فصل سی و دو

THIRTY-TWO

It had not been a heart attack. It had been a brain embolism, sudden, and probably painless. When Louis called Steve Masterton that afternoon and told him what was going on, Steve said that he wouldn’t mind going out just that way.

‘Sometimes God dillies and dallies,’ Steve said, ‘and sometimes he just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.’ Rachel did not want to talk about it at all, and would not allow Louis to talk to her of it.

Ellie was not so much upset as she was shocked and interested – it was what Louis thought a thoroughly healthy five-year-old reaction should be. She wanted to know if Mrs Crandall had died with her eyes shut or open. Louis said he didn’t know.

Jud took hold as well as could have been expected, considering the fact that the lady had been sharing bed and board with him for almost sixty years. Louis found the old man – and on this day he looked very much like an old man of eighty-four – sitting alone at the kitchen table, smoking a Chesterfield, drinking a bottle of beer, and staring blankly into the living room.

He looked up when Louis came in and said, ‘Well, she’s gone, Louis.’ He said this in such a clear and matter-of-fact way that Louis thought it must not have really cleared through all the circuits yet – hadn’t hit him yet where he lived. Then Jud’s mouth began to work and he covered his eyes with one arm. Louis went to him and put an arm around him, and Jud gave in and wept. It had cleared the circuits, all right. Jud understood perfectly the fact that his wife had died.

‘That’s good,’ Louis said. ‘That’s good, Jud, she would want you to cry a little, I think. Probably be pissed off if you didn’t.’ He had started to cry a little himself. Jud hugged him tightly and Louis hugged him back.

Jud cried for ten minutes or so, and then the storm passed. Louis listened to the things Jud said then with great care – he listened as a doctor as well as a friend. He listened for any circularity in Jud’s conversation; he listened to see if Jud’s grasp of when was clear (no need to check him on where; that would prove nothing, because for Jud Crandall the where had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma’s name in the present tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip. Louis was aware that it was not uncommon for two old married people to go almost hand-in-hand, a month, a week, even a day apart. The shock, he supposed, or maybe even some deep inner urge to catch up with the one gone (that was a thought he would not have had before Church; he found that many of his thoughts concerning the spiritual and the supernatural had undergone a quiet but nonetheless deep change). His conclusion was that Jud was grieving hard but that he was – at least for the time being – still all there. He sensed none of that transparent frailty that had seemed to surround Norma on New Year’s Eve, when the four of them had sat in the Creed living room, drinking eggnog.

Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying.

‘A bit early in the day,’ he said, ‘but sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances …’ ‘Say no more,’ Louis told him, and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. ‘Shall we drink to her?’

‘I guess we better,’ Jud said. ‘You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned and her shirtwaist just as clean and white … your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it.’ Louis nodded, raised his beer a little. ‘To Norma,’ he said.

Jud clinked his bottle against Louis’s. He was crying again but he was also smiling a little. He nodded. ‘May she have peace and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is.’ ‘Amen,’ Louis said, and they drank.

It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so, he did not become drunk or in any way incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes, colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could have done half so well.

Jud called the Brookings-Smith Funeral Home in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called ‘the quiet trade’, knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. ‘She’s dead and people know it,’ he said, lighting a Chesterfield. ‘No need to tart her up.’ The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, open during the visiting hours the day before. She was to be buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where they had bought plots in 1951. He had the papers in hand and gave the mortician the plot-number so that preparations could begin out there: H-101. He himself had H-102, he told Louis later on.

He hung up, looked at Louis, and said: ‘Prettiest cemetery in the world is right there in Bangor, as far as I’m concerned. Crack yourself another beer, if you want, Louis. All of this is going to take a while.’ Louis was about to refuse – he was feeling a little tiddly – when a grotesque image arose unbidden behind his eyes; Jud pulling Norma’s corpse on a pagan litter through the woods. Toward the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.

