The After-Room Read online

  “You thought about the other person,” Janie said. “And you could see where they were, through their eyes.”

  “Right,” Benjamin said. “But it had a side effect.”

  “It made you dizzy afterward.”

  “Well, my father took the powder before he died,” he said.

  “Oh—” she said. The full importance of what he was saying began to dawn on her.

  “You see?” he said, excited. “It hasn’t worn off yet!”

  “On you?” she asked.

  “On either of us.”

  “But where is he?” she asked, looking around at the pale light cast by the streetlamp, and the dark beyond it. She felt a chill of fear, but of what, she wasn’t sure—of ghosts? Of the possibility that Benjamin had lost his mind?

  “I’ve been calling it the After-room,” Benjamin said. “But it’s not really a room. The walls aren’t really walls, they’re like—a screen, and beyond it is something else. Something farther. My father is there. I think he’s keeping himself in that place, somehow. He’s stalling, so he can communicate with me. Does that sound stupid?”

  Janie shook her head. It sounded terrifying, but also somehow wonderful.

  “The feeling is different from when we used the powder,” he said. “It’s not like being in someone else’s body, because my father doesn’t have a body. But he’s there, I know he is. I know I’m not alone there.”

  Janie couldn’t keep the hurt expression from her face.

  “I don’t mean that I’m alone here,” he said. “I just—you know.”

  She nodded. “So what does he say?”

  “That’s the thing, I don’t know. I can feel that he’s there, but I can’t get his voice. So I made some more of the mind-connection powder.”

  Janie felt a stinging jolt of surprise. “Without me?” she said. “When did you make it?”

  “When you went to the movies with your parents.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “With words!” she said. “Like this!”

  “I haven’t used it yet,” he said. “You came home before I could. And I was afraid to try it.”

  “You shouldn’t do things like that alone!”

  “But I think it might work,” he said. His voice was eager and strained. “I think it might make the connection stronger.”

  A couple from the dance walked by, the girl’s heels clicking on the concrete steps, and Benjamin waited until they’d passed. In her confusion, Janie was thinking about the fact that she’d been watching Rear Window in a movie theater with her parents while Benjamin was home making the powder in the kitchen. He’d said he had algebra to do. It wasn’t right. She and Benjamin were supposed to work together.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked. “About my father?”

  The old gardener who had helped them decipher the Pharmacopoeia had told them that they shouldn’t assume things were too far-fetched to be true. She nodded. “I do.”

  Relief transformed Benjamin’s face, and his whole body relaxed. “I was afraid you would think I was crazy.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t say I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said. “I just said I believe you.”

  He smiled back, and she realized how close they were sitting in the lamplight. His knee was almost touching hers. He leaned toward her. They hadn’t kissed since they’d arrived in Michigan. Her parents were always around at home, and at school she was supposed to be his cousin, and he’d been so unhappy and preoccupied. But now the steps were deserted, and his face drew near in the dark. She caught his familiar clean smell beneath her own borrowed perfume. She could feel his breath on her face, and the warmth radiating from his skin. Their lips were half an inch apart when the sound of a rattling engine broke the silence of the street, and then a beeping horn.

  They both pulled away. A noisy, well-traveled brown Studebaker nosed up to the curb.

  “Lord Figment!” her father called from the driver’s seat. “Lady Jane! Your chariot awaits!”

  Chapter 3

  The Coastwatcher

  In the dawn light, a body appeared on the island’s northern beach. Ned Maddox spotted it from his observation platform in a banyan tree. He scanned the horizon through binoculars, but saw no boat, so he studied the body again. Thin, possibly a boy. Legs rocking in the shallow waves. It might be a trick to lure him down, a booby-trapped corpse. He tugged and scratched at his beard, thinking.

  Finally curiosity got the better of him, and he climbed down the banyan tree and hiked through the brush to the beach. A wave gave the body another rolling push up onto the sand. The boy wore simple cotton clothes, sodden with seawater. As Ned approached, he saw a long black braid tucked under the shoulder. He circled slowly.

  The castaway didn’t leap up to attack him. He saw no wires or explosives. He grabbed a slender ankle and a wrist, rolled the body over, then jumped back, but nothing happened. It was a girl, Chinese, and her lips and eyelids were blue. He felt her wrist for a pulse. It was thready and weak. She started to cough and throw up seawater.

  Still wary, he looked around, but no one appeared. So he picked the girl up and slung her over his shoulder. Water streamed down his legs as he carried her into the safety of the brush. His tiny island was theoretically under Communist control, but it was so inaccessible, surrounded by reefs and shoals, that no one ever came snooping. He didn’t want them to start now.

  Inside the camouflaged hut, there was only his own narrow cot, so he lowered the castaway onto it. Her eyes remained closed, and she shivered, soaking wet. He put a blanket over her. Her lips were chapped from the sun and the salt water.

