Bag of Bones (7 page)

And in my case, what difference did it make? The goddam thing was written, wasn't it?

“Well, see if you can make the deal,” I said.

“Yes, but I don't think we want to be talking about just a single book here, okay? I think—”

“Harold, what I want right now is to eat some lunch.”

“You sound a little tense, Michael. Is everything—”

“Everything is fine. Talk to them about just one book, with a sweetener for speeding up production at my end. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said after one of his most significant pauses. “But I hope this doesn't mean that you won't entertain a three- or four-book contract later on. Make hay while the sun shines, remember. It's the motto of champions.”

“Cross each bridge when you come to it is the motto of champions,” I said, and that night I dreamt I went to Sara Laughs again.

*   *   *

In that dream—in all the dreams I had that fall and winter—I am walking up the lane to the lodge. The lane is a two-mile loop through the woods with ends opening onto Route 68. It has a number at either end (Lane Forty-two, if it matters) in case you have to call in a fire, but no name. Nor did Jo and I ever give it one, not even between ourselves. It is narrow, really just a double rut with timothy and witchgrass growing on the crown. When you drive in, you can hear that grass whispering like low voices against the undercarriage of your car or truck.

I don't drive in the dream, though. I never drive. In these dreams I walk.

The trees huddle in close on either side of the lane. The darkening sky overhead is little more than a slot. Soon I will be able to see the first peeping stars. Sunset is past. Crickets chirr. Loons cry on the lake. Small things—chipmunks, probably, or the occasional squirrel—rustle in the woods.

Now I come to a dirt driveway sloping down the hill on my right. It is our driveway, marked with a little wooden sign which reads
SARA LAUGHS
. I stand at the head of it, but I don't go down. Below is the lodge. It's all logs and added-on wings, with a deck jutting out behind. Fourteen rooms in all, a ridiculous number of rooms. It should look ugly and awkward, but somehow it does not. There is a brave-dowager quality to Sara, the look of a lady pressing resolutely on toward her hundredth year, still taking pretty good strides in spite of her arthritic hips and gimpy old knees.

The central section is the oldest, dating back to 1900 or so. Other sections were added in the thirties, forties, and sixties. Once it was a hunting lodge; for a brief period in the early seventies it was home to a small commune of transcendental hippies. These were lease or rental deals; the owners from the late forties until 1984 were the Hingermans, Darren and Marie . . . then Marie alone when Darren died in 1971. The only visible addition from our period of ownership is the tiny DSS dish mounted on the central roofpeak. That was Johanna's idea, and she never really got a chance to enjoy it.

Beyond the house, the lake glimmers in the afterglow of sunset. The driveway, I see, is carpeted with brown pine needles and littered with fallen branches. The bushes which grow on either side of it have run
wild, reaching out to one another like lovers across the narrowed gap which separates them. If you brought a car down here, the branches would scrape and squeal unpleasantly against its sides. Below, I see, there's moss growing on the logs of the main house, and three large sunflowers with faces like searchlights have grown up through the boards of the little driveway-side stoop. The overall feeling is not neglect, exactly, but
forgottenness.

There is a breath of breeze, and its coldness on my skin makes me realize that I have been sweating. I can smell pine—a smell which is both sour and clean at the same time—and the faint but somehow tremendous smell of the lake. Dark Score is one of the cleanest, deepest lakes in Maine. It was bigger until the late thirties, Marie Hingerman told us; that was when Western Maine Electric, working hand in hand with the mills and paper operations around Rumford, had gotten state approval to dam the Gessa River. Marie also showed us some charming photographs of white-frocked ladies and vested gentlemen in canoes—these snaps were from the time of the First World War, she said, and pointed to one of the young women, frozen forever on the rim of the Jazz Age with a dripping paddle upraised. “That's my mother,” she said, “and the man she's threatening with the paddle is my father.”

