In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “Lily hated to have her picture taken,” said her foster mother. “She simply refused, she wouldn’t do it. Maybe she inherited that from her father, because he was the same way.”

  “I know,” said Tim, thinking of the black-coated figure silhouetted against the sky at the top of North Superior Street. “I hope that’s all she did inherit from him.”

  Something shifted in the way she took him in: it was as if she were imitating the forthright stance in the photograph. “You really want to write a book about Lily, do you?”

  Willy wandered up on the other side of Tim. She craned her neck forward and scanned the photo. When she spoke, her voice contained a slightly defeated tone. “She was amazing. I should have known.”

  Mrs. Huntress gave her a bemused smile. “Well, you’re very lovely, too, you must know that. In fact, you’re so pretty, it almost hurts to look at you.” She turned again to Tim. “Sit yourselves down, I’ll get you some tea or coffee, and you can tell me about your book.”

  In the end, seated on the firm Huntress sofa with a cup of excellent coffee before him, unhappy Willy steadily sipping from a glass of Coke, he could never be sure what Diane Huntress made of his confused description of the book he claimed to be researching. The word “tactful” turned up, as did “respectful.” As he blathered, he began to think that this was a book he could actually write, forgetting that he had no patience for the kind of detailed research it would involve. If he tried to write such a book, it would consist mainly of leaps into the dark, a number of them noticeably ungainly.

  “I’m sure it’ll come into better focus when you’ve worked on it awhile,” Mrs. Huntress said. “I have to be completely honest with you and tell you that I don’t think you or anyone else should write a book about Lily.”

  “Then you’re being very generous, letting me talk to you.”

  “Lily isn’t going to do anything to stop you, so I think it’s my duty to see that you understand her as well as possible. If you want to talk to her in person, which she is willing to do under certain conditions, you’ll get an idea of the life she has now, but that idea won’t be good enough—it won’t be enough, period. She asked me to tell you that she’s willing to meet with you for an hour, but that nothing she says to you can be quoted in your book.”

  “You don’t want me to meet her, do you?”

  “Let me tell you about Lily Kalendar.”

  Hearing those words at last, Tim sensed a movement on the other side of the room and glanced past Mrs. Huntress to see what it was. His heart stopped. In her Alice dress, April lay on a vibrant rug no larger than herself, her cheek resting on a hand, looking intently at him. Having been seen, she pushed herself upright, got to her feet, and stepped backward, never taking her eyes from him. Tim knew that it was she who had led him to this place, that he might hear out the woman who had known Lily Kalendar best. She wanted him to do more than hear: she was commanding him to listen.

  You have to know a few things about me first, Diane Huntress said. My father built the Sundown Community, which is what we used to call this area, in the forties, and he placed it in this basin because he wanted it to be at one remove from the outside world. He graded Sundown Road himself and he built that little plaza and the bandstand at the bottom. The whole thing was his idea. We never had any money, but that didn’t bother us. My father really didn’t care about money. Originally, all the people who lived here knew one another, and we used to have these communal meals, and there’d be singing, and people would play their instruments, and we’d dance. We had this sense of shared ideals, a shared vision. Nothing ever stays the same in this world, especially communities like Sundown. A lot of new people were moving in by the time Guy Huntress and I got married.

  We were busy—Guy was a housepainter, and I came along and did the detail work. I worked as a waitress, too. We started going places together, spending what little we had on things we came across and liked instead of on hotels and fancy meals. We discovered we couldn’t have children, and that was a blow. And Guy didn’t want to adopt. But one day he said, You know, we could give back to the community by taking in a foster child. That way, at least we’d have a kid around the house. I thought it was a great, great idea, the greatest. We got in touch with Social Services, they put us in touch with Georgia Lathem, and that’s how we got our first three foster children. One after the other, not all together.

