Noah's Compass

4

Over the next few days, Liam often found his thoughts returning to the hired rememberer. It wasn’t that he wanted to hire her for himself, exactly. What good would that have done? He had already lived through the one event he needed reminding of. No, it was just the concept that intrigued him. He wondered how it worked. He wondered if it worked.

On Wednesday evening he asked Kitty if he could use her computer. She was using it herself at the time, sitting on the edge of his bed with the computer resting on her knees, and she shielded the screen in a paranoid way when he walked into the room. “I’m not looking!” he told her. “I just wanted to know if I might do a little research once you’re finished.”

“Research… on my computer?”

“Right.”

“Well, sure, I guess so,” she said. But she looked dubious. His aversion to computers was common knowledge. There’d been numerous complaints from St. Dyfrig parents when they couldn’t reach him by e-mail.

He retreated to the kitchen, where he was warming a pizza for his supper. (Kitty would be going out with Damian, she’d said.) A few minutes later, he heard her call, “It’s all yours.” When he walked into the bedroom, she was stepping into a pair of rhinestone-trimmed flip-flops. “Do you know how to log off when you’re done?” she asked him. “Do you know how to work this, even?”

“Certainly I know how!”

Her computer sat on the nightstand, attached to the phone line there. He assumed this meant that no one could call in, which didn’t trouble him as much as it might have. He settled on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands together. Then he looked up at Kitty. “Did you want something?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said, and she gave an airy wave. “I’m off,” she told him.

“Okay.”

She didn’t mention when she’d be back. Was she supposed to have a curfew?

As of noon, they’d passed the forty-eight-hour mark since his release from the hospital, but she had said nothing about going home. Well, none of his affair.

He waited until she had left the room, and then he typed Ishmael Cope in the Search window. It was true that he knew how to work a computer-he’d taken a mandatory teachers’ training course-but the smaller keyboard gave him some difficulty and he had to hit Delete several times.

There were 4,300-some references to Ishmael Cope. Liam knew from experience that many of these would be false leads-whole paragraphs in which Ishmael and cope coincidentally appeared at widely separated points, or even (amazingly enough) other Ishmael Copes in other cities-but still, he was impressed.

Ishmael Cope was buying up farmland in Howard County. Ishmael Cope and his wife had attended a gala for juvenile diabetes. Ishmael Cope’s plan to build a strip mall on the Eastern Shore was meeting with stiff opposition. Pass on, pass on. Aha: a newspaper profile, dating from just this past April. Mr. Cope had been born on Eutaw Street in 1930, which would make him… seventy-six. Younger than Liam’s father, although Liam had taken him for much older. He had only a high school diploma; he’d started his working life assisting in his parents’ bakery. His first million had come from the invention of an “edible staple” to fasten filled pastries and crepes. (Liam allowed himself a brief grin.) The rest of his career was fairly run-of-the-mill, though: the million parlayed into two million, four million, then a billion as he swept across his own personal Monopoly board. Married, divorced, married again; two sons in the business with him…

Nothing about any memory problems.

The next entry dealt with a question of sewage disposal for a golf community that Mr. Cope was proposing near the Pennsylvania border. In the next, he was merely a name on a list of donors to Gilman School. Liam signed off and closed the computer. He might have known he would come up empty. The whole point of hiring a rememberer, after all, was to conceal the fact that one was needed.

And anyhow, what had he hoped to accomplish even if he had found what he was looking for?

On Thursday morning he had another visit from the police. There were two of them, this time-a man and a woman. The woman did all of the questioning. She wanted to know if Liam recalled any recent conversations in which he had publicly mentioned some valuable possession. Liam said, “Absolutely not, since I have no valuable possessions.”

She said, “Well, maybe not by your standards, but… a high-definition TV, say? For lots of folks, that’s a hot property.”

“I don’t even have a low-definition TV,” Liam told her.

She looked annoyed. She was an attractive young woman, petite and towheaded, but a little W of wrinkles between her eyebrows marred the overall impression. She said, “We’re just trying to figure out why your place would have been targeted, and on the very first night you lived here.”

“Well, it wasn’t Damian, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Damian?”

He regretted bringing the name to her attention. He said, “It wasn’t the guys who moved me in.”

“No. Those were friends, as I understand.”

“Right.”

“How about the man’s voice? Did you hear him speak?”

He felt a sudden sense of despair. He said, “Didn’t they tell you I don’t remember? I don’t remember a thing!”

“Just checking.”

“What: do you imagine you’ll trip me up?”

“No need to get excited, sir.”

He forced himself to take a deep breath. No need at all; she was right, but somehow he felt accused. To this woman he looked inattentive, sloppy, lax. He decided to go on the offensive. “So what will you do next?” he asked her.

