8
Neither of them knows – no one does – that a rogue virus is going to shut down America and most of the world in half a year, but by their fourth day in the basement apartment, Billy and Alice are getting a preview of what sheltering in place will be like. On that fourth morning, a day before Billy has decided to set sail into the golden west, he is doing his sprints up to the third floor and back. Alice has neatened up the apartment, which hardly needed it since neither of them is particularly messy. With that done she subsided to the couch. When Billy comes in, out of breath from half a dozen stair-sprints, she’s watching a cooking show on TV.
‘Rotisserie chicken,’ he says. ‘Looks good.’
‘Why make it at home when you can buy one just as good at the supermarket?’ Alice turns off the TV. ‘I wish I had something to read. Could you download a book for me? Maybe a detective story? On one of the cheap laptops, not yours.’
Billy doesn’t answer. An idea, audacious and frightening, has come into his head.
She misreads his expression. ‘I didn’t look or anything, I just know it’s yours because the case is scratched. The others look brand new.’
Billy isn’t thinking she tried to snoop in his computer. She’d never get past the password prompt, anyway. He’s thinking of the M151 spotter scope, and how he didn’t explain its purpose because what he was writing was only for himself. No one else would ever read it. Only now there is someone, and what harm can it do, considering what she knows about him already?
But it could do harm, of course. To him. If she didn’t like it. If she said it was boring and asked for something more interesting.
‘What’s going on with you?’ she asks. ‘You look weird.’
‘Nothing. I mean … I’ve been writing something. Kind of a life story. I don’t suppose you’d want to—’
‘Yes.’
9
He can’t bear to watch her sitting with his Mac Pro on her lap, reading the words he wrote here and in Gerard Tower, so he goes upstairs to the Jensens’ to spritz Daphne and Walter. He puts a twenty on the kitchen table, with a note that says For Netflix, and then just walks around. Paces around, actually, like an expectant father in an old cartoon. He looks at the Ruger in the drawer of Don’s nightstand, picks it up, puts it back, closes the drawer.
It’s ridiculous to be nervous, she’s a business school student, not a literary critic. She probably sleepwalked through her high school English courses, happy with Bs and Cs, and very likely the only thing she knows about Shakespeare is that his name rhymes with kick in the rear. Billy understands he’s downplaying her intelligence to protect his ego in case she doesn’t like it, and he understands that’s stupid because her opinion shouldn’t matter, the story itself shouldn’t matter, he’s got more important things to deal with. But it does.
Finally he goes back downstairs. She’s still reading, but when she looks up from the screen he’s alarmed to see her eyes are red, the lids puffy.
‘What’s wrong?’
She wipes her nose with the heel of her hand, a childish gesture, oddly winning. ‘Did that really happen to your sister? Did that man really … stomp her to death? You didn’t make that up?’
‘No. It happened.’ Suddenly he feels like crying himself, although he didn’t cry when he wrote it.
‘Is that why you saved me? Because of her?’
I saved you because if I’d left you in the street the cops would have eventually come here, he thinks. Except that’s probably not all the truth. Do we ever tell ourselves all of it?
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m so sorry that happened to you.’ Alice begins to cry. ‘I thought what happened to me was bad, but—’
‘What happened to you was bad.’
‘—but what happened to her is worse. Did you really shoot him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good! And you got put in a home?’
‘Yes. You can stop if it’s upsetting you.’ But he doesn’t want her to stop and he’s not sorry for upsetting her. He’s glad. He reached her.
She grips the laptop as if afraid he might pull it away. ‘I want to read the rest.’ Then, almost accusingly: ‘Why haven’t you been doing this instead of watching a stupid TV show upstairs?’
‘Self-conscious.’
‘All right. I get that, I feel the same, so stop looking at me. Let me read.’