Out of this mellow perfection Will's old Buick appeared, rattling good-naturedly down the hill. As it approached the house, a stray sunbeam turned the windshield into a mirror, creating the illusion that the humpbacked antique was unpiloted. Then Will's boyish features materialized behind the glass, his dimpled smile sparkling in the sunlight.
"You hornin' in on my gal?" he said to the shepherd as he climbed out of the car, his tan flight jacket and wash-faded Levi's fitting smoothly into this picture-perfect setting. Chainsaw trotted out to greet him, pressing a wet muzzle into Will's open palm. "Eh, boy? You tryna swipe my gal?" The dog only wagged its tail.
"All set?" Will said, his eyes resting speculatively on Kelly's tote bag before rising to meet hers.
"You bet," Kelly said happily. "Let's boogie."
And they were off, Chainsaw trailing them up the hill.
They had wine with their meal and, afterward, curled together in a love seat in the lake-facing lounge, brandy by a maplewood fire. The alcohol banished Will's sometimes stifling shyness, and before long he was regaling Kelly with tales of his childhood and yarns about his job as a slag-train engineer at the Nickel Ridge smelter. He was a fine, sensitive man, and Kelly found herself increasingly drawn to him. During the drive out from the city, she'd forsaken the picturesque sights and sat cradled in the crook of his arm, allowing herself an almost forgotten feeling of safety. It felt good to have his arm around her.
As the evening progressed and the alcohol lightened her mood, Kelly found herself reflecting on the items she'd stuffed into her tote bag. Along with a fresh change of clothes, she'd packed a gossamer nightie, a long, ghostly thing cut shamelessly high up the thigh and breasted with delicate lace. Apparently undirected, her fingers had snatched up the nightie and buried it deep in the bag. . . but what had her intentions been?
Now midnight had come and gone, and the proprietors were winding things down for the evening. Both she and Will were too far gone to make the drive home safely. . . and had she known this was going to happen? Willed it, perhaps? This place was famous for its intimate chalets.
Suddenly the question seemed to hang unanswered between them.
Breaking the momentary silence, Will giggled and indicated the bustling staff. "Looks like they're gettin' ready to pitch us out."
"Think you can drive?"
Will giggled again. "No worries." He started to get up, then sat down again. "In a while."
Kelly laughed. Along with her glow, a cool sexual excitement had begun to flutter at the base of her tummy. "Want to pool our pennies and rent a room?" she blurted, the words leaping out before she could intercept them.
Will looked as if he'd swallowed an ice cube. "Er. . . together?"
"Yes, together," Kelly said, feeling suddenly agreeably light-headed. "C'mon. Let's go see if there's a vacancy."
They shuffled arm in arm to the desk, each supporting the other. Kelly hadn't been this tipsy in years, and it felt fine. One of the proprietor's daughters, a blue-eyed girl of about sixteen, smiled knowingly, and Kelly thought, Are we being that obvious?
Agreeing to share the cost, they signed themselves in and then retrieved their things from the Buick. After a brief inspection of the chalet, they sat in lawn chairs on the elevated deck, Kelly wrapped in a blanket against the creeping autumn chill, Will tucked in beside her. The night sky was sensational—moonless and vacant of cloud, stars like flung diamonds scattered so densely they cast their own silvery light—and they lay silent for a time in awe of it.
Then, surprising Kelly, Will slipped out to the car and came back with a Coleman cooler. From it he extracted an iced bottle of Mumm's, two plastic wineglasses with removable bases, and a candle. The candle he seated in a lathed brass holder, obviously new, and lit with a match from a complimentary pack.
As he poured the bubbly, Kelly said, "Did you plan this little sleep-over, Will Chatam?"
Will blushed furiously, his face a throbbing beet red in the candlelight. Still half looped, he accepted the implication in good humor, as Kelly had intended it.
"Moi?" he said, handing her a glass of spritzing amber fluid.
