"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, crowded into Louis's single.
"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 nevertheless taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest. 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--the 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 head, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid, had not looked very minor to him. But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself just to 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 spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital and underwent general anesthesia. His sleeping head was stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at 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 general anesthesia, death during a shunt operation, mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalus, 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, one into Rachel's (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.
"The kid is fine. No hydrocephalus."
"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 a quality of prophecy
He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of the moon looked in the window at him.
43
The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel's and Ellie'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.
Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and 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, and 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 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 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 an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little nervously, 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 Scarry and Beatrix Potter and that famous old standby, 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.
I thought they'd made that one an unbook, Louis thought, bemused.
"Yes," 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 break it 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.
For the first time in months he 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 pine 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 and 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 her sibyl's eyes. "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.
44
As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak fell over his mind. He became aware that he meant to go through with this. His mind, which had been sharp enough to get him through med school mostly on a scholarship and what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-danish on the 5 to 11 A.M. shift six days a week, had taken the problem over and broken it down into components, as if this was just another prelim--the biggest one he had ever taken. And he intended to pass it with an A plus, one hundred percent.
He drove to Brewer, the little city across the Penobscot River from Bangor. He found a parking spot across the street from Watson's Hardware.
"Can I help you?" the clerk asked.
"Yes," Louis said. "I'd like a heavy flashlight--one of the square ones--and something I can hood it with."
The clerk was a small slim man with a high forehead and sharp eyes. He smiled now, but his smile was not particularly pleasant. "Going jacking, good buddy?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Gonna jacklight a few deer tonight?"
"Not at all," Louis said, unsmiling. "I haven't a license to jack."
The clerk blinked and then decided to laugh. "In other words, mind my own business, huh? Well, look--you can't hood one of those big lights, but you can get a piece of felt and poke a hole in the middle of it. Cut the beam down to a penlite."
"That sounds fine," Louis said. "Thanks."
"Surely. Anything else for you today "
"Yes indeed," Louis said. "I need a pick, a shovel, and a spade. Short-handled shovel, long-handled spade. A stout length of rope, eight feet long. A pair of work gloves. A canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight."
"I can do all that," the clerk said.
"I've got a septic tank to dig up," Louis said. "It looks like I'm in violation of the zoning ordinances, and I've got some very nosy neighbors. I don't know if hooding my light will do any good or not, but I thought I might give it a try. I could get a pretty good fine."
"Oh-oh," the clerk said, "better get a clothespin for your nose while you're at it."
Louis laughed dutifully. His purchases came to $58.60. He paid cash.
*
As gas prices went up, they had used the big station wagon less and less. For some time it had had a bad wheel-bearing, but Louis had kept putting off the repair job. This was partly because he didn't want to part with the two hundred it was likely to cost, but mostly because it was a nuisance. Now, when he could have really used the big old dinosaur, he didn't dare chance it. The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going back to Ludlow with the pick, shovel, and spade in there. Jud Crandall's eyes were sharp, and there was nothing wrong with his brains either. He would know what was up.
Then it occurred to him that there was no real reason to go back to Ludlow anyway. Louis recrossed the Chamberlain Bridge into Bangor and checked into the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge on the Odlin Road--once again near the airport, once again near Pleasantview Cemetery where his son was buried. He checked in under the name Dee Dee Ramone and paid cash for his room.
He tried to nap, reasoning that he would be glad of the rest before tomorrow morning. In the words of some Victorian novel or other, there was wild work ahead of him tonight--enough wild work to last a lifetime.
But his brain simply would not shut down.
He lay on the anonymous motel bed beneath a nondescript motel print of picturesque boats at dock beside a
picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet, coins, and keys on the night table beside him, his hands behind his head. That feeling of coldness still held; he felt totally unplugged from his people, the places that had become so familiar to him, even his work. This could have been any Howard Johnson's in the world--in San Diego or Duluth or Bangkok or Charlotte Amalie. He was nowhere, and now and then a thought of surpassing oddity struck him: before he saw any of those familiar places and faces again, he would see his son.
His plan kept unreeling in his mind. He looked at it from all angles, poked it, prodded it, looked for holes or soft places. And he felt that in truth he was walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness.
The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head: O death your hands are clammy . . . I feel them on my knees . . . you came and took my mother . . . won't you come back after me?
Madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him.
He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan.
Tonight, around eleven o'clock, he would dig up his son's grave, remove the body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cutdown piece of the tarpaulin, and put it in the trunk of the Civic. He would replace the coffin and refill the grave. He would drive to Ludlow, take Gage's body from the trunk . . . and take a walk. Yes, he would take a walk.
If Gage returned, the single path forked into two possibilities. Along one, he saw Gage returning as Gage, perhaps stunned or slow or even retarded (only in the deepest recesses of his mind did Louis allow himself to hope that Gage would return whole, and just as he had been--but surely even that was possible, wasn't it?), but still his son, Rachel's son, Ellie's brother.
Along the other, he saw some sort of monster emerging from the woods behind the house. He had accepted so much that he did not balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworld which might well take charge of a reanimated body from which the original soul had fled.
Either way, he and his son would be alone. And he would . . .
I will make a diagnosis.
Yes. That is what he would do.
I will make a diagnosis, not only of his body but of his spirit. I will make allowances for the trauma of the accident itself, which he may or may not remember. Keeping the example of Church before me, I will expect retardation, perhaps mild, perhaps profound. I will judge our ability to reintegrate Gage into our family on the basis of what I see over a period of from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. And if the loss is too great--or if he comes back as Timmy Baterman apparently came back, as a thing of evil--I will kill him.