It had the effect of a slap on him. Without a word, he got up and got another beer out of the fridge. Jud nodded at him and dialed the telephone again. By three that afternoon, when Louis went home for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, Jud had progressed a long way toward organizing his wife’s final rites; he moved from one thing to the next like a man planning a dinner party of some importance. He called the North Ludlow Methodist Church, where the actual funeral would take place, and the Cemetery Administration Office at Mount Hope; these were both calls the undertaker at Brookings-Smith would be making, but Jud called first, as a courtesy. It was a step few bereaved ever thought of … or, if they thought of it, one they could rarely bring themselves to take. Louis admired Jud all the more for it. Later, he called Norma’s few surviving relatives and his own, paging through an old and tattered address book with a leather cover to find the numbers. And between calls, he drank beer and remembered the past.

Louis felt great admiration for him … and love?

Yes, his heart confirmed; and love.

When Ellie came down that night in her pajamas to be kissed, she asked Louis if Mrs Crandall would go to heaven. She almost whispered the question to Louis, as if she understood it would be better if they were not overheard. Rachel was in the kitchen making a chicken pie, which she intended to take over to Jud the next day.

Across the street, all the lights were on in the Crandall house. Cars were parked in Jud’s driveway and up and down the shoulder of the highway on that side for a hundred feet in either direction. The official viewing hours would be tomorrow, at the mortuary, but tonight people had come to comfort Jud as well as they could, and to help him remember, and to celebrate Norma’s passing – what Jud had referred to once that afternoon as ‘the foregoing’. Between that house and this, a frigid February wind blew. The road was patched with black ice. The coldest part of the Maine winter was now upon them.

‘Well, I don’t really know, honey,’ Louis said, taking Ellie on his lap. On the TV, a running gunfight was in progress. A man spun and dropped, unremarked upon by either of them. Louis was aware – uncomfortably so – that Ellie probably knew a hell of a lot more about Ronald McDonald and Spiderman and The Burger King than she did Moses, Jesus, and St Paul. She was the daughter of a woman who was a nonpracticing Jew and a man who was a lapsed Methodist, and he supposed her ideas about the whole spiritus mundi were of the vaguest sort; not myths, not dreams, but dreams of dreams. It’s late for that, he thought randomly. She’s only five, but it’s late for that. Jesus Christ, it gets late so fast.

But she was looking at him, and he ought to say something.

‘People believe all sorts of things about what happens to us when we die,’ he said. ‘Some people think we go to heaven or hell. Some people believe we’re born again as little children—’ ‘Sure, Carnation. Like what happened to Audrey Rose in that movie on TV.’

‘You never saw that!’ Rachel, he thought, would have her own brain embolism if she thought Ellie had seen Audrey Rose.

‘Marie told me at school,’ Ellie said. Marie was Ellie’s self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm or perhaps even scurvy. Both Louis and Rachel encouraged the friendship as well as they could, but Rachel had once confessed to Louis that after Marie left, she always felt an urge to check Ellie’s head for nits and head-lice. Louis had laughed and nodded.

‘Marie’s mommy lets her watch all the shows.’ There was an implied criticism in this that Louis chose to ignore.

‘Well, it’s reincarnation, but I guess you’ve got the idea. The Catholics believe in heaven and hell, but they also believe there’s a place called limbo and one called purgatory. And the Buddhists believe in Nirvana—’ There was a shadow on the dining-room wall. Rachel. Listening.

Louis went on more slowly.

‘There are probably lots more, too. But what it comes down to, Ellie, is this: no one knows. People say they know, but when they say that what they mean is that they believe because of faith. Do you know what faith is?’ ‘Well …’

‘Here we are, sitting in my chair,’ Louis said. ‘Do you think my chair will still be here tomorrow?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be. Get it?’ ‘Yes.’ Ellie nodded positively.

‘But we don’t know it’ll be here. After all, some crazed chair-burglar might break in and take it, right?’ Ellie giggled. Louis smiled.

‘We just have faith that won’t happen. Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don’t believe that, myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: when we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying, or they don’t. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If we don’t, it’s just blotto. The end.’ ‘Like going to sleep?’

He considered this and then said, ‘More like having ether, I think.’

‘Which do you have faith in, Daddy?’

The shadow on the wall moved and came to rest again.