"Yes," Kelly said merrily. "Toi!" She was content, ridiculously so—but something about the champagne chipped the edge off her devil-may-care mood. Suddenly the old voices were grumbling again, tossing up all the old warnings.
Wait, they cautioned her. Don't be so eager to undress. Her heart, though it had soared this evening, now reminded her that it had been battered before. Its walls were weak. One more kick and it might give up for good. In the space of an instant, her physical readiness, her healthy hunger, for Will's embrace had turned into a frightened, childlike watchfulness.
Kelly's smile slipped away. In that same instant Will seemed to sober. He set his wineglass on the trestle table and sat on the foot of Kelly's lawn chair. As he spoke, he stroked her bare foot.
"No, Kelly. I didn't plan it."
And she believed him.
"When we decided to come up here and I went home to get ready, I found myself just. . . grabbing things, without thinking." His blush had faded, but his words came haltingly. "Since meeting you, Kelly, I. . . well, I've been happy. That's the best way I can think of to describe it. And the thought of coming up here with you. . . I guess I got pretty excited." He looked down at her foot. His touch was warm and arousing. "To be alone with you, Kelly, away. . . it turned me kind of crazy. So I just started grabbing things. I didn't mean anything by it."
Touched, Kelly took his hand. "I know that, Will." She chuckled. "Hey, I'm just as bad. You should see some of the things I stuffed into that bag. . . or maybe you shouldn't." Her smile came back then, genuine and only for him. "I like you, Will. I like you a lot."
"Really?" Will said, his expression like that of a lottery winner.
"Really," Kelly said, and kissed his hand.
They were quiet then, content in their closeness and growing affection. In the midst of that quiet a shooting star streaked across the top of the sky, seeming to go on forever before winking out at the rim of the globe. In its afterglow, Kelly made a silent wish. More fiercely, Will did, too.
When it was time to go in—and Kelly was still not sure what she wanted to do—Will spoke again.
"Kelly, there's something else I want to tell you. I hope you won't think I'm weird or that I don't find you attractive, because believe me, I do. But. . . I just want to sleep with you tonight. Beside you." A lump formed in Kelly's throat. "When I was in high school, I played the field a bit. You know. Fooled around. But it didn't suit me. I can't just. . . do it. For fun." He was beginning to struggle, and Kelly took his hand again, silently urging him on. "I cared for someone once, a long time ago, and it didn't work out. I think. . . being with her that way, too soon, made it harder when it was suddenly over. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly," Kelly said, relieved to have the decision taken out of her hands. . . and a little disappointed. "Let's go inside."
Smiling, Will slid the patio doors shut behind them.
SIXTEEN
The wheels tramped over his legs with punishing slowness, leaving him nerveless in the road, that horrific snap! of bone—like teeth chunking into rock candy—reverberating in his skull. He could feel the sun baking his face, the sting of sweat in his eyes. He could feel Kelly's cool shadow pooling around him. . .
And then a tug, the same Scotch tape tug he'd experienced on the night he had nearly died.
A tug. . .
And then he was afloat in the dense summer air, gazing down with cool detachment at the final moments of his normal life, watching his lover weep and the transport carve its ravening path through the bush. Floating nearer, he saw something else—his own lips moving as Kelly leaned over him on bloody knees.
He drifted closer, trying to hear what his last words had been; closer, and he could smell Kelly's sweat mingled with the sharper tang of her fear; closer, and now he could hear his own labored breathing. . . and words, gurgling, half-whisp
ered words. . .
"Uhmm. . . pleassse. . . help me. . . Mommm. . .”
With a force doubling that of the Michelins rolling over his legs, Peter's dream eye was jerked up and away from the scene, leaving the earth behind with the thrust of a moon-bound spacecraft.
And in his heart such a volatile mixture of anguish and fury roiled together that Peter had to scream to diffuse its potency. In his extremity, he'd cried out to his mother like a frightened child. In his direst moment, he'd beckoned to the pathetic gin-swill she'd become, to the witch who had left him for dead.
