“Come to the meetings, if you want to find out about the Sun Collective,” the girl said. “Haven’t we seen your wife there? Yes, we think so. And now we want to see you.”
“Right.”
“We can help. We’re under our own instructions to help. To help you. To help everybody. You would love us.”
“No kidding. You’re sure? Help who?
“You. Your wife. Come meet us. Meet Wye.”
“Wye?”
“Yeah. You could say that he’s the ambassador to old people like you.”
After turning away at the mild insult, Brettigan noticed a mere moment later that the boy, Ludlow, and the girl, Christina, both had seemingly dematerialized. They appeared and vanished without warning, having some sort of spectral means of transportation, or as if he had left his theater seat and entered the lobby, only to return to find the primary actors gone.
“Come on,” Brettigan said, grasping the picnic basket with his left hand and taking Alma’s hand with his right. “Dear, let’s go home.”
Behind them, the birds, once again, grew suddenly quiet, as if taken aback for a second time.
* * *
—
After having accompanied Alma up the stairs to their bedroom, where he thought she would take a nap, Brettigan was emptying the picnic basket in the kitchen, where the deviled eggs wrapped in waxed paper were still out there on the counter, when he heard his wife’s voice from the second floor: she was speaking—almost singing—in a high, unnatural register, her sentences interrupted by pauses and by deep laughter, the exceptionally lively half of a conversation apparently going on with someone whose cleverness was inspiring her to new heights of gleeful agreement. To whom could she possibly be speaking? What was going on? Surely it must be their daughter. But Brettigan had never heard Alma talking to Virginia in this excited and almost adolescent manner, at least not since their daughter had grown up and acquired a husband and formed a family of her own. Alma took a mature, measured tone with her daughter. Perhaps she was speaking to one of their two grandchildren. Nor had she ever spoken to Timothy that way. He hadn’t heard that quality in his wife’s voice in years, and he struggled to think of the proper word for it. Delighted. As of someone who’s being flirtatious. Someone who, caught by surprise and love, might be having an affair.
He lifted the receiver of the kitchen’s landline telephone to eavesdrop and was met with a dial tone.
After removing his shoes in the mudroom by the back door, he took the stairs one by one, skipping the step fifth from the bottom, whose prominent creak would announce his movements up toward her. What was he doing, spying on her like this? Surreptitiously, with neither of them bothering to have secrets from each other anymore? At this age, they had outgrown shame and therefore possessed nothing worth hiding and had almost nothing left to reveal except for the specific content of their dreams. The whole boatload of their lives was all out there in the open, all of it. Nevertheless, he felt in his bones, all the way down to the roots of his soul, that at this moment he must be watchful. He felt the hairs at the back of his neck standing up: Something is going on here, and you don’t know what it is, do you?
No, he thought, I don’t.
Reaching the top of the stairs, he stood next to the linen closet, easing his way toward the bedroom without being detected. Just past the doorway, he saw his wife, who sat at the edge of the bed, her back to him, the dog and the cat positioned in front of her by the window, both of them fixedly staring at her. The dog sat on the floor, and the cat was perched on the windowsill. Brettigan felt a cold breeze start at the top of his head and travel electrically downward. The dog, sensing Brettigan’s presence, raised his muzzle and gave Brettigan a brief, irritated look.
Meanwhile, Alma continued to speak animatedly, waving her hands in the air as if she were grasping little flags and watching a motorcade pass by. To the dog, she said, “I felt a bolt of God’s lightning, right on the very spot,” and then she paused, not speaking, during which time she turned her face toward the cat. For several seconds, she sat quietly in a posture of listening, nodding in assent. Listening to the cat! That was it! She was—Brettigan couldn’t quite believe it—carrying on a conversation with their two household pets, both of whom were apparently making assertions with which she found herself in total agreement.
For a moment, Brettigan thought of the future: the parade of doctors and neurologists, the expensive tests for stroke, the rehabilitations, the MRIs. After all, she was hearing voices now, animal voices. The doctors would put a stop to it; that was their job. Science demanded it. Well, yes, but he too had heard Mrs. Schimmelpfennig’s voice and a bad local band from decades ago. He and his wife were hearing things in tandem.
The dog, with an odd movement, seemed to indicate to Alma that Brettigan was standing behind her, and accordingly she turned to see him, and when she did, she smiled broadly and happily, her eyes wet with tears. In his entire life, and during their long marriage, he had rarely seen his wife so happy, so transported with gaiety.
She was so happy, she was no longer herself. She seemed to be someone else entirely.
“Oh, Harry,” she cried out, joy spreading across her face, “the most wonderful thing has happened.”
- 6 -
One evening the previous winter, Christina had glanced in the mirror above the sink, and what looked back at her was this grimacing female gargoyle, only without horns. There she was, in the ladies’ bathroom at the yoga studio, trying to give the appearance of a slightly down-market Junior League solid citizen, but when she turned the old-fashioned porcelain faucet handle labeled COLD to wash the gargoyle weirdness off her face, hot water came streaming out, so hot that she couldn’t put her hands in it to normalize herself. Yet another prank of the gods. They were always on the job, setting traps, laughing up there on Olympus, spewing lava-scented spooge over everybody. When you needed cold water to straighten yourself out, you got the opposite. From curiosity, she tried the faucet labeled HOT, and of course cold water gurgled into the sink, which was irony, or something.
Christina dipped her hands in the cold water labeled HOT and in slo-mo bent over to splash it on her cheeks and eyes and forehead, which still hurt from the door she had walked into a few hours ago. She didn’t quite have a handle on this drug that her downstairs friend Lucille had given her. A designer concoction purportedly from a basement chemical laboratory in Memphis operated by a genius misfit albino dropout from MIT, it blew things pleasingly out of proportion and produced temporary blackouts, during which you were in two places at once, and sometimes in both the present and the future. Also, it conferred on its users a feeling of blessedness that lasted for an hour, depending on the weight of your past sins. Under its effects, you tended to lie down on the floor, unless you were levitating. Its street name was BT, “Blue Telephone,” in honor of its blue-black exterior coating. She’d had it before, in Chicago, but its effects were getting more specialized, more targeted to warping spacetime. There was no Operator once you swallowed it, however, though there were plenty of messages, such as “You are a total genius,” and “Everybody loves you and thinks you’re beautiful.” And the other one: “Why did you ever worry about anything? Paradise is here, now!” A brushfire of undifferentiated acceptance and love spread out over her interior landscapes, spitting up hot coals of joy.