Velocity

stung by nettles… torn by briars…”
    Billy had forgotten his pocket notebook and his pen. Even if he had remembered them, he could not take the time to settle down and record these utterances.
    “Quick!” she said.
    Standing at her bedside, he put a comforting hand on Barbara’s shoulder.
    “Give it mouth!” she whispered urgently.
    He half expected her eyes to open and to fix on him, but they did not.
    When Barbara fell silent, Billy squatted to look for the cord that powered the bed’s adjustable-mattress mechanism. If he needed to move her the following night, he would have to pull that plug.
    On the floor, just under the high bed, lay a snapshot taken by a digital camera. Billy picked up the photo and stood to examine it in better light. “… creep and creep…” Barbara whispered. He turned the snapshot three ways before he realized that it depicted a praying mantis, apparently dead, pale upon pale painted boards. “… creep and creep… and tear him open…” Suddenly her whispering voice twitched like a dying mantis down through the spiraling chambers of Billy’s ears, inspiring a shudder and a chill. During normal visiting hours, family and friends of patients came through the front doors and went where they wished, without any requirement to sign a register. “… hands of the dead…” she whispered. Because Barbara required less attention than conscious patients with their myriad complaints and demands, nurses did not attend her as frequently as they did others. “… great stones… angry red…” A quiet visitor might stay here half an hour and never be seen at this bedside—or entering, or leaving. He did not want to leave Barbara alone, talking to an empty room, though she must have done so on countless previous occasions. Billy’s evening, already fully scheduled, had been complicated by the addition of one more urgent task. “… chains hanging… terrible…” Billy pocketed the snapshot. He bent to Barbara and kissed her forehead. Her brow was cool, as always it was cool. At the window, he drew down the blind. Reluctant to leave, he stood in the open doorway, looking back at her. She said something then that resonated with him, though he had no clue why.
    “Mrs. Joe,” she said. “Mrs. Joe.”
    He did not know a Mrs. Joe or Mrs. Joseph, or Mrs. Johanson, or Mrs. Jonas, or anyone by any name similar to the one that Barbara had spoken. And yet somehow… he thought he did.
    The phantom mantis twitched in his ears again. Along his spine.
    With a prayer as real as any that he had lied about to Gretchen Norlee, he left Barbara alone on this last night in which she might be safe.
    Less than three hours of daylight remained in a sky too dry to support a wisp of a cloud, the sun a thermonuclear brilliance, the air gathered to a stillness as if in anticipation of a cataclysmic blast.
     
     
     

Chapter 43
     
    The picketed front yard contained no grass in need of mowing, but instead a lush carpet of baby’s tears and, under the graceful boughs of pepper trees, lace flower.
    Shading the front walk, an arbor tunnel was draped with trumpet vines. Orchestras of silent scarlet horns raised their flared bells to the sun.
    The arched-lattice tunnel, a preview of twilight, led to a sunny front patio where pots were filled with red garnet, red valerian.
    The house was a Spanish bungalow. Modest but graceful, it had been tenderly maintained.
    The black silhouette of a bird had been painted on the red front door. The wings were on the upstroke, the bird in an angle of ascent.
    Halfway through Billy’s brief knock, the door opened, as though he had been expected and had been awaited with keen anticipation.
    Ivy Elgin said, “Hi, Billy,” without surprise, as if she had seen him through a window in the door. It had no window.
    Barefoot, she wore khaki shorts cut for comfort and a roomy red T-shirt that sold nothing. Hooded and cloaked, Ivy would still have been a lamp to every moth that flew.
    “I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said.
    “I’m off Wednesdays.” She stepped back from the door.
    Hesitating on the sun side of the threshold, Billy said, “Yeah. But you have a life.”
    “I’m shelling pistachios in the kitchen.”
    She turned and walked away into the house, leaving him to follow as if he had been here a thousand times. This was his first visit.
    Heavily curtained sunlight and a floor lamp with a tasseled sapphire-silk shade accommodated shadows in the living