فصل بیستم

TWENTY

Indian summer came and went. Brazen color came into the trees, rioted briefly, and then faded. After one cold, driving rain in mid-October, the leaves started to fall. Ellie began to arrive home laden with Halloween decorations she had made at school and entertained Gage with the story of the Headless Horseman. Gage spent that evening babbling happily about somebody named Itchybod Brain. Rachel got giggling and couldn’t stop. It was a good time for them, that early autumn.

Louis’s work at the University had settled into a demanding but pleasant routine. He saw patients, he attended meetings of the Council of Colleges, he wrote the obligatory letters to the student newspaper, advising the University’s coed students of the confidentiality of the infirmary’s treatment for VD and exhorting the student population to get flu boosters, as the A-type was apt to be prevalent again that winter. He sat on panels. He chaired panels. During the second week in October he went to the New England conference on College and University Medicine in Providence and presented a paper on the legal ramifications of student treatment. Victor Pascow was mentioned in his paper under the fictitious name ‘Henry Montez’. The paper was well-received. He began working up the infirmary budget for the next academic year.

His evenings fell into a routine: kids after supper, a beer or two with Jud Crandall later. Sometimes Rachel came over with him if Missy was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Norma joined them, but mostly it was just Louis and Jud. Louis found the old man as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk about Ludlow history going back three hundred years, almost as though he had lived all of it. He talked but never rambled. He never bored Louis, although he had seen Rachel yawning under her hand on more than one occasion.

He would cross the road to his house again before ten on most evenings, and, like as not, he and Rachel would make love. Never since the first year of their marriage had they made love so often, and never so successfully and pleasurably. Rachel said she believed it was something in the artesian well-water; Louis opted for the Maine air.

The nasty death of Victor Pascow on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of the student body and in Louis’s own; Pascow’s family no doubt still grieved. Louis had spoken to the tearful, mercifully faceless voice of Pascow’s father on the telephone; the father had only wanted assurance that Louis had done everything he could, and Louis had assured him that everyone involved had. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had been dead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Louis thought he himself would never forget. But for those to whom Pascow was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.

Louis still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it now seemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. His one trip to a massage parlor in Chicago six years ago seemed like that now; they were equally unimportant, side-trips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo-chamber.

He did not think at all about what the dying Pascow had or had not said.

There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Louis and Ellie began trick-or-treating at the Crandalls’. Ellie cackled satisfyingly, pretended to ride her broom around Norma’s kitchen, and was duly pronounced ‘Just the cutest thing I ever saw … isn’t she, Jud?’ Jud agreed that she was and lit a cigarette. ‘Where’s Gage, Louis? Thought you’d have him dressed up, too.’ They had indeed planned on taking Gage around – Rachel in particular had been looking forward to it because she and Missy Dandridge had whomped together a sort of bug-costume with twisted coathangers wrapped in crepe paper for feelers – but Gage had come down with a troublesome bronchial cold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit rattly, and consulting the thermometer outside the window, which read only forty degrees at six o’clock, Louis had nixed it. Rachel, although disappointed, had agreed.

Ellie had promised to give Gage some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow made Louis wonder if she wasn’t just a bit glad that Gage wouldn’t be along to slow her down … or steal part of the limelight.

‘Poor Gage,’ she had said in tones usually reserved for those suffering terminal illness. Gage, unaware of what he was missing, sat on the sofa watching Zoom with Church snoozing beside him.

‘Ellie-witch,’ Gage said without a great deal of interest, and went back to the TV.

‘Poor Gage,’ Ellie said again, fetching another sigh. Louis thought of crocodile tears and grinned. Ellie grabbed his hand and started pulling him. ‘Let’s go, Daddy. Let’s go-let’s go-let’s go.’ ‘Gage has got a touch of the croup,’ he said to Jud now.

‘Well, that’s a real shame,’ Norma said, ‘but it will mean more to him next year. Hold out your bag, Ellie … whoops!’ She had taken an apple and a bite-sized Snickers bar out of the treat-bowl on the table, but both of them had fallen from her hand. Louis was a little shocked at how clawlike that hand looked. He bent over and picked up the apple as it rolled across the floor. Jud got the Snickers and dropped it into Ellie’s bag.

