The Night Listener : A Novel

of time at the hospital,” I said.
    “Some,” she said, “but I’ve arranged for home care, too. It’s such a long haul into Milwaukee.”
    “I thought you lived in Milwaukee.”
    “Not anymore. I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
    “How so?”
    “Too many chances for Pete to run into…them.” It took me a moment to absorb this. “Jesus, you mean his parents are still…”
    “No. God, no. They’re history. They’re locked up. But most of their clients are still out there getting their jollies. And some of them are pretty pissed off that he broke up their party.”
    “But, couldn’t the police…”
    “Oh, get real, Gabriel!”
    I laughed, since her tone had been friendly, and she laughed right back. That lovely golden rumble.
    “The world’s not as tidy as your stories,” she said.
    “Guess not.”
    “I wish it were …for what it’s worth.” There was silence while this thought ascended.
    “So here we are in lovely Wysong, Wisconsin—home of Neilson’s Antique Auto Barn.”
    I laughed. “Culture shock, huh?”
    “It’s not terrible,” she said. “There’s a lake just down from the house, and a nice anonymous mall that has everything we need.”
    “Are you worried that…” I didn’t know how to finish this.
    “That they might find him and…do something?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sometimes. Not often, really. But I have to remember it’s possible.
    They’re a club, you know. With their own chat rooms and everything.
    And they don’t like it when people snitch.”
    “Do you know who they are?”
    “No. Pete could identify some of them, I’m sure, but he shouldn’t have to. Not now, not anymore. He did his job when he turned his parents in. That was enough hell for a lifetime. Now I just want him to feel safe.”
    “But when the book is published…”
    “Well, that’s why he never mentions Wysong. Or his birth name, for that matter. We’ve worked all this out with Ashe Findlay. I think we’ve covered all the bases.”
    Another silence, and then: “Anyway, the point of moving here was not to be paranoid. To get the scary stuff behind us.”
    “I understand.”
    “I’m glad you’re in his life, Gabriel. You’re a good man. I want him to know that grownups can be trusted.” Two days later, a manila envelope arrived from Wysong. I studied it like some sacred artifact, turning it over slowly in my hands, savoring the jangly Midwestern consonants of their address: 511
    Henzke Street.
    When I opened the envelope, out tumbled a kitschy postcard of Neilson’s Antique Auto Barn, apparently photographed in the seventies, judging from the pantsuits on the tourists. On the back Donna had scrawled: “Okay, so it ain’t the Guggenheim.” The other item was a photograph of Pete. He was standing in front of a garage door in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, a small-boned boy wearing a crooked smile beneath a tangle of black hair.
    His eyes were his most arresting feature: a pale, glowing green that stopped you cold with their sheer unlikelihood. Like those pretty stones you find on the beach sometimes that prove, upon closer examination, to be fragments of a pop bottle, roughed up by the ocean.
     
    FIVE

    SEMAPHORE

    FOR MY FATHER and stepmother’s visit I chose a fancy new pan-Asian place on the Embarcadero. I chose it for its big pink blowfish chandelier and the fact that the maître d’ would almost certainly make a fuss over me. I was showing off, God help me, to a man I had battled royally for half a century and a woman I barely recalled from a high school trig class. They were family , for what it was worth, Pap and Darlie; I wanted them to see who I’d finally become, all these years later, since I was no longer sure myself.
    But the maître d’ had called in sick that evening, so we were greeted instead by one of those haughty, terrified tartlets who guard the door at places like Planet Hollywood. “Newman?” she asked with a frown, scanning her reservations list.
    “Noone,” I said as genially as possible. “Gabriel.”
    “Oh. Gabriel is the last name?”
    “No. Noone is the last name.” Get me a homosexual, I thought.
    Find me a cocksucker immediately.
    “Oh,” she said at last. “I think there’s a note here.” There was a note there, and she read every bit of it, too, as evidenced by the faint movement of her lips. Finally, she smiled and told us to follow her, her heels clicking smartly on the tile floor as she explained about the maître d’s illness.