Page 58 of Going Home in the Dark

“Yeah, and so Ernie was with us on that Thanksgiving. The four of us were together.”

Rebecca recalled, “For the holidays, Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Ruth went to Key West with their friends Jack and Sandy Reamer. They all hate one another and have the time of their lives pretending they don’t.”

“The Pinchbecks always ate dinner at four o’clock,” Bobby said. “Then he worked crossword puzzles and she crocheted until they went to bed at seven. That year, every year, they had their traditional Thanksgiving dinner—fish sticks, boiled potatoes, brussels sprouts, and tapioca. I begged off and met up with you guys at Spencer’s place in the late morning. We spent the day making dinner together.”

“I hadn’t sold the kitchen appliances yet,” Spencer said. “Dad was already living at the church with Porifera. There was a holiday orgy that night.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Rebecca said. “You showed us the flyer they sent to parishioners. It was an especially naughty orgy.”

“They called it Spanksgiving,” Spencer said.

They were silent for a moment, although they were not paralyzed by befuddlement.

Then Bobby shuddered. “I don’t like to think about how insane we might be now if we’d never teamed up and become amigos.”

“So why did we go to the hospital that day? It was in the evening, long after dinner.”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” Spencer said.

Face wrenched with frustration and anxiety, Rebecca stood lost in thought. Even with her face thus contorted, she was strikingly beautiful.

Bobby couldn’t stop staring at her, and he thought it was a shame that her beauty would always limit the roles for which she would be considered. She could never play a homely woman, let alone an ugly one. Her talent would allow her to do so, but the director would require her to perform under ten pounds of makeup, a fright wig made of oxtail hair, matching eyebrows, with a hunchback prosthesis—andstillshe would be gorgeous.

Over the more than two decades they had known each other, he had regarded her strictly as a friend, not with romantic interest. In this world of loneliness and alienation, true friends were rarer and more desirable than potential lovers. He treasured her as a friend and understood that by pursuing a more intimate arrangement, he would perhaps diminish or destroy what they had now. Only since their return to Maple Grove had he now and then regarded her with romantic longing. It had to stop. He loved her as an amigo, like a sister, and he dared not risk that profoundly valued relationship. Because he wouldn’t go so far as to put his eyes out, he had to rely on willpower.

Of course if he died horribly in an encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly (a possibility for which a warning was previously issued), that would resolve the matter.

Rebecca’s wrenched face returned to its usual spectacularness. She said, “Maybe we should go to the hospital now. Maybe just seeing the place or walking into it will jog our memories.”

Late-afternoon sunshine slanted through the maples, layering a magical light among the shadows as the amigos exited the pavilion. Squirrels scampered up trees, fearing that one dog or anotherwould pull loose of its leash and savage them, while here and there a dog squatted or hiked a leg to pee. Hidden in a bower, an owl hooted in anticipation of the mice it would snatch off the grass to devour, come night. A new crop of infants in strollers gaped anxiously at the world, innocent of its true nature but intuitively, vaguely cognizant of terrors to come.

The world is a hard place. There are moments of great beauty and peace and plenty. Eventually, however, it was like the Gene Pitney song: sooner or later, you found yourself in a town without pity.

Soon, twenty-four hours would have passed since Ernie Hernishen disappeared from the hospital. By this time tomorrow, the police—who otherwise had nothing meaningful to do—would initiate a search for him, find him, and give him to a coroner or mortician who would make sure he was as dead as Björn Skollborg.

34Ernie Patiently Waiting

Lying behind the foldaway bed, with his five senses shut down and his heart as still as a stone, Ernie was periodically soothed by the kindly male and female voices that came not through his ears but arose within him. He could not understand how it was possible to “hear” them without actually hearing them, but he didn’t waste time worrying about that, even though in his current circumstances he had plenty of time to waste. He continued to compose country songs. The exercise of his musical genius was from time to time interrupted by memories on which he dwelled with interest. At the moment, he was thinking about Thanksgiving in the year of Wayne Louis Hornfly. He knew intuitively and beyond doubt that, elsewhere in Maple Grove, his amigos were obsessed with the same long-ago holiday. That, too, was something he could not possibly know, but he didn’t worry about how he knew it. After all, if he wasn’t worried about being a disembodied consciousness adrift in what seemed to be a lightless vacuum, there wasn’t much point in being worried about anything.

Whether on Thanksgiving and other holidays or on ordinary evenings, Britta Hernishen rarely dined with her son. She’d never done so regularly, and she had entirely disengaged from the practice on the night of Ernie’s fifth birthday.

Sitting directly across the dining room table from his mother, he had been talking about a battery-powered dump truck that could tilt its bed back to spill its contents. It was red, and it was big for a toy, bigger than the four-slice toaster in the kitchen.

He thought she was riveted by his description of the truck, but she interrupted him to say, “Stop playing with your peas.”

“I’m not playing with them.”

“Am I to understand that you would have me believe you are not playing with your peas when I can plainly see that you are? Is that your position?”

“I’m just moving them.”

“Is it your habit to reposition your vegetables at every meal? Do you reposition them when Ms. Merkwurdig feeds you?”

Ms. Merkwurdig was the nanny who looked after him in Britta’s absence, which was most of the time.

“What does ‘reposition’ mean?” he asked.

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