'"I guess I understand that," I said, "but you should know that sneaking around behind a person's back is no way to express love and concern." He got all stiff then, and said he and Jan didn't see it as sneaking around. He cut his eyes toward the bathroom for a second or two when he said it, and I pretty much got the idea that what he meant was Jan didn't see it as sneaking around. Then he told me it wasn't the way I was making it out to be - that Litchfield had called him, not the other way around.
'"All right," I said back, "but what kept you from hanging up once you realized what he'd called to talk to you about? That was just plain wrong, Harry. What in God's good name got into you?"
'He started to flutter and flap around - I think he might even have been starting to apologize - when Jan came back and the you-know-what really hit the fan. She asked where my diamond earrings were, the ones they'd given me for Christmas. It was such a change of direction that at first I could only sputter, and I suppose I sounded like I was going senile. But finally I managed to say they were in the little china dish on my bedroom bureau, same as always. I have a jewelry box, but I keep those earrings and two or three other nice pieces out because they are so pretty that looking at them always cheers me up. Besides, they're only clusters of diamond chips - it's not like anyone would want to break in just to steal those. Same with my engagement ring and my ivory cameo, which are the other two pieces I keep in that dish.'
Lois gave Ralph an intense, pleading look. He squeezed her hand again.
She smiled and took a deep breath. 'This is very hard for me.'
'If you want to stop--'
'No, I want to finish . . . except that, past a certain point, I can't remember what happened, anyway. It was all so horrible. You see, Janet said she knew where I kept them, but they weren't there. My engagement ring was, and the cameo, but not my Christmas earrings. I went in to check myself, and she was right. We turned the place upside down, looked everywhere, but we didn't find them. They're gone.'
Lois was now gripping Ralph's hands in both of her own, and seemed to be talking mostly to the zipper of his jacket.
'We took all the clothes out of the bureau . . . Harold pulled the bureau itself out from the wall and looked behind it . . . under the bed and the sofa cushions . . . and it seemed like every time I looked at Janet, she was looking back at me, giving me that sweet, wide-eyed look of hers. Sweet as melting butter, it is - except in the eyes, anyway - and she didn't have to come right out and say what she was thinking, because I already knew. "You see? You see how right Dr Litchfield was to call us, and how right we were to make that appointment? And how pigheaded you're being? Because you need to be in a place like Riverview Estates, and this just proves it. You've lost the lovely earrings we gave you for Christmas, you're having a serious decline in cognition, and this just proves it. It won't be long before you're leaving the stove-burners on . . . or the bathroom heater . . ."'
She began to cry again, and these tears made Ralph's heart hurt - they were the deep, scouring sobs of someone who has been shamed to the deepest level of her being. Lois hid her face against his jacket. He tightened his arm around her. Lois, he thought. Our Lois. But no; he didn't like the sound of that anymore, if he ever had.
My Lois, he thought, and at that instant, as if some greater power had approved, the day began to fill with light again. Sounds took on a new resonance. He looked down at his hands and Lois's, entwined on her lap, and saw a lovely blue-gray nimbus around them, the color of cigarette smoke. The auras had returned.
3
'You should have sent them away the minute you realized the earrings were gone,' he heard himself say, and each word was separate and gorgeously unique, like a crystal thunderclap. 'The very second.'
'Oh, I know that now,' Lois said. 'She was just waiting for me to stick my foot in my mouth, and of course I obliged. But I was so upset - first the argument about whether or not I was going to Bangor with them to look at Riverview Estates, then hearing my doctor had told them things he had no right to tell them, and on top of all that, finding out I'd lost one of my most treasured possessions. And do you know what the cherry on top was? Having her be the one to discover those earrings were gone! Do you blame me for not knowing what to do?'
'No,'he said, and lifted her gloved hands to his mouth. The sound of them passing through the air was like the hoarse whisper of a palm sliding down a wool blanket, and for a moment he clearly saw the shape of his lips on the back of her right glove, printed there in a blue kiss.
Lois smiled. 'Thank you, Ralph.'
'Welcome.'
