chapter four
The God Damn Miracle woke up one morning ten years later and noticed his dog was dead. I’d stopped aging the previous summer, at twenty-nine, and now Jeepers had stopped aging, too. Maybe my approach seems superior, but give it a couple hundred years.
Yes, Langley Ulin had restored to me my beloved border collie Jeepers. But in retrospect Ulin was probably responsible for the dog’s disappearance in the first place. I’d wondered why Jeepers wasn’t in the house when I discovered my dad’s body. Or if not in the house why he hadn’t been posted at the back door, whining to get in. Because that’s what dogs do. Unlike most humans, they are loyal to the core.
Until I’d arrived at Ulin’s quaint village of Blue Heron, Oregon, I’d felt uneasy and insecure about the whole thing. Then I’d opened the door of my new cottage and Jeepers had leaped at me, all tongue, tail-wag and bark.
Contract sealed.
This morning in 1985, however, I jingled Jeepers’ leash and he remained motionless on his pillow-bed by the kitchen door. I jingled again, waiting for Jeepers to raise a weary eye, make a huffing noise, and gamely stand up on arthritic legs. He was old but he still loved to get outside and walk and sniff around at stuff, especially down on the beach where there were plenty of especially ripe odors.
But Jeepers didn’t move. I hunkered beside him and placed my hand on his cold head, confirming what I’d known since walking into the kitchen. Jeepers’ fur was liberally threaded with silver and had been for years. I stared at the silver and the black hairs and the mostly white eyebrows, and my eyes teared up and I had to get out.
Empty leash in hand, I opened the door on a crisp autumn morning. Late morning. I was due at the Clinic and probably should have skipped walking the dog, anyway. Today they wanted to take my eyes. Again.
Blue Heron was a caricature of a village. White picket fences dividing putting green lawns, chalky nondenominational church steeple rising above postcard elms, etc. Every inhabitant of the village was an Ulin Industries employee. So was I, the only difference being that my whole job was to give at the office. And give, and give, and give. Langley wanted to live deep into the future, and I was supposed to get him there. He had a vision; I had endlessly replenishing organs and various glandular excretions. I guess that made us even.
The clinic was a couple of blocks away, but I turned onto the beach path instead, just as I would have done with Jeepers. Today I was the only beachcomber, unless you counted a couple of seagulls beaking away at tide-stranded delicacies. I kicked at an emerald rope of kelp glistening in the sun. The wind blew in my face, salty and brisk. A few fishing boats trolled far beyond the breakers. I looked back towards the village. The church steeple shone above the trees. Ulin’s fortune derived from cutting edge aerospace research and development. Most of the residents of Blue Heron were engineers and top of the line idea people. They lived here because it was in their contracts to live here, Langely being some kind of proto control freak. Every morning more than half the population of Blue Heron jumped in their cars and drove to the research facility ten miles inland. So on weekdays it was me, the spouses (a la some kind of 1950s template) and various service people.
I resumed walking, the empty leash dangling from my fist, imagining Jeepers plodding along beside me, sniffing at the wet sand, as he had done yesterday. Up ahead someone came out of the dune grass and angled toward me. I kept walking. The individual got closer and I recognized Jillian Bravos, a young woman from the clinic. She was a nurse’s aid or something, what they call you when you take blood samples or hand patients cups to pee or masturbate into. We’d slept together a couple of times, and it pushed back the loneliness, but somehow our liaisons had felt otherwise inauthentic. To me, anyway. Part of it was I had honed the fine art of wall construction, and Jillian didn’t know the secret password. Neither did I, for that matter. And I didn’t want to know it, either.
“Ellis!” She waved and caught up to me.
“Hi, Jill.”
She looked at the leash then scanned around the empty beach. “Taking Jeepers for a walk?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of our last walk.”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
Jillian was a sweet girl. Her yellow hair was cut short and her cheeks got red in the cold. She had a sturdy frame, ample breasts, a frequent smile. She wasn’t my type, which is probably why I picked her. There had been other girls, all of them Blue Heron locals and none of them my type. It was pretty messed up, but there you go.
“Did you ever see that TV show The Prisoner? I asked Jill.
She shook her head. “I don’t watch much TV. Mostly just Miami Vice.”
