‘Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.’
There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter’s bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had
intended to buy. No more than she’d told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck.
What else hadn’t she told me?
‘Stop,’ I muttered. ‘For Christ’s sake stop thinking about it.’
But I couldn’t.
When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again.
Three letters had been clustered in the middle:
g d
o
I moved the o up to where I thought it belonged, making ‘god’ or maybe an abridged version of
‘good.’ Which meant exactly what? ‘I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,’ I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring.
When it didn’t, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth.
As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994. What meetings had Jo put on her calendar for that month?
What excuses to be out of Derry? And once I had finished with Ward, I could tackle Jo’s friend Bonnie Amudson, ask her if anything had been going on with Jo in the last summer of her life.
Let her rest in peace, why don’t you? It was the UFO voice. What good will it do you to do otherwise? Assume she popped over to the TR after one of her board meetings, maybe just on a whim, met an old friend, took him back to the house for a bite of dinner. Just dinner.
And never told me? I asked the UFO voice, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and then rinsing. Never said a single word?
How do you know she didn’t? the voice returned, and that froze me in the act of putting my toothbrush back in the medicine cabinet. The UFO voice had a point. I had been deep into All the Way from the Top by July of ’94. Jo could have come in and told me she’d seen Lon Chaney Junior dancing with the queen, doing the Werewolves of London, and I probably would have said ‘Uh-huh, honey, that’s nice’ as I went on proofing copy.
‘Bullshit,’ I said to my reflection. ‘That’s just bullshit.’
Except it wasn’t. When I was really driving on a book I more or less fell out of the world; other than a quick scan of the sports pages, I didn’t even read the newspaper. So yes — it was possible that Jo had told me she’d run over to the TR after a board meeting in Lewiston or Freeport, it was possible that she’d told me she’d run into an old friend — perhaps another student from the photography seminar she’d attended at Bates in 1991 — and it was possible she’d told me they’d had dinner together on our deck, eating black trumpet mushrooms she’d picked herself as the sun went down. It was possible she’d told me these things and I hadn’t registered a word of what she was saying.
And did I really think I’d get anything I could trust out of Bonnie Amudson? She’d been Jo’s friend, not mine, and Bonnie might feel the statute of limitations hadn’t run out on any secrets my wife had told her.
The bottom line was as simple as it was brutal: Jo was four years dead. Best to love her and let all troubling questions lapse. I took a final mouthful of water directly from the tap, swished it around in my mouth, and spat it out.
When I returned to the kitchen to set the coffee-maker for seven A.M., I saw a new message in a new circle of magnets. It read
blue rose liar ha ha
I looked at it for a second or two, wondering what had put it there, and why.
Wondering if it was true.
I stretched out a hand and scattered all the letters far and wide. Then I went to bed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was very ill. ‘I thought you were going to die,’ my father told me once, and he was not a man given to exaggeration. He told me about how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of cold water one night, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my heart, but both of them completely convinced that I’d burn up before their eyes if they didn’t do something. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive voice about the bright figures I saw in the room — angels come to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure — and the last time my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson & Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. After that, he said, he didn’t dare take it anymore.
I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once. The world grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People — most of them seeming impossibly talldarted in and out of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words all came out booming, with instant echoes. Someone shook a pair of baby-shoes in my face. I seem to remember my brother, Siddy, sticking his hand into his shirt and making repeated arm-fart noises. Continuity broke down. Everything came in segments, weird wieners on a poison string.
In the years between then and the summer I returned to Sara Laughs, I had the usual sicknesses, infections, and insults to the body, but never anything like that feverish interlude when I was eight.
I never expected to — believing, I suppose, that such experiences are unique to children, people with malaria, or maybe those suffering catastrophic mental breakdowns. But on the night of July seventh and the morning of July eighth, I lived through a period of time remarkably like that childhood delirium. Dreaming, waking, moving — they were all one. I’ll tell you as best I can, but nothing I say can convey the strangeness of that experience. It was as if I had found a secret passage hidden just beyond the wall of the world and went crawling along it.
First there was music. Not Dixieland, because there were no horns, but like Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or four acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a hard, happy drumming that didn’t sound as if it was coming from a real drum; it sounded as if someone with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a bunch of boxes. Then a woman’s voice joined in — a contralto voice, not quite mannish, roughing over the high notes. It was laughing and urgent and ominous all at the same time, and I knew at once that I was hearing Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking.
‘You know we’re going back to MANderley,
We’re gonna dance on the SANderley,
I’m gonna sing with the BANderley,
We gonna ball all we CANderley —
Ball me, baby, yeah!’
The basses — yes, there were two — broke out in a barnyard shuffle like the break in Elvis’s version of ‘Baby Let’s Play House,’ and then there was a guitar solo: Son Tidwell playing that chickenscratch thing.
Lights gleamed in the dark, and I thought of a song from the fifties — Claudine Clark singing
‘Party Lights.’ And here they were, Japanese lanterns hung from the trees above the path of railroad-tie steps leading from the house to the water. Party lights casting mystic circles of radiance in the dark: red blue and green.
Behind me, Sara was singing the bridge to her Manderley song — mama likes it nasty, mama likes it strong, mama likes to party all night long — but it was fading. Sara and the Red-Top Boys had set up their bandstand in the driveway by the sound, about where George Footman had parked when he came to serve me with Max Devore’s subpoena. I was descending toward the lake through circles of radiance, past party lights surrounded by soft-winged moths. One had found its way inside a lamp and it cast a monstrous, batlike shadow against the ribbed paper. The flower-boxes Jo had put beside the steps were full of night-blooming roses. In the light of the Japanese lanterns they looked blue.