United States Congressmen.”
He did not speed home like a busy man with lots to do, but like somebody out for a leisurely drive. She had not been in a car with him enough to know if that was how he always drove, but she suspected maybe he was loafing along a little slower than he usually did, so they could have more time together, just the two of them. That was sweet. It made her throat a little tight and her eyes watery. Oh, terrific. A pile of cow flop could’ve carried on a better conversation than she was managing, so now she was going to burst into tears, which would really cement the relationship. Surely every adoptive parent desperately hoped to receive a mute, emotionally unstable girl with physical problems—right? It was all the rage, don’t you know. Well, if she did cry, her treacherous sinuses would kick in, and the old snot-faucet would start gushing, which would surely make her even more appealing. He’d give up the idea of a leisurely drive, and head for home at such tremendous speed that he’d have to stand on the brakes a mile from the house to avoid shooting straight through the back of the garage. (Please, God, help me here. You’ll notice I thought “cow flop” not “cow shit,” so I deserve a little mercy.)
They chatted about this and that. Actually, for a while he chatted and she pretty much just grunted like she was a subhuman out on a pass from the zoo. But eventually she realized, to her surprise, that she was talking in complete sentences, had been doing so for a couple of miles, and was at ease with him.
He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just about bent his ear clear off explaining that some people actually made a living writing the kinds of books she liked to read and that she had been composing her own stories for a year or two. Lame stuff, she admitted, but she would get better at it. She was very bright for ten, older than her years, but she couldn’t expect actually to have a career going until she was eighteen, maybe sixteen if she was lucky. When had Mr. Christopher Pike started publishing? Seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe he’d been as old as twenty, but certainly no older, so that’s what she would shoot for—being the next Mr. Christopher Pike by the time she was twenty. She had an entire notebook full of story ideas. Quite a few of those ideas were good even when you crossed out the embarrassingly childish ones like the story about the intelligent pig from space that she had been so hot about for a while but now saw was hopelessly dumb. She was still talking about writing books when they pulled into the driveway of the house in Laguna Niguel, and he actually seemed interested.
She figured she might get the hang of this family thing yet.
Vassago dreamed of fire. The click of the cigarette-lighter cover being flipped open in the dark. The dry rasp of the striker wheel scraping against the flint. A spark. A young girl’s white summer dress flowering into flames. The Haunted House ablaze. Screams as the calculatedly spooky darkness dissolved under licking tongues of orange light. Tod Ledderbeck was dead in the cavern of the Millipede, and now the house of plastic skeletons and rubber ghouls was abruptly filled with real terror and pungent death.
He had dreamed of that fire previously, countless times since the night of Tod’s twelfth birthday. It always provided the most beautiful of all the chimeras and phantasms that passed behind his eyes in sleep.
But on this occasion, strange faces and images appeared in the flames. The red car again. A solemnly beautiful, auburn-haired child with large gray eyes that seemed too old for her face. A small hand, cruelly bent, with fingers missing. A name, which had come to him once before, echoed through the leaping flames and melting shadows in the Haunted House. Regina ... Regina ... Regina.
The visit to Dr. Nyebern’s office had depressed Hatch, both because the tests had revealed nothing that shed any light on his strange experiences and because of the glimpse he had gotten into the physician’s own troubled life. But Regina was a medicine for melancholy if ever there had been one. She had all the enthusiasm of a child her age; life had not beaten her down one inch.
On the way from the car to the front door of the house, she moved more swiftly and easily than when she had entered Salvatore Gujilio’s office, but the leg brace did give her a measured and solemn gait. A bright yellow and blue butterfly accompanied her every step, fluttering gaily a few inches from her head, as if it knew that her spirit was very like itself, beautiful and buoyant.
She said solemnly, “Thank you for picking me up, Mr. Harrison.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” he said with equal gravity.
