فصل چهل و پنج

FORTY-FIVE

By the time United Airlines flight 419 touched down at O’Hare Airport and offloaded its passengers at ten minutes past three, central standard time, Ellie Creed was in a state of low hysteria, and Rachel was very frightened. Never since the time she had taken the kids out to McDonalds by herself and Gage had begun to choke on a throatful of french fries had she so much wished Louis was with her.

If you touched Ellie casually on the shoulder, she jumped and stared around at you with big wall-eyes, and her whole body quivered steadily and without let-up. It was as if she were full of electricity. The nightmare on the airplane had been bad enough, but this … Rachel simply didn’t know how to cope with it.

Going into the terminal, Ellie tripped over her own feet and fell down. She did not get up; merely lay there on the carpet with people passing around her (or looking down at her with that mildly sympathetic but disconnected glance of people who are in transit and cannot be bothered) until Rachel picked her up in her arms.

‘Ellie, what’s wrong with you?’ Rachel asked.

But Ellie would not answer. They moved across the lobby toward the luggage carousels, and Rachel saw her mother and father waiting there for them. She waved at them with her free hand and they came over.

‘They told us not to go to the gate and wait for you,’ Dory said, ‘so we thought … Rachel? How’s Ellie?’ ‘Not good.’

‘Is there a ladies’ room, Mommy? I’m going to throw up.’

‘Oh, God,’ Rachel said despairingly, and took her by the hand. There was a ladies’ across the lobby, and she led Ellie toward it quickly.

‘Rachel, shall I come?’ Dory called.

‘No, get the luggage, you know what it looks like. We’re okay.’ Mercifully the ladies’ was deserted. Rachel led Ellie to one of the stalls, fumbling in her purse for a dime, and then she saw – thank God – that the locks on three of them were broken. Over one broken lock, someone had written in grease-pencil: SIR JOHN CRAPPER WAS A SEXIST PIG!

Rachel pulled the door open quickly; Ellie was now moaning and holding her stomach. She retched twice, but there was no vomiting; they were the dry heaves of total nervous exhaustion.

When Ellie told her she felt a little better, Rachel took her over to the basins and washed her daughter’s face. Ellie was wretchedly white, and there were circles under her eyes.

‘Ellie, what is wrong? Can’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ she said. ‘But I knew something was wrong ever since Daddy told me about the trip. Because something was wrong with him.’ Louis, what are you hiding? You were hiding something. I could see it; even Ellie could see it.

It occurred to her that she had also been nervous all day, as though waiting for a blow to fall. She felt the way she did in the two or three days before her period, tense and on edge, ready to laugh or cry or get a headache that would come bulleting through like a fast express, there and then gone three hours later.

‘What?’ she said now to Ellie’s reflection in the mirror. ‘Honey, what could be wrong with Daddy?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Ellie said. ‘It was the dream. Something about Gage. Or maybe it was Church. I don’t remember. I don’t know.’ ‘Ellie, what was your dream?’

‘I dreamed I was in the Pet Sematary,’ Ellie said. ‘Paxcow took me to the Pet Sematary and said Daddy was going to go there and something terrible was going to happen.’ ‘Paxcow?’ A bolt of terror both sharp and yet undefined struck her. What was that name, and why did it seem familiar? It seemed that she had heard that name – or one like it – but she could not for the life of her remember where. ‘You dreamed someone named Paxcow took you to the Pet Sematary?’ ‘Yes, that’s what he said his name was. And—’ Her eyes suddenly widened.

‘Do you remember something else?’

‘He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was … I don’t know … that he was near daddy because they were together when his soul was dis—dis— I can’t remember!’ She wailed.

‘Honey,’ Rachel said, ‘I think you dreamed about the Pet Sematary because you’re still thinking about Gage. And I’m sure Daddy is fine. Do you feel any better now?’ ‘No,’ Eileen whispered. ‘Mommy, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?’ ‘Huh-uh,’ Rachel said, with a brisk little shake of her head and a smile – but she was, she was scared, and that name, Paxcow, haunted her with its familiarity. She felt she had heard it in some dreadful context months or even years ago, and that nervy feeling would not leave her.

She felt something – something pregnant, swollen and waiting to burst. Something terrible that needed to be averted. But what? What?

‘I’m sure everything is fine,’ she told Eileen. ‘Want to go back to Grandma and Grandda?’ ‘I guess so,’ Ellie said listlessly.

A Puerto Rican woman led her very young son into the ladies’, scolding him. A large wet stain had spread on the crotch of the little boy’s natty travelling pants, and Rachel found herself reminded of Gage with a kind of paralyzing poignancy. This fresh sorrow was like Novocaine, smothering her jitters.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ll call Daddy from Grandda’s house.’ ‘He was wearing shorts,’ Ellie said suddenly.

‘Who was, honey?’

‘Paxcow,’ Ellie said. ‘He was wearing red shorts. In my dream.’ That brought the name momentarily into focus and Rachel felt that knee-weakening fear again … then it danced away.

They could not get close to the luggage carousel; Rachel could just see the top of her father’s hat, the one with the feather. She turned, saw Dory Goldman holding two seats against the wall for them and waving. Rachel brought Ellie over.

‘Are you feeling any better, dear?’ Dory asked.

‘A little bit,’ Ellie said. ‘Mommy—’

She turned to Rachel and broke off. Rachel was sitting bolt upright, her hand clapped to her mouth, her face white. She had it. It had suddenly gone through with a terrible thud. Of course she should have known at once, but she had tried to put it out of her mind. Of course.

‘Mommy?’