Love and hate clashed within him in bloody hand-to-hand combat. In the same stroke he wanted to tear out his mother's heart, dance on her twitching remains, howl like the warrior triumphant. . . and embrace her in loving forgiveness, bury his head in her breast and purge the pain through his tears.
The perception of skyward acceleration changed suddenly, leveling out and sharply increasing. In an instant the sensation of forward motion became a smeary, breathtaking blur. He was in a corridor now, narrow as a mail slot and infinitely tall, whistling along like a bullet with eyes. A U-shaped pocket of air formed in front of him, causing a resistance he could feel against the crown of his head like a restraining hand. Cranking some interior joystick, he compressed that pocket to a blister—
Then all resistance vanished and he was highballing through space—Light speed, he thought in the awesome clarity of this dream—the sheer exhilaration of it dousing the fires of his rage. Unable to help himself, he twisted his form through a series of deliberate spirals, kissing like a pinball off the flickering neon sheets the walls around him had become.
From someplace in the unseeable distance, faint but familiar music found his ears. Like a moth drawn to light, he bore down on its source—
And in an eyeblink his transit had ceased.
He was in a room he'd never been in before, strange. . . and yet not strange. Behind him stood his piano, its fallboard closed like a coffin lid, its surface flawlessly polished. On the lid near its center stood a tacky sort of shrine, a gaudy memorial to himself, with the eight-by-ten grad photo he'd given to his mother tinged in candles and cheap plastic flowers. It infuriated him to see it there, and with muscles that magically responded, he flung out an arm to sweep it away—
But his arm passed through it, leaving it untouched.
That music. . .
It was the sonata, the last thing he'd played, the memory of it scratchy with years. But no. . . it was taped music, he could see the revolving spools of the recorder over the back of the couch in the next room. Moving closer, he realized it wasn't a separate room after all, but a section of one larger room that had been unfashionably partitioned off with a planter-divider and the bulk of the couch itself.
There were other familiar items around, bits of his past grafted into this drab room, and Peter examined each of them in turn. Above a mock fireplace hung the big, artless K-Mart oil painting he and Sam had pooled their resources to buy for their parents' anniversary twelve years ago. Seeing it now, Peter felt the same twinge of embarrassment he always felt when he remembered how excited the two of them had been, buying an original oil painting for their folks. Later he'd seen at least a dozen duplicates of that same "original" at one of those parking-lot art shows that come and go like a dream. . . and at half the price they'd paid. To his right, on a dusty knickknack shelf, stood the "World's Best Mom" figure he'd bought and then hand-painted for one of her birthdays. And there were other things: the braided oval rug, now irretrievably soiled and uncoiling, that had lain at the foot of his bed; a row of athletic trophies, all of them his, neatly arranged on the mantel, the—
There was a moan, a plea from a tortured dream, and Peter whirled to scan the room. It had come from behind him, from the couch.
He noticed something then that had evaded him before—a pale hand dangling over the armrest, its limp fingers loosely clasping a tilted, almost empty bottle of whiskey whose base rested on the end table next to the couch. The hand twitched slightly, nearly losing the bottle; then it was still.
Not for the first time, the remarkable detail of this dream struck Peter in a concrete moment of thought. Curious, he drifted closer to the couch, intent on discovering who belonged to that hand. . .
But the music swelled, rising in a sweet crescendo, and now Peter remembered that day, the sweet power of making that music, the smooth feel of the keys as his fingertips whispered across them, each touch a fleeting embrace. And later, Kelly moving beneath him in a new kind of crescendo.
He found himself back at the Yamaha, brushing its lid with his palm, almost. . . feeling it. There was a tiny gouge in the wood, a fleck of embedded glass.
That hadn't been there before. . .
He sat on the bench, fingered the curve of the fallboard—and now he could feel it, its smoothness, its substance, its weight.
Ecstatic, he lifted the cover, baring the keys, stroking them tenderly. . .
And as the last chord of the sonata sounded on the tape, he arranged his fingers in the remembered positions and pressed. The chord, rich and clean, rose from the piano like a phantom, filling his heart with joy.
