Pet Sematary (43 page)

“It was
not
all right,” he persisted, and Louis realized—although he did not want to—that Goldman was not just being political, was not just saying that he was sorry he had been such a bastard now that he was getting his own way. The man was nearly weeping, and he was speaking with a slow and trembling urgency. “It was a
terrible
day for all of us. Thanks to me. Thanks to a stupid, bullheaded old man. I hurt my daughter when she needed my help . . . I hurt you, and maybe you needed my help too, Louis. That you do this . . . behave this way . . . after I behaved
that
way . . . it makes me feel like garbage. And I think that is just the way I
should
feel.”

Oh let him stop this, let him stop before I start to scream at him and blow the whole deal.

“Rachel's probably told you, Louis, we had another daughter—”

“Zelda,” Louis said. “Yes, she told me about Zelda.”

“It was difficult,” Goldman said in that trembling voice. “Difficult for all of us. Most difficult for Rachel, perhaps—Rachel was there when Zelda died—but difficult for Dory and me too. Dory almost had a breakdown—”

What do you think Rachel had?
Louis wanted to shout.
Do you think a kid can't have a nervous breakdown? Twenty years later she's still jumping at death's shadow. And now this happens. This miserable, awful thing. It's a minor miracle that she isn't in the fucking hospital, being fed through an I.V. tube. So don't talk to me about how difficult it was for you and your wife, you bastard.

“Ever since Zelda died, we have . . . I suppose we have clung to Rachel . . . always wanting to protect her . . . and to make it up to her. Make up for the problems she had with her . . . her back . . . for years afterward. Make up for not being there.”

Yes, the old man was really crying. Why did he have to be crying? It made it harder for Louis to hold on to his clean, pure hate. More difficult, but not impossible. He deliberately called up the image of Goldman reaching into the pocket of his smoking jacket for his overflowing checkbook . . . but he suddenly saw Zelda Goldman in the background, an unquiet ghost in a stinking bed, her cheesy face full of spite and agony, her hands pulled into claws. The Goldman ghost. Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Mr. Goldman. Irwin. No more. Let's not make things any worse than they have to be, okay?”

“I believe now that you are a good man and that I misjudged you, Louis. Oh, listen, I know what you think. Am I that stupid? No. Stupid, but not
that
stupid. You think I'm saying all of this because now I can, you're thinking oh yeah, he's getting what he wants and once he tried to buy me off, but . . . but Louis, I swear . . .”

“No more,” Louis said gently. “I can't . . . I really can't take any more.” Now his voice was trembling as well. “Okay?”

“All right,” Goldman said and sighed. Louis thought it was a sigh of relief. “But let me say again that I apologize. You don't have to accept it. But that is what I called to say, Louis. I apologize.”

“All right,” Louis said. He closed his eyes. His head was thudding. “Thank you, Irwin. Your apology is accepted.”

“Thank
you,”
Goldman said. “And thank you . . . for letting them come. Perhaps it is what they both need. We'll wait for them at the airport.”

“Fine,” Louis said, and an idea suddenly occurred to him. It was crazy and attractive in its very sanity. He would let bygones be bygones . . . and he would let Gage lie in his Pleasantview grave. Instead of trying to reopen a door that had swung shut, he would latch it and double-bolt it and throw away the key. He would do just what he had told his wife he was going to do: tidy up their affairs here and catch a plane back to Shytown. They would perhaps spend the entire summer there, he and his wife and his good-hearted daughter. They would go to the zoo and the planetarium and boating on the lake. He would take Ellie to the top of the Sears Tower and show her the Midwest stretching away like a great flat gameboard, rich and dreaming. Then when mid-August came, they would come back to this house which now seemed so sad and so shadowy, and perhaps it would be like starting over again. Perhaps they could begin weaving from fresh thread. What was
on the Creed loom right now was ugly, splattered with drying blood.

But would that not be the same as murdering his son? Killing him a second time?

A voice inside tried to argue that this was not so, but he would not listen. He shut the voice up briskly.

“Irwin, I ought to go now. I want to make sure Rachel's got what she needs and then get her to bed.”

“All right. Goodbye, Louis. And once more—”

If he says he's sorry one more time, I'll fucking scream.

“Goodbye, Irwin,” he said and hung up the phone.

*  *  *

Rachel was deep in a litter of clothes when he came upstairs. Blouses on the beds, bras hung over the backs of chairs, slacks on hangers that had been hung over the doorknob. Shoes were lined up like soldiers under the window. She appeared to be packing slowly but competently. Louis could see it was going to take her at least three suitcases (maybe four), but he could also see no sense in arguing with her about it. Instead he pitched in and helped.

“Louis,” she said as they closed the last suitcase (he had to sit on it before Rachel could snap the catches), “are you sure there's nothing you want to tell me?”

“For God's sake, hon, what
is
this?”

“I don't know what it is,” she replied evenly. “That's why I'm asking.”

“What do you think I'm going to do? Creep off to a bordello? Join the circus? What?”

“I don't know. But this feels wrong. It feels as if you're trying to get rid of us.”

“Rachel, that's
ridiculous!”
He said this with a vehemence that was partly exasperation. Even in such straits as these, he felt a certain pique in being seen through so easily.

She smiled wanly. “You never were a very good liar, Lou.”

He began to protest again, and she cut him off.