For most of his adult life – since college days, he supposed – he had believed that death was the end. He had been present at many deathbeds and had never felt a soul bullet past him on its way to … wherever; hadn’t this very thought occurred to him upon the death of Victor Pascow? He had agreed with his Psychology I teacher that the life-after-life experiences reported in scholarly journals and then vulgarized in the popular press probably indicated a last-ditch mental stand against the onrush of death; the endlessly inventive human mind, staving off insanity to the very end by constructing a hallucination of immortality. He had likewise agreed with an acquaintance in the dorm who had said, during an all-night bull-session during Louis’s sophomore year at Chicago, that the Bible was suspiciously full of miracles that had ceased almost completely during modern times (‘totally ceased’ he had said at first, but had been forced backward at least one step by others who claimed with some authority that there were still plenty of weird things going on; little pockets of perplexity in a world that had become, by and large, a clean, well-lighted place – there was, for instance, the Shroud of Turin, which had survived every effort to debunk it). ‘So Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead,’ this acquaintance – who had gone on to become a highly thought-of o.b. man in Dearborn, Michigan – had said. ‘That’s fine with me. If I have to swallow it, I will. I mean, I had to buy the concept that the fetus of one twin can sometimes swallow the fetus of the other in utero, like some kind of goddam unborn cannibal, and then show up with teeth in his testes or hair in his lungs twenty or thirty years later to prove that he did it, and I suppose if I can buy that I can buy anything. But I wanna see the death certificate, you dig what I’m saying? I’m not questioning that he came out of the tomb. But I wanna see the original death certificate. Me, I like Thomas saying he’d only believe Jesus had risen when he could look through the nail-holes and stick his hands in the guy’s side. As far as I’m concerned, he was the real physician of the bunch, not Luke.’ No, he had never really believed in survival. At least, not until Church.

‘I believe that we go on,’ he told his daughter slowly. ‘But as to what it’s like, I have no opinion. It may be that it’s different for different people. It may be that you get what you believed all your life. But I believe we go on, and I believe that Mrs Crandall is probably somewhere where she can be happy.’ ‘You have faith in that,’ Ellie said. It was not a question. She sounded awed.

Louis smiled, a little pleased and a little embarrassed. ‘I suppose so. And I have faith in the fact that it’s time for you to go to bed. Like ten minutes ago.’ He kissed her twice, once on the lips and once on the nose.

‘Do you think animals go on?’

‘Yes,’ he said, without thinking, and for a moment he almost added: Especially cats. The words had actually trembled on his lips for a moment, and his skin felt gray and cold.

‘Okay,’ she said, and slid down. ‘Gotta go kiss Mommy.’

‘Right on.’

He watched her go. At the dining-room doorway she turned back and said, ‘I was really silly about Church that day, wasn’t I? Crying like that.’ ‘No hon,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you were silly.’

‘If he died now, I could take it,’ she said, and then seemed to consider the thought she had just spoken aloud, as if mildly startled. The she said, as if agreeing with herself: ‘Sure I could.’ And went to find Rachel.

Later, in bed, Rachel said: ‘I heard what you were talking about with her.’

‘And don’t approve?’ Louis asked. He had decided that maybe it would be best to have this out, if that was what Rachel wanted.

‘No,’ Rachel said, with a hesitance that was not much like her. ‘No, Louis, it’s not like that. I just get … scared. And you know me. When I get scared, I get defensive.’ Louis could not remember ever hearing Rachel speak with such effort, and suddenly he felt more cautious than he had with Ellie earlier. He felt that he was in a minefield.

‘Scared of what? Dying?’

‘Not myself,’ she said. ‘I hardly even think of that … any more. But when I was a kid, I thought of it a lot. Lost a lot of sleep. Dreamed of monsters coming to eat me up in my bed, and all of the monsters looked like my sister Zelda.’ Yes, Louis thought. Here it is; at last, after all the time we’ve been married, here it is.

‘You don’t talk about her much,’ he said.

Rachel smiled, and touched his face. ‘You’re sweet, Louis. I never talk about her. I try never to think about her.’ ‘I always assumed you had your reasons.’

‘I did. I do.’

