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“Okay,” I said.
When I was standing at the door to leave I asked her if I could take her to see the movie. It was playing for only one more night.
“I’d love to,” she said.
“I’ll be over in the morning to set up the bird feeder.”
“I’m glad you came over, Willy.”
“Me too.”
“I’m not afraid now,” she said.
“I’m never afraid of anything,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Goodnight, Willy.”
I don’t know how it happened, if it was that she started to hold her right hand out for a handshake or what, but we were standing close and her right hand came up and I took it in my left hand and then she took my right hand in her left hand, so that we were holding hands, and then our hands sort of floated up to our shoulders. She was looking up at my eyes and I was looking down at hers, and my eyes must have been saying please, because hers were saying yes. Then we let go of each other’s hands, and hers moved up my arms and around the back of my neck, and mine went down and around her waist. Then we were kissing, but it was only a few seconds and she pushed against my shoulders and sort of slipped away from me.
She put my hands by my sides, patted the front of my tee shirt, and let out a deep breath.
“Well,” she said. We were still looking at each other’s eyes.
“So,” she said.
I tried to hold her again but she wasn’t so sure. My hands were all over her and she was sort of pushing me away.
“Willy, I’m not who you think I am,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve made so many stupid mistakes and I don’t even know if I can stop making them. I still haven’t got everything straightened out.”
“It’s the same with me,” I said. “None of that matters now. It’s only now and tomorrow that matters.”
I didn’t want to leave, and I never wanted to hurt her.
“Nancy, could I … would you mind if I asked you if I could …?”
Just then Mr. Winkley knocked a pot off the table and ran under the bed.
“Oh, that cat,” she said. She put the pot back on the table looked under the bed and told him he was a bad cat. Then she came back.
“Now where were we?” she said.
I want to stay with you tonight, I almost said. If I had just said it out loud, everything would have turned out different, but I didn’t say it.
“We were saying goodnight,” I said.
“Goodnight, Willy.”
“Goodnight, Nancy.”
I left.
I couldn’t sleep so I went out for a walk. I walked around for about an hour and all I could think about was Nancy. I remembered the suitcase under her bed, and her saying that she wasn’t going anywhere. Sometimes at The Morpheum you’d be friends with somebody and then they’d leave in the middle of the night and not even say goodbye, and you’d never know what happened to them. I was afraid that when I went to Nancy’s room the next morning, she’d be gone.
I hadn’t really spent all of the money that Elsie had given me for the hinges. I’d only told Howie that because I didn’t want him borrowing it. I still had a little over two dollars, and that was enough for two movie tickets, a drink, and some popcorn.
5 (#ulink_d7f9e8a3-3fab-5f7e-b98c-ed807e7a88ce)
When I woke up the next morning Mr. Winkley was meowing outside my door. He made for me to follow him to Nancy’s room. She had never let him run loose like that before. He started meowing again and I picked him up and put my hand over his mouth so that Elsie wouldn’t hear. I knocked and called Nancy’s name but there was no answer. I tried her door and it was locked. I didn’t want to think that she had left in the middle of the night without taking Mr. Winkley. I knocked on Gladys’s door and called to her.
“Gladys!”
“Pipe down out there!” she said. “People are trying to sleep!”
“I’m looking for Nancy. She’s not in her room.”
“Yeah well I haven’t seen her.”
The Colonel stuck his head out from his room, which was right next to mine. With his flat-top haircut and thin face, his head sticking out sideways looked like a triangle.
“Willy,” he whispered, like he had some secret to tell me. He looked up and down the hallway to make sure nobody else was out there, and waved for me to come over. I thought maybe he knew where Nancy was.
“Come here,” he whispered. “I have something to show you.”
We went in and Mr. Winkley hopped up on the Colonel’s bed and went to sleep. It turned out the Colonel just wanted to play chess. He’d invented a foolproof strategy that he wanted to try out on me.
“I can’t play chess now, Colonel,” I said. “Nancy’s gone. I was supposed to put up her bird feeder, but she doesn’t answer her door, and it’s locked. Mr. Winkley was in the hall meowing. Something’s wrong.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation,” he said. “You’ve taken quite a fright. Why don’t you just sit down here, and while we’re awaiting Nancy’s return, we can have a little game.”
“This isn’t a game,” I said. “She was afraid that somebody might break into her room, and then last night she said she might be leaving.”
“Well then, that explains it. You see, she’s not going anywhere. She only wants you to think that. You still have a lot to learn about the female mind, my boy. Sit down and I’ll explain.”
