1.
Eleven days after the discovery of the Dunbarger girl's body, a sleet-and-ice storm struck northern New England. On the sixth floor of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, everything was running just a little bit late in consequence. A lot of the staff had run into problems getting to work, and those that made it found themselves running hard just to stay even.
It was after nine am when one of the aides, a young woman named Allison Conover, brought Mr. Starret his light breakfast. Mr. Starret was recovering from a heart attack and was 'doing his sixteen' in intensive care - a sixteen-day stay following a coronary was standard operating procedure. Mr. Starret was doing nicely. He was in room 619, and he had told his wife privately that the biggest incentive to his recovery was the prospect of getting away from the living corpse in the room's second bed. The steady whisper of the poor guy's respirator made it hard to sleep, he told her. After a while it got so you didn't know if you wanted it to go on whispering or stop. Stop dead, so to speak.
The TV was on when Allison came in. Mr. Starret was sitting up in bed with his control button in one hand. 'Today' had ended, and Mr. Starret had not yet decided to blank out 'My Back Yard', the cartoon show that followed it. That would have left him alone with the sound of Johnny's respirator.
'I'd about given up on you this morning,' Mr. Starret said, looking at his breakfast tray of orange juice, plain yoghurt, and wheat flakes with no great joy. What he really craved was two cholesterol-filled eggs, fried over easy and sweating butter, with five slices of bacon on the side, not too crisp. The sort of fare that had, in fact, landed him here in the first place. At least according to his doctor - the birdbrain.
'The going's bad outside,' Allison said shortly. Six patients had already told her they had about given up on her this morning, and the line was getting old. Allison was a pleasant girl, but this morning she was feeling harried.
'Oh, sorry,' Mr. Starret said humbly. 'Pretty slippery on the roads, is it?'
'It sure is,' Allison said, thawing slightly. 'If I didn't have my husband's four-wheel drive today, I never would have made it.'
Mr. Starret pushed the button that raised his bed so he could eat his breakfast comfortably. The electric motor that raised and lowered it was small but loud. The TV was still quite loud - Mr. Starret was a little deaf, and as he had told his wife, the guy in the other bed had never complained about a little extra volume. Never asked to see what was on the other channel either. He supposed a joke like that was in pretty poor taste, but when you'd had a heart attack and wound up in intensive care sharing a room with a human vegetable, you either learned a little black humor or you went crazy.
Allison raised her voice a little to be heard over the whining motor and the TV as she finished setting up Mr. Starret's tray. 'There were cars off the road all up and down State Street hill.'
In the other bed Johnny Smith said softly, 'The whole wad on nineteen. One way or the other. My girl's sick.'
'You know, this yogurt isn't half bad,' Mr. Starret said. He hated yogurt, but he didn't want to be left alone until absolutely necessary. When he was alone he kept taking his own pulse. 'It tastes a little bit like wild hickory....
'Did you hear something?' Allison asked. She looked around doubtfully.
Mr. Starret let go of the control button on the side of the bed and the whine of the electric motor died. On the TV, Elmer Fudd took a potshot at Bugs Bunny and missed.
'Nothing but the TV,' Mr. Starret said. 'What'd I miss?'
'Nothing, I guess. It must have been the wind around that window.' She could feel a stress headache coming on - too much to do and not enough people this morning to help her do it - and she rubbed at her temples, as if to drive the pain away before it could get properly seated.
On her way out she paused and looked down at the man in the other bed for a moment. Did he look different somehow? As if he had shifted position? Surely not.
Allison left the room and went on down the hall, pushing her breakfast cabinet ahead of her. It was as terrible a morning as she had feared it would be, everything out of kilter, and by noon her head was pounding. She had quite understandably forgotten all about anything she might have heard that morning in Room 619.
But in the days that followed she found herself looking more and more often at Smith, and by March Allison had become almost sure that he had straightened a bit - come out of what the doctors called his prefetal position a little. Not much just a little. She thought of mentioning it to someone, but in the end did not. After all, she was only an aide, little more than kitchen help.
It really wasn't her place.
It was a dream, he guessed.