They would have to do something about this “Mr. Harrison” business before the day was out. He sensed that her formality was partly a fear of getting too close—and then being rejected as she had been during the trial phase of her first adoption. But it was also a fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and unwittingly destroying her own prospects for happiness.
At the front door, he said, “Either Lindsey or I will be at the school for you every day—unless you’ve got a driver’s license and would just rather come and go on your own.”
She looked up at Hatch. The butterfly was describing circles in the air above her head, as if it were a living crown or halo. She said, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid I am.”
She blushed and looked away from him, as if she was not sure if being teased was a good or bad thing. He could almost hear her inner thoughts: Is he teasing me because he thinks I’m cute or because he thinks I’m hopelessly stupid, or something pretty close to that.
Throughout the drive home from school, Hatch had seen that Regina suffered from her share of self-doubt, which she thought she concealed but which, when it struck, was evident in her lovely, wonderfully expressive face. Each time he sensed a crack in the kid’s self-confidence, he wanted to put his arms around her, hug her tight, and reassure her—which would be exactly the wrong thing to do because she would be appalled to realize that her moments of inner turmoil were so obvious to him. She prided herself on being tough, resilient, and self-sufficient. She projected that image as armor against the world.
“I hope you don’t mind some teasing,” he said as he inserted the key in the door. “That’s the way I am. I could check myself into a Teasers Anonymous program, shake the habit, but it’s a tough outfit. They beat you with rubber hoses and make you eat Lima beans.”
When enough time passed, when she felt she was loved and part of a family, her self-confidence would be as unshakable as she wanted it to be now. In the meantime, the best thing he could do for her was pretend that he saw her exactly as she wished to be seen—and quietly, patiently help her finish becoming the poised and assured person she hoped to be.
As he opened the door and they went inside, Regina said, “I used to hate Lima beans, all kinds of beans, but I made a deal with God. If he gives me ... something I ’specially want, I’ll eat every kind of bean there is for the rest of my life without ever complaining.”
In the foyer, closing the door behind them, Hatch said, “That’s quite an offer. God ought to be impressed.”
“I sure hope so,” she said.
And in Vassago’s dream, Regina moved in sunlight, one leg embraced in steel, a butterfly attending her as it might a flower. A house flanked by palm trees. A door. She looked up at Vassago, and her eyes revealed a soul of tremendous vitality and a heart so vulnerable that the beat of his own was quickened even in sleep.
They found Lindsey upstairs, in the extra bedroom that served as her at-home studio. The easel was angled away from the door, so Hatch couldn’t see the painting. Lindsey’s blouse was half in and half out of her jeans, her hair was in disarray, a smear of rust-red paint marked her left cheek, and she had a look that Hatch knew from experience meant she was in the final fever of work on a piece that was turning out to be everything she had hoped.
“Hi, honey,” Lindsey said to Regina. “How was school?”
Regina was flustered, as she always seemed to be, by any term of endearment. “Well, school is school, you know.”
“Well, you must like
it. I know you get good grades.” Regina shrugged off the compliment and looked embarrassed.
Repressing the urge to hug the kid, Hatch said to Lindsey, “She’s going to be a writer when she grows up.”
“Really?” Lindsey said. “That’s exciting. I knew you loved books, but I didn’t realize you wanted to write them.”
“Neither did I,” the girl said, and suddenly she was in gear and off, her initial awkwardness with Lindsey past, words pouring out of her as she crossed the room and went behind the easel to have a look at the work in progress, “until just last Christmas, when my gift under the tree at the home was six paperbacks. Not books for a ten-year-old, either, but the real stuff, because I read at a tenth-grade level, which is fifteen years old. I’m what they call precocious. Anyway, those books made the best gift ever, and I thought it’d be neat if someday a girl like me at the home got my books under the tree and felt the way I felt, not that I’ll ever be as good a writer as Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or Mr. Christopher Pike. Jeez, I mean, they’re right up there with Shakespeare and Judy Blume. But I’ve got good stories to tell, and they’re not all that intelligent-pig-from-space crap. Sorry. I mean poop. I mean junk. Intelligent-pig-from-space junk. They’re not all like that.”
