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ELEVEN

The next morning at breakfast, Ellie saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant.

‘It means he’s going to have a very small operation,’ Louis said. ‘He’ll probably have to stay over at the vet’s for one night afterwards. And when he comes home, he’ll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much.’ ‘Or cross the road?’ Ellie asked.

She may be only five, Louis thought, but she’s sure no slouch. ‘Or cross the road,’ he agreed.

‘Yay!’ Ellie said, and that was the end of the subject.

Louis, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Church being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquiesced. And he realized how worried she must have been. Perhaps Rachel had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had had on her, after all.

Rachel herself, who was feeding Gage his breakfast egg, shot him a grateful approving look, and Louis felt something loosen in his chest. The look told him that the chill was over; this particular hatchet had been buried. For ever, he hoped.

Later, after the big yellow schoolbus had gobbled Ellie up for the morning, Rachel came to him, put her arms around his neck and kissed his mouth gently. ‘You were very sweet to do that,’ she said, ‘and I’m sorry I was such a bitch.’ Louis returned her kiss, feeling a little uncomfortable nonetheless. It occurred to him that the I’m sorry I was such a bitch statement, while by no means a standard, was not exactly something he’d never heard before, either. It usually came after Rachel had gotten her way.

Gage, meanwhile, had toddled unsteadily over to the front door and was looking out of the lowest pane of glass at the empty road. ‘Bus,’ he said, hitching nonchalantly at his sagging diapers. ‘Ellie-bus.’ ‘He’s growing up fast,’ Louis said.

Rachel nodded. ‘Too fast to suit me, I think.’

‘Wait until he’s out of diapers,’ Louis said. ‘Then he can stop.’

She laughed and it was all right between them again; completely all right. She stood back, made a minute adjustment to his tie, and looked him up and down critically.

‘Do I pass muster, Sarge?’ he asked.

‘You look very nice.’

‘Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart-surgeon? Two hundred thousand dollar a year man?’ ‘No, just like old Lou Creed,’ she said and giggled. ‘The rock and roll animal.’ Louis glanced at his watch. ‘The rock and roll animal has got to put on his boogie shoes and go,’ he said.

‘Are you nervous?’

‘Yeah, a little.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s sixty-seven thousand dollars a year for putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill—’ ‘Don’t forget the crab-and-louse lotion,’ Louis said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprised him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Quell, which seemed to him enormous – more fitted to an army base infirmary than to one on a middle-sized University campus.

Miss Charlton, the head nurse, had smiled cynically. ‘Off-campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You’ll see.’ He supposed he would.

‘Have a good day,’ she said, and kissed him again, lingeringly. But when she pulled away she was mock-stern. ‘And for Christ’s sake remember that you’re an administrator, not an intern or a second-year resident!’ ‘Yes, doctor,’ Louis said humbly, and they both laughed again. For a moment he thought of asking: Was it Zelda, babe? Is that what’s got under your skin? Is that the zone of low pressure? Zelda and how she died? But he wasn’t going to ask her that, not now. As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don’t monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.

So instead of asking, he only kissed her again and went out.

It was a good start, a good day. Maine was putting on a late summer show, the sky was blue and cloudless, the temperature pegged at an utterly perfect seventy-two degrees. Rolling to the end of the driveway and checking for traffic, Louis mused that so far he hadn’t seen so much as a trace of the fall foliage that was supposed to be so spectacular. But he could wait.

He pointed the Honda Civic they had picked up as a second car toward the University and let it roll. Rachel would call the vet this morning, they would get Church fixed, and that would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling got into your head and began to seem right) and death-fears behind them. There was no need to be thinking about death on a beautiful September morning like this one.

Louis turned on the radio and dialed until he found Huey Lewis and the News belting out ‘Working for a Living’. He turned up the radio and sang along – not well, but with lusty enjoyment.