77 Shadow Street

9

Apartment 2-A

Almost-nine-year-old Winny was curled in an armchair in his bedroom, examining three books, deciding which one to read next. Officially a fourth grader, he could read at a seventh-grade level. He’d been tested. It was true. He wasn’t all puffed-up proud of it. He knew he wasn’t smart or anything. If he was smart, he would know what to say to people. He never knew what to say to people. His mom said he was shy, and maybe he was, but he also never knew what he should say, which a truly smart person would know.

The reason that he could read so well was just because he read all the time, ever since he could remember. First picture books with a few words. Then books with fewer pictures and more words. Then books with no pictures at all. He read mostly young-adult fiction these days. But in a couple years, he’d probably be reading thousand-page adult books, whatever, unless he just read so much that his head exploded, and that would be that.

His dad, who had homes in Nashville and Los Angeles, who came around way less often than the FedEx delivery guy, almost as seldom as Santa Claus, didn’t want Winny to get lost in books all the time. He said any boy who got lost in books all the time might turn into a sissy or even an autistic, whatever that was. His dad wanted him to be more into music. Winny liked music, but not as much as he liked reading and writing.

Besides, he was never going to work in music. His dad was a famous singer, and his mom was a semi-famous songwriter, and Winny never wanted to be famous for anything. Being famous and never knowing what to say would be the worst, everybody hanging on your every word but you didn’t have any words for them to hang on. That would be like falling facedown into manure in front of everybody like twenty times a day, every day of your life. Everyone in music always seemed to know what to say. Some never shut up. Forget music.

Winny might be a sissy like his dad worried he would be. He didn’t know. He liked to think he wouldn’t be. But he’d never been tested. Four days a week, he went to the Grace Lyman School, which was founded by Mrs. Grace Lyman, who died like thirty years earlier, but it was an exclusive school even though she was dead. Of course, she wasn’t still at the school. They didn’t keep her corpse around in a big jar or anything. That would have been cool, but they didn’t. He didn’t know where her corpse was. Nobody ever said. Maybe nobody knew. Grace Lyman was dead, but they still ran the school by her rules, and one of her rules was zero tolerance of bullies. If he never came face-to-face with a bully, he couldn’t be sure whether he was a sissy or not.

He might even be a killer. If some bully started pushing him around, really getting him worked up, maybe he would just go berserk and cut the guy’s head off or something. He didn’t think he was a berserk killer, but he had never been tested. One thing Winny had learned from books was that you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac—he could be anything, and he wouldn’t know until he was tested.

One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn’t real like the FedEx guy. This was a recent discovery of Winny’s. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. At first, he was sad, he felt like Santa had died, but the sad thing didn’t last very long. A person who never existed couldn’t die, you couldn’t grieve for him. Mostly Winny felt like an idiot for having believed the whole stupid Santa thing as long as he had.

So now he couldn’t honestly say his dad came around as seldom as Santa Claus because in truth Santa Claus never came, but sometimes his dad did. Of course, he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time, so maybe it would turn out that his dad never existed, either. Winny got a phone call now and then, but that could be a fake-out, the guy on the other end could be anyone. If his dad came for a Christmas visit, he would bring Winny what he always brought: a musical instrument or two, a stack of CDs, not just his own but also CDs by other singers, and a signed publicity photo if he had a new one. Every time Farrel Barnett got a new publicity photo, he made sure that Winny received one. Even though Santa Claus didn’t exist, he brought better presents than Winny’s dad, who was most likely real, though you never could tell.

Winny had almost decided which of the three books to read when the floor and walls shuddered. The lamp on the table beside his chair had a pull chain, and it swung back and forth, clinking against the base. At the windows, draperies swished a little, as if stirred by a draft, but there was no draft. In the open shelf of his bookcase headboard, Dragon World action figures vibrated against the wood. They jiggled around as if they were coming to life. They were jiggling a lot. But of course they were even deader than old Grace Lyman.

