Tess lay on the floor of Apartment 311A of the Cloud Cuckoo Land Motel. She was tossing shoes at the bottom of Gallagher's bed.
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Above her head, the bed springs creaked. Gallagher lifted the bedspread. "Madame?" he questioned sleepily.
"Ohhh," Tess said, "you're awake. Why don't you come down here and have some ice-cream with me? I can't sleep."
"It's almost two o'clock in the morning," Gallagher protested.
"In that case," she said, "don't move a muscle. I'll come up." She quickly sprang to her feet, grabbed two spoons from the kitchen, stuck them in a pocket of her pajamas, and tucked a litre of Breyer's Vanilla under one arm before climbing up the ladder.
Tess scrambled out from under Gallagher's bed and pushed the hair out of her eyes. "This is nice," she said. "You've got the standard bed, dresser, television, ratty old lamps, and a picture of a sailing ship on the wall. Classic motel decor." She slumped down on one corner of his bed. "Here," she said as she passed a spoon his way.
Gallagher sighed, took the spoon, and turned the notch on the bedside lamp to a higher level of brightness. "I thought that tonight, you were going to be working with that nice brown pencil you seem to like so much," he said.
"It's merlot, not brown," Tess corrected. "And mer-low is a perfectly lovely shade for designating history and the past... 'Cept, the thing is," she said as she slid a spoon of ice-cream into her mouth, "I don needth to work on my pathst anymawr, or at leastht, not right now. Mmmm. This is yummy ice-cream. Don't you think this is yummy?"
Gallagher nodded and sucked on his spoon.
"See, I only went back there to see if I could find anything there that would explain how I ended up here. Not on-your-bed-here, but capital-H: HERE. Stuck in this place, at this moment, unable to go backward or forward with my life. Just like my cousin was stuck in that chair and couldn't get unstuck either. But the only thing that might account for any of my being here is maybe I saw some stuff as a kid that I didn't think I'd seen and Leprosy Man woke that memory up in me. If he did, I don't remember the awakened memory.
She shook her head, "As for all the rest -- my father? I don't have any issues with him. He's dead. I loved him. He loved me. We still love each other. It's a done deal. And it's pretty much the same way with my mother, although I might have to talk about some of that later, but really, trust me -- there're no issues there either. Grief, yes. Issues, no. There are also no issues with my marriage," she said. "And there are no issues with my children. There aren't even issues with those BadBad babysitters. Don't you see, Gallagher?"
Gallagher shook his head, no.
"This time it really is all about me," she said. "It's about my friends, my heart, my fears, my failures, my self-identity. It's about finding myself after having spent 15 years as a dedicated wife and mother, ready to go back to school and finally get started on my life, except I got hit by a cosmic-two-by-four that I helped orchestrate and instead, landed my ass in a great big pile of phuckedupedness. Speaking of which," Tess paused and looked around, "Where are the little Phuckups anyway? I haven't seen them all day."
"My Beautiful Phuckedupedness spent the day watching dirty movies on the movie channel," Gallagher patiently explained. "Your Beautiful Phuckedupedness spent the day digging and mucking about in the garden; I don't think the peony is going to make it."
"Hmmm," Tess said. "Probably peonies envy. I've heard of that. Anyways," she dug her spoon back into the ice-cream, "I was thinking about Leprosy Man some more and I think I can definitely scratch it off my list that he's some kind of extension of me. It's not like he was doing nothing out of the ordinary and I reacted to that. He was being pretty weird, deliberately frightening. And he did a lot of damaging things. He hurt a LOT of people," she emphasized. "And he doesn't even seem to see that, let alone care about it. The man has NO empathy, NO compassion for others. But he's plenty smart and amazingly, plenty charismatic. You'd be amazed at the sympathy he can arouse. So, I think, instead, we're just going to say that Leprosy Man is one El Supremo Whackjob and I was scared of him because . . . He's a scary guy."
"I'll have the stationer make up new place cards immediately," Gallagher quipped.
"Ha!" Tess smacked at him with her ice-cream spoon. "That's very butlerish of you to do. I'm so glad I went with a butler who'd been properly trained in a foreign service and not one of those ordinary run-of-the-mill domestic types."
Gallagher made a face at her and pressed into the ice-cream with his spoon. "Alright then. It sounds as if you're making progress. What's next?"
"Well, I think I figured out what I'm scared of. It's me and it's not me. I'm hidden away right now so it would be difficult for him to find me, but not impossible, which is a frightening thought. But the other thing is, I'm worried that he either already has, or else will hurt someone real bad. Capital-R. Capital-B. REAL BAD. I think I managed to see into a really bad person Gallagher and that scared me too."
"Did you tell anyone who could do anything?" Gallagher asked.
"I did," Tess said. "We all did. But no one listened. The people who could have done something were too busy passing the buck or else just too busy. So he's still out there and there's pretty much nothing that can stop him from doing whatever it is he decides to do except maybe one of the four. But what if he found that out? Tess used the spoon to punctuate her remarks, "And that's scary too! So what would you do, Gallagher, if you ran into someone like that?"
