The Night Listener : A Novel

school. I saw WOODSMEN RULE and BRENT AND MEGAN and, largest of all, a boldly lettered CLASS OF 2001. That number seemed downright jarring in such a traditional setting, like the climax of an old Twilight Zone episode in which the hero discovers that his time machine has landed in the wrong century. That will be me, I thought, all too soon: adrift and alone in a new millennium when I hadn’t yet found my footing in the old one.
    Abandoning Roberta, I turned my attention to the neighbor hood itself, concentrating on the houses on the dark side of the tank.
    The street was deserted, the cars all tucked into their driveways, having long since morphed into giant white tortoises. It was past ten o’clock, and most of the houses were already dark, though here and there, through filmy curtains, I could see figures bathed in the blue aquarium glow of television. I couldn’t tell you now what I’d hoped to find on this haphazard prowl: a mailbox labeled LOMAX, perhaps, or a quick glint of steel from Pete’s bed, or Pete himself, green-eyed and haunted, peering out into the dense albino darkness.
    But I soon began to notice the cold. My toes were turning brittle in my soft-sided California shoes, and every breath I took felt more glacial and invasive than the last. I was on the verge of making some decisive move—ringing a doorbell, maybe—when I realized I had company. Someone in a bungalow across the street was watching me from the shadows of her living room. My first thought, of course, was Donna, though I ruled that out as soon as I saw the woman duck behind a curtain. Her body language suggested someone in her seventies at least, possibly even older, nothing like the person Pete had described. This was just a nervous old lady, I reckoned, understandably wary of a stranger stalking her street after dark.
    Then again, I knew so little about Donna. After all, I had never even seen a picture of her. And voices could be deceptive on the phone, especially when it came to determining age. If I doubted any part of Pete’s story, why not the part about Donna being young and vigorous? For that matter, where was the proof that she existed at all? I’d been worrying for weeks that Donna had invented Pete, but I’d never once considered the reverse. Maybe Pete was the real one, in fact, and he’d created this loving, compassionate, perfect mother to aid in his search for a father, to give a man he’d never met permission to love a thirteen-year-old boy.
    If, after all, their voices were uncannily similar, who could say who was impersonating whom? It could just as easily have been Pete who mailed me that photo from Henzke Street, Pete who told me that Pete was near death and needed my love more than ever, Pete who invited me here for Donna’s chili, only to back out when he realized he could never pull it off. And—perhaps most disturbing of all—it could have been Pete who flew into that terrible rage when The Blacking Factory was cancelled.
    All right, could have. Could have . Even supposing that was true, where the hell would he live? And with whom? A kid that age didn’t occupy a house on his own, didn’t occupy anything on his own.
    Unless he was homeless, of course, operating out of soup kitchens and private post offices, escaping his tormentors the only way he could. But how would he survive in this unrelenting cold? In Man-hattan he could have slept in an abandoned subway tunnel; in San Francisco, in a cardboard box in the park. Here the options for shelter would be severely limited. Abandoned structures wouldn’t stay that way for long.
    Unless…
    I jerked around suddenly and stared at the water tank. Pete had told me that it was no longer in use, so there had to be an empty chamber inside. It wouldn’t be warm in there, of course, but it would probably be dry enough—and private as anyone could want. A clever kid like Pete could have slipped through that fence the way those taggers had. He could have found his way around with a flashlight and built a nest with a pile of rags, a hideout that no one could find. And he could have brought along a portable radio to keep himself company…
    Right, dipshit. Could have, could have .
    Feeling slightly hysterical, I turned back to the bungalow again.
    The old lady had moved from the window and was standing in an alcove near the back, reaching for a telephone on the wall. It didn’t take me long to decide she was calling the police. I’d been there for over a