f-find him, Vic.”


SHE HEARD WAYNE CLIMBING OUT OF THE CAR BEHIND HER, HIS DOOR thumping shut. He opened the rear door, and Hooper leaped from the backseat. She wanted to tell him to get back in the car but couldn’t without signaling her fear.

The woman smiled at her. There was an innocence and a simple kindness to her face that Vic very much associated with the mad. She had seen it often enough in the mental hospital.

“I’m s-s-ss-sorry,” the visitor said. “That wasn’t how I mm-mm-muh—” Now she sounded like she might be gagging. “—mmmMMmmeant to begin. I’m m-mm-mm—oh, God. Mmm-mm-mMMM-MAGGIE. Bad st-stammer. S-s-s-s-suh-suh—apologies. We had tea once. You s-scraped your knee. Long time ago. You weren’t much older than your s-s-suh-ss-ss—” She stopped talking, drew a deep breath, tried again. “Kid here. But I think you really m-must remember.”

It was awful listening to her try to talk—like watching someone with no legs dragging herself along a sidewalk. Vic thought, She didn’t use to be so bad, while at the same time remaining convinced that the junkie girl was a deranged and possibly dangerous stranger. She found herself able to juggle these two notions without any sense of contradicting herself whatsoever.

The junkie girl put her hand on Vic’s for a moment, but her palm was hot and damp, and Vic quickly pulled away. Vic looked at the girl’s arms and saw they were a battlefield of pocked, shiny scars: cigarette burns. Lots of them, some livid pink and recent.

Maggie regarded her with a brief look of confusion that bordered on hurt, but before Vic could speak, Hooper barged past to poke his nose into Maggie Leigh’s crotch. Maggie laughed and pushed his snout away.

“Oh, gee. You have your own yeti. That’s adorbs,” she said. She looked beyond the dog to Vic’s son. “And you must b-b-be Wayne.”

“How do you know his name?” Vic asked in a hoarse voice, thinking a crazy thing: Her Scrabble tiles can’t give her proper names.

“You dedicated your first s-ss-s—book to him,” said Maggie. “We used to have them all at the library. I was so suh-suh-sssssssspsyched for you.”

Vic said, “Wayne? Take Hooper into the house.”

Wayne whistled and clicked and walked by Maggie, and the dog shambled after. Wayne firmly shut the door behind both of them.

Maggie said, “I always thought you’d write. You said you would. I wondered if I mm-mm-my-mm-my—might hear from you after M-M-Muh-MmmManx was arrested, but then I thought you wanted to put him behind you. I almost wrote you a few times, b-but first I worried your puh-p-puh-pp-p—I worried your folks would question you about me, and later I thought muh-mm-mm—perhaps you wanted to put m-me behind you as well.”

She tried to smile again, and Vic saw she was missing teeth.

“Ms. Leigh. I think you’re confused. I don’t know you. I can’t help you,” Vic said.

What frightened Vic most was her feeling that this was exactly backward. Maggie wasn’t the one who was confused—her whole face glistened with lunatic certainty. If anyone was confused, it was Vic. She could see it all in her mind’s eye: the dark cool of the library, the yellowing Scrabble tiles scattered on the desk, the bronze paperweight that looked like a pistol.

“If you don’t know me, how come you know my last name? I didn’t mention it,” Maggie said, only with more stuttering—it took close on half a minute to get this sentence out.

Vic held up a hand for silence and ignored this statement as the absurd distraction it was. Of course Maggie had mentioned her last name. She had said it when she introduced herself, Vic was sure.

“I see you know quite a bit about me, though,” Vic continued. “Understand that my son knows nothing about Charles Manx. I’ve never talked to him about the man. And I’m not having him find out from . . . from a stranger.” She almost said a crazy person.

“Of course. I didn’t m-muh-mm-mean to alarm you or s-s-suh-s—”

“But you did anyway.”