Lindsey never showed Hatch—or anyone else—a canvas in progress, withholding even a glimpse of it until the final brush stroke had been applied. Though she was evidently near completion of the current painting, she was still working on it, and Hatch was surprised that she didn’t even twitch when Regina went around to the front of the easel to have a look. He decided that no kid, just because she had a cute nose and some freckles, was going to be accorded a privilege he was denied, so he also walked boldly around the easel to take a peek.
It was a stunning piece of work. The background was a field of stars, and superimposed over it was the transparent face of an ethereally beautiful young boy. Not just any boy. Their Jimmy. When he was alive she had painted him a few times, but never since his death—until now. It was an idealized Jimmy of such perfection that his face might have been that of an angel. His loving eyes were turned upward, toward a warm light that rained down upon him from beyond the top of the canvas, and his expression was more profound than joy. Rapture. In the foreground, as the focus of the work, floated a black rose, not transparent like the face, rendered in such sensuous detail that Hatch could almost feel the velvety texture of each plush petal. The green skin of the stem was moist with a cool dew, and the thorns were portrayed with such piercingly sharp points that he half believed they would prick like real thorns if touched. A single drop of blood glistened on one of the black petals. Somehow Lindsey had imbued the floating rose with an aura of preternatural power, so it drew the eye, demanded attention, almost mesmeric in its effect. Yet the boy did not look down at the rose; he gazed up at the radiant object only he could see, the implication being that, as powerful as the rose might be, it was of no interest whatsoever when compared to the source of the light above.
From the day of Jimmy’s death until Hatch’s resuscitation, Lindsey had refused to take solace from any god who would create a world with death in it. He recalled a priest suggesting prayer as a route to acceptance and psychological healing, and Lindsey’s response had been cold and dismissive: Prayer never works. Expect no miracles, Father. The dead stay dead, and the living only wait
to join them. Something had changed in her now. The black rose in the painting was death. Yet it had no power over Jimmy. He had gone beyond death, and it meant nothing to him. He was rising above it. And by being able to conceive of the painting and bring it off so flawlessly, Lindsey had found a way to say goodbye to the boy at last, goodbye without regrets, goodbye without bitterness, goodbye with love and with a startling new acceptance of the need for belief in something more than a life that ended always in a cold, black hole in the ground.
“It’s so beautiful,” Regina said with genuine awe. “Scary in a way, I don’t know why ... scary ... but so beautiful.”
Hatch looked up from the painting, met Lindsey’s eyes, tried to say something, but could not speak. Since his resuscitation, there had been a rebirth of Lindsey’s heart as well as his own, and they had confronted the mistake they had made by losing five years to grief. But on some fundamental level, they had not accepted that life could ever be as sweet as it had been before that one small death; they had not really let Jimmy go. Now, meeting Lindsey’s eyes, he knew that she had finally embraced hope again without reservation. The full weight of his little boy’s death fell upon Hatch as it had not in years, because if Lindsey could make peace with God, he must do so as well. He tried to speak again, could not, looked again at the painting, realized he was going to cry, and left the room.
He didn’t know where he was going. Without quite remembering taking any step along the route, he went downstairs, into the den that they had offered to Regina as a bedroom, opened the French doors, and stepped into the rose garden at the side of the house.
In the warm, late-afternoon sun, the roses were red, white, yellow, pink, and the shade of peach skins, some only buds and some as big as saucers, but not one of them black. The air was full of their enchanting fragrance.
With the taste of salt in the corners of his mouth, he reached out with both hands toward the nearest rose-laden bush, intending to touch the flowers, but his hands stopped short of them. With his arms thus forming a cradle, he suddenly could feel a weight draped across them. In reality, nothing was in his arms, but the burden he felt was no mystery; he remembered, as if it had been an hour ago, how the body of his cancer-wasted son had felt.
