“You feel crap because what?” Justin had come out of his room, to the bottom of the stairs; I could picture him, in his striped pyjamas, clutching the banister and peering short-sightedly upwards. Daniel was giving me an intent, thoughtful gaze that made me edgy as hell.
“Shut up!” yelled Abby, furious enough that we could hear her right through her door. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”
“Lexie? You feel crap because what?”
A thud: Abby had thrown something. “Justin, I said shut up! Jesus! ”
Faintly, from the ground floor, Rafe shouted something irritable that sounded like “What the hell is going on?”
“I’ll come down and explain, Justin,” Daniel called. “Everyone go back to bed.” To me: “Good night.” He stood up and smoothed the duvet again. “Sleep well. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Don’t count on it.”
The steady rhythm of his footsteps going downstairs, then hushed voices below me: at first a lot of Justin and an occasional brief interjection from Daniel, shifting gradually till it was the other way round. I got out of bed, carefully, and put my ear to the floor, but they were talking barely above whispers and I couldn’t make out the words.
It was twenty minutes before Daniel came back upstairs, softly, pausing for a long few seconds on the landing. I didn’t start shaking until his bedroom door closed behind him.
I stayed awake for hours that night, flipping pages and pretending to read, rustling the covers and doing deep breaths and pretending to be asleep, unplugging the mike for a few seconds or a few minutes every now and then. I think I created a pretty good impression of a jack come loose, disconnecting and reconnecting itself as I moved, but it didn’t reassure me. Frank is very far from stupid, and he was in no humor to give me the benefit of any doubts.
Frank to the left of me, Daniel to the right, and here I was, stuck in the middle with Lexie. I passed the time, while I played my mike-jack game, by trying to work out how it was logistically possible for me to have ended up on the opposite side from absolutely everyone else involved in this case, including people who were on opposite sides from each other. Before I finally went to sleep I took the chair from Lexie’s dressing table, for the first time in weeks, and braced it against my door.
Saturday went fast, in a helpless nightmare daze. Daniel had decided-partly because working on the house always settled them all down, presumably, and partly to keep everyone in one room and under his eye-that we needed to spend the day sanding floors: “We’ve been neglecting the dining room,” he told us, at breakfast. “It’s starting to look terribly shabby, next to the sitting room. I think today we should start bringing it up to scratch. What do you think?”
“Good idea,” said Abby, sliding eggs onto his plate and giving him a tired, determinedly positive smile. Justin shrugged and went back to picking at toast; I said, “Whatever,” into the frying pan; Rafe took his coffee and left without a word. “Good,” Daniel said serenely, going back to his book. “That’s a plan, then.”
The rest of the day was just about as excruciating as I’d expected. The Happy Place magic was apparently on its day off. Rafe was in a silent, fuming rage with the whole world; he kept banging the sander into the walls, making everyone jump, till Daniel took it out of his hands without a word and passed him a sheet of sandpaper instead. I turned up my sulk as loud as I could and hoped it would have some effect on someone, and that sooner or later-not too much later-I would find a way to use it.
Outside the windows it was raining, thin petulant rain. We didn’t talk. Once or twice I saw Abby wipe her face, but she always had her back to the rest of us and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was just the sawdust. It got everywhere: drifting up our noses, down our necks, working its way into the skin of our hands. Justin wheezed ostentatiously and had great dramatic coughing fits into a handkerchief until finally Daniel put down the sander, stalked out, and came back with an ancient, hideous gas mask, which he held out to Justin in silence. No one laughed.
“They’ve got asbestos in them,” Rafe said, scrubbing viciously at an awkward corner of floor. “Are you actually trying to kill him, or do you just want to give that impression?”
Justin gave the mask a horrified look. “I don’t want to breathe asbestos.”
“If you’d prefer to tie your handkerchief around your mouth,” said Daniel, “then do that instead. Just stop moaning.” He shoved the mask into Justin’s hands, went back to the sander and fired it up again.
The gas mask that had sent me and Rafe into a giddy fit, that night on the patio. Daniel can wear it into college, we’ll get Abby to embroider it… Justin dumped it gingerly in a bare corner, where it sat for the rest of the day, staring at us all with huge, empty, desolate eyes.
