NOS4A2(82)

“I want things to be easy for you. So you can be around for Wayne. Not, like, I’m laying guilt!” he added quickly. “I’m not giving you a hard time about . . . having a hard time. Wayne and me have been doing okay, just the two of us. I make sure he brushes his teeth, gets his homework done. We go out on jobs together, I let him run the winch. He loves that. He’s totally into winches and stuff. I just think he knows how to talk to you. Or maybe you know how to listen. Or something. It’s a mom thing.” He paused, then added, “I should’ve given you a heads-up about Manx dying, though. Just so you knew there might be reporters coming around.”

“Reporters?”

“Yeah. This lady who turned up yesterday—wasn’t she a reporter?”

They were sitting under a low tree, and there were pink blossoms in it. A few petals dropped, caught in Vic’s hair. Lou ached with happiness, and never mind what they were talking about. It was July, and he was with Vic, and there were blossoms in her hair. It was romantic, like a song by Journey, one of the good ones.

“No,” Vic said. “She was a crazy person.”

“You mean someone from the hospital?” Lou asked.

Vic frowned, seemed to sense the petals in her hair, swiped a hand back and brushed them away. So much for romance. She was, in truth, about as romantic as a box full of spark plugs.

“You and me have never talked about Charlie Manx much,” she said. “About how I wound up with him.”

This conversation was headed in a direction he didn’t like. They didn’t talk about how she wound up with Charlie Manx because Lou didn’t want to hear about how the old f*ck sexually assaulted her and kept her locked in the trunk of his car for two days. Serious conversations always gave Lou the stomach flutters. He preferred casual banter about the Green Lantern.

“I figured if you wanted to talk about it,” he said, “you’d bring it up.”

“I never talked about it because I don’t know what happened.”

“You mean you don’t remember. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. I’d block that shit out, too.”

“No,” she said. “I mean I don’t know. I remember, but I don’t know.”

“But . . . if you remember, then you know what happened. Aren’t remembering and knowing the same thing?”

“Not if you remember it two different ways. In my head there are two stories about what happened to me, and they both seem true. Do you want to hear them?”

No. Not at all.

He nodded anyway.

“In one version, the version I told the federal prosecutor, I had a fight with my mom. I ran away. I wound up at a train station, late at night. I called my dad to see if I could stay with him, and he told me I had to go home. When I hung up, I felt a stinging in my backside. As I turned around, my vision blurred and I fell into Manx’s arms. Charlie Manx kept me in the trunk of his car all the way across the country. He only took me out to keep me drugged. I was aware, vaguely, that he had another child with him, a little boy, but he mostly kept us apart. When we got to Colorado, he left me in the trunk and went off to do something with the boy. I got out. Forced the trunk open. I set fire to his place to distract him and ran to the highway. I ran through those awful woods with all the Christmas ornaments swinging from the trees. I ran to you, Lou. And you know the rest after that,” she said. “That’s one way I remember things happening. Do you want to hear the other way?”

He wasn’t sure he did but nodded for her to go on.

“So in a different version of my life, I had a bicycle. My father gave it to me when I was a little girl. And I could use this bicycle to find lost things. I would ride it across an imaginary covered bridge, and the bridge would always take me wherever I needed to go. Like once my mother lost a bracelet and I rode my bike across this bridge and came out in New Hampshire, forty miles away from home. And the bracelet was there, in a restaurant called Terry’s Primo Subs. With me so far?”

“Imaginary bridge, superpowered bike. Got it.”

“Over the years I used my bicycle and the bridge to find all kinds of things. Missing stuffed animals or lost photos. Things like that. I didn’t go ‘finding’ often. Just once or twice a year. And as I got older, even less. It started to scare me, because I knew it was impossible, that the world isn’t supposed to work that way. When I was little, it was just pretend. But as I got older, it began to seem crazy. It began to frighten me.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t use your special power to find someone who could tell you there was nothing wrong with you,” Lou said.

Her eyes widened and lit with surprise, and Lou understood that in fact she had done just that.

“How did you—” she began.

“I read a lot of comics. It’s the logical next step,” Lou said. “Discover magic ring, seek out the Guardians of the Universe. Standard operating procedure. Who was it?”

“The bridge took me to a librarian in Iowa.”

“It would be a librarian.”

“This girl—she wasn’t much older than me—had a special power of her own. She could use Scrabble tiles to reveal secrets. Spell messages from the great beyond. That kind of thing.”

“An imaginary friend.”

She gave him a small, scared, apologetic smile and a brief shake of the head. “It didn’t feel imaginary. Not ever. It felt real.”