Pet Sematary (16 page)

“Well, when you were in with them, Mr. Crandall was telling me that his wife had been having little chest pains. In fact, you might have been responsible for saving her life or at least for keeping it from being much worse.”

Now it was Ellie's turn to look startled.

Louis nodded. “She needed a doctor, honey. I'm a doctor. But I was only there because it was your night to go trick-or-treating.”

Ellie considered this for a long time and then nodded. “But she'll probably die anyway,” she said matter-of-factly. “People who have heart attacks usually die. Even if they live, pretty soon they have another one and another one and another one until . . . boom!”

“And where did you learn these words of wisdom, may I ask?”

Ellie only shrugged—a very Louislike shrug, he was amused to see.

She allowed him to carry in her bag of candy—an almost ultimate sign of trust—and Louis pondered her attitude. The thought of Church's death had brought on near-hysteria. But the thought of grandmotherly Norma Crandall dying . . . that Ellie seemed to take calmly, a matter of course, a given. What had she said? Another one and another one, until . . .
boom!

The kitchen was empty, but Louis could hear Rachel
moving around upstairs. He set Ellie's candy down on the counter and said, “It doesn't necessarily work that way, Ellie. Norma's heart attack was a very small one, and I was able to administer the treatment right away. I doubt if her heart was damaged much at all. She—”

“Oh, I know,” Ellie agreed, almost cheerfully. “But she's old and she'll die pretty soon anyway. Mr. Crandall too. Can I have an apple before I go to bed, Daddy?”

“No,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “Go up and brush your teeth, babe.”

Does anyone really think they understand kids?
he wondered.

*  *  *

When the house was settled and they were in their side-by-side twin beds, Rachel asked softly, “Was it very bad for Ellie, Lou? Was she upset?”

No,
he thought.
She knows old people croak at regular intervals, just like she knows to let the grasshopper go when it spits . . . like she knows that if you stumble on the number thirteen when you're skipping rope, your best friend will die . . . like she knows that you put the graves in diminishing circles up in the Pet Sematary . . .

“Nope,” he said. “She handled herself very well. Let's go to sleep, Rachel, okay?”

That night, as they slept in their house and as Jud lay wakeful in his, there was another hard frost. The wind rose in the early morning, ripping most of the remaining leaves, which were now an uninteresting brown, from the trees.

The wind awoke Louis, and he started up on his
elbows, mostly asleep and confused. There were steps on the stairs . . . slow, dragging steps. Pascow had come back. Only now, he thought, two months had passed. When the door opened he would see a rotting horror, the jogging shorts caked with mould, the flesh fallen away in great holes, the brain decayed to paste. Only the eyes would be alive . . . hellishly bright and alive. Pascow would not speak this time; his vocal cords would be too decayed to produce sounds. But his eyes . . . they would beckon him to come.

“No,” he breathed, and the steps died out.

He got up, went to the door, and pulled it open, his lips drawn back in a grimace of fear and resolution, his flesh cringing. Pascow would be there, and with his raised arms he would look like a long-dead conductor about to call for the first thundering phrase of
Walpurgisnacht.

No such thing, as Jud might have said. The landing was empty . . . silent. There was no sound but the wind. Louis went back to bed and slept.

The next day Louis called the intensive care unit at the EMMC. Norma's condition was still listed as critical; that was standard operating procedure for the first twenty-four hours following a heart attack. Louis got a
cheerier assessment from Weybridge, her doctor, however. “I wouldn't even call it a minor myocardial infarction,” he said. “No scarring. She owes you a hell of a lot, Dr. Creed.”

On impulse, Louis stopped by the hospital later that week with a bouquet of flowers, and found that Norma had been moved to a semiprivate room downstairs—a very good sign. Jud was with her.

Norma exclaimed over the flowers and buzzed a nurse for a vase. Then she directed Jud until they were in water, arranged to her specifications, and placed on the dresser in the corner.

“Mother's feeling ever s'much better,” Jud said dryly after he had fiddled with the flowers for the third time.

