But would that not be the same as murdering his son? Killing him a second time?
A voice inside tried to argue that this was not so, but he would not listen. He shut the voice up briskly.
“Irwin, I ought to go now. I want to make sure Rachel’s got what she needs and then get her to bed.”
“All right. Goodbye, Louis. And once more—”
If he says he’s sorry one more time, I’ll fucking scream.
“Goodbye, Irwin,” he said and hung up the phone.
Rachel was deep in a litter of clothes when he came upstairs.
Blouses on the beds, bras hung over the backs of chairs, slacks on hangers that had been hung over the doorknob. Shoes were lined up like soldiers under the window. She appeared to be packing slowly but competently. Louis could see it was going to take her at least three suitcases (maybe four), but he could also see no sense in arguing with her about it. Instead he pitched in and helped.
“Louis,” she said as they closed the last suitcase (he had to sit on it before Rachel could snap the catches), “are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“For God’s sake, hon, what is this?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she replied evenly. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“What do you think I’m going to do? Creep off to a bordello? Join the circus? What?”
“I don’t know. But this feels wrong. It feels as if you’re trying to get rid of us.”
“Rachel, that’s ridiculous!” He said this with a vehemence that was partly exasperation. Even in such straits as these, he felt a certain pique in being seen through so easily.
She smiled wanly. “You never were a very good liar, Lou.”
He began to protest again, and she cut him off.
“Ellie dreamed you were dead,” she said. “Last night. She woke up crying, and I went in to her. I slept with her for two or three hours and then came back in with you. She said that in her dream you were sitting at the kitchen table and your eyes were open, but she knew you were dead. She said she could hear Steve Masterton screaming.”
Louis looked at her, dismayed. “Rachel,” he said at last, “her brother just died. It’s normal enough for her to dream that other members of her family—”
“Yes, I surmised that much for myself. But the way she told it the elements . . . it seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.
She laughed weakly.
“Or maybe you had to be there.”
“Yes, maybe so,” Louis said.
It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.
“Come to bed with me,” Rachel said. “The Valium’s all worn
off, and I don’t want to take any more. But I’m afraid. I’ve been having my own dreams. . .“
“Dreams of what?”
“Of Zeida,” she said simply. “The last few nights since Gage died, when I go to sleep, Zelda’s there, She says she’s coming for me, and this time she’ll get me. That both she and Gage will get me.
For letting them die.”
“Rachel, that’s—”
“I know. Just a dream. Normal enough. But come to bed with me and keep the dreams away if you can, Louis.”
They lay together in the dark, crowded into Louis’s single.
“Rachel? You still awake?”
“Yes.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
He hesitated, not wanting to cause her even more pain but needing to know.
“Do you remember the scare we had with him when he was nine months old?” he asked finally.
“Yes. Yes, of course I do. Why?”
By the time Gage was nine months old, Louis had become deeply concerned about his son’s cranial size. It was right off Louis’s Berterier Chart, which showed the normal range of infant head sizes on a per-month basis. At four months, Gage’s skull size had begun to drift toward the highest part of the curve, and then it began to go even higher than that. He wasn’t having any trouble holding his head up—that would have been a dead giveaway
—but Louis had nevertheless taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest. Rachel had wanted to know what was wrong, and Louis had told her the truth: he was worried that Gage might be hydrocephalic. Rachel’s face had grown very white, but she had remained calm.
“He seems normal to me,” she said.
Louis nodded. “He does to me too. But I don’t want to ignore this, babe.”
“No, you mustn’t,” she said. “We mustn’t.”
Tardiff had measured Gage’s skull and frowned. Tardiff poked two fingers at Gage’s face, Three Stooges style. Gage flinched. Tardiff smiled. Louis’s heart thawed out a little. Tardiff gave Gage a ball to hold. Gage held it for a while and then dropped it.
Tardiff retrieved the ball and bounced it, watching Cage’s eyes.
Gage’s eyes tracked the ball.
“I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s hydrocephalic,” Tardiff said to Louis in his office later. “No—the odds may actually be a bit higher than that. If so, it’s mild. He seems very alert. The new shunt operation should take care of the problem easily . . . if there is a problem.”
“A shunt means brain surgery,” Louis said.
“Minor brain surgery.”
Louis had studied the process not long after he began to worry about the size of Gage’s head, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid, had not looked very minor to him. But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself just to be grateful the operation existed at all.
“Of course,” Tardiff went on, “there’s still a large possibility that your kid just has a real big head for a nine-month-old. I think a CAT-scan is the best place to start. Do you agree?”
Louis had agreed.
Gage spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital and underwent general anesthesia. His sleeping head was stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at Grandma and Grandda’s, watching “Sesame Street” nonstop on Grandda’s new video recorder. For Louis, those had been long, gray hours in which he found himself totting up sums of varying ugliness and comparing results. Death under general anesthesia, death during a shunt operation, mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalus, cataclysmic retardation as a result of same, epilepsy, blindness. . .
oh, there were all sorts of possibilities. For really complete disaster maps, Louis remembered thinking, see your local doctor.
Tardiff had come into the waiting room around five o’clock. He had three cigars. He plugged one into Louis’s mouth, one into Rachel’s (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.
“The kid is fine. No hydrocephalus.”
“Light this thing,” Rachel had said, weeping and laughing at the same time. “I’m going to smoke it till I puke.”
Grinning, Tardiff lit their cigars.
God was saving him for Route 15, Dr. Tardiff, Louis thought now.
“Rachel, if he had been hydrocephalic, and if the shunt hadn’t worked. . . could you have still loved him?”
“What a weird question, Louis!”
“Could you?”
“Yes, of course. I would have loved Gage no matter what.”
“Even if he was retarded?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have wanted him institutionalized?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I suppose, with the money you’re making now, we could afford that . . . a really good place, I mean. . . but I think I’d want him with us if we could. . . Louis, why do you ask?”
“Why, I suppose I was still thinking of your sister Zelda,” he said.
He was still astonished at this eerie glibness. “Wondering if you could have gone through that again.”
“It wouldn’t have been the same,” she said, sounding almost amused. “Gage was . . . well, Gage was Gage. He was our son.
That would have made all the difference. It would have been hard, I guess, but. . . would you have wanted him in an institution? A place like Pineland?”
“Let’s go to sleep.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I feel like I can sleep now,” she said. “I want to put this day behind me.”
“Amen to that,” Louis said.
A long time later she said drowsily, “You’re right, Louis . . just dreams and vapors. . .“
“Sure,” he said, and kissed her earlobe. “Now sleep.”
It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.
He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of the moon looked in the window at him.
43
The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel’s and Ellie’s baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.