“Well, we have the case in our records now.”

“Is that it?”

She stared him down.

“How about fingerprints? Did they find any fingerprints?” he asked.

“Oh, well, fingerprints. Fingerprints are overrated,” she said.

Then she told him to take care (an expression he hated; take care of what?), and she and her partner walked out.

Back during Liam’s first marriage, when all their friends were having babies, he and Millie knew a woman who experienced some terrible complication during labor and lay in a coma for several weeks afterward. Gradually she returned to consciousness, but for a long time she had no recollection of the whole preceding year. She didn’t even remember being pregnant. Here was this infant boy, very sweet and all that but what did he have to do with her? Then one day, a neighbor climbed her porch steps and trilled out, “Yoo-hoo!” Evidently that was the neighbor’s trademark greeting, uttered in a high fluty voice with a Southern roundness to the vowels. The woman rose slowly from her chair. Her eyes widened; her lips parted. As she described it later, it was as if the neighbor’s “Yoo-hoo” had provided a string for her to grab hold of, and when she tugged it, other memories came trailing in besides-not just the previous “Yoo-hoos,” but how this neighbor brought homemade pies to people at the drop of a hat, and how she always labeled her pie tins with her name on a strip of masking tape, and how in fact she’d contributed a pie to the final, celebratory meeting of the childbirth class that they had both attended. Childbirth! And bit by bit, over the course of the next few days, more and more came back, until the woman remembered everything.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Liam could find such a string?

“Good afternoon, Dr. Morrow’s office,” the voice on the telephone said.

Liam said, “Ah, hello. Verity? I’m calling on behalf of Ishmael Cope. Mr. Cope has mislaid his appointment card, and he asked me to find out when he’s due in next.”

“Cope,” the receptionist said. There was a series of clicking sounds. “Cope. Cope. Ishmael Cope. He’s not due in.”

“He’s not?”

“Did he say he was?”

“Well, ah… yes, he seemed to believe so.”

“But he was just here,” the receptionist said.

“Was he? Oh, his mistake, then. Never mind.”

“Ordinarily he waits till closer to the actual time to make the next appointment, since we see him just every three months is all, but if you’d prefer to set something up for him-”

“I’ll find out and call you back. Thanks.”

Liam replaced the receiver.

That evening his sister arrived bearing a cast-iron pot. “Stew,” she announced, and she swept past him into the apartment and stopped short and looked around. “Goodness,” she said. Liam didn’t know why. All his boxes were unpacked now and he thought the place was looking fairly decent. But: “You know,” she said, “just because you live alone doesn’t mean you have to live miserably.”

“I’m not living miserably!”

She turned and skinned him with a glance. “And don’t think I can’t see what you’re up to,” she said. “You’re trying to come out even with your clothes.”

“Come out…?”

“You suppose if you play your cards right, you won’t have to buy more clothes before you die.”

“I don’t suppose any such thing,” Liam said. Although it was true that the idea had crossed his mind once or twice, just as a theoretical possibility. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” he asked her.

“Your pants are losing a belt loop and that shirt is so old it’s transparent.”

He had hoped nobody would notice.

Julia herself was, as always, impeccably put together. She wore what she must have worn to work that day: a tailored navy suit and matching pumps. It was obvious she and Liam were related-she had Liam’s stick-straight gray hair and brown eyes, and she was short like him although, of course, smaller boned-but she’d never allowed herself to put on so much as an extra ounce, and her face was still crisply defined while Liam’s had grown a bit pudgy. Also, she had a much more definite way of speaking. (This may have been due to her profession. She was a lawyer.) She said, for instance, “I’m going to stay and eat with you. I trust you have no plans,” and something in her tone suggested that if he did have plans, he would naturally be canceling them.

She marched on into the kitchen, where she set the pot on the stove and slid a canvas grocery bag from her shoulder. “Where do you keep your silverware?” she asked.

“Oh, um…”

Just then Kitty sauntered down the hallway from the bedroom, clearly summoned by the sound of their voices. “Aunt Julia!” she said.

“Hello, there, Kitty. I’ve brought your dad some beef stew.”

“But he doesn’t eat red meat.”

“He can just pluck the meat out, then,” Julia said briskly. She was pulling drawers open; in the third, she found the silverware. “Will you be joining us?”

“Well, sure, I guess so,” Kitty said, although earlier she’d told Liam not to count on her for supper. (All three of his daughters seemed drawn to Julia’s company, perhaps because she made herself so scarce.)