  Sally, Rob, and Charlie. Wonderful kids. Screwed up as hell when we first got them, but basically okay. A little antisocial, you know, shoplifting, mouthing off, testing the rules. All the normal stuff. What we did with those kids, we thought was what everybody would do. Now, to Georgia Lathem and them, what we did was special. So when they had an unusual case come in, I guess they thought of us first. We go down to Karadara Street, we go into Miss Lathem’s office, and sitting there like a little wet cat is this child named Lily Kalendar. What we didn’t know about Lily and her background would fill volumes, let me tell you.

  This one is going to be trouble, Guy said. This one is going to break your heart, he said. Are you sure you want to do this? Her first day in the Foundlings’ Shelter, Lily peed on the floor and tried to stab another kid with a pencil. Her second day, she lit a fire in the game room. She barely talked. She was like a little savage. Sure I’m sure, I told my husband. This kid Lily, this little monster, she’s going to be my project, because you know what? I love her already.

  And I did. I did love that child. I saw something in her, maybe what you saw in that picture, Mr. Underhill. I saw a terribly damaged little girl who felt everything that happened everywhere. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Underhill? The spirit in there, it might have been scared and angry and half-poisoned, but it wasn’t selfish.

  She was angry. Lily was the angriest child I ever met—no, the angriest person I ever met. The first thing I had to do was let her know that she could have all that anger and still feel safe. Once we got through that stage, I was pretty sure we could begin to make a human being out of the girl. She still talked in baby talk half the time, and she pronounced her name Wiwwy, because she couldn’t say the letter l. Wiwwy hate, Wiwwy bite. You know how many times I heard that? Other times, she rolled out curse words so terrible a superstitious person would say she was possessed. She was possessed, but by herself, not the devil.

  When she got wild, I’d roll her up in a blanket and lie down on the ground with her and hold her until she stopped screeching. I had to toilet train her, the way you do a three-year-old. We had messes I won’t describe, but they were awful. And, of course, she’d never been to school a day in her life, but when she came to see that I was going to stick with her no matter what she did, or how terrible she acted, she calmed down enough for me to get some textbooks and readers. The point was, I wasn’t going to leave her, and I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was just going to do everything I could to make her feel better.

  At first, she was always running away! She’d slip out of the house when my back was turned and take off, but she was so terrified of everything, everything meant so much to her, that she could never get very far. I found her hiding behind the bushes, lying flat under cars. Weeping her head off. Terrified to go any farther, terrified of coming back. She’d scream her head off when I carried her home, but she clung tight, she didn’t struggle. No night room, she said, no night room for Wiwwy, and I’d tell her right back, Honey, we don’t have a night room, you don’t have to worry about it. So what was a night room?

  Separately, Timothy Underhill and Willy Patrick felt a succession of shocks like that of an electrical pulse zigzagging through their bodies and, like a pinball, lighting up whatever it touched.

  I called up Georgia Lathem, said Diane Huntress, and asked her, and what she told me just about peeled my scalp off. That terrible, terrible man built a horrible room onto his house, and he didn’t put any lights or windows in there, all he put in there was a big wooden bed! With, like, handcuffs on it, restraints. And to be frank, Mr. Underhill, he raped
his little girl on the bed—that was his punishment for her leaving the house. Well, I knew she’d been abused, but I hadn’t known it had been as bad as all that.

  You see, he didn’t want her to leave the house because he didn’t want anyone to know about her. She had no birth certificate, which gave us problems I’ll tell you about later. Officially, Lily Kalendar didn’t exist. He kept that child as his toy, Mr. Underhill, and he beat her and starved her, because that was his version of love. When I learned that, I knew I was in for a long siege, and so I was.