He was playing again, actually play—
"Peter?"
Peter flinched as if stung. That voice. . .
"Peter?"
There was a sudden clatter from the direction of the couch—the bottle tipping over, liquid gurgling out, an ashtray wobbling to the rug. Then Peter saw five pallid fingers crawl up the backrest, a vampire's fingers dislodging the lid of its daylight sleeping quarters. . . only these fingers belonged to a woman.
And that voice—
"Peter? Is that. . .”
Then there was a face above the fingers, a familiar face—no, a cruel caricature of a familiar face. It was in the eyes.
It was—
(no not her please don't let it be her)
his mother.
"Peter?" Her jaundiced eyes searched as if blind. "My baby?"
Peter hammered both fists into the keys.
And the drunken caricature came alive, clambering to its feet, lurching over the back of the couch with outspread arms.
On the tape, applause hissed eerily out—
And Peter awoke in his ICU bed, his mother's sobs and the spoiled-meat taste of loathing stalking him back. Hoaxed by the magical renewal of his body in the dream, he tried to sit up. . .
But of course he couldn't.
Despairingly, he wept.
Sam was there when his brother awoke from his coma. He'd been there almost constantly over the past five days. When Peter looked at him, Sam rose from his chair and lay beside his brother on the bed, being careful not to jostle the tube in his mouth. He stayed that way, ignoring the protests of the staff, until Peter slept soundly again. Then he made his way home.
In the living room he switched off the reel-to-reel, ending its monotonous flapping, then started down the hallway to his room. The door to his mother's bedroom stood ajar, and although he didn't want to, Sam peeked inside, half expecting to see her snoring shape sprawled-over by some grizzled buffoon. But the bed was empty. No mother, no company, nothing.
Suddenly Sam felt afraid.
Where was she? It was ten past four in the morning. Had she fallen down drunk in some dark corner and fractured her skull? Had some redneck taken her home and gutted her with a hunting knife? An image of his mother's body, naked and motionless in a dead-woman's sprawl, assaulted Sam's weary mind.
He was partway down the hallway when he heard the sobbing.
Sam found his mother in the bathroom, huddled in the tub behind the stained shower curtain, a shapeless nightdress cowling her body. Like a toddler with a blanket, she clutched an empty whiskey bottle to her neck. Black eyeliner ran down her cheeks like the tears of a tragic clown. Her sobs were like laughter. Crazy laughter.
"He was here, Sammy," Leona said, her breath rustling in her throat. "Your dear sweet brother was here."
Sam's flesh crawled in cold handfuls.
His mother began to rock.
SEVENTEEN
I expressly refused you permission to do that," Peter said huskily. He was still hoarse from the tube in his throat.
Dr. Lowe fingered his collar. Behind him, arranged in a tight semicircle, a group of students looked on in horrified awe. Earlier that morning Dr. Lowe had come in to extubate Peter, but had neglected to mention the electronic device he'd instructed the surgeons to implant beneath Peter's skin. Peter had found out for himself when a nurse came in to calibrate it.
"It had to be done," Lowe said in his own defense. "Without this device, you'd be stuck on a ventilator indefinitely."
Peter's face reddened to the cast of old brick. "You had no right!"
Lowe backed up a step. "Well, I can see there is little point in continuing this—"
"Don't you dare walk out on me!" Peter roared. "Don't you dare!"
With an outstretched arm Lowe herded his students toward the door.
"Come back here!" Peter shouted. "Come back here, dammit!"
Lowe turned his back.
And Peter spat. Using a technique a school chum had taught him when he was a kid, he amassed a huge gob and propelled it along the curled chute of his tongue. The bulk of it caught Lowe behind the ear, where it dangled obscenely. Sticky satellites speckled his balding pate and the shoulder of his pinstripe suit. Unable to stop himself, one of the students burst out laughing, nervous laughter that was quickly stifled.
Lowe rounded on Peter in fury. "Don't you dare ever do that again." He dug a monogrammed handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped his ear with it.
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