Loons crying, their voices like loss. Now I can see Venus in the darkening sky. Star light, star bright, wish I may, wish I might . . . in these dreams I always wish for Johanna.

With my wish made, I try to walk down the driveway. Of course I do. It's my house, isn't it? Where
else would I go but my house, now that it's getting dark and now that the stealthy rustling in the woods seems both closer and somehow more purposeful? Where else
can
I go? It's dark, and it will be frightening to go into that dark place alone (suppose Sara resents having been left so long alone? suppose she's angry?), but I must. If the electricity's off, I'll light one of the hurricane lamps we keep in a kitchen cabinet.

Except I can't go down. My legs won't move. It's as if my body knows something about the house down there that my brain does not. The breeze rises again, chilling gooseflesh out onto my skin, and I wonder what I have done to get myself all sweaty like this. Have I been running? And if so, what have I been running toward? Or from?

My hair is sweaty, too; it lies on my brow in an unpleasantly heavy clump. I raise my hand to brush it away and see there is a shallow cut, fairly recent, running across the back, just beyond the knuckles. Sometimes this cut is on my right hand, sometimes it's on the left. I think,
If this is a dream, the details are good.
Always that same thought:
If this is a dream, the details are good.
It's the absolute truth. They are a novelist's details . . . but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know?

Now Sara Laughs is only a dark hulk down below, and I realize I don't want to go down there, anyway. I am a man who has trained his mind to misbehave, and I can imagine too many things waiting for me inside. A rabid raccoon crouched in a corner of the kitchen. Bats in the bathroom—if disturbed they'll crowd the air around my cringing face, squeaking
and fluttering against my cheeks with their dusty wings. Even one of William Denbrough's famous Creatures from Beyond the Universe, now hiding under the porch and watching me approach with glittering, pus-rimmed eyes.

“Well, I can't stay up here,” I say, but my legs won't move, and it seems I
will
be staying up here, where the driveway meets the lane; that I will be staying up here, like it or not.

Now the rustling in the woods behind me sounds not like small animals (most of them would by then be nested or burrowed for the night, anyway) but approaching footsteps. I try to turn and see, but I can't even do that . . .

. . . and that was where I usually woke up. The first thing I always did was to turn over, establishing my return to reality by demonstrating to myself that my body would once more obey my mind. Sometimes—most times, actually—I would find myself thinking
Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley.
There was something creepy about this (there's something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won't be dislodged), but I would be lying if I didn't add that some part of me enjoyed the breathless summer calm in which the dream always wrapped me, and that part also enjoyed the sadness and foreboding I felt when I awoke. There was an exotic strangeness to the dream that was missing from my waking life, now that the road leading out of my imagination was so effectively blocked.

The only time I remember being really frightened (and I must tell you I don't completely trust any of
these memories, because for so long they didn't seem to exist at all) was when I awoke one night speaking quite clearly into the dark of my bedroom: “Something's behind me, don't let it get me, something in the woods, please don't let it get me.” It wasn't the words themselves that frightened me so much as the tone in which they were spoken. It was the voice of a man on the raw edge of panic, and hardly seemed like my own voice at all.

*   *   *

Two days before Christmas of 1997, I once more drove down to Fidelity Union, where once more the bank manager escorted me to my safe-deposit box in the fluorescent-lit catacombs. As we walked down the stairs, he assured me (for the dozenth time, at least) that his wife was a
huge
fan of my work, she'd read all my books, couldn't get enough. For the dozenth time (at least) I replied that now I must get
him
in my clutches. He responded with his usual chuckle. I thought of this oft-repeated exchange as Banker's Communion.

Mr. Quinlan inserted his key in Slot A and turned it. Then, as discreetly as a pimp who has conveyed a customer to a whore's crib, he left. I inserted my own key in Slot B, turned it, and opened the drawer. It looked very vast now. The one remaining manuscript box seemed almost to quail in the far corner, like an abandoned puppy who somehow knows his sibs have been taken off and gassed.
Promise
was scrawled across the top in fat black letters. I could barely remember what the goddam story was about.

