Page 4 of Going Home in the Dark

Such lengthy pauses now separated their responses to each other that it seemed as if Bobby might have fallen into a coma out there in dangerous Baltimore.

At last he said, “How perfect could Maple Grove have been with comatose people strewn from one end of town to the other?”

She considered his question as though mulling over an issue of profound philosophical importance. “Don’t you think maybe ‘strewn’ is hyperbole, since neither of us can remember a single comatose person before Ernie?”

Perhaps Bobby translated his reply into Chinese, from Chinese into Hebrew, and from Hebrew back into English before he finally said, “Memory is a funny thing.”

“I’m not laughing here.”

“I mean, isn’t it possible, if you feel a thing happened, feel it intensely, it could be true even if you have no memory of it?”

“You mean like a repressed memory.”

“Repressed or erased.”

“Who could erase our memories?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “We can try to figure it out when we meet up in Maple Grove.”

“I guess I’m going there.”

“Of course you are. For Ernie. For Spencer. For me. For yourself. The four amigos.”

She said, “We’ve always known that one day we’d be going home again—haven’t we?”

“Yes.”

“How? How did we know?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to us back in the day?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s going to happen to us now?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know.”

Sliding off the hood ornament and oozing across the sun-warmed car metal, the dollop of guano seemed to be a portent, an omen, full of chalky-glistening-slimy symbolic meaning, though Rebecca wasn’t able to interpret it.

Having been nominated for an Emmy five times during the run ofEnemies, and having won twice, Rebecca possessed that special kind of confidence that also comes to ambitious car salesmen when they rack up enough deals to receive a plaque decorated with a small golden wheel and be named the Employee of the Month, or to a real estate agent similarly honored during the brokerage’s biannual banquet at Golden Corral. Now she tapped that well of confidence, seeking to wash away the dread that seeped into her like sludge from a broken sewer pipe, and she said, “There’s no reason to be scared. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

From out there in Baltimore, Bobby the Sham said, “I’m sure you’re right, although ...”

“Although what?”

“Although that’s what the blonde with the pixie haircut said.”

“What blonde with a pixie haircut?”

“I don’t think she had a name. InShriek and Shriek Again, she said that same thing just before Judyface cut her head in two with a chain saw.”

“Oh. Yeah. Her. That was the opening scene. The script just called her ‘Victim Number One.’”

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