by Стивен Кинг
She screamed, darted her head forward, and buried her teeth in my wrist.
The pain was immediate and enormous. I jerked my arm up even higher and then brought it down, not thinking about hurting her, wanting only to rid myself of that weasel’s mouth. Another wave hit the half-submerged dock as I. did. Its rising, splintered edge impaled Rogette’s descending face. One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw the torn topography of her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a fluorescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud. What I saw when I looked back toward The Sunset Bar was another glimpse under the skin of this world, but one far different from the face of Sara in the Green Lady or the snarling, half-glimpsed shape of the Outsider. Kyra stood on the wide wooden porch in front of the bar amid a litter of overturned wicker furniture. In front of her was a waterspout in which I could still see—very faintly—the fading shape of a woman. She was on her knees, holding her arms out. They tried to embrace. Ki’s arms went through Mattie and came out dripping. “Mommy, I can’t get you!” The woman in the water was speaking—I could see her lips moving. Ki looked at her, rapt. Then, for just a moment Mattie turned to me. Our eyes met, and hers were made of the lake. They were Dark Score, which was here long before I came and will remain long after I am gone. I put my hands to my mouth, kissed my palms, and held them out to her. Shimmery hands went up, as if to catch those kisses. “Mommy don’t go/” Kyra screamed, and flung her arms around the figure. She was immediately drenched and backed away with her eyes squinched shut, coughing. There was no longer a woman with her; there was only water running across the boards and dripping through the cracks to rejoin the lake, which comes up from deep springs far below, from the fissures in the rock which underlies the TR and all this part of our world.
Moving carefully, doing my own balancing act, I made my way out along the wavering dock to The Sunset Bar. When I got there I took Kyra in my arms. She hugged me tight, shivering fiercely against me. I could hear the small dicecup rattle of her teeth and smell the lake in her hair.
“Mattie came,” she said. “I know. I saw her.”
“Mattie made the white nana go away.”
“I saw that, too. Be very still now, Ki. We’re going back to solid ground, but you can’t move around a lot. If you do, we’ll end up swimming.” She was good as gold. When we were on The Street again and I tried to put her down, she clung to my neck fiercely. That was okay with me. I thought of taking her into Warrington’s, but didn’t. There would be towels in there, probably dry clothes as well, but I had an idea there might also be a bathtub full of warm water waiting in there.
Besides, the rain was slackening again and this time the sky looked lighter in the west. “What did Mattie tell you, hon?’ I asked as we walked north along The Street. Ki would let me put her down so we could crawl under the downed trees we came to, but raised her arms to be picked up again on the far side of each. “To be a good girl and not be sad. But I am sad. I’m very sad.” She began to cry, and I stroked her wet hair. By the time we got to the railroad-tie steps she had cried herself out… and over the mountains in the west, I could see one small but very brilliant wedge of blue. ’gxll the woods fell down,” Ki said, looking around. Her eyes were very wide. “Well… not all, but a lot of them, I guess.” Halfway up the steps I paused, puffing and seriously winded. I didn’t ask Ki if I could put her down, though. I didn’t want to put her down. I just wanted to catch my breath. “Mike?”
“What, doll?”
“Mattie told me something else.”
“What?”
“Can I whisper?”
“If you want to, sure.” Ki leaned close, put her lips to my ear, and whispered. I listened. When she was done I nodded, kissed her cheek, shifted her to the other hip, and carried her the rest of the way up to the house.