  He turned on the little kerosene stove to heat some broth. When it was ready, he poured it into a bowl and held it up so the steam would reach her nose. Her whole face contorted at the smell of food, and it seemed to drag her back to consciousness. She opened her eyes, blinking. He knew his beard was long and scraggly. He needed to conserve his fuel for cooking, so he didn’t shave. The hair on his head was long, too. He owned a signaling mirror that he rarely looked into, but when he did, it gave him a start: A wild man looked back. Now the girl recoiled in fear.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said in Mandarin.

  She watched him, waiting for more. She wasn’t going to commit herself. But he knew she understood.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked in Cantonese, just in case.

  She was silent.

  “My name is Ned Maddox,” he said in English. “First lieutenant, U.S. Navy. Can you understand me?”

  She gave a grave nod.

  “Want some soup?”

  She struggled to sit up, then winced and sank back, as if the movement hurt.

  “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll help.” He held her head and lifted it.

  The girl took a few sips of soup and lay back against the pillow. She was young, no older than twenty-five, but there was something otherworldly about her. She looked around the hut and seemed to take everything in. He wasn’t used to anyone witnessing his life. The Chinese runners who kept him supplied with food and fuel from the U.S. Navy ships were always in a hurry.

  The hut had a narrow cot, a tiny table, a little stove, and a few shelves. His clothes hung on pegs. But it misrepresented his life. His realm was enormous: the black sky full of stars, the hidden platform in the banyan tree with a view to the horizon. He was lord of it all, listening and watching. He had been watching, this morning, for something in particular. An American naval officer had gone missing and was believed to be hiding in the islands. Ned had been looking for the officer, not for a Chinese girl. But could there be some connection?

  “Who brought you here?” he asked. “Were you on a boat?”

  “Long story,” she said in Mandarin.

  “Plenty of time,” he
said, in Mandarin also.

  But the girl seemed to have no interest in recounting her story. She knew it already, so why should she tell it to him? Her eyes fell on a large yellow cloth, draped over a blocky shape at the foot of his cot. He hoped she would think it was a makeshift bureau: a crate, perhaps, where he kept his shorts and socks.

  But she reached out and tugged the yellow cloth free, revealing his heavy suitcase radio and his headset. She turned to him, eyes shining.

  He should be concerned, he knew, that he had exposed his listening station. She was a threat to his security and to his mission. But instead, he felt an unaccountable impulse to explain himself to her. That was just loneliness, of course. He’d been out here too long.

  The girl spoke in English. “May I send a message?”

  He shook his head. “It would give away our position.”

  She gave him an interested look. Why had he said our?

  “My position,” he said.

  “Have you seen an Englishman?” she asked. “In a boat? A landing craft?”

  He frowned. Were they looking for the same person? “Not an American?”

  She shook her head, then winced at the movement.

  “I haven’t seen an Englishman,” he said. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  She frowned and closed her eyes, then lay back against the pillow again. He was left with the irrational feeling of having disappointed this intruder he didn’t even know, and wishing he had the information she wanted.

  He thought he should go through her things to find out who she was, but she had no things, just her simple clothes.

  So he kept watch, in silence, while she slept.

  Chapter 4

  The Debriefing

  Janie tried, in general, to understand her parents’ point of view. They wanted her to be happy. They wanted Benjamin to be less depressed. They feared he would pull her down into his vortex of gloom, so they tried to combat it with their relentless cheerfulness.

  But when her father had interrupted in his horrible noisy car, with his dumb jokes, just as Benjamin was about to kiss her, Janie thought she might scream. On the ride home, while her father asked if they’d enjoyed the ball, and talked about how difficult it was to get mice to pull a pumpkin, she seethed and said nothing. At the house, her father leaped out and opened the passenger door with an elaborate coachman’s bow.

  “Just stop it!” she hissed at him. “Please!”

  Their house in Ann Arbor was a two-story Victorian with tall, narrow windows, which reminded Janie of a mournful face. Benjamin went straight inside without a word. He had finally started to talk to her—really talk, but her father’s arrival had shut him back down. She went inside and watched Benjamin climb the stairs, and heard the decisive thunk of his bedroom door. She kicked off her shoes.

  “How was it, honey?” her mother asked, curled up in her chair in the front parlor. She was grading student papers. Janie’s father, aware he was in trouble, headed back toward the kitchen.

  “It was fine,” Janie said, in a voice that said it hadn’t been.

  “Your mascara’s smeared,” her mother said.

  “Doesn’t matter now.” But Janie ran her fingers under her eyes.

  “You looked so lovely tonight,” her mother said. “Did Benjamin think so?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Her mother frowned and patted the ottoman. “Is he thinking about his father?”

  “Yes,” Janie said, sitting down, because that was true.

  Her parents knew about the apothecary’s death. Count Vili, when he brought Janie and Benjamin home to Ann Arbor, would have given her parents drugged champagne to make them forget everything, but Janie had made him promise not to. Their memories had been taken from them once before, and it didn’t seem fair to do it again. But Vili had given them something, some anti-worry herb or potion to make them calm and accepting when he told them that their daughter had been kidnapped and taken to Malaya. Benjamin and his father had gone to rescue her, and Benjamin’s father had been killed. Her parents had been uncharacteristically mellow about the whole thing, and the story had faded, for them, into hazy background, like a fairy tale they’d nearly forgotten. That must have required some medicinal help. Her parents accepted Vili as a glamorous friend of Benjamin’s father, a kind of godfather to Benjamin, who could fix things by nature of his aristocratic connections and his worldly skills. Janie curled and stretched her toes.