Kitty was wearing one of those outfits that showed her abdomen, and in her navel she had somehow affixed a little round mirror the size of a dime. From where Liam stood, it looked as if she had a hole in her stomach. It was the oddest effect. He kept glancing at it and blinking, but Julia seemed impervious. “Here,” she said, handing Kitty a fistful of silver. “Set the table, will you.” No doubt she saw all sorts of get-ups in family court. She slapped a baguette on a cutting board and went back to searching through drawers, presumably hunting a bread knife, although Liam could have told her she wouldn’t find one. She settled on a serrated fruit knife. “Now, I trust you’re researching burglar alarms,” she told Liam.

“No, not really,” he said.

“This is important, Liam. If you insist on living in unsafe surroundings, you should at least take steps to protect yourself.”

“The thing of it is, I don’t think this place is unsafe,” Liam told her. “I think what happened was just a fluke. If I hadn’t left the patio door unlocked, and if some drugged-up guy hadn’t come fumbling around on the off chance he could get in somewhere… But at least I seem to have neighbors who will call the police, you notice.”

He had met the neighbors that morning-a portly, middle-aged couple heading out to their car just as he was dropping a bag of garbage into the bin. “How’s your head?” the husband had asked him. “We’re the Hunstlers. The folks who phoned 911.”

Liam said, “Oh. Glad to meet you.” He had to force himself to proceed through the proper steps-thank them for their help, give a report on his injuries-before he could ask, “Why did you phone, exactly? I mean, what was it that you heard? Did you hear me say any words?”

“Words, well, no,” the husband said. “Just, like, more of a shout. Just a shout like ‘Aah!’ or ‘Wha?’ and Deb says, ‘What was that?’ and I look out our bedroom window and see this guy running away. Kind of a darker shape in the dark, was all I could make out. Afraid I wouldn’t be much of a witness if it ever came to trial.”

“I see,” Liam said.

“It was a medium-sized guy, though; I will say that. Medium-sized individual.”

Liam said, “Hmm,” barely listening, because why would he care what size the man was? It was his own words he’d hoped to hear about. That was it? “Aah!” and “Wha?” Surely he had said more. He felt a flash of exasperation with the Hunstlers.

As Julia said, setting the bread plate on the table, “You’d be a fool to rely on neighbors.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” Liam said. “I’ll give some thought to an alarm.”

But he knew he wouldn’t.

“And have any arrests been made?” she asked once they’d taken their seats.

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

“Any leads, at least?”

“Nobody’s told me of any.”

“Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think it was somebody in this complex.”

“A neighbor?”

“You can see this is a down-and-outers’ kind of place. Flimsily built rental units, opposite a shopping mall-imagine the sort of people who live here.”

“I live here, for one,” Liam said. He started buttering a slice of bread. “And so do the Hunstlers.”

“Who are the Hunstlers?”

“Julia, you’re missing the point,” Liam said.

“What is the point, then? Surely you want to see justice done.”

“This is more about me,” he said. “Why can’t I remember what happened?”

“Why would you want to?”

“Everybody asks me that! You don’t understand.”

“No, evidently not,” Julia said, and then she turned to Kitty and, in an obvious changing-the-subject tone of voice, started quizzing her about her college plans.

Which wasn’t much more successful, really. Kitty said, “I don’t have any plans. I’ve just finished my junior year.”

“I thought you were a senior.”

“Nope.”

“Shouldn’t she be a senior?” Julia asked Liam.

“Nope.”

Julia turned back to Kitty. “But still you must have visited some campuses,” she said.

“Not yet. I might not even be going to college. I might decide to travel a while.”

“Oh? Where would you travel to?”

“ Buenos Aires is supposed to be fun.”

Julia looked at her blankly for a moment. Then she shook her head and told Liam, “I thought she was a senior.”

“Just goes to show,” Liam said cheerfully. “This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t keep in touch with your family.”

“I keep in touch!”

Liam raised his eyebrows.

“I phoned you just this past Saturday, when you were moving in!”

“So you did,” Liam said.

“And I’ve brought you this nice beef stew, which you haven’t even tasted!”

“Sorry,” Liam said.

It was true; all he had on his plate was the one slice of bread. He helped himself to some stew. There were carrots, potatoes, and celery chunks along with the meat-enough to make a meal of, if he just scraped off the gravy.

“Your father’s been a picky eater all his life,” Julia told Kitty.

“It’s not so much that I’m picky as that I’m out of the habit,” Liam said. “If I went back to eating meat now, I doubt I’d have the enzymes anymore to digest it.”

“See what I mean?” Julia asked Kitty. “There was a period in his childhood when he would eat nothing but white things. Noodles and mashed potatoes and rice. Our mother had to fix him an entire separate meal.”