“T’wasn’t the stawm of the century, chummy, and don’t you go thinkin that it was. Nossir. So said the old-timers who sat in front of the big Army medics’ tent that served as the Lakeview General that late summer and fall. A huge elm had toppled across Route 68 and bashed the store in like a Saltines box. Adding injury to insult, the elm had carried a bunch of spitting live lines with it. They ignited propane from a ruptured tank, and the whole thing went kaboom. The tent was a pretty good warm-weather substitute, though, and folks on the TR took to saying they was going down to the MAS4 for bread and beer—this because you could still see a faded red cross on both sides of the tent’s roof. The old-timers sat along one canvas wall in folding chairs, waving to other old-timers when they went pooting by in their rusty old-timer cars (all certified old-timers own either Fords or Chevys, so I’m well on my way in that regard), swapping their undershirts for flannels as the days began to cool toward cider season and spud-digging, watching the township start to rebuild itself around them. And as they watched they talked about the ice storm of the past winter, the one that knocked out lights and splintered a million trees between Kittery and Fort Kent; they talked about the cyclones that touched down in August of 1985; they talked about the sleet hurricane of 1927. Now them was some stawms, they said. There was some stawms, by Gorry. I’m sure they’ve got a point, and I don’t argue with them—you rarely win an argument with a genuine Yankee old-timer, never if it’s about the weather—but for me the storm of July 21, 1998, will always be the storm. And I know a little girl who feels the same. She may live until 2100, given all the benefits of modern medicine, but I think that for Kyra Elizabeth Devore that will always be the storm. The one where her dead mother came to her dressed in the lake.
The first vehicle to come down my driveway didn’t arrive until almost six o’clock. It turned out to be not a Castle County police car but a yellow bucket-loader with flashing yellow lights on top of the cab and a guy in a Central Maine Power Company slicker working the controls. The guy in the other seat was a cop, though—was in fact Norris Ridgewick, the County Sheriff himself. And he came to my door with his gun drawn.
The change in the weather the TV guy had promised had already arrived, clouds and storm-cells driven east by a chilly wind running just under gale force. Trees had continued to fall in the dripping woods for at least an hour after the rain stopped. Around five o’clock I made us toasted-cheese sandwiches and tomato soup… comfort food, Jo would have called it. Kyra ate listlessly, but she did eat, and she drank a lot of milk. I had wrapped her in another of my tee-shirts and she tied her own hair back. I offered her the white ribbons, but she shook her head decisively and opted for a rubber band instead. “I don’t like those ribbons anymore,” she said. I decided I didn’t, either, and threw them away. Ki watched me do it and offered no objection. Then I crossed the living room to the woodstove. “What are you doing?” She finished her second glass of milk, wriggled off her chair, and came over to me.
“Making a fire. Maybe all those hot days thinned my blood. That’s what my mom would have said, anyway.” She watched silently as I pulled sheet after sheet from the pile of paper I’d taken off the table and stacked on top of the woodstove, balled each one up, and slipped it in through the door. When I felt I’d loaded enough, I began to lay bits of kindling on top. “What’s written on those papers?” Ki asked. “Nothing important.”
“Is it a story?”
“Not really. It was more like… oh, I don’t know. A crossword puzzle. Or a letter.”
“Pretty long letter,” she said, and then laid her head against my leg as if she were tired. “Yeah,” I said. “Love letters usually are, but keeping them around is a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because they…” Can come back to haunt you was what rose to mind, but I wouldn’t say it. “Because they can embarrass you in later life.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” I
said. “These papers are like your ribbons, in a way.”
“You don’t like them anymore.”
“Right.” She saw the box then—the tin box with JO’s NOTIONS written on the front. It was on the counter between the living room and the sink, not far from where old Krazy Kat had hung on the wall. I didn’t remember bringing the box up from the studio with me, but I suppose I might not have; I was pretty freaked. I also think it could have come up… kind of by itself. I do believe such things now; I have reason to. Kyra’s eyes lit up in a way they hadn’t since she had wakened from her short nap to find out her mother was dead. She stood on tiptoe to take hold of the box, then ran her small fingers across the gilt letters. I thought about how important it was for a kid to own a tin box. You had to have one for your secret stuff the best toy, the prettiest bit of lace, the first piece of jewelry. Or a picture of your mother, perhaps. “This is so… pretty,” she said in a soft, awed voice. “You can have it if you don’t mind it saying JO’s NOTIONS instead of KI’s NOTIONS. There are some papers in it I want to read, but I could put them somewhere else.” She looked at me to make sure I wasn’t kidding, saw I wasn’t. “I’d love it,” she said in the same soft, awed voice. I took the box from her, scooped out the steno books, notes, and clippings, then handed it back to Ki. She practiced taking the lid off and then putting it back on. “Guess what I’ll put in here,” she said. “Secret treasures?”
