“I know what you thought,” he said, “because great minds think alike. Look under your pillow.”
She did, and pulled out the package Jack had hidden there before going to the theater. When she unwrapped it, she still wasn't sure what it was. Jack helped her to remove the cellophane and shake out the uninflated toy. “Where's the nozzle?” he said, turning it over.
“There.”
“Shall I do the honors?”
“Please.”
“This may take a minute or two.” Halfway through blowing it up, he stopped and said, “I should have had Vinnie do this. Guitar players aren't known for their breath control.” Nancy was leaning back against the headboard, watching with delight as the figure took shape. When it was fully inflated, and Jack stood it up beside the bed, she laughed and said, “I recognize the white lab coat.”
“But have you ever taken a punch at it?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not.”
“Then this is your chance,” and he poked it in the nose. It rocked way back on its base, then just as quickly rocked forward again. “This is to help you get rid of your aggressions.”
“Let me at it,” she said, getting to her knees on the bed. Take this, Sprague,” and she socked it to the floor. “And this,” when it teetered back up again. Jack took a swipe too, and it spun away from the bed. Nancy took one last lunge, missed it, and ended up half on the floor. Jack dragged her back up onto the bed.
“Whew. I don't think I realized the full extent of your pent-up aggression.”
Nancy sighed and lay back against the pillows. “I have,” she said, “and let me tell you, it's no fun.”
Even in the flickering candlelight, Jack could see a pensive expression steal across her face. He lay down beside her, on his back. “If it's really that bad,” he said, “why don't you quit?”
“And leave you to his kind ministrations?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Can you?” she said, turning her face toward his. She looked as if she was debating what to say. “You didn't see yourself after you came out of that sensory-deprivation tank. I did.” Should she tell him, now, about the terribly altered heart rhythms? “And there's something else you don't know -- something Sprague has tried to pass off to me as a mechanical malfunction. I checked the machine later, on my own, and it's working fine.”
“What machine?”
“The tank-room cardiograph. Your brain waves did all the usual, impossible things, but your heart joined in this time. The machine acted as if it was recording two entirely different heartbeats... only the first one, the one you started out with, almost got lost in the second.”
“What are you saying?”
“I'm saying, your heart nearly stopped -- and even then Sprague wouldn't stop the experiment.”
“And where did this second heartbeat come from?” Jack asked, though there was only one possible answer.
“I don't know . . . you tell me.”
And he knew she was thinking the same thing.
“Jack—I think you're putting your life in danger every time you make these journeys now. I thought it was dangerous right from the start; now I think it could be deadly. Sprague's completely consumed with it. He thinks you're his ticket to a Nobel Prize, and he won't stop at anything anymore.” She found his hand on the mattress and took it in her own. “You've got to stop, before something terrible happens. You've got to stop traveling between this world and that other one . . . before you get trapped there for good.”
They lay quietly beside each other, Jack haunted by all that she'd just said. No, he hadn't seen himself dragged from the tank—but he could remember that overwhelming sensation of loss, of having been drained, down to the marrow, of something essential, something vital. In his heart—his nearly stopped heart—he had felt an almost unbearable loneliness, a sense of despair that had washed over him, again and again, like a rolling, black wave, until, in the light of the lab, with a blanket wrapped around him, it had slowly, but even now not completely, receded.
And yes, inextricably bound up in that despair, there had been a thread of pure and simple fear—Nancy wasn't wrong. He had felt it himself, that sense of growing menace. But should he allow it to stop him in his tracks, forego his newfound powers, and desert the mother he had only just discovered? Was that the sane thing to do—or merely the cowardly?
“Can we get under the blankets?” Nancy said. “It's getting chilly in here.”
“You're right. It is.”
They pulled their legs up, then crawled under the quilt; the white tablecloth, with the embroidered tiger, still lay on top of it.
“You never told me the significance of the tiger tablecloth,” Jack said, as Nancy nestled her head in the crook of his arm.
