More Stories from the Twilight Zone (17 page)

“Wasn't anything to do with Phil? Didn't you tell us that—”

“James,” Irma snapped, spinning around at the kitchen door. “However or whyever this thing happened and no matter whose help was used, that card is to me from my husband. My
dead
husband. Writing to me from one of the most wonderful cities on
Earth.” She shrugged and her stern expression mellowed. “Sure, I could maybe track down the whys and wherefores of it—talk to Phil, ask him to come clean and so on—and where would that leave me? What benefit would I gain from that?”

James could feel the color draining out of his cheeks.

“You think of religion, right? All those folks traipsing to chapels and churches, synagogues and mosques . . . and all of them doing it, week in and week out, on the back of a fairy story? Oh, it's a pretty widely held and widely believed fairy story, but it's still a fairy story. There's no proof. It's like the old saying goes: If you had proof, then you wouldn't need faith. And right now, when I thought my life was pretty well over, I get a postcard from the one person on this planet who means more to me than anything else in the world . . . a postcard from Venice, for crissakes—excuse my French—and yes, sure, there's a part of me, maybe just a tiny itsy bitsy part, that thinks, well, maybe he is
in
Venice! And maybe I will get to go there with him one of these days. And until that happens, he's just going to stay in touch with me, writing little messages to me. It doesn't hurt, does it? To believe that, I mean? But you want me to seek out the proof that he just sat in his den day after day, concocting silly meaningless little notes using his travel books so's he could send me postcards from exotic locations for me to read while his body—the body I loved and cherished more than anything else, and that I miss so very very much—just decayed to mulch in the—” Irma slid down the wall, sobbing.

James went across to her and crouched down beside her, his own tears rolling down his face. “Oh, Mom . . . I'm so sorry. So very very sorr—”

Irma patted his arm and rubbed her eyes with her sleeve. “No, you haven't done anything, honey. It's me who should be sorry.”

“No, you—”

“Shh. Let me finish. You just wanted me to rationalize everything
so's I wouldn't fool myself . . . so's I would face the fact that your dad is dead and gone and I'm alone now. You didn't want me to allow myself to become dependent on . . . on a fantasy. Is that about right?”

James nodded. “That's about right, yes.”

“Well, honey, let me reassure you that I'm absolutely fine. I do know the score. Maybe your dad and me . . . maybe we'll meet up again”—Irma waved her hand and shrugged, eyebrows raised as though challenging her son to disagree with her—“someplace else . . . be it Heaven or wherever. And then again,” she said with a shrug of resignation, “maybe we won't. But the possibility—no, the
faith
that I have—that I
will
see him again is all that's going to keep me going. And that postcard and maybe others just like it, is a part of that faith.

“Even though, deep down, I know—and I
do
know—that your dad wrote those cards when he was still alive, there's just this wonderful
what if?
element about it . . . like when you see a squirrel gathering nuts and you imagine it going home to a tree-hole where its partner is cooking dinner for it, or on Halloween when you look out of the window and you wonder whether, just maybe, the ghouls and the ghosts are gathering down at the cemetery gates just waiting for some shmuck to wander by . . . or Christmas Eve, looking out of that same window into the snow and trying real hard, no matter how old you've become, to hear sleigh bells.

“The whole thing about the
very idea
of the cards and that he even thought of doing it and that Phil got so involved—God only knows how much effort
he
had to put into this . . . and maybe is
still
putting into it—well, how could anyone not
want
to believe? It comes right down to this: my man is dead and I have to go on without him. I can make that portion of my time on Earth
very
hard or I can make it just hard—it could never be easy. The postcard helped. God forgive me that I needed such help,
but I guess I did. And I still do. And if I speak with Phil about it, then I break the spell. So all those people he's had lined up and all those visits to the house when your dad was so sick . . . all of that would have been in vain.”

The sudden sound of water draining from the bath upstairs broke the silence and Irma smiled, running a hand through her gray hair and sweeping it back from her forehead.

“You're right, Mom,” James said, and he threw his arms around her once again. Breathing in the smell of her—her soap or perfume or whatever it was—suddenly made him realize that he wouldn't be smelling his father's unique smell ever again. “I miss him, too,” he whispered into his mother's ear.

“I know, honey,” she said. And then, because such a revelation and the enormity of its implications needed to be acknowledged more than once, “I know.”

They made a pact that night, Irma and James and Nicola, to keep the postcard—they hardly dared speak of it in plural, not yet at least—a secret amongst themselves. They had a small celebration to mark their decision, a late-night feast of port and cheese and crackers, raising their glasses to the continued success of Boz Mendholsson's travels and adventures. When James went to stand outside in the wind and snow for a cigarette, he looked at the surrounding houses and listened to the snow-muted sounds of the neighborhood and the susurrant hum of the traffic on the interstate, and he steeled himself to face a world that was now minus one of the half-dozen people who mattered most to him. It was easier than he had imagined.

 

The second card—the one from Paris—arrived the following week, wedged between a credit card statement and a letter from Suzanne, Irma's eldest sister. The statement and the letter were ignored until much later in the day, but the other item was devoured voraciously by Irma right there on the doorstep, the wind
blowing her hair around her face. Casual passersby who knew of Irma's loss might have been surprised and possibly even dismayed by the huge grin on her face. “And
au revoir
to you, too, honey,” Irma whispered when she reached the end.

From then on, the cards arrived with dependable regularity—always one per week and very often two. It seemed that Boz was on a whirlwind tour of the entire world, jetting across continents and time zones with casual disregard for jet lag or budgetary constraints. Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Austin, Reykjavik, Milan, Rome . . . and every card cross-referenced and referring to ones that came before it. It was a veritable
where's where
of cities, countries, and cultures, each card bringing her up to date on how Boz was and providing snapshots of local cuisine and landmarks, the smells, sights, and sounds of the world delivered every few days into the Mendholssons' mailbox.

