Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  of getting too close-and then being rejected as she had been during the

  trial phase of her first adoption. But it was also a fear of saying or

  doing the wrong thing and unwittingly destroying her own prospects for

  happiness.

  At the front door, he said, "Either Lindsey or I will be at the school

  for you every day-unless you've got a driver's license and would just

  rather come and go on your own."

  She looked up at Hatch. The butterfly was describing circles in the air

  above her head, as if it were a living crown or halo. She said, "You're

  teasing me, aren't you?"

  "Well, yes, I'm afraid I am."

  She blushed and looked away from him as if she was not sure if being

  teased was a good or bad thing. He could almost hear her inner

  thoughts: Is he teasing me because he thinks I'm cute or because he

  thinks I'm hopelessly stupid or something pretty close to that.

  Throughout the drive home from school, Hatch had seen that Regina

  suffered from her share of self-doubt, which she thought she concealed

  but which, when it struck, was evident in her lovely, wonderfully

  expressive face. Each time he sensed a crack in the kid's

  selfconfidence, he wanted to put his arms around her, hug her tight, and

  reassure her-which would be exactly the wrong thing to do because she

  would be appalled to realize that her moments of inner turmoil were so

  obvious to him. She prided herself on being tough, resilient, and

  self-sufficient. She projected that image as armor against the world.

  "I hope you don't mind some teasing," he said as he inserted the key in

  the door. "That's the way I am. I could check myself into a Teasers

  Anonymous program, shake the habit, but it's a tough outfit. They beat

  you with rubber hoses and make you eat Lima beans."

  When enough time passed, when she felt she was loved and part of a

  family, her selfconfidence would be as unshakable as she wanted it to be

  now. In the meantime, the best thing he could do for her was pretend

  that he saw her exactly as she wished to be seen-and quietly, patiently

  help her finish becoming the poised and assured person she hoped to be.

  As he opened the door and they went inside, Regina said, "I used to hate

  Lima beans, all kinds of beans, but I made a deal with God. If he gives

  me something I specially want, I'll eat every kind of bean there is for

  the rest of my life without ever complaining."

  In the foyer, closing the door behind them, Hatch said, "That's quite an

  offer. God ought to be impressed."

  "I sure hope so," she said.

  And in Vassago's dream, Regina moved in sunlight, one leg embraced in

  steel, a butterfly attending her as it might a flower. A house thanked

  by palm trees. A door. She looked up at Vassago, and her eyes revealed

  a soul of tremendous vitality and a heart so vulnerable that the beat of

  his own was quickened even in sleep.

  They found Lindsey upstairs, in the extra bedroom that served as her

  at-home studio. The easel was angled away from the door, so Hatch

  couldn't see the painting. Lindsey's blouse was half in and half out of

  her jeans, her hair was in disarray, a smear of rust-red paint marked

  her left cheek, and she had a look that Hatch knew from experience meant

  she was in the final fever of work on a piece that was turning out to be

  everything she had hoped.

  "Hi, honey," Lindsey said to Regina. "How was school?"

  Regina was flustered, as she always seemed to be, by any term of

  endearment. "Well, school is school, you know."

  "Well, you must like it. I know you get good grades."

  Regina shrugged off the compliment and looked embarrassed.

  Repressing the urge to hug the kid, Hatch said to Lindsey, "She's going

  to be a writer when she grows up."

  "Really?" Lindsey said. "That's exciting. I knew you loved books, but

  I didn't realize you wanted to write "Neither did I," the girl said, and

  suddenly she was in gear and off, her initial awkwardness with Lindsey

  past, words pouring out of her as she crossed the room and went behind

  the easel to have a look at the work in progress, "until just last

  Christmas, when my gift under the tree at the home was six paperbacks.

  Not books for a ten-year-old, either, but the real stuff, because I read

  at a tenth-grade level, which is fifteen years old.

  I'm what they call precocious. Anyway, those books made the best gift

  ever, and I thought it'd be neat if someday a girl like me at the home

  got my books under the tree and felt the way I felt, not that I'll ever

  be as good a writer as Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or Mr. Christopher Pike.

  Jeeze, I mean, they're right up there with Shakespeare and Judy Blume.

  But I've got good stories to tell, and they're not all that

  intelligent-pig-from-space crap.

  Sorry. I mean poop. I mean junk. Intelligent-pig-from-space junk.

  They're not all like that."