‘Oh, let me get you another apple, honey,’ Norma said. ‘That one will bruise.’ ‘It’s fine,’ Louis said, trying to drop it into Ellie’s bag, but Ellie stepped away, holding her bag protectively shut.

‘I don’t want a bruised apple, Daddy,’ she said, looking at her father as if he might have gone mad. ‘Brown spots … yuck!

‘Ellie, that’s damned impolite!’

‘Don’t scold her for telling the truth, Louis,’ Norma said. ‘Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children. The brown spots are yucky.’ ‘Thank you, Mrs Crandall,’ Ellie said, casting a vindicated eye on her father.

‘You’re very welcome, honey,’ Norma said.

Jud escorted them out to the porch. Two little ghosts were coming up the walk, and Ellie recognized them both as friends from school. She took them back to the kitchen, and for a moment Jud and Louis were alone on the porch.

‘Her arthritis had gotten worse,’ Louis said.

Jud nodded and pinched out his cigarette over an ashtray. ‘Yeah. It’s come down harder on her every fall and winter, but this is the worst it’s ever been.’ ‘What does her doctor say?’

‘Nothing. He can’t say nothing, because Norma hasn’t been back to see him.’ ‘What? Why not?’

Jud looked at Louis, and in the light cast by the headlamps of the station wagon waiting for the ghosts, he looked oddly defenseless. ‘I’d meant to ask you this at a better time, Louis, but I guess there isn’t no good time to impose on a friendship. Would you examine her?’ From the kitchen, Louis could hear the two ghosts boooing and Ellie going into her cackles – which she had been practicing all week – again. It all sounded very fine and Halloweenish.

‘What else is wrong with Norma?’ he asked. ‘Is she afraid of something else, Jud?’ ‘She’s been having pains in her chest,’ Jud said in a low voice. ‘She won’t go see Dr Weybridge any more. I’m a little worried.’ ‘Is Norma worried?’

Jud hesitated and then said, ‘I think she’s scared. I think that’s why she doesn’t want to go to the doctor. One of her oldest friends, Betty Coslaw, died in the EMMC just last week. Cancer. She and Norma were of an age. She’s scared.’ ‘I’d be happy to examine her,’ Louis said. ‘No problem at all.’

‘Thanks, Louis,’ Jud said gratefully. ‘If we catch her one night, gang up on her, I think—’ Jud broke off, head cocking quizzically to one side. His eyes met Louis’s.

Later on Louis couldn’t remember exactly how he felt just then, or exactly how one emotion slipped into the next. Trying to analyze it only made him feel dizzy. All he could remember for sure was that curiosity changed swiftly into a feeling that somewhere something had gone badly wrong. His eyes met Jud’s, both unguarded. It was a moment before he could find a way to act.

‘Hoooo-hoooo,’ the Halloween ghosts in the kitchen chanted. ‘Hooo-hooo.’ And then suddenly the h-sound was gone and the cry rose louder, genuinely frightening: ‘oooo-OOOOOO—’ And then one of the ghosts began to scream.

‘Daddy!’ Ellie’s voice was wild and tight with alarm. ‘Daddy! Missus Crandall fell down!’ ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Jud almost moaned.

Ellie came running out on to the porch, her black dress flapping. She clutched her broom in one hand. Her green face, now pulled long in dismay, looked like the face of a pygmy wino in the last stages of alcohol poisoning. The two little ghosts followed her, crying.

Jud lunged through the door, amazingly spry for a man of over eighty. No, more than spry. Again, almost lithe. He was calling his wife’s name.

Louis bent and put his hands on Ellie’s shoulders. ‘Stay right here on the porch, Ellie. Understand?’ ‘Daddy, I’m scared,’ she whispered.

The two ghosts barreled past them and ran down the walk, candy-bags rattling, screaming their mother’s name.

Louis ran down the front hall and into the kitchen, ignoring Ellie, who was calling for him to come back.

Norma lay on the hilly linoleum by the table in a litter of apples and small Snickers bars. Apparently, going down, she had caught the bowl with her hand and had overturned it. It lay nearby like a small Pyrex flying saucer. Jud was chafing one of her wrists, and he looked up at Louis with a strained face.

