Book of Kelly

“Your offer intrigues me, Mr. Derleth.”

Vincent Bell stood beneath the terminal awning with his bag held close to his leg. Behind him, the automatic doors opened and closed, releasing brief currents of warm air that smelled of old coffee, damp clothing, and the exhausted patience of people waiting to be taken elsewhere.

“But I have come to Providence for a reason.”

August Derleth inclined his head.

“Yes. Of course.”

He did not appear disappointed. If anything, Vincent’s objection seemed to confirm something he had already considered.

“May I ask what reason?”

Vincent looked past him.

A bus was pulling away from the curb. Water trembled beneath its tires. Through a darkened window, he glimpsed the pale oval of a face and a raised hand that might have been waving or merely resting against the glass.

The bus moved on.

Vincent continued watching the space it had occupied.

“Perhaps I could help,” August said. “Whatever brought you here.”

The words were mild.

There was nothing in them that required an answer.

Nevertheless, Vincent felt an uncomfortable pressure to provide one.

He had known the reason in San Francisco.

Of that, he was almost certain.

There had been a moment above Robert Armstrong’s bar when the decision had possessed such clarity that everything else—the distance, the cost, the uncertainty of arrival—had seemed secondary.

Providence.

He had said the name, and Robert had bought the ticket.

Now he stood in Providence and discovered that the purpose of the journey had failed to arrive with him.

He searched the terminal windows.

The benches.

The people passing through the doors.

Sometimes a forgotten thought returned when he found the thing it had been standing beside. A cup. A certain color. A word spoken without emphasis.

But these were new surroundings.

Nothing here knew where he had put his reason.

August waited.

Vincent shifted the bag to his other hand.

“I am having some difficulty recalling it at the moment.”

The admission emerged with a dignity he had to work to preserve.

August’s expression did not change.

“It happens more often than I would prefer.”

Vincent gave a small, distracted smile.

“As I imagine many things do.”

A taxi passed without stopping.

He followed it with his eyes until it disappeared around the corner.

“Give me a moment.”

“I will wait,” August said.

The old man made no attempt to fill the silence.

That should have been a kindness.

Instead, Vincent became increasingly conscious of being watched.

Not impatiently.

Not even closely enough to object.

August simply remained present, allowing the work of recollection to become something Vincent performed before him.

The morning continued around them.

A woman emerged carrying a sleeping child against her shoulder. A man dragged a suitcase with one defective wheel, the uneven rattle following him across the pavement. Somewhere near the curb, a driver called a destination in a voice worn flat by repetition.

Vincent closed his eyes.

For a moment, the bus journey remained inside him.

The movement of the seat.

The narrow aisle.

The reflected faces suspended over black windows.

Then, beneath those recent things, another image rose.

White dust on dark hair.

A hand turning an unfinished shape toward the light.

A room in which something had been covered with a cloth.

He opened his eyes abruptly.

“Constance.”

August remained still.

“My wife.”

The words seemed to settle Vincent more firmly inside himself.

“Yes. Constance has something to do with it.”

“I see,” August said.

His voice became softer by a degree.

“Then let me express my condolences on her passing.”

Vincent looked at him.

For an instant, the street seemed to recede.

Not because the news surprised him.

Because it did not.

He knew this.

Somewhere, he had already received it.

Somewhere, he had already stood through the first silence that followed.

He searched for that earlier moment and found only the certainty of its having occurred.

“Thank you.”

August lowered his head.

A conventional gesture.

Expertly small.

“Yes,” Vincent continued. “I believe I had heard.”

The distinction troubled him as soon as he made it.

Heard.

He lifted a hand toward the side of his head, then let it fall before touching anything.

“It was after I removed my ears.”

August offered no visible response.

No astonishment.

No glance toward the place where the hair had been arranged with care.

Vincent felt an immediate, disproportionate gratitude for that restraint.

Other people often behaved as though the mention of his ears entitled them to inspect the consequences.

August did not.

He merely listened.

“I don’t recall,” Vincent said, “what she would have to do with Providence.”

The sentence sounded crueler than he intended.

As though the city belonged to one compartment of his life and Constance to another, and he could not imagine why anyone had troubled to place them together.

But it was not indifference.

It was the terrible nearness of something he could not reach.

Constance’s name had opened a door.

Beyond it lay a room he recognized.

He could see the light.

He could not cross the threshold.

“Perhaps it will come back,” August said.

Vincent looked down at his bag.

The handle had left a red indentation across his fingers.

He had carried it for three days and seven hours. He had kept it beneath his seat, beside his feet, against his knees. He had remembered it at every stop.

He had not abandoned a single useless object.

Only the reason for bringing them.

“May I offer you a ride somewhere while you think?”

August asked the question as though the practical difficulty were now the only one that mattered.

Vincent looked toward the curb.

There were cars.

Drivers.

Places with names he did not yet know.

A ride required a destination.

The realization arrived slowly enough to make him wish he had not been given time to have it.

He looked back through the terminal doors.

For three days, the stations had provided an arrangement he could inhabit without explaining himself.

A seat.

A departure time.

A route.

Even waiting had possessed a purpose.

Now the journey was over, and no one had told him where to stand.

A little warmth had gathered beneath the edge of the wax ear on the left side of his head.

