Eddie stepped closer and read this: “Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine, Done parked her RIG in the DIXIE PIG, in the year of ’99.” He looked at Susannah. “What in the hell does that mean? Any idea, Suze?”
She shook her head. Her eyes were very large. Frightened eyes, Roland thought. But which woman was frightened? He couldn’t tell. He only knew that Odetta Susannah Holmes had been divided from the beginning, and that “mio” was very close to Mia. The hum coming from the darkness behind the fence made it hard to think of these things. He wanted to go to the source of the hum right now. Needed to, as a man dying of thirst needs to go to water.
“Come on,” Jake said. “We can climb right over. It’s easy.”
Susannah looked down at her bare, dirty feet, and took a step backward. “Not me,” she said. “I can’t. Not without shoes.”
Which made perfect sense, but Roland thought there was more to it than that. Mia didn’t want to go in there.
Mia understood something dreadful might happen if she did. To her, and to her baby. For a moment he was on the verge of forcing the issue, of letting the rose take care of both the thing growing inside her and her troublesome new personality, one so strong that Susannah had shown up here with Mia’s legs.
No, Roland. That was Alain’s voice. Alain, who had always been strongest in the touch. Wrong time, wrong place.
“I’ll stay with her,” Jake said. He spoke with enormous regret but no hesitation, and Roland was swept by his love for the boy he had once allowed to die. That vast voice from the darkness beyond the fence sang of that love; he heard it. And of simple forgiveness rather than the difficult forced march of atonement? He thought it was.
“No,” she said. “You go on, honeybunch. I’ll be fine.” She smiled at them. “This is my city too, you know. I can look out for myself. And besides—” She lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. “I think we’re kind of invisible.”
Eddie was once again looking at her in that searching way, as if to ask her how she could not go with them, bare feet or no bare feet, but this time Roland wasn’t worried. Mia’s secret was safe, at least for the time being; the call of the rose was too strong for Eddie to be able to think of much else. He was wild to get going.
“We should stay together,” Eddie said reluctantly. “So we don’t get lost going back. You said so yourself, Roland.”
“How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?” Roland asked. It was hard to talk with that hum singing in his ears like a wind. Hard to think.
“It’s pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but probably less.”
“The second we hear the chimes,” Roland said, “we run for the fence and Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Eddie said.
“All three of us and Oy,”Jake said.
“No, Oy stays with Susannah.”
Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn’t expected him to. “Jake, Oy also has bare feet… and didn’t you say there was broken glass in there?”
“Ye-eahh…” Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and looked into Oy’s gold-ringed eyes.
“Stay with Susannah, Oy.”
“Oy! Ay!” Oy stay. It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to Roland, and nodded.
“Suze?” Eddie asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia in control, pulling the levers and turning the dials. Almost. Even now he wasn’t positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be positive of anything except that everything— everything—could be all right.
Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board fence with its odd poem: Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and gone like a breath of breeze.
“Ake!” Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah’s bare feet.
“You next, Eddie,” Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers together, meaning to give Eddie the same step Eddie had given Jake, but Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie Roland had first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could never have done that.
Roland said, “Stay where you are. Both of you.” He could have meant the woman and the billy-bumbler, but it was only the woman he looked at.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, and bent to stroke Oy’s silky fur. “Won’t we, big guy?”
“Oy!”
“Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can.”
Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the fence. A moment later he was gone, leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.
ELEVEN
Strange things happened to her as she waited.
Back the way they’d come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock alternately flashed the time and temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with the sign’s machinery?
Must’ve, she thought. What else could it be? Nothing, she supposed, but why did everything suddenly feel different? Even look different? Maybe it was my machinery that went wrong.
Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she realized why things looked different.
Besides somehow slipping seven uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former, all-too-familiar perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy because she was closer to the ground. The splendid lower legs and feet she’d been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.
How had it happened1? And when? In the missing seven minutes’?
Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Halfa dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn’t todash.
This woman was dead.
TWELVE
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash- and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas’s gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes called him ‘Bama, although that was a secret, just between them.
Eddie saw people from the old neighborhood: Jimmie Polio, the kid with the clubfoot, and Tommy Fredericks, who always got so excited watching the street stickball games that he made faces and the kids called him Halloween Tommy. There was Skipper Brannigan, who would have picked a fight with Al Capone himself, had Capone shown sufficient bad judgment to come to their neighborhood, and Csaba Drabnik, the Mad Fuckin Hungarian. He saw his mother’s face in a pile of broken bricks, her glimmering eyes recreated from the broken pieces of a soft-drink bottle. He saw her friend, Dora Bertollo (all the kids on the block called her Tits Bertollo because she had really big ones, big as fuckin watermelons). And of course he saw Henry. Henry standing far back in the shadows, watching him. Only Henry was smiling instead of scowling, and he looked straight. Holding out one hand and giving Eddie what looked like a thumbs-up. Go on, the rising hum seemed to whisper, and now it whispered in Henry Dean’s voice. Go on, Eddie, show em what you’re made of. Didn’t I tell those other guys? When we were out behind Dahlie’s smokin Jimmie Polio’s cigarettes, didn’t I tell em ? “My little bro could talk the devil into settin himself on fire,”I said. Didn’t I?Yes.
Yes he had. And that’s the way I always felt, the hum whispered. I always loved you. Sometimes I put you down, but I always loved you. You were my little man.
Eddie began to cry. And these were good tears.
Roland saw all the phantoms of his life in this shadowed, brick-strewn ruin, from his mother and his cradle-amah right up to their visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis. And as they walked, that sense of Tightness grew. A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all.