Chapter Twenty-three

(1)

Rima was instantly sorry she’d asked. Addison’s face locked tight for a second; her cheeks had no color. But before she could speak, Rima became aware that someone was standing behind her. She turned to see a young Asian woman with tiny glasses and black hair just long enough to tuck behind her ears. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” the young woman said, “but I’m such a fan. I can’t even fly on a plane unless I have one of your books to read. Otherwise I spend the whole flight expecting to crash and die.” She had a preppy look—a powder-blue sweater set and jeans with embroidered flowers on the knees. Gold stud earrings, only two, and only in the lobes. Very un-Santa Cruz. But very pretty.

“Air travel has become impossible,” Addison agreed. She’d managed a smile. Unpersuasive, but high-wattage all the same. “I’m so pleased to hear I help.”

“That’s all I wanted to say.” This was a lie. The woman’s eyes were big and her voice nervous. More words came out, all in a rush. “I love every book you’ve ever written. I won’t read anyone else. Until you write a new one, I’ll just keep rereading the old ones. Will there be a new one soon?”

Addison stopped smiling. “I hope so.”

“Does it have a title?”

“Not yet. Maybe when we get habeas corpus back.” Addison gestured to Rima. “This is my goddaughter, Rima Lanisell.”

“Oh!” The word came out in a gasp. “Bim’s daughter? I love Bim! I’m the biggest M-and-B-shipper!”

A couple of weeks earlier, Rima wouldn’t have known what to make of that description. Now she knew it meant that this woman was a fan of the Maxwell-Bim relationship. Possibly she wrote sex scenes and posted them on the Web. Probably she read them. Probably these sex scenes were lousy with deep emotional connection. Rima didn’t imagine that anyone who wore sweater sets would be into meaningless sex.

“You do understand that those characters are under copyright?” Addison asked. (In point of fact, since Bim was not only a character in a book but also a newspaper columnist for The Plain Dealer and dead, the issue of copyright was kind of interesting. Addison wasn’t doing the nuance.)

The woman took a step backward. “I’m not a writer,” she said. “I won’t interrupt you anymore. I just wanted to say how much I love your books.”

“Aren’t you sweet?”

The woman backed into one of the Ping-Pong players. The backswing of his paddle hit her right on the ass. This mortified everyone concerned, so there was a string of apologies in multiple languages. It brought the smile back to Addison’s face. “Ping-Pong is a deadly game,” she said to Rima. “Few survive it.”

The cavalry arrived, a bit late, in the form of the owner with a water pitcher. “Are you being disturbed?” she asked in a whisper, topping off their already full glasses.

“By someone who reads my books? Never,” Addison said. “She’d have to bite me before I’d find her disturbing.”

The owner and Addison were both members of the Bonny Doon wine club. They discussed the latest shipment in such detail that Rima felt Addison was deliberately prolonging it. If enough time passed, she could pretend to have forgotten the question Rima had asked. Rima did her bit by excusing herself and going to the bathroom.

The rest room mirror was recessed, and framed by a wooden box painted with vines. The silver base of the sink matched the chairs in the restaurant. There was the usual sign about employees being required to wash their hands. No such requirement for customers. Rima washed her hands voluntarily.

Someone knocked on the door. Rima dried her hands quickly and opened it. The young M-and-B-shipper was standing outside.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I was trying so hard not to babble and all I did was babble. I insulted her!”

“You didn’t,” Rima said.

“I gushed! I babbled! I got paddled! That’s what she’ll remember. I’ll probably be in her next book.”

“She was charmed.”

“You’re such a liar.”

Rima stepped aside so that the woman could step in. It was that sort of bathroom, a single toilet, no stalls. One person at a time. But the woman blocked Rima’s exit. “I actually wanted to talk to you,” she said. She closed and locked the door with Rima still inside. “I’ll only take a minute.”

Rima didn’t suppose she should let herself be locked in a rest room with a strange woman even if it was only for a minute. Any more than she should let one in the house to rifle through the shelves. And yet somehow, here she was.

“You’re staying with her, right?” the woman asked. “I was just wondering if she ever talks about the new book. You’ve probably seen the dollhouse at least.”

“No,” said Rima. “And no. And why would I tell you, even if I had? She obviously doesn’t want it talked about.”

“There’s this person,” the woman said. “On the Web. Who’s offered two thousand dollars to anyone who can find out what’s going to happen to Maxwell. Of course, I’d share the money if you found out something. Fifty-fifty. I mean, you could just look around, right? The dollhouse has to be somewhere.”

“When did this offer go up?” Rima asked. “The two thousand?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“We had a break-in recently.”

The woman brushed her black hair back nervously with her hand. Her eyes skipped from Rima’s face to the mottled gray-and-white tile on the floor. “Yeah,” she said. “Listen. That’s the other thing I wanted to say to you. You know how on the Web you mostly can’t tell who’s crazy and who isn’t? That woman’s crazy. You should watch out for her.”

“You know about the break-in?”

“She posted about it. She figured she had some leverage, now that she had something Early would want back.”

