by Stephen King
Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, “Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet.” That would earn him Vera Smith’s Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o’clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn’t think he could take that particular smile.
The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, “Hello, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.”
“Is it my boy? Something about my boy?”
Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.
Sergeant Meggs said, “Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?”
“Is he all right? Is he okay?”
Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. “What is it? What’s happened to my Johnny?”
Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, “I am handling this.”
She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.
“Mr. Smith, are you there?”
Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb’s mouth. “I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He’s a teacher at the high school there.”
“He’s been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I’m very sorry to have to give you this news.” The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.
“Oh, my God,” Herb said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. “Oh, my God,” he said again.
“He’s dead?” Vera asked. “He’s dead? Johnnys dead?”
He covered the mouthpiece. “No,” he said. “Not dead.”
“Not dead! Not dead!” she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. “O God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and ...”
“Vera shut up!”
For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face; Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs who was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes. I ... I apologize for the ruckus.”
“Quite understandable,” Meggs said.
“My boy ... Johnny ... was he driving his Volkswagen?”
“Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are deathtraps,” Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.
“He was in a Bangor & Orono Yellow Cab,” Meggs said. “I’ll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved, two of them driven by kids from Cleaves Mills. They were dragging. They came up over what’s known as Carson’s Hill on Route 6, headed east. Your son was in the cab, headed west, toward Cleaves. The cab and the car on the wrong side of the road collided head-on. The cab driver was killed, and so was the boy driving the other car. Your son and a passenger in that other car are at Eastern Maine Med. I understand both of them are listed as critical.”
“Critical,” Herb said.
“Critical! Critical!” Vera moaned.
Oh, Christ, we sound like one of those weird off-off-Broad-way shows, Herb thought. He felt embarrassed for Vera, and for Sergeant Meggs, who must surely be hearing Vera, like some nutty Greek chorus in the background. He wondered how many conversations like this Sergeant Meggs had held in the course of his job. He decided he must have had a good many. Possibly he had already called the cab driver’s wife and the dead boy’s mother to pass the news. How had they reacted? And what did it matter? Wasn’t it Vera’s right to weep for her son? And why did a person have to think such crazy things at a time like this?
“Eastern Maine,” Herb said. He jotted it on a pad. The drawing on top of the pad showed a smiling telephone handset. The phone cord spelled out the words PHONE PAL. “How is he hurt?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Smith?”
“Where did he get it? Head? Belly? What? Is he burned?”
Vera shrieked.
“Vera can you please shut UP!”
“You’d have to call the hospital for that information,” Meggs said carefully. “I’m a couple of hours from having a complete report.”
“All right. All right.”
“Mr. Smith, I’m sorry to have to call you in the middle of the night with such bad news ...”
“It’s bad, all right,” he said, “I’ve got to call the hospital, Sergeant Meggs. Good-bye.”
“Good night, Mr. Smith.”
Herb hung up and stared stupidly at the phone. Just like that it happens, he thought. How ’bout that. Johnny.
Vera uttered another shriek, and he saw with some alarm that she had grabbed her hair, rollers and all, and was pulling it. “It’s a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on sin, on something! Herb, get down on your knees with me ...”
“Vera, I have to call the hospital. I don’t want to do it on my knees.”
“We’ll pray for him ... promise to do better ... if you’d only come to church more often with me I know ... maybe it’s your cigars, drinking beer with those men after work ... cursing ... taking the name of the Lord God in vain ... a judgment ... it’s a judgment ...”
He put his hands on her face to stop its wild, uneasy whipping back and forth. The feel of the night cream was unpleasant, but he didn’t take his hands away. He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania. Five years after Johnny was born, the doctor had found a number of benign tumors in her uterus and vaginal canal. Their removal had made it impossible for her to have another baby. Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of “pure Christians” who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.
“Vera,” he said.
“We’ll do better,” she whispered, her eyes pleading with him. “We’ll do better and he’ll live. You’ll see. You’ll ...”
“Vera.”
She fell silent, looking at him.
“Let’s call the hospital and see just how bad it really is,” he said gently.
“A-All right. Yes.”
“Can you sit on the stairs there and keep perfectly quiet?”
“I want to pray,” she said childishly. “You can’t stop me.”
“I don’t want to. As long as you pray to yourself.”
“Yes. To myself. All right, Herb.”
She went to the stairs and sat down and pulled her robe primly around her. She folded her hands and her lips began to move. Herb called the hospital. Two hours later they were headed north on the nearly deserted Maine Turnpike. Herb was behind the wheel of their ’66 Ford station wagon. Vera sat bolt upright in the passenger seat. Her Bible was on her lap.
