Anna clicked through the rest of the pictures in Tinker’s Instamatic. She took two of the doll and two of the torn screen. When the film was used up, she rewound it and dropped the roll into her pocket. Tinker could not be trusted to be sufficiently hard-hearted. Anna could.
She wrapped the blue baby in its plastic shroud, then glanced at the clock: a rhinestone Sylvester, tail and eyes twitching off the seconds. After ten p.m. and she was marooned in Rock Harbor with no food, no wine, no dry clothes, no change of underwear, and no place to sleep.
Patience would just be closing the restaurant at the lodge. All Anna needed to do was look moderately pitiful and she would provide everything but the underwear. Anna bundled herself and the baby out the window, replaced the screen, and set off through the fog at a trot.
The lights of the lodge glowed a warm welcome. Coming out of the darkness of the trees, Anna felt as if she’d been lost in the wilderness for a month. “I once was lost, but now am found.” Whistling the old hymn, she felt her spirits rise.
Two parties, one of six and one of eight, still lingered in the dining room. Though they were subject to the glares of a waitress and two busboys, Anna was grateful to them. They had forced the kitchen to stay open. And the bar. She ordered pasta Alfredo and a glass of Chianti. The pasta was gooey and the bread reheated but, glad to be in a warm well-lit place where nice people brought food, she was not inclined to be picky.
Patience, looking tired but well groomed, had drifted over to Anna’s table and been wheedled out of an invitation to sleep on her sofa. By the time a pretty young waiter, angling for a tip, brought over a second glass of Chianti, Anna had begun to feel downright expansive. Even the snufflings of Carrie Ann, trying to chip the crockery at the sideboard, seemed more homey than sullen.
Near eleven the larger party called for their check and Patience felt she could go home. Carrie Ann in tow, she came by Anna’s table. Scarcely into her teens, Carrie was already taller and bigger than her mother.
“We are practicing togetherness.” Patience explained Carrie’s late hours as Anna pushed up out of her chair, then finished the last swallow of Chianti. “Surveillance in the guise of Motherly Love has taken the place of trust and ‘do your own thing.’ Certain persons of the childish persuasion seemed to think three a.m. was a good hour to retire.”
Anna found herself wishing Patience would address her insults/parables/whatevers to her daughter instead of banking them like an expert billiard player off Anna. No such thing as a free lunch, she reminded herself. She was to be had for a meal and a bed.
“More star-crossed disappearances?” Anna said to say something.
“In spades,” Patience replied.
“Oh God!” Carrie Ann rolled her oversized brown eyes. “What speech now? AIDS or ‘when I was your age’?”
“Shut up!” her mother snapped. To Anna she said: “Get your tubes tied.”
Anna began to wonder if partaking in this dispute was going to be too much to pay for a dry bed.
Shortly after they reached the Bittners’ apartment, Carrie disappeared into her room.
“Gad!” Patience threw herself onto the vinyl of an institutional rendition of an overstuffed chair. “I need a drink. Need, not want: the point when connoisseur becomes addict. Can I pour you something?”
“Whatever,” Anna replied. She wanted the hot shower, the flannel gown, the sofa Patience had lent her in the past, but, ever mindful of her beggar-not-chooser status, she schooled herself to listen to anything from confession to kvetching.
“Wine! Lord, what would we do without it?” Patience asked rhetorically. “Wine is about the only thing you can count on. Too bad you can’t choose vintage children. Can’t say, ‘Ah, yes, ’78, that was an excellent year for children. Sweet, a little precocious, but not impertinent.‘ Do you remember Prohibition?”
“Not firsthand,” Anna replied. “I’ve seen the movies. Loved Sean Connery in The Untouchables.”
“It almost killed the California wine industry. A crippling blow.” Patience brought two glasses of red wine over to the couch where Anna huddled dreaming of dry flannel gowns. “Some kept going in secret-like the Catholics in Communist Russia or the secular artists during the Inquisition-artists smuggling their art out of a repressive country.”
“Mmm.” Anna drank of the red. It slid down rich, uncompromising. “California?” she guessed.
“No!” Patience laughed. “Hungarian. Who cares?” she said with a sudden change of attitude. “Wine’s wine. It’ll get you there.”
“ ‘There’s’ not where it used to be,” Anna said wearily and, with the words, realized she’d probably consumed enough alcohol for one night.
“You sound like a woman who’s had a long day,” Patience observed.
“Long day,” Anna agreed. She found she didn’t want to talk about it, about Jo, Stanton and his pointed questions, about Scotty or blackmail or blue plastic baby dolls. What she wanted, she realized, was to watch TV. Preferably something familiar, something without too much violence.
“Isn’t Murder, She Wrote on tonight?” she asked. “I haven’t looked at television for a while.”