  After a while, I discovered the one thing that calmed her down. I read to her. It was like I had a charm, like I waved a magic wand over her. When I sat down next to this raging little thing and started to read, it never took her more than a couple of minutes to quiet down, stick her thumb in her mouth, and listen to the story. Oh my God, she was so adorable then. I must have read the same ten books over and over a thousand times, Goodnight Moon and Ping and Make Way for Ducklings and The Runaway Bunny. I can still see her, lying on the floor with her chin in her hands, drinking in every word I said. Concentrating, concentrating, concentrating. When I saw that, I knew hope—hope can just about strike you dead, so you have to take care with it, but Lily’s ability to concentrate made me feel that sunlight had just entered a very, very dark room.

  And the other thing was, she was smart. She remembered everything we read, word for word, and once we moved past those ten books, she really demanded that what we read was stuff worth reading. I tore through that little library my father established down there on Sundown Plaza. Six books every week, and Lily was pretty vocal about what she wanted me to read to her and what she didn’t. We had about six months when all she wanted were murder mysteries and horror stories! Now, I’m not saying that any of this went smoothly, because it certainly did not. Lily could spend days doing nothing but pouting or screaming or breaking things—she even screamed in her sleep. There were days Guy came home from work and looked at the mess and listened to the uproar, and I could see on his face he was wondering if I could really take it much longer. But talk about saints, Guy never said he’d had enough, that we could maybe hand this wild animal back to the city. Never.

  Dickens was our big breakthrough, Charles Dickens, may God care for him forever through all eternity. When we got started on Dickens, Lily didn’t want to stop! I started on A Christmas Carol, and she loved it so much she made me read it three times. The next one was, I think, The Old Curiosity Shop. But the miracle, what I call the miracle, happened near the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. She crawled into my lap! This was a girl who couldn’t bear to be touched when she first came into our lives, not unless she was wrapped in a blanket first, and then there was a fifty-fifty chance she would crap in the blanket. Never said a word, just squiggled in between me and the book and plunked herself down on my lap. God bless you, Mr. Dickens, that’s all I can say. See? It still makes me cry. Because, you know, everything good flowed from that one thing she did, that willingness to be close, that consent.

  From that, she learned to read. I’d say I taught Lily to read, but really she taught herself. With Dickens! Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay, they taught Lily how to read. We’d already taught her the alphabet, and she had memorized those ten children’s books we’d read over and over, so it was just a matter of making the connection between the letters and the words. I almost have to say that little girl memorized A Tale of Two Cities, because that was her method, all right. I said the words, and she looked at them, and then she said the words, and that’s how she learned to read.

  And did she read! Like a wolf! Those books, down they went! Social Services had been keeping in touch, of course—we had a weekly visit from Adele Spelvin, Willy’s social worker—and one day Adele Spelvin says to us that in her opinion Lily was ready to start going to school, which was a big moment for us, and a big decision, because it really felt like losing her, you know? You send a child to school, you give her to all these other people.

  She still had emotional problems, too. That should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow. You have to think hard about sending a kid to school if you can’t be certain she won’t lose it and decide to wipe her feces all over the walls of the girls’ room or slam some boy’s head onto the playground because he upset her in some way. Actually, she was pretty well over the bodily fluids phase, and she really was learning to manage her anger, but she still felt everything everywhere, and she was still wounded and she walked around in a blur of pain. . . . But she was coping!

  So I said, Okay, we’ll send her to Grace and Favor, which is the grade school right here in Sundown, but you people better know that there will be days when this child will simply not be able to come to your school. There will be days when she will show up but won’t be able to come out of the cloakroom, and you will have to bring her home. She may cry a lot, for no reason you can see. Well, let me tell you, I said, this little girl has plenty to cry about, and if you’d gone through what she went through, you’d be living in a rubber room and wearing a straitjacket.

  Everybody listened because I made them listen, Mr. Underhill, and off to school my girl went—oh, so terrified that day, and the next, and the next. After a long while she got used to the idea of walking down to Grace and Favor all on her lonesome. And by reports, because I insisted on reports, she got on well—after a while, I mean—with the other children, although to her they were just children, you see, not people she could make friends with and be comfortable around. I’m not sure she ever understood what a friend was supposed to be, and how to act toward one. None of her classmates ever came back here with her. The whole situation was a tremendous success, I can say that. We never expected her to bring friends home. Lily only got into a couple of fights, and she didn’t do any permanent damage to her opponents, which means that even when she lost it, she could manage a little bit of self-control.

