“No. Of course not.”
“Good. I couldn’t fit it in the car. I’d have to put wheels on Peaches and ride her home.”
“You have your sister’s sense of humor.”
“We’re a funny family.”
“I asked when the baby was due, and she said she’d been pregnant forever and still had a few years to go.”
“That’s Sis, sure enough.”
We arrived at a short hallway with changing rooms on both sides, where customers could try on the secondhand clothes.
The clerk said, “There’s a basket in the room. If your new things fit, just put all your wet clothes in the basket. Your sister said you’d want to donate them.”
At the last room on the right, an OCCUPIED sign hung on the doorknob.
“It’s your room,” she said. “I reserved it when your sister said you’d be along shortly.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry for dripping all over your store.”
“Oh, dear, don’t you worry. That’s why God made mops.” She patted me on the shoulder and left me alone.
On a bench in the changing room were a white T-shirt, a pair of briefs, socks, blue jeans, a blue crewneck sweater, a pair of Nike basketball shoes, and a black raincoat with a hood.
Everything fit perfectly. I left my wet clothes in the plastic laundry basket.
In the right-hand pocket of the raincoat, I found a disposable cell phone. It rang in my hand.
I felt as if I were in a Mission Impossible movie. The internals of the phone would probably melt into slag as soon as we finished our conversation.
“Hello?”
As always, her words seemed to float to me on the warm currents of her voice. “Do you remember the promise you made to me when I gave you the pendant with the bell?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Because the walls of the changing room were thin, I lowered my voice. “You said some people wanted to kill you. And you asked me if I’d die for you. I said yes, somewhat to my surprise.”
“But not to mine. When my hour of need arrives, how will you be able to die for me if you’re already dead from pneumonia?”
“I was just a little wet.”
“And I’m just a little pregnant. You should wear galoshes, too.”
“I’m not a galoshes kind of guy. Where are you right now?”
“Where you left me. At the cottage by the sea, with Tim. We baked cookies, and now we’re eating them while we play cards.”
“How could you be at the cottage, a couple hundred miles from here, and buy me these clothes?”
“Every place is the same place in the end.”
“Another riddle.”
“You hear riddles, but I never speak in them.”
High in the flooded sky, thunder crashed like great structures falling into ruin, and here below, the building vibrated as if with a premonition of its own destruction.
I said, “The clerk told me you called yourself my sister.”
“People hear what they need to hear.”
“I wish you were my sister.”
I swear I could hear her smile when she said, “That’s sweet of you, odd one, and I know you don’t intend to diminish me.”
“Diminish you? What does that mean?”
“It means what it means, as you will understand in time.”
In the si
lent wake of the thunder, more intimate sounds arose from the ductwork behind a ventilation grille, in the back wall of the dressing room, near the ceiling. The soft ponk and bink of sheet metal dimpling and tweaking under some weight. An intermittent ticking accompanied by a faint slithering noise.
“Now tell me,” Annamaria said, “have the events of the day made you afraid?”
“For a while there, yeah. But I’m okay now.”
“Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others.”
I thought of the Green Moon Mall in Pico Mundo, nineteen months earlier, when many had been saved but some had died, when among the dead had been she whom I loved more than myself, more than life.
I sat on the bench where I had found my fresh clothes folded and waiting for me. “Truth is, ma’am, I’m more afraid than I have been in a long time. And I’m afraid to be afraid.”
“Afraid to be afraid, but why?” she asked, though it seemed to me that she knew me as well as I knew myself and that her question was therefore moot.
“Because I’ve always gotten by on grit and little more. Or be fancy and call it fortitude. I can endure pain and trial, and not lose hope. Grit and wit—laughter in the dark is my surest defense. I usually hold off fear with a joke, but that only works for a while. What true courage I might have is limited and comes from desperation, brief spurts, just enough to get through a crisis. If the crisis is protracted, as I suspect this one will be, if fear is constant for too long, then courage will for darn sure bleed out of me when I need it most.”
Annamaria was silent so long that I thought I had embarrassed her with my confession, but that seemed not to be the case when she spoke. “Young man, there are few people who understand as much about themselves as you understand about yourself, to the depth that you understand it. But your greatest strength is that there are things you don’t recognize about yourself.”