2
The telephone woke Sarah at quarter of nine. She went to answer it with half her mind still asleep in bed.
Her back hurt from the vomiting she had done the night before and the muscles in her stomach felt strained, but otherwise she felt much better.
She picked up the phone, sure it would be Johnny. “Hello?”
“Hi, Sarah.” It wasn’t Johnny. It was Anne Strafford from school. Anne was a year older than Sarah and in her second year at Cleaves. She taught Spanish. She was a bubbly, effervescent girl and Sarah liked her very much. But this morning she sounded subdued.
“How are you, Annie? It’s only temporary. Probably Johnny told you. Carnival hot dogs, I guess ...”
“Oh, my God, you don’t know. You don’t ...” The words were swallowed in odd, choked sounds. Sarah listened to them, frowning. Her initial puzzlement turned to deadly disquiet as she realized Anne was crying.
“Anne? What’s wrong? It’s not Johnny, is it? Not ...”
“There was an accident,” Anne said. She was now sobbing openly. “He was in a cab. There was a head-on collision. The driver of the other car was Brad Freneau, I had him in Spanish II, he died, his girl friend died this morning, Mary Thibault, she was in one of Johnny’s classes, I heard, it’s horrible, just horri ...”
“Johnny!”Sarah screamed into the phone. She was sick to her stomach again. Her hands and feet were suddenly as cold as four gravestones. “What about Johnny?”
“He’s in critical condition, Sarah. Dave Pelsen called the hospital this morning. He’s not expected ... well, it’s very bad.”
The world was going gray. Anne was still talking but her voice was far and wee, as e.e cummings had said about the balloon man. Flocked images tumbling over and over one another, none making sense. The carny wheel. The mirror maze. Johnny’s eyes, strangely violet, almost black. His dear, homely face in the harsh, county fair lighting, naked bulbs strung on electric wire.
“Not Johnny,” she said, far and wee, far and wee. “You’re mistaken. He was fine when he left here.”
And Anne’s voice coming back like a fast serve, her voice so shocked and unbelieving, so affronted that such a thing should have happened to someone her own age, someone young and vital. “They told Dave he’d never wake up even if he survived the operation. They have to operate because his head ... his head was ...”
Was she going to say crushed? That Johnny’s head had been crushed?
Sarah fainted then, possibly to avoid that final irrevocable word, that final horror. The phone spilled out of her fingers and she sat down hard in a gray world and then she slipped over and the phone swung back and forth in a decreasing arc, Anne Strafford’s voice coming out of it: “Sarah? ... Sarah? ... Sarah?”
3
When Sarah got to Eastern Maine Medical, it was quarter past twelve. The nurse at the reception desk looked at her white, strained face, estimated her capacity for further truth, and told her that John Smith was still in OR. She added that Johnny’s mother and father were in the waiting room.
“Thank you,” Sarah said. She turned right instead of left, wound up in a medical closet, and had to backtrack.
The waiting room was done in bright, solid colors that gashed her eyes. A few people sat around looking at tattered magazines or empty space. A gray-haired woman came in from the elevators, gave her visitor’s pass to a friend, and sat down. The friend clicked away on high heels. The rest of them went on sitting, waiting their own chance to visit a father who had had gallstones removed, a mother who had discovered a small lump under one of her breasts a bare three days ago, a friend who had been struck in the chest with an invisible sledgehammer while jogging. The faces of the waiters were carefully made-up with composure. Worry was swept under the faces like dirt under a rug. Sarah felt the unreality hovering again. Somewhere a soft bell was ringing. Crepe-soled shoes squeaked. He had been fine when he left her place. Impossible to think he was in one of these brick towers, engaged in dying.
She knew Mr. and Mrs. Smith at once. She groped for their first names and could not immediately find them. They were sitting together near the back of the room, and unlike the others here, they hadn’t yet had time to come to terms with what had happened in their lives.
Johnny’s mom sat with her coat on the chair behind her and her Bible clutched in her hands. Her lips moved as she read, and Sarah remembered Johnny saying she was very religious—maybe too religious, somewhere in that great middle ground between holy rolling and snake-handling, she remembered him saying. Mr. Smith—Herb, it came to her, his name is Herb—had one of the magazines on his knees, but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking out the window, where New England fall burned its way toward November and winter beyond.