“Yes!” she said, and actually smiled for a moment. “Who was Jo, Mike? Do I know her? I do, don’t I? She was one of the fridgearator people.”
“She—” A thought occurred. I shuffled through the yellowed clippings. Nothing. I thought I’d lost it somewhere along the way, then saw a corner of what I was looking for peeking from the middle of one of the steno notebooks. I slid it out and handed it to Ki. “What is it?”
“A backwards photo. Hold it up to the light.” She did, and looked for a long time, rapt. Faint as a dream I could see my wife in her hand, my wife standing on the swimming float in her two-piece suit. “That’s Jo,” I said. “She’s pretty. I’m glad to have her box for my things.”
“I am too, Ki.” I kissed the top of her head.
When Sheriff Ridgewick hammered on the door, I thought it wise to answer with my hands up. He looked wired. What seemed to ease the situation was a simple, uncalculated question. “Where’s Alan Pangborn these days, Sheriff?.”
“Over New Hampshire,” Ridgewick said, lowering his pistol a little (a minute or two later he holstered it without even seeming to be aware he had done so). “He and Polly are doing real well. Except for her arthritis. That’s nasty, I guess, but she still has her good days. A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again, that’s what I think. Mr. Noonan, I have a lot of questions for you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“First off and most important, do you have the child? Kyra Devore?”
“Where is she?”
“I’ll be happy to show you.” We walked down the north-wing corridor and stood just outside the bedroom doorway, looking in. The duvet was pulled up to her chin and she was sleeping deeply. The stuffed dog was curled in one hand we could just see its muddy tail poking out of her fist at one end and its nose poking out at the other.
We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, watching her sleep in the light of a summer evening. In the woods the trees had stopped falling, but the wind still blew. Around the eaves of Sara Laughs it made a sound like ancient music.
EPILOGUE It snowed for Christmas—a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in It’s a Wonderful Lij. By the time I came back from checking Kyra for the third time, it was quarter past one on the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the snow had stopped. A late moon, plump but pale, was peeking through the unravelling fluff of clouds.
I was Christmasing with Frank again, and we were the last two up. The kids, Ki included, were dead to the world, sleeping off the annual bacchanal of food and presents. Frank was on his third Scotch—it had been a three-Scotch story if there ever was one, I guess—but I’d barely drunk the top off my first one. I think I might have gotten into the bottle quite heavily if not for Ki. On the days when I have her I usually don’t drink so much as a glass of beer. And to have her three days in a row… but shit, kemo sabe, if you can’t spend Christmas with your kid, what the hell is Christmas for?
“Are you all right?” Frank asked when I sat down again and took another little token sip from my glass.
I grinned at that. Not is she all right but are you all right. Well, nobody ever said Frank was stupid. “You should’ve seen me when the Department of Human Services let me have her for a weekend in October. I must have checked on her a dozen times before I went to bed… and then I kept checking. Getting up and peeking in on her, listening to her breathe. I didn’t sleep a wink Friday night, caught maybe three hours on Saturday. So this is a big improvement. But if you ever blab any of what I’ve told you, Frank—if they ever hear about me filling up that bathtub before the storm knocked the gennie out—I can kiss my chances of adopting her goodbye. I’ll probably have to fill out a form in triplicate before they even let me attend her high-school graduation.” I hadn’t meant to tell Frank the bathtub part, but once I started talking, almost everything spilled out. I suppose it had to spill to someone if Iwas ever to get on with my life. I’d assumed that John Storrow would be the one on the other side of the confessional when the time came, but John didn’t want to talk about any of those events except as they bore on our ongoing legal business, which nowadays is all about Kyra Elizabeth Devore. “I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. How goes the adoption battle?”
