The Corner of the Frame

The Corner of the Frame

The sleepwalking was not the worst thing on the tape.

I went to the top corner of the frame, the corner where Emily had put her bed.

From 3:14 a.m. on, while I sat up and went down and talked in a child's voice, Emily never closed her eyes.

She lay still on the bed. In the flat infrared her eyes were open wide, aimed at the ceiling. She didn't move, didn't sit up, and showed nothing at all.

My arms went down at my sides and my weight went back against the chair. The laptop stopped on the last frame: Emily's face on the bed, not moving, her eyes wide open on nothing in the dark, taking in every line a 15-year-old was saying with my mouth.

There was no alarm in it. She lay there the way a person lies there when the thing in front of her is going the way it was meant to go.

Emily had lied to me again, the house was not a safe place, and my own brain no longer belonged to me.

I put my hand flat on the desk beside the laptop and left it there. In a house with this much arrangement in it, who was holding the key to what was real? Who knew about the child named B, about the red Parcheesi piece, about the night 31 years ago?

One name came up in my head: GhostInk.

The strange pages that anonymous ghostwriter had been sending me were where all of it started coming through. He knew. He had to know something that had been taken out of me.

I got up, ran the ethernet cable straight into the laptop, and opened the encrypted chat window. I let go of the pride and of the whole ugly argument the two of us had had online, and for the first time I typed to him first:

"I need to meet you. Now. I'll come anywhere you want."

GhostInk's ash-gray avatar sat there and did nothing for almost five minutes, five minutes of me turning my head toward the living room door in case Emily woke up, and then a new line came up, slow:

"I don't meet people."

I set my teeth, brought both hands down on the desk, and typed fast:

"Stop playing. I just watched last night back on tape. I went down into my own basement out of my mind and talked in a child's voice, and my wife lay there and watched me do it. You know about this. Tell me what you want so it stops."

The screen sat quiet a moment. Then GhostInk's next line came up, one word at a time, unhurried:

"I'll answer every question you have. But you have to write the eighth book. This time you're the main character."

Write the eighth book? Make myself the main character and open the whole thing up? I read the line twice. My hand stayed on the edge of the desk. I typed back fast:

"This is blackmail. You're using the fact that I'm cornered to push me into your script."

On his end nothing moved. The last line came through short:

"Nobody's blackmailing you, James. This is treatment."

GhostInk's "Nobody's blackmailing you, James. This is treatment" stayed on the screen, putting its pale blue light out across the desk. I sat there with both hands on the edge of the table. I had no answer to make to it and nowhere to go with the anger, so I left both where they were.

I was still sitting like that when the cheap phone in my pocket, the one with no internet on it, started to buzz.

The buzzing carried into the wood of the desk and I moved. I got it out of my pocket and the screen said Michael.

I answered and put it against my ear. Before I could get a word out Michael was already talking, fast, short of breath, his voice coming apart at the edges.

"James. I got the statements."

I put my free hand flat on the desk. "Go ahead," I said. "What's the number?"

"Two days on this. It's off the old paper statements in the filing cabinet at your place, not the bank. Eleven years, 43 transfers, different amounts every time, and they add up to more than $200,000."

Michael pulled in a breath, and it came over the line thin and scraped. "Every dollar of it went to one address, a private facility in Westchester. I know a guy at a title insurance company, he pulls public records all day, so I had him run the business registration on the place. James. That facility has no fertility department. It never had one."

The edges of the room slid a little and came back.

For 11 years Emily had said she was going out there for private psychiatric treatment, and since January for the fertility work as well. Every large withdrawal from the family savings came with that reason attached to it. The reason was manufactured, start to finish.

"Whose name is on them?" I said. "The doctor who signed."

Michael read out a name I had never heard, the kind of name an old-school psychiatrist has.

I didn't need a second to think about it.

"Keep going. Find out where he came from, where he is now, and whether he still holds a license. I need to know where that money actually went."

The call ended. After that there was nothing to do but sit with the wall clock going.

I sat in the quiet and went back and forth between the memory card with me sleepwalking and talking like a child on it, and GhostInk's chat window, which had stopped moving.

I washed the two mugs in the sink and stood them upside down on the towel. I wound the wall clock, which had four days on it yet. I made coffee in the press and let it sit until it was cold and poured it down the drain. Twice I picked up the cheap phone to check the ringer.

The house was quieter than it should have been. Every so often a floorboard in the basement contracted and clicked.

The money plant on the bookcase had water standing in the saucer and the soil was dark all the way to the rim. I had not watered it in nine days. I put a finger into it to the first knuckle, wiped the finger on my jeans, and sat back down.

Exactly 40 minutes later the phone went again.

I had it up on the first ring.

"Did you find him?"

The shake was gone out of Michael's voice. He was flat now, and slow, and there was nothing behind it.

"James. I found his file."

"And? Where is he?" I stopped breathing to hear it.

"He died in 1998."

Michael's voice slipped off the words, and each one came down on its own.

"Are you hearing me? Your wife has been signing invoices with a dead man's signature."