'I suppose you have a pretty good idea of how things turned out, don't you? Jan said, "You really should take better care, Mother Lois, only Dr Litchfield says you've come to a time of life when you really can't take better care, and that's why we've been thinking about Riverview Estates. I'm sorry we ruffled your feathers, but it seemed important to move quickly. Now you see why."'
Ralph looked up. Overhead, the sky was a cataract of green-blue fire filled with clouds that looked like chrome airboats. He looked down the hill and saw Rosalie still lying between the Portosans. The dark gray balloon-string rose from her snout, wavering in the cool October breeze.
'I got really mad, then -' She broke off and smiled. Ralph thought it was the first smile he'd seen from her today which expressed real humor instead of some less pleasant and more complicated emotion. 'No - that's not right. I did more than just get mad. If my great-nephew had been there, he would have said, "Nana went nuclear."'
Ralph laughed and Lois laughed with him, but her half sounded a trifle forced.
'What galls me is that Janet knew I would,' she said. 'She wanted me to go nuclear, I think, because she knew how guilty I'd feel later on. And God knows I do. I screamed at them to get the hell out. Harold looked like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards - shouting has always made him so embarrassed - but Jan just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, smiling and actually nodding her head, as if to say "That's right, Mother Lois, you go on and get all that nasty old poison out of your system, and when it's gone, maybe you'll be ready to hear sense."'
Lois took a deep breath.
'Then something happened. I'm not sure just what. This wasn't the first time, either, but it was the worst time. I'm afraid it was some kind of . . . well . . . some kind of seizure. Anyway, I started to see Janet in a really funny way . . . a really scary way. And I said something that finally got to her. I can't remember what it was, and I'm not sure I want to know, but it certainly wiped that sweety-sweety-sweet smile I hate so much off her face. In fact, she just about dragged Harold out. The last thing I remember her saying is that one of them would call me when I wasn't so hysterical that I couldn't help making ugly accusations about the people who loved me.
'I stayed in my house for a little while after they were gone, and then I came out to sit in the park. Sometimes just sitting in the sun makes a body feel better. I stopped in the Red Apple for a snack, and that's when I heard you and Bill had a fight. Are you and he really on the outs, do you think?'
Ralph shook his head. 'Nah - we'll make it up. I really like Bill, but--'
'- but you have to be careful what you say with him,' she finished. 'Also, Ralph, may I add that you can't take what he says back to you too seriously?'
This time it was Ralph who gave their linked hands a squeeze. 'That might be good advice for you, too, Lois - you shouldn't take what happened this morning too seriously.'
She sighed. 'Maybe, but it's hard not to. I said some terrible things at the end, Ralph. Terrible. That awful smile of hers . . .'
A rainbow of understanding suddenly hit Ralph's consciousness. In its glow he saw a very large thing, so large it seemed both unquestionable and preordained. He fully faced Lois for the first time since the auras had returned to him . . . or since he had returned to them. She sat in a capsule of translucent gray light as bright as fog on a summer morning which is about to turn sunny. It transformed the woman Bi
ll McGovern called 'Our Lois' into a creature of great dignity . . . and almost unbearable beauty.
She looks like Eos, he thought. Goddess of the dawn.
Lois stirred uneasily on the bench. 'Ralph? Why are you looking at me that way?'
Because you're beautiful, and because I've fallen in love with you, Ralph thought, amazed. Right now I'm so in love with you that I feel as if I'm drowning, and the dying's fine.
'Because you remember exactly what you said.'
She began to play nervously with the clasp of her purse again. 'No, I--'
'Yes you do. You told your daughter-in-law that she took your earrings. She did it because she realized you were going to stick to your guns about not going with them, and not getting what she wants makes your daughter-in-law crazy . . . it makes her go nuclear. She did it because you pissed her off. Isn't that about the size of it?'
Lois was looking at him with round, frightened eyes. 'How do you know that, Ralph? How do you know that about her?'
'I know it because you know it, and you know it because you saw it.'
'Oh, no,' she whispered. 'No, I didn't see anything. I was in the kitchen with Harold the whole time.'
