I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, Mrs M. had told me. They think it’s cute. Max Devore must have thought so, too, because he had named a son Roger and his daughter Rogette.
Perhaps she’d come by the Whitmore part honestly — she might have been married in her younger years — but once the wig was gone, her antecedents were beyond argument. The woman tottering along the wet dock to finish the job was Kyra’s aunt.
Ki began to back up rapidly, making no effort to be careful and pick her footing. She was going into the drink; there was no way she could stay up. But before she could fall, a wave slapped the dock between them at a place where some of the barrels had come loose and the slatted walkway was already partly submerged. Foamy water flew up and began to twist into one of those helix shapes I had seen before. Rogette stopped ankle-deep in the water sloshing over the dock, and I stopped about twelve feet behind her.
The shape solidified, and even before I could make out the face I recognized the baggy shorts with their fading swirls of color and the smock top. Only Kmart sells smock tops of such perfect shapelessness; I think it may be a federal law.
It was Mattie. A grave gray Mattie, looking at Rogette with grave gray eyes. Rogette raised her hands, tottered, tried to turn. At that moment a wave surged under the dock, making it rise and then drop like an amusement-park ride. Rogette went over the side. Beyond her, beyond the water-shape in the rain, I could see Ki sprawling on the porch of The Sunset Bar. That last heave had flipped her to temporary safety like a human tiddlywink.
Mattie was looking at me, her lips moving, her eyes on mine. I had been able to tell what Jo was saying, but this time I had no idea. I tried with all my might, but I couldn’t make it out.
‘Mommy! Mommy!’
The figure didn’t so much turn as revolve; it didn’t actually seem to be there below the hem of the long shorts. It moved up the dock to the bar, where Ki was now standing with her arms held out.
Something grabbed at my foot.
I looked down and saw a drowning apparition in the surging water. Dark eyes stared up at me from beneath the bald skull. Rogette was coughing water from between lips that were as purple as plums. Her free hand waved weakly up at me. The fingers opened . . . and closed. Opened . . . and closed. I dropped to one knee and took it. It clamped over mine like a steel claw and she yanked, trying to pull me in with her. The purple lips peeled back from yellow toothpegs like those in Sara’s skull. And yes — I thought that this time Rogette was the one laughing.
I rocked on my haunches and yanked her up. I didn’t think about it; it was pure instinct. I had her by at least a hundred pounds, and three quarters of her came out of the lake like a gigantic, freakish trout. She screamed, darted her head forward, and buried her teeth in my wrist. The pain was immediate and enormous. I jerked my arm up even higher and then brought it down, not thinking about hurting her, wanting only to rid myself of that weasel’s mouth. Another wave hit the half-submerged dock as I did. Its rising, splintered edge impaled Rogette’s descending face. One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw the torn topography of her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a fluorescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud.
What I saw when I looked back toward The Sunset Bar was another glimpse under the skin of this world, but one far different from the face of Sara in the Green Lady or the snarling, half-glimpsed shape of the Outsider. Kyra stood on the wide wooden porch in front of the bar amid a litter of overturned wicker furniture. In front of her was a waterspout in which I could still see —
very faintly — the fading shape of a woman. She was on her knees, holding her arms out.
They tried to embrace. Ki’s arms went through Mattie and came out dripping. ‘Mommy, I can’t get you!’
The woman in the water was speaking — I could see her lips moving. Ki looked at her, rapt.
Then, for just a moment Mattie turned to me. Our eyes met, and hers were made of the lake. They were Dark Score, which was here long before I came and will remain long after I am gone. I put my hands to my mouth, kissed my palms, and held them out to her. Shimmery hands went up, as if to catch those kisses.
‘Mommy don’t go!’ Kyra screamed, and flung her arms around the figure. She was immediately drenched and backed away with her eyes squinched shut, coughing. There was no longer a woman with her; there was only water running across the boards and dripping through the cracks to rejoin the lake, which comes up from deep springs far below, from the fissures in the rock which underlies the TR and all this part of our world.
Moving carefully, doing my own balancing act, I made my way out along the wavering dock to The Sunset Bar. When I got there I took Kyra in my arms. She hugged me tight, shivering fiercely against me. I could hear the small dicecup rattle of her teeth and smell the lake in her hair.
‘Mattie came,’ she said.
‘I know. I saw her.’
‘Mattie made the white nana go away.’
‘I saw that, too. Be very still now, Ki. We’re going back to solid ground, but you can’t move around a lot. If you do, we’ll end up swimming.’
She was good as gold. When we were on The Street again and I tried to put her down, she clung to my neck fiercely. That was okay with me. I thought of taking her into Warrington’s, but didn’t.
There would be towels in there, probably dry clothes as well, but I had an idea there might also be a bathtub full of warm water waiting in there. Besides, the rain was slackening again and this time the sky looked lighter in the west.
‘What did Mattie tell you, hon?’ I asked as we walked north along The Street. Ki would let me put her down so we could crawl under the downed trees we came to, but raised her arms to be picked up again on the far side of each.
‘To be a good girl and not be sad. But I am sad. I’m very sad.’ She began to cry, and I stroked her wet hair.
By the time we got to the railroad-tie steps she had cried herself out . . . and over the mountains in the west, I could see one small but very brilliant wedge of blue.
‘All the woods fell down,’ Ki said, looking around. Her eyes were very wide.
‘Well . . . not all, but a lot of them, I guess.’
Halfway up the steps I paused, puffing and seriously winded. I didn’t ask Ki if I could put her down, though. I didn’t want to put her down. I just wanted to catch my breath.
‘Mike?’
‘What, doll?’
‘Mattie told me something else.’
‘What?’
‘Can I whisper?’
‘If you want to, sure.’
Ki leaned close, put her lips to my ear, and whispered.
I listened. When she was done I nodded, kissed her cheek, shifted her to the other hip, and carried her the rest of the way up to the house.
‘T’wasn’t the stawm of the century, chummy, and don’t you go thinkin that it was. Nossir.
So said the old-timers who sat in front of the big Army medics’ tent that served as the Lakeview General that late summer and fall. A huge elm had toppled across Route 68 and bashed the store in like a Saltines box. Adding injury to insult, the elm had carried a bunch of spitting live lines with it.
They ignited propane from a ruptured tank, and the whole thing went kaboom. The tent was a pretty good warm-weather substitute, though, and folks on the TR took to saying they was going down to the MASH for bread and beer — this because you could still see a faded red cross on both sides of the tent’s roof.
The old-timers sat along one canvas wall in folding chairs, waving to other old-timers when they went pooting by in their rusty old-timer cars (all certified old-timers own either Fords or Chevys, so I’m well on my way in that regard), swapping their undershirts for flannels as the days began to cool toward cider season and spud-digging, watching the township start to rebuild itself around them. And as they watched they talked about the ice storm of the past winter, the one that knocked out lights and splintered a million trees between Kittery and Fort Kent; they talked about the cyclones that touched down in August of 1985; they talked about the sleet hurricane of 1927. Now there was some stawms, they said. There was some stawms, by Gorry.