  Lindsey never showed Hatch-or anyone else-a canvas in progress,

  withholding even a glimpse of it until the final brush stroke had been

  applied. Though she was evidently near completion of the current

  painting, she was still working on it, and Hatch was surprised that she

  didn't even twitch when Regina went around to the front of the easel to

  have a look. He decided that no kid, just because she had a cute nose

  and some freckles, was going to be accorded a privilege he was denied,

  so he also walked boldly around the easel to take a peek.

  It was a stunning piece of work. The background was a field of stars,

  and superimposed over it was the transparent face of an ethereally

  beautiful young boy. Not just any boy. Their Jimmy. When he was alive

  she had painted him a few times, but never since his death-until now. It

  was an idealized Jimmy of such perfection that his face might have been

  that of an angel. His loving eyes were turned upward, toward a warm

  light that rained down upon him from beyond the top of the canvas, and

  his expression was more profound than joy. Rapture.

  In the foreground, as the focus of the work, floated a black rose, not

  transparent like the face, rendered in such sensuous detail that Hatch

  could almost feel the velvety texture of each plush petal. The green

  skin of the stem was moist with a cool dew, and the thorns were

  portrayed with such piercingly sharp points that he half believed they

  would prick like real thorns if touched. A single drop of blood

  glistened on one of the black petals. Somehow Lindsey had imbued the

  floating rose with an aura of preternatural power, so it drew the eye,

  demanded attention, almost mesmeric in its effect. Yet the boy did not

  look down at the rose; he gazed up at the radiant object only he could

  see, the implication being that, as powerful as the rose might be, it

  was of no interest whatsoever when compared to the source of the light

  above.

  From the day of Jimmy's death until Hatch's resuscitation, Lindsey had

  refused to take solace from any god who would create a world with death

  in it. He a priest suggesting prayer as a route to acceptance and

  psychological healing, and Lindsey's response had been co
ld and

  dismissive: Prayer never works. Eat no miracles, Father. stay and the

  living only wait to join them. Something had changed in her now.

  The black rose in the painting was death. Yet it had no power over

  Jimmy.

  He had gone beyond death, and it meant nothing to him. He was rising

  above it. And by being able to conceive of the painting and bring it

  off so flawlessly, Lindsey had found a way to say goodbye to the boy at

  last,.

  goodbye without regrets, goodbye without bitterness, goodbye with love

  and with a sag new acceptance of the need for belief in something more

  than a life that ended always in a cold, black hole in the ground.

  "It's so beautiful," Regina said with genuine awe. "Scary in a way, I

  don't know why... ... . but so beautiful." Hatch looked up from the

  painting, met Lindsey's eyes, tried to say something, but could not

  speak. Since his resuscitation, there had been a rebirth of Lindsey's

  heart as well as his own, and they had confronted the mistake they had

  made by losing five years to grief. But on some fundamental level, they

  had not accepted that life could ever be as sweet as it had been before

  that one small death; they had not-let Jimmy go. Now, meeting Lindsey's

  eyes, he knew that she had actually embraced hope again without

  reservation. The full weight of his little boy's death fell upon Hatch

  as it had not in years, because if Lindsey could make peace with God, he

  must do so as well. He tried to again, could not, looked again at the

  painting, he was going to cry, and left the room.

  He didn't know where he was going. Without quite remembering taking any

  step along the route, he went downstairs, into the den that they had

  offered to Regina as a bedroom, opened the French doors, and stepped

  into the rose garden at the side of the house.

  In the warm, afternoon sun, the roses were red, white, yellow, pink, and

  the shade of peach skins, some only buds and some as big as saucers, but

  not one of them black. The air was full of their enchanting fragrance.

  With the taste of salt in the corners of his mouth, he reached out with

  both hands toward the nearest rose-laden bush, intending to touch the

  flowers, but his hands stopped short of them. With his arms thus

  forming a cradle, he suddenly could feel a weight draped across them.

  In reality, nothing was in his arms, but the burden he felt was no

  mystery; he remembered, as if it had been an hour ago, how the body of

  his cancer-wasted son had felt.

  In the final moments before death's hateful visitation, he had pulled

  the wires and tubes from Jim, had lifted him off the sweat-soaked

  hospital bed, and had sat in a chair by the window, holding him close

  and murmuring to him until the pale, parted lips drew no more breath.

  Until his own death, Hatch would remember precisely the weight of the

  wasted boy in his arms, the sharpness of bones with so little flesh left

  to pad them, the awful dry heat pouring off skin translucent with

  sickness, the heart-rendingfragility.

  He felt all that now, in his empty arms, there in the rose garden.

  When he looked up at the summer sky, he said, "Why?" as if there were

  Someone to answer. "He was so small," Hatch said. "He was so damned

  small."