“The Prisoner was about this guy who was a secret agent or something, and he winds up captured by the bad guys, and he has to live in this village where everybody works for the bad guys, only it’s unclear. You know? It’s all kind of mixed up and goofy, so you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Plus nobody has a name.”
“No names?” She smiled uncertainly
“Yeah. Everybody has a number instead. The secret agent guy was Number Six.”
“It sounds weird. Are you sure you’re not making it up?”
“It was a BBC show,” I said.
“Well no wonder!”
I nodded, looking past her down the shingle where the land curved away. “What would happen,” I asked, “if I kept walking along this beach for a long time?”
“I guess you’d get tired.”
“What I mean is, would I be allowed to?”
“What’s to stop you?”
“I don’t know. Giant white balloons and guys in golf carts, maybe.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Want to walk with me to the clinic? I’m on my way there now. Don’t you have an appointment? I think I saw you had an appointment.”
I jingled the leash, remembering how Jeepers used to like it when I scratched him behind his ears. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I forgot about that appointment. My dog isn’t up for a really long walk, anyway. Lucky I bumped into you.”
Jillian picked up my hand and looked into my eyes, which made me uncomfortable. “What’s wrong, Ellis?”
“Nothing. Shall we go?”
Holding hands, we walked to the clinic.
And so they took my eyes. My corneas, to be exact. In later years they discovered the corneas regenerated more perfectly when they took the entire eye. But these were the early days.
When I came to I was in my own familiar bed in my own cottage, and someone was puttering. I reached up and touched the thick gauze. Already the tingling of my re-gens had begun. My mouth was dry and sticky with the post-op crud.
“I’m thirsty,” I said.
The puttering stopped (I think she’d been dusting). Brisk steps to the bedside. A hand gently lifting my head, a straw inserted between my lips. Cold apple juice, sweet.
“Please open the window,” I said. “It’s stuffy in here.”
“It’s cold outside,” she said in a nursey voice.
“Please open the fucking window.”
She opened the window.
“Sorry,” I said. “Guess I’m cranky when I wake up blind.”
“Mr. Ulin wanted to see you as soon as you were awake.”
“Swell. As long as he doesn’t expect me to see him. That was sort of a joke.”
“I’ll call,” the nurse said.
“Do that.”
She began to walk away.
“Nurse? I really am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about the window.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Herrick. I think it must be awful for you.”
Something caught in my throat, but I kept it there and wouldn’t let it out. The nurse left. She was right: it was awful. The eyes were only the latest in a seemingly endless season of harvest. Besides various organs, Ulin’s medical team was particularly fond of my pituitary excretions. I mean, who wouldn’t be? The process for harvesting those excretions was complicated, invasive, painful and recurrent. Ever recurrent. I was tired.
Langley Ulin showed up in my bedroom and sat heavily in the wicker chair. The chair made a dry straw cracking sound. Ulin’s breathing was labored, as always. I couldn’t see him but I pictured him in my mind: a walking cadaver “rejuvenated” by multiple transplant surgeries and the experimental hormonal, blood and pituitary treatments. Ulin’s skin was deeply jaundiced and textured like bee’s wax. There wasn’t much they could do about that yet. My brain was the one organ they couldn’t harvest. So they irrigated Ulin’s brain with a chemical wash derived mostly from my pituitary gland. He should have left it alone. The treatments occasionally caused synaptic misfires.
“How’s the world look to you now?” I asked.
He grunted. “They couldn’t do the transplant. Your corneas degraded too rapidly.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It was an anomaly.”
“Hmmm.”
“We’ll try again, as soon as your regenerations are complete.”
I swallowed sticky spit.
“There’s a concern that some regenerated organs are not adaptable to transplant.”
“So maybe one set of eyes is all you get out of me.”
He grunted again. “We’ll beat the problem.”
“Will we?”
“Inevitably, yes.”
I pictured him slouched in the wicker chair, staring possessively at me with my own eyes—my original pair, which they’d taken almost ten years ago. None of my harvested organs lasted as long as they would have had they been left in my own body.
So it was horrible all right, but I’d stayed with the program. My dad’s heart had failed. In many ways Langley Ulin had assumed the role of surrogate father, and I had no intention of letting him down and letting him die. That didn’t mean I loved him like a father; far from it. Freud no doubt would have relished my cockeyed contradictions.