Liam said, “I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you were little. And another period, you would eat only with chopsticks. For one solid year, you insisted on eating everything including soup with these pointy ivory chopsticks they shipped back with Uncle Leonard’s belongings after he died in the War.”

“Chopsticks?” Liam said.

“And you had to have this old record played every night before you went to bed: ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time,’ with Kitty Kallen. Whatever happened to Kitty Kallen? Kiss me once, and kiss me twice,” Julia sang, in an unexpectedly pretty soprano. “It was how Mother taught you to kiss us good night. You would blow kisses in tempo. Kiss to the right, kiss to the left… big smacking sounds, huge grin on your face. Wearing those pajamas with the feet and the trap-door bottom.”

“How come you always remember so much more than me?” Liam asked.

“You were only two, is why.”

“Yes, but you come up with so many details. And some are from when I was ten or twelve, when supposedly I was a fully conscious being; but still they’re all news to me.”

Although total recall was not an unmixed blessing, he had noticed. His sister could hold a grudge forever. She collected and polished resentments as if it were some sort of hobby. For over half a century now, she hadn’t spoken to their father. (He’d left them to marry a younger woman back when they were children.) Even when he suffered a heart attack, a few years ago, Julia had refused to visit him. Let him go ahead and kick the bucket, she’d said; good riddance if he did. And she insisted on using their mother’s maiden name, although their mother herself had stayed a Pennywell till she died. It may have been this bitter streak that kept Julia single. She had never even seriously dated, as far as Liam knew.

“I can see you plain as day,” she said now. “Your little red cheeks, your sparkly eyes. Your fat little fingers flinging kisses. Don’t tell me you didn’t know exactly how cute you were being.”

There was an acid edge to her voice, but even so, Liam envied how she envisioned this picture so clearly, hovering in the air above the table.

Cope Development’s offices were on Bunker Street, near the train station, according to the telephone book. You would think Ishmael Cope could have sprung for a better address-something around Harborplace, say. But that was how the rich were, sometimes. It might be why they were rich.

Shortly before noon on Friday, defying medical orders, Liam drove down to Bunker Street. When he reached Cope Development he pulled over to the curb and shut off the ignition. He had hoped for a little park of some sort, or at least a strip of grass with a bench where he could sit, but clearly this was not that kind of neighborhood. All the buildings were scrunched together, and their wooden doors were chewed-looking, the paint on their trim dulled and scaling, their bricks crumbling like biscuits. The place to the right of Cope Development sold plumbing supplies; the place to the left was a mission for indigent men. (That was how the sign in the window phrased it. Would indigent men know the word “indigent”?) Apart from a hunched old woman dragging a wheeled shopping tote behind her, there wasn’t a pedestrian in sight. Liam’s original plan-to blend in with the crowd on the sidewalk, trailing Ishmael Cope and his assistant unobserved as they strolled to some nearby café-seemed silly now.

He sat low behind the steering wheel, arms folded across his chest, eyes on the Cope building. It looked as dismal as the others, but the plaque beside the door was brass and freshly polished. Twice the door opened and people emerged-a boy with a messenger bag, two men in business suits. Once a woman approached the building from the direction of St. Paul Street and paused, but she moved on after consulting a slip of paper she took from her purse. It was a warm, muggy, overcast day, and Liam had rolled his window down, but even so, the car began to grow uncomfortable.

He hadn’t planned what he would do after he’d followed them to lunch. He had imagined finagling a table next to them and then, oh, just worming his way in, so to speak. Joining them. Becoming a member.

It was just as well that they weren’t showing up, because this would never have worked.

Still, he went on waiting. He noticed that although he was watching for the two of them, it was the assistant he wanted to talk to. Mr. Cope himself had nothing to teach him; Liam knew all there was to know about forgetting. The assistant, on the other hand… Unconsciously, he seemed to be crediting the assistant with specialized professional skills, as if she were a psychologist or a neurologist. Or something more mysterious, even: a kind of reverse fortune teller. A predictor of the past.

It was this thought that made him come to his senses, finally. Not for the first time, he wondered if the blow to his head had somehow affected his sanity. He gave himself a little shake; he wiped his damp face on his shirt sleeve. Then he started the car and, after one last glance at the door (still closed), he pulled out into traffic and drove home.

Barbara called on Saturday morning and said she wanted to come get Kitty. “I’ll stop by for her in, say, half an hour,” she said. “Around ten or so. Is she still asleep?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, wake her up and tell her to pack. I’ve got a busy day today.”

“Okay, Barbara. How have you been?” Liam asked, because he felt a little hurt that she hadn’t inquired about his injuries.

But she just said, “Fine, thanks. Bye,” and hung up.

