19.

Marvin nods his head once, noncommittal nod, and then he goes to the bedroom window, stands there with his back to her and Niki, staring down at the traffic on Alamo Square. Daria crushes the b.u.t.t of her cigarette out in the ashtray and sets it on the table.

"You think I don't know how much Niki needs me here?" she asks, but he doesn't answer, and Daria sighs loudly and reaches for her pack of cigarettes, her old Zippo lighter.

"You're smoking too much again," he says very quietly.

"Yeah? Well, it's a G.o.dd.a.m.n miracle I'm not doing a h.e.l.l of a lot worse than that," and Daria has to flick her thumb across the striker wheel four times before the Zippo gives up an unsteady inch of blue-orange flame.

"She was playing your music," Marvin says. "Friday night, before she went up to bed. She plays your music all the time these days. I finally had to ask her to use the headphones because she'd put one song on repeat and it was driving me crazy."

The Zippo's flame sputters and dies before Daria can light the cigarette hanging limply from her lips. She curses and flips the cover shut again, turns to face Marvin and the Sunday morning sunshine streaming in around him.

"Look, I don't need you laying some kind of f.u.c.king guilt trip on me, okay? Jesus," and she takes the cigarette from her mouth and puts it back in the pack.

"You said you wanted to know everything."

"Then why didn't you tell me before now? If you thought it was important that she was listening to my music Friday night, why didn't you tell me that to begin with?"

"Take her with you, Dar," Marvin says, and he glances at Niki; she's rolled over onto her left side now, and her face is buried deep in the white cotton folds of sheets and pil-lowcases. "That's what she needs. Just to be near you for a little while. Just a few days-"

"No," and something in the way she says it, spitting that one word out at him, so emphatic, so final, something cold and ugly in her voice-but nothing she can take back, no 20 matter how it makes her feel. "You weren't with us when she freaked out on me in Boston. I can't work and watch after her at the same time."

Marvin rubs nervously at his stubbly chin, his dark cheeks specked with darker whiskers when he's never anything but clean shaven.

"Then take me with you, too," he says. "I'll watch her when you can't."

"I said no, Marvin, so don't ask again. Does she even look like she's in any shape to be on the road?" and Daria pauses, knows he isn't going to answer her, but leaves s.p.a.ce for an answer anyway. "Now, if you don't think you can do your job, I can look for someone else."

"I'm trying to do my job," he says, the angry smudge at the edges of his voice. "I'm trying to keep her alive."

"Well, you sure could've fooled me."

And then neither of them says anything else, only one or two heated words away from something that can't be taken back, apologized for, excused. Daria sits in the chair by the bed, running strong fingers through her spiky blond hair, staring at Niki's bare shoulders as though there might be answers printed on her skin like tattoos or scars. The answers she needs to hold the world together around her, around them both, some secret talisman or incantation against all her fears and failures.

She was playing your music. She plays your music all the time these days.

"Will you leave us alone for a while?" Daria says. "I need to get my head together, that's all. I have to figure out what the h.e.l.l I'm going to do next."

"Yeah, Dar, sure," he replies, the reluctance plain to hear, but at least he doesn't sound p.i.s.sed off anymore. "If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen."

"And take this d.a.m.ned thing with you," and she reaches into her jacket, removes her cell phone from a pocket and hands it to Marvin. "If anyone calls, especially that p.r.i.c.k-"

"You're busy."

21.

"Whatever. You can tell them I'm off s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a herd of sheep for all I care."

Marvin turns the phone over in his hand a couple of times, as if preparing to pa.s.s judgment on its molded plastic faceplate, plastic the indecent color of ripe cranberries.

"It does have an off switch, you know?" he says and points to a tiny black b.u.t.ton on one side.

"Then turn it off and take it with you."

Marvin nods his head and walks past her to the bedroom door, has already started pulling it shut behind him when he stops and looks back at Daria.

"Hey. Who was Spider?" he asks her, and she stares at him like someone struck dumb, struck stupid, someone too far gone to ever be surprised by anything ever again but this one thing.

"What?"

"Spider. Last night, at the hospital, when Niki started coming back around, she asked for someone named Spider a couple of times. I'd almost forgotten-"

"I don't know," Daria lies, answering the question much too quickly, and she can see from his expression, the mix of confusion and concern, that Marvin knows perfectly well that she's lying.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I thought it might be important,"

and he closes the door, leaving Daria Parker alone with Niki and Ophelia and the sun-bright walls.

