The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

was now repeating himself endlessly, as the same questions kept flying at him from different voices in the crowd.
    Other voices intruded. For a second, he thought they were coming from the people around him, but then he realized they were coming from the distant rooms in the house. Parents sobbing. Teachers babbling platitudes. People reassuring one another when they had no real basis for reassurance.
    He felt uneasy. No way in the world was he going to report these voices. He shut them out. But then it came to him.
Why the hell am I hearing this? If I can’t report it, well, what’s the point?
The fact was, there was nothing much to report.
    He typed in what was obvious. Parents were breaking down under the strain. No ransom call. He felt confident enough to verify that. All those voices told him there had been none, even the low drone of the crisis manager, assuring them that such a call would likely come.
    People around him talked about the famous Chowchilla school bus kidnapping of the seventies. No one had been hurt in that one. The teachers and the kids had been taken off their bus and moved by van to an underground quarry, from which they’d later managed to escape.
    What can I do, really do, to help this situation? Reuben was thinking. He was exhausted suddenly and agitated. Maybe he wasn’t ready to go back to work. Maybe he didn’t want ever again to go back to work.
    By six o’clock, when nothing had changed in the situation, he headed back across the Golden Gate and home.
    He was still suffering waves of unusual exhaustion, no matter how robust he looked, and Grace said this was a simple aftereffect of the anesthesia used in the abdominal surgery he’d endured. And then those antibiotics. He was still on them and they were still making him sick.
    As soon as he hit the house, he hammered out a visceral “on the scene” piece for the morning’s paper and e-mailed it in. Billie called a minute and a half later to say she loved it, especially the stuff about the crisis counselors, and the flowers getting totally trampled by the press.
    He went downstairs for supper with Grace, who was not her usual self for a number of reasons, among them that two patients had died on the table that afternoon. Of course, no one had expected either one to survive. But even a trauma center surgeon takes two losses painfully, and he sat just a little longer at the table with her than he might have done otherwise. The family talked about “The School Bus Kidnapping,” with the television on mute in the corner of the room so Reuben could watch for developments.
    Then Reuben was back at work, writing up a review of the old Chowchilla kidnap case, including updates on the kidnappers who were still to this day behind bars. They’d been young men his age at the time of thekidnapping. He wondered what had really become of them during their long years of incarceration. But that wasn’t the focus of his piece. He was optimistic. All of the kids and teachers had survived.
    This was the busiest he’d been in one day since the massacre in Mendocino. He took a long shower, and went to bed.
    An extraordinary restlessness came over him. He got up, paced, went back to bed. He was lonely, hideously lonely. He hadn’t really been with Celeste since before the massacre. He didn’t want to be with Celeste now. He kept thinking that if he was with Celeste, he’d hurt her, bruise her somehow, run roughshod over her feelings. Wasn’t he doing that these days without their putting it to the bedroom test?
    He turned over, clutched his pillow and imagined he was alone at Nideck Point, in Felix’s old bed, and that Marchent was with him. Just a useful incoherent fantasy to get to sleep. When sleep did come he went down deep into the dreamless darkness.
    When next he opened his eyes, the clock said midnight. The television was the only light in the room. Beyond the open windows, the city burned bright in spectral towers on the crowded hills. The