He was in a dark, gloomy place - a hallway of some kind. The ceiling was too high to see. It was lost in the shadows. The walls were dark chromed steel. They opened out as they went upward. He was alone, but a voice floated up to where he stood, as if from a great distance. A voice he knew, words that had been spoken to him in another place, at another time. The voice frightened him. It was groaning and lost, echoing back and forth between that dark chromed steel like a trapped bird he remembered from his childhood. The bird had flown into his father's toolshed and hadn't the wit to get back out. It had panicked and had gone swooping back and forth, cheeping in desperate alarm, battering itself against the walls until it had battered itself to death. This voice had the same doomed quality as that long ago bird's cheeping. It was never going to escape this place.
'You plan all your life and you do what you can,' this spectral voice groaned. 'You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his ass-hole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don't...
Look out, he wanted to say. He wanted to warn the voice, but he was mute. Look out for what? He didn't know. He didn't even know for sure who he was, although he had a suspicion that he had once been a teacher or a preacher.
'Jeeeesus!' The faraway voice screamed. Lost voice, doomed, drowned. 'Jeeeee...
Silence then. Echoes dying. away. Then, in a little while, it would start again.
So after a while - he did not know how long, time seemed to have no meaning or relevance in this place - he began to grope his way down the hall, calling in return (or perhaps only calling in his mind), perhaps hoping that he and the owner of the voice could find their way out together, perhaps only hoping to give some comfort and receive some in return.
But the voice kept getting further and further away, dimmer and fainter
(far and wee)
until it was just an echo of an echo. And then it was gone. He was alone now, walking down this gloomy and deserted hall of shadows. And it began to seem to him that it wasn't an illusion or a mirage or a dream - at least not of the ordinary kind. It was as if he had entered limbo, a weird conduit between the land of the living and that of the dead. But toward which end was he moving?
Things began to come back. Disturbing things. They were like ghosts that joined him on his walk, fell in on either side of him, in front of him, behind him, until they circled him in an eldritch ring - weave a circle round him thrice and touch his eyes with holy dread, was that how it went? He could almost see them. All the whispering voices of purgatory. There was a Wheel turning and turning in the night, a Wheel of the Future, red and black, life and death, slowing. Where had he laid his bet? He couldn't remember and he should be able to, because the stakes were his existence. In and out? It had to be one or the other. His girl was sick. He had to get her home.
After a while, the hallway began to seem brighter. At first he thought it was imagination, a sort of dream within a dream if that were possible, but after an unknown length of time the brightness became too marked to be an illusion. The whole experience of the corridor seemed to become less dreamlike. The walls drew back until he could barely see them, and the dull dark color changed to a sad and misty gray, the color of twilight on a warm and overcast March afternoon. It began to seem that he was not in a hallway at all anymore, but in a room -almost in a room, separated from it by the thinnest of membranes, a sort of placental sac, like a baby waiting to be born. Now he heard other voices, not echoey but dull and thudding, like the voices of nameless gods speaking in forgotten tongues. Little by little these voices came clearer, until he could nearly make out what they were saying.
He began to open his eyes from time to time (or thought he did) and he could actually see the owners of those voices: bright, glowing, spectral shapes with no faces at first, sometimes moving about the room, sometimes bending over him. It didn't occur to him to try speaking to them, at least not at first. It came to him that this might be some sort of afterlife, and these bright shapes the shapes of angels.
The faces, like the voices, began to come clearer with time. He saw his mother once, leaning into his field of vision and slowly thundering something totally without meaning into his upturned face. His father was there another time. Dave Pelsen from school. A nurse he came to know; he believed her name was Mary or possibly Marie. Faces, voices, coming closer, jelling together.
Something else crept in: a feeling that he had changed. He didn't like the feeling. He distrusted it. It seemed to him that whatever the change was, it was nothing good. It seemed to him that it meant sorrow and bad times. He had gone into the darkness with everything, and now it felt to him that he was coming out of it with nothing at all - except for some secret strangeness.
The dream was ending. Whatever it had been, the dream was ending. The room was very real now, very close. The voices, the faces -He was going to come into the room. And it suddenly seemed to him that what he wanted to do was turn and run - to go back down that dark hallway forever. The dark hallway was not good, but it was better than this new feeling of sadness and impending loss.