James and Nicola fell into a routine of telephoning Irma purely to get the lowdown on their dad's latest adventures, and whenever they visited the house, they relished holding the postcards and reading them for themselves, marveling still, way down inside of them, at the ingenuity and sheer meticulous dedication being employed in this scam of scams. But as the days and weeks rolled into months and seasons, that attitude was eroded and, even in spite of themselves, the cards became the reality of their situation . . . their father off on a prolonged world trip with a brief communication coming from every stop along the way.

By the time Irma flipped the calendar over into 1987, Boz had sent her seventy-one cards. The one she received on January 7 was from Moscow—or St. Petersburg, as Boz informed her in his note—where he had spent New Year's Eve celebrating in Red Square. In a nice touch at the end he said it was a good thing he didn't feel the cold because it was ten degrees below.

Irma kept the cards in a special rosewood box by the side of her bed, the cards all filed in date order. There had been a couple of
screw ups in the summer when cards arrived in the wrong order, but now she had marked each one with a number and there was a complementary sheet with all the numbers and the dates the cards arrived. At night, before she went to sleep, Irma would sit in bed, with the wind whistling around the streets of Forest Plains, picturing Boz in all these exotic locations. He hit his one hundredth card in late June—the card even emblazoned with a hand-drawn rosette in red ink proclaiming Boz's literary century.

Irma was glad of the warmer weather. The winter—her second as a widow—had been cold and long, and it had taken its toll on her stamina and her constitution. Nicola insisted that she go to see Dr. Fredricks and, though she refused at first, James was quick to remind her of what she would have said to his dad in a similar situation.

Jack Fredricks said that Irma's blood pressure was up a little, but it wasn't anything to worry about. He gave her some pills and congratulated her on dealing with her loss so magnanimously. “You're an inspiration to us all,” he told her as he showed her out of the surgery.

“Well,” Irma said, “I've had a lot of help.” And then she was on her way.

Phil and Jackie Defantino had stayed in close contact over the twenty months since Boz's death, and though Phil was often tempted to mention something to Irma about his special project with Boz, he refrained. He had quickly recognized the danger of stealing the magic from what Boz had conceived and so he never said a thing . . . not even a knowing smile. And Irma, in what Phil considered to be remarkable forbearance, never let her own face slip when he would ask her how things were.

But when James and Nicola were shown the one hundredth postcard, they saw something that must have been happening for a
while but which they had missed. They didn't say anything as such, but James had to ask his mother to clarify some of the message as the words appeared to have been smudged. “Probably dropped in a puddle someplace,” was all Irma could say as she took the card and read aloud the whole message. While she read, James looked across at his sister and saw the same concerns in her eyes as he felt sure were present in his own: Boz's handwriting was deteriorating.

The following day, James called around to take his mom to the mall, but she wasn't ready. He shouted into the bathroom and asked if it was okay for him to flip through Boz's postcards. “Go ahead,” Irma shouted over the noise of the shower. “They're in the box beside my bed.”

Sitting on the bed, flicking through the cards, James saw that it was worse than he had first thought. Boz's penmanship had become uncontrolled, the words slanting into each other and littered with misspellings and grammatical errors, inconsistencies and duplications. He wondered just when, in his father's illness, these cards had been written.

But, as it was to turn out, James's concerns were overtaken by events.

 

The following Monday, James took the day off from work and drove up to Forest Plains to see Nicola. They met up at the coffee shop on Main Street, the plan being to discuss what they were going to do when the cards dried up. It was something they had never really considered, having been swept away on Irma Mendholsson's flood tide of optimism and wonder. Maybe, for just a while there, they too had signed onto the belief that their father truly was enjoying a long vacation, writing home every few days to keep them aware of where he was.

“She's going to crash,” James said, shaking his head in desperation. “Crash and burn.”

“Oh, I don't know that—”

“Nick, she has never mentioned the whole thing ever since that first couple of cards came. Not once. And neither have we. She actually believes now that he's simply out of the country.”

Nicola nodded thoughtfully.

“And when the cards finally stop, it's all going to come back to her. It'll be like he's died all over again.”

“So what'll we do?”

“I think the time has come to have a long talk with Mom.”

With great reluctance, Nicola agreed.

They realized that something was wrong as soon as they saw the folded-up Sunday newspaper lying on the porch.

“Oh, God, Nick,” James said as he fumbled for his key.

“Stay cool, it might not mean anything,” Nicola said. “Let me try the doorbell.” She reached past her brother and pressed the bell. The distant sound of
bing bong
from inside the house only seemed to exacerbate their feeling of impending doom.

Inserting the key in the lock, James turned the handle and opened the door. “Mom?”

They both stood on the porch for a couple of seconds, each of them convincing themselves that they simply didn't want to frighten their mother. But it was more than that. It was something both profound and sublime. So long as they remained outside the house, then anything that might have happened in there stayed in the future as a mere possibility. Once they went in and confronted what they now believed to be inevitable, there was no turning back . . . no alternative but to accept.

“Maybe she's sick,” Nicola said, taking the first step.

“Slept late?” James offered.

“James, it's two o'clock in the afteroon.”

“We should have called,” he said, moving along the hallway.

“Mom?” Nicola shouted. “It's Nicola and James.”

Irma was in the TV room sitting in Boz's chair. She could just have been asleep, but they knew immediately that she wasn't.

“Oh, Mom,” was all James could think of to say.

Nicola remembered what Frank Garnett had said about when he found his own father dead in bed.
You know,
Frank had said, a look of something approaching wonderment on his face,
he just wasn't there any longer. It was his body, but it was completely empty. Like a drawing of my dad rather than the actual article.