It was dark under the thick gauze wrap, and a part of my mind clawed at the darkness, like something primitive and trapped. In a day or so the itch-tingle of regeneration would be driving me mad. Then, gradually, light would reenter my world, seeping in around the edges at first. In a few week’s time I would be able to see in a blurry approximation of normal vision. A week after that I’d have regained full ocular function. At which point—Ulin had just proposed—my corneas would again be harvested.
“I wish I had my dog,” I said.
“Your dog?”
“Jeepers, my dog.”
“Don’t you worry about that dog. My people take fine care of him, fine care.”
I turned my head on the pillow, detecting a misfire.
“Jeepers wasn’t ever lost, was he?”
“Jeepers creepers where’d you get them peepers!” Ulin said. “Remember that one?”
“Not really.”
“Before your time.”
“What about my dad?”
“What about him?” Ulin sounded distracted.
“What was your deal with him?”
“That’s old news, ancient history.”
“So I’m a history buff.”
“You know something, Ellis?”
“What?”
“I’ve never felt better in my life, and I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve got you to thank for that.”
“You’re welcome as hell.”
He stood up, the wicker chair crackling. His feet shuffled to my bedside. He smelled like something kept in a closet and brought out once a year for Christmas or Hanukkah. His fingers trembled over my eye bandages, touched them lightly. I flinched away.
“They’re always blue,” he said.
“I guess they would be.”
“The clearest blue . . .”
“I hate it when you hover,” I said.
He laughed dryly. The fucking Crypt Keeper. Suddenly I felt terrible loneliness.
“I miss my dog.”
“That poor animal is dead,” Ulin said.
After a day of depressive torpor I felt capable enough to do my own puttering. As soon as I woke up I suggested the nurse find something else to do with her day. She respectfully declined my suggestion and told me breakfast was ready.
“Thanks. I can find my way to the kitchen by myself. I can also find my way to the bathroom by myself, and since that about covers the necessities, you might as well go home or someplace.”
“Oh, I couldn’t just leave you alone,” she said.
“Yes you could. In fact, I insist that you do. Good-bye.”
“But—”
“I hope I won’t have to get rude again. It’s really not in my nature and it gives me a stomach ache. But I’m cranky as hell, and you wouldn’t want me to get a stomach ache.”
When she was gone I listened to the empty house for a while, no friendly scrabble of dog claws on the floor. That wasn’t fun, so I groped my way to the kitchen, following my nose, which was following the smell of fried eggs and coffee. Wobbly with suppressed grief, I sat down and pulled the plate to me and wound up dumping breakfast in my lap. It was a hot breakfast. I bolted up, knocking my chair back and shouting something nasty.
“Oops,” somebody said behind me, and I froze.
“Who’s that?”
“Jill.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. How do you like my mess?” I was irritated that she hadn’t bothered to knock, but I kept it to myself.
“It’s spectacular. Want some help?”
“Yeah.”
I sat on the other side of the table drinking coffee while Jill cleaned up the eggs and toast and whatever else had been on the plate.
“I fired my nurse,” I said.
“I know. I bumped into her.”
“A lot of bumping goes on around here, doesn’t it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Sorry about the mess. I could probably clean it up myself.”
“It’s all right.”
Insert uncomfortable silence.
“Um, want some coffee?” I said.
“You know I pass your house every day on my way to the clinic. I’m not spying on you. As far as I know, no one is spying on you.”
“I’m the paranoid type.”
“I don’t know about that, but you’re certainly the suspicious type. And—and not very nice. Sometimes.”
I heard her scraping breakfast into the trash then the sharp clatter of plate and utensils in the sink.
Sheepishly, I said, “I guess I can be kind of abrasive.”
“I’ll go,” she said. “I know you love to be alone. Even those times I slept with you I could tell you wanted me to leave after it was over. After we made love. Maybe I should have left, to make you happy.”
“I wouldn’t say I love being alone, exactly.”
A hesitation vibe in the air. “Do you want me to stay? I could call in.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Ellis, just tell me what you want.”
“I want you to stay. I want you to sit and have a cup of coffee with me. And I want to apologize.”
“I’d love a cup of coffee, and you absolutely don’t have to apologize.”
