Justin Cronin - The Twelve

Grey relaxed his grip and backed away. Lila was looking at the floor. The brisk, officious woman he’d met in the paint aisle was gone; in her place stood a frail, diminished creature, almost childlike.

“Can I ask you something, Lawrence?” Her voice was very small.

Grey nodded.

“What did you do before?”

For a moment he didn’t understand what she was asking; then he realized she meant what job. “I cleaned,” he said, and shrugged. “I mean, I was a janitor.”

Lila considered his statement without expression. “Well, I guess you’ve got me there,” she said miserably. She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was anything at all.”

Another silence descended, Lila staring at the floor, Grey wondering what she would next say. Whatever it was, he sensed their survival depended on it.

“I lost one before, you see,” Lila said. “A baby girl.”

Grey waited.

“Her heart, you understand,” she said, and placed a hand against her chest. “It was a problem with her heart.”

It was strange; standing in the quiet, Grey felt as if he’d known this about her all along. Or, if not the thing itself, then the kind of thing. It was as if he were looking at one of those pictures that made no sense when you saw it up close, but then you backed away and suddenly it did.

“What was her name?” Grey asked.

Lila raised her tear-streaked face. For a moment she just looked at him, her eyes pulled into an appraising squint. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, asking this. The question had just popped out.

“Thank you, Lawrence. Nobody ever asks me that. I can’t tell you how long it’s been.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know.” Her shoulders lifted with a tiny shrug. “I guess they think it’s bad luck or something.”

“Not to me.”

A brief silence passed. Grey didn’t think he’d ever felt so awful for anybody in his life.

“Eva,” Lila said. “My daughter was Eva.”

They stood together in the presence of this name. Outside, beyond the windows of Lila’s house, the night was pressing down. Grey realized it had begun to rain—a quiet, soaking, summer rain, pattering the windows.

“I’m not really who you think I am,” Grey confessed.

“No?”

What did he want to tell her? The truth, surely, or some version of it, but in the last day and a half, the idea of truth seemed to have slipped its moorings completely. He didn’t even know where to begin.

“It’s all right,” Lila said. “You don’t have to say anything. Whoever you were before, it doesn’t make much difference now.”

“It might. I’ve had… some troubles.”

“So that would make you just like the rest of us, wouldn’t it? One more person with a secret.” She looked away. “That’s the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You’re just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.”

Grey nodded. What was there to say?

“Promise me you won’t leave,” Lila said. “Whatever happens, don’t do that.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll look after me. We’ll look after each other.”

“I promise.”

The conversation seemed to end there. Lila, exhaling a weary breath, pushed her shoulders back. “Well. I guess I’d better turn in. I expect you’ll want to be leaving first thing in the morning. If I’m reading you correctly.”

“I think that’s best.”

Her eyes wistfully traveled the room with its shiny appliances and overflowing trash bags and dirty dishes in piles. “It’s too bad, really. I did want to finish the nursery. But I guess that will have to wait.” She found his face again. “Just one thing. You can’t make me think about it.”

Grey understood what she was asking. Don’t make me think about the world . “If that’s what you want.”

“We’re just …” She looked for the words. “Taking a drive in the country. How does that sound? Do you think you can do that for me?”

Grey nodded. The request struck him as strange, even a little silly, but he would have put on a clown suit if that’s what it took to get her out of there.

“Good. Just so long as that’s settled.”

He waited for her to say something more, or else leave the room, but neither thing happened. A change came into Lila’s face—a look of intense concentration, as if she were reading tiny print that only she could see. Then, abruptly, her eyes grew very wide; she seemed about to laugh.

“Oh my goodness, what a scene I made! I can’t believe I did that!” Her hands darted to her cheeks, her hair. “I must look terrible. Do I look terrible?”

“I think you look fine,” Grey managed.

“Here you are, a guest in my home, and off go the waterworks. It drives Brad absolutely crazy.”

The name wasn’t one he’d heard from her before. “Who’s Brad?”

Lila frowned. “My husband, of course.”

“I thought David was your husband.”

She gave him a blank stare. “Well, he is. David, I mean.”

“But you said—”

Lila waved this away. “I say a lot of things, Lawrence. That’s one thing you’ll have to learn about me. Probably you think I’m just some crazy woman, and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Grey lied.

An ironic smile creased her fine-boned face. “Well. We both know you’re only saying that because you’re being nice. But I appreciate the gesture.” She surveyed the room again, nodding vaguely. “So, it’s been quite a day, don’t you think? I’m afraid we don’t really have a proper guest room, but I made up the couch for you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just leave the dishes for the morning and say good night.”

Grey had no idea what to make of any of this. It was as if Lila had broken her trance of denial, only to slip back into it again. Not slip, he thought; she had done this to herself, forcing her thoughts back into place with an act of will. He watched in dumb wonder as she made her way to the doorway, where she turned to face him.

“I’m so very glad you’re here, Lawrence,” she said, and smiled emptily. “We’re going to be good friends, you and I. I just know it.”

Then she was gone. Grey listened to her slow trudge down the hallway and up the stairs. He cleared the rest of the dishes from the table. He would have liked to wash them, so she could come down to a clean kitchen in the morning, but there was nothing he could do but deposit them in the sink with the others.

He carried one of the candles from the table to the living room. But the minute he lay down on the sofa, he knew sleep was out of the question. His brain was bouncing with alertness; he still felt a little nauseated from the soup. His mind returned to the scene in the kitchen, and the moment when he’d put his arms around her. Not a hug, exactly; he’d just been trying to get Lila to stop hitting him. But at some point it had become something hug like . It had felt good—more than good, actually. The feeling wasn’t anything sexual, not as Grey recalled it. Years had gone by since Grey had experienced anything that even approximated a sexual thought—the anti-androgens saw to that—on top of which, the woman was pregnant, for God’s sake. Which, come to think of it, was maybe what was so nice about the whole thing. Pregnant women didn’t just go hugging people for no reason. Holding Lila, Grey had felt as if he’d stepped into a circle, and within this circle there were not just two people but three—because the baby was there, too. Maybe Lila was crazy and maybe she wasn’t. He was hardly the person to judge. But he couldn’t see that this made a difference one way or the other. She’d chosen him to help her, and that was exactly what he’d do.