"She wrote this song when we lived in Boulder," Niki said, and Marvin frowned at her, at Niki Ky sitting in the center of about a hundred jewel cases, the scatter of CDs like tiny s.p.a.ce-age Frisbees. Niki in a gray-green cardigan at least two sizes too large and a black T-shirt underneath, faded black cotton and a big white letter Z with a question mark behind it-Z? inside a white silk-screened square- and then the song started again.

"When we still lived with Mort and Theo on Arapahoe,"

she said.

22.

"Yeah," Marvin replied and he turned a page in the book he was trying to read. "You told me."

"She used to play it on Pearl Street, for spare change, you know, and I'd sit on top of the big bronze beaver and listen. Sometimes Mort would tap along on his snare drum, if he didn't have to work that day."

"You told me that, too, dear," and Marvin stared at her over the top of his paperback Somerset Maugham novel.

"But haven't you played it enough for one night?"

"You had to have a license, but there were lots of street performers on Pearl. No cars allowed. We knew a girl who juggled winegla.s.ses, and a guy named Silence who played the hammer dulcimer."

Marvin made a face like a cat trapped in a small child's lap, sighed and glanced back down at his book.

"I'm sorry," Niki said, not entirely certain what she was apologizing for and feeling more annoyed at Marvin than sorry for playing "Dark in Day" twelve times in a row.

"No," he said, but no change at all in his expression, the strained patience, his good-nurse face that she hated so much. "It's not your fault. I think I'm getting a headache."

Niki picked up one of the CDs, turned it over and stared at her reflection in the iridescent plastic. Her face too round, too fat because the Elavil made her gain weight and hold water. Dark circles beneath her eyes and the disc's center hole where her nose ought to be. She held the CD at an angle so it caught the lamplight, sliced it up into spectrum wedges, violet to blue to green, yellow to red, and she hummed quietly with the song. Daria's ba.s.s thumping out the rhythm like an erratic heartbeat, breathless fingertip dance across steel strings to draw music from nothing, and Niki murmured the last part of the chorus just loud enough that Marvin would hear.

" 'Dark in day, I'd always say, that's not the way to know,' " her voice and Daria's, pretending they were together because Daria was still on tour, out singing for other people in Nashville or Louisville or Memphis, some distant Southern city that Niki had never seen and never wanted

23.

to see. And her reflection in the CD wavered then, as if the plastic were water now and someone had just dipped their hand into it, concentric ripples racing themselves towards the edge of the disc, and Niki dropped it.

"Is something wrong?" Marvin asked, and no, Niki said, didn't say the word aloud but shook her head, not taking her eyes off the CD lying on the floor. It had stopped rippling and she stared back up at herself from the mercury-smooth underbelly of the disc.

"You're sure, Niki?" and she looked up at Marvin, hoping he wouldn't see that she was frightened, because then he'd try to get her to tell him why, to explain another one of the things that no one ever believed she really saw or heard. The things they gave her pills for, so that she wouldn't really see or hear them, either.

"I dropped it," she said. "Sorry," and then she smiled for him, and Marvin smiled back and stopped looking so concerned.

"It's almost midnight," he said. "Don't forget your medicine. And will you please use the headphones if you're going to keep playing that same song over and over?"

Niki glanced nervously back at the CD, but it was still just a CD again. Nothing that shimmered or rippled like ice water, and she reached for the headphones lying in their place on the shelf beside the stereo as "Dark in Day"

ended and began again.

Lady lost in all your pain and thunder, all your shattered wonder . . .

She reached down and used one finger to gently flip the disc over so she wouldn't have to see the mirrored side anymore. The safer, printed-on side instead, Tom Waits' Bone Machine, and hardly any of the silver showing through.

Walking where the spinning world grows brittle, and I can't find you there . . .

She plugged the black headphones into the stereo, and Daria's voice shrank to a whisper, a small, faraway sound until Niki pulled the phones down over her head so that the music swelled suddenly around her again, wrapped her 24 tight in electric piano and drums and the constant, comforting thump, thump, thump of the ba.s.s guitar.

You never look over your shoulder anymore, Daria sang, her gravel-and-whiskey voice suspended somewhere inde-finable between Niki's ears, somewhere inside her head.

I'm afraid what you would see. And Niki began singing again, never mind if it annoyed Marvin, because everything she did annoyed Marvin, and singing made her feel a little closer to Daria.

" 'Dark in day, I'd always say, dark in day, that's not so far to fall.' "

The three prescription bottles were lined up neatly for her on one of the big speakers, the pills sealed inside like flies and ants and moths in polished chunks of amber. All her crazy medicine, her psychoactive trinity: Elavil and Xanax and the powder-blue Klonopin tablets. It made her feel better to have the bottles nearby, especially when Daria wasn't. Niki reached for the Xanax, first station of that pharmaceutical cross, calming palindrome, and the gla.s.s of water that Marvin had brought her almost half an hour before.

