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FORTY-TWO

By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall.

‘Where you going, Lou?’ Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching Little House on the Prairie with Gage’s picture on her lap.

‘I thought I’d pick up a pizza.’

‘Didn’t you get enough to eat earlier?’

‘I just didn’t seem hungry then,’ he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie: ‘I am now.’ That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gage’s funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburger and noodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche (‘It will keep until you want it, if it doesn’t all get eaten,’ she told Rachel. ‘Quiche is easy to warm up.’) The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appeared – neither of them would speak to Louis, or even come close to him, for which he was not sorry – with a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheese – a large wheel of his old favorite, Mr Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples. The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences.

This was the funeral party, and while it was quiet, it was not quite subdued. There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some. After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago), Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told him – that at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased’s shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love, that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceased’s ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying DOA tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue-keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong.

Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her. Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, let-it-all-go way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gage’s death, or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar half-world of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter’s. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachel’s shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis.

Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canapés, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm.

Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave-robbing … only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied.

It was not as if he intended to do anything.

Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two six-packs of cold beer, and called ahead to Napoli’s for a pepperoni and mushroom pizza.

‘Want to give me a name on that, sir?’

Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, Louis thought.

‘Lou Creed.’

‘Okay, Lou, we’re real busy so that’ll be maybe forty-five minutes – that okay for you?’ ‘Sure,’ Louis said, and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh— He cut that thought off.

He drove past Napoli’s to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None.

He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semi-circle, were wrought-iron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louis’s mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills, there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry-water), a few isolated weeping willows. It wasn’t quiet. The turnpike was near – the drone of traffic came on the steady, chill wind – and the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport.

He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking They’ll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenaged neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men (there’s that word again)

were over. The right-hand gate swung in with a faint, screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through. He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch.

He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around.

A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who? Andrew Marvell? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway?

Jud’s voice spoke up in his mind then, worried and – frightened? Yes. Frightened.

Louis, what are you doing here? You’re looking up a road you don’t want to travel.

He pushed the voice aside. If he was torturing anyone, it was only himself. No one need know he had been here as the daylight wound down to dark.

He began to walk toward Gage’s grave, taking one of the winding paths. In a moment he was in a lane of trees; they rustled their new leaves mysteriously over his head. His heart was thudding too loudly in his chest. The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker’s building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview’s twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers.

Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No. It wasn’t. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles, moving inward to the center; rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if … For a moment Louis saw the Pet Sematary as a kind of advertisement … a come-on, like the kind they gave you on freak alley at the carnival. They’d bring out the fire-eater and you got to watch his show for free because the owners knew you wouldn’t buy the steak unless you saw the sizzle, you won’t cough up the cash if you don’t see the flash— Those graves, those graves in their almost Druidic circles.

The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the pharaohs, a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guildkings of Stonehenge had created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the Christian Bible as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job.

The spiral was the oldest sign of power in the world, man’s oldest symbol of that twisty bridge which may exist between the world and the Gulf.

Louis reached Gage’s grave at last. The payloader was gone. The Astroturf had been removed, rolled up by some whistling workman with his mind on an after-work beer at the Fairmount Lounge, stored in an equipment shed somewhere. Where Gage lay there was a neat rectangle of bare, raked earth, perhaps five feet by three feet. The headstone had not been set up yet.

Louis knelt. The wind blew through his hair, tumbling it. The sky was almost entirely dark, now. It raced with clouds.

No one has shone a light in my face and asked me what I’m doing here. No watchdog has barked. The gate was unlocked. The days of the Resurrection Men are past. If I came up here with a pick and a shovel— He came back to himself with a jerk. He was only playing a dangerous mind-game with himself if he pretended that Pleasantview stood unwatched during the night hours. Suppose he were discovered belly-deep in his son’s new grave by the caretaker or the watchman? It might not get into the papers, but then again it might. He might be charged with a crime. What crime? Grave-robbing? Unlikely. Malicious mischief or vandalism would be more likely. And, in the paper or out of it, the word would get around. People would talk; it was a story too juicy not to be told. Local doctor is discovered digging up his two-year-old son, recently killed in a tragic road accident. He would lose his job. Even if not, Rachel would be chilled by the wind of such tales, and Ellie might be harried by them at school until her life was a misery of chanting children. There might be the humiliation of a sanity test in exchange for dropping charges.

But I could bring Gage back to life! Gage could live again!