‘Help me, Louis,’ he said. ‘Help Norma. She’s dying, I think.’

‘Move to one side,’ Louis said. He knelt and one knee came down on a Spy, crushing it. He felt juice bleed through the knee of his old cords, and the cidery smell of apple suddenly filled the kitchen.

Here it is, Pascow all over again, Louis thought, and then shoved the thought out of his mind so fast it might have been on wheels.

He felt for her pulse and got something that was weak, thready, and rapid – not really a beat but only simple spasming. Extreme arrhythmia, well on the way to full cardiac arrest. You and Elvis Presley, Norma, he thought.

He opened her dress, exposing a creamy-yellow silk slip. Moving with his own rhythm now, he turned her head to one side and began administering CPR.

‘Jud, listen to me,’ he said. Heel of the left hand one-third of the way up the breastbone – four centimeters above xyphoid process. Right hand gripping the left wrist, bracing, lending pressure. Keep it firm, but let’s take it easy on the old ribs; no need to panic yet. And for Christ’s sake, don’t collapse the old lungs.

‘I’m here,’ Jud said.

‘Take Ellie,’ he said. ‘Go across the street. Carefully – don’t get hit by a car. Tell Rachel what’s happened. Tell her I want my bag. Not the one in the study, the one on the high shelf in the upstairs bathroom. She’ll know the one. Tell her to call Bangor MedCu and to send an ambulance.’ ‘Bucksport’s closer,’ Jud said.

‘Bangor’s faster. Go. Don’t you call; let Rachel do that. I need that bag.’ And once she knows the situation here, Louis thought, I don’t think she’ll bring it over.

Jud went. Louis heard the screen door bang. He was alone with Norma Crandall and the smell of apples. From the living room came the steady tick of the seven-day clock.

Norma suddenly uttered a long, snoring breath. Her eyelids fluttered. And Louis was suddenly doused with a cold, horrid certainty.

She’s going to open her eyes … oh Christ she’s going to open her eyes and start talking about the Pet Sematary.

But she only looked at Louis with a muddled sort of recognition and then her eyes closed again. Louis was ashamed of himself and this stupid fear that was so unlike him. At the same time he felt hope and relief. There had been some pain in her eyes, but not agony. His first guess was that this had not been a grave seizure.

Louis was breathing hard now, and sweating. No one but TV paramedics could make CPR look easy. A good steady closed-chest massage popped a lot of calories, and the webbing between his arms and shoulders would ache tomorrow.

‘Can I do anything?’

He looked around. A woman dressed in slacks and a brown sweater stood hesitantly in the doorway, one hand clutched into a fist between her breasts. The mother of the ghosts, Louis thought. His snap judgment was that she was scared but not helpless.

‘No,’ he said, and then: ‘Yes. Wet a cloth, please. Wring it out. Put it on her forehead.’ She moved to do it. Louis looked down. Norma’s eyes were open again.

‘Louis, I fell down,’ she whispered. ‘Think I fainted.’

‘You’ve had some sort of coronary event,’ Louis said. ‘Doesn’t look too serious. Now relax and don’t talk, Norma.’ He rested for a moment, then took her pulse again. The beat was too fast. She was doing what Dr Tucker at the University of Chicago Med School had once called Morse-coding: her heart would beat regularly, then run briefly in a series of beats that was almost but not quite fibrillation, and then begin to beat regularly again. Beat-beat-beat, WHACK/WHACK/WHACK/WHACK, beat-beat-beat-beat-beat. It was not good, but it was marginally better than cardiac arrhythmia.

The woman came over with the cloth and put it on Norma’s forehead. She stepped away uncertainly. Jud came back in with Louis’s bag.

‘Louis?’

‘She’s going to be fine,’ Louis said, looking at Jud but actually speaking to Norma. ‘MedCu coming?’ ‘Your wife is calling them,’ Jud said. ‘I didn’t stay around.’

‘No … hospital,’ Norma whispered.