He turned and looked behind him, and yes, it was there, the place where the room's walls changed to dark chrome, a corner beside one of the chairs where, unnoticed by the bright people who came and went, the room became a passageway into what he now suspected was eternity. The place where that other voice had gone, the voice of -The cab driver.
Yes. That memory was all there now. The cab ride, the driver bemoaning his son's long hair, bemoaning the fact that his son thought Nixon was a pig. Then the headlights breasting the hill, a pair on each side of the white line. The crash. No pain, but the knowledge that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame. There had been a sensation of cold wetness and then the dark hallway and now this.
Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or they'll choose for you, they'll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is, like doctors ripping a baby out of its mother's womb by cesarian section.
And then Sarah's face came to him - she had to be out there someplace, although hers had not been one of the bright faces bending over his. She had to be out there, worried and scared. She was almost his, now. He felt that. He was going to ask her to marry him.
That feeling of unease came back, stronger than ever, and this time it was all mixed up with Sarah. But wanting her was stronger, and he made his decision. He turned his back on the dark place, and when he looked back over his shoulder later on, it had disappeared; there was nothing beside the chair but the smooth white wall of the room where he lay. Not long after he began to know where the room must be - it was a hospital room, of course. The dark hallway faded to a dreamy memory, never completely forgotten. But more important, more immediate, was the fact that he was John Smith, he had a girl named Sarah Bracknell, and he had been in a terrible car accident. He suspected that he must be very lucky to be alive, and he could only hope that all his original equipment was still there and still functioning. He might be in Cleaves Mills Community Hospital, but he guessed the EMMC was more likely. From the way he felt he guessed he had been here for some time - he might have been blacked out for as long as a week or ten days. It was time to get going again.
Time to get going again. That was the thought in Johnny's mind when things finally jelled all the way back together and he opened his eyes.
It was May 17, 1975. Mr. Starret had long since gone home with standing orders to walk two miles a day and mend his high cholesterol ways. Across the room was an old man engaged in a weary' fifteenth round with that all-time heavyweight champ, carcinoma. He slept the sleep of morphia, and the room was otherwise empty. It was 3 15 P.M. The TV screen was a drawn green shade.
'Here I am,' Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all. He was shocked by the 'weakness of his voice. There was no calendar in the room, and he had no way of knowing that he had been out of it four-and-a-half years.
3.
The nurse came in some forty minutes later. She went over to the old man in the other bed, changed his IV feed, went into the bathroom, and came out with a blue plastic pitcher. She watered the old man's flowers. There were over half a dozen bouquets, and a score of get-well cards standing open on his table and windowsill. Johnny watched her perform this homey chore, feeling as yet no urge to try his voice again.
She put the pitcher back and came over to Johnny's bed. Going to turn my pillows, he thought. Their eyes met briefly, but nothing in hers changed. She doesn't know I'm awake. My eyes have been open before. It doesn't mean anything to her.
She put her hand on the back of his neck. It was cool and comforting and Johnny knew she had three children and that the youngest had lost most of the sight of one eye last Fourth of July. A firecracker accident. The boy's name was Mark.
She lifted his head, flipped his pillow over, and settled him back. She started to turn away, adjusting her nylon
uniform at the hips, and then turned back, puzzled. Belatedly thinking that there had been something new in his eyes, maybe. Something that hadn't been there before.
She glanced at him thoughtfully, started to turn away again, and he said, 'Hello, Marie.'
She froze, and he could hear an ivory dick as her teeth came suddenly and violently together. Her hand pressed against her chest just above the swell of her breasts. A small gold crucifix hung there. '0-my-God,' she said. 'You're awake. I thought you looked different. How did you know my name?'
'I suppose I must have heard it.' It was hard to talk, terribly hard. His tongue was a sluggish worm, seemingly unlubricated by saliva.
She nodded. 'You've been coming up for some time now. I'd better go down to the nurses' station and have Dr. Brown or Dr. Weizak paged. They'll want to know you're back with us.' But she stayed a moment longer, looking at him with a frank fascination that made him uneasy.
'Did I grow a third eye?' he asked.