Did he really, actually believe that?

The fact was that he did. He had told himself time and time again, both before Gage’s death and after it, that Church had not really been dead, only stunned. That Church had dug his way out and come home. A kiddie story with gruesome undertones – Winnie the Poe. Master unwittingly piles a cairn of stones over a living animal. Faithful beast digs itself out and comes home. Fine. Except it was not true. Church had been dead. The Micmac burying ground had brought him back to life.

He sat by Gage’s grave, trying to place all the known components in an order as rational and logical as this dark magic would allow.

Timmy Baterman, now. First, did he believe the story? And second, did it make a difference?

In spite of its convenience, he believed most of it. It was undeniable that if a place like the Micmac burying ground existed (as it did), and if people knew of it (as a few of the older Ludlow-ites did), then sooner or later, someone would try the experiment. Human nature as Louis understood it made it more difficult to believe that it had stopped at a few pets and valuable breed animals.

All right, then – did he also believe that Timmy Baterman had been transformed into some sort of all-knowing demon? That was a more difficult question, and he was wary of it because he didn’t want to believe it, and he had seen the results of that sort of mind-set before.

No, he did not want to believe Timmy Baterman had been a demon, but he would not – absolutely could not – allow himself to let what he wanted cloud his judgment.

Louis thought about Hanratty, the bull. Hanratty, Jud said, had turned mean. So, in his way, had Timmy Baterman. Hanratty had later been ‘put down’ by the same man who had somehow dragged the bull’s body up to the Micmac burying ground on a sledge. Timmy Baterman had been ‘put down’ by his father.

But because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No. Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact an exception to the general case. Look back at the other animals – Jud’s dog Spot, the old woman’s parakeet, Church himself. They had all come back changed, and the change had been noticeable in all cases, but in the case of Spot, at least, the change hadn’t been so great that Jud had forborne to recommend the process of … of … (resurrection)

Yes, of resurrection to a friend years later. Of course, further down the line he had tried to justify and hem and haw and had spouted a lot of ominous, confused bullshit that could not even rightly be called philosophy.

How could he refuse to take the chance available to him – this one, unbelievable chance – on the basis of the Timmy Baterman story? One swallow did not a summer make.

You’re slanting all the evidence in favor of the conclusion you want to produce, his mind protested. At least tell yourself the goddamned truth about the change in Church. Even if you want to disqualify the animals – the mice and the birds – what about the way he is? Muddled … that’s the best word of all, that sums it up. The day we were out with the kite. You remember how Gage was the day we were out with the kite? How vibrant and alive he was, reacting to everything? Wouldn’t it be better to remember him that way? Do you want to resurrect a zombie from a grade-B horror picture? Or even something so prosaic as a retarded little boy? A boy who eats with his fingers and stares blankly at images on the TV screen and who will never learn to write his own name? What did Jud say about his dog? ‘It was like washing a piece of meat.’ Is that what you want? A piece of meat? And even if you’re able to be satisfied with that, how do you explain the return of your son from the dead to your wife? To your daughter? To Steve Masterton? To the world? What happens the first time Missy Dandridge pulls into the driveway and sees Gage riding his trike in the yard? Can’t you hear her screams, Louis? Can’t you see her harrowing her face with her fingernails? What do you say to the reporters? What do you say when a film crew from Real People turns up on your doorstep, wanting to shoot film of your resurrected son?

Did any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things could not be dealt with? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?

Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return … well … diminished. But would that change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were hydro-cephalic, mongoloids, autistic. They loved children who were born blind, children born as Siamese twins, children who were born with guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicial mercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder and to torture the innocent.

Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could he simply dismiss his son as a … a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?

But, Louis, my God, you don’t live in a vacuum! People will say —

He cut that thought off with rude, angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.

Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage’s grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course through him. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern of concentric circles in the dirt – he had drawn a spiral with circles.

He swept the fingers of both hands though the dirt, rubbing the pattern out. Then he left Pleasantview, hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned at every turn of the path.

He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it was semi-cold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay. Louis ate one piece and then tossed the rest out of the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn’t a litterbug by nature, but he did not want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in her mind that a pizza wasn’t really what he’d had in mind when he went to Bangor.

Louis now began to think about time and circumstance.

Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a good while before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot the 19th … Timmy was buried – don’t hold me to this, but I think it was July 22nd. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn … saw Timmy walking up the road.