I sat at his table. The chess board was all set up on it.
“Her fears,” he said, “which prompted her to engage your services in repairing her door, are all in here.” He pointed to his own head. “Don’t you see? It’s not the outside intruder she fears, but her innermost desires which she cannot acknowledge.”
“What are you talking about, Colonel?”
“A young woman’s desires. It is highly dubious that she ever had any intention of leaving. She probably placed Mr. Winkley outside your door, pinched him until he meowed, and then ran off when you opened it. She wants to make you aware of how much you care for her.”
Mr. Winkley jumped off the bed and went to scratching the Colonel’s door.
“You see,” he said, pointing at Mr. Winkley. “There is an entity whom we see as the devil, who scratches at the door of our unconscious. We lock our door against him, thinking to keep him out. But where is he, really? He is inside.” The Colonel pointed at Mr. Winkley, then at his own head. “He’s not trying to get in. He wants only to be let out, to be free, where he cannot harm us.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “I’m going to ask Elsie if she’s seen Nancy,” I said.
“Oh posh, Elsie is probably in cahoots with Nancy. The two are doubtlessly engaged in a conspiracy.”
“I’m going to find Nancy.”
“Very well, then. I’ll go with you.”
“Okay. Don’t let Mr. Winkley out.”
I ran down the stairs and asked Elsie if she’d seen Nancy.
“She hasn’t gone out,” Elsie said. “She must be in her room.”
“I don’t think so. She doesn’t answer her door, and it’s locked.”
“Did you say anything to upset her, Willy? Nancy might not want to see you.”
By then the Colonel had come down the stairs, and we went outside and looked up and down the street.
“Her window!” I said, and ran around the back of the hotel and up the fire escape.
When I got up to Nancy’s window I tried to open it but it was latched. I squatted down and looked in. I couldn’t see much at first, because the sun was bright and the light was off in her room.
Then I saw her lying on the bed, and I knew. When somebody looks right at you, and your eyes lock onto theirs; when neither one of you moves and time stops and the bottom falls out of your stomach, you just know right away. She didn’t move, and nobody could sleep with their arm twisted behind them like that and their eyes wide open. A needle and syringe hung from the crook of her other arm fallen off the side of the bed, and a rubber cord was tied above. You always know when somebody’s dead.
I was squatted there at the window, and I looked down at the ground through the grate, because I didn’t want to see Nancy like that. It felt like the fire escape was pulling away from the building, and I grabbed onto the window ledge to keep from falling. I tried to stand and I lost my balance and fell against the railing. By then the Colonel had come around to the back of the building and I saw him standing on the ground in the alley looking up at me and his mouth was moving and I could see that he was shouting something, but it was like they turned the sound off and I couldn’t hear anything.
He must have known from the way I looked, because he ran back around the corner.
I caught up with him inside the hotel as he and Elsie were going up the stairs.
Elsie wouldn’t call the police until she was sure, and she wouldn’t give me or the Colonel her key ring. We finally made it to Nancy’s room and waited while Elsie caught her breath and sorted through the keys, but she couldn’t open the door because the deadbolt was locked, and it was the kind that works only from the inside.
The police had to break in the door to get into the room. The hinges didn’t come off, and the keyed lock didn’t break because Elsie had unlocked it. The deadbolt and chain lock were ripped off the door frame, but still screwed to the door.
It was only a few seconds between the time the door swung open and the time the police moved us away, and I thought I didn’t see the statue. I didn’t exactly not see it, though, so I wasn’t sure.
“I think it was probably there last night because I didn’t see it missing then,” I told the cop. He had a small book he was writing my answers in. “It should be on her bureau.”
“Wait here,” he said. He went in the room and talked to the other cop, and came back.
“Okay, Willy,” he said. I wanted to ask about the statue but he went off to talk to Elsie.
Then the other cop came out of the room and went over to talk to the first cop, and I thought they were talking about me, because I was the last one to see Nancy alive. I went over and asked them about the statue.
“You seem very interested in that statue,” the first cop said. They wouldn’t tell me anything. I walked away and the cops were whispering something, but I couldn’t hear what it was.
They weren’t looking, and they hadn’t said to stay out of the room. I wanted to see if the statue was in there, and I turned the door knob.
“Hey!” The first cop ran over and threw me against the wall. My knees gave out and my back slid down the wall and I ended up sitting on the floor against it.
With all the commotion Elsie never heard Mr. Winkley meowing in the Colonel’s room, and she never saw his dish or his litter box in Nancy’s room.
A doctor came and then they took her away. They locked her door with Elsie’s key.
