Free Day of Wrath by Jonathan Valin Page B

asleep?"
    "All right. I wanted to look through Robbie's room again,
anyway."
    We turned to the stairs like an old married couple retiring
for the night.
    "I'm sorry I broke down," she said. "It won't happen again."
    When we got to the bedroom, she pressed my arm.
    "Thanks," she said. "I'll be O.K. now. I just needed a
shoulder to cry on, I guess. I'll be fine." She turned to the door, then
looked back at me. "I don't think you disagree with it, Harry. The street
and all this." She gestured about her. "I think you're disappointed in
it. And that's a very different thing. You seem to be a man who is easily
disappointed in people. You must have very high standards."
    " For everyone but myself," I said with a laugh.
    "No," she said earnestly. "I don't believe that. You're
idealistic, which is what makes you such an odd man. As for me . . . I
just want things to be the way they were. I just want my daughter back."
    She stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind
her. I spent an hour going through Robbie's things one more time. But I
wasn't thinking about the girl as I looked over the books and the jewelry
and the clothing. I was thinking about her mother, who was lying in a bed
in the adjoining room, trying to make sense out of the jumbled materials
of her own life—trying to piece it all back together, as if it were one
of her china cups.
    She'd come close to breaking down an hour before. So close
it had worried me. I wasn't in the business of keeping other people sane.
I knew that. But I'd acted as if I were, partly because the woman had needed
reassurance, partly because I'd felt guilty for the way I'd treated her
earlier that morning, and partly because it had been the only thing to
do. It had been thoroughly unprofessional to pretend there was no reason
to worry about Robbie's welfare.
    The whole business left me feeling vaguely conspiratorial,
as if I'd committed myself to a scheme to keep Mildred from learning the
truth about her daughter—not just the truth about what had happened to
her, but the truth about what had happened to their relationship. Mildred
only wanted things to be the same as they were; the truth was that they
could never be the same again. Not after what had happened to Bobby Caldwell.
Not after what she'd begun to discover about Robbie. And not after what
Robbie had probably learned about herself.
 

    10
    I DIDN'T FIND ANYTHING NEW IN ROBBIE'S ROOM. I spent a
few minutes thumbing through the Gurdjieff and the Hueben books. The one
looked like it had barely been opened; the other had been thoroughly read
and underscored, as if Robbie had been prepping for an exam in sex education.
It would have been easy to make a good deal out of that, if I hadn't dimly
remembered my own adolescence and all those nights spent squinting over
art books and medical texts in my father's study. That was how I picked
up my sex education—ogling paintings by Rubens and nude photographs of
hebephrenics. It's no wonder you're an odd man, Harry, I said to myself.
    The hash pipe and the papers had been purchased at The
Head Shop in Mt. Adams. Thumbnail price tags were still attached to each.
There was no store label in the T-shirt or on any of the other items. I
put them all back in the cardboard box, put the box in the closet, and
closed the sliding door. The house was still and sleepy, save for the faint
hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
    I tiptoed past Mildred's bedroom and down the stairs.
Outside, everything was still and sleepy, too. The boys had gone in from
the playfield. And the street was deserted, except for a tall, gray-haired
priest sweepmg dust from the cobbled stairs leading to the school. I watched
him for a moment—lean, black, intent—bent to his work as if the sweeping
actually meant something, as if he wouldn't have to do the same thing again
the next afternoon when the boys trudged in from the playfields. He finished
with a flourish, tamping the broom stoutly on the stone then putting