Rima had been picturing Pamela Price as a drug-addled homeless type. Not, she corrected herself hastily and for Tilda’s sake, that the homeless were usually drug-addled or even that there was a homeless type. But the thing Pamela Price had never struck Rima as being was a Web maven.

“What’s her handle?” Rima asked.

“ConstantComment. Avatar of a teapot. But I think she uses a lot of other names and avatars too. But I think she’s all over the discussion boards. Sock puppets here, there, and everywhere. Nothing I can prove.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Rima said, “and I’m going to decline your offer. Are we finished, then? Can I go?”

The woman let her out. “I really do love her books,” she said apologetically. “I really do love Maxwell Lane.”

“Don’t we all?” said Rima. Halfway through the open door, she had another thought. “How did you know we were here?”

“She comes here all the time. I got a phone call,” the woman said.

Poor Addison! So worried about governmental spying, while her fans were tracking her every movement. Every pizza parlor a nest of spies. Rima had changed her mind about the young woman’s being pretty. Apparently they were letting just anyone wear a sweater set these days.

(2)

Martin had said he would come for dinner and would arrive around six-thirty. By seven, Tilda was so nervous she was practically airborne. She stood at the stove, stirring the mushroom soup and fretting that it was getting a skin.

Rima had told Addison about the woman in the rest room and the two-thousand-dollar bounty on Maxwell Lane sightings. Addison had gone upstairs to see what she could find on the Internet. Now she came back down. If she’d found anything out, she wasn’t sharing.

“Just leave the soup,” she told Tilda. “Rima and I are going to play Trivial Pursuit while we wait for Martin.” This was the first Rima had heard of it. “Come join us.”

“Which board?” Tilda asked.

“Lord of the Rings. It’s a party in a box,” Addison said temptingly.

Tilda turned the burner off and put a lid on the soup. She moved the baking dish from the oven to the counter and covered it with a dish towel.

“No one has ever beaten Tilda at Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit,” Addison told Rima. “Not in the whole history of Middle-earth.”

Rima didn’t think of herself as a Middle-earth expert. But she did know that Gandalf’s sword was named Glamdring and that Glamdring had once belonged to Turgon, the only Elf ever to be king of Gondolin. She had no idea how she knew this. But she thought she’d probably do okay. Like all first children, when she played games, she planned to win.

Addison got the board from upstairs; Tilda got the books from her room. Rima cleared some magazines that Addison would maybe read someday from the living room coffee table. There was a chair for Addison and the couch for Tilda. Rima would sit cross-legged on one of the deep pile rugs Addison had bought from the Portuguese widow whose shop occupied the address given in Addison’s books as Maxwell Lane’s. The rug was a Persian pattern in black and red, the red so vivid it glowed.

The living room contained three dollhouses—Folsom Street, Native Dancer, and Party of None. The largest and most elaborate was Folsom Street—San Francisco woman pushed from a balcony during the Gay Pride parade. The dollhouse was actually a street scene with three housefronts and two parade floats. The corpse lay on the sidewalk, head cracked open and flattened where it hit. The victim had missed a Nancy Sinatra impersonator by inches. This dollhouse took up most of the window seat that looked out on the yard toward Addison’s studio.

On the opposite wall was a fireplace in white tile with white wood shelving on either side. Native Dancer was to the left of the fireplace and three shelves up—the tack room of a stable, plus two stalls, one with an arch-necked palomino inside. Hanging from a rafter was the corpse, western bridle around his neck.

Party of None was on the lowest shelf to the right of the fireplace—a long, narrow diner with a linoleum counter, tiny napkin dispensers with tiny napkins, and a shiny black jukebox. The corpse had bits of green foam around her mouth. She’d overdosed on caffeine.

The three women heard a car outside, and each stopped what she was doing for a moment to listen. The motor cut off somewhere down around the Morrisons’ house. The door slammed. The women picked up where they had left off.

They gathered at the coffee table and the game began. Tilda took the wizard token, Addison the man. This left the Elven princess or the halfling for Rima. She made the obvious choice. The halfling’s sword curved, but not like a scimitar, more like a mistake.

The game provided answers as well as questions; Tilda and Addison ignored the former. Too many of the answers were based on the movies rather than the books, and even when based on the books, they were often not based on what Addison called a deep reading. Who solved the riddle that opened Moria’s West-gate? If Rima had answered Gandalf, she would have gotten the pie wedge. If she’d answered Merry, there would have been wiggle-room enough to count the answer, since in the book Gandalf credits Merry with being on the right track. But Frodo, the answer Rima gave and the answer listed as correct on the back of the card, could not be credited. It could not even be countenanced.

In addition to ignoring the official answers, Tilda and Addison had inserted a system of challenges into the game. Rima, for instance, was free to challenge the decision on Frodo. If she did so, Tilda would find and read the relevant section from The Fellowship of the Ring. If Tilda and Addison turned out to be right, as they had no doubt they would be, the challenge would cost Rima the only pie wedge she had so far—the green one for remembering that the name of the Elven bread was Lembas. She passed on the challenge.

