by John Saul
“Jeez,” Josh breathed.
Jeff shuddered. “It was so real.” He was awake now, his whole body covered with an icy sweat, the terrible feeling that had come over him as he’d called out to his brother one last time still gripping him.
“What’s going on?” Brad Hinshaw asked, coming into the room. Then he saw Jeff. “Jeez, man, you look like you saw a ghost or something.”
“H—He did,” Josh stammered. “He dreamed that Adam was dead, and that it was his fault.”
“Shit,” Brad breathed. But before he could say anything else, someone else came into the room.
“Is Adam in here?”
A deathly silence fell over the room as the three boys stared at one another. Then Jeff got slowly out of bed and made his way toward the door, Josh and Brad instinctively backing away to let him pass. He walked to the room next to his own, hesitated a moment, then went inside.
The bed was empty, though it looked as if it had been slept in.
All Adam’s things were in their usual places.
“M—Maybe he just went to the can,” Brad Hinshaw suggested, but then a new voice spoke. “I
just looked. It’s empty.”
Jeff stared at the empty bed for another moment, and then his eyes shifted to the computer on Adam’s desk. Moving slowly, almost as if he were being drawn to it against his will, Jeff approached the desk and pressed the power button on the bottom of the monitor. A green light flashed on, and then the monitor began to glow. A second or two after that, the last words that Adam had typed appeared next to the prompt. Jeff, along with Josh and Brad, stared silently at the words:
C: NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME, SO IT IS TIME THAT I MOVE ON. I AM GOING TO A BETTER, HIGHER PLACE.
Josh, gazing at the message, felt his stomach tighten as he realized what it meant. In his mind he was suddenly back at the beginning of last week, when he’d sat on the bed in his own room back home in Eden, the hunting knife in his hands.
Unconsciously, the fingers of his left hand touched the scabs on his right wrist, all that was left to remind him of what he’d done.
Suddenly he understood why Adam had been acting weird the last few days. Josh knew he’d thought about dying for only a few minutes when he was angry. Unlike him, Adam must have been thinking about it for days.
Thinking about it, and making up his mind.
But what had he done? Where was he?
“Wh—Whatcha going to do?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
But Jeff merely turned and walked away.
Just as Jeff Aldrich emerged from his brother’s room, Hildie Kramer appeared at the top of the stairs.
She seemed puzzled when she saw him, but spoke to him in a soft, steady voice. “Jeff? Could you come downstairs with me, please? There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
A minute later, sitting in his pajamas on the sofa next to Hildie, Jeff listened in silence as she told him that Adam’s body had just been found.
“It was on the railroad tracks,” she said. “I—I suppose it might have been an accident …” Her voice trailed off, and she slipped an arm around Jeff.
The boy stiffened in her embrace.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident. He left a note on his computer.”
For a long moment Hildie said nothing. Then, after discharging a deep breath from her lungs, she said, “I think I’d better get you to your parents.”
Jeff said nothing, letting her lead him back to his room so he could dress. But even as he began pulling his clothes on, the dream kept coming back to him.
So what Adam had said in the dream was right: he hadn’t chickened out at all.
Oddly, Jeff Aldrich felt proud of his brother.
And even as he felt that wave of pride, he knew it was something he would never tell anyone about.
Not ever.
10
Chet Aldrich awakened slowly, his eyes automatically seeking out the blue digits of the clock radio on his nightstand: 5:47.
The alarm wasn’t due to go off until six-thirty.
Chet scowled in annoyance. He never wakened so long before the alarm went off; indeed, he invariably woke up a minute before the alarm sounded, squelching it before its irritating beep even had a chance to begin.
But something had disturbed his sleep. He glanced out the window to see the sky, already brightening. Thunder? He dismissed that idea from his mind when he noticed the moon still hanging above the horizon. Then, as he was about to roll over and bury his head in the pillows once more, he heard the ringing of the doorbell, the sound muffled through the closed bedroom door.
