First Thrills

by Lee Child

  Finally, in the heat of an argument, she had mentioned John’s fitful nights and he had turned on her like an animal, accused her of being cold, of not dealing with her emotions.

  There was a switch.

  John was always the rational one, Pam the emotional one. He had always used logic to defeat her and invariably won every argument because he didn’t let his feelings get the best of him. Even nine years ago, when Pam had found out that he was cheating on her with one of the front office secretaries from school, he had outlogicked her.

  “You’re not going to leave me, Pam,” he had told her, arrogance seeping from every pore. “You don’t have enough money to raise Zack on your own, and you won’t be able to teach at the same school as me because no one likes you there. They’ll all be on my side.”

  Sobering to hear from the man you love, not least of all since every word he said was true.

  Through almost twenty years of marriage, he had consistently been the more reasonable one, the one who said, “let’s just wait and see” when she was certain that a raspy cough from Zack’s room in the middle of the night was lung cancer or that the rolling papers that fell out of his notebook one day in the kitchen meant he was a meth freak.

  “Let’s wait and see,” John had said when she told him she thought Zack had taken some wine from the refrigerator.

  “Boys will be boys,” John had said when she found an empty bottle of vodka in the back of Zack’s closet. The cliché had made her want to scratch out his eyes, but she had listened to him, made herself calm down, because the irritated way John glanced at her, the quick shrug of his shoulders, made her feel like a hysterical mother instead of simply a concerned parent. At school, they both dealt with overreacting parents on a daily basis: mothers who screamed at the top of their lungs that grades must be changed or they would go to the school board; fathers who tried to bully teachers into not failing their sons by threatening to sue.

  The phone call had come at nine o’clock on a Friday evening—not one in the morning, not a panicked, wake-up-to-catastrophe time of night. Zack had left home earlier with Casey and some friends, and John and Pam were watching a movie. The Royal Tenenbaums. Pam was making herself watch the entire movie—not because she enjoyed it that much but because she knew Zack did, and she wanted to talk to him about it in the morning. He was at that point in his teenage life where any sort of discussion with his mother was pained, and she sought out things—literally, things: movies, football games, funny articles in the paper—that they could comfortably talk about.

  “I’ll get it.” John jumped for the phone—he always liked to answer it—as Pam fumbled with the remote control to mute the television.

  “Yes, it is,” John had said, his tone of voice low, slightly annoyed. A telemarketer, she thought, then John’s face had turned white. What a silly phrase, Pam had thought, as she sat on the couch, her feet tucked underneath her, to say that someone’s face turned white—but it had. She sat there watching it happen, a line of color draining down his neck like a sink being suddenly unplugged until all the red was gone from John’s usually ruddy skin.

  Then, he had whispered, “Yes, we have a son.”

  “We have a son.” The first words John had said to her when she had come out of recovery. The birth had been difficult, and after sixteen hours of labor, the doctor had decided to do a caesarian. Pam’s last memory had been the sweet relief of the pain being taken away by the drugs (she would have freebased heroin by then), and John’s crouching trot beside the gurney as they rolled her into the OR, tears in his eyes as he whispered, “I love you.”

  He whispered again into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”

  Only he wasn’t right there. It was the ghost of John who had sat in the passenger seat of the car as she drove to the county hospital. It was his ghost who had floated through the front doors and waited for the elevator to come. Pam had taken his hand, shocked at how cold it was, the skin clammy, his calloused fingers like ice.

  Zack, she thought. This is how Zack’s hand will feel.

  John had stood frozen outside the morgue. “I can’t do it,” he had told her. “I can’t see him like that.”

  Pam had, though. She had looked at her son, stroked back his thick, black hair and kissed his forehead even though it was caked with dried blood. His eyes were slit open, his lips slightly parted. A long gash had flayed open the line of his jaw. She took his hand and kissed his face, his beautiful face, then signed the papers and took John home.

  Pam’s second trip to California had been very different from the first one. First-class was a whole new world to her, from the hot towel to wipe her face to the warmed nuts to the endless supply of alcoholic beverages. A well-dressed man stood in baggage claim, her name on the placard he held in front of him. The black Lincoln Town Car was spotless, a bottle of cold water waiting for her as she climbed into the back seat.

  This was John’s personal driver, she gathered. Bestselling millionaire authors didn’t have to drive themselves around, especially when they lived in the Hollywood Hills. Pam took no delight in the palm-tree- lined streets, her first glimpse of the famous Hollywood sign. She felt like a whore for taking John’s money. At the dissolution of their marriage, she had insisted they split everything down the middle: selling the house, the cars, their meager stocks so that it could all be done in cash. Money had been the noose he kept around her neck for years. They couldn’t go on vacation or buy a new car or splurge on a dinner out because of money. To say John had kept a tight grip on the purse strings was an understatement. Everything was on a budget and even Pam was kept on an allowance. She seethed with hatred every time she thought about their life before, the way she had allowed him to control everything. How easy it must have been for him, how boring in its own way, to have so much power over her.

