The boy and I sat looking at one another. His eyes wide, unblinking. Does something, recognition, sympathy, identification, pass between us? Is there a message, is there feeling, even comprehension, in those eyes? How can I know? They’re like stone artifacts left behind, the menhirs of Carnac, unreadable.
Then the boy worked his mouth a moment and made sounds.
What was that?
You got me, Lewis, Lester said from the doorway. Miracle, some might be inclined to say. Boy’s never spoken before. No one thought he could…. Big uns?
Pigeons.
You’re right. It could be.
What about them? I asked the boy. What about the pigeons? What are you trying to tell me?
His mouth worked silently for a time before producing again (at what unimaginable cost?) that same indecipherable sound.
Here I squatted at cave’s mouth, a midwife attending language’s birth, witnessing urgencies that over hundreds of years, a thousand, would shape themselves into human speech. Lester shifted feet beside me in the doorway. Downstairs the phone rang. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up. Again, momentarily, I became a child: comforting voices from other rooms, grown-ups out there doing drinks and dinner parties, extending the ever-elastic day while I lie tucked away safe and warm in night-time’s folds.
We waited, but the boy failed to speak again. When at last I stood, hauling myself up with one hand on whatever I could reach, wincing at pain and stiffness, his eyes didn’t follow.
I could have said many things as Lester and I trudged together down the stairs. That the boy had identified somehow with the park’s pigeons, taking their illness, their immobility-all he could understand of death? — for his own. That with the extreme posture of his stillness he’d found a way to speak, a way to express his grief. Instead I said that I was sorry and hoped the boy might soon get better. Lester thanked me for coming.
It was my day for casualty reports. Earlier I’d gone to see Alouette. She’d been up and about and doing well for some time, but two days ago that bearable pain along the incision became something more; she woke with a fever and with (her words) maggoty white pus oozing from the site. A two-hour wait and five-minute visit at her OB/GYN confirmed the obvious diagnosis of infection. So now she was supposed to be back on bed rest, pushing fluids, cleaning the incision regularly with peroxide, gobbling dollar-a-capsule Keflex. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, laptop propped awobble on stacked books and phone cradled to one ear, little LaVerne asleep alongside in what looked like a dishpan lined with towels bearing pictures of teakettles, iron skillets, yellow squash, carrots.
As usual, the backdoor stood open, screen unlatched.
“Don’t blame me,” Alouette said, looking up from computer and phone, when I stepped through. “She likes it there, it’s the only place she’ll go to sleep. I laugh at your sixty-dollar cradle! your tapes of mother’s heartbeat!”
“You really shouldn’t be sitting here with the door unlocked.”
“So everyone says.” Back to the phone. “Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, but you’re telling me Judge Haslep isn’t in town? Even though he had a full docket today and has another scheduled tomorrow? Why am I supposed to believe this?”
She motioned me to sit.
“You’ll get back to me? Gee, I sure hope so.” Sweetest voice possible. “Within the hour? Before I start dialing up some other numbers here on my Rolodex, asking if they know what’s going on?”
Thumbing the phone dead, she set it down.
“Every bit of your mother’s charm.”
“God, I hope so. Worked for her. Get you something?”
“I’m good. You?”
“Absolutely.”
“I do have to say it doesn’t look much like a bed in here. Which is where, according to my information, you’re supposed to be?”
She shrugged. “Larson.” Word and shrug alike conveying this comic sense of the burden she had to carry, alas. “So why is it he talks to you when he never talks to anyone else?”
“Must be the honest face. Maybe like any good tribesman he values my experience as an elder. Or at the other end of civilization, merely defers to my status as cult novelist.”
“My God, you don’t think he can read, do you?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Besides, I thought you gave all that up.”
“More like I was given up. Not that you’d be changing the subject….”
A beat, as Deborah and her actors would say. “I feel fine, Lew. Little Verne’s fine.”
“That’s good. We’d all like to keep it that way.”
She pushed the phone to one side, a dinner plate she was done with. “I’m not going to get out of talking about this, am I?”
I shook my head.
She typed in several lines, hit the mouse, glanced at the screen and hit it again. Then in a gesture of capitulation raised her hands, fingers spread. Pushed back from the table.
“The messages began about the time I learned I was pregnant. Just a sentence or two at first, scrawled on postcards. I didn’t think too much about them.”
“Unsigned.”
“Always. I’d wonder, but how far can you go with nothing to go on?”
“You didn’t save them? Didn’t take any notice of postmarks?”
“Why would I?”
“And these were what-standard post-office issue? Picture postcards?”
“Well … at first a lot of them were like those godawful slick cards from souvenir shops. Antelopes with jackrabbit ears, talking cactus wearing sunglasses, ‘Back to the grind soon’ with the drawing of an office coffeepot, that sort of thing. The messages were just as generic. Wish you were here. Hope you’re well. Missing you.”
“Then at some point they changed?”
“So slowly as to go unremarked.”
From time to time her mother’s speech leapt to the surface in Alouette’s, word choice, cadence, attitude. Fishhooks in the heart.
“After a while I began to have the feeling that the cards were getting selected rather than picked at random. A stunning photo of Alaska with ‘It never gets fully dark here’ written on the back, for instance. There’s some deeper message there, I’m sure. Was sure. Though I had and have absolutely not the barest ghost of an idea what it might be.”
“Nothing directly threatening.”
“Nothing overt. Nor ever, really. More the feel of it all. This presence forever refusing to announce itself but always palpably there.”
Catching a thought on the wing, she pushed back up to the computer to type it in. I remembered LaVerne telling me, You’re never completely here, with me, when you’re working, are you, Lew?
“Sounds like classic paranoia, doesn’t it?” Alouette said.
“Exactly the response a stalker wants to elicit…. I’ve seen your GOK file, you know.”
“I was wondering when you’d bring that up. If you’d bring it up.”
“Everything about it-your taking pains to tuck it away, that it exists at all-suggests you must have taken the whole affair more seriously than you claim.”
From within the dishpan on the floor alongside came the scuttling sound of small legs and arms. “Hungry again,” Alouette said. Fishing little Verne out, she bared a breast and put the baby to it.
“I do have to wonder, though, Lew. How is it you manage to avoid seeing this as a violation of privacy? All those rights and principles you uphold so heartily-what, they just go by the way when it becomes personal? And you have no qualms about the dishonesties involved?”
“Of course I do.”
She shifted the child against her chest. “Of course you do. I’m sorry, Lew. I know it’s not that simple.”
“What is?”
“And I do appreciate your taking time to look into this. Though it’s probably nothing.”
“Probably. But it’s okay with you if I keep poking around, right?”