by Dean Koontz
now, unable to perform the one miracle she needed. “Barty’s birthday is in eight days. I was hoping…”
Dr. Chan’s manner remained professional, providing the strength that Agnes required, but his pain was evident when his gentle voice softened further: “These tumors are so advanced, we won’t know until surgery if the malignancy has spread. We may already be too late. And if we aren’t too late, we’ll have only a small window of opportunity. A small window. Eight days would entail too much risk.”
She nodded. And could not lift her gaze from her hands. Could not meet his eyes, afraid that his worry would feed her own, afraid also that the sight of his sympathy would shake loose her perilous grip on her emotions.
After a while, Franklin Chan asked, “Do you want me with you when you tell him?”
“I think…just me and him.”
“Here in my office?”
“All right.”
“Would you like time by yourself before I bring him to you?”
She nodded.
He rose, opened the door. “Mrs. Lampion…?”
“Yes?” she replied without looking up.
“He’s a wonderful boy, so very bright, so very full of life. Blindness will be hard, but it won’t be the end. He’ll cope without the light. It’ll be so difficult at first, but this boy…eventually he’ll thrive.”
She bit her lower lip, held her breath, repressed the sob that sought release, and said, “I know.”
Dr. Chan closed the door as he left.
Agnes leaned forward in her chair: knees together, clasped hands resting on her knees, forehead against her hands.
She thought that she already knew all about humility, about the necessity of it, about the power of it to bring peace of mind and to heal the heart, but in the following few minutes, she learned more about humility than she had ever known before.
The shakes returned, became more violent than previously—and then once more passed.
For a while, she couldn’t get enough air. Felt suffocated. She drew great, raw, shuddering breaths, and thought that she would never be able to quiet herself. But quiet came.
Worried that tears would frighten Barty, that indulging in a few would result in a ruinous flood, Agnes held back the salt tides. A mother’s duty proved to be the stuff from which dams were built.
She got up from the chair, went to the window, and raised the venetian blind rather than look out between its slats.
The night, the stars.
The universe was vast and Barty small, yet the boy’s immortal soul made him as important as galaxies, as important as anything in Creation. This Agnes believed. She couldn’t tolerate life without the conviction that it had meaning and design, though sometimes she felt that she was a sparrow whose fall had gone unnoticed.
Barty sat on the edge of the doctor’s desk, legs dangling, holding Red Planet, his place marked by an inserted finger.
Agnes had lifted him to this perch. Now she smoothed his hair, straightened his shirt, and retied his loosened shoelaces, finding it even harder than she had expected to say what needed to be said. She thought she might require Dr. Chan’s presence, after all.
Then suddenly she found the right words. More accurately, they seemed to come through her, for she was not conscious of formulating the sentences. The substance of what she said and the tone in which she said it were so perfect that it almost seemed as though an angel had relieved her of this burden by possessing her long enough to help her son understand what must happen and why.
Barty’s math and reading skills exceeded those of most eighteen-year-olds, but regardless of his brilliance, he was a few days shy of his third birthday. Prodigies were not necessarily as emotionally mature as they were intellectually developed, but Barty listened with sober attention, asked questions, and then sat in silence, staring at the book in his hands, with neither tears nor apparent fear.
At last he said, “Do you think the doctors know best?”
“Yes, honey. I do.”
“Okay.”
He put the book aside on the desk and reached for her.
Agnes drew him into her arms and lifted him off the desk and embraced him tightly, with his head on her shoulder and his face nestled against her neck, as she’d held him when he was a baby.
“Can we wait till Monday?” he asked.
Some information she’d withheld from him: that the cancer might already have spread, that he might still die even after his eyes were removed—and that if it hadn’t yet spread, it might soon do so.
“Why Monday?” she asked.
“I can read now. The twisties are gone.”
“They’ll be back.”
“But over the weekend, maybe I could read a few last books.”
“Heinlein, huh?”
He knew the titles that he wanted: “Tunnel in the Sky, Between Planets, Starman Jones.”
Carrying him to the window, gazing up at the stars, the moon, she said, “I’ll always read to you, Barty.”
“That’s different though.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
Heinlein dreamed of traveling to far worlds. Prior to his death, John Kennedy had promised that men would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. Barty wanted nothing so grand, only to read a few stories, to lose himself in the wonderful private pleasure of books, because soon each story would be a listening experience only, no longer entirely a private journey.
His breath was warm against her throat: “And I want to go back home to see some faces.”
“Faces?”
“Uncle Edom. Uncle Jacob. Aunt Maria. So I can remember faces after…you know.”
The sky was so deep and cold.
The moon shimmered, and the stars blurred—but only briefly, for her devotion to this boy was a fiery furnace that tempered the steel of her spine and brought a drying heat to her eyes.
Without Franklin Chan’s full approval but with his complete understanding, Agnes took Barty home. On Monday, they would return to Hoag Hospital, where Barty would receive surgery on Tuesday.
