Projection by Keith Ablow Read Free Book Online

that was because we were close or because they knew enough (or had been through enough hell themselves) to keep their distance.  Maybe a light touch and the gift of space are the greatest things you can give a man like me, cornered too many times by a father raging through the night, a bottle in one hand, a belt in the other.
    I had let Rachel in close.  Then I had lost her.
    I saw the round tower of West Lynn Creamery coming up, across from Webster Avenue, which starts with a boarded-up Pizza Palace and ends with the Lynn Y.  I swerved to make the hard right on to Webster, guessing that Cynthia would have headed back to her place when I hadn't come home within a few hours.
    I stayed in my truck a minute or two deciding whether to go inside. What was I there for, after all?  If it was sex, I could have it delivered.  A different girl every time.  If I was trying to bury my grief over Rachel's death or escape my guilt over the deaths of Grace Cummings and Lawrence Winston, then I was just drugging myself again.
    I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes.  I was thinking too much — my chief defense against feeling too much.  I wanted to see Cynthia.  I got out of the truck.
    The Y had been a Comfort Inn for about a year in the early 90s, until whoever had been betting on Lynn's revitalization realized the city wasn't coming back from the grave, and donated the building for a tax credit.  Over the years that followed, the place became a way station for schizophrenics, addicts and prostitutes coming from someplace worse or going someplace worse, but together enough for the time being to turn their welfare checks into $380-a-month or $22-a-day rent, instead of drink, dope or lottery tickets.
    The staff's attempt to keep up the lobby had resulted in a surreal combination of Paine furniture and pained people.  On my way to the reception desk I passed a crumpled man and woman, past middle age, seated on separate love seats in front of a knotty pine false fireplace.  The love seats faced one another, but the man and woman made no eye contact.  He stared up at the mirror over the mantel, she, into the empty hollow where a fire would burn.  I couldn't tell whether or not they were a couple, whether or not they were on their way up in life or down, whether this was a pit stop or their last stop.  But even in my burnt-out state, those questions were enough to make me want to plant myself in one of the armchairs near them and burrow into their story.  The impulse was no surprise to me.  I have always felt an undertow of humanity pulling me into desperate lives, probably because I grew up in desperation myself.
    The desk clerk, a young man who suffered what looked like cerebral palsy, informed me there were no visitors allowed after midnight, then rang Cynthia's room after I slipped him ten bucks.  She told him to send me up.
    I took the stairs to the third floor.  The door to room 305 opened with one knock, and Cynthia stood there in a white T-shirt that barely reached her thighs.  She tilted her head, and her straight, light brown hair cascaded to one side of her face.  "I waited a while, then left," she said.  "I figured something bad must have happened at the hospital."
    I swallowed hard.  "Things went wrong."
    She held out her hand.  I took it and followed her into the room.  The only light came from a set of sconces on either side of the bed.  Only half the bulbs worked, but they showed what I expected — an economy hotel room part of the way to disrepair, with stained wall-to-wall carpeting and faded, floor-to-ceiling floral draperies.  I was surprised to see what looked like a pretty competent oil painting of a winged woman in a flowing violet robe hanging over the bed.
    "Two people were killed," I said, not knowing why I was confiding in her.
    Cynthia turned around.  She had the rare ability to say nothing.  And she had those eyes that seemed to understand everything.  Rachel's eyes.
    I let go of