Instantly, the last vestiges of sleep left him. He slid out of bed, reaching for the robe he always left draped over the back of the chair in the corner. Pulling it on, he glanced at Jeanette, who was still sound asleep, lying on her left side, her hair spread out on the pillow around her head.
As the doorbell sounded again, Chet hurried downstairs, a growing sense of foreboding looming within him. Someone at the door this early could only mean bad news.
Very bad, his mind corrected, fully awake now. As he reached for the doorknob, and the bell rang yet again, an idea of what must have happened took shape in his head. His heart had begun to race even before he opened the door and saw Jeff, pale and wide-eyed, trembling on the front porch. Behind him stood Hildie Kramer, flanked by two police officers.
For a moment he had a fleeting feeling of hope—he’d been wrong, and all that had happened was that Jeff had sneaked out in the middle of the night and gotten himself into some kind of trouble. But even as the idea formed, he dismissed it, for he could read Hildie Kramer’s eyes clearly. They weren’t reflecting anger, or even disappointment.
What he saw in them was grief.
Grief, and sympathy.
“What is it?” he asked, opening the door wide so the four people on the porch could come inside the house. When no one said anything, as if each of them was waiting for someone else to pronounce the news they had come to tell him, he knew.
“It’s Adam, isn’t it?” he breathed. “Something’s happened to him.”
It was Hildie Kramer who finally broke the silence of the group. Stepping forward, she gripped his arm, almost as if to steady him. “I’m sorry, Chet,” she told him. “He’s—I’m afraid he’s dead.”
“Dear God,” Chet muttered, the words catching in his throat as he felt himself begin to sink down onto his knees. Only Hildie’s strong hold kept him upright. “No. There’s a mistake.… There has to be—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Aldrich,” one of the policemen said. “It happened about an hour ago, maybe a little more. He was on the tracks when—”
His words were cut off by Jeanette, who was now standing at the top of the stairs, her robe clutched protectively around her body, her face still puffy with sleep.
“Tracks?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
Chet, struggling once more to remain on his feet, gazed bleakly up at his wife. “It’s Adam,” he told her. “He’s—Hildie says he’s dead.”
Hildie says …
As if to leave open the possibility that Hildie was wrong, that it was all some kind of terrible mistake, that Adam was still alive somewhere. And yet the words had their effect, whether Chet had intended it or not, for Jeanetten’s eyes, wide and disbelieving, shifted immediately to the housemother and chief administrator of the Academy.
“Adam?” Jeanette breathed. “But that’s not possible. You said he was doing fine.” Her voice rose as she rejected the idea of her son’s death. “He was doing fine! Last weekend, at the picnic—”
Hildie moved up the stairs, brushing past Chet, who was still frozen in place, as if the news had drained the strength from his muscles. “We don’t know exactly what happened, Jeanette,” she said, casting about in her mind for some possible straw for the shocked woman to grasp at. “Perhaps it was some kind of an accident—”
“Accident?” Jeanette echoed. “Wh-W
hat happened?”
Half supported by Hildie Kramer, Jeanette came slowly down the stairs as one of the policemen recounted the engineer’s story.
“He said there was nothing he could do,” the cop finished. “He hit the brakes and the horn as soon as he saw your son, but it was too late. The boy didn’t move at all, and the train was going too fast to stop.”
“D-Didn’t move?” Jeanette repeated. “H-He just sat there?”
“I’m sorry,” the policeman said. “The engineer said it was as if he was just waiting for the train to hit him.”
Jeanette slumped against her husband. As Chet’s arms went around her, she began sobbing softly. It was impossible—the whole thing. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept it. That was why they’d sent Adam to the Academy, just to prevent something like this. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t believe it. It’s not Adam. It—It’s someone else. It has to be.”
“I’m so sorry, Jeanette,” Hildie Kramer told the distraught woman. “I wish it were somebody else. But there isn’t any mistake.”
Jeanette only shook her head, her body suddenly filling with an unnatural strength. “I want to see him,” she said. “I want to see him for myself.”
