WAR, the headline at the newsstand cried.
He started to turn into a street by Tenn’s Hardware. She balked at what she saw there. He paused when he felt it, faced her with his back to the fires of that burning.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“Where do you want to go?”
She shrugged helplessly, indicated the main street, the other direction.
He talked to her then, as he might talk to a child, humoring her fear. It was pity. Some treated her that way. She recognized it, and took even that.
His name was Jim. He had come into the city yesterday, hitched rides. He was looking for work. He knew no one in the city. She listened to his rambling awkwardness, reading through it. When he was done, she stared at him still, and saw his face contract in dismay at her.
“I’m not crazy,” she told him, which was a lie that everyone in Sudbury would have known, only he would not, knowing no one. His face was true and solid, and the tiny scar by the mouth made it hard when he was thinking; at another time she would have been terrified of him. Now she was terrified of losing him amid the ghosts.
“It’s the war,” he said.
She nodded, trying to look at him and not at the fires. His fingers touched her arm, gently. “It’s the war,” he said again. “It’s all crazy. Everyone’s crazy.”
And then he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her back the other way, toward the park, where green leaves waved over black, skeletal limbs. They walked along the lake, and for the first time in a long time she drew breath and felt a whole, sane presence beside her.
They bought corn, and sat on the grass by the lake, and flung it to the spectral swans. Wraiths of passersby were few, only enough to keep a feeling of occupancy about the place old people, mostly, tottering about the deliberate tranquillity of their routine despite the headlines.
“Do you see them,” she ventured to ask him finally, “all thin and grey?”
He did not understand, did not take her literally, only shrugged. Warily, she abandoned that questioning at once. She rose to her feet and stared at the horizon, where the smoke bannered on the wind.
“Buy you supper?” he asked.
She turned prepared for this, and managed a shy, desperate smile. “Yes,” she said, knowing what else he reckoned to buy with that–willing, and hating herself, and desperately afraid that he would walk away, tonight, tomorrow. She did not know men. She had no idea what she could say or do to prevent his leaving, only that he would when someday he realized her madness.
Even her parents had not been able to bear with thatvisited her only at first in the hospitals, and then only on holidays, and then not at all. She did not know where they were.
There was a neighbor boy who drowned. She had said he would. She had cried for it. All the town said it was she who pushed him.
Crazy Alis.
Fantasizes, the doctors said. Not dangerous.
They let her out. There were special schools, state schools.
And from time to time–hospitals.
Tranquilizers.
She had left the red pills at home. The realization brought sweat to her palms. They gave sleep. They stopped the dreams. She clamped her lips against the panic and made up her mind that she would not need them–not while she was not alone. She slipped her hand into his arm and walked with him, secure and strange, up the steps from the park to the streets.
And stopped.
The fires were out.
Ghost-buildings rose above their jagged and windowless shells. Wraiths moved through masses of debris, almost obscured at times. He tugged her on, but her step faltered, made him look at her strangely and put his arm about her.
“You’re shivering,” he said. “Cold?”
She shook her head, tried to smile. The fires were out. She tried to take it for a good omen. The nightmare was over. She looked up into his solid, concerned face, and her smile almost became a wild laugh.