“I apologize anyway, for being a shit.”
“I need sugar for my coffee. Lots of sugar.”
“Aren’t you sweet enough already?”
“Don’t,” she said. “I already know you’re good at charming insincerities.”
Ouch.
So I got me a new nurse slash housekeeper until my eyes grew back. No, strike that. I got me a friend. The whole thing still felt weirdly scripted, but I was tired of my own suspicious mind and wanted to rest and make some decisions. To that end, I allowed the situation go all domestic. Jill came by every morning before I was out of bed, made breakfast, checked my eyes, got me comfortably arranged, then trotted off to the clinic. She returned at lunch and again in the evening. The resting part was fairly easy, but decisions didn’t come readily. Maybe I needed to define my choices. Jill helped me out in that department, too. One day she said:
“Would you like to go for a drive up the coast?”
“You mean leave the village?”
“Yep.”
“Can we do that?”
“Why not? It’s Saturday and it’s beautiful out. We can go to Seaside. It’s about forty miles. Feel up to it?”
This was the second week of my regeneration process. I’d discarded my Man With The X-Ray Eyes bandages and the world presented itself to me in soft cotton candy blurs of color and gray scale, painful if the light got too bright.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
October and unseasonably warm. The windows rolled down and the wind in my face, crisp and clean flowing behind the lenses of my very dark glasses. Eagles on the radio, cranked. Hotel California.
“How’s it feel to get out?” Jill said.
“Scary.”
We ate clam chowder on the pier. I dumped two packets of oyster crackers in my bowl and stirred them around with my plastic spoon. She hadn’t commented on my “scary” remark but it hung between us just begging for elaboration.
“You know, this is my first time outside the village in ten years.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Not usually, but in this particular instance, yeah.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Amazing plus other less appealing descriptors.”
“Wow,” Jill said. “I mean, I got the impression you didn’t even like it there so much.”
I slipped my glasses off and squinted at the blurry world then replaced them.
“I guess it has its virtues. It’s confining but feels safe. Also, I signed a contract. Strictly speaking this little jaunt is illegal.”
“Safe from what?” Jill asked.
“I dunno. The big bad world?”
“It’s big, all right. But I don’t think it’s so bad. It can be a pretty nice place, really. Don’t you like it here today?”
“I do. For one thing the chowder’s great. Not to mention the company.”
She placed her hand over mine and squeezed briefly.
“Would you categorize my last remark as a charming insincerity?” I asked.
“I don’t think you meant it that way, but yes. I’m sorry. Don’t be hurt. You want me to be honest, don’t you?”
“Not really.” I smiled to show her it was a joke, though it wasn’t.
“I think your charm switches on automatically in certain situations,” Jill said.
“You mean like during a clam chowder interlude?”
“Maybe.”
I raised my glasses, but her face was a pink balloon framed in yellow soft-focus curls.
Back home I invited her to stay the night but she declined, which stung.
“I really want you to,” I said.
She laughed. “I know. But I’m not ready for that again.”
“It isn’t auto pilot stuff,” I said. “I promise.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Unless you’re mad at me.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
She kissed my cheek and gave me a soft, brief hug. I spent the night with myself and a recorded book. For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Pretty good but not Hem’s best. To make it short, the damn bell tolls for thee and thee and thee.
But not for me.
The next day my eyesight was marginally improved. When Jill showed up I’d already made breakfast for both of us.
“They want you to come down to the clinic this morning,” she said, accepting the cup of French roast I handed her.
“What if I don’t go?”
She shrugged.
“What would happen?” I said.
“Mr. Paranoid. Nothing would happen. You’re not a prisoner. You’re not Number Seven.”
“Six.”
“Whatever,” she said.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m an employee with full benefits.”
She sipped her coffee. “So don’t go,” Jill said. She grinned. “What do you want to do instead?”
“Can we go for another drive?”
“Sure. Where to?”
“I don’t care. Anyplace outside the village.”
Anyplace turned out to be Portland, a three hour drive. We had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. I got around okay. My eyesight had steadily improved but was still poor. The DMV would have declared me legally blind, but what do they know? In the restaurant I removed my dark glasses. The place was crowded, the whole city was crowded by Blue Heron standards.
“You look kind of nervous,” Jill said.