Jeff had been standing silently just inside the door, his face pale as he listened to his parents being informed of his brother’s death. Now he darted across to his mother and pressed himself wordlessly against her. Almost unconsciously, Jeanette’s hand smoothed her remaining son’s hair, but her eyes remained fixed on the policeman who had just told her what had happened. “I want to see where it happened,” she said almost tonelessly. “And I want to see my son. I think I have the right, don’t I?”
The young officer shifted uneasily. “It’s not really necessary, ma’am,” he replied. “I mean, there isn’t any doubt about what happened—”
“No!” Jeanette said sharply. “I have doubts. I want to see him! Can’t you understand? He’s my son, and I want to see him!”
As her voice rose again, taking on a note of hysteria, Jeff pressed closer to her, and Hildie Kramer exchanged a glance with the policeman. “I can stay here with Jeff,” she said. “Can you take Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich?”
Now Chet spoke, his voice strangling on his words. “Jeanette, we don’t have to do this. We—”
But Jeanette only shook her head once more. “No, Chet. I have to do it I won’t believe it unless I see it for myself.” Gently, she disentangled herself from Jeff’s arms.
“Can I go, too?” the boy asked.
Though Jeanette seemed not to hear the question, Chet shook his head. “You don’t want to, son,” he said, his voice breaking. “Just stay here with Hildie, and well be back as soon as we can. All right?”
“But I want to go,” Jeff protested, his face setting stubbornly. “I want to see what happened, too.” Though he’d said nothing about his dream either to Hildie Kramer or anyone except Josh MacCallum and Brad Hinshaw, it was still fresh in his mind.
And in his dream—
No! What had happened in his dream wasn’t real The only thing real was that Adam was dead. But he couldn’t be dead! He couldn’t be! He’d said he was going away—
“Come on, Jeff,” Hildie said quietly, gently steering the
boy toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “Let’s leave your parents alone for a little while, all right?”
Jeff, still trying to piece it all together in his mind, to reconcile the dream of his brother’s death with the reality of it, allowed himself to be guided down the hall as Jeanette and Chet, escorted by the two policemen, left the house.
The police car pulled over to the side of the road. They were some four miles north of Barrington. A hundred yards ahead the road, and the railroad track next to it, curved away out of sight, following the contour of the coast. Beyond the track a concrete retaining wall held the cutaway hillside in place, and as Jeanette emerged from the car into the steadily brightening morning sunlight, she felt a chill as she saw the blood that was smeared along the retaining wall.
People swarmed over the site, taking pictures, making sketches, and taking various measurements that would eventually determine the precise speed at which the engine had been traveling when it struck Adam Aldrich. Two members of the train’s crew hovered nervously near the caboose, but the engineer himself was nowhere in sight.
“They took him down to the station to check his blood for alcohol or drugs,” one of the detectives told Chet when he asked where the engineer was. “Not that we expect to find anything,” he went on. “The rest of the crew says Lawrence—that’s the engineer, Gary Lawrence—is a real teetotaler. His wife was an alkie, and he won’t touch the stuff. No one’s ever seen him with anything stronger than coffee.”
While Jeanette gazed silently at the spot where the train had struck her son, Chefs eyes reluctantly searched for any sign of the body’s presence. The detective, sensing what Chet was looking for, lowered his voice so Jeanette wouldn’t hear his words. “They’ve already taken your boy away, Mr. Aldrich. It’s—Well, it’s pretty messy, and I’m not sure you’ll want to see him.”
Chet nodded, feeling a sense of relief that for the moment, at least, both he and Jeanette would be spared the stark reality of what had happened to their son.
“Where did they take him?” Jeanette asked, emerging from her reverie. “Where is he?”
In unconscious imitation of the cop whose job it had been to inform the Aldriches of the death of their child, the detective shifted uneasily. “They’ll have taken him to the hospital in Santa Cruz,” he said. “Once he’s been pronounced, they’ll keep him until you give them instructions.”