The Bright Beach Library was open until nine on Friday evening. Arriving an hour before closing, they returned the Heinlein novels that Barty had already read and checked out the three that he wanted. In a spirit of optimism, they borrowed a fourth, Podkayne of Mars.
In the car again, a block from home, Barty said, “Maybe you could just not tell Uncle Edom and Uncle Jacob until Sunday night. They won’t handle it real well. You know?”
She nodded. “I know.”
“If you tell them now, we won’t have a happy weekend.”
Happy weekend. His attitude amazed her, and his strength in the face of darkness gave her courage.
At home, Agnes had no appetite, but she fixed Barty a cheese sandwich, spooned potato salad into a dish, added a bag of corn chips and a Coke, and served this late dinner on a tray, in his room, where he was already in bed and reading Tunnel in the Sky.
Edom and Jacob came to the house, asking what Dr. Chan had said, and Agnes lied to them. “There are some test results we won’t have until Monday, but he thinks Barty is going to be all right.”
If either of them suspected that she was lying, it was Edom. He looked puzzled, but he didn’t pursue the issue.
She asked Edom to stay in the main house, so Barty wouldn’t be alone while she visited Maria Gonzalez for an hour or two. He was pleased to oblige, settling down to watch a television documentary about volcanoes, which promised to include stories about the 1902 eruption of Mont Pelee, on Martinique, which killed 28,000 people within minutes, and other disasters of colossal proportions.
She knew Maria was home, waiting for a call about Barty.
The apartment above Elena’s Fashions could be reached by a set of exterior stairs at the back of the building. The climb had never before taxed Agnes in the least, but now it took away her breath and left her legs trembling by the time she reached the top landing.
Maria looked stricken when she
answered the doorbell, for she intuited that a visit, instead of a call, meant the worst.
In Maria’s kitchen, still just four days past Christmas, Agnes let dissolve her stoic mask, and wept at last.
Later, at home, after Agnes sent Edom back to his apartment, she opened a bottle of vodka that she had bought on the way back from Maria’s. She mixed it with orange juice in a waterglass.
She sat at the kitchen table, staring at the glass. After a while she emptied it in the sink without having taken a sip.
She poured cold milk and drank it quickly. As she was rinsing the empty glass, she felt as if she might throw up, but she didn’t.
For a long time, she sat alone in the dark living room, in the armchair that had been Joey’s favorite, thinking about many things but returning often to the memory of Barty’s dry walk in wet weather.
When she went upstairs at 2:10 in the morning, she found the boy fast asleep in the soft lamplight, Tunnel in the Sky at his side.
She curled up in the armchair, watching Barty. She was greedy for the sight of him. She thought she would not doze off, but would spend the night watching over him, yet exhaustion defeated her.
Shortly after six o’clock, Saturday morning, she stirred from a fretful dream and saw Barty sitting up in bed, reading.
During the night, he had awakened, seen her in the chair, and covered her with a blanket.
Smiling, pulling the blanket more tightly around herself, she said, “You look after your old mom, don’t you?”
“You make good pies.”
Caught unaware by the joke, she laughed. “Well, I’m glad to know I’m good for something. Is there maybe a special pie you’d like me to make today?”
“Peanut-butter chiffon. Coconut cream. And chocolate cream.”
“Three pies, huh? You’ll be a fat little piggy.”
“I’ll share,” he assured her.
Thus began the first day of the last weekend of their old lives.
Maria visited on Saturday, sitting in the kitchen, embroidering the collar and cuffs of a blouse, while Agnes baked pies.
Barty sat at the kitchen table, reading Between Planets. From time to time, Agnes discovered him watching her at work or studying Maria’s face and her dexterous hands.
At sunset, the boy stood in the backyard, gazing up through the branches of the giant oak as an orange sky darkened to coral, to red, to purple, to indigo.
At dawn, he and his mother went down to the sea, to watch the rolling waves filigreed with foam and gilded with the molten gold of morning sun, to see the kiting gulls and to scatter bread that brought the winged multitudes to earth.
On Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Edom and Jacob came for dinner. Following dessert, when Barty went to his room to continue reading Starman Jones, which he had begun late that afternoon, Agnes told her brothers the truth about their nephew’s eyes.
Their struggle to put their sorrow into words moved Agnes not because they cared so deeply, but because in the end they were unable to express themselves adequately. Without the relief provided by expression, their anguish grew corrosive. Their lifelong introversion left them without the social skills to unburden themselves or to provide solace to others. Worse, their obsessions with death, in all its many means and mechanisms, had prepared them to expect Barty’s cancer, which left them neither shocked nor capable of consolation, but merely resigned. Ultimately, in great frustration, each twin was reduced to fragmented sentences, crippled gestures, quiet tears—and Agnes became the only consoler.