She laughed nervously. 'No ...of course not. Excuse me.
His eye caught on his own window ledge and his table pushed up against it. On the ledge was a faded African violet and a picture of Jesus Christ - it was the sort of picture of Jesus his mother favored, with Christ looking as if he was ready to bat dean-up for the New York Yankees or something of a similar clean and athletic nature. But the picture was yellow. Yellow and beginning to curl at the corners. Sudden fear dropped over him like a suffocating blanket. 'Nurse! he called. 'Nurse!'
In the doorway she turned back.
'Where are my get-well cards?' Suddenly it was hard for him to breathe. 'That other guy's got ... didn't anyone send me a card?'
She smiled, but it was forced. It was the smile of some one who is hiding something. Suddenly Johnny wanted her by his bed. He would reach out and touch her. If he could touch her, he would know what she was hiding.
'I'll have the doctor paged,' she said, and left before he could say anything else. He looked at the African violet, at the aging picture of Jesus, baffled and afraid. After a little while, he drifted off to sleep again.
4.
'He was awake,' Marie Michaud said. 'He was completely coherent.'
'Okay,' Dr. Brown answered. 'I'm not doubting you. If he woke up once, he'll wake up again. Probably. It's just a matter of...
Johnny moaned. His eyes opened. They were blank, half rolled up. Then he seemed to see Marie, and his eyes came into focus. He smiled a little. But his face was still slack, as if only his eyes were awake and the rest of him still slept. She had a sudden feeling that he was not looking at her but into her.
'I think he'll be okay,' Johnny said. 'Once they clean that impacted cornea, the eye'll be as good as new. Should be.'
Marie gasped harshly, and Brown glanced at her.
'What is it?'
'He's talking about my boy,' she whispered. 'My Mark.'
'No,' Brown said. 'He's talking in his sleep, that's all Don't make a picture out of an inkblot, Nurse.'
'Yes. Okay. But he's not asleep now, is he?'
'Marie?' Johnny asked. He smiled tentatively. 'I dozed off, didn't I?'
'Yes,' Brown said. 'You were talking in your sleep. Gave Marie here a turn. Were you dreaming?'
'No-oo... not that I remember. What did I say? And who are you?'
'I'm Dr. James Brown. Just like the soul singer. Only I'm a neurologist. You said, "I think he'll be okay once they clean that impacted cornea." I think that was it, wasn't it, Nurse?'
'My boy's going to have that operation,' Marie said. 'My boy Mark.'
'I don't remember anything,' Johnny said. 'I guess I was sleeping.' He looked at Brown. His eyes were clear now, and scared. 'I can't lift my arms. Am I paralyzed?'
'Nope. Try your fingers.'
Johnny did. They all wiggled. He smiled.
'Superfine,' Brown said. 'Tell me your name.'
'John Smith.'
'Good, and your middle name?'
'I don't have one.'
'That's fine, who needs one? Nurse, go down to your station and find out who's in neurology tomorrow. I'd like to start a whole series of tests on Mr. Smith.'
'Yes, Doctor.'
'And you might call Sam Weizak. You'll get him at home or at the golf course.'
'Yes, Doctor.'
'And no reporters, please ... for your life!' Brown was smiling but serious.
'No, of course not.' She left, white shoes squeaking faintly. Her little boy's going to be just fine, Johnny thought. I'll be sure to tell her.
'Dr. Brown,' he said, 'where are my get-well cards? Didn't anybody send me a card?'
'Just a few more questions,' Dr. Brown said smoothly. 'Do you recall your mother's name?'
'Of course I do. Vera.'
'Her maiden name?'
'Nason.'
'Your father's name?'
'Herbert. Herb. And why did you tell her no reporters?'
'Your mailing address?'
'RFD #1, Pownal,' Johnny said promptly, and then stopped. An expression of comic surprise passed across his face. 'I mean ... well, I live in Cleaves Mills now, at 110 North Main Street. Why the hell did I give you my parents' address? I haven't lived there since I was eighteen.'
'And how old are you now?'
'Look it up on my driver's license,' Johnny said. 'I want to know why I don't have any get-well cards. How long have I been in the hospital, anyway? And which hospital is this?'