All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son’s original interment … no. If he was going to err, let him err on the side of conservatism. Say three days. For the sake of argument, assume that Timmy Baterman returned from the dead – on July 29th. That made ten days between the boy’s death and his return, and that was a conservative estimate. It might have been as long as twelve days. For Gage, it had now been four days. Time had already gotten away from him to a degree, but it was still possible to cut Bill Baterman’s time in half. If … If he could bring about circumstances similar to those which had made the resurrection of Church possible. Because Church had died at the best possible time, hadn’t he? His family had been away when Church was struck and killed. No one the wiser, except for him and Jud.

His family had been in Chicago.

For Louis, the final piece fell into place with a neat little click.

‘You want us to what? Rachel asked, staring at him, astounded.

It was quarter of ten. Ellie had gone to bed. Rachel had taken another Valium after cleaning up the detritus of the funeral party (‘funeral party’ was another of those horrible phrases full of unstated paradox, like ‘visiting hours’, but there seemed no other phrase for the way they had spent their afternoon) and had seemed dazed and quiet ever since he returned from Bangor … but this had gotten through.

‘To go back to Chicago with your mother and father,’ Louis repeated patiently. ‘They’ll be going tomorrow. If you call them now and Delta right after, you may be able to get on the same plane with them.’ ‘Louis, have you lost your mind? After the fight you had with my father—’

Louis found himself speaking with a quick glibness that was totally unlike him. It afforded him a cheesy sort of exhilaration. He felt like a football sub who suddenly gets the ball and makes a seventy-yard touchdown run, cutting and weaving, out-thinking potential tacklers with a delirious one-time-only ease. He had never been a particularly good liar, and he had not planned this encounter in any detail at all, but now a string of plausible lies, half-truths, and inspired justification poured out of him.

‘The fight we had is one of the reasons I want you and Ellie to go back with them. It’s time we sewed up this wound, Rachel. I knew that … felt it … at the funeral parlor. When the fight started, I was trying to patch things up.’ ‘But this trip … I don’t think it’s a good idea at all, Louis. We need you. And you need us.’ Her eyes measured him doubtfully. ‘At least, I hope you need us. And neither of us are in any shape to—’ ‘—in any kind of shape to stay here,’ Louis said forcefully. He felt as if he might be coming down with a fever. ‘I’m glad you need me, and I do need you and Ellie. But right now this is the worst damn place in the world for you, honey. Gage is everywhere in this house, around every corner. For you and me, sure. But it’s even worse for Ellie, I think.’ He saw pain flicker in her eyes and knew he had touched her. Some part of himself felt shame at this cheap victory. All the textbooks he’d read on the subject of death told him that the bereaved’s first strong impulse in the aftermath of death-shock is to get away from the place where it happened … and that to follow such an impulse may turn out to be the most harmful course of action, because it allows the bereaved the dubious luxury of refusing to come to terms with the new reality. The books said it was best to remain where you were, to battle grief on its home ground until it subsided into remembrance. But Louis simply did not dare make the experiment with his family at home. He had to get rid of them, at least for a while.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It just … hits you all over the place. I moved the couch while you were in Bangor … I thought running the vacuum around would take my mind off … off things … and I found four of his little Matchbox cars under there … as if they were waiting for him to come back and … you know, play with them …’ Her voice, already wavering, now broke. Tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘And that’s when I took the second Valium, because I started crying again, the way I’m crying now … oh what a fucking soap opera all of this is … hold me, Lou, will you hold me?’ He did hold her, and he did it well; but he felt like an imposter. His mind spun with ways to turn these tears to his further benefit. Some nice guy, all right. Hey-ho, let’s go.

‘How long does it go on?’ she wept. ‘Does it ever end? If only we could have him back, Louis, I swear I’d watch him better, it would never happen, and just because that driver was going too fast that doesn’t let me – us – off the hook. I didn’t know there could ever be hurt like this, and that’s the truth. It comes, over and over it comes, and it hurts so much, Louis, there’s no rest from it even when I go to sleep, when I go to sleep I dream it, over and over again I see him running to the road … and I scream to him …’ ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘Rachel. Shhhh.’

She lifted her puffy face to him. ‘It wasn’t even as if he were being bad, Louis. It was just a game to him … the truck came at the wrong time … and Missy Dandridge called while I was still crying … and said she read in the Ellsworth American that the driver tried to kill himself.’ ‘What?’

