Duma Key(167)

"Miss Cookie!" I shouted. "Miss Cookie, don't you dare hang up this phone!"

That got through. "Dad... dee?" There was a world of wonder in that broken word.

"Yeah, honey Dad."

"If you're really Daddy..." A long pause. I could see her in her own kitchen, barefoot (as she had been that day in Little Pink, looking at the picture of the doll and the floating tennis balls), head down, hair hanging around her face. Distracted, maybe almost to the point of madness. And for the first time I began to hate Perse as well as fear her.

"Ilse... Miss Cookie... I want you to listen to me-"

"Tell me my screen name." There was a certain shocked cunning in the voice now. "If you're really my Daddy, tell me my screen name."

And if I didn't, I realized, she'd hang up. Because something had been at her. Something had been fooling her, pawing her over, drawing its webs around her. Only not an it. She.

Illy's screen name.

For a moment I couldn't remember that, either.

You can do this, Kamen said, but Kamen was dead.

"You're not... my Daddy," said the distracted girl on the other end of the line, and again she was on the verge of hanging up.

Think sideways, Kamen advised calmly.

Even then, I thought, without knowing why I was thinking it. Even then, even later, even now, even so -

"You're not my Daddy, you're her, " Ilse said. That drugged and dragging voice, so unlike her. "My Daddy's dead. I saw it in a dream. Goodb-"

" If so! " I shouted, not caring if I woke Wireman or not. Not even thinking about Wireman. " You're If-So-Girl! "

A long pause from the other end. Then: "What's the rest of it?"

I had another moment of horrible blankness, and then I thought: Alicia Keyes, keys on a piano -

"88," I said. "You're If-So-Girl88."

There was a long, long pause. It seemed forever. Then she began to cry.

vii

"Daddy, she said you were dead. That was the one thing I believed. Not just because I dreamed it but because Mom called and said Tom died. I dreamed you were sad and walked into the Gulf. I dreamed the undertow took you and you drowned."

"I didn't drown, Ilse. I'm okay, I promise you."

The story came out in fragments and bursts, interrupted by tears and digressions. It was clear to me that hearing my voice had steadied her but not cured her. She was wandering, strangely unfixed in time; she referred to the show at the Scoto as if it had occurred at least a week ago, and interrupted herself once to tell me that a friend of hers had been arrested for "cropping." This made her laugh wildly, as if she were drunk or stoned. When I asked her what cropping was, she told me it didn't matter. She said it might even have been part of her dream. Now she sounded sober again. Sober... but not right. She said the she was a voice in her head, but it also came from the drains and the toilet.

Wireman came in at some point during our conversation, turned on the kitchen fluorescents, and sat down at the table with his harpoon in front of him. He said nothing, only listened to my end.

Ilse said she had begun to feel strange "eerie-feary" was what she actually said from the first moment she came back into her apartment. At first it was just a spaced-out feeling, but soon she was experiencing nausea, as well the kind she'd felt the day we had tried to prospect south along Duma Key's only road. It had gotten worse and worse. A woman spoke to her from the sink, told her that her father was dead. Ilse said she'd gone out for a walk to clear her head after that, but decided to come right back.

"It must be those Lovecraft stories I read for my Senior English Project," she said. "I kept thinking someone was following me. That woman."

Back in the apartment, she'd started to cook some oatmeal, thinking it might settle her stomach, but the very sight of it when it started to thicken nauseated her every time she stirred it, she seemed to see things in it. Skulls. The faces of screaming children. Then a woman's face. The woman had too many eyes, Ilse said. The woman in the oatmeal said her father was dead and her mother didn't know yet, but when she did, she would have a party.

"So I went and lied down," she said, unconsciously reverting to the diction of childhood, "and that's when I dreamed the woman was right and you were dead, Daddy."

I thought of asking her when her mother had called, but I doubted if she'd remember, and it didn't matter, anyway. But, my God, hadn't Pam sensed anything wrong besides tiredness, especially in light of my phone call? Was she deaf? Surely I wasn't the only one who could hear this confusion in Ilse's voice, this weariness. But maybe she hadn't been so bad when Pam called. Perse was powerful, but that didn't mean it still didn't take her time to work. Especially at a distance.

"Ilse, do you still have the picture I gave you? The one of the little girl and the tennis balls? The End of the Game, I called it."

"That's another funny thing," she said. I had a sense of her trying to be coherent, the way a drunk pulled over by a traffic cop will try to sound sober. "I meant to get it framed, but I didn't get around to it, so I tacked it on the wall of the big room with a Pushpin. You know, the living room/kitchen. I gave you tea there."

"Yes." I'd never been in her Providence apartment.