“Okay.”
“The shot will have worn off by then. Your friend Mr. Crandall says he’ll stay with Ellie during the afternoon viewing hours—”
“Right.”
“—and play Monopoly or something with her—”
“Uh-huh.”
“But—”
“Right.”
Steve stopped. They were standing in the garage, Church’s stomping ground, the place where he brought his dead birds and dead rats. The ones that Louis owned. Outside was May sun-
shine, and a robin bopped across the head of the driveway, as if it had important business somewhere. Maybe it did.
“Louis,” Steve said, “you’ve got to get hold of yourself.”
Louis looked at Steve, politely questioning. Not much of what Steve had said had gotten through—he had been thinking that if he had been a little quicker he could have saved his son’s life— but a little of this last registered.
“I don’t think you’ve noticed,” Steve said, “but Ellie isn’t vocalizing. And Rachel has had such a bad shock that her very conception of time seems to have been twisted out of shape.”
“Right!” Louis said. More force in reply seemed to be indicated here. He wasn’t sure why.
Steve put a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “Lou,” he said, “they need you more now than they ever have in their life. More than they
ever will again, maybe. Please, man . . . I can give your wife a shot, but . . . you . . . see, Louis, you gotta . . oh, Christ, Louis, what a cock-knocking, motherfucking mess this is!”
Louis saw with something like alarm that Steve was starting to cry.
“Sure,” he said, and in his mind he saw Gage running across the lawn toward the road. They were yelling at Gage to come back, but he wouldn’t—lately the game had been to run away from Mommy-Daddy—and then they were chasing him, Louis quickly outdistancing Rachel, but Gage had a big lead, Gage was laughing, Gage was running away from Daddy—that was the game—and Louis was closing the distance but too slowly, Gage was running down the mild slope of the lawn now to the verge of Route 15, and Louis prayed to God that Gage would fall down— when little kids ran fast, they almost always fell down because a person’s control over his legs didn’t get really cool until he was maybe seven or eight. Louis prayed to God that Gage would fall down, fall down, yes, fall down bloody his nose crack his skull need stitches whatever, because now he could hear the drone of a truck coming toward them, one of those big ten-wheelers that went back and forth endlessly between Bangor and the Orinco plant in Bucksport, and he had screamed Gage’s name then, and he believed that Gage had heard him and tried to stop. Gage seemed to realize that the game was over, that your parents didn’t scream at you when it was just a game, and he had tried to put on the brakes, and by then the sound of the truck was very loud, the sound of it filled the world. It was thundering. Louis
had thrown himself forward in a long flying tackle, his shadow tracking the ground beneath him as the shadow of the Vulture had tracked the white late-winter grass of Mrs. Vinton’s field that day in March, and he believed that the tips of his fingers had actually brushed the back of the light jacket Gage had been wearing, and then Gage’s forward motion had carried him out into the road, and the truck had been thunder, the truck had been sunlight on high chrome, the truck had been the deep-throated, shrieking bellow of
an air horn, and that had been Saturday, that had been three days ago.
“I’m okay,” he said to Steve. “I ought to go now.”
“If you can get yourself together and help them,” Steve said, swiping at his eyes with the arm of his jacket, “you’ll be helping yourself too. The three of you have got to get through it together, Louis. That’s the only way. That’s all anybody knows.”
“That’s right,” Louis agreed, and in his mind it all started to happen again, only this time he leaped two feet farther right at the end, and snagged the back of Gage’s jacket, and none of this was happening.
At the time the scene in the East Room happened, Ellie was pushing her Monopoly marker aimlessly—and silently—around the board with Jud Crandall. She shook the dice with one hand and clutched the Polaroid of her pulling Gage on her Speedaway sled with the other.
Steve Masterton had decided it would be all right for Rachel to attend the afternoon viewing—in light of later developments, it was a decision he came to deeply regret.
The Goldmans had flown into Bangor that morning and were staying at the Holiday Inn. Her father had called four times by noon, and Steve had to be increasingly firm—almost threatening, by call four—with the old man. Irwin Goldman wanted to come out and not all the dogs of hell could keep him from his daughter in her time of need, he said. Steve responded that Rachel needed this time before going to the funeral parlor to get over as much of her initial shock as she could. He didn’t know about all the dogs of hell, he said, but he knew one Swedish-American physician’s assistant that had no intention of allowing anyone into the Creed home until Rachel had appeared in public, of her own volition.
After the viewing in the afternoon, Steve said, he would be
more than happy to let the relatives’ support system take over.
Until then, he wanted her left alone.
The old man swore at him in Yiddish and banged the phone down at his end, breaking the connection. Steve waited to see if Goldman would indeed show up, but Goldman had apparently decided to wait. By noon Rachel did seem a little better. She was at least aware of the time frame she was in, and she had gone out to the kitchen to see if there were sandwich makings or anything for after. People would probably want to come back to the house after, wouldn’t they? she asked Steve.
Steve nodded.
There was no bologna or cold roast beef, but there was a Butterball turkey in the freezer, and she put it on the drainboard to thaw.
Steve looked into the kitchen a few minutes later and saw her standing by the sink, looking fixedly at the turkey on the drainboard and weeping.
“Rachel?”
She looked toward Steve. “Gage really liked these. He especially liked the white meat. It was just occurring to me that he was never going to eat another Butterball turkey.”
Steve sent her upstairs to dress—the final test of her ability to cope, really—and when she came down wearing a simple black dress belted at the waist and carrying a small black clutch bag (an evening bag, really), Steve decided she was all right, and Jud concurred.
Steve drove her into town. He stood with Surrendra Hardu in the lobby of the East Room and watched Rachel drift down the aisle toward the flower-buried coffin like a wraith.
“How is it going, Steve?” Surrendra asked quietly.
“Going fucking terrible,” Steve said in a low, harsh voice. “How did you think it was going?”
“I thought it was probably going fucking terrible,” Surrendra said and sighed.
The trouble really began at the morning viewing, when Irwin Goldman refused to shake hands with his son-in-law.
The sight of so many friends and relatives had actually forced Louis out of the web of shock a little, had forced him to notice what was going on and be outward. He had reached that stage of malleable grief that funeral directors are so used to handling and turning to its best advantage. Louis was moved around like a counter in a Parcheesi game.
Outside the East Room was a small foyer where people could smoke and sit in overstuffed easy chairs. The chairs looked as if they might have come directly from a distress sale at some old English men’s club that had gone broke. Beside the door leading into the viewing room was a small easel, black metal chased with gold, and on this easel was a small sign which said simply CAGE
WILLIAM CREED. If you went across this spacious white building that looked misleadingly like a comfortable old house, you came to an identical foyer, this one outside the West Room, where the sign on the easel read ALBERTA BURNHAM
NEDEAU. At the back of the house was the Riverfront Room. The easel to the left of the door between the foyer and this room was blank; it was not in use on this Tuesday morning. Downstairs was the coffin showroom, each model lit by a baby spotlight mounted on the ceiling. If you looked up—Louis had, and the funeral director had frowned severely at him—it looked as if there were a lot of strange animals roosting up there.