‘He tried to hang himself in his garage. He’s in shock and deep depression, the paper said …’ ‘Too fucking bad he didn’t make good on it,’ Louis said savagely, but his voice sounded distant to his own ears and he felt a chill spreading through. The place has a power, Louis … it’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared it’s coming round to full again. ‘My boy’s dead and he’s out on a thousand dollars’ bail and he’ll go on feeling depressed and suicidal until some judge takes away his licence for ninety days and gives him a slap-on-the-wrist fine.’ ‘Missy says his wife has taken the kids and left him,’ Rachel said dully. ‘She didn’t get that from the paper, but from somebody who knows somebody down Ellsworth way. He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t on drugs. He didn’t have any previous speeding violations. He said that when he got to Ludlow, he just felt like putting the pedal to the metal. He said he didn’t even know why. So around and around it goes.’ He just felt like putting the pedal to the metal.

The place has a power …

Louis thrust these thoughts away. He gripped his wife’s forearm gently. ‘Call your mother and father. Do it now. There’s no need for you and Ellie to be in this house another day. Not another day.’ ‘Not without you,’ she said. ‘Louis, I want us … I need us to stick together.’

‘I’ll follow you in three days, four at the most.’ If things went well, Rachel and Ellie might be back here in forty-eight hours. ‘I’ve got to find someone to fill in for me, on a part-time basis, at least, at the University. I’ve got sick-time and vacation-time coming, but I don’t want to leave Surrendra on the hot-seat. Jud can watch the house while we’re gone, but I’ll want to cut off the electricity and store what we’ve got in the deep-freeze somewhere. Dandridges’, I guess.’ ‘Ellie’s school …’

‘The hell with it. It’s out in three weeks, anyway. They’ll understand, the circumstances being what they are. They’ll arrange an early dismissal. It’ll all work just—’ ‘Louis?’

He broke off. ‘What?’

‘What are you hiding?’

‘Hiding?’ He looked at her openly, clearly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘Don’t you?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Never mind. I’ll call them right now … if that’s what you really want.’

‘It is,’ he said, and the words seemed to echo in his mind with an iron clang.

‘It might even be best … for Ellie.’ She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes, still slightly glazed from Valium. ‘You look feverish, Louis. As if you might be coming down with something.’ She went to the telephone and called the motel where her parents were staying before Louis could reply.

The Goldmans were overjoyed at Rachel’s proposal; they were overjoyed. They were not so wild about the idea of Louis joining them in three or four days, but in the end they wouldn’t have to worry about it at all, of course. Louis had not the slightest intention of going to Chicago. He had suspected that if there was to be a snag, it would be getting air reservations this late. But luck was with him there, too. There were still available seats on Delta’s Bangor-to-Cincinnati run, and a quick check showed two cancellations on a Cincinnati-to-Chicago flight. It meant that Rachel and Ellie would be able to travel with the Goldmans only as far as Cincinnati, but they would get to Chicago less than an hour after.

It’s almost like magic, Louis thought, hanging up the telephone, and Jud’s voice responded promptly: It’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared … Oh, get fucked, he told Jud’s voice rudely. I’ve learned to accept a great many strange things in the last ten months, my good old friend – if you’d told me the half of them, I would have told you my mind would probably snap under the strain. But am I ready to believe that a haunted patch of ground can influence airline ticketing? I don’t think so.

‘I’ll have to pack,’ Rachel said. She was looking at the flight information Louis had jotted down on the pad by the phone.

‘Take just the one big suitcase,’ Louis said.

She looked at him wide-eyed, mildly startled. ‘For both of us? Louis, you’re joking.’ ‘All right, take a couple of tote-bags, too. But don’t exhaust yourself packing a different outfit for the next three weeks,’ he said, thinking: Especially since you may be back in Ludlow very soon. ‘Take enough for a week, ten days. You’ve got the checkbook and the credit cards. Buy what you need.’ ‘But we can’t afford—’ she began doubtfully. She seemed doubtful about everything now, malleable, easily confused. He remembered her cold, dangling comment about the Winnebago he had once spoken idly about buying.

‘We have the money,’ he said.

‘Well … I suppose we could use Gage’s college fund if we needed to, although it would take a day or two to process the savings account and a week to get the treasury bills cashed—’ Her face began to crumple and dissolve again. Louis held her. She’s right. It just keeps right on hitting you, it never lets up. ‘Rachel, don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry.’ But of course she did – she had to.