In the final moments before death’s hateful visitation, he had pulled the wires and tubes from Jim, had lifted him off the sweat-soaked hospital bed, and had sat in a chair by the window, holding him close and murmuring to him until the pale, parted lips drew no more breath. Until his own death, Hatch would remember precisely the weight of the wasted boy in his arms, the sharpness of bones with so little flesh left to pad them, the awful dry heat pouring off skin translucent with sickness, the heart-rending fragility.
He felt all that now, in his empty arms, there in the rose garden. When he looked up at the summer sky, he said, “Why?” as if there were Someone to answer. “He was so small,” Hatch said. “He was so damned small.”
As he spoke, the burden was heavier than it had ever been in that hospital room, a thousand tons in his empty arms, maybe because he still didn’t want to free himself of it as much as he thought he did. But then a strange thing happened—the weight in his arms slowly diminished, and the invisible body of his son seemed to float out of his embrace, as if the flesh had been transmuted entirely to spirit at long last, as if Jim had no need of comforting or consolation any more.
Hatch lowered his arms.
Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.
He stood among the roses.
The day was warm. The late-afternoon light was golden.
The sky was perfectly clear—and utterly mysterious.
Regina asked if she could have some of Lindsey’s paintings in her room, and she sounded sincere. They chose three. Together they hammered in picture hooks and hung the paintings where she wanted them—along with a foot-tall crucifix she had brought from her room at the orphanage.
As they worked, Lindsey said, “How about dinner at a really super pizza parlor I know?”
“Yeah!” the girl said enthusiastically. “I love pizza.”
“They make it with a nice thick crust, lots of cheese.”
“Pepperoni?”
“Cut thin, but lots of it.”
“Sausage?”
“Sure, why not. Though you’re sure this isn’t getting to be a pretty revolting pizza for a vegetarian like you?”
Regina blushed. “Oh, that. I was such a little shit that day. Oh, Jeez, sorry. I mean, such a sma
rtass. I mean, such a jerk.”
“That’s okay,” Lindsey said. “We all behave like jerks now and then.”
“You don’t. Mr. Harrison doesn’t.”
“Oh, just wait.” Standing on a stepstool in front of the wall opposite the bed, Lindsey pounded in a nail for a picture hook. Regina was holding the painting for her. As she took it from the girl to hang it, Lindsey said, “Listen, will you do me a favor at dinner tonight?”
“Favor? Sure.”
“I know it’s still awkward for you, this new arrangement. You don’t really feel at home and probably won’t for a long time—”
“Oh, it’s very nice here,” the girl protested.
Lindsey slipped the wire over the picture hook and adjusted the painting until it hung straight. Then she sat down on the stepstool, which just about brought her and the girl eye to eye. She took hold of both of Regina’s hands, the normal one and the different one. “You’re right—it’s very nice here. But you and I both know that’s not the same as home. I wasn’t going to push you on this. I was going to let you take your time, but ... Even if it seems a little premature to you, do you think tonight at dinner you could stop calling us Mr. and Mrs. Harrison? Especially Hatch. It would be very important to him, just now, if you could at least call him Hatch.”
The girl lowered her eyes to their interlocked hands. “Well, I guess ... sure ... that would be okay.”
“And you know what? I realize this is asking more than it’s fair to ask yet, before you really know him that well. But do you know what would be the best thing in the world for him right now?”
The girl was still staring at their hands. “What?”
“If somehow you could find it in your heart to call him Dad. Don’t say yes or no just now. Think about it. But it would be a wonderful thing for you to do for him, for reasons I don’t have time to explain right here. And I promise you this, Regina—he is a good man. He will do anything for you, put his life on the line for you if it ever came to that, and never ask for anything. He’d be upset if he knew I was even asking you for this. But all I’m asking, really, is for you to think about it.”