She paused, thinking.

‘I know she died … spinal meningitis …

‘Spinal meningitis,’ she repeated, and he saw she was very near to tears. ‘There are no pictures of her in the house any more.’ ‘There’s a picture of a young girl in your father’s—’

‘In his study. Yes. I forgot that one. And my mother carries one in her wallet still, I think. She was two years older than I was. She caught it … and she was in the back bedroom … she was in the back bedroom like a dirty secret, Louis, she was dying in there, my sister died in the back bedroom and that’s what she was, a dirty secret, she was always a dirty secret!’ Rachel suddenly broke down completely, and in the loud, rising quality of her sobs, Louis sensed the onset of hysteria and became alarmed. He reached for her and caught a shoulder, which was pulled away from him as soon as he touched it. He could feel the whisper of her silk nightdress under his fingertips.

‘Rachel – babe – don’t—’

Somehow she controlled the sobs. ‘Don’t tell me don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t stop me, Louis. I’ve only got the strength to tell this once, and then I don’t want to ever talk about it again. I probably won’t sleep tonight as it is.’ ‘Was it that horrible?’ he asked, knowing the answer already. It explained so much, and even things he had never connected before or only suspected vaguely suddenly came together in his mind. She had never attended a funeral with him, he realized, not even that of Al Locke, a fellow med-student who had been killed when the car he was riding in had collided with a dump-truck. Al had been a regular visitor at their apartment, and Rachel had always liked him. Yet she had not gone to his funeral.

She was sick that day, Louis remembered suddenly. Got the flu, or something. Looked serious. But the next day she was okay again.

After the funeral she was all right again, he corrected himself. He remembered thinking even then that her sickness might just be psychosomatic.

‘It was horrible, all right. Worse than you can ever imagine. Louis, we watched her degenerate day by day and there was nothing anyone could do. She was in constant pain. Her body seemed to shrivel … pull in on itself … her shoulders hunched up and her face pulled down until it was like a mask. Her hands were like birds’ feet. I had to feed her sometimes. I hated it, but I did it and never said boo about it. When the pain got bad enough they started giving her drugs, mild ones at first, and then ones that would have left her a junkie if she had lived. But of course everyone knew she wasn’t going to live. I guess that’s why she’s such a … secret to all of us. Because we wanted her to die, Louis, we wished for her to die, and it wasn’t just so she wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was so we wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was because she was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster … oh Christ I know how awful that must sound …’ She put her face in her hands.

Louis touched her gently. ‘Rachel, it doesn’t sound awful at all.’

‘It does!’ she cried. ‘It does!’

‘It just sounds true,’ he said. ‘Victims of long illnesses often become demanding, unpleasant monsters. The idea of the saintlike, long-suffering patient is a big romantic fiction. By the time the first set of bedsores crops up on a bed-bound patient’s butt, he – or she – has started to snipe and cut and spread the misery. They can’t help it, but that doesn’t help the people in the situation.’ She looked at him, amazed … almost hopeful. Then distrust stole back into her face. ‘You’re making that up.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Want me to show you the textbooks? How about the suicide statistics? Want to see those? In families where a terminal patient has been nursed at home, the suicide statistics spike right up into the stratosphere in the six months following the patient’s death.’ ‘Suicide!’

‘They swallow pills, or sniff a pipe, or blow their brains out. Their hate … their weariness … their disgust … their sorrow …’ He shrugged, and brought his closed fists gently together. ‘The survivors start feeling as if they’d committed murder. So they step out.’ A crazy, wounded kind of relief had crept into Rachel’s puffy face. ‘She was demanding … hateful. Sometimes she’d piss in her bed deliberately. My mother would ask her if she wanted help getting to the bathroom … and later, when she couldn’t get up any more, if she wanted the bedpan … and Zelda would say no … and then she’d piss the bed so my mother or my mother and I would have to change the sheets … and she’d say it was an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it. The room always smelled of piss and her drugs … she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough Drops and that smell was always there … some nights I wake up … even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry Cough Drops … and I think … if I’m not really awake I think “Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?” … I think …’ Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed it with savage, brilliant tightness.

