“Pajamas, I guess. I’m not sure I can sleep, but I’d better try.”
“One pair of clean, dry, much-too-large men’s pajamas coming up.” He removed a folded pair from a dresser drawer and handed them to her with ceremony. “Followed by one slightly ratty bathrobe.” He plucked a robe, not ratty at all, from a hanger in the closet. “And slippers. No, that won’t work. They’ll be way too big for you. How about thick wool socks?”
“Perfect.”
He found a pair. “Anything else?”
“I think you’ve got me covered. So to speak. I’ll be right out.”
“Take your time. And, Wendy… like I said on the phone, I really am glad you’re okay.”
“Me too,” she answered, using the same words she’d spoken earlier.
He hesitated, as if feeling the need to say something more, then apparently decided against it. He shut the door behind him. Wendy heard his footsteps recede down the hall.
She kicked off her one slipper and stripped out of her robe and pajamas, then hung them from the shower head. Turning to the bathroom mirror, she studied her face. The new hard glint in her eyes, which she’d first detected at the hospital, was still there.
She filled the sink, then methodically ran a damp washcloth over her legs, arms, breasts, face. The cool water felt like a process of healing. She dried herself, enjoying the towel’s rough texture. Finally she wetted, dried, and combed her hair. Jeffrey had always said she ought to let it fall around her shoulders. She wondered how he liked it this way.
Returning to the bedroom, she unfolded Jeffrey’s pajamas, a pair of blue cotton trousers and a matching long-sleeved shirt. With difficulty she pulled them. He was right: they were much too large. They hung on her like a clown’s baggy suit. She rolled up the pant legs and sleeves till she felt marginally less ridiculous, then donned the robe and belted it tight. The socks came last; they warmed her feet instantly.
“Want something to drink?” Jeffrey asked when she returned to the living room.
“No, thanks. I’ve had enough stimulation for one night.”
“It doesn’t have to be a drink — drink. I’ve got fruit juice, coffee, probably some hot chocolate somewhere, mineral water, the works.”
“I’m okay. Really.”
“All right.” He sat on the edge of a battered armchair, under a grainy close-up of a half-crushed beer can. “So.”
“So.”
“I guess it’s time we talked.”
“I guess.” She thought about taking a seat, didn’t. She stood before him, putting her hands in the pockets of the robe and taking them out, shifting her weight restlessly. “Look, Jeffrey, I know this is going to sound hard to believe…”
“It was the Gryphon, wasn’t it?”
She felt her jaw drop, actually drop. “How did you know?”
“Oh, Jesus, Wendy. Oh, Jesus.”
“Come on, tell me. How did you know?”
His glasses were in his hand. He rubbed his eyes, wincing, shaking his head.
“Jeffrey. How?”
With effort he answered her. “After you called, I had nothing to do except wait. So I turned on the radio. The news came on. They were reporting that the Gryphon went after two women in the same apartment building tonight. He killed one; the other one got away. They didn’t give the address, but the neighborhood sounded like yours. Of course I wasn’t sure. When you told me those cops would be watching the house, I thought… But I couldn’t really believe… I mean, it sounds so insane…”
“It is insane. All of it. So insane I still can’t believe it myself.”
Jeffrey sat looking down at his glasses, the wire frames glinting in the lamplight. Then he tossed the glasses aside and rose to his feet in one crisp motion. He must have crossed the room to her, but Wendy didn’t see him do that; she knew only that one moment he was standing by the sofa and the next moment he was holding her in his arms, rocking her back and forth, kissing her forehead, her cheek, her mouth.
“Wendy. Wendy. Wendy…”
She swayed with him, hugging him tight, then buried her face in his chest, needing the warmth she found there, needing to be close to his heart. Distantly, past the buzzing haze filling her brain, she heard a quiet, emotionless voice-her own-telling her she’d been wrong about Jeffrey, terribly wrong. He might not have shown it, but he did care for her, cared a great deal, far more than she’d known, perhaps more than she’d wanted to know.
“Wendy,” he said again, the word whispered like a prayer.
After a long time they parted. She looked at him through a prism of tears. When he spoke, he made an effort to sound casual, almost businesslike, as if nothing had happened between them; but his voice was hoarse and cracked, giving the show away.
“Look, you don’t have to tell me the details tonight. Unless you want to talk about it.”
She’d thought she did, but in that moment she knew she’d been wrong. She couldn’t go over it again, couldn’t relive the experience as she’d relived it in Delgado’s office. She felt worn through, like old cloth.
“No,” she answered. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now. In the morning, maybe. It’ll be easier for me-everything will-in the morning.”
“Would you like to get some rest or stay up for a while?”
“Rest, I think.”
“You take the bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“I’m sorry to put you out like this.”
He laughed. Low helpless laughter that had no hilarity in it. After a startled moment she joined him.
They were still giggling softly as Jeffrey accompanied her down the hall to the bedroom. His arm was around her waist, and her head was resting on his shoulder. For the length of the walk, Wendy hoped the hallway would be endless, the bedroom forever receding, this moment stretching like elastic and never breaking.
At the doorway they stopped. She lifted her head from his shoulder, and felt his hand glide free of her body. The last of their laughter dribbled out and was gone. Then they were just two people standing there.
“If you need anything during the night, holler,” Jeffrey said.
She smiled up at him. “I will. Good night.”
He kissed her again, then hesitated, his hand brushing her hair. She wondered if he would try anything.
1 won’t mind if he does, she thought. I won’t try to stop him.
Now that was a new attitude, wasn’t it? Not in keeping with the old Wendy at all. But the old Wendy, the one who was always a victim, was not the Wendy she’d seen in the hand mirror at the hospital or in the bathroom mirror just minutes ago. She was not the Wendy birthed in bloody trauma tonight.
His fingers lingered in her hair for another moment, then vanished, leaving only the memory of their touch. He took a step back. She knew he would not try anything, would not take advantage of her when she was tired and confused and perhaps willing to do something she might later regret. As always, he was a gentleman.
“Good night,” he echoed softly, then turned with involuntary abruptness and walked too quickly toward the living room, where the sofa was.
Wendy’s heart was beating fast, and her face felt flushed. She stepped into the bedroom, shut the door, and leaned against it, drawing rapid, shallow breaths. Though Jeffrey was gone, she could still see him behind her closed eyelids, gazing down at her with sympathetic concern. “Are you all right, Wendy?” she heard him ask, his calm baritone edged with a hint of an accent…
She blinked. It was not Jeffrey she was imagining. It was Delgado.
Why would she be thinking of him now?
A tremor danced lightly over her shoulders like a shrug. She dismissed the question.
Carefully she draped the robe over a chair, then climbed into bed. Lying on her back, her hands folded on her belly, she stared up at the ceiling with its cobwebbed corners. One of those gray fuzzy things that floated perpetually before everybody’s eyes drifted across the white blankness of the ceiling like a cell on a microscope slide.
After a while she heard the creaking of the sofa and realized Jeffrey had settled down for the night. She wondered if he’d turned off the lights in the living room. Of course he had.