The Book of Illumination (21 page)

There was a message from Julian on my machine. He’d come to realize, following our lunch on Saturday, that he had no one but himself to blame for his failure to see a little bit of New England. The next few weekends were fraught with complications—visitors coming and going, college events that he couldn’t miss—so he was thinking about taking a drive out to the Berkshires later in the week, maybe Thursday or Friday. He knew it was short notice, and on top of that, a weekday, but he wondered if by chance I had any time. If so, might I be interested in coming along?

I thought of his leg pressed unself-consciously against mine in the movie theater and immediately decided I would. Just as immediately, I concluded that I couldn’t, because, unbeknownst to Julian—and I would have to mention this sometime soon, if we ever got together again—I had a little boy.
Damn!
I mean, not damn about Henry, just damn about no date.

A moment later, I had an inspiration. Friday wouldn’t work, because Delia and Nell were coming here right after Henry got out of school, but if I could get Nat to take Henry to the movies on Thursday night, and if she could also pick him up from after-school and also feed him a slice of pizza at some point and also hang around the apartment until I got back, which I would try to do on the early side, then maybe I could go! If Thursday worked for Julian, that is.

It was the first of two inspired thoughts that came to me as
I folded laundry, relishing the fact that Henry was occupied quietly in his room. I’d been stressing about the costume. For all my craftiness when it comes to books, I’m not good at costumes. At Halloween, when better mothers than I are sewing and stapling and making helmets and tiaras, we’re at Target buying the cheesy kind in the box.

I think costumes are stupid. I hate costume parties. Masks, especially Mardi Gras masks, give me the creeps.

Henry was already getting on my case about
needing
to get going on his costume, which we
needed
to finish in time for the
Q
and
U
wedding. He had no idea when this was, of course.
Didn’t you get the invitation?
he’d asked accusingly, as though not yet having received the all-important letter constituted a failure of some kind on my part.

As for the costume itself, it had to have everything to do with the letter
h
. A guessing game with all of his classmates, each of whom had been assigned a letter, was going to precede the wedding.

First he had announced that he wanted to be a Hunter with a raccoon Hat. I nixed that right away, because you can’t be a hunter without a gun, and to have a five-year-old carrying a fake rifle into a kindergarten party, especially here in Cambridge, well, it just wasn’t going to happen. With a slaughtered raccoon on his head? Not a chance.

Because I’d said no to the hunter idea, Henry acted as though I had used up the one and only no to which I was entitled. But I surprised him. I said no again—this time to a devil costume, which would be all red, he’d told me excitedly, with horns and a pitchfork and a curly tail that pointed up to the ceiling, a tail with a spike on the end. What did that have to do with
h?
I’d asked him. That was the joke! he’d explained, fairly bursting with pride at his own subtle wit. He was Hot.

Again, I’d had to disappoint him. The devil doesn’t get much airtime, as far as I can tell, in current theological instruction, at least at the kindergarten level; I suspected that this idea had more to do with the books of Maurice Sendak than those of the Old Testament. But a couple of older nuns were still at work in the school, running the one-room library and helping struggling students master their letters and numbers. I’d met them both—one was a rabid Red Sox fan—and I doubted that either of them would be offended by Henry’s sashaying up the aisle in red tights and pointy red slippers, which, by the way, I was going to be expected to make. Still, it
was
a Catholic school. Why take a chance?

Henry was fit to be tied. He thought my ideas were inane. He could be Handsome, I’d teased him. We’d make him up like a movie star and he’d get all the girls. He didn’t see the Humor. How about Humpty Dumpty? Or a Horse? Harry Potter! He rejected each of these ideas on principle, the principle being: they weren’t his.

Then I had a brainstorm. Ellie! She loved stuff like this! And she could sew! She was always bemoaning the fact that she didn’t get to participate in Halloween with her grandchildren. Pictures of them in their costumes, carrying orange plastic jack-o-lanterns presumably filled with candy, just made her want to cry.

And not only that, we’d be killing two birds with one stone. With Halloween just around the corner, the costume might be able to serve double duty, sparing me the annual torture of the trip to Target, where Henry always got wound up into a frenzied panic, searching madly, and usually in vain, for the
perfect
costume. The good ones sell out early. Better mothers than I am keep track of when they go on sale, which I gather must be sometime in the summer.

I finished folding the laundry. Now I felt guilty. He wouldn’t
be little forever, and I should be thanking my lucky stars that he was excited and passionate and full of ideas and imagination. And I did. I adored this about him, even when it got us into trouble.

But tonight, I was tired, hungry, and in need of a helping hand to get to the end of the week. To my great good fortune, I could probably count on four.

I
LUCKED INTO
a visitor parking place near the corner of Marl-borough and Clarendon. At night, most of the metered spots in Back Bay revert to being reserved for the use of the people who live around here and have residential stickers on their cars. Miss the fine print explaining this on the parking signs, and you’ll come back to discover a hundred-dollar ticket on your windshield. Near the corners of some of the blocks, though, are one or two coveted spots marked “Visitor.” I’d never actually scored one of these before, so I thought this might be a good omen. Tonight, I was going to be lucky.

Come to think of it, I already had
been
lucky. Thanks to an exhausting after-school walking trip to the playground on the Cambridge Common, nearly a mile away from St. Enda’s, Henry had practically fallen asleep into his plate of franks and beans. He’d dawdled lazily in the bathtub, had gotten into his Spider-Man pj’s as I ran down to the basement to throw a load of towels into the wash, and by the time I made it back up to his room, ready to usher him into dreamland with the next chapter of
Redwall
, he was out.