After a long silence, the girl looked up from their linked hands and nodded. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you, Regina.” She got up from the stepstool. “Now let’s hang that last painting.”
Lindsey measured, penciled a spot on the wall, and nailed in a picture hook.
When Regina handed over the painting, she said, “It’s just that all my life ... there’s never been anyone I called Mom or Dad. It’s a very new thing.”
Lindsey smiled. “I understand, honey. I really do. And so will Hatch if it takes time.”
In the blazing Haunted House, as the cries for help and the screams of agony swelled louder, a strange object appeared in the firelight. A single rose. A black rose. It floated as if an unseen magician was levitating it. Vassago had never encountered anything more beautiful in the world of the living, in the world of the dead, or in the realm of dreams. It shimmered before him, its petals so smooth and soft that they seemed to have been cut from swatches of the night sky unspoiled by stars. The thorns were exquisitely sharp, needles of glass. The green stem had the oiled sheen of a serpent’s skin. One petal held a single drop of blood.
The rose faded from his dream, but later it returned—and with it the woman named Lindsey and the auburn-haired girl with the soft-gray eyes. Vassago yearned to possess all three: the black rose, the woman, and the girl with the gray eyes.
After Hatch freshened up for dinner, while Lindsey finished getting ready in the bathroom, he sat alone on the edge of their bed and read the article by S. Steven Honell in Arts American. He could shrug off virtually any insult to himself, but if someone slammed Lindsey, he always reacted with anger. He couldn’t even deal well with reviews of her work that she thought had made valid criticisms. Reading Honell’s vicious, snide, and ultimately stupid diatribe dismissing her entire career as “wasted energy,” Hatch grew angrier by the sentence.
As had happened the previous night, his anger erupted into fiery rage with volcanic abruptness. The muscles in his jaws clenched so hard, his teeth ached. The magazine began to shake because his hands were trembling with fury. His vision blurred slightly, as if he were looking at everything through shimmering waves of heat, and he had to blink and squint to make the fuzzy-edged words on the page resolve into readable print.
As when he had been lying in bed last night, he felt as if his anger opened a door and as if something entered him through it, a foul spirit that knew only rage and hate. Or maybe it had been with him all along but sleeping, and his anger had roused it. He was not alone inside his own head. He was aware of another presence, like a spider crawling through the narrow space between the inside of his skull and the surface of his brain.
He tried to put the magazine aside and calm down. But he kept reading because he was not in full possession of himself.
Vassago moved through the Haunted House, untroubled by the hungry fire, because he had planned an escape route. Sometimes he was twelve years old, and sometimes he was twenty. But always his path was lit by human torches, some of whom had collapsed into silent melting heaps upon the smoking floor, some of whom exploded into flames even as he passed them.
In the dream he was carrying a magazine, folded open to an article that angered him and seemed imperative he read. The edges of the pages curled in the heat and threatened to catch fire. Names leaped at him from the pages. Lindsey. Lindsey Sparling. Now he had a last name for her. He felt an urge to toss the magazine aside, slow his breathing, calm down. Instead he stoked his anger, let a sweet flood of rage overwhelm him, and told himself that he must know more. The edges of the magazine pages curled in the heat. Honell. Another name. Steven Honell. Bits of burning debris fell on the article. Steven S. Honell. No. The S first. S. Steven Honell. The paper caught fire. Honell. A writer. A barroom. Silverado Canyon. In his hands, the magazine burst into flames that flashed into his face—
He shed sleep like a fired bullet shedding its brass jacket, and sat up in his dark hideaway. Wide awake. Excited. He knew enough now to find the woman.
One moment rage like a fire swept through Hatch, and the next moment it was extinguished. His jaws relaxed, his tense shoulders sagged, and his hands unclenched so suddenly that he dropped the magazine on the floor between his feet.
He continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a while, stunned and confused. He looked toward the bathroom door, relieved that Lindsey had not walked in on