A spear of light grew from a corner of the box she was in and she realized that it wasn’t just a box, it was a coffin, and the people pulling the lid off the coffin weren’t just any townspeople—there was Billy Hoskins at the foot of the coffin, cackling and dancing around like a monkey. Tommy Masello who had died when his dad had mistaken him for a deer on a hunting trip three years back— Linda Marrow, who seemed more beautiful in death than she ever had in her short life of seven years, her wispy blond hair wreathed with withered roses—Deke Hunt, who’d been run over by the eleven o’clock train that took a piece of him (they said) all the way down to New Orleans; reaching his gangly arms into her coffin, grabbing her by the ankles and tugging—And above her, Grandpa and Grandma O’Keefe, their skin dried like leather against their bones and skull, Grandma with her scraggly white hair hanging down to her elbows—in her arms, her toy poodle, Buffy, its eye sockets empty, its fur gone, but its tiny mouth opening and closing in a dusty yap. Grandma said, “We’re so pleased you came to us, dear, we’ve had all these children to look after.”
The sky was red, and a wind picked up.
“I’m dead,” Becky said, remembering the bloody creature dropping onto her at Virgil Cobb’s office. She knew it had killed her, and she was buried, and now, what was she? “I’m a vampire?” she asked.
Grandma O’Keefe grinned, a pink worm spitting from her crusty jaw. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said, “I’d say you were just about ripe for picking, is what I’d say.”
“Indeed, yes,” Grandpa O’Keefe chortled.
Billy Hoskins leaned into the coffin, into her, right down her belly as if sniffing out her womb. Then, he attached his lips at her navel and started sucking. She could not move no matter how hard she tried.
Billy watched her face, but kept his lips to her navel He made gurgling sounds in the back of his throat. She felt nausea in her stomach, and then, something else, something worse than pain —a terrible, sweet feeling, as if she were about to enjoy what he was doing to her too much —excess blood spilling from between his puckered lips —and then, they all fell on her —
She heard Virgil Cobb say, “It’s all right, Becky, it’s gone.”
She felt as if she were being vacuumed out of her skin, and she realized she was still in the waiting room. She tried to open her eyes, but it was dark. She heard Virgil near her, felt his hands on her shoulders, but she remembered the shower of blood that had come from the ceiling only seconds earlier, and she began thrashing wildly.
“What the hell, Jesus!” Becky gasped, pushing away what felt like insects crawling across her skin. She couldn’t see; her eyelashes felt like they were glued together. She brushed frantically at her face. “Get it off me!”
Virgil Cobb was busy wiping a damp towel across her forehead, and around her neck. When he was done, she managed to open her eyes.
Becky looked at her hands. They were dry. There was no redness to her skin, no splotches of blood down her arms. She looked at Virgil. “It got on me. I saw it fall. I saw the blood come down.” She glanced up at the ceiling, but it was as if it had been wiped clean.
She convulsed into sobbing, and Virgil Cobb took her in his arms and held her. “What is it?” she whimpered, her face pressed into his neck. “Oh, God, Virgil, what is it? Am I crazy? I was dead—the children—my grandparents—God, oh, God help me.”
“No, no, dear,” he whispered, patting her back. “You’re sane. It’s gone now. It’s all gone.”
For just a moment it was like being a little girl in her father’s arms again. She felt safe and warm and dry.
3.
The phone rang. Becky and Virgil looked at it as if it were completely alien to their understanding. Then Virgil picked it up. “Hello?”
He glanced at Becky. “It’s Winston.” After a minute, he hung the phone up.
“Is he all right?”
Virgil looked as if he had been drained of vitality. “He says he’s with Eugene.”
A sharp pain cut into Becky’s head.
“Tad,” was all she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE HOMECOMING
1.