‘Yes, hospital,’ Louis said. ‘Five days’ observation, medication, then home with your feet up, Norma my girl. And if you say anything else, I’ll make you eat all these apples. Cores and all.’ She smiled wanly, then closed her eyes again.

Louis opened his bag, rummaged, found the Isodil, and shook one of the pills, so tiny it would have fitted easily on the moon of one fingernail, into the palm of his hand. He recapped the bottle and pinched the pill between his fingers.

‘Norma, can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Want you to open your mouth. You did your trick, now you get your treat. I’m going to put a pill under your tongue. Just a small one. I want you to hold it there until it dissolves. It’s going to taste a little bitter, but never mind that. All right?’ She opened her mouth. Stale denture breath wafted out, and Louis felt a moment of aching sorrow for her, lying here on her kitchen floor in a litter of apples and Halloween candy. It occurred to him that once she had been seventeen, her breasts eyed with great interest by the young men of the neighborhood, all her teeth her own, and the heart under her shirtwaist a tough little pony-engine.

She settled her tongue over the pill and grimaced a little. The pill tasted a little bitter, all right. It always did. But she was no Victor Pascow, beyond help and beyond reach. He thought Norma was going to live to fight another day. Her hand groped in the air and Jud took it gently.

Louis got up then, found the overturned bowl, and began to pick up the treats. The woman, who introduced herself as Mrs Storey from down the road, helped him and then said she thought she better go back to the car. Her two boys were frightened.

‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Storey,’ Louis said.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said flatly. ‘But I’ll go down on my knees tonight and thank God you were here, Dr Creed.’ Louis waved a hand, embarrassed.

‘That goes for me, too,’ Jud said. His eyes found Louis’s and held them. They were steady. He was in control again. His brief moment of confusion and fear had passed. ‘I owe you one, Louis.’ ‘Get off it,’ Louis said, and tipped a finger toward Mrs Storey as she left. She smiled and waved back. Louis found an apple and began to eat it. The Spy was so sweet that his tastebuds cramped momentarily … but that was not a totally unpleasurable sensation. Won one tonight, Lou, he thought, and worked on the apple with relish. He was ravenous.

‘I do, though,’ Jud said. ‘When you need a favor, Louis, you see me first.’ ‘All right,’ Louis said. ‘I’ll do that.’

∗

The ambulance from Bangor MedCu arrived twenty minutes later. As Louis stood outside watching the orderlies load Norma into the back, he saw Rachel looking out the living-room window. He waved to her. She lifted a hand in return.

He and Jud stood together and watched the ambulance pull away, lights flashing, siren silent.

‘Guess I’ll go on up to the hospital now,’ Jud said.

‘They won’t let you see her tonight, Jud. They’ll want to run an EXG on her and then put her in intensive care. No visitors for the first twelve hours.’ ‘Is she going to be okay, Louis? Really okay?’

Louis shrugged. ‘No one can guarantee that. It was a heart attack. For whatever it’s worth, I think she’s going to be fine. Maybe better than ever, once she gets on some medication.’ ‘Ayuh,’ Jud said, lighting a Chesterfield.

Louis smiled and glanced at his watch. He was amazed to see it was only ten minutes to eight. It seemed that a great deal more time had gone by.

‘Jud, I want to go get Ellie so she can finish her trick-or-treating.’ ‘Yeah, course you do.’ This came out Coss y’do. ‘Tell her to get all the treats she can, Louis. I guess she’s had her trick for the evening.’ ‘I guess she has at that,’ Louis said.

Ellie was still in her witch costume when Louis got home. Rachel had tried persuade her into her nightie, but Ellie had resisted, holding out for the possibility that the game, suspended because of heart attack, might yet be played out. When Louis told her to put her coat back on, Ellie whooped and clapped.

‘It’s going to be awfully late for her, Louis.’

‘We’ll take the car,’ he said. ‘Come on, Rachel. She’s been looking forward to this for a month.’ ‘Well …’ She smiled. Ellie saw it and shouted again. She ran for the coat closet. ‘Is Norma all right?’ ‘I think so.’ He felt good. Tired, but good. ‘It was a small one. She’s going to have to be careful, but when you’re seventy-five you have to recognize that your pole-vaulting days are done, anyway.’ ‘It’s lucky you were there. Almost God’s providence.’