“It was given to me as a child. The tiger's supposed to ward off evil spirits.”
“Then maybe we should leave it on tonight,” he joked, but Nancy didn't seem amused. He gathered her closer. One of the candles on the bedside table blew out. “Must be a draft in here.”
“Must be,” Nancy said, slipping one hand between the buttons of Jack's shirt. “Just look at our inflatable Dr. Sprague.”
Jack glanced across her, at the blow-up toy. It was rocking, with its bright red nose and its painted-on glasses, back and forth on its rubber base, almost as if, it dawned on Jack with a sudden slight shiver, almost as if it were being purposefully rocked by some unseen hand.
The other candle abruptly sputtered out, throwing the room into total darkness. He could still hear the rustle of the rocking toy, as he drew the white cloth, with its guardian tiger, up and over Nancy's shoulders.
Chapter Twenty-Five
HE AWOKE, ALONE, to a ringing telephone. He picked it up and mumbled, “Hello?”
“This is the operator. Will you accept an emergency call from a Mr. Clancy?”
“Mr. Clancy?”
“Jack, it's me,” he heard Clancy saying in the background.
“Will you accept this call?’
“Of course,” he said, sitting up. The tablecloth, with the red tiger, had been tucked around him. “What's up?” he said. “Did you lose my new number?”
“Yes. I don't know where Mam put it . . “ There was something subdued, but urgent, in his voice. “Jack, Mam's in the hospital. St. John's.”
The same hospital Jack had been born in.
“That's where I'm calling you from.”
He swung his legs off the bed; his clothes lay in a heap on the floor. “What happened?”
“I don't know, for sure . . . somebody'd called her, she was talking on the phone, next thing I heard was her lamp hitting the floor. Maybe she'd done that on purpose, so I'd hear it downstairs. She was hardly breathing at all when I got to her . . .”
“And you took her to the hospital?”
“The ambulance did. She's in Intensive Care now.”
Jack didn't know how to ask the terrible question that he had in mind. But Clancy guessed it.
“The doctors say . . .” He stopped for a second, unable to speak. “The doctors say . . . it's going to be hard to hold her.”
“I'm coming right out,” Jack said. “Just wait there. I'll be there in an hour.”
He leaped out of the bed and flew into the clothes he'd had on the night before. In the bathroom, he rubbed some cold water over his face, and read the note Nancy had left stuck to the mirror: Merry Christmas, it said, see you on the 26th. She was going to an uncle's place, with her family, for a couple of days.
Outside, he flagged down a livery service car and offered the guy thirty dollars, all he had in his wallet, to drive him to Weehawken.
“Forty and I'll do it.”
“Thirty's all I've got. Take it or leave it.”
“I'll take it.”
He was at the hospital forty-five minutes after Clancy had called. There was a small waiting room, across the hall from the Intensive Care Unit. Clancy was sitting on one of the green plastic chairs,
his elbows resting on his knees, one foot tapping nervously. When Jack sat down beside him, he simply said, “They're in there now, the doctors.”
“They say anything else?”
“Not yet.” Clancy was wearing one of his threadbare cardigans and a pair of baggy trousers. “Half the time I don't know what they're telling me anyway.” He ran his hands roughly over his face, as if he was trying to wash this whole thing away.
“Can you tell me again what happened?” Jack said. He needed to hear it once more, now that he was fully awake.
Clancy listlessly recited the details of the morning, the medication he'd brought in to Mam in her bedroom, the coffee and cookies he'd had for breakfast, the call she'd gotten just before collapsing. “By the time I got up there, she was half out of the bed, the lamp on the floor, the telephone too . . . For a second,” he said, scrubbing the sides of his face again, “I thought she was already gone.”
“Who was it on the phone?” Jack asked, merely to fill in the picture, merely to know everything there was to know about such a fateful moment.