‘When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting. Near the end, Louis, near the end it seemed like her … like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of her back.’ Now Rachel’s wet eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power.

‘And sometimes she’d touch me with her … her hands … her birdy hands … and sometimes I’d almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream … and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.

‘Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom … our dirty secret.’ Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.

‘My parents were gone when she finally … when she … you know, when she …’

With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.

‘When she died my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover Season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting for it to be time to give her some more medicine, because she was screaming. She’d been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldn’t read with her screaming that way. And then … see, what happened was … well … Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight … bad dreams every night … I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live … I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don’t really think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way … turned me out of it like in a fairy story … I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right … to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis—’ Rachel’s voice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience. ‘Louis, I didn’t know what to do! I was eight!’ ‘No, of course you didn’t,’ Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him with the panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a large lake. ‘Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better, either. No one could change it. No one could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. She started making a sound, a kind of, I don’t know – Gaaaaaa – like that—’ In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sister Zelda must have sounded, and Louis’s mind suddenly flashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.

‘—and there was spit, spit coming down her chin—’

‘Rachel, that’s enough,’ he said, not quite steadily. ‘I am aware of the symptoms.’

‘I’m explaining,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I’m explaining why I can’t go to poor Norma’s funeral, for one thing, and why we had that stupid fight that day—’ ‘Shh, that’s forgotten.’

‘Not by me, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sister Zelda choking to death in her bed on April 14th, 1963.’ For a long moment there was silence in the room.

‘I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back,’ Rachel went on at last. ‘It’s all I knew to do. Her feet were beating up and down … and her twisted legs … and I remember there was a sound like farting … I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn’t farts, it was the seams under both arms of my blouse ripping out when I turned her over. She started to … to convulse … and I saw that her face was turned sideways, turned into the pillows and I thought, oh, she’s choking, Zelda’s choking and they’ll come home and say I murdered her by choking, they’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, and they’ll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true, too. Because, Louis, see, the first thought that went through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my first thought was Oh good, finally, Zelda’s choking and this is going to be over. So I turned her over again and her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up. Then she died. I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out of the door but I hit the wall and a picture fell down, it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with the meningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, because she couldn’t make that sound and so she sounded like Elmer Fudd. My mother got that picture framed because … because Zelda liked it most of all … Oz the Gweat and Tewwible … and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shattered and I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought … I guess I thought it was her ghost, coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn’t be stuck in bed, so I screamed … I screamed and I ran out of the house screaming “Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead!“ And the neighbors … they came and they looked … they saw me running down the street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms … I was yelling “Zelda’s dead!“ Louis, and I guess maybe they thought I was crying but I think … I think maybe I was laughing, Louis. I think maybe that’s what I was doing.’ ‘If you were, I salute you for it,’ Louis said.

‘You don’t mean that, though,’ Rachel said with the utter certainty of one who has been over a point and over it and over it. He let it go. He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long – most of it, anyway – but never this part. Never completely. Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are half-buried things in the terrain of any life, and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotted tooth, its crown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God was good it would remain dormant, except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as much as she had was well nigh incredible – it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was in awe of her. He felt like cheering.

He sat up now and turned on the light. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I salute you for it. And if I needed another reason to … to really dislike your mother and father, I’ve got it now. You never should have been left alone with her, Rachel. Never.’ Like a child – the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened – she reprimanded him: ‘Lou, it was Passover Season—’ ‘I don’t care if it was Judgment Trump,’ Louis said with a sudden low and hoarse savagery that caused her to pull back a little. He was remembering the student nurses, those two candy-stripers whose evil luck it had been to be in attendance on the morning Pascow had been brought in dying. One of them – a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Charlton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her.