  Those were the summers we took her abroad with us, to Kenya, where Guy took that picture after wheedling Lily for about an hour and telling her she could hide behind me, and the Black Forest and the Rhine, and Amsterdam. She didn’t have a birth certificate, but in this state there’s a document they can make up, called an extraordinary birth certificate, for times like that. The information on it isn’t necessarily accurate, because who knew the exact date of Lily’s birth? No one, not even her horrible father, I bet. And the hour? And her weight? Please. But there is information on her document, and that document is part of the record. So it’s fiction, and it’s true at the same time. Getting the document took a little doing, but it came through, and we could start going on our travels again. Lily spent every possible minute with her nose in a book, but every now and then we got her to look up from her page and see a cathedral, or a castle, or a good painting.

  But right then, when she was fourteen, two terrible things happened. My husband died, very suddenly, no warning at all. Pop, and there he was, dead in a heap on the ground. I thought I was going to go crazy with grief, but I couldn’t, for Lily’s sake. She took Guy’s death in her own way, and she took it hard. By dying, he betrayed her trust, which she’d only just learned to give. He’d abandoned her, and she turned wild again. There were days when I had to wrap her in her blanket all over again and hold her until she could feel some peace. And not long after, here came the second terrible thing: her father was arrested, and his terrible crimes were printed all over the newspapers. She couldn’t go to school anymore. I didn’t even try. Some of the children in her class came over here and shouted things at her from the front lawn. Every day! They painted things on our front door.

  Without Guy, I couldn’t handle it. On top of everything else, I had to go back to work, because we had no money coming in anymore. Getting a job was no picnic, but I finally landed a spot at the Dresden, more a cocktail lounge than a restaurant, but they serve food, too. Lily and I cried ourselves to sleep, because we could see it coming. She couldn’t stay here anymore, that was it. We both knew it. I was a wreck, s
he had to stay in all day, those children were calling her “monster baby” and all kinds of things, they were driving us both crazy. . . . And I was losing my grip! So I did the worst thing in the world, the worst thing possible, which I had no choice but to do. I put Lily back in the shelter.

  And they tortured her there. I thought they’d protect her, but they can only do so much when the kids are in those dormitories and they turn off the lights. They tortured her. I can’t bear to think of what happened to my dear girl when she was fourteen and fifteen years old. And do you know the most unbearable part of all that? Lily pretended nothing was wrong. She told me not to come, I thought because she was mad at me, which she was, but believe me, what she was actually doing was protecting me from the knowledge of what her life was like. In those days, Lily went wild—she smoked, and she drank, and she took drugs, because in her old age Georgia Lathem began to slip, and she couldn’t see what was going on under her own nose.

  By working at the Dresden, and learning to live on my own, I gradually began to put things together, and I realized that more than anything else in the world I wanted to get Lily back. I thought I had to get her back with me, if I was going to call myself a human being. So I astonished Miss Georgia Lathem by telling her I wanted to be Lily’s foster mother again, and what’s more, that I wanted to adopt her. Because that’s what we should have done the first time.

  Young woman, you appear to live on candy bars.

  Anyhow, my darling girl came back, and we lived together in this house, and I adopted her, and we had tons of work to do, academically, personally, psychologically, but we got through it. I managed to scrape together enough money to get tutors for her, but she was so smart that she didn’t need them for long. Academic work came so naturally to her, and she turned out to be a whiz in science. The mental problems were a lot more difficult. At one time, both of us were seeing therapists. I see you nodding your heads, so you know how much a person can get out of therapy. Guy never understood, and I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been forced to do it, but I doubt that Lily would have gone as far as she has without it.