He would be sorry to see Kitty go, in some ways. Having another person around was oddly cheering. And unlike her two sisters, who seemed to adopt a tone of high dudgeon whenever they talked to him, Kitty often behaved as if she might actually enjoy his company.

On the other hand, it would be good to have his own bed back. He noticed when he stuck his head in to wake her that already the room had taken on her scent-various perfumed cosmetics mingling with the smell of worn clothing-and it was strewn with far more possessions than could have fit into that one duffel bag, surely. Bottles and jars covered the bureau; T-shirts littered the floor; extension cords trailed from the outlets. The bed itself was shingled with glossy magazines. He didn’t know how she could sleep like that.

“Kitty, your mother will be here in half an hour,” he said. “She’s coming to take you home.”

Kitty was just a feathery tousle of hair on the pillow, but she said, “Mmf,” and turned over, so he felt it was safe to leave her.

He laid out breakfast: toasted English muffins and (against his principles) the Diet Coke she always claimed she needed to get her going. For himself he brewed coffee. He was starting on his second cup, seated at the table watching the English muffins grow cold, before she emerged from the bedroom. She still had her pajamas on, and a crease ran down one cheek and her hair was sticking up every which way. “What time is it?” she asked, pulling out her chair.

“Almost ten. Do you have your things packed?”

“No,” she said. “Hello-o, did anyone warn me? All at once I’m yanked out of bed and told I’m being evicted.”

“I guess it’s the only time your mother can come,” Liam said. He helped himself to an English muffin. “She said she had a busy day today.”

“So she couldn’t inform me ahead? Maybe ask me if it was convenient?”

Kitty popped the tab on her Diet Coke and took a swig. Then she stared moodily down at the can. “I don’t know why she wants me back anyway,” she said. “We’re not getting along at all.”

“Well, everybody has their ups and downs.”

“She’s this, like, rule-monger. Nitpicker. If I’m half a minute late it’s, whoa, grounded forever.”

“I would have supposed,” Liam said, picking his way delicately between words, “that she would be less concerned with all that now that she has a… boyfriend, did you say?”

“Howie,” Kitty said. “Howie the Hound Dog.”

“Hound dog!”

“He has these droopy eyes, like this,” Kitty said, and she pulled down her lower lids with her index fingers till the pink interiors showed.

Liam said, “Heh, heh,” and waited to hear more, but Kitty just reached for the butter.

“So, are they… serious, do you suppose?” Liam asked finally.

“How would I know?”

“Ah.”

“They go to these movies at the Charles that all the artsy people go to.”

“I see.”

“He has permanent indigestion and can’t eat the least little thing.”

Liam said, “Tsk.” And then, after a pause, “That must be hard for your mother. She’s such an enthusiastic cook.”

Kitty shrugged.

This was the first boyfriend Liam had heard about since Madigan died-Barbara’s second husband. He had died of a stroke several years ago. Liam had always viewed Madigan as temporary, ersatz, a mere substitute husband; but in fact Madigan had been married to Barbara longer than Liam himself had, and it was Madigan who had occupied the Father of the Bride role at Louise’s wedding. (Everything but the actual walking her down the aisle; that much they had oh-so-graciously allowed Liam.) At Madigan’s funeral the girls had shed more tears than they ever would for Liam, he would bet.

“I’m just thankful your Grandma Pennywell didn’t live to see your mother marry Madigan,” he told Kitty. “It would have broken her heart.”

“Huh?”

“She was very fond of your mother. She always hoped we’d reconcile.”

Kitty sent him a look of such blank astonishment that he said, hastily, “But anyhow! Shouldn’t you be packing?”

“I’ve got time,” Kitty said. And even though the doorbell rang at the very next instant, she continued licking butter off each finger in a catlike, unhurried way.

Before he could get all the way to the door, Barbara walked on in. She wore a Saturday kind of outfit-frumpy, wide slacks and a T-shirt. (No doubt she would have dressed differently for what’s-his-name. For Howie.) She was carrying a lidded plastic container and a cellophane bag of rolls. “How’s the head?” she asked, striding right past him.

“Nobody seems to inquire about it anymore,” he said sadly.

“I just did, Liam.”

“Well, it’s better. It doesn’t ache, at least. But I still can’t remember what happened.”

“When do you get the stitches out?”

“Monday,” he said. He was disappointed that she had ignored the reference to his failed memory. “I’m hoping maybe when I’m sleeping in my own bed again, it will all come back to me. Do you think?”

“Maybe,” Barbara said absently. She was putting the container in his refrigerator. “This is homemade vegetable soup for your lunch. Where’s Kitty?”