He felt it shift.

Only slightly.

A loosening of pressure near the temple.

Vincent raised his hand and adjusted it with an absent care that suggested he had performed the gesture often enough to forget what it looked like.

The wax was not quite the color of his skin.

In the cold morning light, it seemed paler.

Something fashioned.

Something doing its best to stand in for what was gone.

August’s eyes moved to the hand.

Then back to Vincent’s face.

He said nothing.

Vincent continued looking around the station.

A posted notice fluttered inside its frame.

Someone had abandoned a paper cup on a low wall.

The doors opened again, and a gust of terminal air stirred the hem of his coat.

He had imagined arrival.

Not this part of it.

Not the moment afterward, when the road ceased to carry him and the world expected him to make the next decision alone.

“Mister Wild?”

August’s voice reached him after what seemed a considerable interval.

Vincent turned.

The preferred name, spoken so courteously, restored something of his composure.

“Yes.”

“Is there somewhere you would like me to take you?”

Vincent’s fingers tightened around the bag.

He considered inventing a place.

A hotel.

An acquaintance.

An address remembered incorrectly.

It would have been easy to preserve his dignity for another minute.

Then the minute would end.

He looked at August.

“This is embarrassing.”

The old man waited.

“I really have nowhere to go.”

The confession was small.

Its consequences did not feel small.

Vincent had lived above Robert’s bar long enough to regard shelter as one of those arrangements that simply existed around a person. There were stairs. A key. A room whose particular creaks and shadows no longer required attention.

A cat expecting food.

Downstairs, Robert opening for the evening.

He had left that life to answer something he could no longer remember clearly.

Now he stood in a city associated with his dead wife, wearing a face partly repaired in wax, explaining to a stranger that arrival had exhausted his resources.

August did not rush to reassure him.

For a moment, he looked past Vincent toward the doors, as though considering an ordinary inconvenience.

Then he said, “Let me help with that.”

Vincent lifted his head.

“I have secured a loft in the Valley neighborhood.”

The words arrived with the smoothness of a key turning in a lock.

Not I know somewhere.

Not we might find a room.

I have secured a loft.

Already done.

Already waiting.

Vincent heard the difference.

Some quiet part of him, not yet exhausted by the journey, turned toward it.

“For whom?”

August’s expression remained pleasant.

“For the arrangement I mentioned.”

“The books.”

“Yes.”

Vincent looked toward the street.

A room.

A place to put down the bag.

Somewhere with a door he could close while he tried to recover the purpose that had brought him across the country.

The offer seemed almost excessively generous.

Then again, perhaps Providence was a city in which such things happened.

Perhaps that was why he had come.

He tried to imagine the loft.

High windows.

An open floor.

Light broad enough to change during the day.

He could not tell whether he was imagining a future or remembering one someone had described to him long ago.

“That sounds perfect,” he said.

August’s smile deepened almost imperceptibly.

Then Vincent remembered the cat.

Not the reason for the journey.

Not the missing connection between Constance and Providence.

The cat.

The simple obligation returned with a clarity that made everything else seem, briefly, less hopeless.

“Do they allow pets?”

August answered at once.

“Yes.”

Vincent studied him.

“My cat is still in San Francisco.”

“I understand.”

“Robert is feeding her.”

“That seems sensible.”

“I would have to arrange—”

“Those details can be attended to.”

The old man’s confidence was gentle enough to lean upon.

Vincent felt himself beginning to do so.

Still, the question mattered.

He had left many things uncertain. He did not intend to make the animal pay for all of them.

“You’re certain?”

August met his eyes.

“I would not have secured it if it did not.”

Vincent became quiet.

Behind August, Providence extended into the morning: wet streets, old masonry, windows reflecting a sky that had not quite decided to brighten.

Somewhere within it waited a loft prepared before he had asked for one.

Somewhere within it lay the explanation for Constance.

He could feel that much.

Or wanted to.

The distinction was becoming harder to preserve.

August turned slightly toward the curb.

“Shall we?”

Vincent looked back at the terminal.

For a moment, he had the peculiar conviction that he ought to remain beneath its awning until the missing thought returned. That if he left too soon, it would arrive a few minutes later and find no one waiting to receive it.

Then the doors opened behind him.

Another traveler emerged.

The moment passed.

He adjusted his wax ear.

Lifted his bag.

And followed August toward the car.

As they walked, the opening of a song stirred in Vincent’s throat.

Holding someone.

Only in his dreams.

A question asked so often that it had begun to seem as though an answer was owed.

He did not sing.

Not yet.

August reached the passenger door and opened it for him.

Vincent paused before getting in.

“Providence,” he murmured.

As though the city’s name might still unlock the rest.

August rested one hand upon the open door.

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve arrived.”

Vincent lowered himself into the seat.

The door closed with a solid, reassuring sound.

For the first time since leaving San Francisco, he had somewhere to go.

He sat with the bag on his knees, grateful for the fact, while August walked around the front of the car.

Only when the old man disappeared briefly beyond the windshield did Vincent remember the wording of the offer.

I have secured a loft.

He watched August’s hand reach for the driver’s door.

He had not told the man he needed a home.

He had not told him about the cat.

The engine started before he could decide which of those things ought to trouble him more.