'Not then, not when she did it, but when she came back. You saw it in her and all around her.'
As he himself now saw Harold Chasse's wife in Lois, as if the woman sitting beside him on the bench had become a lens. Janet Chasse was tall, fair-skinned, and long-waisted. Her cheeks were spattered with freckles she covered with makeup, and her hair was a vivid, gingery shade of red. This morning she had come to Derry with that fabulous hair lying over one shoulder in a bulky braid like a sheaf of copper wire. What else did he know about this woman he had never met?
Everything, everything.
She covers her freckles with pancake because she thinks they make her look childish; that people don't take women with freckles seriously. Her legs are beautiful and she knows it. She wears short skirts to work, but today when she came to see (the old bitch) Mother Lois, she was wearing a cardigan and an old pair of jeans. Derry dress-downs. Her period is overdue. She's reached that time of life when it doesn't come as regular as clockwork anymore, and during that uneasy two-or three-day pause she suffers through every month, a pause when the whole world seems made of glass and everyone in it seems either stupid or wicked, her behavior and her moods have become erratic. That's probably the real reason she did what she did.
Ralph saw her coming out of Lois's tiny bathroom. Saw her shoot an intense, furious glance toward the kitchen door - there is no sign of the sweety-sweety-sweet smile on that narrow, intense face now - and then scoop the earrings out of the china dish. Saw her cram them into the left front pocket of her jeans.
No, Lois had not actually witnessed this small, ugly theft, but it had changed the color of Jan Chasse's aura from pale green to a complex, layered pattern of browns and reds which Lois had seen and understood at once, probably without the slightest idea of what was really happening to her.
'She took them, all right,' Ralph said. He could see a gray mist drifting dreamily across the pupils of Lois's wide eyes. He could have looked at it for the rest of the day.
'Yes, but--'
'If you'd agreed to keep the appointment at Riverview Estates after all, I bet you would have found them again after her next visit . . . or she would have found them, I guess that's more likely. Just a lucky accident - "Oh, Mother Lois, come see what I found!" Under the bathroom sink, or in a closet, or lying in some dark corner.'
'Yes.' She was looking into his face now, fascinated, almost hypnotized. 'She must feel terrible . . . and she won't dare bring them back, will she? Not after the things I said. Ralph, how did you know?'
'The same way you did. How long have you been seeing the auras, Lois?'
4
'Auras? I don't know what you mean.' Except she did.
'Litchfield told your son about the insomnia, but I doubt if that alone would have been enough to get even Litchfield to . . . you know, tattle. The other thing - what you said he called sensory problems - went right by me. I was too amazed by the idea of anyone thinking you could possibly be prematurely senile, I guess, even though I've been having my own sensory problems lately.'
'You!'
'Yes, ma'am. Then, just a little bit ago, you said something even more interesting. You said you started to see Janet in a really funny way. A really scary way. You couldn't remember what you said just before the two of them walked out, but you knew exactly how you felt. You're seeing the other part of the world - the rest of the world. Shapes around things, shapes inside things, sounds within sounds. I call it the world of auras, and that's what you're experiencing. Isn't it, Lois?'
She looked at him silently for a moment, then put her hands over her face. 'I thought I was losing my mind,' she said, and then said it again: 'Oh Ralph, I thought I was losing my mind.'
5
He hugged her, then let her go and tilted her chin up. 'No more tears,' he said. 'I didn't bring a spare hanky.'
'No more tears,' she agreed, but her eyes were already brimming again. 'Ralph, if you only knew how awful it's been--'
'I do know.'
She smiled radiantly. 'Yes . . . you do, don't you?'
'What made that idiot Litchfield decide you were slipping into senility - except Alzheimer's is probably what he had in mind - wasn't just insomnia but insomnia accompanied by something else . . . something he decided were hallucinations. Right?'
'I guess, but he didn't say anything like that at the time. When I told him about the things I'd been seeing - the colors and all - he seemed very understanding.'
'Uh-huh, and the minute you were out the door he called your son and told him to get the hell down to Derry and do something about old Mom, who's started seeing people walking around in colored envelopes with long balloon-strings floating up from their heads.'