“She must be packing. Thanks for the soup.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Guess what Julia brought: beef stew.”

“Ha!” Barbara said. But he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She said, “How late did Kitty stay out nights?”

Liam didn’t have time to answer (not that he’d have been able to, since he was generally sound asleep when Kitty got home) before Kitty called from the bedroom, “I heard that!”

“I was only wondering,” Barbara said.

“Then why don’t you ask me?” Kitty said. She appeared in the hallway, struggling under the weight of her duffel bag, which was bulging open, too full to zip. “Typical,” she told Liam. “She’s always going behind my back. She doesn’t trust me.”

Liam said, “Oh, now, I’m sure that’s not-”

“Darn right I don’t trust you,” Barbara said. “Who was it who changed my bedroom clock that time?”

“That was months ago!”

“She snuck into my room before she went out and set my clock an hour behind,” Barbara told Liam. “I guess she thought I wouldn’t notice when I went to bed. I’d wake in the night and look at the clock and think she wasn’t due back yet.”

Liam said, “Surely, though-”

“Oh, why do you always, always take her side against me?” Barbara demanded.

“When have I taken her side against you?”

“You don’t even know what happened! You just jump on in with both feet!”

“All I said was-”

“Do you have a grocery bag?” Kitty asked him. “I’ve got way too much stuff.”

She made it sound as if he were somehow to blame for that. In fact he felt blamed by both of them. He went over to a kitchen cupboard and pulled out a flattened paper bag and handed it to her in silence.

As soon as Kitty left the room, he turned to Barbara and said, “Shall we sit down?”

“I’m really pressed for time,” Barbara said. But she followed him into the living room and settled in the rocker. He sat across from her. He laced his fingers together and smiled at her.

“So!” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re looking well.”

She was, Saturday clothes or no. She had that fair, clean skin that showed to best advantage without makeup, and her serenely folded hands-the nails cut sensibly short and lacking any sort of polish-struck him as restful. Reassuring. He went on smiling at her, but she had her mind elsewhere. She said, “I’m getting too old for this.”

“Pardon?”

“For dealing with teenage girls.”

“Well, yes, you are a little old,” Liam said.

This caused Barbara to give a short laugh, but he was only speaking the truth. (She’d had Kitty at age forty-five.)

“It wasn’t so bad with Louise,” she said. “Say what you will about the born-again thing; at least it made her an easy adolescent. And Xanthe I don’t even count. Xanthe was such a good girl.”

Thank heaven for that much, Liam thought, since Xanthe wasn’t her own. Wouldn’t he have felt guilty if Xanthe had given Barbara any trouble! But she had been so docile-a quiet, obedient three-year-old when Barbara first met her. He’d brought her along to work one morning when his child-care fell through, and the two of them had hit it off at once. Barbara hadn’t fussed over her or used that fake, high, cooing voice that other women used or expected Xanthe to rise to any particular level of enthusiasm. She seemed to understand that this child had a low-key nature. And she’d already known that about Liam. She certainly knew he was low-key.

So why did she want more than that after they were married? Why did she prod him, and drag him to counseling, and at last, in the end, give up on him?

Women had this element of treachery, Liam had discovered. They entered your life under false pretenses and then they changed the rules. Underneath, Barbara had turned out to be just like all the others.

Take today, for instance. Look at her sitting in his rocking chair. Although she had started out so calm-hands folded in her lap-she grew more restless by the minute. First she picked up an issue of Philosophy Now from the floor beside her and examined the cover. Then she set it down and looked around the room, knitting her eyebrows in such a way that Liam felt himself becoming defensive. He sat up straighter. She turned her gaze on him and said, “Liam, I wonder if you might perhaps be a little bit depressed.”

“Why on earth would you say that?” Liam asked.

Why did she feel she had the right to say it, was what he meant. But she misread the question. She said, “Because you’re narrowing your world so. Haven’t you noticed? You’re taking up a smaller and smaller space. You don’t have a separate kitchen anymore or a fireplace or a view from your window. You seem to be… retreating.”

Luckily, Kitty came into the room just then. She was lugging not just the grocery bag but a pillowcase stuffed with clothing-the pillowcase from Liam’s bed, which she hadn’t asked permission to take. “Here,” she told her mother, and she dropped the pillowcase in Barbara’s lap and then bent to pick up her duffel bag.

“What is all this?” Barbara asked as she struggled to her feet. “How did you end up with so many belongings?”

“It’s not my fault! You’re the one who sent me here!”

“Did I tell you to bring your whole closet? Where did all this come from?”

“I had to buy a couple of extra things,” Kitty said.

“What? With what money?” Barbara demanded.