“Don't be smart, Judson,” Norma said.

“No, ma'am.”

At last Norma looked at Louis. “I want to thank you for what you did,” she said with a shyness that was utterly unaffected and thus doubly touching. “Jud says I owe you my life.”

Embarrassed, Louis said, “Jud exaggerates.”

“Not very damn much, he don't,” Jud said. He squinted at Louis, almost smiling but not quite. “Didn't your mother tell you never to slip a thank-you, Louis?”

She hadn't said anything about that, at least not that Louis could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.

“Norma,” he said, “anything I could do, I was pleased to do.”

“You're a dear man,” Norma said. You take this man of mine out somewhere and let him buy you a glass of beer. I'm feeling sleepy again, and I can't seem to get rid of him.”

Jud stood up with alacrity. “Hot damn! I'll go for that, Louis. Quick, before she changes her mind.”

*  *  *

The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on the twenty-second of November, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and blue and cold. Louis took his family to Bangor International Airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to Chicago for a visit with Rachel's parents.

“It's not right,” Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time since discussions on this matter had commenced in earnest a month ago. “I don't like thinking of you rattling around the house alone on Thanksgiving Day. That's supposed to be a family holiday, Louis.”

Louis shifted Gage, who looked gigantic and wide-eyed in his first big-boy parka, to his other arm. Ellie was at one of the big windows, watching an Air Force helicopter take off.

“I'm not exactly going to be crying in my beer,” Louis said. “Jud and Norma are going to have me over for turkey and all the trimmings. Hell, I'm the one who feels guilty. I've never liked these big holiday group gropes anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three in the afternoon and fall asleep at seven, and the next day it feels like the Dallas
Cowgirls are dancing around and yelling boola-boola inside my head. I just don't like sending you off with the two kids.”

“I'll be fine,” she said. “Flying first class, I feel like a princess. And Gage will sleep on the flight from Logan to O'Hare.”

“You hope,” he said, and they both laughed.

The flight was called, and Ellie scampered over. “That's us, Mommy. Come on—come on—come on. They'll leave without us.”

“No, they won't,” Rachel said. She was clutching her three pink boarding cards in one hand. She was wearing her fur coat, some fake stuff that was a luxuriant brown . . . probably it was supposed to look like muskrat, Louis thought. Whatever
it
was supposed to look like, it made
her
look absolutely lovely.

Perhaps something of what he felt showed in his eyes because she hugged him impulsively, semicrushing Gage between them. Gage looked surprised but not terribly upset.

“Louis Creed, I love you,” she said.

“Mom-
eee,
” Ellie said, now in a fever of impatience. “Come on-come on-c—”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “Be good, Louis.”

“Tell you what,” he said, grinning, “I'll be careful. Say hello to your folks, Rachel.”

“Oh, you,” she said and wrinkled her nose at him. Rachel was not fooled; she knew perfectly well why Louis was skipping this trip. “Fun-
nee.”

He watched them enter the boarding ramp . . . and disappear from sight for the next week. He already felt
homesick and lonely for them. He moved over to the window where Ellie had been, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, watching the baggage handlers loading the hold.

The truth was simple. Not only Mr. but also Mrs. Irwin Goldman of Lake Forest had disliked Louis from the beginning. He came from the wrong side of the tracks, but that was just for starters. Worse, he fully expected their daughter to support him while he went to medical school, where he would almost surely flunk out.

Louis could have handled all this, in fact had been doing so. Then something happened which Rachel did not know about and never would . . . not from Louis, anyway. Irwin Goldman had offered to pay Louis's entire tuition through med school. The price of this “scholarship” (Goldman's word) was that Louis should break off his engagement with Rachel at once.