  As he spoke, the burden was heavier than it had ever been in that

  hospital room, a thousand tons in his empty arms, maybe because he still

  didn't want to free himself of it as much as he thought he did.

  But then a strange thing happened-the weight in his arms slowly

  dmumshed, and the invisible body of his son seemed to float out of his

  embrace, as if the flesh had been transmuted entirely to spirit at long

  last, as if Jim had no need of comforting or consolation any more.

  Hatch lowered his arms.

  Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only

  the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not

  be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.

  He stood among the roses.

  The day was warm. The late-afternoon light was golden.

  The sky was perfectly clear-and utterly mysterious.

  Regina asked if she could have some of Lindsey's paintings in her room,

  and she sounded sincere. They chose three. Together they hammered in

  picture hooks and hung the paintings where she wanted them-along with a

  foot-tall crucifix she had brought from her room at the orphanage.

  As they worked, Lindsey said, "How about dinner at a really super pura

  parlor I know?"

  "Yeah!" the girl said enthusiastically. "I love pizza."

  "They make it with a nice thick crust, lots of cheese."

  "Pepperoni?"

  "Cut thin, but lots of it."

  "Sausage?"

  "Sure, why not. Though you're sure this isn't getting to be a pretty

  revolting pizza for a vegetarian like you?"

  Regina blushed. "Oh, that. I was such a little shit that day. Oh,

  jeeze sorry. I mean, such a ass. I mean, such a jerk."

  "That's okay," Lindsey said. "We all behave like jerks now and then."

  "You don't. Mr. Harrison doesn't."

  "Oh, just wait." Standing on a stepstool in front of the wall opposite

  the bed' Lindsey pounded in a nail for a picture hook. Regina was

  holding the painting for her. As she took it from the girl to hang it,

  Lindsey said, "Listen, will you do me a favor at dinner tonight?"

  "Favor? Sure?"

  "I know it's still awkward for you, this new arrangement. You don't

  really feel at home and probably won't for a long time-"

  "Oh, it's very nice here," the girl protested.

  Lindsey slipped the wire over the picture hook and adjusted the painting

  until it hung straight. Then she sat down on the stepstool, which just

  about brought her and the girl eye to eye. She took hold of both of

  Regina's hands, the normal one and the different one. "You're right

  it's very nice here. But you and I both know that's not the same as

  home. I wasn't going to push you on this. I was going to let you take

  your time, but.. . Even if it seems a liNe premature to you, do you

  think tonight at dinner you could stop calling us Mr. and Mrs.

  Harrison?

  asked Hatch. It would be very important to him, just now, if you could

  at least call him Hatch."

  The girl lowered her eyes to their interlocked hands. "Well, I guess

  ... sure... that would be okay."

  "And you know what? I realize this is asking more than it's fair to ask

  yet, before you really know him that well. But do you know what would

  be the best thing in the world for him right now?"

  The girl was still staring at their hands. "What?"

  "If somehow you could find it in your heart to call him Dad. Don't say

  yes or no just now. Think about it. But it would be a wonderful thing

  for you to do for him, for reasons I don't have time to explain right

  here. And I promise you this, Regina-he is a good man. He will do

  anything for you, put his life on the line for you if it ever came to

  that, and never ask for anything. He'd be upset if he knew I was even

  asking you for this. But all I'm asking, really, is for you to think

 
about it."

  After a long silence, the girl looked up from their linked hands and

  nodded. "Okay. I'll think about it."

  "Thank you, Regirta." She got up from the stepstool. "Now let's hang

  that last painting."

  Lindsey measured, penciled a spot on the wall, and nailed in a picture

  hook.

  When Regina handed over the painting, she said, "It's just that all my

  .... . there's never been anyone I called Mom or Dad. It's a very new

  thing."

  Lindsey smiled. "I understand, honey. I really do. And so will Hatch

  if it takes time."

  In the blazing Haunted House, as the cries for help and the screams of

  agony swelled louder, a strange object appeared in the firelight. A

  single rose. A black rose. It floated as if an unseen magician was

  levitating it.

  Vassago had never encountered anything more beautiful in the world of

  the living, in the world of the dead, or in the realm of dreams. It

  shimmered before him, its petals so smooth and soft that they seemed to

  have been cut from swatches of the night sky unspoiled by stars. The

  thorns were exquisitely sharp, needles of glass. The green stem had the

  oiled sheen of a serpent's skin. One petal held a single drop of blood.

  The rose faded from his dream, but later it returned-and with it the

  woman named Lindsey and the auburn-haired girl with the soft-gray eyes.

  Vassago yearned to possess all three: the black rose, the woman, and the