Meanwhile they were limping toward the door, hampered by their burdens, yawping at each other like two blue jays. Liam saw them out with a feeling of relief. After they were gone he returned to his chair and sank into it. The silence was so deep it almost echoed. He was alone again.

Monday morning his stitches were removed. A patch of thin gray fuzz hid the scar now. He went to the barber the following day and had his hair cut even shorter than usual, and after that the patch was nearly unnoticeable.

On his palm, the stitches left puckers. They turned the deepest of the creases there into a sort of ruffle. He wondered if this would be permanent. He sat in his rocker staring down at his palm for minutes on end.

He had too much time to fill; that was the truth of the matter. For a brief while, the fuss of moving in had entertained him-arranging and rearranging his books, scouring three different kitchen stores for the exact type of wall-mounted can opener he was used to in the old place. But that couldn’t last forever. And with no summer school now, no papers to grade, no ten-year-old boys in despair over the inconsistencies of i-before-e… well, face it, he was bored. He could sit and read for only so many hours. He could take only so many walks. Of course he could always listen to classical music on his clock radio, but it seemed to him that the station kept playing the same pieces, and most of the pieces sounded like the music they played at the circus. Besides: just sitting, just listening, just staring straight ahead with his hands resting on his kneecaps, was not enough to use up the day.

Nobody called to ask how he was. Not Barbara, not his sister, not any of his daughters. Here he thought he and Kitty had gotten on so well, but he didn’t hear a word from her.

The hospital sent him a bill for expenses not covered by his health insurance. They charged him rent for a phone in his room, and he was able to consume quite a large chunk of one morning on a protest call to Accounting.

“Not that I wouldn’t have liked a phone in my room,” he said. “I certainly asked for one. I had no way of getting in touch with my family and letting them know where I was. Everybody was needlessly worried.”

The woman at the other end of the line allowed a silence to develop after each one of his statements. He hoped this meant she was writing down his words, but he suspected she was not. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”

Another silence. Then, “Mmhmm.”

“Also,” he said, “this bill was for three days. For June tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. But I was unconscious on the tenth! How do they think I was able to order a phone when I was unconscious?”

“A visitor could have ordered it,” she said after another pause.

“I didn’t have any visitors.”

“How do you know that, if you were unconscious?”

This last remark came lickety-split, no pause at all, triumphantly. He sighed. He said, “I don’t think I had even made it into my room on the tenth. I think I was still in emergency. And meanwhile my family was completely in the dark, wondering what had become of me.”

It almost seemed like the truth. He imagined relatives all over town wringing their hands and calling around and checking with the police.

But the woman in Accounting was unimpressed. She told him they would get back to him later. Her tone of voice implied that it wasn’t going to be uppermost on anyone’s agenda.

At nighttime he slept poorly, no doubt because he wasn’t tired. He was bothered by the faint scent of Kitty’s shampoo even though he had changed the sheets, and a neighbor’s TV was so loud that percussive thumping noises vibrated one wall. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed dreams that exhausted him-complicated narratives that he had to work to keep track of. He dreamed he was a pharmacist advising a customer about her medications, but while he was talking he absentmindedly, unintentionally ate every one of her pills. He dreamed he was leading a policewoman through his apartment-not the woman who had visited in real life but another one, old and crabby-and while they were in the bedroom they heard a sound from the window. “There!” Liam said. “Didn’t I tell you?” He was pleased, because in the dream there seemed to be some suspicion that he had made the intruder up. Then he woke, and for an instant he thought that the sound from the window had been real. His heart seemed to stop; he felt suddenly cold, although it was a warm night. But almost immediately, he understood that he had imagined it. The only sounds were the meep-meep of tree frogs, the neighbor’s TV, the distant rush of traffic on the Beltway. He was surprised that he’d felt such terror. Why should he be afraid? Everybody dies sometime. In fact he was almost waiting to die. But evidently his body had other ideas.

His heartbeat returned to normal and the chill faded, and he was left with a feeling of disappointment. Wouldn’t you think that that flash of alarm could have jogged his memory?

He had no idea when Cope Development opened for business each day, and so he drove downtown extra early-shortly after eight o’clock. A panel truck occupied the space where he’d parked the last time. He drew up directly behind it, in front of the Mission for Indigent Men. He cut the engine and rolled down his window and prepared himself for a wait.

Within minutes, a woman approached from the other direction, hunting through a red tote as she walked. She brought forth a bunch of keys and climbed the front steps, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside. But no others followed. Maybe this woman was the office manager, or opener, or whatever the term was. The sidewalk remained empty. Liam began to feel deeply, maddeningly bored. His throat developed a hollow ache from holding back his yawns. His face grew sticky with perspiration.