6 (#ulink_67ddc0b0-a4c0-55cc-a55f-a5ada45524d1)
Mr. Winkley moved in with me. Cats hunt at night, so their eyes don’t need much light to see, but as far as anyone can tell they don’t see very many colors. Even humans don’t see color except in bright light, but we don’t usually think about it. The Colonel told me. He said if you look outside early in the morning before it gets too light, you won’t see any colors, and I looked one morning and he was right. That’s probably how a cat sees, only they see better than we do. The Colonel knew all about it. He was a pretty smart old guy, that Colonel.
Anyway, I had a dream that night. I was thinking about Nancy’s Virgin Mary statue as I fell asleep. It had a lot of colors; red, blue, white, and gold, and she had on a thing like a sheet that covered the top of her head and most of her arms. She had her arms down, with her hands held open in front of her. She was looking at something behind or above you, but she was looking at you too. I don’t see how they could have made her that way on purpose. Maybe the person who painted her had to work fast and dabbed the dot of one of her eyes a bit off. She had a pretty face, though.
The dream began with a sound like a pop and a whoosh, like opening a can of soda, and the pupil of an eye shot wide open and became a dark room that glowed like a black and white TV when you woke up at two in the morning and they’d gone off the air.
A cat walked on linoleum. I don’t know if it was Mr. Winkley; it might have been. It jumped onto a chair, then from the chair onto a bureau. The statue was on the bureau.
The cat rubbed up against the statue and knocked it off the bureau, and then the cat jumped off and landed on the floor. It put its paws carefully, one after the other, on the linoleum as it walked to the bed, and jumped up on it. It walked on the person on the bed and rubbed its nose against the body. Then it knew that something was not the same as before, and it stopped. The statue, in color now, like it was lighted from inside, was still falling, glittering and twirling, with that funny look in her eyes, and almost smiling. I wanted to catch it but I couldn’t. The cat pushed its nose at the body on the bed, but didn’t get an answer, and the cat wondered what had changed and what it meant. The statue was falling and a train passed going rackety-rack rackety-rack. The cat was afraid, and kept still, waiting for the train to pass. Then there was a crashing sound and I woke up.
I reached for the lamp by my bed but it wasn’t there. Mr. Winkley had knocked it over, and that was the crash I heard in the dream. He jumped up on my chest and started walking in place, looking right at my eyes with his big black eye. He thought I was his mother and he was trying to get milk out of me.
“I’m not your mother,” I said, and put him on the floor. The train passed, and it blew its whistle.
“You don’t even have a mother.”
What Nancy had said the night before, when I was sitting at her table looking at Mr. Winkley’s eye, came back to me: “Help me, Willy.”
7 (#ulink_4f442317-243a-5321-8061-010041bf01dd)
A couple of days later I went out for a newspaper. The police hadn’t been back and nobody had gone into Nancy’s room. I walked down the hallway and stopped at her door. It was too quiet in the hotel with Nancy gone.
She didn’t have any relatives, not that anybody knew of. Gladys wrote a story about Nancy for the newspaper, and she ended up having to make up some of it, to fill in the blanks.
“She did have a life,” Gladys said. “She was somebody.”
The reason I was going out for a paper was that I thought maybe Gladys’s story would be in it. I took a canvas shopping bag with me but I didn’t really plan to do much shopping. It was a big bag and you could put a lot of stuff in it and nobody would ever know.
Mostly I just wanted to go out. It was a nice day, and I probably didn’t feel as sad as I was supposed to. Anyway, I was thinking that by the time I got back with the paper it would be time for lunch, and if I cleaned the bathroom and mopped the hallway for Elsie, then she might give me some of her soup.
I always skipped down the stairs because I liked to hear my shoes going kaboom kaboom kaboom. When I was passing Elsie’s parlor Stanley was in there. I stopped. He was sitting in my chair, watching the TV with the sound off and eating a sandwich. Elsie was stirring soup on the hot plate.
“Willy, I need to have a word with you,” she said. She didn’t even look up from her soup, and I couldn’t think how she knew it was me; but like I told you, nothing ever got by her.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Somebody—never mind who—told me they saw an alley cat hanging around the dumpster out back. Have you seen any cats?”
“I didn’t see any cat,” I said. “There’s no cat out there.”
“There are no pets in this hotel. If I hear any more reports I’m calling the exterminator. I don’t want to see any cats.”
“You won’t,” I said. “Maybe it was a skunk. I’m pretty sure I might have seen a skunk out there.”
“If you saw a skunk, why didn’t you tell me?”