'It's the Eastern Maine Medical Center. And we'll get to all the rest of your questions if you'll just let me ...
Brown was sitting by the bed in a chair he had drawn over from the corner - the same corner where Johnny had once seen the passage leading away. He was making notes on a clipboard with a type of pen Johnny couldn't remember ever having seen before. It had a thick blue plastic barrel and a fibrous tip. It looked like the strange hybrid offspring of a fountain pen and. a ballpoint.
Just looking at it made that formless dread come back, and without thinking about it, Johnny suddenly seized Dr. Brown's left hand in one of his own. His arm moved creakily, as if there were invisible sixty-pound weights tied to it - a couple below the elbow and a couple above. He captured the doctor's hand in a weak grip and pulled. The funny pen left a thick blue line across the paper.
Brown looked at him, at first only curious. Then his face drained of color. The sharp expression of interest left his eyes and was replaced with a muddy look of fear. He snatched his hand away - Johnny had no power to hold it - and for an instant a look of revulsion crossed the doctor's face, as if he had been touched by a leper.
Then it was gone, and he only looked surprised and disconcerted. 'What did you do that for? Mr. Smith...'
His voice faltered. Johnny's face had frozen in an expression of dawning comprehension. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen something terrible moving and shifting in the shadows, something too terrible to be described or even named.
But it was a fact. It had to be named.
'Fifty-five months?' Johnny asked hoarsely. 'Going on five years? No. Oh my God, no.'
'Mr. Smith,' Brown said, now totally flustered. 'Please, it's not good for you to excite...
Johnny raised his upper body perhaps three inches from the bed and then slumped back, his face shiny with sweat. His eyes rolled helplessly in their sockets. 'I'm twenty-seven?' he muttered. 'Twenty-seven? Oh my Jesus.'
Brown swallowed and heard an audible dick. When Smith had grabbed his hand, he had felt a sudden on-rush of bad feelings, childlike in their intensity; crude images of revulsion had assaulted him. He had found himself remembering a picnic in the country when he had been seven or eight, sitting down and putting his hand in something warm and slippery. He had looked around and had seen that he had put his hand into the maggoty remains of a woodchuck that had lain under a laurel bush all that hot August. He had screamed then, and he felt a little bit like screaming now - except that the feeling was fading, dwindling, to be replaced with a question: How did he know? He touched me and he knew
Then twenty years of education rose up strongly in him, and he pushed the notion aside. There were cases without number of comatose patients who had awakened with a dreamlike knowledge of many of the things that had gone on around them while they were in coma. Like anything else, coma was a matter of degree. Johnny Smith had never been a vegetable; his EEG had never gone flat-line, and if it had, Brown would not be talking with him now. Sometimes being in a coma was a little like being behind a one-way glass. To the beholding eye the patient was completely conked out, but the patient's senses might still continue to function in some low, power-down fashion. And that was the case here, of course.
Marie Michaud came back in. 'Neurology is confirmed, and Dr. Weizak is on his way.'
'I think Sam will have to wait until tomorrow to meet Mr. Smith,' Brown said. 'I want him to have five milligrams of Valium.'
'I don't want a sedative,' Johnny said. 'I want to get out of here. I want to know what happened!'
'You'll know everything in time,' Brown said. 'Right now it's important that you rest.'
'I've been resting for four-and-a-half years!'
'Then another twelve hours won't make much difference,' Brown said inexorably.
A few moments later the nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, and there was the sting of a needle. Johnny began to feel sleepy almost at once. Brown and the nurse began to look twelve feet tall.
'Tell me one thing, at least,' he said. His voice seemed to come from far, far away. Suddenly it seemed terribly important. 'That pen. What do you call that pen?'
'This?' Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. 'It's called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.'
And Johnny did, but the word followed him down into his sleep like a mystic incantation, full of idiot meaning:
Flair... ....... Flair...
5.
Herb put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. From the other room came the sound of the TV, turned up almost all the way. Oral Roberts was talking about football and the healing love of Jesus there was a connection there someplace, but Herb had missed it. Because of the telephone call. Oral's voice boomed and roared. Pretty soon the show would end and Oral would dose it out by confidently telling his audience that something good was going to happen to them. Apparently Oral was right.