“Yeah.”
“So . . .?”
“It’s just my Chinese restaurant look.”
“I see.”
“Okay—I am nervous. I feel truant. Two days in a row.”
She giggled. “Do you want me to write you a note to get back into the village?”
“I think my mother has to do that.”
“Right.”
“Jill, you’d be honest with me, wouldn’t you?”
“Honest about what?”
“About us. About why you want to spend so much time with me.”
“Oh, brother. Don’t go there, please don’t. I thought you were getting over that.”
“I’m trying to get over a lot of things. Let me ask you something. If I stood up right now and walked out of this place without telling you where I was going, what would you do?”
“Probably call an ambulance?”
“Why?”
“Because you can hardly see and you’d wind up getting yourself run over by a truck.”
I laughed. “Good answer.” I pushed my chair back and stood up, dropping my napkin on the table.
“Hey—”
“Relax, I’m just going to the men’s room.”
“Do you want me to—?
“No, I can find it all right.”
I negotiated my way between the tables. Things were pretty blurry. Each table had a little red lantern with a candle. To me they were like a fuzzy, pulsing star field. I put my dark glasses back on and asked a guy in a white coat which way to the restrooms. He steered me in the right direction. At the end of the corridor there was a green blur above a crash-bar door. EXIT. On impulse I walked to it, shoved the bar, and found myself outside in the cold night of Portland.
I picked my way around to the sidewalk. Traffic zoomed by. Towers of light all around, city cacophony. I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, blinked, rubbed them some more. Squinting, I could just make out the façade of the restaurant. The Jade Dragon. I moved down the sidewalk until I encountered a bus-stop shelter. I sat on the bench and waited, but not for a bus.
The minutes passed, maybe twenty of them. A vehicle pulled up in front of me, the door opened, and a man climbed out. I tensed, but it wasn’t a UI goon come to round me up. The man sat on the bench next to me, the car drove away, and moments later a bus arrived. The man stepped into it but I declined to board.
After a while I stood up and wandered down the street, feeling lost. And then I was lost. Finally I asked a passerby to steer me towards The Jade Dragon. By the time I got there more than two hours had elapsed since I ducked out the back. Jill was gone, and I was alone, except for my deflated paranoia. Fear by any other name. I was my own goon, a depressing realization.
“Ellis!” It was Jillian, waving from her car. I got in and we drove away from there.
“I was so scared,” she said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
I made all the appropriate noises of apology and contrition and tried to keep the self-contempt at a minimum. It was a long drive back to Blue Heron.
“I want to renegotiate my contract.”
“I see,” Langely Ulin said.
We were alone in the kitchen of my cottage. My dark glasses lay on the Formica tabletop. So did a fresh ten year contract, virtually identical to the last one, and a Lacrosse pen. My eyes wouldn’t stop watering, but that was okay; it was a good sign.
“You’re unhappy with the current arrangement?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve mistreated you in some way?”
I wiped my Niagara eyes. “No.”
“What new terms do you propose?”
“Simple. The truth. From your lips.”
“The truth regarding what?”
“My father.”
“You already know all that.”
“I don’t think so. My dad and I didn’t have the greatest relationship, but it’s never made sense that he would essentially sell me to you. I know he felt guilty about it, but why did he do it in the first place?”
Ulin sighed. “Back then I had my feelers out, my people watching everywhere for medical anomalies. Of course I funded—and continue to fund—life prolongation and rejuvenation research around the world. But my feelers have always been out. I believed in the possibility of you or someone like you appearing one day. Call it intuition, or a dream, if you like. Those Seattle doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with, but my people recognized a green flag when they saw one. Preternaturally accelerated healing, and even the hint of organ regeneration. Fantastic.”
Ulin coughed into his hand and picked up his red can of Coke, sipped, and put the can back down.
“Well,” he continued, “you were a minor, so we needed your father’s help. We required your exclusive cooperation. We couldn’t afford to let the world find out about you.”
“Yeah, I understand your motives,” I said.
“Your father was a principled man,” Ulin said. “But everyone can be moved. His lever, ironically, was surgery. Heart valve replacement. Congenital defect discovered later in life. He had no medical insurance, and besides: most insurance companies wouldn’t have covered the procedure, not in 1974. Back then such a procedure was considered experimental.”