They wanted to go up to Barty’s room, but she refused them, because there was nothing more they could do for the boy than they had done for her. “He wants to finish reading Starman Jones, and I’m not letting anything interfere with that. We’re leaving for Newport Beach at seven in the morning, and you can see him then.”
Shortly past nine o’clock, an hour after Edom and Jacob had gone, Barty came downstairs, book in hand. “The twisties are back.”
For each of them, Agnes put one scoop of vanilla ice cream in a tall glass of root beer, and after changing quickly into their pajamas, they sat together in Barty’s bed, enjoying their treats, while she read aloud the last sixty pages of Starman Jones.
No weekend had ever passed so quickly, and no midnight had ever brought with it such dread.
Barty slept in his mother’s bed that night.
Shortly after Agnes turned out the light, she said, “Kiddo, it’s been one whole week since you walked where the rain wasn’t, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that.”
“It’s not scary,” he assured her again.
“Well, it still is to me. But what I’ve been wondering…when you talk about all the ways things are…is there someplace where you don’t have this problem with your eyes?”
“Sure. That’s how it works with everything. Everything that can happen does happen, and each different way of happening makes a whole new place.”
“I didn’t follow that at all.”
He sighed. “I know.”
“Do you see these other places?”
“Just feel ’em.”
“Even when you walk in them?”
“I don’t really walk in them. I sort of just walk…in the idea of them.”
“I don’t suppose you could make that any clearer for your old mom, huh?”
“Maybe someday. Not now.”
“So…how far away are these places?”
“All here together now.”
“Other Bartys and other Agneses in other houses like this—all here together now.”
“Yeah.”
“And in some of them, your dad’s alive.”
“Yeah.”
“And in some of them, maybe I died the night you were born, and you live alone with your dad.”
“Some places, it has to be like that.”
“And some places it has to be that your eyes are okay?”
“There’s lots of places where I don’t have bad eyes at all. And then lots of places where I have it worse or don’t have it as bad, but still have it some.”
Agnes remained mystified by this talk, but a week before, in the rain-swept cemetery, she had learned there was substance to it.
She said, “Honey, what I’m wondering is…could you walk where you don’t have bad eyes, like you walked where the rain wasn’t…and leave the tumors in that other place? Could you walk where you have good eyes and come back with them?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
He considered the issue for a while. “I don’t know.”
“Will you think about it for me?”
“Sure. It’s a good question.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you, too.”
“Have you said your silent prayers?”
“I’ll say them now.”
Agnes said hers, too.
She lay beside her boy in the darkness, gazing at the covered window, where the faint glow of the moon pressed through the blind, suggesting another world thriving with strange life just beyond a thin membrane of light.
Murmuring on the edge of sleep, Barty spoke to his father in all the places where Joey still lived: “Good-night, Daddy.”
Agnes’s faith told her that the world was infinitely complex and full of mystery, and in a peculiar way, Barty’s talk of infinite possibilities supported her belief and gave her the comfort to sleep.
Monday morning, New Year’s Day, Agnes carried two suitcases out of the back door, set them on the porch, and blinked in surprise at the sight of Edom’s yellow-and-white Ford Country Squire parked in the driveway, in front of the garage. He and Jacob were loading their suitcases into the car.
They came to her, picked up the luggage that she had put down, and Edom said, “I’ll drive.”
“I’ll sit up front with Edom,” Jacob said. “You can ride in back with Barty.”
In all their years, neither twin had ever set fo
ot beyond the limits of Bright Beach. They both appeared nervous but determined.
Barty came out of the house with the library copy of Podkayne of Mars, which his mother had promised to read to him later, in the hospital. “Are we all going?” he asked.
“Looks that way,” said Agnes.
“Wow.”
“Exactly.”
In spite of major earthquakes pending, explosions of dynamite-hauling trucks on the highway, tornadoes somewhere churning, the grim likelihood of a great dam bursting along the route, freak ice storms stored up in the unpredictable heavens, crashing planes and runaway trains converging on the coastal highway, and the possibility of a sudden violent shift in the earth’s axis that would wipe out human civilization, they risked crossing the boundaries of Bright Beach and traveled north into the great unknown of territories strange and perilous.
As they rolled along the coast, Agnes began to read to Barty from Podkayne of Mars: “‘All my life I’ve wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.’”
In the front seat, Edom and Jacob murmured agreement with the narrator’s sentiments.
Monday night, Edom and Jacob booked adjoining units in a motel near the hospital. They called Barty’s room to give Agnes the phone number and to report that they had inspected eighteen establishments before finding one that seemed comparatively safe.
In regard for Barty’s tender age, Dr. Franklin Chan had arranged for Agnes to spend the night in her son’s room, in the second bed, which currently wasn’t needed for a patient.
For the first time in many months, Barty didn’t want to sleep in the dark. They left the door of the room open, admitting some of the fluorescent glow from the hallway.