My boy, Herb thought. While Vera had prayed for a miracle, Herb had prayed for his boy to die. It was Vera's prayer that had been answered.. What did that mean, and where did it leave him? And what was it going to do to her?
He went into the living room. Vera was sitting on the couch. Her feet, encased in elastic pink mules, were up on a hassock. She was wearing her old gray robe. She was eating popcorn straight from the popper. Since Johnny's accident she had put on nearly forty pounds and her blood pressure had skyrocketed. The doctor wanted to put her on medication, but Vera wouldn't have it - if it was the will of the Lord for her to have the high blood, she said, then she would have it. Herb had once pointed out that the will of the Lord had never stopped her from taking Bufferin when she had a headache. She had answered with her sweetest long-suffering smile and her most potent weapon: silence.
'Who was on the phone?' she asked him, not looking away from the TV. Oral had his arm round the well-known quarterback of an NFC team. He was talking to a hushed multitude. The quarterback was smiling modestly.
.... and you have all heard this fine athlete tell you tonight how he abused his body, his Temple of God. And you have heard...
Herb snapped it off.
'Herbert Smith! ' She nearly spilled her popcorn sitting up. 'I was watching! That was...'
'Johnny woke up.'
.... Oral Roberts and
The words snapped off in her mouth. She seemed to crouch back in her chair, as if he had taken a swing at her.
He looked back, unable to say more, wanting to feel joy but afraid. So afraid.
'Johnny's...' She stopped, swallowed, then tried again. 'Johnny... our Johnny?'
'Yes. He spoke with Dr. Brown for nearly fifteen minutes. Apparently it wasn't that thing they thought ... false-waking... after all. He's coherent. He can move.'
'Johnny's awake?'
Her hands came up to her mouth. The popcorn popper, half full, did a slow dipsy-doodle off her lap and thumped to the rug, spilling popcorn everywhere. Her hands covered the lower half of her face. Above them her eyes got wider and wider still until for a dreadful second, Herb was afraid that they might fall out and dangle by their stalks. Then they dosed. A tiny mewing sound came from behind her hands.
'Vera? Are you all right?'
'O my God I thank You for Your will be done my Johnny You brought me my I knew You would, my Johnny, 0 dear God I will bring You my thanksgiving every day of my life for my Johnny Johnny JOHNNY -, Her voice was rising to an hysterical, triumphant scream. He stepped forward, grabbed the lapels of her robe, and shook her. Suddenly time seemed to have reversed, doubled back on itself like strange cloth - they might have been back on the night when the news of the accident came to them, delivered through that same telephone in that same nook.
By nook or by crook, Herb Smith thought crazily.
'O my precious God my Jesus oh my Johnny the miracle like I said the miracle...'
'Stop it, Vera!'
Her eyes were dark and hazy and hysterical. 'Are you sorry he's awake again? After all these years of making fun of me? Of telling people I was crazy?'
'Vera, I never told anyone you were crazy.'
'You told them with your eyes!' she shouted at him. 'But my God wasn't mocked. Was he, Herbert? Was he?'
'No,' he said. 'I guess not.'
'I told you I told you God had a plan for my Johnny. Now you see his hand beginning to work.' She got up. 'I've got to go to him. I've got to tell him.' She walked toward the closet where her coat hung, seemingly unaware that she was in her robe and nightgown. Her face was stunned with rapture. In some bizarre and almost blasphemous way she reminded him of the way she had looked on the day they were married. Her pink mules crunched popcorn into the rug.
'Vera.'
'I've got to tell him that God's plan...
'Vera.'
She turned to him, but her eyes were far away, with her Johnny.
He went to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
'You tell him that you love him... that you prayed... waited ... watched. Who has a better right? You're his mother. You bled for him. Haven't I watched you bleed for him over the last five years? I'm not sorry he's back with us, you were wrong to say that. I don't think I can make of it what you do, but I'm not sorry. I bled for him, too.'
'Did you?' Her eyes were flinty, proud, and unbelieving.
'Yes. And I'm going to tell you something else, Vera. You're going to keep your trap shut about God and miracles and Great Plans until Johnny's up on his feet and able to...'