While she was upstairs packing, the phone rang. Louis sprang for it, thinking it would be someone from Delta ticketing, saying a mistake had been made, no flights were available. I should have known everything was going too smoothly.

But it wasn’t Delta ticketing. It was Irwin Goldman.

‘I’ll get Rachel,’ Louis said.

‘No.’ For a moment there was nothing else, only silence. He’s probably sitting there and trying to decide which name to call you first.

When Goldman spoke again, his voice was strained. He seemed to be pushing the words out against some great inner resistance. ‘It’s you I want to talk to. Dory wanted me to call and apologize for my … for my behavior. I guess … Louis, I guess I wanted to apologize, too.’ Why, Irwin! How big of you! My God, I think I just wet my pants!

‘You don’t need to apologize,’ Louis said. His voice was dry and mechanical.

‘What I did was inexcusable,’ Goldman said. Now he did not just seem to be pushing the words out; he seemed to be coughing them out. ‘You suggesting that Rachel and Eileen come out has made me see what a big man you have been about this … and how small I have been.’ There was something very familiar in this rap, something eerily familiar—

Then he got it, and his mouth suddenly pulled together in a tight pucker, as if he had bitten straight through a plump yellow lemon. Rachel’s way – she was completely unaware of it, Louis was sure – of saying contritely: Louis, I’m sorry I was such a bitch after her bitchiness had gotten her her own way about something she really wanted. Here was that voice, robbed of Rachel’s life and merriness, true, but that same voice saying I’m sorry I was such a bastard, Louis.

The old man was getting his daughter and granddaughter back; they were running home from Maine to Daddy. Courtesy of Delta and United, they were coming back to where they belonged, back to where Irwin Goldman wanted them. Now he could afford to be magnanimous. As far as old Irwin knew, he had won. So let’s just forget that I took a swing at you over your dead son’s body, Louis, or that I kicked you when you were down, or that I knocked his coffin off its bier and snapped the latch so you could see – or think that you saw – that one last flash of your child’s hand. Let’s forget all of that. Let bygones be bygones.

Terrible as it may be, Irwin, you old prick, I’d wish for you to drop dead right this second, if it wouldn’t screw up my plans.

‘That’s all right, Mr Goldman,’ he said evenly. ‘It was … well … an emotional day for all of us.’ ‘It was not all right,’ he persisted, and Louis realized – although he did not want to – that Goldman was not just being political, not just saying that he was sorry he had been such a bastard now that he was getting his own way. The man was nearly weeping, and he was speaking with a slow and trembling urgency. ‘It was a terrible day for all of us. Thanks to me. Thanks to a stupid, bullheaded old man. I hurt my daughter when she needed my help … I hurt you, and maybe you needed my help, too, Louis. That you do this … behave this way … after I behaved that way … it makes me feel like garbage, Louis. And I think that is just the way I should feel.’ Oh let him stop this, let him stop before I start to scream at him and blow the whole deal.

‘Rachel’s probably told you, Louis, we had another daughter—’

‘Zelda,’ Louis said. ‘Yes, she told me about Zelda.’

‘It was difficult,’ Goldman said in that trembling voice. ‘Difficult for all of us. Most difficult for Rachel, perhaps, yes, Rachel was there when Zelda died, but difficult for Dory and me, too. Dory almost had a breakdown—’ What do you think Rachel had? Louis wanted to shout. Do you think a kid can’t have a nervous breakdown? Twenty years later she’s still jumping at death’s shadow. And now this happens. This miserable, awful thing. It’s a minor miracle that she isn’t in the fucking hospital, being fed through an IV-tube. So don’t talk to me about how difficult it was for you and your wife, you bastard.