I snatched that time-traveller from the eighties
and slammed the safe-deposit box shut. Nothing left in there now but dust.
Give me that,
Jo had hissed in my dream—it was the first time I'd thought of that one in years.
Give me that, it's my dust-catcher.

“Mr. Quinlan, I'm finished,” I called. My voice sounded rough and unsteady to my own ears, but Quinlan seemed to sense nothing wrong . . . or perhaps he was just being discreet. I can't have been the only customer, after all, who found his or her visits to this financial version of Forest Lawn emotionally distressful.

“I'm really going to read one of your books,” he said, dropping an involuntary little glance at the box I was holding (I suppose I could have brought a briefcase to put it in, but on those expeditions I never did). “In fact, I think I'll put it on my list of New Year's resolutions.”

“You do that,” I said. “You just do that, Mr. Quinlan.”

“Mark,” he said. “Please.” He'd said this before, too.

I had composed two letters, which I slipped into the manuscript box before setting out for Federal Express. Both had been written on my computer, which my body would let me use as long as I chose the Note Pad function. It was only opening Word Six that caused the storms to start. I never tried to compose a novel using the Note Pad function, understanding that if I did, I'd likely lose that option, too . . . not to mention my ability to play Scrabble and do crosswords on the machine. I had tried a couple of times to compose longhand, with spectacular lack of success. The problem wasn't what I had once heard
described as “screen shyness”; I had proved that to myself.

One of the notes was to Harold, the other to Debra Weinstock, and both said pretty much the same thing: here's the new book,
Helen's Promise,
hope you like it as much as I do, if it seems a little rough it's because I had to work a lot of extra hours to finish it this soon, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Erin Go Bragh, trick or treat, hope someone gives you a fucking pony.

I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter-eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low-pressure time—that's one of the things I love about it), with
Helen's Promise
under my left arm and a paperback copy of Nelson DeMille's
The Charm School
in my right hand. I read almost fifty pages before entrusting my final unpublished novel to a harried-looking clerk. When I wished her a Merry Christmas she shuddered and said nothing.

T
he phone was ringing when I walked in my front door. It was Frank Arlen, asking me if I'd like to join him for Christmas. Join
them,
as a matter of fact; all of his brothers and their families were coming.

I opened my mouth to say no—the last thing on earth I needed was a crazed Irish Christmas with everybody drinking whiskey and waxing sentimental about Jo while perhaps two dozen snotcaked rugrats crawled around the floor—and heard myself saying I'd come.

Frank sounded as surprised as I felt, but honestly delighted. “Fantastic!” he cried. “When can you get here?”

I was in the hall, my galoshes dripping on the tile, and from where I was standing I could look through the arch and into the living room. There was no Christmas tree; I hadn't bothered with one since Jo died. The room looked both ghastly and much too big to me . . . a roller rink furnished in Early American.

“I've been out running errands,” I said. “How about I throw some underwear in a bag, get back into the car, and come south while the heater's still blowing warm air?”

“Tremendous,” Frank said without a moment's hesitation. “We can have us a sane bachelor evening before the Sons and Daughters of East Malden start arriving. I'm pouring you a drink as soon as I get off the telephone.”

“Then I guess I better get rolling,” I said.

*   *   *

That was hands down the best holiday since Johanna died. The only good holiday, I guess. For four days I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johanna's memory too many times . . . and knew, somehow, that she'd be pleased to know I was doing it. Two babies spit up on me, one dog got into bed with me in the middle of the night, and Nicky Arlen's sister-in-law made a bleary pass at me on the night after Christmas, when she caught me alone in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich. I kissed her because she clearly wanted to be kissed, and an adventurous (or perhaps “mischievous” is the word I want) hand groped me for a moment in a place where no one other than myself had groped in almost three and a half years. It was a shock, but not an entirely unpleasant one.