The Night Listener : A Novel

meant so much to him! It was being believed! And he lost that the minute you doubted him. Is that so hard to understand? How would you like it if somebody came to verify you ? That book was his therapy, nothing more. It was the only way I had to bring him out of his blackness…” She stopped to swipe at her cheeks, and I realized with a stab of despair that there was still one function her eyes could readily perform. “What did you think?” she asked. “That I had written it?”
    “Honestly, Donna, I didn’t know. I just…”
    “You should see how I write. I’m pathetic for someone with a doctorate. I can barely string two sentences together. Pete wasn’t like that at all. It just flowed out of him like honey. He had a goddamned gift .”
    “I know that,” I said gently. “And he still does.”
    “What?”
    “I want him to keep writing, Donna. I’ll find him another publisher, and I’ll vouch for him myself. We could even do something together…a series of letters, maybe. Or I could write an introduction for him. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right again.”
    She absorbed this proposal with her mouth agape and her brow furrowed, as if I’d just said something inhuman. What had I done now? Did she think I was trying to exploit the boy? Or—worse—ride on his coattails?
    “Jesus,” she murmured. “You don’t know, do you?”
    “What?”
    “You haven’t talked to Ashe lately? In the last few days?”
    “No. Not for a week, at least.”
    She looked away from me, then murmured “Fuck” so softly it might have been a prayer.
    “What is it?”
    “I just assumed that he’d called you, and that’s why you came here…oh, shit, Gabriel, I’m so sorry…I thought…oh, Jesus…” I could feel the blood draining from my head to make room for the shadowy enormity that had finally arrived.
    “Pete died last Monday,” she said.
    There was enough irony for a lifetime in the curious reversal that followed. This woman who had lost her only child days before came and sat next to me on the sofa, the better to pour out her sympathy.
    By anyone’s call I should have been consoling her , but there she sat with her hand on my knee, attending to my pain and confusion. No wonder Pete had treasured her.
    “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Gabriel. I just thought…”
    “I know.”
    “I probably shouldn’t have turned off the phone, but…there were too many people to tell. I needed to feel it on my own and not spend my time…you know…explaining things.”
    I nodded.
    “I called Ashe when I came out of it, and I figured he’d call you, but…I guess you’ve been on the road, huh?” I pictured this woman’s solitary anguish while I was out getting laid in a truck stop. This story had never been about me, I realized; it had always been happening somewhere else. “Was it his lungs?” I asked.
    “Yeah. They just finally gave up. It wasn’t unexpected.” I considered that for a moment, shuddering a little. “Was it…difficult for him?”
    She shrugged. “He was on morphine at the end, so he was peaceful enough. He just drifted off in my arms.” I envied her the certainty of that moment, though I could already feel the weight of him in my own arms, the warmth ebbing from his body.
    “I’m sorry you had to hear about it this way, but I’m glad you came.” She squeezed my knee in gentle punctuation. “Really.” I wanted to cry, but I found myself unable. Part of me was still watching it all from a distance. There was safety in that, I suppose.
    But it also seemed indulgent, in the face of Donna’s profound loss, to grieve for someone I’d never seen, however much he had meant to me.
    “Do you want to see his room?” she asked.
    I did, very badly. I needed something to make the past real for me. Not proof exactly—I was already beyond that—but a way to feel what had happened. And words were no longer sufficient.
    “Would you mind terribly?” I asked.
    “Of course not.”
    So she rose and led me down the hallway to his bedroom. It was the second door on the right, painted bright blue and emblazoned with a raft of impertinent bumper stickers. The one I remember said: PERHAPS YOU’VE MISTAKEN ME FOR SOMEBODY WHO ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT.
    “That’s just like him,” she said, tapping the stickers. “He wouldn’t let us get too sentimental.” Then, with a sigh, she swung open the door and switched on the light, and my heart seemed to stop altogether.
    And here’s