Lady lost where night can't reach you anymore, tripping softly 'round the edges you endure . . .

She popped the top off the plastic bottle and tipped it carefully so that only two or three of the pills would spill out into her open palm. Always careful, because she hated it when she poured out a whole handful by accident, that sudden rush like candy from a vending machine, and always a few that slipped, inevitably, between her fingers, bounced or rolled away across the floor, and she'd have to scramble about to find them. She tapped the mouth of the bottle once against her hand, but nothing happened. Niki checked to be sure the bottle wasn't empty, saw there were at least two weeks' worth of tablets left inside and tried again. And that time a single white pill came rolling out and lay glistening like a droplet of milk on her skin. It certainly wasn't Xanax, whatever it was, wasn't anything she was supposed to be taking and nothing she remembered

25.

ever having taken before, that tiny, glistening sphere like a ripe mistletoe berry, and Those are poisonous, aren't they?

she thought, holding the strange pill closer to her face.

Dark in day, Daria sang inside her head, I'd always say, dark in day, that's not so far to fall.

And then a very faint, rubbery pop, and the white pill extended eight long and jointed legs, raised itself up, and she could see that there were eyes, too, shiny eyes so pale they were almost transparent, a half-circle dewdrop crown of eyes staring up at her. Niki squeezed her hand shut around the thing, the impossible spider pill, and glanced quickly towards Marvin. He was still sitting on the sofa, his nose buried in The Moon and Sixpence. So he hadn't seen, had not seen anything at all and he wouldn't, even if she walked across the room and showed it to him.

Pain then, little pain like someone p.r.i.c.king at her skin with a sharp sewing needle, and so she opened her hand again. But the spider was gone and there were only three pink Xanax, instead; Niki put the extra pill back into the bottle, set the bottle down on the floor beside her. She exhaled slowly and then took a deep, hitching breath. Her heart was racing, adrenaline-dizzy rush and beads of cold sweat, a faintly metallic taste like aluminum in her mouth.

You hold it all inside, you hold it all in, you hold it all inside you . . .

Niki chewed her lower lip and concentrated on breathing more slowly, breathing evenly, knew from experience she'd only wind up hyperventilating if she didn't. She stared at her palm like a fortune-teller trying to divine the future from two Xanax; but there was something else there, something other than the pills, so small she hadn't noticed it at first. A pin-point welt, raised skin gone a slightly brighter shade of pink than her medication, and she closed her hand again, making a fist so tight her short nails dug painfully into her flesh.

The song ended, and this time Niki pulled the headphones off, let them fall to the floor among the CDs. The noise drew Marvin's attention, but only for a moment.

She forced a smile for him, something false but credible 26 enough to pa.s.s for a smile, a strained charm against his questions, and he smiled back, relieved, and let his eyes drift once more to his book.

Not real, she whispered, not aloud but safe inside her head, the way that Dr. Dalby had taught her. Not real at all.

Even if it meant something, even if I needed to see it and pay attention and remember I saw it, nothing real.

Like a memory or a ghost. Nothing that can hurt me.

But when she opened her hand again the welt was still there, the swelling a little more p.r.o.nounced than before, and her palm had begun to throb slightly. The patient, faithful Xanax, as well, and four half-moon dimples left by her fingernails; any harder and she might have drawn blood, and that would have freaked Marvin out for sure.

Don't you lock up. Keep moving, and so she pressed her lips to her hand; the small welt felt hot when the tip of her tongue brushed over it, and Niki dry-swallowed the pills.

She snapped the cap back on the Xanax bottle, took the Elavil next, then the Klonopin last of all, this routine me-thodical as counting rosary beads, and she drank all the water Marvin had brought her, even though it was warm and tasted faintly of dishwashing liquid. If she hadn't he might have asked why, and one question could have led to another, and another. She set the prescription bottles back on the speaker, pressed the OFF b.u.t.ton on the CD player, and "I think I'll go to bed now," she said. "I'll see you in the morning, Marvin."

"Good night, dear," Marvin replied, not bothering to look up at her. "Sweet dreams."

"Yeah. You too," she whispered, and then Niki took a deep breath and climbed the stairs alone.

Awaking from a dream of something she should have done differently, something lost, and Niki Ky stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes before she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. LED numbers and letters that glowed the same murky yellow-green as cartoon toxic waste, 6:07 A.M., and the darkness outside the bedroom