‘Ever since Zelda died, we have … I suppose we have clung to Rachel … always wanting to protect her … and to make it up to her. Make up for the problems she had with her … her back … for years afterward. Make up for not being there.’ Yes, the old man was really crying. Why did he have to be crying? It made it harder for Louis to hold on to his clean, pure hate. More difficult, but not impossible. He deliberately called up the image of Goldman reaching into the pocket of his smoking jacket for his overflowing check-book … but he suddenly saw Zelda Goldman in the background, an unquiet ghost in a stinking bed, her cheesy face full of spite and agony, her hands pulled into claws. The Goldman ghost. Oz, the Gweat and Tewwible.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please, Mr Goldman. Irwin. No more. Let’s not make things any worse than they have to be, okay?’ ‘I believe now that you are a good man and that I misjudged you, Louis. Oh, listen, I know what you think. Am I that stupid? No. Stupid, but not that stupid. You think I’m saying all of this because now I can, you’re thinking oh yeah, he’s getting what he wants and once he tried to buy me off, but … but Louis, I swear …’ ‘No more,’ Louis said gently. ‘I can’t … I really can’t take any more.’ Now his voice was trembling as well. ‘Okay?’ ‘All right,’ Goldman said, and sighed. Louis thought it was a sigh of relief. ‘But let me say again that I apologize. You don’t have to accept it. But that is what I called to say, Louis. I apologize.’ ‘All right,’ Louis said. He closed his eyes. His head was thudding. ‘Thank you, Irwin. Your apology is accepted.’ ‘Thank you,’ Goldman said. ‘And thank you … for letting them come. Perhaps it is what they both need. And we’ll meet them at the airport.’ ‘Fine,’ Louis said, and an idea suddenly occurred to him. It was crazy and attractive in its very sanity. He would let bygones be bygones … and he would let Gage lie in his Pleasantview grave. Instead of trying to re-open a door that had swung shut, he would latch it and double-bolt it and throw away the key. He would do just what he had told his wife he was going to do: tidy up their affairs here and catch a plane back to Shytown. They would perhaps spend the entire summer there, he and his wife and his good-hearted daughter. They would go to the zoo and the planetarium and go boating on the lake. He would take Ellie to the top of the Sears Tower and show her the Midwest stretching away like a great flat game-board, rich and dreaming. Then when mid-August came, they would come back to this house which now seemed so sad and so shadowy, and perhaps it would be like starting over again. Perhaps they could begin weaving from fresh thread. What was on the Creed loom right now was ugly, splattered with drying blood.

But would that not be the same as murdering his son? Killing him a second time?

A voice inside tried to argue that this was not so, but he would not listen. He shut the voice up briskly.

‘Irwin, I ought to go now. I want to make sure Rachel’s got what she needs and then get her to bed.’ ‘All right. Goodbye, Louis. And once more—’

If he says he’s sorry one more time, I’ll fucking scream.

‘Goodbye, Irwin,’ he said, and hung up the phone.

Rachel was deep in a litter of clothes when he came upstairs. Blouses on the beds, bras hung over the backs of chairs, slacks on hangers that had been hung over the doorknob. Shoes were lined up like soldiers under the window. She appeared to be packing slowly but competently. Louis could see it was going to take her at least three suitcases (maybe four), but he could also see no sense in arguing with her about it. Instead, he pitched in and helped.

‘Louis,’ she said as they closed the last suitcase (he had to sit on it before Rachel could snap the catches), ‘are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?’ ‘For God’s sake, hon, what is this?’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she replied evenly. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

‘What do you think I’m going to do? Creep off to a bordello? Join the circus? What?’ ‘I don’t know. But this feels wrong. It feels as if you’re trying to get rid of us.’ ‘Rachel, that’s ridiculous!’ He said this with a vehemence that was partly exasperation. Even in such straits as these, he felt a certain pique in being seen through so easily.

She smiled wanly. ‘You never were a very good liar, Lou.’

He began to protest again and she cut him off.

‘Ellie dreamed you were dead,’ she said. ‘Last night. She woke up crying, and I went in to her. I slept with her for two or three hours and then came back in with you. She said that in her dream you were sitting at the kitchen table and your eyes were open but she knew you were dead. She said she could hear fire engines, and smell something burning. And she said that she could hear Steve Masterton screaming.’ Louis looked at her, dismayed. ‘Rachel,’ he said at last, ‘her brother just died. It’s normal enough for her to dream that other members of her family—’ ‘Yes, I surmised that much for myself. But the way she told it … the elements … it seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.’ She laughed weakly.

‘Or maybe you had to be there.’

‘Yes, maybe so,’ Louis said.

In spite of his rational tone, he could feel gooseflesh crawling all over him. The roots of his hair had gone stiff.

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

‘Come to bed with me,’ Rachel said. ‘The Valium’s all worn off and I don’t want to take any more. But I’m afraid. I’ve been having my own dreams …’ ‘Dreams of what?’

‘Of Zelda,’ she said simply. ‘The last few nights, since Gage died, when I go to sleep, Zelda’s there. She says she’s coming for me, and this time she’ll get me. That both she and Gage will get me. For letting them die.’ ‘Rachel, that’s—’

‘I know. Just a dream. Normal enough. But come to bed with me and keep the dreams away if you can, Louis.’ They lay together in the dark.