'You see those, too? Ralph, you see those, too?'
'Me too,' he said, and laughed. It sounded a bit loon-like, and he wasn't surprised. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her; he felt crazed with impatience. And there was something else, something so unexpected he hadn't even been able to identify it at first: he was horny. Not just interested; actually horny.
Lois was crying again. Her tears were the color of mist on a still lake, and they smoked a little as they slipped down her cheeks. Ralph knew they would taste dark and mossy, like fiddleheads in spring.
'Ralph . . . this . . . this is . . . oh my!'
'Bigger than Michael Jackson at the SuperBowl, isn't it?'
She laughed weakly. 'Well, just . . . you know, just a little.'
'There's a name for what's happening to us, Lois, and it's not insomnia or senility or Alzheimer's Disease. It's hyper-reality.'
'Hyper-reality,' she murmured. 'God, what an exotic word!'
'Yes, it is. A pharmacist down the street at Rite Aid, Joe Wyzer, told it to me. Only there's a lot more to it than he knew. More than anyone in their right minds would guess.'
'Yes, like telepathy . . . if it's really happening, that is. Ralph, are we in our right minds?'
'Did your daughter-in-law take your earrings?'
'I . . . she . . . yes.' Lois straightened. 'Yes, she did.'
'No doubts?'
'No.'
'Then you've answered your own question. We're sane, all right . . . but I think you're wrong about the telepathy part. It isn't minds we read, but auras. Listen, Lois, there's all sorts of things I want to ask you, but I have an idea that right now there's only one thing I really have to know. Have you seen -' He stopped abruptly, wondering if he really wanted to say what was on the tip of his tongue.
'Have I seen what?'
'Okay. This is going to sound crazier than anything you've told me, but I'm not crazy. Do you believe that? I'm not.'
'I believe you,' she said simply, and Ralph felt a vast weight slip from his heart. She was telling the truth. There was no question about it; her belief shone all
around her.
'Okay, listen. Since this started happening to you, have you seen certain people who don't look like they belong on Harris Avenue? People who don't look like they belong anywhere in the ordinary world?'
Lois was looking at him with puzzled incomprehension.
'They're bald, they're very short, they wear white smock tops, and what they look like more than anything are the drawings of space aliens they sometimes have on the front pages of those tabloid newspapers they sell in the Red Apple. You haven't seen anyone like that when you've been having one of these hyper-reality attacks?'
'No, no one.'
He banged a fist on his leg in frustration, thought for a moment, then looked up again. 'Monday morning,' he said. 'Before the cops showed up at Mrs Locher's . . . did you see me?'
Very slowly, Lois nodded her head. Her aura had darkened slightly, and spirals of scarlet, thin as threads, began to twist slowly up through it on a diagonal.
'I imagine you have a pretty good idea of who called the police, then,' Ralph said. 'Don't you?'
'Oh, I know it was you,' Lois said in a small voice. 'I suspected before, but I wasn't sure until just now. Until I saw it . . . you know, in your colors.'
In my colors, he thought. It was what Ed had called them, too.
'But you didn't see two pint-sized versions of Mr Clean come out of her house?'
'No,' she said, 'but that doesn't mean anything. I can't even see Mrs Locher's house from my bedroom window. The Red Apple's roof is in the way.'
Ralph laced his hands together on top of his head. Of course it was, and he should have known it.
'The reason I thought you called the police is that just before I went to take a shower, I saw you looking at something through a pair of binoculars. I never saw you do that before, but I thought maybe you just wanted a better look at the stray dog who raids the garbage cans on Thursday mornings.' She pointed down the hill. 'Him.'
Ralph grinned. 'That's no him, that's the gorgeous Rosalie.'
'Oh. Anyway, I was in the shower a long time, because there's a special rinse I put in my hair. Not color,' she said sharply, as if he had accused her of this, 'just proteins and things that are supposed to keep it looking a little thicker. When I came out, the police were flocking all around. I looked over your way once, but I couldn't see you anymore. You'd either gone into a different room or kind of scrunched back in your chair. You do that, sometimes.'