Winny sat through the shaking, the bright blasts of lightning at the windows, and the booming thunder. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to wet his pants or anything. But he wasn’t calm and collected, either. He was in-between somewhere. He didn’t know the word for how he felt. The past couple of days, things were kind of strange in the Pendleton. Things were weird. But weird didn’t always have to be scary. Sometimes weird was really interesting. Last Christmas, his dad gave him a gold-plated saxophone, which was just about as big as Winny. That was more than a little weird, but it wasn’t either interesting or scary, just weird in a stupid kind of way.

He had kept secret the weird and interesting thing that happened to him twice in the past two days. Although he wanted to share his strange experiences with his mom, he suspected that she would feel she had to tell his dad. For all the right reasons, she was always trying to keep old Farrel Barnett involved in his son’s life. For sure, his dad would overreact, and the next thing Winny knew, he would be seeing a shrink twice a week, and there would be some kind of custody battle, and he would be in danger of Nashville or Los Angeles.

As the shaking came to an end, Winny glanced at the TV. It was dark and silent. Although the acrylic screen wasn’t polished enough to reflect him as he sat in the armchair, it didn’t appear flat but instead seemed to have forbidding depths, like a cloudy pool of water in the shade of a forest. The glow of his reading lamp, floating on the screen, seemed to be the pale distorted face of someone drowned and drifting just below the surface.

Twyla hurried from her study to Winny’s room at the farther end of the big apartment, which contained over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space in eight rooms, three baths, and a kitchen—one of the two largest units in the building. She knocked on his door, and he told her to come in, and when she crossed the threshold, she found him in the armchair, legs tucked under himself, three books in his lap.

He was luminous, at least to her, although she thought not only to her, because she had often seen people staring at him as if his appearance compelled their attention. He had her dark hair—almost black—and his father’s blue eyes, but his looks were not the essence of his appeal. In spite of his shyness and reserve, he possessed some ineffable quality that endeared him to people on first encounter. If a boy so young could be said to have charisma, Winny was charismatic, though he seemed to be oblivious of it.

“Honey, are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure. I’m all right. Are you okay?”

“What was that shaking?” she wondered.

“You don’t know? I figured you’d know.”

“I don’t think it was an earthquake.”

He said, “Maybe something blew up in the basement.”

“No. That would have set off an alarm.”

“It happened before.”

“When?”

“Earlier but not as bad. Maybe someone’s blasting somewhere. Some construction guys or someone.”

His bedroom had a twelve-foot-high coffered ceiling with an ornate gilded-plaster medallion in each coffer and exquisite panels of wainscoting with a gilded ground overpainted with a Japanese-style scene of dragonflies and bamboo, original to the Pendleton.

This almost daunting elegance was balanced by Winny’s toys and books, but Twyla wondered—and not for the first time—if she had made a mistake when she bought the apartment, if this was a suitable environment for a child. This was a safe building in a safe city, a privileged ambiance in which to grow up. But there weren’t many kids in the Pendleton, therefore few opportunities to have playmates. Winny had no interest in playmates; he always seemed to keep himself entertained. If he were to overcome his shyness, however, he needed to be around other kids his age, not just at school, but also playing and having fun.

Sitting on the footstool in front of her son’s armchair, Twyla said, “Honey, do you like it here in the Pendleton?”

“I don’t want to live in Nashville or L.A.,” he said at once.

“No, no,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to live in those places, either. I mean, maybe we could get a house in a regular neighborhood, not so fancy as this, a house with a yard, maybe near a park or something, where there’s lots of other kids. We could get a dog.”

“We could get a dog right here,” Winny said.

“Yes, we could, but it’s not as easy to take care of in the city as it would be in a suburb. Dogs like to have room to run.”

He frowned. “Anyway, you can’t just go and live in a regular neighborhood ’cause of who you are.”

“Who I am? I’m just me, just someone who writes songs. I’m nobody special.”

“You’ve been on TV sometimes. You even sang on TV that time. You sang really good.”

“I grew up in a regular neighborhood, you know. In fact it was a kind of shabby regular neighborhood.”

“Anyway, I don’t much like parks. I always get some itchy rash or something. You know how I get that rash. Or I can’t stop sneezing ’cause of the flowers and trees and all. Maybe it’s fun to go to a park in winter, you know, when everything’s all dead and frozen and covered in snow, but it’s not so great most of the year.”

