by Dean Koontz
Amy winced at the other girl's choice of words.
“All you have to do,” Liz said, “is grit your teeth and sit through all the shouting, and then they’ll pay for the abortion.”
“No. You're forgetting that my family is Catholic. They think abortion is a sin.”
“They might think it's a sin, but they won't force a young girl like you to ruin her whole life. Catholics get abortions all the time, no matter what they say.”
“I'm sure you're right,” Amy said. “But my mother is too devout. She won't ever agree to it.”
“You really think she'd be willing to live with the shame of an illegitimate grandchild right there in her own house?”
“To hurt me . . . and mainly to teach me a lesson . . . yes.”
“You're sure?”
“Positive.”
They sat in glum silence for a while.
On the jukebox, Donna Summer was singing about the price she had to pay for love.
Suddenly Liz snapped her fingers. “I've got it!”
“What?”
“Even Catholics approve of abortion if the mother's life is in danger, don't they?”
“Not all Catholics. Just the most liberal ones approve of it even under those circumstances.”
“And your old lady isn't liberal.”
“Hardly.”
“But your father's better, isn't he? At least about the religious stuff”
“He's not so fanatical as Mama. He might agree to let me have an abortion if he truly thought the baby would destroy my health.”
“All right. So you make him think it's destroying your mental health. Dig it? You get suicidal. You threaten to kill yourself if you can't have an abortion. Act like you're half crazy. Be hysterical. Be irrational. Scream, cry, then laugh without having any reason to laugh, then cry again, break things . . . If all of that doesn't convince them, then you can make a phony attempt to slash your wrists, just a big enough cut to smear some blood around. They won't be sure whether you botched it on purpose or by accident, and they won't want to take any chances.”
Amy slowly shook her head. “It wouldn't work.”
“Why not?”
“I'm not a good actress.”
“I'll bet you'd fool them.”
“Carrying on like that, pretending . . . Well, I'd feel stupid.”
“Would you rather feel pregnant?”
“There must be another way.”
“Like what?”
“I don't know.”
“Face it, kid. This is your best shot.”
“I don't know.”
“I do know.”
Amy sipped her Coke. After a couple of minutes of thought, she said, “Maybe you're right. Maybe I'll try the suicide bit.”
“It'll work. Just as smooth as glass. You'll see. When will you tell them?”
“Well, I had been thinking about breaking the news right after graduation if I couldn't find another way out by then.”
“That's two weeks! Listen, kid, the sooner the better.”
“Two weeks won't hurt anything. Maybe in that time I'll find some way to come up with the money myself.”
“You won't.”
“Maybe.”
“You won't,” Liz said sharply. “Anyway, you're only seventeen. You probably couldn't get an abortion without your parents' consent, not even if you had the money to pay for it. I'll bet you have to be at least eighteen before they let you have one on your own say-so.”
Amy hadn't considered that possibility. She simply didn't think of herself as a minor, she felt a hundred and ten years old.
“Get your head on straight, kid,” Liz said. “You wouldn't take my advice about the pill. Now get your shit together this time, will you? Please, please, for Christ's sake, listen to me. The sooner the better.”
Amy realized that Liz was right. She leaned back in the booth, away from the table, and a wave of resignation swept through her. She sagged as if she were a marionette whose strings had been cut. “Okay. The sooner the better. I'll tell them tonight or tomorrow.”
“Tonight.”
“I don't think I have the strength for it tonight. If I'm going to put on a big suicide act, I'll need to have my wits about me. I'll have to be rested.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Liz said. “No later than tomorrow. Get it over with. Listen, we have a great summer coming up. If I go west at the end of the year, like I'm hoping to, this'll probably be the last summer you and I will have together. So we've got to do it up right. We've got to make a lot of memories to last us a long while. Lots of sun, some good dope to smoke, a couple of new guys . . . It'll be a blast. Except it won't be so terrific if you're walking around all bloated and preggy.”
* * *
For Joey Harper, Sunday turned out to be a fine day.
The morning started with Mass and Sunday school, of course, which was as boring as usual, but then the day improved rapidly. When his father stopped at Royal City News for the Sunday papers, Joey found a batch of new comic books on the rack and had enough coins in his pockets to buy the two best issues. Then his mother made chicken and waffles for lunch, which was one of his favorite things in the whole wide world.
After lunch his father gave him money to go to the Rialto. That was a theater, a revival house that played only old movies. It was six blocks from their house, and he was allowed to ride his bicycle that far, but no farther. The Rialto was showing two monster flicks for the Sunday matinee—The Thing and It Came from Outer Space. Both pictures were super.
Joey liked scary stories. He wasn't exactly sure why he did. Sometimes, sitting in a dark theater, watching some slimy thing creep up on the hero, Joey almost peed in his pants. But he loved every minute of it.
After the movies he went home for dinner, and his mother made cheeseburgers and baked beans, which was even better than chicken and waffles, better than just about anything he could think of. He ate until he thought he'd bust.