Louis Creed had not been at the optimum time of life to deal with such an outrage, but such melodramatic proposals (or bribes, to call a spade a spade) are rarely made to those who
are
at an optimum time—which might be around the age of eighty-five. He was tired, for one thing. He was spending eighteen hours a week in classes, another twenty hitting the books, another fifteen waiting tables in a deep-dish pizza joint down the block from the Whitehall Hotel. He was also nervous. Mr. Goldman's oddly jovial manner that evening had contrasted completely with his previous cold behavior, and Louis thought that when Goldman invited him into the study for a cigar, a look had
passed from him to his wife. Later—much later, when time had lent a little perspective—Louis would reflect that horses must feel much the same free-floating anxiety when they smell the first smoke of a prairie fire. He began expecting Goldman to reveal at any moment that he knew Louis had been sleeping with his daughter.

When Goldman instead made his incredible offer—even going so far as to take his checkbook from the pocket of his smoking jacket like a rake in a Noël Coward farce—Louis had blown up. He accused Goldman of trying to keep his daughter like an exhibit in a museum, of having no regard for anyone but himself, and of being an overbearing, thoughtless bastard. It would be a long time before he would admit to himself that part of his rage had been relief.

All of these little insights into Irwin Goldman's character, though perhaps true, had no redeeming touch of diplomacy in them. Any semblance of Noël Coward departed; if there was humor in the rest of the conversation, it was of a much more vulgar sort. Goldman told him to get out and that if he ever saw Louis on his doorstep again, he would shoot him like a yellow dog. Louis told Goldman to take his checkbook and plug up his ass with it. Goldman said he had seen bums in the gutter who had more potential than Louis Creed. Louis told Goldman he could also shove his goddam BankAmericard and his American Express Gold Card right up there beside his checkbook.

None of this had been a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.

In the end Rachel had brought them around (after each man had had a chance to repent of the things he had said, although neither of them had ever changed his mind in the slightest about the other). There was no more melodrama, certainly no dismally theatrical from-this-day-forward-I-have-no-daughter scene. Goldman would have probably suffered through Rachel's marriage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon before denying her. Nevertheless the face rising above the collar of Irwin Goldman's morning coat on the day Louis married Rachel had greatly resembled the faces sometimes seen carved on Egyptian sarcophagi. Their wedding present had been a six-place setting of Spode china and a microwave oven. No money. For most of Louis's harum-scarum med school days, Rachel had worked as a clerk in a women's apparel store. And from that day to this day, Rachel only knew that things had been and continued to be “tense” between her husband and her parents . . . particularly between Louis and her father.

Louis could have gone to Chicago with his family, although the university schedule would have meant flying back three days earlier than Rachel and the kids. That was not a great hardship. On the other hand, four days with Im-Ho-Tep and his wife the Sphinx would have been.

The children had melted his in-laws a good deal, as children often do. Louis suspected that he himself could have completed the rapprochement simply by pretending he had forgotten that evening in Goldman's study. It wouldn't even matter that Goldman
knew he was pretending. But the fact was (and he at least had the guts to be up front about it with himself) that he did not quite want to make the rapprochement. Ten years was a long time, but it was not quite long enough to take away the slimy taste that had come into his mouth when, in Goldman's study over glasses of brandy, the old man had opened one side of that idiotic smoking jacket and removed the checkbook residing within. Yes, he had felt relief that the nights—five of them in all—that he and Rachel had spent in his narrow, sagging apartment bed had not been discovered, but that surprised disgust had been quite its own thing, and the years between then and now had not changed it.

He could have come, but he preferred to send his father-in-law his grandchildren, his daughter, and a message.

The Delta 727 pulled away from the rampway, turned . . . and he saw Ellie at one of the front windows, waving frantically. Louis waved back, smiling, and then someone—Ellie or Rachel—hiked Gage into the window. Louis waved, and Gage waved back—perhaps seeing him, perhaps only imitating Ellie.

“Fly my people safe,” he muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the wind whined and zoomed with force enough to almost tear his hunter's cap off his head, and he clapped a hand to it. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the driver's side door of his car and then turned as the jet rose beyond the terminal building, its nose tilted upward into the hard blue, its turbos thundering.