She smiled. “So a park—that’s like a little piece of Hell right here on earth, huh?”

“I don’t know what Hell’s like, except probably hot. It must be worse than the park, since it’s the worst place ever. Let’s stay where we are.”

She loved Winny so much that she wanted to shout it out. She could hardly contain so much love. “I want you to be happy, kiddo.”

“I’m happy. Are you happy?”

“I’m happy with you,” she said. He was in his stocking feet. She took hold of his right foot by the toes and shook it affectionately. “Wherever I am, I’m happy if you’re there.”

He averted his eyes, embarrassed by her declaration of love. “I like it here okay. This place is cool. It’s different.”

“Anytime you want,” she said, “you could have kids from school for a sleepover or a Saturday afternoon.”

Frowning, he said, “What kids?”

“Any kids you want. Your friends. One or two, or a whole bunch, whoever.”

After a hesitation, alarmed by the thought of inviting kids home with him, Winny said, “Or you and me, maybe we could go to the park and stuff if that’s what you want.”

Rising from the footstool, she said, “You’re a gentleman. You really are.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead. “Dinner at six.”

“I’ll just sit here and read till then.”

“You have homework?”

“Did it in the car, coming back from school with Mrs. Dorfman.”

Mrs. Dorfman, the housekeeper, doubled as Winny’s chauffeur.

“Doesn’t sound like much homework for a Grace Lyman student.”

“It was a ton, but it was stuff that’s all easy for me. There wasn’t any awful math or anything.”

Twyla once told the boy that she had done well in math because it was a kind of music. Ever since, to support his determination to avoid being pushed into becoming a musician, Winny had pretended to find math difficult.

Lightning flashed, much softer than previously, but instead of glancing at the windows, the boy turned to regard the dark TV in the wall of cabinetry and bookshelves opposite his bed. Brow furrowed, his face settled into a look of wary expectation.

As thunder rolled instead of crashing like before, Twyla was overcome by intuitive motherly concern. “Is anything wrong, Winny?”

He met her eyes. “Anything like what?”

“Anything at all.”

After a hesitation, he said, “No. I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m good. I feel good.”

“Love you, my little man.”

“Me too.” He blushed and opened one of the books in his lap.

His mom was great, the best, probably pretty much like a real angel would be, except that she said things like “my little man,” which an angel never would because an angel would know that it was an embarrassing thing for anyone to say to Winny. He was little, all right, but he wasn’t a man. He was just a skinny kid that the wind could blow over. He kept waiting to get biceps bigger than pimples, but it wasn’t happening even though he was almost nine years old. He was probably going to be a skinny kid all his life until suddenly he turned into a skinny old geezer, with nothing in between.

But his mom always meant well. She was never mean or phony. And she listened really well. He could tell her things, and she cared.

When she asked if anything was wrong, maybe he should have shared his recent weird experiences even if she would tell his dad. At dinner, maybe he would tell her about the voice that spoke to him from the weird channel on the TV.

Witness stepped to the piano in Twyla Trahern’s study as she exited the room, her back to him, unaware that he was behind her. He followed the woman to the doorway and stood on the threshold just long enough to ascertain that she was headed to the kitchen, most likely to make dinner for herself and her son.

Whatever she intended to prepare, they would not be here to eat it. Time was running out, the moment looming.

Witness wandered back toward the piano, pausing at the display shelves containing Twyla’s awards for songwriting. She had achieved remarkable success before the age of thirty. He remembered her songs because he forgot nothing. Nothing. He had owned the CD she made, on which she sang her own compositions, her voice warm and throaty.

Where he came from now, there were no songwriters, no songs, no singers, no musicians, no audiences. The morning dawned unsung, and through the day and night, the air was not once brightened by a note of Nature’s music. Among the last people whom he had killed were a man who could play the guitar with great finesse and a young girl, perhaps twelve, whose voice had been clear, sweet, angelic.

He had not been himself in those days. He had loved the law and music at one time. But then he had changed, been changed, in some ways by his intention, in other ways not. He had enjoyed music once. Now that he lived without music, he revered it.

Reverence could not keep him in Twyla Trahern’s study. It all shimmered away.