Praying for Sleep

frequently, who her sister really is. Is she truly the stranger she seems?
    Lis just doesn’t know. But she’s decided to find out. If not through the nursery business, then in some other way. For a thought occurred to her recently—not long after Indian Leap, in fact. A thought she just can’t shake: that the only way the dark heritage of the L’Aubergets can be redeemed— if it can be redeemed at all—is through the two surviving members of the family.
    These two, together.
    She can’t say exactly why she wants this reconciliation. But nonetheless Lis feels, inexplicably, that this is something she must try. As a student told her last week, after she caught him cheating, “Hey, you play the odds.”
    They sling more gravel, as the rain falls heavily in thick dashes through the car’s white headlight beams. Then the stuffy announcer fades in to tell his listeners that coming up next will be Handel’s Water Music. He’s apparently oblivious to the joke, and moves on to other news, while the sisters look at each other for an instant, and laugh, then return to their task.
     
    The Cadillac raced down the highway amid the sticky rush of thick tires on wet asphalt and the hum of the grand engine’s eight calm cylinders.
    Michael Hrubek was still anxious from the run-in with the conspirators twenty minutes before. The fuckers! He’d escaped, yes, but his hands quivered violently and his heart pounded. His mind kept slipping off track, and he’d forget where he was and what he was doing. The echo of the gun’s loud crack, the memory of the feel as it jumped in his hand, were prominent in his thoughts.
    “Cadillac,” he sang frantically, “hard tack, sic semper tyran-ak . . . Dr. Anne, won’t you come back?”
    After the death of Dr. Anne Muller, Michael began to wander. He occasionally spent time in state hospitals but lived mostly on the street, surviving on cheese sandwiches from social workers and scrounging through Dumpsters outside restaurants. He was ravaged by anxiety and paranoia though the latter condition had a positive consequence: fearing drugs, all of which he believed to be poisonous, he remained uninfected by AIDS, hepatitis and other serious illnesses.
    After several months in the Northeast he meandered south to Washington, D.C., intending to apologize for his past crimes to Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant or the current President, whomever he met first. He managed to get to the White House gate and knocked on the door of the guard’s station.
    “It’s vital that I talk to you about this assassination business, John Guard. It’s vital !”
    Picked up, bang, by the Secret Service.
    “That was stupid,” he told himself glumly as he waited in an interrogation room somewhere in the Treasury Department. “Shouldn’t’ve done that.”
    But he wasn’t tortured as he’d expected. He was simply asked a series of what he called mind-messing questions and released after two hours. He knew that during the session the agents had somehow planted a tracking device in his body and he threw himself in the reflecting pool of the Washington Monument to short out the battery. He felt better after this dip and moved into Arlington National Cemetery, where he lived for a month.
    Finally he grew bored with the capital and wandered back north, looking for his father. After a month of sporadic searching Michael believed he found his family’s house in an old neighborhood of Philadelphia. He walked through the unlocked front door to see if anyone was home. Someone was, though it turned out to be not his father but the wife of a police detective.
    Picked up, bang, for that one too.
    Released the next day he hiked all the way to Gettysburg and lay in the middle of the battlefield, howling in shame for his role in ending the life of the greatest President the United States had ever known.
    Picked up, bang.
    Phillie, Newark, Princeton, New York, White Plains, Bridgeport, Hartford.
    That was Michael’s life: hospitals and the street. He slept in boxes, he bathed in rivers when he bathed, and he wandered purposefully. Every day was an intense experience. He saw truths with a piercing clarity. There were truths everywhere! Raw and painful truths. In red cars zipping down the street, in the motion of a tugboat easing into a slip, in the part of a teenage boy’s hair, in a symmetrical display of watches in a jewelry-store window. He considered each of these revelations, always wondering if it might ease the