She went over to them. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”
They looked up at her, their faces tensed for the dreaded blow. Mrs. Smith’s hands tightened on her Bible, which was open to the Book of Job, until her knuckles were white. The young woman before them was not in nurse’s or doctor’s whites, but that made no difference to them at this point. They were waiting for the final blow.
“Yes, we’re the Smiths,” Herb said quietly.
“I’m Sarah Bracknell. Johnny and I are good friends. Going together, I suppose you’d say. May I sit down?”
“Johnny’s girl friend?” Mrs. Smith asked in a sharp, almost accusing tone. A few of the others looked around briefly and then back at their own tattered magazines.
“Yes,” she said. “Johnny’s girl.”
“He never wrote that he had a lady friend,” Mrs. Smith said in that same sharp tone. “No, he never did at all.”
“Hush, Mother,” Herb said. “Sit down, Miss ... Bracknell, wasn’t it?”
“Sarah,” she said gratefully, and took a chair. “I ...”
“No, he never did,” Mrs. Smith said sharply. “My boy loved God, but just lately he maybe fell away just a bit. The judgment of the Lord God is sudden, you know. That’s what makes backsliding so dangerous. You know not the day nor the hour ...”
“Hush,” Herb said. People were looking around again. He fixed his wife with a stern glance. She looked back defiantly for a moment, but his gaze didn’t waver. Vera dropped her eyes. She had closed the Bible but her fingers fiddled restlessly along the pages, as if longing to get back to the colossal demolition derby of Job’s life, enough bad luck to put her own and her son’s in some sort of bitter perspective.
“I was with him last night,” Sarah said, and that made the woman look up again, accusingly. At that moment Sarah remembered the biblical connotation of being “with” somebody and felt herself beginning to blush. It was as if the woman could read her thoughts.
“We went to the county fair ...”
“Places of sin and evil,” Vera Smith said clearly.
“I’ll tell you one last time to hush, Vera,” Herb said grimly, and clamped one of his hands over one of his wife’s. “I mean it, now. This seems like a nice girl here, and I won’t have you digging at her. Understand?”
“Sinful places,” Vera repeated stubbornly.
“Will you hush?”
“Let me go. I want to read my Bible.”
He let her go. Sarah felt confused embarrassment. Vera opened her Bible and began to read again, lips moving.
“Vera is very upset,” Herb said. “We’re both upset. You are too, from the look of you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you and Johnny have a good time last night?” he asked. “At your fair?”
“Yes,” she said, the lie and truth of that simple word all mixed up in her mind. “Yes we did, until ... well, I ate a bad hot dog or something. We had my car and Johnny drove me home to my place in Veazie. I was pretty sick to my stomach. He called a cab. He said he’d call me in sick at school today. And that’s the last time I saw him.” The tears started to come then and she didn’t want to cry in front of them, particularly not in front of Vera Smith, but there was no way to stop it. She fumbled a Kleenex out of her purse and held it to her face.
“There, now,” Herb said, and put an arm around her. “There, now.” She cried, and i
t seemed to her in some unclear way that he felt better for having someone to comfort; his wife had found her own dark brand of comfort in Job’s story and it didn’t include him.
A few people turned around to gawk; through the prisms of her tears they seemed like a crowd. She had a bitter knowledge of what they were thinking: Better her than me, better all three of them than me or mine, guy must be dying, guy must have gotten his head crushed for her to cry like that. Only a matter of time before some doctor comes down and takes them into a private room to tell them that—
Somehow she choked off the tears and got hold of herself. Mrs. Smith sat bolt upright, as if startled out of a nightmare, noticing neither Sarah’s tears nor her husband’s effort to comfort her. She read her Bible.
“Please,” Sarah said. “How bad is it? Can we hope?”
Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: “There’s hope in God, Missy.”
Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb’s eyes and thought: He thinks it’s driven her crazy. And maybe it has.
4
A long afternoon stretching into evening.
Sometime after two P.M., when the schools began to let out, a number of Johnny’s students began to come in, wearing fatigue coats and strange hats and washed-out jeans. Sarah didn’t see many of the kids she thought of as the button-down crowd—upward-bound, college-oriented kids, clear of eye and brow. Most of the kids who bothered to come in were the freaks and long-hairs.
A few came over and asked Sarah in quiet tones what she knew about Mr. Smith’s condition. She could only shake her head and say she had heard nothing. But one of the girls, Dawn Edwards, who had a crush on Johnny, read the depth of Sarah’s fear in her face. She burst into tears. A nurse came and asked her to leave.