“Slow. I’ve come to loathe the State of Maine court system, and DHS as well. You take the people who work in those bureaucracies one by one and they’re mostly fine, but when you put them together…”
“Bad, huh?”
“I sometimes feel like a character in Bleak House. That’s the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers. John tells me to be patient and count my blessings, that we’re making amazing progress considering that I’m that most untrustworthy of creatures, an unmarried white male of middle age, but Ki’s been in two foster-home situations since Mattie died, and—”
“Doesn’t she have kin in one of those neighboring towns?”
“Mattie’s aunt. She didn’t want anything to do with Ki when Mattie was alive and has even less interest now. Especially since—”
“—since Ki’s not going to be rich.”
“Yeah.”
“The Whitmore woman was lying about Devore’s will.”
“Absolutely. He left everything to a foundation that’s supposed to foster global computer literacy. With due respect to the numbercrunchers of the world, I can’t imagine a colder charity.”
“How is John?”
“Pretty well mended, but he’s never going to get the use of his right affn back entirely. He damned near died of blood-loss.” Frank had led me away from the entwined subjects of Ki and custody quite well for a man deep into his third Scotch, and I was willing enough to go. I could hardly bear to think of her long days and longer nights in those homes where the Department of Human Services stores away children like knickknacks nobody wants. Ki didn’t live in those places but only existed in them, pale and listless, like a well-fed rabbit kept in a cage. Each time she saw my car turning in or pulling up she came alive, waving her arms and dancing like Snoopy on his doghouse. Our weekend in October had been wonderful (despite my obsessive need to check her every half hour or so after she was asleep), and the Christmas holiday had been even better. Her emphatic desire to be with me was helping in court more than anything else… yet the wheels still turned slowly. Maybe in the spring, Mike, John told me. He was a new John these days, pale and serious. The slightly arrogant eager beaver who had wanted nothing more than to go head to head with Mr. Ma
xwell “Big Bucks” Devore was no longer in evidence. John had learned something about mortality on the twenty-first of July, and something about the world’s idiot cruelty, as well. The man who had taught himself to shake with his left hand instead of his right was no longer interested in partying ’til he puked. He was seeing a girl in Philly, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. I had no idea if it was serious or not, Ki’s “Unca John” is closemouthed about that part of his life, but when a young man is of his own accord seeing the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, it usually is. Maybe in the spring: it was his mantra that late fall and early winter. What am I doing wrong? I asked him once—this was just after Thanksgiving and another setback.
Nothing, he replied. Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the putative adopter is a man, it’s worse. At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, poking the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist. That’s blatant sex discrimination, John. I3ah, but usually it’s justified. Blame it on every twisted asshole who ever decided he had a right to take off some little kid’s pants, if you want,’ blame it on the bureaucracy, if you want,’ hell, blame it on cosmic rays if you want. It’s a slow process, but you’re going to win in the end. I3u’ve got a clean record, you’ve got Kyra saying “I want to be with Mike” to every judge and DHS worker she sees, you’ve got enough money to keep ajger them no matter how much they squirm and no matter how many Jrms they throw at you… and most of all, buddy, you’ve got me. I had something else, toowhat Ki had whispered in my ear as I paused to catch my breath on the steps. I’d never told John about that, and it was one of the few things I didn’t tell Frank, either. Mattie says I’m your little guy now, she had whispered. Mattie says you’ll take care of me. I was trying to—as much as the fucking slowpokes at Human Services would let me—but the waiting was hard. Frank picked up the Scotch and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head. Ki had her heart set on snowman-making, and I wanted to be able to face the glare of early sun on fresh snow without a headache.
