The Night Listener : A Novel

times, still holding tight, bracing himself for my answer.
    “Of course not,” I said.
    “Never?”
    “Oh, Pete, why would I doubt you? What reason could I possibly have? I’m a writer myself, remember? I know how hard it is to tell the truth in print. Don’t you think I would respect that?”
    “I guess,” he said softly.
    My face was afire now, my stomach queasy with deceit. I knew I couldn’t sustain this sanctimonious charade a moment longer.
    “Okay,” I said briskly, “here’s the plan. First, I’m gonna talk to Donna about how we can—”
    “No!”
    “Why not? I’m just gonna propose a plan.”
    “What kind of plan?”
    “Just a way we can…satisfy their requirements at Argus.” He was silent for a moment. “You won’t tell her what I said, will you? About them thinking I’m a phony?”
    “No,” I said guardedly. “Not if you don’t want me to.”
    “You can’t. She’ll totally flip out. She hates it when people don’t believe kids. It sets her off more than anything.” Which could be useful, I thought. An irate mother on the rampage might put Findlay on the spot in a way that I would never be able to do. Then again, what if things got so hot that the editor felt compelled to defend himself, to say who had planted his doubts in the first place? Or at least reinforced them. Findlay had left me out of it so far—as far as I knew—but I would certainly be pushing my luck if I provoked Donna.
    “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just talk to Findlay. And if he goes for it I’ll talk to your mom.”
    “If?”
    “Well, I think he will. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”
    “You’re not gonna tell me what it is, huh?”
    “Sure. In a day or so. Just let me do my stuff, okay?”
    “Okay, Dad.”
    He’s counting on me, I thought. His old feral terrors are back again, no longer contained by his writing, free to prowl and maim at will.
    And he needs his old man to make it all better.
     
    SIXTEEN

    THE SANDBAR

    THE TERRORS OF MY OWN childhood were petty next to Pete’s, but they’re really the only measure I have: I would get hysterical in department stores whenever I heard the sound of those old-fashioned pneumatic tubes—the ones that once carried money and paperwork from place to place. To me there was something deeply disturbing about them: the way they would scream and swoop overhead like the Wicked Witch of the West. And when those canisters finally dropped in front of me with a creepy thud, my panic was not negotiable; the only remedy was retreat into my mother’s arms and her solemn promise—tearfully extorted—that we would never return again.
    I was almost as sissy about merry-go-rounds. I could handle the animals that just went around, but the ones that went up and down were the stuff of nightmares, and no amount of gentle persua-sion could ever get me onto them. An even greater fear was of our cemetery; not of corpses or ghosts or the like, since it was just family history, after all, but of being locked in there after dark. I knew the place closed at five o’clock, that the big iron gates were chained shut then, so I kept an eye on the mausoleum clock when my father pulled the weeds off our ancestors after church. I was certain that without my diligence we’d be trapped in there all night, forced to eat worms and drink rainwater until the caretaker came in the morning.
    Our cottage on Sullivan’s Island was a disheveled, gray-shingled thing that tiptoed above the tide on barnacled pilings. I loved it there. I liked to get up early, when the sand was still cool under the house, and crack the crust of it with my toes. Sometimes, all by myself, I’d head down to the place we called the Point, where there were dozens of odd little beach-bound pools, warm as piss and very shallow, where fickle tides were known to dump a treasure trove of flotsam and shells. My cousin Lucy, who was my age and lived two cottages away, would join me there after breakfast, and we would spend the morning digging for coquinas—brightly hued little clams no bigger than a black-eyed pea. In the belief that these poor creatures were lonely for their own kind, we would build them orphanages in the sand, lodging them according to color, as God had surely intended.
    But I rarely ventured into the surf. The horror I felt under the dead weight of the waves was something primal and undeniable. My father once tried to break me of this by tempting me with the offshore sandbar. It might be scary near