  When John had gotten his first royalty check from Biological Healing, he had offered her a share of the money, but Pam had told him where he could deposit it. She had read the book at least three times by then, had gone to school where her students had read about the “pedestrian” sex life she had shared with her husband. Her colleagues had read about how she had simply walked away when John had accused her of not loving their son. Her drycleaner knew that she had once told John that she was disgusted by the thought of being with him.

  “Take the money.” John had reasoned, “I know you need it.”

  “You bastard,” she had hissed. Her teeth were clenched, and she wished they were biting into his jugular, twisting it out of his neck like a root from the ground. She cursed him, something she never did, because she thought cursing was base and showed a lack of intelligence. “Fuck you and fuck your money.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Pam.” His tone was reasonable, the same tone he had used when she questioned him about where he had been until one in the morning, why there was a key in his pocket that didn’t fit any of their locks. The tone that said, “Why are you being so silly? Why are you letting your anger ruin your life?”

  She could even picture that smirk, that knowing smirk that said he knew that he had won. Money was his way back into her life, his way to control her again, to make her want nice things only so he could snatch them away at will.

  As if she were a prostitute, he had offered: “I can send it to you in cash, if you prefer.”

  Pam had slammed down the phone before he could say anything else.

  Mostly, she got news of her ex-husband from magazines, television shows, and helpful friends. “Did you see John met the Dali Lama? Did you see John spent the weekend with the president?”

  “Did you see that I don’t give a shit?” Pam had said to one of them, but this had been a mistake, because God forbid she should be bitter about the man who was helping heal the country. Funny how he never mentioned his affair, or how he had told her when she was pregnant with Zack that she was too fat to be attractive. Why were these amusing little anecdotes missing from his precious little book? And why was it t
hat the world didn’t notice that disgusting smirk on his face every time he talked about the nature of healing your soul?

  Pam’s mouth had gaped open when the Town Car pulled past the open gate and into John’s driveway. She had never seen a private home this large before. The school where she taught was not as big as this building. The same man who had ten years ago insisted they keep the heat off during a snowstorm could not own this stunning mansion.

  “Pam!” Cindy, the gorgeous, young Pilates instructor/whore, had said. She looked Pam right in the eye, but Pam knew that as she’d walked down the front steps toward the car the woman had taken in her wide hips, the wrinkles at her eyes, and the inappropriate braid.

  “He’s been waiting for you,” Cindy told her. She had a bag of ice in her hand, the sort of thing you’d have if you sprained an ankle.

  There was a man in a dark suit leaning against a white van that was parked in the shade of one of the many trees. NuLife was written across the door, the print small and unassuming. Pam imagined they didn’t advertise much considering the morbid nature of their jobs. She had looked up the lab—if you could call it that—online when John had told her about it. Their secret facility in Arizona held dozens of heads and bodies in stasis, all awaiting reanimation. Fees were listed on the site as well. A neuroseperation (or decapitation, as it was known to the rest of the world) ran around two hundred thousand dollars. The whole body cost over half a million. For an additional fee, you could even store personal objects with the body so that when they were reanimated, they had some of their favorite things to remind them of their “first life.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Pam snapped, and Cindy seemed surprised. Yes, Cindy was young enough to be John’s daughter, but she’d certainly read Biological Healing. Surely, she’d paid close attention to the chapter that talked about Pam’s coldness after Zack’s death, the way she had turned away from John, blocked him out and denied him the one thing that would bring them back together.

  Sex played a large part in Biological Healing—not just sex, but lots of it. Sure, Pam and John had gone at it like bunnies until Zack was born, but then, as with most couples, their lives had changed when they had a child. Who knew that John was so interested in screwing? Certainly not his ex- wife. Apparently, it was the elixir of life, the succor through which both John and Pam would have reclaimed their marriage, if only she hadn’t been such a frigid, uncaring bitch. The fact that John hadn’t been able to perform the one time after Zack’s death that they had tried to have sex, had also somehow been left out of the book.

  “You’ve killed me,” he had said after that failed attempt, rolling onto his back, more bereft about his flaccidity than he had ever seemed about Zack. “You have finally killed me.”

  If only she had.

  Cindy led her into the house, which had the largest set of oak doors Pam had seen outside of a castle. The foyer was huge, their footsteps echoing up to an enormous chandelier as they walked into what must have been the living room.

  “They’re from NuLife,” Cindy said, indicating a man and a woman sitting on a couch beside the fireplace. They had coolers stacked around them, the kind you would find at a family picnic, and they were each scooping ice into baggies similar to the one Cindy held in her hand.

  Cindy said, “They’re just waiting.”

  “Waiting for—” Pam started, but Cindy interrupted her.

  “He’s in his study,” she said, leading the way down a long, art-lined hallway. The Pilates instructor’s shoes were strappy little things, the kind that Pam had never been able to wear because they made her back hurt. The flip-flip of the sandals echoed in the hall as they made their way to the back of the house. Outside, there was a courtyard with a fountain. The windows and doors were open so that the splattering of the water mixed with the flopping of the shoes, some kind of mad cacophony that served nothing but to annoy.

  John’s study was slightly different from the converted garage space they had made for him back in Decatur. No flimsy pine paneling buckled off the walls, and the antique leather-lined desk was a far cry from the two saw horses and the piece of plywood that had held his computer for all those years.