He didn’t even wake up when I took the book out of his
hands, lifted him off his quilt, and got him settled in under the covers. Max and Ellie, who were babysitting, were going to be disappointed tonight. There’d be no calls for reassuring drinks of water and no need to rock him back to sleep in their upstairs den.

The skies had been unsettled all day, with occasional bolts of sunshine breaking through. But now, the gray heavens hung low. You don’t see stars in Boston, not often anyway—there’s too much light on the ground for them to be visible—but tonight, behind a somber ceiling of dense, gloomy mist, there wasn’t even the hint of a moon. The air, for the first time this fall, was actually cold. It was drizzling steadily, the wind gusting angrily and auras of fog surrounded the streetlights, all of this reminding me that before I knew it, Thanksgiving would be here.

It was a little too late—nine fifteen—for one of my favorite bad habits: peering through the windows of other people’s houses. The best time to do this is right around dusk, when the occupants of a house first start to realize that it’s getting dark out and switch on their interior lights. Most folks don’t close their curtains right away, though, so in the fleeting minutes during which it’s brighter in the rooms than it is outside on the street, someone as curious as I am can catch thrilling, normally forbidden glimpses of chandeliers and paintings and wallpapered walls. As true darkness descends, though, people usually close their curtains. Tonight, possibly owing to the wintry dampness that was driving away autumn, most of the curtains had been closed.

I paused at the beginning of the alley. The thought of sneaking around after dark in Finny’s house, assuming I could actually get inside the house, didn’t bother me at all. But the prospect of encountering that rat again or one of his scavenging pals in the dark, deserted alley behind the house filled me with absolute dread.

It was all I’d thought about in the past two days. Not the possibility that in my desire to ease the distress of a restless old
ghost, I could get myself arrested for breaking and entering. No, that thought barely crossed my mind. What haunted me instead, in the moments before I fell asleep, and in those just before I woke up, were the several hundred feet of shadowy alleyway—the dim, Dumpster-filled picnic ground for the shifty nocturnal set—that lay between a bright, well-traveled block of Dartmouth Street and the back entrance to the Winslow home.

I’d taken precautions. I’d worn heavy rubber rain boots, the better for kicking the rats away, and my thickest pair of jeans over dense cotton leggings, in case I didn’t see one of them coming and it managed to scramble up the back of my leg.

I belted my raincoat and tied it tight, so that if one of them did manage to get up my leg, he wouldn’t get past my waist. I’d brought a flashlight and Henry’s baseball bat. The bat would probably be useless, as it was made of aluminum and sized and weighted for a five-year-old playing T-ball, but I figured it was better than nothing.

I glanced at my watch—nine twenty-eight. I had to go. Now. I took a deep breath and headed into the alley, my gaze darting right and left. Sure enough, there was a heart-stopping rustle as I passed the first Dumpster, and I caught the nauseating flick of a long, fat tail disappearing behind a nearby can. Fighting the urge to scream and run, I walked as quickly as I could toward the small, reassuring structure onto which I’d now fastened my gaze—the little shed behind the house. In a minute, with my blood rushing loudly through my ears, I was there.

Now what?
I thought, trying to take in a decent breath. Had Johnny been able to deactivate the alarm? I had no way of knowing. We should have agreed upon a signal. I should have instructed him to appear to me in one of the windows to let me know the coast was clear, or to come outside and meet me on the stoop. I hadn’t really thought this through when I hatched the plan
with him on Monday. I’d made it all up on the spot. And now I had a problem.

If the alarm system was the modern kind, the kind lots of people are putting in nowadays, the whole thing would be electronic. Like when you press that button on your car key as you cross a parking lot, and when you get to your car, the doors are all unlocked. If the house had a system like this, and if Johnny had been able to shut it all down, the back door might already be open.

But I didn’t peg Finny Winslow for the kind of guy who’d spring for a flashy, ultra-high-tech system. Tad, yes: in its sleek, impersonal efficiency, it would neatly satisfy the sensibility that savored the sight of a lone pear on a square plate on Tad’s concrete dining table. Finny, on the other hand, struck me as the sort of person who might enjoy the feel of keys in his pocket. I could see him bowing to the need for some kind of alarm system, probably years ago, but I couldn’t see him updating it every year, not from the looks of rest of the house. In his world, you bought something good in the first place, and then you made it last.

In other words, alarm or no alarm, the door probably still locked with a key. The problem was, I didn’t have a key. Nor did I have a set of lock picks, and even if I had, I don’t know how to use them. I’d once used a bobby pin to open a door that blew shut unexpectedly, but the lock was old and loose. And tonight, I didn’t have a bobby pin. All I had was a credit card, which might be a little thick, and a driver’s license, which was a little thinner. I do know how to slide a credit card down between a door and the doorframe, which is sometimes successful at pushing the bolt conveniently aside. Sometimes, but not always.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one I had.

I scanned the upper windows one last time for a glimpse of ghostly Johnny. Nothing. My hands were shaking, either from the cold or from the adrenaline that had been released by my near-encounters
with the rats. I stepped up to the door, looked around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, and held my breath. I prepared myself mentally to run, because if Johnny had let me down, or had simply been unable to disable the alarm, and I started messing around with the back-door lock, I was going to set it off. I’d know that if I stepped inside and the little red light was blinking.

I peered closely at the lock, trying to gauge what I was up against before touching anything. Just at that moment, a freezing gust of rainy wind swept in from behind me and I heard a squeal that made my heart leap into my throat. I jumped back, sick with fear, my gaze plummeting to the ground, where I expected to see a squadron of rodents shimmering toward my feet. I flicked on the flashlight. Nothing.