'I'll say what I have to say!'
... and able to think what he's doing. What I'm saying is that you're going to give him a chance to make something of it for himself before you start in on him.'
'You have no right to talk to me that way! No right at all!'
'I'm exercising my right as Johnny's dad,' he said grimly. 'Maybe for the last time in my life. And you better not get in my way, Vera. You understand? Not you, not God. not the bleeding holy Jesus. You follow?'
She glared at him sullenly and said nothing.
'He's going to have enough to do just coping with the idea that he's been out like a light for four-and-a-half years. We don't know if he'll be able to walk again, in spite of the therapist that came in. We do know there'll have to be an operation on his ligaments, if he even wants to try; Weizak told us that. Probably more than one. And more therapy, and a lot of it's going to hurt him like hell. So tomorrow you're just going to be his mother.'
'Don't you dare talk to me that way! Don't you dare!'
'If you start sermonizing, Vera, I'll drag you out of his room by the hair of your head.'
She stared at him, white-faced and trembling. Joy and fury were at war in her eyes.
'You better get dressed,' Herb said. 'We ought to get going.'
It was a long, silent ride up to Bangor. The happiness they should have felt between them was not there; only Vera's hot and militant joy. She sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, her Bible in her lap, open to the twenty-third Psalm.
6.
At quarter of nine the next morning, Marie came into Johnny's room and said, 'Your mom and dad are here, if you're up to seeing them.'
'Yes, I'd like that.' He felt much better this morning, stronger and less disoriented. But the thought of seeing them scared him a little. In terms of his conscious recollection, he had seen them about five months ago. His father had been working on the foundation of a house that had now probably been standing for three years or more. His mom had fixed him home-baked beans and apple pie for dessert and had clucked over how thin he was getting.
He caught Marie's hand weakly as she turned to go.
'Do they look all right? I mean...'
'They look fine.'
'Oh. Good.'
'You can only have half an hour with them now. Some more time this evening if the neurology series doesn't prove too tiring.'
'Dr. Brown's orders?'
'And Dr. Weizak's.'
'All right. For a while. I'm not sure how long I want to be poked and prodded.'
Marie hesitated.
'Something?' Johnny asked.
'No... not now. You must be anxious to see your folks. I'll send them in.'
He waited, nervous. The other bed was empty; the cancer patient had been moved out while Johnny slept off his Valium pop.
The door opened. His mother and father came in. Johnny felt simultaneous shock and relief: shock because they had aged, it was all true; relief because the changes in them did not yet seem mortal. And if that could be said of them, perhaps it could be said of him as well.
But something in him had changed, changed drastically - and it might be mortal.
That was all he had time to think before his mother's arms were around him, her violet sachet strong in his nostrils, and she was whispering: 'Thank God, Johnny thank God, thank God you're awake.'
He hugged her back as best he could his arms still had no power to grip and fell away quickly and suddenly, in six seconds, he knew how it was with her, what she thought, and what was going to happen to her. Then it was gone, fading like that dream of the dark corridor. But when she broke the embrace to look at him, the look of zealous joy in her eyes had been replaced with one of thoughtful consideration.
The words seemed to come out of him of their own:
'Let them give you the medicine, Mom. That's best.'
Her eyes widened, she wet her lips and then Herb was beside her, his eyes filled with tears. He had lost some weight - not as much as Vera had put on, but he was noticeably thinner. His hair was going fast but the face was the same, homely and plain and well-loved. He took a large brakeman's bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his eyes with it. Then he stuck out his hand.
'Hi, son,' he said. 'Good to have you back.'
Johnny shook his father's hand as well as he could; his pale and strengthless fingers were swallowed up in his father's red hand. Johnny looked from one to the other -his mother in a bulky powder-blue pantsuit, his father in a really hideous houndstooth jacket that looked as if it should belong to a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Kansas -and he burst into tears.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry, it's just that...'
'You go on,' Vera said, sitting on the bed beside him. Her face was calm and clear now. There was more mother than madness in it. 'You go on and cry, sometimes that's best.'
And Johnny did.
7.