  He was lying on a hospital bed in the back of the room, facing the large windows that overlooked the fountain in the courtyard. The glass doors were open here, too, and the water was more soothing, now that Cindy had stopped flipping her idiotic shoes. A ray of light beamed down from the heavens, showering the bed in warmth. Pam would not have been surprised if he had hired a chorus of angels to sing beside him, but no, there was just the usual apparatus of lingering death: an oxygen tank, a heart monitor, and the requisite plastic pitcher on the table beside his bed.

  “Honey?” Cindy asked, her shrill voice cutting into the soft hiss of the oxygen tank. “Pam is here.”

  A frail voice echoed, “Pam?”

  “I’ve got to go fill up more bags,” Cindy said, then left, more like an overworked nurse announcing a visitor than a lover. The girl couldn’t be older than nineteen, Pam thought. The fact that John was dying must be something she took as a personal affront rather than a fact of life.

  And dying he was. As Pam walked toward the bed, she could smell death, the same odor that had clung to her mother as she rotted away from breast cancer several years ago. John’s skin was yellow and his beard was completely white. He had always had a full head of hair, but most of it was gone now. Some of it had obviously been shaved by a doctor—she could see the healing scar where a surgeon had cut into his head—some probably chased away by what ever medications they were giving him to keep him alive for a few more days.

  As if he could read her mind, he moved away the oxygen mask and said, “It won’t be long.”

  She was facing him now, seeing an older version of John, the face of his father, his grandfather. Would Zack have looked like this if he had managed to survive that accident? Would her son have aged this badly if the first, second, third, millionth time Pam had told John that she thought Zack had a drinking problem, instead of saying, “He’s just a boy,” he had said, “Yes, you’re right. Let’s do something to help him.”

  Would Zack be alive if for just once in her life Pam had stood up to her husband and said, “No”?

  There was a large cooler beside John’s bed, and she could not help but shudder at the sight of it. Were they going to chop him up and throw him in the van?

  “Open it,” he told her, and despite her better judgment, she did. What had she been expecting to find? A head-sized thermos? A steaming vat of liquid nitrogen? Certainly not the little baggies of ice she found.

  “To preserve me while they . . .” his finger made a dragging motion across his neck.

  “What?” But Pam understood. She could see where his finger had traced across his throat, a cut that would be real soon enough.

  “Of course . . . the procedure is . . . illegal,” he managed, his breath raspy so that he had to put the mask back over his face.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded. When he did not answer, she found herself staring at the bags of cubed ice as if they were tea leaves and she a wise old gypsy.

  “In California,” he finally gasped. “It’s illegal to cut off . . .” He took another breath of oxygen. “The law considers it mutilating . . . a dead body.”

  “Well, it is mutilation,” she said, letting the cooler lid slam back into place. Of course it was illegal to cut the head off a dead body—even in this Godforsaken loony bin of a state. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He laughed, the old John bringing a sparkle into his eyes.

  “You’re absolutely insane,” she told him, but she laughed, too. My God, over twenty years with this man. A house, a home, a son, a life. Twenty years of her existence meshed in with his like the weave of a blanket.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, reaching out for her hand. Before she could stop herself, she took his hand, felt the coldness of his skin. Had it been like this since Zack’s death?
The truth was that the reason she couldn’t make love to John was because his touch sent a deathly chill through her. Had John been a ghost all this time? Had he cried so many tears, wept for so many nights, that the life had seeped out of him?

  He was wearing silk pajamas, a dark burgundy that only brought out the sallowness of his skin. There was a blanket folded at the end of the bed, his feet resting on top of it.

  He said, “Gross,” and she took a minute to realize he meant his toenails. They were long and yellow, disgusting to look at. “John Hughes.”

  “Howard Hughes,” she corrected before she could stop herself.

  There was a flash in his eyes, but he didn’t pursue it. The John she knew would have never let her get away with correcting him. For the first time since she had heard from him, Pam realized that he really was dying, that this was it. No matter what she did with her life, where she went, she would do so with the knowledge that John no longer walked the face of the earth.

  Granted, he would be in stasis in a vat of liquid nitrogen somewhere, but still.

  “Remember,” he began. “With Zack . . . you bit . . . his toenails.”

  She felt herself smile at the memory. Once, very early on, she had accidentally trimmed one of Zack’s nails to the quick. Her heart had broken at the sight of blood, and Zack’s screaming still reverberated in her ears if she thought about it long enough. After that, she had used her teeth to clip his nails, terrified she would hurt him with the sharp metal clippers. Standing beside John’s deathbed, she could almost feel Zack’s thin nails between her teeth, taste the sour, baby-soft skin of his feet.

  “I . . .” John moved the mask back over his mouth and nose, and she could see his chest rising and falling. “I need to . . .”

  She shushed him. “It’s okay.”

  “I want to . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, thinking that if he apologized now, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself.

  He took a few deep breaths, his eyes slitting almost closed. Suddenly, he opened them wide as if he remembered that he could die if he closed them too long. “I . . . I left you something.”