The Night Listener : A Novel

little relieved that there’s been a resolution.” Again, no response.
    “Does that sound insensitive?”
    “No. I just wondered if…I mean, if he was already cremated when you got there, how do you know if he actually…”
    “I know , Anna. All right?”
    “But how?” Her voice was more timid, but she wasn’t giving up.
    “I saw his room and his stuff. I saw her , for God’s sake. I saw the look on her face. She was plainly grieving.”
    “Maybe she was grieving the loss of that personality.”
    “Anna, would you stop it, please?”
    “But don’t you see what—”
    “You weren’t here. You didn’t feel what I felt. I could practically smell him in the room.”
    I realized how peculiar this sounded. “I had the same thoughts,” I added in a quieter tone, “but they didn’t last. Sometimes you have to stop doubting and trust your heart.”
    “My parents did that,” Anna replied after a moment. “That’s why we spent the first year of our lives in Jonestown.” I wasn’t following her at all. “What? Who did?”
    “Edgar and me. And Mom and D’or.”
    “Jonestown, Guyana? With Jim Jones, you mean?”
    “We escaped to Cuba just before the big Kool-Aid thing. Then we lived in Cuba for three years because my moms trusted their hearts about Castro. Right up to the day he deported them as dykes.” The light dawned. I remembered headlines from the early eighties, when a couple of lesbians, long presumed dead in the massacre, showed up in San Francisco with their toddler twins. It had caused a minor uproar at the time. “Jesus,” I murmured. “That was you?”
    “That was us.”
    “Do you remember that?”
    “No. Not the Jonestown part. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn from it.”
    “You’ve never even mentioned it before.”
    “It’s embarrassing,” she said. “Nobody should be that gullible.” I had a feeling she was talking about me again, but I didn’t pick up the gauntlet. What I’d just experienced had been akin to a miracle or a flying saucer sighting. Not the sort of thing you could share with the uninitiated.
    “I was just checking the messages,” I said, by way of signing off.
    “Is there anything you need me to do?”
    “Not really,” she replied. “Just some checks to sign when you get back. Jess is coming over in a minute to help me prioritize them.”
    “Thanks for holding down the fort, Anna.”
    “No problem.”
    “Do me a favor, would you? When you talk to Jess, don’t tell him what I just told you.”
    “About the kid being dead, you mean?”
    “Any of it. I’d rather handle this when I get home.”
    “You got it,” said Anna.
    “Is Hugo okay?”
    “Oh, he’s fine. Sitting right here with me. He peed on the carpet this morning, but Jess cleaned it up.”
    Hugo hadn’t done that since he was a puppy, so I could imagine the old dog’s humiliation. Is that what it means to get old? I wondered. To revert to the helplessness of infancy without any of the fun?
    “Give him a hug for me,” I said.
    “Who?” asked Anna.
    “Both of them,” I replied.
    I took my second shower of the evening, just to make it easier to sleep. For the same reason I ordered a movie, but it was relentlessly stupid, so I scrounged a roach from the ashtray and managed to extract a few hits. In minutes I was buried in gray dreamless sleep, and I might have stayed that way until morning had I not been jarred awake by the phone at 2 A.M.
    “I know it’s late,” said Jess.
    “More like early.” I was sure he’d somehow wheedled the news from Anna, but I had no intention of rehashing it at that hour.
    “I just got a call from Josie,” Jess said. “I thought you should know, babe. Your father’s had a stroke.”
    Such a suitable word, stroke . I’d heard it since childhood without fully understanding its meaning, but it sounded, even through a haze of sleep and dope, just like itself: abrupt and brutal and irreversible.
    A stroke of lightning, the stroke of midnight, the stroke of a pen.
     
    TWENTY-SIX

    THE BOO DADDY

    WHEN JOSIE AND I were children at midcentury, I would terrorize her with tales of the Boo Daddy, a variation on the boogeyman I’d lifted from Gullah folklore. The Boo Daddy, it was said, would creep into your house late at night if your shutters weren’t painted a certain prophylactic shade of blue. So I would watch for that color on trips to the country and point it out with perverse pleasure to my skittish little sister.
    This memory