The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  Doyle seemed to notice Benjamin in the hospital bed for the first time. He stared. “Whad happened?”

  “He tried to talk to his father,” she said.

  “I told him to knock thad off.”

  “You also promised you’d teach him how to do it safely!”

  The nurse came back with two burly men in white scrubs, who seized Doyle by the arms. Janie wondered what the nurse had heard. She hoped it hadn’t been too much.

  “Oush!” Doyle said. “Careful! My ribzh!” He dragged his feet as the two orderlies carried him out the door. “Zhanie, you have to help me!” he cried.

  Janie turned away. Doyle should have stopped playing poker. He should have taught Benjamin what he promised. But everything went back to the filter. They shouldn’t have given it to Doyle without thinking harder about what it might do. It had been wildly irresponsible, just handing it over. The apothecary would never have approved.

  “He’s gone,” she said to Benjamin, who gave no sign of hearing.

  She sat at his bedside. The room was silent. She wished she had brought her homework after all—anything to keep her mind from spinning around the wrongness of what they’d done, and the question of what they should do now. She felt that buzzing, anxious feeling again, rising in her chest.

  A paper drinking straw was on the little table by Benjamin’s bed, with a glass of water. Janie focused on the straw, pulling it toward her hand. She thought it shifted slightly, angling toward her, or maybe it was just a trick of the light.

  She blinked and tried again. At first nothing, and then the straw slid off the table and shot into her hand. The anxious feeling in her chest turned into triumphant, liquid joy, suffusing her whole body.

  The nurse came back into the room. “He’s gone,” she said. “You want to tell me who that was?”

  “He’s—a magician,” Janie said. “He’s our friends’ uncle.”

  The nurse frowned. “That man is trouble. You all right?”

  Janie nodded, clutching the straw in her hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Chapter 17

  Conscience

  Jin Lo sat listening to Ned Maddox’s radio, trying to decipher patterns in the cloud of signals, making notes on a piece of paper, looking for meaning. The U.S. Navy was searching the tiny islands in the China Sea for the rogue commander, Thomas Hayes, but she thought that was wrong. He wouldn’t be in the islands. The commander was a military man, and he knew that orders came from the top. So she thought he would go after Chairman Mao. To get to Mao he had to go to Beijing. To get to Beijing by water, which was a naval officer’s natural element, he had to go up the Grand Canal.

  She presented this theory to Ned Maddox.

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “He is crazy,” she said. “From grief.”

  “And you know this because—you’re psychic? Is that another one of your tricks?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So I’m supposed to risk my career for a guess.”

  “You would be helping your navy if we found him,” she said.

  “I’d also be abandoning my post.”

  “So tell them you’re leaving,” she said.

  “Because a strange girl washed up on the beach and told me to?”

  “Tell them you think he is in the canal.”

  “That’s not how it works,” he said. “I’m stationed here for a reason. I have orders.”

  “Your orders are to help your navy,” she said. “To look for enemies.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So there’s a protocol,” he said. “There’s a chain of command.”

  “But they are looking in the wrong place,” she said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “I would need evidence to explain why I wanted to go.”

  She tilted her head. “So you will let a nuclear explosion occur in China. And that will be your evidence.”

  “I’m not letting anything happen!”

  “You are,” she said. “By not acting.”

  “Stop pretending to be my conscience!”

  “I am your conscience,” she said.

  “You’re not,” he said. “I have my own, thank you very much!”

  Jin Lo sighed. She knew Ned Maddox had not asked for her to show up and start making demands. But no one ever asked for the task they had been given. “You remember I told you my teacher said that the universe is always doing its work,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You said that.”

  “This is what the universe is doing, Ned Maddox. We are what it is doing. Come with me and see. Or I will go alone.”

  “You don’t have a boat,” he said.

  “You hide one in the mangrove swamp.”

  He frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “I am not stupid.”

  “And if I say you can’t take it?”

  She looked him in the eye, to make sure he knew she was serious. “I will,” she said. “You cannot do your work and watch me all the time.”

  Chapter 18

  A Vanishing Act

  Janie’s parents made her go home from the hospital to sleep, over her protests. At the house, she checked the mail, in case anything had come from Vili.

  “Did anyone telephone?” she asked.

  “Why?” her father said. “You expecting a call from your agent?”

  “Just asking,” she said, sullen. Sometimes her parents forgot that she was not a child. She’d been in boarding school, and had a job washing dishes in an Italian restaurant. She’d been to Nova Zembla—although that had been chemically erased from their memories.

  In the morning, the hospital called to say that Benjamin was being discharged. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but they wanted him to stay home and rest.

  “I’ll stay home, too,” Janie said.

  “No, you’ll go to school,” her father said.

  “I won’t miss anything important.”

  “School is your job,” her father said. “We’ll work at home and keep an eye on him.”

