Stephen King – The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates
The New York Times
at Special Bargain Rates
She’s fresh out of the shower when the phone begins to ring, but although the house is
still full of relatives—she can hear them downstairs, it seems they will never go away,
it seems she never had so many—no one picks up. Nor does the answering machine,
as James programmed it to do after the fifth ring.
Anne goes to the extension on the bed-table, wrapping a towel around her, her wet
hair thwacking unpleasantly on the back of her neck and bare shoulders. She picks it
up, she says hello, and then he says her name. It’s James. They had thirty years
together, and one word is all she needs. He says Annie like no one else, always did.
For a moment she can’t speak or even breathe. He has caught her on the exhale and
her lungs feel as flat as sheets of paper. Then, as he says her name again (sounding
uncharacteristically hesitant and unsure of himself), the strength slips from her legs.
They turn to sand and she sits on the bed, the towel falling off her, her wet bottom
dampening the sheet beneath her. If the bed hadn’t been there, she would have gone to
the floor.
Her teeth click together and that starts her breathing again.
“James? Where are you? What happened? ” In her normal voice, this might have
come out sounding shrewish—a mother scolding her wayward eleven-year-old who’s
come late to the supper-table yet again—but now it emerges in a kind of horrified
growl. The murmuring relatives below her are, after all, planning his funeral.
James chuckles. It is a bewildered sound. “Well, I tell you what,” he says. “I don’t
exactly know where I am.”
Her first confused thought is that he must have missed the plane in London, even
though he called her from Heathrow not long before it took off. Then a clearer idea
comes: although both the Times and the TV news say there were no survivors, there
was at least one. Her husband crawled from the wreckage of the burning plane (and
the burning apartment building the plane hit, don’t forget that, twenty-four more dead
on the ground and the number apt to rise before the world moved on to the next
tragedy) and has been wandering around Brooklyn ever since, in a state of shock.
“Jimmy, are you all right? Are you…are you burned?” The truth of what that would
mean occurs after the question, thumping down with the heavy weight of a dropped
book on a bare foot, and she begins to cry. “Are you in the hospital?”
“Hush,” he says, and at his old kindness—and at that old word, just one small piece of
their marriage’s furniture—she begins to cry harder. “Honey, hush.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“I’m all right,” he says. “Most of us are.”
“Most—? There are others?”
“Not the pilot,” he says. “He’s not so good. Or maybe it’s the co-pilot. He keeps
screaming. ‘We’re going down, there’s no power, oh my God.’ Also ‘This isn’t my
fault, don’t let them blame it on me.’ He says that, too.”
She’s cold all over. “Who is this really? Why are you being so horrible? I just lost my
husband, you asshole!”
“Honey—”
“Don’t call me that!” There’s a clear strand of mucus hanging from one of her nostrils.
She wipes it away with the back of her hand and then flings it into the wherever, a
thing she hasn’t done since she was a child. “Listen, mister—I’m going to star-sixty-
nine this call and the police will come and slam your ass…your ignorant, unfeeling
ass…”
But she can go no farther. It’s his voice. There’s no denying it. The way the call rang
right through—no pickup downstairs, no answering machine—suggests this call was
just for her. And… honey, hush. Like in the old Carl Perkins song.
He has remained quiet, as if letting her work these things through for herself. But
before she can speak again, there’s a beep on the line.
“James? Jimmy? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, but I can’t talk long. I was trying to call you when we went down, and I guess