About the same time that Virgil Cobb was finishing up his story for Becky O’Keefe, with the corpse of a little girl in the next room, Joe Gardner pulled his Buick Skylark over to the side of the road. His mother, in the backseat, was clutching the area near her heart with her right hand. Her left hand was rigid. The car grazed the curb. The rain started coming down in sheets, and the wind was blowing hard. Joe felt a panic such as he hadn’t felt since the death of Melissa Welles, a choking sensation in his throat, palpitations of his heart. He managed to turn the ignition off before completely succumbing to the feeling of encroaching darkness in his brain, as if he were about to shut down.
Jenny was talking quickly: hospitals, doctors, heart attacks, strokes. He saw a look he remembered from the past across his wife’s face, a look he’d seen on someone else’s face once. It was a face with a shadow across it; his vision blurred.
Don’t shut down, Joe, don’t shut down, he told himself, It’s not that bad. He knew he was a coward most of the time, and it was nothing special to overcome as a writer sitting in a room typing away; but with his mother dying in the backseat . . .
He did it. He broke through the ice of his inertia and unbuckled his seat belt. He quickly wiped at the tears forming in his eyes. He opened his door and got out of the car. He went to his mother’s side of the car and opened the door. The rain was cold. He tasted it on his lips.
He was normal again. He was behaving normally, he knew. He slid beside his mother, who seemed small and frail, like a baby bird dropped too early from its nest.
“Mom,” he said, putting his arm around her. She felt like a silk handbag, full of bones. He was afraid he might crush her.
Weakly, she said, “It’s over, it’s over, I’ll be fine.” She rested in his arms. Joe sighed. His heart continued to beat rapidly. He tried to bring his breathing under control. For a second there, he thought she might go, and then what was he to do after all these years of hating her, love her for one day and then, nothing? He glanced at Jenny, who had tears in her eyes. Aaron, beside them, was silent, his eyes wide.
His mother, a bird in his arms, a thin small bird with no strength whatsoever in its frame. She smelled like lilacs. He saw a thin spot on the top of her head. Her skin was less wrinkled than it was like butterfly wings, so thin as to be translucent to the workings of the pink and blue veins beneath it.
“Mom, don’t you die on me,” he whispered to her, kissing the top of her head.
“I won’t,” she sighed. She seemed to fold herself into him, weary and in retreat.
“You’re the only mother I’ve got.”
“And you’re my only son.”
The rest of the world disappeared for a few moments: the car, the rain, even Aaron, Hillary, and Jenny. He held his mother as if she were a baby, and rocked her.
When she had recovered some strength, she told him the truth.
2.
“I have had heart problems for sixteen years,” she said, “At first, nothing much. My heart has never pumped all that well. I spend about three weeks a year at the hospital. I go to the pain clinic over the hills once a week. If there’s a minor problem, I just go to Dr. Cobb and he takes care of me. Well, after all, to go to Stone Valley, I have to take a cab, and it costs a small fortune, and takes forever—there’s only one driver in this whole damn town. I know it’s punishment for the first half of my life.”
“Shh, Mom, that’s not true.” Joe cradled her.
“It is true. I was awful to you and your father. I was an unfit mother. I don’t know why. I don’t know what possessed me in those times. Perhaps it was some undiagnosed illness. Who can say now?”
Jenny said, “We should drive over to the hospital.”
Anna Gardner shook her head. “It’s fine, now, really. I’ll go in tomorrow morning for my appointment, anyway. I hav
e some pills at home, I should’ve remembered to take them, but I was so excited from today . . .”
“You’re talking too much, you need to rest,” Joe said. “Let’s go back home. I’ll call the restaurant and get a message to Hopfrog. We’ll spend a nice night at home.”
He looked at Jenny. There was something in her eyes, more than tears, a glimmer of something so corny he could only call it the innocence of love, for he knew that she was looking upon him again as she had when they were first married.
He hadn’t expected that his wife would ever look upon him again with that innocence, not after what he’d done. He’d never thought they could recapture that.
Joe kept his arms around his mother.
Jenny slid over to the driver’s side, and drove them home through the rain.