Where was the nurse? There should have been an RN in attendance … they went out, they actually went out and left an eight-year-old kid alone with her dying sister who was probably clinically insane by then. Why? Because it was Passover Season. And because elegant Dory Goldman couldn’t stand the stink that particular morning and had to get away from it for just a little while. So Rachel got the duty. Right, friends and neighbors? Rachel got the duty. Eight years old, pigtails, middy blouse. Rachel got the mother-fucking duty. Rachel could stay and put up with the stink. What did they send her to Camp Sunset in Vermont for six weeks every year, if not to put up with the stink of her dying, insane sister? Ten new shirt-and-jumper combinations for Gage and six new dresses for Ellie and I’ll pay your way through medical school if you’ll stay away from my daughter … but where was the overflowing checkbook when your daughter was dying of spinal meningitis and your other daughter was alone with her, you cheap bastard? Where was the R-FUCKING-N?

Louis sat up, got out of bed.

‘Where are you going?’ Rachel asked, alarmed.

‘To get you a Valium.’

‘You know I don’t—’

‘Tonight you do,’ he said.

She took the pill and then told him the rest. Her voice remained calm throughout. The tranquilizer was doing its job.

The next-door neighbor had retrieved eight-year-old Rachel from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming ‘Zelda’s dead!’ over and over. Rachel’s nose had been bleeding. She had blood all over her. The same neighbor had called the ambulance and then her parents; after getting Rachel’s nosebleed stopped and calming her with a cup of hot tea and two aspirins, she was able to get the location of her parents out of her – they were visiting Mr and Mrs Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business.

By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare box. Later – much later – it had become Dory Goldman’s sewing room.

The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been horrified to discover she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it moving Zelda. In her spurt of adrenalin-powered strength, she had lifted her with enough force to pull her blouse apart.

That she had strained herself trying to keep Zelda from choking was simple, obvious, elementary-my-dear-Watson. To everyone, that was, except Rachel herself. Rachel had been sure that this was Zelda’s revenge from beyond the grave. Zelda knew that Rachel was glad she was dead; Zelda knew that when Rachel burst from the house screaming Zelda’s dead, Zelda’s dead, she had been laughing, not screaming; Zelda knew she had been murdered and she had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and soon her back would start to twist and change and she would have to lie in bed, slowly but surely turning into a monster, her hands hooking into claws.

After a while she would begin screaming with the pain, as Zelda had done, and then she would start wetting the bed, and finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. It was Zelda’s revenge.

No one could talk Rachel out of this belief; not her mother, her father, or Dr Murray, who diagnosed a mild back-sprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some – Louis, for instance – would have said) to stop behaving so badly. She ought to remember that her sister had just died, Dr Murray told her; her parents were prostrate with grief and this was not the time for Rachel to make a childish play for attention. Only the slowly abating pain had been able to convince her that she was neither the victim of Zelda’s supernatural vengeance nor God’s just punishment of the wicked. For months (or so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel’s hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back … She had not attended Zelda’s funeral, nor any funeral since.

‘If you’d told me this before,’ Louis said, ‘it would have explained a hell of a lot.’

‘Lou, I couldn’t,’ she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now. ‘Since then I’ve been … I guess a little phobic on the subject.’ Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.

‘I can’t … seem to help it. In my mind I know you’re right, that death is perfectly natural, good, even – but what my mind knows and what happens … inside me …’ ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘That day I blew up at you,’ she said, ‘I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea … a way of getting used to it … but I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Louis.’ ‘No apology needed,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.’ She smiled. ‘It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that’s poisoned part of me for years.’ ‘Maybe you have.’

Rachel’s eyes slipped closed and then opened again … slowly. ‘And don’t blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills – Zelda’s bills – were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off. On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.

‘Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda’s death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan and since then he’s never looked back. But that’s why they’ve always been possessive of me, I think. It’s not just because I’m the only one left—’ ‘It’s guilt,’ Louis said.

‘Yes, I suppose. And you won’t be mad at me if I’m sick on the day they bury Norma?’

‘No, honey, I won’t be mad.’ He paused, and then took her hand. ‘May I take Ellie?’

Her hand tightened in his. ‘Oh, Louis, I don’t know,’ she said, and the fear was back in her voice. ‘She’s so young—’ ‘She’s known where babies come from for a year or more,’ he reminded her again.

She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips. ‘If you think it’s best,’ she said finally. ‘If you think it won’t … won’t hurt her.’ ‘Come over here, Rachel,’ he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis’s bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay and she slept again.