Amy came home from The Dive at eight o'clock, an hour and a half before Joey's bedtime, so that he was still awake when she found the rubber snake hanging in her closet. She stormed down the hall, calling his name, and she chased him around his room until she caught him. After she had tickled him and had made him promise never to frighten her that way again (a promise they both knew he wouldn't keep), he persuaded her to play a sixty-minute time-limit game of Monopoly, and that was a whole lot of fun. He beat her, as usual, for an almost grown-up person, she sure didn't know much about financial wheeling and dealing.
He loved Amy more than anybody. Maybe that was wrong of him. You were supposed to love your mother and father most of all. Well, after God. God came first. Then your mother and father. But Mama was hard to love. She was all the time praying with you or praying for you or giving you a lecture on the proper way to behave, and she told you over and over again that she cared that you grew up the right way, but she somehow never showed you that she cared. It was all talk. Daddy was easier to love, but he wasn't around that much. He was busy doing law stuff, probably saving innocent men from the electric chair and things like that, and when he was home he spent a lot of time alone, working on the miniature layouts he built for model trains, he didn't like you messing around in his workshop.
Which left Amy. She was there a lot. And she was always there when you needed her. She was the nicest person Joey knew, the nicest he ever expected to know, and he was glad that he had her for a sister instead of that crabby, nasty Veronica Culp, who his best friend, Tommy Culp, had to share a house with.
Later, after the Monopoly game, when he was in his pajamas, teeth brushed, and ready for bed, he said his prayers with Amy, which was much better than saying them with Mama. Amy said them faster than Mama did, and she sometimes changed a word here and there to make the prayers a little bit funny. Like, instead of saying, “Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea,” she might say, “Mary, Mother of God, hear my flea.” She always made Joey giggle, but he had to be careful not to laugh too lo
ud because Mama would wonder what was so funny about prayers, and then everyone would be in trouble.
Amy tucked him in and kissed him and finally left him alone in the moonglow of his night-light. He snuggled down in the covers and fell asleep almost instantly.
Sunday had been a fine day indeed.
But Monday began badly.
Not long after midnight, in the first few minutes of the new day, Joey was awakened by the spooky, mush-mouthed sound of his mother's whispered conversation. As on other occasions, he kept his eyes closed and pretended to be sleeping.
“My little angel . . . maybe not an angel at all . . . inside . . .”
She was really sloshed, pickled. According to Tommy Culp, when somebody was falling-down drunk, you said they were “pissed.” Mama was sure pissed tonight.
She rambled on about how she couldn't decide whether he was good or bad, pure or evil, about how there might be something ugly hidden inside of him and waiting to break out, about how she didn't want to bring devils into the world, about how it was God's work to rid the world of such evil any way you could, and she talked about how she had killed somebody named Victor and hoped she would never have to do the same thing to her precious angel.
Joey started to shiver and was deathly afraid that she would discover he was awake. He didn't know what she might do if she knew he had heard her weird mumblings.
When he felt on the brink of telling her to shut up and go away, Joey tried desperately to tune her out. He forced himself to think of something else. He concentrated on putting together a detailed mental picture of the big, vicious alien creature in The Thing, which he had seen just that afternoon at the Rialto. The thing in the picture was like a man, only much bigger. With gigantic hands that could tear you to pieces in a minute. And sunken eyes full of fire. And yet it was a plant. An alien plant that was almost indestructible and lived on blood. He could vividly recall the scene in which the scientists were looking for the alien behind a series of doors, they didn't find it, and they finally gave up, and then the very next door they opened, when they weren't expecting anything, the monster jumped out at them, growling and spitting and eager to eat somebody. Remembering the unexpected fury of the monster's attack, Joey felt his blood turn to ice as it had in the theater. That scene was so spine-chilling, so tingly-icky-awful that it made his mother's drunken rambling seem harmless by comparison. The things that happen to people in horror movies were so terrible that they made the scary things in life seem tame. Suddenly Joey wondered if that was why he liked those spooky stories so much.
6
MAMA WAS always the first up in the morning. She went to Mass every day of the week, even when she was sick, even when she had a really bad hangover. During the summer, when school was out, she would expect Amy and Joey to attend services and take Holy Communion nearly as often as she did.
On this Monday morning in May, however, Amy still lay in bed, listening to her mother move through the house and then into the garage, which was directly under Amy's bedroom. The Toyota started on the second try, and the automatic garage door rumbled up, coming to rest with a solid thud that rattled Amy's windows.
After her mother had gone, Amy got out of bed, showered, dressed for school, and went downstairs to the kitchen. Her father and Joey were finishing a breakfast of toasted English muffins and orange juice.
“You're running late this morning,” her father said. “Better grab a bite quick. We're leaving in five minutes.”
It's such a beautiful morning,” Amy said. “I think I'll walk to school today.”
“Are you sure you have enough time?”
“Oh, yes. Plenty of time.”
“Me too,” Joey said. “I want to walk with Amy.”
“The elementary school is three times as far as the high school,” Paul Harper said. “Your legs would be worn down to your knees by the time you got there.”
“Nah,” Joey said. “I can make it. I'm rough and ready.”