Then around nine o’clock, people started arriving-young men in suits, and women of all ages strolling in twos and threes, talking as they entered the building, laughing and nudging each other. Liam felt a pang of nostalgia for the easy camaraderie of people who worked together.

A man in coveralls walked past Liam’s car, climbed into the parked panel truck, and drove away. Immediately afterward, as if by prearrangement, a dingy green Corolla pulled into the vacant space. A woman stepped out from the driver’s side: the rememberer. She was wearing another big, folksy skirt, or perhaps the same one, for all Liam knew, and her ringlets were wet-looking now from the heat. She circled behind her car, so close that he could hear the slogging sound of her sandals on the pavement. She opened the front passenger door, and Mr. Cope unfolded himself from his seat and stood upright. He had that old-person knack of remaining cool in sweltering weather. His hatchet face was dry and chalky; his high white collar and close-fitting suit were still crisp.

The rememberer, on the other hand, looked rumpled and uncomfortable. Under the glaring sunlight she was not quite so young as Liam had first assumed. Nor did she seem so professional. She somehow got her purse strap entangled when she tried to close the car door, and as she was guiding Mr. Cope up the front steps she managed to trample on the hem of her own skirt. The elastic waist slid perilously low on one side; she yanked it up again and gave a quick glance around her, luckily not appearing to notice Liam in his car. Then she cupped a hand under Mr. Cope’s elbow and shepherded him into the building. The door swung shut behind them.

It wasn’t clear to Liam what he had hoped to gain from this sighting. He started his engine and rolled up his window and drove home.

Toward the end of June he phoned Bundy and invited him to supper on a night when Bundy’s fiancée had yoga class. He planned a real menu; it gave him something to do. He went to the supermarket for groceries, and he roasted a chicken. It was way too hot for roast chicken, but he didn’t know how to cook much of anything else. And Bundy was appreciative, since his fiancée fed him a steady diet of Lean Cuisines.

Liam couldn’t quite explain why he and Bundy were friends. It was surely none of his doing. But from the day they’d met, at a St. Dyfrig teachers’ meeting one September, Bundy had seemed to view Liam with a mixture of fascination and… well, glee would have to be the word for it. And Liam, almost against his will, found himself playing into that view. Leading Bundy through the apartment this evening, for instance, he flung open the closet door to show off his new tie rack. “A separate little spoke for each tie! And see how it revolves for easy access.” Bundy rocked back on his heels, grinning.

When it grew apparent that the apartment’s air conditioning couldn’t handle the heat of the oven, they moved their meal to the patio. They sat out on the tiny square of concrete in two rotting canvas butterfly chairs left behind by the previous tenant, and they ate from makeshift trays formed by several folded newspaper sections laid across their knees.

Bundy shook his head when he heard about the intruder. He said, “Ah, man. And you’re in the county now!” But he showed less sympathy for Liam’s memory lapse. “Shoot,” he said, “that happens to me just about every weekend. No big deal about that.”

Then he drifted into St. Dyfrig gossip-the headmaster’s latest cockamamie piece of foolishness, the latest dispute with some pigheaded parent. He knew all of Liam’s old students and could tell him what most were up to, since he was in charge of athletics for St. Dyfrig’s summer program. Brucie Winston had been caught selling drugs, which was something of a dilemma since Brucie’s parents had just single-handedly funded the new auditorium. Lewis Bent was failing his make-up math course and there was talk of holding him back next year. Liam had never much liked Brucie Winston, but Lewis was a whole other story. He tsk-ed and said, “Well, that’s a shame.” He wondered if there were something he should have done differently while Lewis was in his class.

When they’d polished off the dessert (a pint of pistachio ice cream) and it was time for Bundy to go, Liam led him back through the apartment, carelessly leaving the patio door unlocked behind them. Even as he was telling Bundy good night he had an edgy awareness of that unlocked door at his rear. “Sure, you’re welcome; any time,” he said, almost pushing Bundy out. But it wasn’t anxiety that made him hurry back to the patio; it was a sort of magnetic pull, a half-guilty, compelling attraction. All for nothing, as it happened. No one was trying to get in.

That night he dreamed that he woke to a sense of someone standing over his bed. He dreamed that he lay very still, curled on his side, pretending to be asleep. He could hear soft, steady breathing. He could feel a thread-thin blade of cold steel placed lightly against his bare neck. Then the blade was raised in the air to strike the fatal blow.

Who would have guessed that a killer would make that trial move first? Like setting a cleaver against a joint of meat before lifting it to chop, Liam thought. The horror of that image caused his eyes to fly open in the dark. His heart was beating so violently that it rustled his pajamas.