He raised his head to look at her. Such nice eyes. Good eyes. They
were eyes that loved you. Like Julie’s eyes or Bobby’s.
Thomas said, “God made me dumb to test me?”
“You’re not dumb, Thomas. Not in some ways. I don’t like to hear you
call yourself dumb. You’re not as smart as some but that’s not your
fault. You’re different, that’s all. Being.. different is your
hardship, and you’re coping with it well.”
“I am?”
“Beautifully. Look at you. You’re not bitter. You’re not sullen. You
reach out to people.” “Being Sociable.”
She smiled, pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the worktable,
and wiped the tears from his face.
“Of all the smart people in the world, Thomas, not any one of them
handles hard ship better than you do, and most not as well.”
He knew she meant what she said, and her words made him happy, even if
he didn’t quite believe life was ever hard for smart people.
She stayed a while. Made sure he was okay. Then she made sure Derek
was still snoring.
Thomas sat at the worktable. Tried to make more poems.
After a while he went to the window. Rain was coming dow now. It
trickled on the glass. The afternoon was almost gone. Night was soon
coming down on top of the rain.
He put his hands against the glass. He stared into the rain into the
gray day, into the nothingness of the night that was slowly sneaking up
on them.
The Bad Thing was still out there. He could feel it. A man but not a
man. Something more than a man. Very bad. Ugly-nasty. He’d felt it
for days, but he hadn’t sent a warning to Bobby since last week because
the Bad Thing wasn’t coming any closer. It was far away, right now
Julie was safe, and if he sent too many warnings to Bobby, then Bobby
would stop paying attention to them, and when the Bad Thing finally
showed up, Bobby wouldn’t believe in it any more, and then it would get
to Julie because Bobby wouldn’t be paying attention.
What Thomas most feared was that the Bad Thing would take Julie to the
Bad Place. Their mother went to the Bad Place when Thomas was two years
old, so he’d never known her. Then their dad went to the Bad Place
later, leaving Thomas with just Julie.
He didn’t mean Hell. He knew about Heaven and Hell. Heaven was God’s.
The devil owned Hell. If there was a Heaven, he was sure his mom and
dad went there. You wanted to go up to Heaven if you could. Things
were better there. In Hell, the aides weren’t nice.
But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn’t just Hell. it was Death. Hell was
a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place. Death was a word you couldn’t
picture. Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran
out, over, done, kaput. How could you picture that? A thing wasn’t
real if you couldn’t picture it. He couldn’t see Death, couldn’t get a
picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other
people seemed to think about it. He was just too dumb, so he had to
picture it in his head as a place. They said Death came to take you,
and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked
him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place.
And that was the Bad Place. It’s where you were taken and never allowed
to come back. Thomas didn’t know what happened to a person there. Maybe
nothing nasty. Except you weren’t allowed to come back and see people
you loved, which made it nasty enough, no matter if the food was good
over there. Maybe some people went on to Heaven, some to Hell, but you
couldn’t come back from either one, so both were part of the Bad Place,
just different rooms. And he wasn’t sure Heaven and Hell were real,
maybe all there was in the Bad Place was darkness and!” and so much