The whole way back, Joe felt something break inside, something that he had repaired years ago, through anger and strength and stubbornness. But it broke again, just like it was china knocked off the shelf. It wasn’t anything like his heart; it was that part of him that believed in things, in happy endings, the part that wasn’t so cynical about the world. As he sat with his mother in the car, he didn’t think he would ever regain that part of himself again.
3.
Even back at his mother’s house, he thought about that: what he believed in. What could possibly be believed in this world. Joe sat on the stairs, just as he had when he’d been a boy, sneaking down to watch late night TV (which his mother would sit up and watch while she drank in the parlor). He sat with his hand cupping his chin. Hillary was tucked up against him, her legs dangling slightly over his knees. She was almost asleep, her small nostrils flaring slightly as she breathed, her eyes closed. He kissed her on the scalp a few times.
Jenny came out of the bathroom. “She’s taken her pills, Joe,” she said. “Anna seems fine. She needs to rest. It’ll be all right.”
Jenny stood on the landing. Aaron was out on the front porch, watching the storm. Joe felt the invisible tentacles of family emanate out from him and touch each one of them, to make sure they were okay. “Sometimes it seems like my only job in life.”
“Joe?”
“I was just thinking. About when I was a kid, and now. How I always wanted to make sure that nothing bad ever happened to anyone. I look at Hillary, and Aaron, and I think about all the bad stuff they’re going to have to face. And other kids, too. All sweet and pure and bright, and how they’re going to have to go through what happens to everyone, but shouldn’t. I wish I could be there to stop whatever bad’s going to happen.”
“Like Holden Caulfield?”
“Right: catch them as they go over the rye field. But he wanted to because he thought adults were phonies. I don’t think that. I think adults are just overgrown kids who maybe looked in the funhouse mirror and believed what they saw.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. She took two steps up the stairs, and sat down just beneath him.
“I guess in my heart of hearts I’ve always felt it was me who drove my mother away. I’ve always felt it was me ...” That was about as clearly as he could put it. He hugged Hillary tight and rocked her back and forth against him. She smelled like shampoo and rain. “I don’t want my kids to ever feel that. To ever feel like they did anything wrong.”
“Joe.” Jenny placed her hand on his knee. Her voice was low and soft and steady. “Maybe we should go home. Maybe this is too much right now.”
He shook his head slowly. “No. I want to be here now. This is my home.”
He began stammering on these last words. Finally, he said, “I don’t want her to die.”
He barely heard the phone ringing.
4.
Hopfrog Petersen and his son had been sitting at the corner booth downstairs at the Angel Wing for half an hour, when Tad got the brilliant idea. “Why don’t you call them? I’m starved.”
So Hop had wheeled on over to Lou’s phone—Lou sat it upright on the host podium for anyone to use— and dialed Joe’s mother’s house. In all those intervening years, he hadn’t forgotten the number, which was less a tribute to friendship than it was to Hopfrog’s unnerving memory for minute and less than important details. The phone picked up on the fifth ring.
A woman said, “Gardner residence. Hello?”
He hesitated. This didn’t sound like a little old lady, and it definitely wasn’t Joe Gardner. “You’re Jenny,” he said.
“Hello?”
“This is Homer—this is Hopfrog Petersen.”
“Oh.” Her voice had a strain of sadness running through it, “I’m so sorry we didn’t call first. Joe’s mother isn’t feeling well, and we had to come back home. Let me put Joe on.” Before he could get another word in, the voice changed.
It was Joe. “Hop?”
“Joey?”
“Hey, long time no see.”
“Well, you woulda seen me had you kept your appointment with destiny.” In a split second, the two of them had fallen back into the speech pattern and cadence of their adolescence. “So, how’s it hangin’?”
“Oh, Jenny told you. That was Jenny, my wife. Wait’ll you meet her.” This was said in gusts of breath, and then, the sadness. “Mom’s not doing too well tonight. We had to come back. She’s doing a little better now.”
Hopfrog said, “I have so much to talk about with you, Joe.”
“Me, too. I want you to meet my kids and Jenny. I guess this just isn’t the night for it.”
“How ‘bout if my boy and I swing by there?”
