Devoted(7)

He knows what he must do. He can’t travel back in time fourteen years and marry Megan, but he can go to her in California, where she lives now. She is a widow. Three years a widow. She will be easier now than she was when they were younger, ready for a new life, for the right life, the one that they would have had together if Jason Bookman hadn’t come along. Lee will take her with him to Costa Rica. The boy, too, if she really wants to bother with a mentally disabled mute. Hot Megan and steamy Costa Rica: This prospect stimulates Lee, inflames him. He can be happy again, with a fine future that holds great promise.

In the bathroom mirror, the reflection speaks to him, though it’s not his image any longer, but somehow that of Jason Bookman, the poaching Machiavellian betrayer of friends. “You’re infected,” Jason declares. “They’re swarming inside you. Something’s going wrong with your mind.”

“Liar,” Lee replies. “You just don’t want me to get in her pants.” He snatches up the pint of spiced rum and throws it.

The shattering bottle fractures the mirror, instantly beheading and dismembering Jason Bookman, daggers and dirks and stilettos and scimitars of glass spilling out of the frame, slashing down upon the sink and the faux marble encircling it, ringing like the silvery bells of some demonic fairy church. The aroma of spiced rum—orange peel, cinnamon, coconut, vanilla bean—spurts across Lee Shacket, splashes off the wall behind him.



In a state of high excitement, two hours before dawn, he returns to the bedroom and quickly dresses for the long drive.





7



For a few hours, Dorothy phased in and out of sleep, her hand always on Kipp, either still or caressing.

He remained awake, alert to her condition, asking only for another minute of her company, another and another.

Then she passed away.

Kipp smelled his mistress leaving first her flesh and then the room.

He cried the only way that his kind could cry, spilling not a tear, but issuing a series of thin, miserable whimpers.

In tears, for she had loved Dorothy, Rosa said, “Oh, sweet Kipp, please stop, please don’t, you sound so pathetic, you’re breaking my heart twice.”

But for the longest while, he could not stop, because Dorothy had gone where he couldn’t follow.

He was not merely alone now. He was reduced to half of who he had been.





8





Woody never needed more than five hours of sleep. Perhaps he’d slept more when he’d been a fat-cheeked baby, but though he had an exceptional memory, he could recall nothing of his infancy other than a mobile that hung over his crib: colorful Lucite birds—coral pink, yellow, sapphire blue—circling around and around, casting cheerful prismatic patterns on the walls. Maybe the mobile was why, all these years later, he sometimes dreamed that he could fly.

Medical authorities unanimously agreed that everyone needed eight hours of sleep every night. Less sack time supposedly led to difficulty focusing the mind, disordered thought processes. Most people who wound up as vagrants or embezzlers or serial killers had perhaps been shaped by sleep deprivation. That was a theory, anyway. In Woody’s case, however, if he languished in bed too long, that left him fuzzy-headed, with a lingering attention deficit. At 3:50 a.m., his eyelids flipped up with an almost audible click, and he became awake, with no chance whatsoever of falling back into sleep.

This embarrassed him. He was different from other people in half a gajillion ways. If only he had needed eight hours in the sheets, he would have been a little less alien.

On this Wednesday morning, Woody did what he always did on arising. He had his routines. Routines were his salvation. The world was vast and complex, part of a larger and even more complex solar system, an enormous galaxy, an infinite universe—trillions of stars!—and he didn’t want to think too much about that. There were uncountable choices that were yours to make, innumerable things that could happen to you. The options could paralyze you with indecision, and all the threats could petrify you with fear. Routines made the infinite finite and manageable. So he took his usual four-minute shower and dressed and went quietly downstairs.



He was allowed to prepare his own breakfast cereal and toast, but it was too early to eat.

Anyway, he liked to have breakfast with his mother when she got up for the day. He never spoke a word as they ate, but he enjoyed listening to her. Sometimes she didn’t say much, either, and that was okay, too, as long as she wasn’t quiet because she was sad.

He always knew when she was sad. Her sadness passed through him like windblown sleet, and he became chilled into sadness, too, which he otherwise never was.

From a kitchen drawer, he retrieved a Bell and Howell Tac Light and his trusty Attwood signal horn. The latter was a small aerosol can with a red plastic Klaxon on top, which could produce an earsplitting WAAAAAHHHHH that reliably scared off potentially dangerous animals, though he had rarely seen any of those and had only used the horn twice.

Thus equipped, he stepped to the security alarm keypad next to the back door. He entered the four numbers, and the recorded voice said, “System is disarmed.” The volume was turned low so that his mother wouldn’t be awakened by anything but the alarm itself.

The back porch offered a pair of teak chairs with thick blue cushions, a little table between them, a bench swing hanging from stainless-steel chains, and darkness all around.