Herb told him his Aunt Germaine had died. Vera told him that the money for the Pownal Community Hall had finally been raised and the building had commenced a month ago, as soon as the frost was out of the ground. Herb added that he had put in a bid, but he guessed honest work cost too dear for them to want to pay. 'Oh, shush, you sore loser,' Vera said.
There was a little silence and then Vera spoke again.' I hope you realize that your recovery is a miracle of God, Johnny. The doctors despaired. In Matthew, chapter nine, we read...
'Vera,' Herb said warningly.
'Of course it was a miracle, Mom. I know that.'
'You.. .you do?'
'Yes. And I want to talk 'about it with you... hear your ideas about what that means ... just as soon as I get on my feet again.'
She was staring at him, open-mouthed. Johnny glanced past her at his father and their eyes met for a moment. Johnny saw great relief in his father's eyes. Herb nodded imperceptibly.
'A Conversion!' Vera ejaculated loudly. 'My boy has had a Conversion! Oh, praise God!'
'Vera, hush,' Herb said. 'Best to praise God in a lower voice when you're in the hospital.'
'I don't see how anybody could not call it a miracle, Mom. And we're going to talk about it a lot. Just as 'soon as I'm out of here.'
'You're going to come home,' she said. 'Back to the house where you were raised. I'll nurse you back to health and we'll pray for understanding.'
He was smiling at her, but holding the smile was an effort. 'You bet. Mom, would you go down to the nurses' station and ask Marie if I can have some juice? Or maybe some ginger ale? I guess I'm not used to talking, and my throat...'
'Of course I will.' She kissed his cheek and stood up. 'Oh, you're so thin. But I'll fix that when I get you home.' She left the room, casting a single victorious glance at Herb as she went. They heard her shoes tapping off down the hall.
'How long has she been that way?' Johnny asked quietly.
Herb shook his head. 'It's come a little at a time since your accident. But it had its start long before that. You know. You remember.'
'Is she..,'
'I don't know. There are people down South that handle snakes. I'd call them crazy. She doesn't do that, How are you, Johnny? Really?'
'I don't know,' Johnny said. 'Daddy, where's Sarah?'
Herb leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. 'I don't like to tell you this, John, but...'
'She's married? She got married?'
Herb didn't answer. Without looking directly at Johnny, he nodded his head.
'Oh, God,' Johnny said hollowly. 'I was afraid of that.'
'She's been Mrs. Walter Hazlett for going on three years. He's a lawyer. They have a baby boy. John... no one really believed you were going to wake up. Except for your mother, of course. None of us had any reason to believe you would wake up.' His voice was trembling now, hoarse with guilt. 'The doctors said ... ah, never mind what they said. Even I gave you up. I hate like hell to admit it, but it's true: All I can ask you is try to understand about me... and Sarah.'
He tried to say that he did understand, but all that would come out was a sickly sort of croak. His body felt sick and old, and suddenly he was drowning in his sense of loss. The lost time was suddenly sitting on him like a load of bricks - a real thing, not just a vague concept.
'Johnny, don't take on. There are other things. Good things.'
'It's ... going to take some getting used to,' he managed.
'Yeah. I know.'
'Do you ever see her?'
'We write back and forth once in a while. We got acquainted after your accident. She's a nice girl, real nice. She's still teaching at Cleaves, but I understand she is getting done this June. She's happy, John.'
'Good,' he said thickly. 'I'm glad someone is.'
'Son...
'I hope you're not telling secrets,' Vera Smith said brightly, coming back into the room. She had an ice-clogged pitcher in one hand. 'They said you weren't ready for fruit juice, Johnny, so I brought you the ginger ale.
'That's fine, Mom.'
She looked from Herb to Johnny and back to Herb again. 'Have you been telling secrets? Why the long faces?'
'I was just telling Johnny he's going to have to work hard if he wants to get out of here,' said Herb. 'Lots of therapy.'
'Now why would you want to talk about that now?' She poured ginger ale into Johnny's glass. 'Everything's going to be fine now. You'll see.'
She popped a flexible straw into the glass and handed it to him.
'Now you drink all of it,' she said, smiling. 'It's good for you.'
Johnny did drink all of it. It tasted bitter.