Clancy had to think. “Somebody I didn't recognize . . . sounded like he was British.” He shook his head. “Who would Mam know, who'd sound like he was British?”
“Didn't he give his name?”
“He did, but I didn't bother to remember it. After I found her, I just told him to get off the line, I had to call the hospital.”
An Irish accent, Jack might have understood—some obscure relative, from the old country. But British? It was just one of those things he might never know the answer to.
The door to the I.C.U. swung open, and a doctor, about fifty-five or sixty, with a jaunty bowtie above his white coat, came out. Jack stood up and introduced himself.
“Ian Prescott,” the doctor replied, looking him fixedly, almost appraisingly, in the eye.
“How is she?” Clancy asked, with trepidation, from his chair.
“Not good, I'm afraid,” Prescott said. He drew up a chair, and Jack sat down too. “With the one lung gone,” he explained, “the other has been working overtime for years now. I don't know how much longer it can carry the burden.”
“Well, can't you do some sort of transplant—I read about ‘em all the time,” Clancy put in, “or use some kind of machine to breathe for her?”
“There are other complications,” Prescott said, in very sober tones, and by the time he had finished outlining them, Jack knew what he was trying to say, that it was just a matter of hours—a day or two, at best—before Mam would pass away.
Clancy simply got to his feet and said, “I'm going in to see her now.” Prescott didn't stop him. “The head nurse will keep an eye on him,” he said to Jack.
“Is there anything we should be doing?” Jack asked, helplessly.
“Everything that can be done, we're already doing,” Prescott said. Then he added, “You know, it's a funny thing—I had a call about you, just the other day, from somebody named Sprague. In New York.”
Jack was speechless, then remembered that Prescott's name had appeared in one of the articles he'd found in the attic.
“I was doing my residency here when your mother was brought in. I wound up helping with your delivery.”
“What did you tell Sprague?”
“Nothing much he didn't already know; he'd scoured the back issues of all the local newspapers. You were rather a celebrated case, you know, in your time.”
So Jack had gathered, from the clips that he himself had seen. But did Prescott know anything of his current celebrity?
“I asked him why, after all this time, he was so curious about it now,” Prescott volunteered, “and he said you were a patient of his.”
“What kind of patient?”
Prescott appeared surprised by Jack's question. “Psychiatric,” he said, “but nothing serious. He told me he was just checking up on some unusual background information you'd included in your medical history. I assured him,” he said, with a slight smile, “that it was all true. He said he'd wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth.”
“And that's it, that's all he said?”
Prescott shrugged. “It's all I remember. Oh, he asked after Dr. Mehta, who'd been truly in charge, and I told him Mehta had left the hospital fifteen years ago and gone somewhere in India.”
Sprague was thorough; Jack had to give him that. And he hadn't given the real reason for calling—that was a blessing. Prescott, apparently, did not read the Post.
“I've got other patients to look in on,” Prescott said, “but I'll be here all day. When your grandfather comes out, you can go in for a few minutes—just try not to disturb her.” He stood up and, before going, said, “It's nice to see you turned out so well.”
Even now, Jack thought, even here, with Mam gasping for breath across the hall, it was the unnatural turn his own life had taken that rose up, out of nowhere, to haunt him. Nancy's words from the night before came back to him, too, and he experienced again that tremor of fear. For a second, he felt, in the pit of his stomach, that same gnawing emptiness, that same strange sense of having almost . . . disappeared.
An orderly went by, pushing a rattling cart of linens and equipment.
But could he just turn his back on the whole bizarre business? Turn his back and walk away, pretend none of it had ever happened? Sure, Garcia was dead anyway—but mat wasn't his fault. And Zakin, Adolph Zakin was alive and well—that was definitely a victory. It was even possible—who knew anymore?—that he'd helped that guy in the park, that Adam Baldwin. Maybe there was some power in his hands . . . some power he could use, now, to help Mam.