“One mean hombre,” his father agreed. “But just the same, you'll ride with me.”
“Aw, shoot!” Joey said.
“Bang,” Amy said, pointing a finger at him.
Joey grinned.
“Come on, hombre,” his father said. “Let's get moving.”
Amy stood at one of the living room windows, watching the man and the boy drive away in the family's Pontiac.
She had lied to her father. She wasn't going to walk to school. In fact she didn't even intend to go to school at all today.
She returned to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, poured a steaming mug of it for herself. Then she sat down at the kitchen table to wait for her mother to get back from Mass.
Last night, tossing restlessly in bed, plotting how best to make her confession, she had decided that she should tell her mother first. If Amy sat them down and told them both at the same time, Mama's reaction to the news would be calculated to impress not only her daughter but her husband, she would be even tougher on Amy than she might be if Amy told her in private. And Amy also knew that if she told her father first, it would look as if she were sneaking around behind her mother's back, trying to drive a wedge between her parents, trying to make an ally of her father. If Mama thought that was the case, she would be twice as difficult as she otherwise might have been. By telling Mama first, by according her at least that much special respect, Amy hoped to improve her chances of getting the abortion she wanted.
She finished the mug of coffee. She poured herself another, finished that one, too.
The ticking of the kitchen clock seemed to grow louder and louder, until it was a drumbeat to which her nerves jumped in sympathy.
When Mama finally came home from Mass, entering the kitchen through the connecting door to the garage, Amy had never been more tense. The back and underarms of her blouse were damp with perspiration. In spite of the hot coffee, there seemed to be a lump of ice in her stomach.
“Morning, Mama.”
Her mother stopped in surprise, still holding the door open, the shadowy interior of the garage I visible behind her. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to—”
“You should be in school.”
I stayed home so I could—”
“Isn't this final exam week?”
“No. That's next week. This week we just review material for the tests.”
“That's important, too.”
“Yes, but I don't think I'll be going to school today.”
As Mama closed and locked the door of the garage, she said, “What's wrong? Are you sick?”
“Not exactly. I—”
“What do you mean—not exactly?” she asked, putting her purse on the counter by the sink. “You're either sick or you're not. And if you aren't, you should be in school.”
“I have to talk to you,” Amy said.
Her mother came to the table and stared down at her. “Talk? About what?”
Amy couldn't meet the woman's eyes. She looked away, turned her gaze to the muddy residue of cold coffee in the bottom of her mug.
“Well?” Mama asked.
Although Amy had drunk a lot of coffee, her mouth was so dry that her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed, licked her parched lips, cleared her throat, and at last said, “I have to withdraw some money from my savings account.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need . . . four hundred dollars.”
“That's ridiculous.”
“No. I really need it, Mama.”
“For what?”
“I'd rather not say.”
Her mother was astonished. “You'd rather not say?”
“That's right.”
The astonishment turned to consternation. “You want to withdraw four hundred dollars that's meant for your college tuition, and you don't want to say what you're going to do with it?”
“Mama, please. After all, I earned it.”
The consternation turned to anger. “Now you listen to
me and listen good, young lady. Your father does well enough at his law practice, but he doesn't do all that well. He's not F. Lee Bailey. You want to go to college, and college is expensive these days. You're going to have to help pay for it. In fact you're going to have to pay for most of it. We'll let you live here, of course, and we'll pay for your food, your clothes, your medical bills, while you're going to the junior college, but you'll have to meet the tuition out of your savings. When you go away to the university in a couple of years, we'll send you some money for living expenses, but you'll have to pay for that tuition, too. We just can't do more than that. We'll be sacrificing as it is.”
If you didn't spend so much money trying to impress Father O'Hara with your devotion to St. Mary's Church, if you and Daddy didn't contribute a tithe and a half to show what good people you are, maybe you'd be able to do more for your own children, Amy thought. Charity starts at home, Mama. Isn't that what the Bible tells us? Besides, if you hadn't made me tithe to St. Mary's, I'd have that extra four hundred bucks now that I need it.
Amy wished she could say all of that, but she didn't dare. She didn't want to completely alienate her mother before she even had a chance to mention the pregnancy. Anyway, no matter how she tried to express what she was thinking, no matter what words she chose, she would sound petty and selfish.
But she wasn't selfish, damn it.
She knew it was a good thing to give money to the Church, but there had to be limits. And you had to give for the right reasons. Otherwise it didn't mean anything. Sometimes Amy suspected that her mother hoped to buy a place in Heaven, and that was definitely the wrong reason to give to the Church.
Amy forced herself to look up at her mother and smile. “Mama, I've already got that small scholarship for next year. If I work real hard I'll probably get scholarships every year, even if they're all just small ones. And I'll be working at The Dive summers and weekends. With what I'll be earning, plus what I've got in the bank already, I'll have more than enough to pay for my own way. By the time I get to Ohio State, I won't need to ask you and Daddy for help, not even for living expenses. I can spare that four hundred dollars right now, Mama. I can spare it easy.”