‘I’ll settle for luck.’ He grinned as Ellie came back. ‘You ready, Witch Hazel?’ ‘I’m ready,’ she said. ‘Come on-come on-come on!’

On the way home with half a bag of candy an hour later (Ellie protested when Louis finally called a halt, but not too much; she was tired), his daughter startled him by saying: ‘Did I make Missus Crandall have the heart attack, Daddy? When I wouldn’t take the apple with the bruise on it?’ Louis looked at her, startled, wondering where children got such funny, half-superstitious ideas. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Loves-me-loves-me-not. Daddy’s stomach, Daddy’s head, smile at midnight, Daddy’s dead. That made him think of the Pet Sematary again, and those crude circles. He wanted to smile at himself and was not quite able.

‘No, honey,’ he said. ‘When you were in with those two ghosts—’

‘Those weren’t ghosts, just the Buddinger twins.’

‘Well, when you were in with them, Mr Crandall was telling me that his wife had been having little chest pains. In fact, you might have been responsible for saving her life, or at least for keeping it from being much worse.’ Now it was Ellie’s turn to look startled.

Louis nodded. ‘She needed a doctor, honey. I’m a doctor. But I was only there because it was your night to go trick-or-treating.’ Ellie considered this for a long time and then nodded. ‘But she’ll probably die anyway,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘People who have heart attacks usually die. Even if they live, pretty soon they have another one and another one until … boom!’ ‘And where did you learn these words of wisdom, may I ask?’

Ellie only shrugged – a very Louis-like shrug, he was amused to see.

She allowed him to carry in her bag of candy – an almost ultimate sign of trust – and Louis pondered her attitude. The thought of Church’s death had brought on near-hysteria. But the thought of grandmotherly Norma Crandall dying … that Ellie seemed to take calmly, a matter of course, as given. What had she said? Another one and another one, until … boom!

The kitchen was empty, but Louis could hear Rachel moving around upstairs. He set Ellie’s candy down on the counter and said, ‘It doesn’t necessarily work that way, Ellie. Norma’s heart attack was a very small one, and I was able to administer the treatment right away. I doubt if her heart was damaged much at all. She—’ ‘Oh, I know,’ Ellie agreed, almost cheerfully. ‘But she’s old, and she’ll die pretty soon anyway. Mr Crandall, too. Can I have an apple before I go to bed, daddy?’ ‘No,’ he said, looking at her thoughtfully. ‘Go up and brush your teeth, babe.’ Did anyone really think they understood kids? he wondered.

When the house was settled and they were in bed, Rachel asked softly: ‘Was it very bad for Ellie, Lou? Was she upset?’ No, he thought. She knows old people croak at regular intervals, just like she knows to let the grasshopper go when it spits … like she knows that if you stumble on number thirteen when you’re skipping rope that your best friend will die … like she knows that you put the graves in diminishing circles up in the Pet Sematary … ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She handled herself very well. Let’s go to sleep, Rachel, okay?’ That night, as they slept in their house and as Jud lay wakeful in his, there was another hard frost. The wind rose in the early morning, ripping most of the remaining leaves, which were now an uninteresting brown, from the trees.

The wind awoke Louis and he started up on his elbows, mostly asleep and confused. There were steps on the stairs … slow, dragging steps. Pascow had come back. Only now, he thought, two months had passed. When the door opened he would see a rotting horror, the jogging shorts caked with mould, the flesh fallen away in great holes, the brain decayed to paste. Only the eyes would be alive … hellishly bright and alive. Pascow would not speak this time; his vocal cords would be too decayed to produce sounds. But his eyes … they would beckon him to come.

‘No,’ he breathed, and the steps died out.

He got up, went to the door, and pulled it open, his lips drawn back in a grimace of fear and resolution, his flesh cringing. Pascow would be there, and with his raised arms he would look like a long-dead conductor about to call for the first thundering phrase of Walpurgisnacht.

No such thing, as Jud might have said. The landing was empty … silent. There was no sound but the wind. Louis went back to bed and slept.