‘Rachel? You still awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Go ahead.’

He hesitated, not wanting to cause her even more pain, but needing to know.

‘Do you remember the scare we had with him, when he was nine months old?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes. Yes, of course I do. Why?’

By the time Gage was nine months old, Louis had become deeply concerned about his son’s cranial size. It was right off Louis’s Berterier Chart, which showed the normal range of infant head-sizes on a per-month basis. At four months, Gage’s skull size had begun to drift toward the highest part of the curve, and then it began to go even higher than that. He wasn’t having any trouble holding his head up – that would have been a dead giveaway – but Louis had taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest, nevertheless. Rachel had wanted to know what was wrong, and Louis had told her the truth: he was worried that Gage might be hydrocephalic. Rachel’s face had grown very white, but she had remained calm.

‘He seems normal to me,’ she said.

Louis nodded. ‘He does to me, too. But I don’t want to ignore this, babe.’

‘No, you mustn’t,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t.’

Tardiff had measured Gage’s skull and frowned. Tardiff poked two fingers at Gage’s face, Three Stooges style. Gage flinched. Tardiff smiled. Louis’s heart thawed out a little. Tardiff gave Gage a ball to hold. Gage held it for a while and then dropped it. Tardiff retrieved the ball and bounced it, watching Gage’s eyes. Gage’s eyes tracked the ball.

‘I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s hydrocephalic,’ Tardiff said to Louis in his office later. ‘No – odds may actually be a bit higher than that. If so, it’s mild. He seems very alert. The new shunt operation should take care of the problem easily … if there is a problem.’ ‘A shunt means brain surgery,’ Louis said.

‘Minor brain surgery.’

Louis had studied the process not long after he began to worry about the size of Gage’s skull, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid from the patient’s skull, had not looked very minor to him. But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself to just be grateful the operation existed at all.

‘Of course,’ Tardiff went on, ‘there’s still a large possibility that your kid just has a real big head for a nine-month-old. I think a CAT-scan is the best place to start. Do you agree?’ Louis had agreed.

Gage had spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital, underwent general anesthesia, and had had his sleeping head stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes-dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at her grandma and grandda’s, watching Sesame Street nonstop on grandda’s new video recorder. For Louis, those had been long, gray hours in which he found himself totting up sums of varying ugliness and comparing results. Death under g-a; death during a shunt operation; mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalia; cataclysmic retardation as a result of same; epilepsy; blindness … oh, there were all sorts of possibilities. For really complete disaster maps, Louis remembered thinking, see your local doctor.

Tardiff had come into the waiting room around five o’clock. He had three cigars. He plugged one into Louis’s mouth; plugged one into Rachel’s (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.

‘The kid is fine. No hydrocephalia.’

‘Light this thing,’ Rachel had said, weeping and laughing at the same time. ‘I’m going to smoke it till I puke.’ Grinning, Tardiff lit their cigars.

God was saving him for Route 15, Dr Tardiff, Louis thought now.

‘Rachel, if he had been hydrocephalic, and if the shunt hadn’t worked … could you have still loved him?’ ‘What a weird question, Louis!’

‘Could you?’

‘Yes, of course. I would have loved Gage no matter what.’

‘Even if he was retarded?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you have wanted him institutionalized?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said slowly. ‘I suppose, with the money you’re making now, we could afford that … a really good place, I mean … but I think I’d want him with us if we could … Louis, why do you ask?’ ‘Why, I suppose I was still thinking of your sister Zelda,’ he said. He was still astonished at this eerie glibness. ‘Wondering if you could have gone through that again.’ ‘It wouldn’t have been the same,’ she said, sounding almost amused. ‘Gage was … well, Gage was Gage. He was our son. That would have made all the difference. It would have been hard, I guess, but … would you have wanted him in an institution? A place like Pineland?’ ‘No.’

‘Let’s go to sleep.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

‘I feel like I can sleep now,’ she said. ‘I want to put this day behind me.’

‘Amen to that,’ Louis said.

A long time later she said drowsily: ‘You’re right, Louis … just dreams and vapors …’ ‘Sure,’ he said, and kissed her earlobe. ‘Now sleep.’

It seemed to me to have the quality of prophecy.

He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of May’s dying moon looked in the window at him.