Rachel turned slowly to her daughter, and Ellie could hear the tendons in her neck creak. She took her hand away from her mouth.

‘Did the man in your dream tell you his first name, Ellie?’

‘Mommy, are you all—’

‘Did the man in your dream tell you his first name?’

Dory was looking at her daughter and granddaughter as if they might have both gone crazy.

‘Yes, but I can’t remember … Mommy, you’re hurrrrting me—’

Rachel looked down and saw that her free hand was clamped around Ellie’s lower forearm like a manacle.

‘Was it Victor?’

Ellie drew sharp breath. ‘Yes, Victor! He said his name was Victor! Mommy, did you dream him, too?’ ‘Not Paxcow,’ Rachel said. ‘Pascow.’

‘That’s what I said. Paxcow.’

‘Rachel, what’s wrong?’ Dory said. She took Rachel’s free hand and winced at its chill. ‘And what’s wrong with Ellie?’ ‘It’s not Ellie,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s Louis, I think. Something is wrong with Louis. Or something is going to be wrong. Sit with Ellie, Mom. I want to call home.’ She got up and crossed to the telephones, digging in her purse for a quarter. She made the call collect, but there was no one to accept the charges. The phone simply rang.

‘Will you try your call later?’ the operator asked her.

‘Yes,’ Rachel said, and hung up.

She stood there, staring at the phone.

He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was … that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis— dis— I can’t remember!

‘Discorporated,’ Rachel whispered. Her fingers dug at the fabric of her handbag. ‘Oh my God, was that the word?’ She tried to catch at her thoughts, to arrange them. Was something going on here, something beyond their natural upset at Gage’s death and this queer cross-country trip that was so much like flight? How much had Ellie known about the young man who had died on Louis’s first day at work?

Nothing, her mind answered inexorably. You kept it from her, the way you tried to keep anything from her that had to do with death – even the possible death of her cat, remember that dumb, stupid argument we had that day in the kitchen? You kept it from her. Because you were scared then and you’re scared now. His name was Pascow, Victor Pascow, and how desperate is the situation now, Rachel? How bad is this? What in the name of God is happening?

Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her two tries to redeposit her quarter. This time she called the infirmary at the University and got Charlton, who accepted the call, a little mystified. No, she hadn’t seen Louis, and would have been surprised if he came in today. That said, she offered her sympathies to Rachel again. Rachel accepted them and then asked Charlton to have Louis call her at her folks’ house if he did come in. Yes, he had the number, she answered Charlton’s question, not wanting to tell the nurse (who probably knew anyway; she had a feeling that Charlton didn’t miss much) that her folks’ house was half the continent away.

She hung up, feeling hot and trembly.

She heard Pascow’s name somewhere else, that’s all. My God, you don’t raise a kid in a glass box like a … a hamster, or something. She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mind stored it away. Even that word she couldn’t say – suppose it was a jawbreaker like ‘discorporated’ or ‘discorporeal,’ so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of sticky flypaper they say it is.

She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that, under the right conditions, your memory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every meal you had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made a persuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer with staggering numbers of memory chips – not 16K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K: literally, a thousand billions. And how much might each of these organic ‘chips’ be capable of storing? No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to be erasable so they could be re-used. In fact, the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some of them as a protection against informational insanity. ‘You might not be able to remember where you keep your socks,’ the psych instructor had said, ‘if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells.’ This had produced dutiful laughter from the class.

But this isn’t a psych class under good fluorescent lights with all that comforting jargon written on the board and some smartass assistant prof cheerfully blueskying his way through the last fifteen minutes of the period. Something is dreadfully wrong here and you know it – you feel it. I don’t know what it has to do with Pascow, or Gage, or Church, but it has something to do with Louis. What? Is it— Suddenly a thought as cold as a handful of jelly struck her. She picked up the telephone receiver again and groped in the coin-return for her dime. Was Louis contemplating suicide? Was that why he had gotten rid of them, nearly pushed them out the door? Had Ellie somehow had a … a … oh, fuck the psychology! Had she had a psychic flash of some sort?

This time she made the call collect to Jud Crandall. It rang five times … six … seven. She was about to hang up, when his voice, breathless, answered. ‘H’lo?’ ‘Jud! Jud, this is—’

‘Just a minute, ma’am,’ the operator said. ‘Will you accept a collect call from Mrs Louis Creed?’ ‘Ayuh,’ Jud said.

‘Pardon, sir, is that yes or no?’

‘I guess I will,’ Jud said.

There was a doubtful pause as the operator translated Yankee into American. Then: ‘Thank you. Go ahead, ma’am.’ ‘Jud, have you seen Louis today?’

‘Today? I can’t say I have, Rachel. But I was away to Brewer this mornin’, gettin’ my groceries. Been out in the garden this afternoon, behind the house. Why?’ ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing, but Ellie had a bad dream on the plane and I just thought I’d set her mind at ease if I could.’ ‘Plane?’ Jud’s voice seemed to sharpen a trifle. ‘Where are you, Rachel?’ ‘Chicago,’ she said. ‘Ellie and I came back to spend some time with my parents.’ ‘Louis didn’t go with you?’

‘He’s going to join us by the end of the week,’ Rachel said, and now it was a struggle to keep her voice even. There was something in Jud’s voice she didn’t like.

‘Was it his idea that you should go out there?’

‘Well … yes. Jud, what’s wrong? Something is wrong, isn’t it? And you know something about it.’ ‘Maybe you ought to tell me the child’s dream,’ Jud said after a long pause. ‘I wish you would.’