فصل چهل و سه

FORTY-THREE

The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel’s and Elllie’s baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. That had been Gage’s first and last plane trip.

Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and had seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.

Conspirator’s complex working overtime, boyo, he told himself.

She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy first, perhaps for the whole summer, only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airport with her, and she had sat calmly in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.

Mr and Mrs Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight-time. Irwin Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Ellie.

Louis and Irwin Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the my-son my-son playlet, but he was spared. Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.

They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of the new Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little anxiously, at the picture Ellie was holding.

Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick out something to read on the plane.

Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn’t like it. It made him nervous.

‘Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda’s?’ he asked her as they walked over.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there’s a truant officer and he gets school-skippers.’ ‘Don’t you worry about the truant officer,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of the school, and you can start again in the fall with no trouble.’ ‘I hope I’ll be okay in the fall,’ Ellie said. ‘I never was in a grade before. Only kindergarten. I don’t know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.’ ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?’

He gaped at her. ‘Why in the world would you think I was … that I didn’t like your grandda, Ellie?’ She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. ‘When you talk about him you always look pissed off.’ ‘Ellie, that’s vulgar.’

‘Sorry.’

She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of kid-books – Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scary and Beatrix Potter and that famous old stand-by, Dr Seuss. How do they find this stuff out? Or do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How’s it affecting her? Ellie, what’s behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him, Christ!

‘Can I have these, Daddy?’ She was holding out a Dr Seuss and a book Louis hadn’t seen since his own childhood – the story of Little Black Sambo and how the tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.

Christ, I thought they’d made that one an un-book, Louis thought, bemused.

‘Yes, fine,’ he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash-register. ‘Your Grandda and I like each other fine,’ he said, and thought again of his mother’s story of how, when a woman really wanted a baby, she ‘found’ one. He remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own children. Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.

‘Oh,’ she said, and fell silent.

The silence made him uneasy. To say something and break the silence, he said: ‘So do you think you’ll have a good time in Chicago?’ ‘No.’

‘No? Why not?’

She looked up at him with that fey expression. ‘I’m scared.’

He put his hand on her head. ‘Scared? Honey, what for? You’re not scared of the plane, are you?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’m scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at Gage’s funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage’s crib and that was empty, too. But there was dirt in it.’ Lazarus, come forth.

Then, for the first time in months, he consciously remembered the dream he had had after Pascow’s death – the dream, and then waking up to find his feet dirty and the foot of the bed caked with fir needles and muck.

The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred.

‘Just dreams,’ he said to Ellie, and his voice sounded, to his ears at least, perfectly normal. ‘They’ll pass.’ ‘I wish you were coming with us,’ she said, ‘or that we were staying here. Can we stay, Daddy? Please? I don’t want to go to Grandma and Grandda’s … I just want to go back to school. Okay?’ ‘Just for a little while, Ellie,’ he said. ‘I’ve got …’ he swallowed ‘ … a few things to do here, and then I’ll be with you. We can decide what to do next.’ He expected an argument, perhaps even an Ellie-style tantrum. He might even have welcomed it; a known quantity, as that look was not. But there was only that pallid, disquieting silence which seemed so deep. He could have asked her more, but found he didn’t dare; she had already told him more than he perhaps wanted to hear.

Shortly after he and Ellie returned to the boarding lounge, the flight was called. Boarding passes were produced, and the four of them got in line. Louis embraced his wife, kissed her hard. She clung to him for a moment and then let him go so he could pick Ellie up and buss her cheek.

Ellie gazed at him solemnly with sybil’s eyes. ‘Your lips are so cold,’ she said. ‘Why is that, Daddy?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, now more uneasy than ever. He set her down. ‘You be good, pun’kin.’ ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said again, but so low only Louis could really hear over the shuffle and murmur of the boarding passengers. ‘I don’t want Mommy to go, either.’ ‘Ellie, come on,’ Louis said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘but what about you? Daddy, what about you?’ The line had begun to move, now. People were walking down the jetway to the 727. Rachel pulled Ellie’s hand and for a moment she resisted, holding up the line, her eyes fixed on her father, and Louis found himself remembering her impatience last time, her cries of come on-come on-come on.

‘Daddy?’

‘Go now, Ellie. Please.’

Rachel looked at Ellie and saw that dark, dreamy look for the first time. ‘Ellie?’ she said, startled and, Louis thought, a little afraid. ‘You’re holding up the line, baby.’ Ellie’s lips trembled and grew white. Then she allowed herself to be led into the jetway. She looked back at him, and he saw naked terror in her face. He raised his hand to her in false cheeriness.

Ellie did not wave back.