“Ellie dreamed you were dead,” she said. “Last night. She woke up crying, and I went in to her. I slept with her for two or three hours and then came back in with you. She said that in her dream you were sitting at the kitchen table and your eyes were open, but she knew you were dead. She said she could hear Steve Masterton screaming.”

Louis looked at her, dismayed. “Rachel,” he said at last, “her brother just died. It's normal enough for her to dream that other members of her family—”

“Yes, I surmised that much for myself. But the way she told it . . . the elements . . . it seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.”

She laughed weakly.

“Or maybe you had to be there.”

“Yes, maybe so,” Louis said.

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

“Come to bed with me,” Rachel said. “The Valium's all worn off, and I don't want to take any more. But I'm afraid. I've been having my own dreams . . .”

“Dreams of what?”

“Of Zelda,” she said simply. “The last few nights since Gage died, when I go to sleep, Zelda's there. She says she's coming for me, and this time she'll get me.
That both she and Gage will get me. For letting them die.”

“Rachel, that's—”

“I know. Just a dream. Normal enough. But come to bed with me and keep the dreams away if you can, Louis.”

*  *  *

They lay together in the dark, crowded into Louis's single.

“Rachel? You still awake?”

“Yes.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

He hesitated, not wanting to cause her even more pain but needing to know.

“Do you remember the scare we had with him when he was nine months old?” he asked finally.

“Yes. Yes, of course I do. Why?”

By the time Gage was nine months old, Louis had become deeply concerned about his son's cranial size. It was right off Louis's Berterier Chart, which showed the normal range of infant head sizes on a per-month basis. At four months, Gage's skull size had begun to drift toward the highest part of the curve, and then it began to go even higher than that. He wasn't having any trouble holding his head up—that would have been a dead giveaway—but Louis had nevertheless taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest. Rachel had wanted to know what was wrong, and Louis had told her the truth: he was worried that Gage might be hydrocephalic. Rachel's
face had grown very white, but she had remained calm.

“He seems normal to me,” she said.

Louis nodded. “He does to me too. But I don't want to ignore this, babe.”

“No, you mustn't,” she said.
“We
mustn't.”

Tardiff had measured Gage's skull and frowned. Tardiff poked two fingers at Gage's face, Three Stooges style. Gage flinched. Tardiff smiled. Louis's heart thawed out a little. Tardiff gave Gage a ball to hold. Gage held it for a while and then dropped it. Tardiff retrieved the ball and bounced it, watching Gage's eyes. Gage's eyes tracked the ball.

“I'd say there's a fifty-fifty chance he's hydrocephalic,” Tardiff said to Louis in his office later. “No—the odds may actually be a bit higher than that. If so, it's mild. He seems very alert. The new shunt operation should take care of the problem easily . . . if there
is
a problem.”

“A shunt means brain surgery,” Louis said.

“Minor
brain surgery.”

Louis had studied the process not long after he began to worry about the size of Gage's head, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid, had not looked very minor to
him.
But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself just to be grateful the operation existed at all.

“Of course,” Tardiff went on, “there's still a large possibility that your kid just has a real big head for a nine-month-old. I think a CAT-scan is the best place to start. Do you agree?”

Louis had agreed.

Gage spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital and underwent general anesthesia. His sleeping head was stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at Grandma and Grandda's, watching “Sesame Street” nonstop on Grandda's new video recorder. For Louis, those had been long, gray hours in which he found himself totting up sums of varying ugliness and comparing results. Death under general anesthesia, death during a shunt operation, mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalus, cataclysmic retardation as a result of same, epilepsy, blindness . . . oh, there were all sorts of possibilities.
For really complete disaster maps,
Louis remembered thinking,
see your local doctor.

Tardiff had come into the waiting room around five o'clock. He had three cigars. He plugged one into Louis's mouth, one into Rachel's (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.

“The kid is fine. No hydrocephalus.”

“Light this thing,” Rachel had said, weeping and laughing at the same time. “I'm going to smoke it till I puke.”

Grinning, Tardiff lit their cigars.

God was saving him for Route 15, Dr. Tardiff,
Louis thought now.

“Rachel, if he
had
been hydrocephalic, and if the shunt hadn't worked . . . could you have still loved him?”

“What a weird question, Louis!”

“Could
you?”

“Yes, of course. I would have loved Gage no matter what.”

“Even if he was retarded?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have wanted him institutionalized?”

“No, I don't think so,” she said slowly. “I suppose, with the money you're making now, we could afford that . . . a really good place, I mean . . . but I think I'd want him with us if we could . . . Louis, why do you ask?”

“Why, I suppose I was still thinking of your sister Zelda,” he said. He was still astonished at this eerie glibness. “Wondering if you could have gone through that again.”

“It wouldn't have been the same,” she said, sounding almost amused. “Gage was . . . well, Gage was Gage. He was our son. That would have made all the difference. It would have been hard, I guess, but . . . would
you
have wanted him in an institution? A place like Pineland?”

“No.”

“Let's go to sleep.”

“That's a good idea.”

“I feel like I
can
sleep now,” she said. “I want to put this day behind me.”

“Amen to that,” Louis said.

A long time later she said drowsily, “You're right, Louis . . . just dreams and vapors . . .”

“Sure,” he said, and kissed her earlobe. “Now sleep.”

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy

He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of the moon looked in the window at him.

The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel's and Ellie's baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving.

Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.

Conspirator's complex working overtime, boyo,
he told himself.

She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy first, perhaps for the whole summer, and only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airport with her, and she sat calmly
in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.