“You promised him a valve replacement for signing me over to you.”
“Roughly, yes.”
“That’s fairly slimy.”
“A matter of business negotiation.”
“He didn’t last long. What did you give him, a lemon?”
“He never underwent the surgery.”
“Why not?”
“He refused it after you ran away. He spent the final months of his life searching for you. I believe he intended to tell you everything and hope you would agree to cooperate of your own free will. If not he was prepared to accept the consequences and die. Some of this is conjecture. But the picture is clear enough, don’t you think?”
I remembered that night in Long Beach, when I ran. And later a phone ringing endlessly in a lifeless house. The rest I shut out. Or tried to shut out. Flies.
That night I experienced something like a dream but not a dream. I was lying in bed. Claws scratched at the bedroom door. I got up in my boxers and T-shirt and opened the door. Jeepers stood there, his eyes like white marbles. My eyes were fine, the water works shut off, in crystalline focus. Now that he had my attention, Jeepers turned and padded away, and I followed him.
He waited at the front door. I opened it for us and we went out. The air was perfectly still. My bare feet whispered on the lawn. Then the sidewalk was cold and hard, and Jeepers was trotting, claws clicking jauntily on the cement, and I started jogging after him. The dog’s nose was in the air. I looked up and saw a Glinda bubble drifting serenely above and ahead of us. Something moved inside that bubble but I don’t think it was a good witch; it wasn’t anything I could make out, just a shadow, like what you might see through the translucent skin of an insect egg.
The bubble led Jeepers, and Jeepers led me. We arrived at an open expanse of blue grass with an orderly copse of trees in the middle. Orderly? They formed a perfect ring. Each tree was between seven and nine feet tall and they stood close together.
As Jeepers and I approached, the two nearest trees opened up, or stepped aside. Stepped aside. In the middle of the circle a few people stood conversing quietly with one another. The night was so weirdly still that their whispery voices sounded like a sentient breeze.
Jeepers trotted right up to the group and they welcomed him. One man bent over and scratched the dog behind the ears, and Jeepers’ tail started wagging.
The man was my father.
I stood apart from the group, just within the ring of trees, all of which had begun to sway gently side to side. The two that had parted for us now moved together again, closing the ring. I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at these trees. I was frightened of them. A trunk pushed against me, urging me forward.
Only my father’s face was distinct. The other people were silent now, their features not quite discernable. Above them the Glinda bubble hovered and pulsed with a ghost light of its own. The light fell upon the people, and I suddenly realized that was why I couldn’t see them properly. The light did not illuminate but somehow obscured them. My father was recognizable because he had leaned out of the cone of light when he reached to scratch Jeepers.
“Dad—?” I said.
He smiled at me. It was a smile I’d never seen him wear in life. Easy and broad and loose, a happy and unselfconscious smile with parted teeth.
“That man lied to you,” he said.
“What man?”
“Ulin.”
Our voices were bell-clear within the circle of trees. My father’s voice seemed to be right inside my head.
“What did he lie about?” I asked.
“That whole business with the valve. I would have taken the operation. Heck, I was dying. Of course I would have. But they told me I had to hunt you up first.”
“You should have told me.”
He shook his head. “Here’s the deal, Ellis. Things happen the way they’re meant to happen, and that’s that. Everything has a reason and a purpose. That’s what I’m told. Anyway, it’s time for you to get out in the world. Past time. That’s what this whole deal is about. You aren’t supposed to hide out in Blue Heron anymore.”
The others who remained under the cone of light nodded their heads. Dad sat down on the grass and roughhoused Jeepers a little. Jeepers licked his face and my dad laughed. He would never have let the dog do that in real life. He had loved Jeepers in his own taciturn way but wouldn’t tolerate getting licked at like that. I laughed at the sight, and when I laughed it was a real sound, and I was walking clumsily, like a drunk or a somnambulist, in through the open door of my cottage.
An hour later I walked back out, leaving the contract on the kitchen table with the fancy Lacrosse pen lying on it, nib aimed at the empty signature line.
I thought about calling Jillian, waking her up, but knew I wouldn’t have considered it if I hadn’t needed a ride out of town. That was a little too mercenary even for me. Besides, I was no damn good at good-byes.