When Clancy came out a few minutes later, his eyes red-rimmed, his face a pallid gray, he said, “I told her you were here—you ought to go in now. The nurse said you could have five minutes.”
Jack put a hand on Clancy's shoulder as he sat down, then crossed the hall to the Intensive Care Unit. At first, he was surprised at the dimness of the lighting, then he passed into the brilliant glare around the nursing station. A heavyset nurse, wearing the kind of peaked hat he didn't think they wore anymore, said, “Mr Logan?”
“Yes.”
“The last bed on your left. Five minutes, no more. Keep your voice down and don't do anything to agitate her.”
There was a drawn curtain on one side of her bed, a wall on the other. On the curtained side, there was a battery of machines and an IV unit; on the other, a single, straight-backed chair. Jack pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down.
There was almost no sign of Mam; almost no sign of anyone at all. The crisp white sheet that covered the bed showed only the slightest elevation where she lay beneath it; her frail limbs made nothing more than wrinkles in the sheet. The top half of the bed had been raised slightly, and a clear plastic sheet—an oxygen tent, Jack remembered from a previous episode, years before—had been draped over it. Mam's face appeared sunken and faded, far away, behind the plastic scrim. There was a low but constant whooshing sound, from the oxygen compressor.
Jack guessed where her hand lay, under the sheet, and gently placed his own on top of it. Her head turned, just a little, on the pillow. “Don't try to talk,” he said. “Just rest.”
But her head shook, ever so slightly, and her hand stirred. He inched the chair even closer, and put his face up to the tent. A pale green tube had been inserted in one of her nostrils, and a couple of black wires—Jack was reminded of Sprague's lab—trailed from somewhere under the sheet and into the monitors ranged around her.
“The doctors said you should just lie still,” Jack repeated, “to recover your strength.”
But Mam would have none of it; she knew better. He sensed she wanted to tell him something. And behind the plastic curtain, he could see her lips moving. But the sound of the compressor was too great for him to hear her. He leaned his head against the cool plastic, and said, “Mam, I'm sorry—you'll have to say it again.” And then he heard, "Investigator.”
He sat stockstill in the chair.
Mansfield—that bastard. His was the British accent Clancy had heard.
“Said you had . . . powers.” It was meant, Jack understood, as a question. But what exactly—and how much—had Mansfield told her? “Is it true?” she asked, in a ragged whisper.
Was what true? Had Mansfield told her about Zakin? Garcia? The TV appearance Jack had made? How had he even found her?
“Mam . . . I don't think now is the time—”
Her hand slipped out from under the sheet, and, with surprising vigor, clutched his. He looked down at her bony, but tenacious fingers.
“Jack . . . tell me,” she said.
And he did—everything that he believed Mansfield already knew, and might have told her himself. Then he told her about the experiments that were being done at the Institute of Abnormal Psychology, and his own mixed emotions about them. When he paused for a moment, hoping he had satisfied her curiosity, she squeezed his hand again and said, "How?"
“How do I do it?”
She nodded, once.
The moment of truth had come, the moment he'd feared and at the same time secretly hoped for—the moment when he could tell Mam that he knew all about his own miraculous birth, and that he believed it was connected to his equally miraculous abilities. There might not be another time in which to do it—and it was absolutely vital that she know.
“Mam, remember when I came out to Weehawken and said I needed my birth certificate to get my passport?” He explained the real purpose of the search, and told her about the newspaper clippings he had discovered in Clancy's footlocker. When he thought she had understood, and accepted, that revelation, he took a deep breath, put his own hand on top of hers, and said, “There's something more.”
The nurse poked her head around the partition, silently assessed the situation, and said, “Not much longer, okay?”
Jack nodded, and when she left he said, “There's something else I think you must know, something I think will make you very, very happy.”
Mam waited, absolutely still, while he found the words.
“In that Other World that I've been telling you about, those who have gone before us still live. In that Other World, Mam, I have seen, and I have talked to, my mother—your daughter—Mary Elizabeth.”
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