“I want to go to the hospital,” Jeanette announced. “Now, please.”
Chet felt his stomach tighten as he helped his wife back into the car. She insisted on being taken to see her child and would not be dissuaded.
Straws, Chet thought. She’s grasping at straws. But he knew that for now there was nothing he could say to her, that all he could do was stay with her, offering her whatever support she needed while she came to grips in her own way with what had happened.
And yet, he reflected, what about him? To whom was he supposed to turn? The knot of grief that had begun forming inside him from the second he’d opened the door and seen the look on Hildie Kramer’s face now threatened to strangle him. How long had it been? Half an hour? He glanced at his watch, wondering if it was possible that only thirty minutes had passed since he’d heard of his son’s death.
And in those thirty minutes, he’d felt himself turning numb, dealing with the cold reality of Adam’s death by turning cold himself, going through the motions of dealing with the situation even while he, in his own way, rejected the reality of it no less than Jeanette.
Was it really possible that Adam was dead? That he was never going to see his son’s face, so different from Jeff’s, yet so much the same, again?
An image of Adam came into his mind, a quiet image, of Adam as he so often was, alone, exploring some world within his own mind that was totally unknown to anyone else, even his twin brother. For it had always been Jeff who was the extroverted one, Jeff who made friends with other kids, and dragged Adam, often protesting, into his games.
Was what had happened this morning Adam’s Anal pro test, his final rejection of a world he’d never really been a part of? Or had it been just a momentary whim that he would have gotten over, given enough time?
Chet realized that he would now never know. Adam was, irretrievably, gone.
They arrived finally at the hospital’s emergency entrance. Together, the Aldriches went inside, where they were met by a pale, lanky man in a rumpled white coat, a resident whose young face reflected the ravages of the long hours he’d put in during the night. He came toward them almost reluctantly, and Chet caught himself abstractly wondering if this was the first time this doctor had ever had to deal with parents who had just lost a child.
“Mr. Aldrich? Mrs. Aldrich?” he heard the
doctor saying. “I’m Joel Berman. I was on duty when they brought your son in.” He gestured toward a sofa and two chairs arranged around a messy coffee table in the reception area. “If you’d like to sit down …?”
Jeanette shook her head. “I want to see Adam,” she said, but her nerves were beginning to betray her, and her voice was unsteady as she uttered the words. “Please, I have to see my son.”
Joel Berman’s face tightened. “I—Mrs. Aldrich, I’m not sure you want to see him.”
“I do,” Jeanette said simply. “I have to.”
Berman seemed about to object further, then apparently changed his mind. “This way,” he said softly. He led them down a short corridor and then into an examining room. On a gurney, covered by a sheet, was the form of a body. Jeanette paused at the door, but then steeled herself. Moving across to the gurney, she hesitantly touched the cover, then gently pulled it back.
She stared into Adam’s face.
Smeared with blood, and battered by the impact of the locomotive, it was barely recognizable, and yet she knew instantly that it was her son. At last the wall she’d built inside her broke and she began sobbing. “Oh, Adam,” she whispered, the words choking in her constricted throat. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you just come home? I would have made it right, honey. I would have taken care of you.” Her tears flowing freely, she bent down and, oblivious of the blood that still stained her son’s cheeks, gently kissed him.
Only then did she allow the doctor to cover her son’s face once again, and her husband to lead her out of the room.
A few minutes later, her hands trembling, she tried to force herself to drink a cup of scalding hot coffee while the doctor did his best to reassure her that Adam hadn’t suffered.
“He would have died instantly. Apparently he was sitting in the middle of the tracks, his back to the train. The first contact would have killed him. I’m sure he felt nothing at all.”
But the terror, Jeanette found herself thinking. How he must have felt, hearing the train thundering toward him. In her mind she heard the blast of the horn, the roar of the locomotive; she even imagined she could feel the tracks vibrating as the train rushed toward her son. She shuddered, and the coffee slopped over, staining the white terry-cloth robe she was still wearing.