  “What are you reading?” she asked.

  “Oh, writing assignments,” her mother said. “They were supposed to write a scene that takes place in a kitchen. I thought it might help them think about how people actually talk, in real life.”

  “Any good ones?”

  “A couple, maybe,” her mother said. “But two police officers just burst into the kitchen in this one, and said ‘Hands up! You’re coming with us!’ For no reason, out of nowhere. I think next week we need to talk about how suspense works.”

  Janie’s parents were screenwriters who had moved to London to avoid being forced to testify about their friends’ political beliefs. But now America had grown tired of Senator McCarthy and his hunt for Communists. The senator had never produced a single spy for all his talk about having a whole list of them. Once, when a journalist asked him to produce the list, he’d said it was in his other pants. No one took him seriously anymore, and the Scotts were able to live in the United States without being followed by federal marshals. But there was no work at the Hollywood studios for them. The people who gave out jobs were still afraid, and moving away to London had given the Scotts the air of guilt. So they’d been teaching at the university in Ann Arbor, reading stacks of student work every night, for almost no money. Their savings were dwindling. It had been a stretch to buy the lemon-ice dress.

  “I wish you could just write again,” Janie said.

  “You’re telling me,” her mother said. She wound her hair up in a knot, clipping it in place.

  “Everyone knows you’re not spies,” Janie said.

  “I know, but these things stick. Tell me about the dance, that’s more interesting. What did the twins wear?”

  “Nat wore a white tux. And Valentina wore a blue dress—sort of robin’s-egg blue. And strapless.”

  “Mmm,” her mother said. “They must’ve looked amazing.”

  Janie’s mother was fascinated with Nat and Valentina, with their exotic looks and their tennis skills and their parents’ bravery in marrying each other. Janie sometimes wanted to shield the twins from her mother’s interest. “They did,” she said cautiously.

  “We’re going to their party tomorrow, right?” her mother asked.

  Janie nodded. She wished it were a party just for adults, or just for kids.

  “Do you think Benjamin’ll go?” her mother asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “What else? Tell me more.”

  Janie tried to think of something besides the fact that Benjamin believed he had contacted his dead father. She could report that someone had spiked the punch early in the evening, but her mother wouldn’t want to know that, and Janie hadn’t drunk any, so it wasn’t relevant. There had been a time when she could say anything to her mother. Not so long ago, she could say anything to anyone—to her teachers at Hollywood High, to her friends, to her parents’ friends. Or at least there was nothing she wanted to say that she couldn’t. Now there seemed to be conversational pitfalls everywhere. Was that what growing up was? An ever-mounting number of things you couldn’t say? “The band played ‘Skylark,’” she finally offered.

  Her mother made a face. “Oh, that sappy thing. It drags so.”

  “It’s my favorite song,” Janie said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Janie’s eyes stung. She wanted not to cry. Her mother couldn’t understand about skylarks, about flying over the stre
ets of London with the wind in your feathers. Or about her extraordinary happiness when Benjamin had shown up to find her on that terrifying island, having been blown off course by storms and fallen from the sky. About how much she missed the old Benjamin.

  “Honey, what is it?” her mother asked.

  “Benjamin was finally talking to me about his father,” she said. “He was telling me things. But then Dad pulled up and started making his stupid jokes, and now Benjamin’s gone upstairs and closed the door.” The tears spilled over, spotting the pale silk of her dress.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” her mother said.

  “I’m so tired of his jokes!”

  Her father appeared in the doorway, carrying a sandwich on a small plate. His shoulders hunched forward in apology, or maybe that was just his habitual posture, now that he was marginally employed. His curly dark hair was starting to retreat from his forehead. When he was anxious, he tugged at it, which didn’t help. Janie found herself wishing that her parents were bad people so she could just be angry at them, without feeling terrible about it. Or at least that they would be consistently annoying, so she could stay annoyed.

  “You chased Benjamin away,” she said.

  Her father set the plate beside her on the ottoman. The sandwich was cut diagonally, the way she liked it. She didn’t want to accept the peace offering, but she was hungry, and it looked like an excellent sandwich. Turkey and Swiss cheese and crisp lettuce on toasted bread. She took a bite, and tasted tangy mustard.

  Her father sat down on the couch, with his elbows on his knees. “I know I interrupted tonight,” he said. “It’s not easy for us, you know. Most parents don’t have their sixteen-year-old daughters’ boyfriends living in the house. I saw that he was about to kiss you as I drove up, and I went a little nuts.”

  Her mother smiled. “Oh, so there was a kiss at stake! I thought it was just about Benjamin telling you things.”