  So her parents dropped Janie on the sidewalk outside the school, on their way to pick him up at the hospital. She had retrieved the jar of powder from under his bed and put it in her knapsack for safekeeping, but that didn’t make her feel any better.

  The blue sedan didn’t seem to be hanging around the school, at least. It was still early, and the Doyle twins were practicing on the tennis courts. Janie watched them wistfully. A game of tennis on a spring morning seemed so simple and straightforward. You couldn’t worry while you played tennis. Nothing mattered but getting to the ball. She walked around the chain-link fence to the court.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked.

  “We’re just hitting the ball,” Valentina said.

  “She’s winning,” Nat said.

  He picked up balls with a quick flick of his racquet against his toe. They both looked happy from playing, but then Janie thought she could see the worry come back into their faces, like a storm cloud gathering.

  “Our uncle was supposed to come to dinner last night,” Valentina said. “But he didn’t show up.”

  “Maybe he didn’t feel like it, with two black eyes,” Janie said.

  Nat looked confused. “Did we tell you he had two black eyes?”

  “Have you seen him?” Valentina asked, eager.

  Janie winced inwardly. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? “He came to the hospital last night, to see Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin was in the hospital?” Nat said.

  Janie nodded. “This weird thing happened where he stopped breathing.”

  “Like asthma?” Valentina asked.

  “
Sort of,” Janie said. “Do you know who your uncle plays poker with?”

  Nat flicked up another ball. “His name’s Joey Rocco,” he said. “They used to call him Joey the Haberdasher. He ran liquor in Detroit, back when it was illegal. He went to prison and he’s retired now, but our dad says he’s still a crook.”

  “Wait, is Benjamin okay?” Valentina asked.

  “I think so,” Janie said.

  The first bell rang, and the twins picked up their bags to go change.

  Joey the Haberdasher. A nickname like that seemed an ominous sign. What would her mother and father do if someone came to the house for Benjamin? Her parents had many admirable qualities, but they were not equipped to deal with gangsters.

  Janie couldn’t concentrate on anything in school. In chemistry, she sat at her desk with her chin in her hand and stared at a row of glass beakers, trying to slide one of them across the stone lab counter. Mr. Walters was droning on and on.

  “Miss Scott?” he said.

  Janie sat up straight.

  “Would you care to explain how that last reaction works?”

  She looked at the blackboard. The notes looked like incoherent scribbles. A beaker fell to the floor with a crash.

  “Who did that?” Mr. Walters snapped.

  Looks shot around the room, but no one had been anywhere near the lab counters.

  “Janie, you can clean it up, for not paying attention,” Mr. Walters said.

  She nodded and stood, her face hot, and got the broom and dustpan from the corner of the room. It took her the rest of the class to chase down all the glinting pieces. She let her hair fall over her face to hide the small smile of triumph she could feel on her face.

  When school finally let out, she avoided the twins, who might have more questions, and hurried in the direction of home, but the blue sedan cruised up beside her. It was a Chevrolet and said Bel Air in fancy letters on the side. The driver rolled the passenger window down and leaned over the seat. She caught his dark glasses out of the corner of her eye.

  “Afternoon, miss,” he said.

  She sped up her stride, gripping her knapsack strap, wondering if she could swing the bag as a weapon if he got out of the car. It was heavy with books.

  “Just stop a minute, miss,” he said.

  She shook her head no and kept walking.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” he asked.

  Her hands were sweating.

  “I said, miss, where’s the boy?”

  “What boy?” she asked.

  “The apothecary’s kid.”

  She glanced sideways. The dark glasses had blue lenses. What had Doyle told these people? “He left town,” she said.

  The man had to pull around two parked cars, but then he sidled back into the curb. “Left town?”

  She nodded. “He got really sick, so they sent him to a better hospital. On a plane.”

  “What kind of sick?”

  “They don’t know. The doctor had never seen anything like it.”

  He frowned. “Was it from taking that powder?”

  Janie’s heart plunged into her stomach. “What powder?”

  “The one he maybe left behind?”

  She renewed her sweaty grip on her knapsack, trying not to think about the glass jar nestled inside it. “He didn’t leave anything behind,” she said. “I’d know.”

  “Would you, now?” the man asked.

  “Of course.”

  “No suspicious jars or packages? Glass bottles?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  He had to pull around two more parked cars. Then he cruised back over. He stretched his hand out the window, holding a business card between two fingers. He had very white shirt cuffs and black enameled cufflinks. “My number,” he said. “If you run across anything.”

  Janie took the card, which said only EN-4800. No name. “Okay.”

  “What hospital did they send him to?” he asked.

  “I think it was in Minnesota,” she said. There was a good hospital there, but she couldn’t remember the name.

  “The Mayo Clinic?” he asked.

  She nodded. “That one.”

