The housekeeper began herding the girl back toward the dark corridor. A moment later Jack heard the bathroom door creak shut, the gasp and blast of water surging up through the recalcitrant pipes. Mrs. Iverson’s voice rose and fell, and after a minute or two he heard the girl laughing.
“Great,” he muttered, and crossed over to the stove. A Thermos held what was left of the morning’s brew. He poured himself a mug, grimacing as he picked out bits of dandelion root and grounds, and stared unhappily out the window. The kitchen telephone sat on a shelf there beside a ragged copy of the Yonkers telephone book. He thought of picking up the receiver to see if there would be a dial tone today, checking in the Yellow Pages for whatever defunct agency had once dealt with circumstances like this. Child Welfare? New Hope for Women? Emma would know what to do. He could call her, arrange for Jule to hydroplane down the Saw Mill River Parkway and take the girl to an appropriate shelter somewhere.
Oh please! He could just hear Leonard’s derisive laughter. Shelter? Where’s your sense of Christian duty, Jackie-boy? Throw her back to the wolves!
Oh, fuck off, thought Jack, and reached for the receiver. He’d long ago stopped trying to find any sort of pattern in when the phones would work, just as he had stopped trying to find a reason for the power outages. It’s just the Way We Live Now! Leonard would cry gleefully, but more than the outages themselves it was the constant uncertainty that maddened Jack.
Because if you knew there would be no electricity for, say, the next fifty years, you could Just Make Do. Remember the Depression? Remember Sarajevo? Some people live like this all the time!
But when the power popped back on at 3 A.M., there was always the same insane rush for lights and a hot shower, the cappuccino maker, the computer, and the television. It made no difference that this just made it all worse. Jack himself knew that when faint music rose from a forgotten radio, he would find Mrs. Iverson struggling downstairs to the washing machine and his grandmother rolling pie crust in the kitchen, even as Jack made a beeline for the stereo.
Jule told him that in the city it was even worse. Brokers and traders camping out on the floor of the Exchange, so as not to miss that instant when its black cavernous reaches suddenly burst into light and life; the wealthy pouring from their luxury towers and commandeering hansoms for impromptu parties and lightning visits to restaurants, nightclubs, galleries that opened only by electric light. People addicted to the new interactive drugs rushed to the electric avenues where they could sate themselves. Musicians and club kids filled streets and warehouses and tunnels, and for a little while life began to take on some of its old contours: trains running, businesses operating, people complaining about jobs and missed flights instead of the search for bottled water and fresh produce.
But sooner or later it would all come crashing down again. And an entire secondary industry had sprung up around that—people who made it their business to handicap whether or not the NYSE would be open on a particular day, or when the Tokyo Exchange would kick in. Jule—who had many friends, if not clients, and occasionally still ventured into the city with them—told of watching a beautifully dressed young woman decapitate a black rooster on the floor of the Exchange, while her partner collected international currency and more useful offerings—chocolate, coffee, a small strand of black pearls—from a crowd of commodities brokers.
So it was with mild trepidation that Jack lifted the telephone from its cradle. And yes, there was a dial tone and the familiar recording that warned of delays.
“…constantly working to improve our service to our customers…”
“All right, dear!” He started, replacing the handset as Mrs. Iverson’s shrill voice heralded the opening of the bathroom door. “Let’s go stand in front of the fire and get warm—”
Jack listened to the soft parade of footsteps going from hall to entryway. Was there a fire today? He certainly hadn’t made one. But when he got to the living room he found the girl crouched in front of the blazing hearth, wearing clothes that were much too big for her.
“What was her mother thinking?” Mrs. Iverson demanded of Jack. “Make sure she stays warm while I take care of those—” Her eyes narrowed, fixing on the pathetic mound of tattered cloth she’d dropped in the hallway. “We should call the doctor, too,” she added vaguely, and toddled off.
At the word doctor the girl shot Jack an alarmed look.
“Don’t worry. There’s no doctor. Not unless we bundle you off to the hospital.” He crossed his arms, trying to strike a pose between beneficence and menace. The girl looked so puzzled that he gave up and sank into an armchair. “Oh, screw it. So what’s your name?”
The fire’s crackling all but drowned her reply. “Marz.”
“’Scuse me?”
“Marz. Marz Candry.”
“Marcie?”
“No. It’s short for Marzana—Mary, in Polish. Just call me Marz, okay?”
“Polish, huh?” That would account for the accent, also the starved-refugee look. “Mary, that was my aunt’s name. Mary Anne. I never knew her, really,” he added, as though she had asked. “She disappeared when I was a kid.”
He drew himself up in the chair. “As a matter of fact, those are some of her clothes, I think.”
He pointed at the heathery pink sweater that billowed across the girl’s chest, the voluminous folds of a dirndl skirt that spread about her like a pool of melting wax. “Let me see, move over here…”
He tugged at the sweater until it grew taut as a tent flap in front of her, smiling when he found what he was looking for: the remains of an embroidered monogram.
“Mary Anne Finnegan. See?” He shook his head. “No one knows what happened to her. She ran away to California in the sixties and never came back. A couple of people told me some character in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was actually her. Probably she just OD’ed somewhere. But weird, huh?”
“What?”
“Oh, never mind. So are you, uh—what? A runaway? Or something?”
“Something.” Jack waited for her to go on, but she only inched closer to the fire, strands of lank hair falling across her cheeks. The girl extended her bare toes onto the hearth.
“Nice and warm at least,” Jack suggested.
The girl yawned. Watching her, Jack wondered how he could have ever mistaken her for the child from his dream. She was obviously older, and obviously female. There was a piquant, almost hungry sharpness about her features: hollow cheeks and small pinched nose, black slit of a mouth. No jewelry save a simple gold ring. There was nothing remotely pretty about her, save those deep-set slanted eyes, so deep a blue as to be almost purple in the flickering light. Even now, crouched safely on the hearth, she twitched and glanced suspiciously over her shoulder, as though willing him to leave.
Keeley’s voice sounded from the entry room. There was the thump of her walking stick. A moment later she appeared in the doorway.
“Now, dear.” Jack looked up obediently, but his grandmother was staring at the girl. “Larena said she found you some clothes? Let me see if they fit.”
The girl glanced up but didn’t move. “Stand up,” commanded Keeley. “I want to see, she said they were too big.”