“Let me check,” Joe said, and then the phone went silent. Hopfrog figured he must be punching the mute button. When Joe came back on he sounded like an excited sixteen-year-old who got the car for the night: “Hey, Hop, Jenny said she’ll stay here with Mom and the kids. I feel sort of guilty leaving them ...” From the background, Hopfrog heard Joe’s wife say, “You’re not going to sit around here and mope all night,” and then Joe said, “I can meet you down there in about fifteen minutes.”
5.
It took less than ten minutes, actually, and Joe was sopping wet from the rain when he walked into the pub. The place was full and smoky; Joe had a bit of a problem with asthma, so he started coughing right off, and that’s what made Hopfrog look up to the door.
Joe stood there, his dark hair a little too long (although certainly very short by the standards of their boyhoods), his glasses round and schoolteacherish. In all that time, the guy had still not changed his style of dress: khakis, topsiders, white button-down shirt, and a blue windbreaker. It made Hopfrog laugh out loud to see him, and he practically did a wheelie as he cut a path to the door. The two men hugged, and Joe was the first to say, “I missed you, ratface.”
Tad came up and stood beside his father, looked up at Joe and said, “It’s about time. I’m starved.”
6.
Lou moved their table to the back room, where there was less smoke than up front, owing to the great open patio (Joe was still coughing, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been in the front room). The rainstorm raged outside, but it was not so cold as to be uncomfortable, and the three of them were the only ones in the small room.
“So tell me about my dad when he was a kid,” Tad said.
“I don’t know if he wants me to do that.” Joe winked. “Your father was a geek from the word go. He didn’t have a neck and he walked pigeon-toed.”
“Figures,” Tad said.
“Don’t do much walking anymore,” Hopfrog said, and then when he noticed that, Joe’s face got all sad when he made this reference to his legs, he laughed. “It’s a joke, Joe. I don’t miss my legs all that much. Do I, Tad?”
The boy shook his head as he took a bite out of an enormous hamburger.
“How’s the woodworking business?”
“Fair. We had a fire last year out on Connaught Road, and so I got a lot of work there redoing kitchen cabinets and some detail work on staircases. The factory hires me four months of the year to do detail work on the ro
ckers, too. Then I teach shop at the junior high a couple of days a week. I get by. How’s the book business?”
“Let me put it this way,” Joe said. “If I had it to do over again, I’d’ve studied accounting. Or plumbing. But it’s all I seem to be able to do.”
“Your Mom?”
“She took some pills and fell asleep. She claimed that she’d be fine if she got some rest. I feel a little guilty running out the door, but Jenny was okay with it.” Then, turning to Tad, “I wish I’d dragged Aaron down to meet you, Tad.”
Tad, finishing his hamburger quickly, looked at his father and then at Joe, as if scrutinizing them. He said, “Mom says that whenever you two get together, it’s all she can do to keep from jumping out a window.”
All three of them laughed. “Well, it’s true,” Joe said.
Tad shook his head. “I like it. Dad doesn’t have any friends, not really. Only me, and I don’t count ‘cause I’m blood. I’m really happy he has a best friend.”
Later, after a couple of beers and talk about family and work and places traveled, Hopfrog turned to Joe and said, “I have to ask this, even though I’m not sure I want to.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you come back because of what happened?”
Joe looked a little confused. “I came back because of my mother.”
Hopfrog wasn’t buying this. “No, you didn’t. You came back because what’s here -- monster, it, thing, demon -- wanted you to come back.”
“Hop? What are you talking about?”
Now Hopfrog felt a little angry. He said, “Don’t play games with me on this, Joe. Remember? That night? When you convinced me that we’d find it empty— remember?”
Joe said, “I don’t know what you’re ...” and then stopped himself. Joe glanced at Tad, who was watching him. “I don’t know if we should talk about this right now.”
“It’s okay, Joe. Tad saw her last night. I didn’t really believe him, not ‘til this morning when I found this.” Hopfrog reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a shred of silk fabric. He passed it to Joe.
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