“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”
“Like me being dead?”
“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife . . . no, he corrected himself, his late wife—sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.
“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”
“I thought you gave them up.”
“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”
Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.
“You’re in a nonsmoking room,” said the clerk. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.
“Got it,” said Shadow.
He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.
Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too,” said Laura.
When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.
“So,” she said. “They let you out.”
“Yes.”
The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”
“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.
“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”
“I guess.”
She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”
“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.
“I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”
“Yes.”
“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”
“I didn’t need to hear that.”
“No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”
“It matters to me.”