Swan Dive

her, we never taught you any better than that?’ ”
    ”What if next time it’s the child, Sheilah?”
    She scrunched her face, like a grotesquely older version of what Vickie had looked like at the vet’s. ”There’s nothing I can do! I love him, can’t you see that?”
    Unfortunately, she looked so hopeless that I could. I got up and left her, head bobbing slightly as she cried.
    I found a pay phone in the lobby and told the Bonham cop who answered that I wouldn’t be at their firing range the next day. The scarecrow at the hospital security desk told me to forget the cafeteria and gave me directions to the nearest diner, where I bought eight Styrofoam cups of tea. I set the bag of cups on the passenger-side floor of the Fiat and drove to Peabody .
    At the police station, I spoke briefly with the detective who had responded to the break-in earlier that evening. He said there wasn’t much hope of anything official happening. Not exactly news.
    I told him what I’d be doing that night, and he said, ”It’s your time, pal.” Then he cleared me with the patrol supervisor in case anybody reported my car.
    In the darkness, it took a while to find Hanna’s house.

One thing that must be said for tea: When you’re not used to drinking the stuff, the caffeine really keeps you awake. It also gives you the shakes and urges you to relieve yourself. Often. For the last symptom, the Styrofoam cups are reusable.
    I sat and watched Hanna’s place until my eyes glazed over. I perked up when somebody else’s cat scooted into the shrubbery and came out a few seconds later, thrashing something in its mouth and proudly prancing in that successful stalker way. I lost track of him, but thirty minutes later he was back, nosing around the bushes again.
    At fifteen past midnight, a car wandered down the street and jumped the curb at a driveway four houses away. A woman stumbled out, obviously drunk. She wore a dark dress that flashed purple in the car’s courtesy light. A guy got out from behind the wheel, playfully fighting her for the front door key and almost forgetting to come back and close the driver-side door. They laughed and groped each other a little too frantically as they finally crossed the threshold.
    A few hours later, I jumped when two birds zoomed by the windshield, so fast and so close they could have been a 3-D special effect. I couldn’t remember anything but owls flying at night. Maybe the questing cat had spooked them.
    An elderly lady in a bathrobe watched me from a third-floor window across the street. She was peering around a shade, but she had a hall light on somewhere behind her, producing a stark, clear silhouette. When I waved to her, she abruptly let the shade fall back. I expect she went to call the police.
    At 3:10, the man who drove the purple dress home came hustling out of her house, trying to knot his tie, put on his jacket, and check his watch all at once. He hopped in, fishtailed out, and took off the way Sheilah Kelley had earlier that afternoon in Swampscott. Perhaps with equal reason for feeling guilty.
    The rain began at 4:15, drops the size of dimes pelting the bugs on the windshield. I tried the wipers once, but I would have had to use them continuously to do much good, which would have been a bit conspicuous. I did my best to peer between the veins of water pulsing down the glass.
    At 5:30, the showers abated, and the sky started to lighten. At 6:00 I saw a light go on in Hanna’s apartment. Leaving the car, I disposed of the reused cups in a storm drain and creaked stiffly around the puddles to her door.

    ”You should not have stayed in a car all the night.”
    ”I was afraid Roy might be back.”
    ”On the telephone, you tell me he would not.”
    ”I didn’t want to chance being wrong.”
    Hanna set a glass of milk next to me. She reached over the counter and absently pulled a box of dry cat food from a cabinet. Shaking it like a dinner bell, she caught herself, said, ”Oh,” and put it in the trash.
    She said, ”At least you could knock on the door and come inside here.”
    ” Roy was mad enough at you already. I didn’t want him to think there was something else he should get even about.”
    She added milk to her coffee and joined me at the table. ”Vickie is still asleep. From the doctor’s pills.” When Hanna raised her eyes to me, I thought I saw a glimmer marked ”invitation.” I thought of the guy with the woman in the purple dress. I said, ”How is