  The man lowered his dark glasses and looked at her over them. The look in his eyes made her shudder. “You telling me the truth, my girl?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  The car pulled away. Janie watched, holding her breath, until it had rolled around the corner. Then she ran all the way home. What if Benjamin had gone out for a walk and had been spotted? She ran up the stairs to the front porch and threw open the door.

  The front hall and the parlor were empty, and she felt panic rising. Had Joey the Haberdasher been here already? Was the man in the car just distracting her? Had they taken Benjamin and her parents away?

  In her mind, she saw Doyle’s bruised eyes, his broken nose and swollen jaw.

  “Benjamin!” she called, out of breath.

  “We’re back here!” her father’s voice said.

  She ran to the kitchen and found the three of them sitting at the table as if nothing had happened. Benjamin was eating a bowl of soup, and his face had color in it. Her parents looked positively giddy.

  “Janie, you’ll never guess!” her mother said. “We have a job!”

  Chapter 19

  Deus Ex Machina

  The cable had come before lunchtime. Janie’s parents had been asked to rewrite a script for a movie that was shooting in Italy. They were to go to Rome at once to meet the director, and it meant leaving on a morning flight.

  “They’ll pay everyone’s way,” her mother said. “Yours and Benjamin’s too. Janie, it’s Italy! Cinecittà! And a writing job!”

  “I didn’t think we’d ever get one again,” her father said.

  “But it means you have to miss the last two weeks of school,” her mother said. “Do you mind too much?”

  “Of course she doesn’t mind,” her father said. “Who minds missing school to go to Rome?”

  Janie sat down at the table, her legs collapsing under her with relief that Benjamin and her parents were fine. But she was confused about whether to be happy. Rome? That should be good news. Her parents had a job. They would be leaving town at exactly the right moment. But it all seemed too good to be true. Was it a trap? “Can I see the telegram?” she asked.

  Her mother slid it across the table. “You can make up the schoolwork,” she said. “It’s such an opportunity! We can stay all summer. You wanted to go away, remember?”

  “Benjamin wants to go,” her father said. “Right, Figment?”

  Benjamin was watching her. “If Janie does.”

  Janie ignored them and read the message:

  DAVIS AND MARJORIE SCOTT:

  FILM NEEDS REWRITE ON SET. PLEASE REPORT TO CINECITTÀ, ROME, EARLIEST POSSIBLE. FLAT ARRANGED FOR FAMILY OF 4. FLY TOMORROW. SPEAKING TO AGENT ABOUT YOUR FEE. PLEASE REPLY ASAP.

  There was that Italian word they’d been saying: chee-nay-chee-TAH. “Cinecittà is a movie studio?” she asked.

  “Where Fellini works,” her father said. “He’s a genius!”

  “They’re doing a film in English, and they want us to rewrite it,” her mother said. “We talked to our agent, and it’s legitimate. He called us long distance.”

  “The poor guy thought we’d never get another job,” her father said.

  “He didn’t know what our fee should be, so he just made up a number. And they said okay!”

  “Or whatever the Italian is,” her father said. “Okay-dokay.”

  “Va bene,” Janie said, automatically.

  “See, you can translate for us! It’s perfect!”

  “I don’t know that much,” she said. “I can say Dai, dai, d
ai, ragazza! That’s what they shouted at me when I was too slow washing dishes in the restaurant. And I can order food.”

  “So we won’t starve!” her father said.

  Her mother peered into her face. “Oh, Janie. Please don’t kick up a fuss like when we went to London. You were such a pill.”

  “What?” her father said. “How can you be a pill about Rome?”

  Janie’s mind was racing. This was too elaborate to be a trap. Joey Rocco might have an Italian name, but he wouldn’t send them all the way to Rome to trap them, when he was right here in Michigan. So why did she have so much trouble believing that her parents could get a writing job? They’d done it before. They were funny and talented. She’d seen them spin out stories, adding twists and surprises, and talking about character. That was what they did best, what they were supposed to do. “I want to go,” she said. “I really do. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, not surprised. It’s great. You deserve it.”

  Her parents sat back in their chairs, grinning with relief. “You scared us!” her father said.

  “We have so much packing to do!” her mother said. “A transatlantic flight! It’s so glamorous. I’m going to find the suitcases.” They both went up the stairs, and their voices receded.

  Janie studied Benjamin. He really did look healthier. “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better, thanks,” he said.

  “Doyle showed up at the hospital, wanting more filter.”

  Benjamin scowled. “I hope you told him to get lost.”

  “The nurse did,” Janie said. “She had orderlies carry him out. His face is all smashed up. The twins think he owes money to a retired mobster named Joey Rocco. I’m sure that’s who sent the guy to follow us. That guy asked where you were today, and I told him you were sick and had gone to Minnesota.”

  “And he believed you?”

  “He seemed to. There’s a big hospital there, he knew the name. He wanted to know if you’d left any powder behind, and I said no.”

  “So is Rocco behind your parents’ job?” Benjamin asked.

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Janie said. “But why would he send us to Rome?”