The game was interrupted when Addison noticed that Berkeley was chewing on something. It took both Addison and Tilda to pry the Ringwraith pawn from Berkeley’s jaws, and it looked nothing like a Ringwraith by the time they’d done so. If Rima ever wrote a horror movie, the world would find itself menaced by gigantic dachshunds, dachshunds the size of semis. “Has anyone tried to reason with them?” the scientist would say, and before the scene was over he would look just like the Ringwraith pawn now looked.

Rima fell behind. She wasn’t missing the answers so much as sucking at the die-throwing part of the game. This too had been made more difficult by the substitution of Addison’s Dungeons & Dragons die for the normal six-sided one. With a single throw you might lose as many as three turns battling balrogs, or two turns for orcs, or one turn to stop and eat your second breakfast.

The clock upstairs chimed eight. Addison got up and went to the kitchen. She returned with a tray and three salads made of lettuce, jícama, and blood oranges. When they’d finished those, Addison went back to the kitchen and dished up the mac and cheese.

By eight-thirty, Tilda had all six pie wedges. “Pwned again,” Addison said, handing Tilda her final wedge plus the ring of ultimate power.

Tilda wore the ring while she did the dishes, thus proving herself extremely unclear on the concept of total world domination. Rima cleaned up the board and cards. Addison poured herself a glass of whiskey.

Martin arrived a little after nine. “I kept dinner hot for you,” Tilda said, but he said he’d already eaten.

(3)

Martin and Rima quarreled quietly at the top of the stairs. Things got about as heated as they could and still be whispered. A pen-and-ink sketch of an old oak was hanging on the wall behind Martin. By tilting her head, Rima could make the tree appear to grow straight out of his hair. This provided a small and cheap sense of satisfaction.

Rima started the fight, unless Martin started it by being so late in the first place, for which a case could certainly be made. “Your mother expected you for dinner,” Rima said. Her tone was as unpleasant as she could make it.

Martin’s was unperturbed. “My mother missed the teen years,” he said. “I’m just filling in the gaps.” He added that he didn’t really think of Tilda as his mother anyway, and he wished Rima wouldn’t keep calling her that. He stood, with the tree growing out of his head, stroking that stupid little stamp of hair above his chin in a way Rima could describe only as complacent. There were many reasons Rima would never grow a beard. Among them was all the annoying stroking.

Rima said that he did too think of Tilda as his mother, because no one would treat another person as badly as he treated Tilda unless that person was his mother. No one would treat a stranger or a casual acquaintance that way.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t her child,” Martin said nonsensically. “I said she wasn’t my mother.” He’d taken a step backward, so Rima lost the edge that the tree on the wall had given her. Now she was reduced to winning on the merits.

She pointed out that his mother wasn’t dead, the way some people’s mothers were. Dead to you, she said, was not at all the same as dead. Someday Tilda would be dead, and Rima could predict with absolute certainty that then Martin would be sorry.

By now his temper matched Rima’s. How often, he asked, did Rima plan to play the my-whole-family-is-dead card? Could she limit it to once or twice a day, because it was getting tiresome.

And anyway, Martin said, any idiot could see that it was worse for him because his mother wasn’t dead. Rima’s mother would have stayed if she could, but Martin’s mother had chosen to leave. His situation was much worse, and if Rima weren’t so focused on herself she’d see this. “Just because she’s back now doesn’t mean she’s here to stay,” Martin said. “How do I know she’s not already drinking again?”

Rima remembered Tilda with Addison’s glass in her hand, sitting in the TV room in the blue light of the aquarium. If she hadn’t been so angry, she might have conceded Martin the point. But what he’d said about her family was unforgivable. “I would give anything,” Rima said, “to see my mother again,” and Martin said, there, that proved it, because there wasn’t a thing in the world he would give for that.

And how was any of it Rima’s business?

They retired to their separate rooms, both in a state of substantial snit. The clock on the wall chimed ten.

Just after the chime at the quarter-hour, Tilda came knocking. In spite of the whispering, the argument had been overheard. “Please don’t blame him,” Tilda said. “Please stay out of it.” And then, having just asked her to stay out of it, Tilda said that Martin was leaving and would Rima please come and talk him back into staying the night. Rima followed her down the stairs. Seeing Martin and Tilda by the door together made her notice how much they looked alike. Same hair, same eyes, same sad, sad expression.

It took about a half an hour of insincere groveling to get Martin to stay. By the time it was done, Rima had agreed to that wine-tasting with ghosts in the mountains on the following day. Apparently there would be not only wine and ghosts but also a piano player.

Somewhere in the back of her head, somewhere in the midst of that jumble of Glamdring and Le Pétomane and British slang circa World War II, Oliver—or maybe it was Maxwell—had come up with a new plan, but Rima wouldn’t figure that out until the next day. It would come to her slowly, as she sat in the passenger seat of Martin’s car, cresting the mountains on the wet, twisted road.

You know what I could do now, she would find herself thinking, if only I wasn’t me? You know what someone who wasn’t me could do now?

You know what Oliver would do?