Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep. He had lost all interest in his father-in-law, in the MX
missile, in permanent versus dissolving sutures, in the heat death of the universe. At that moment, Louis Creed wished he were dead.
And suddenly, weirdly, an image rose in his mind: Gage in Mickey Mouse ears, Gage laughing and shaking hands with a great big Goofy on Main Street, in Disney World. He saw this with utter clarity.
One of the trestle supports had fallen over; the other leaned with drunken casualness against the low dais where a minister might stand to offer a eulogy. Sprawled in the flowers was Goldman, also weeping. Water from the overturned vases trickled.
The flowers, some of them crushed and mangled, gave off their turgid scent even more strongly.
Rachel was screaming and screaming.
Louis could not respond to her screams. The image of Gage in Mickey Mouse ears was fading, but not before he heard a voice announcing there would be fireworks later that evening. He sat with his face in his hands, not wanting them to see him anymore, his tear-stained face, his loss, his guilt, his pain, his shame, most of all his cowardly wish to be dead and out of this blackness.
The funeral director and Dory Goldman led Rachel out. She was still screaming. Later on, in another room (one that Louis assumed was reserved especially for those overcome with grief— the Hysterics’ Parlor, perhaps) she became very silent. Louis himself, dazed but sane and in control, sedated her this time, after insisting that the two of them be left alone.
At home he led her up to bed and gave her another shot. Then he pulled the covers up to her chin and regarded her waxy, pallid face.
“Rachel, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d give anything in the world to take that back.”
“It’s all right,” she said in a strange, flat voice and then rolled over on her side, turning away from him.
He heard the tired old question Are you all right? rising to his lips and pushed it back. It wasn’t a true question; it wasn’t what he really wanted to know.
“How bad are you?” he asked finally.
“Pretty bad, Louis,” she said and then uttered a sound that could have been a laugh. “I am terrible, in fact.”
Something more seemed required, but Louis could not supply it.
He felt suddenly resentful of her, of Steve Masterton, of Missy Dandridge and her husband with his arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple, of the whole damned crew. Why should he have to be the eternal supplier? What sort of shit was that?
He turned off the light and left. He found that he could not give much more to his daughter.
For one wild moment, regarding her in her shadowy room, he thought she was Gage—the thought came to him that the whole thing had been a hideous nightmare, like his dream of Pascow leading him into the woods, and for a moment his tired mind grasped at it. The shadows helped—there was only the shifting light of the portable TV that Jud had taken up for her to pass the hours. The long, long hours.
But it wasn’t Gage, of course; it was Ellie, who was now not only grasping the picture in which she was pulling Gage on the sled, but sitting in Cage’s chair. She had taken it out of his room and brought it into hers. It was a small director’s chair with a canvas seat and a canvas strip across the back. Stenciled across that strip was GAGE. Rachel had mail-ordered four of these chairs. Each member of the family had one with his or her name stenciled on the back.
Ellie was too big for Gage’s chair. She was crammed into it, and the canvas bottom bulged downward dangerously. She held the Polaroid picture to her chest and stared at the TV, where some movie was showing.
“Ellie,” he said, snapping off the TV, “bedtime.”
She worked her way out of the chair, then folded it up. She apparently meant to take the chair into bed with her.
Louis hesitated, wanting to say something about the chair, and finally settled on, “Do you want me to tuck you in?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Do you. . . would you want to sleep with Mommy tonight?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure?”
She smiled a little. “Yes. She steals the covers.”
Louis smiled back. “Come on then.”
Instead of trying to put the chair in bed with her, Ellie unfolded it by the head of the bed, and an absurd image came to Louis—here was the consulting room of the world’s smallest psychiatrist.
She undressed, putting the picture of her and Gage on her pillow to do it. She put on her baby doll pajamas, picked up the picture, went into the bathroom, put it down to wash up, brush, floss, and to take her fluoride tablet. Then she picked it up again and got into bed with it.
Louis sat down beside her and said, “I want you to know, Ellie, that if we keep on loving each other, we can get through this.”
Each word was like moving a handcar loaded with wet bales, and the total effort left Louis feeling exhausted.
“I’m going to wish really hard,” Ellie said calmly, “and pray to God for Gage to come back.”
“Ellie—”
“God can take it back if He wants to,” Ellie said. “He can do anything He wants to.”
“Ellie, God doesn’t do things like that,” Louis said uneasily, and in his mind’s eye he saw Church squatting on the closed lid of the toilet, staring at him with those muddy eyes as Louis lay in the tub.
“He does so,” she said. “In Sunday School the teacher told us about this guy Lazarus. He was dead, and Jesus brought him back to life. He said ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ and the teacher said if he’d just said ‘Come forth,’ probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out, and Jesus only wanted Lazarus.”
An absurdity popped out of his mouth (but the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity): “That was a long time ago, Ellie.”
“I’m going to keep things ready for him,” she said. “I’ve got his picture, and I’m going to sit in his chair—”
“Ellie, you’re too big for Gage’s chair,” Louis said, taking her hot, feverish hand. “You’ll break it.”
“God will help it not to break,” Ellie said. Her voice was serene, but Louis observed the brown half-moons under her eyes. Looking at her made his heart ache so badly that he turned away from her.
Maybe when Gage’s chair broke, she would begin to understand what had happened a little better.
“I’m going to carry the picture and sit in his chair,” she said. “I’m going to eat his breakfast too.” Gage and Ellie had each had their own breakfast cereals; Gage’s, Ellie had once claimed, tasted like dead boogers. If Cocoa Bears was the only cereal in the house, Ellie would sometimes eat a boiled egg. . . or nothing at all. “I’ll eat lima beans even though I hate them, and I’ll read all of Gage’s picturebooks and I’ll. . . I’ll. . . you know. . . get things ready. . . in case . . .“
She was crying now. Louis did not try to comfort her but only brushed her hair back from her forehead. What she was talking about made a certain crazed sense. Keeping the lines open.
Keeping things current. Keeping Gage in the present, in the Hot One Hundred, refusing to let him recede; remember when Gage did
this . . . or that . . . yeah, that was great . . . good old Gage, wotta kid. When it started not to hurt, it started not ‘to matter. She understood, perhaps, Louis thought, how easy it would be to let Gage be dead.
“Ellie, don’t cry anymore,” he said. “This isn’t forever.”
She cried forever . . . for fifteen minutes. She actually fell asleep before her tears stopped. But eventually she slept, and downstairs the clock struck ten in the quiet house.
Keep him alive, Ellie, if that’s what you want, he thought and kissed her. The shrinks would probably say it’s as unhealthy as hell, but I’m for it. Because I know the day will come—maybe as soon as this Friday—when you forget to carry the picture and I’ll see it lying on your bed in this empty room while you ride your bike around the driveway or walk in the field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGown’s house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage won’t be with you, and that’s when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls’ hearts and starts to become Something That Happened in 1984. A blast from the past.