Ralph would think of those two expressions and the distance between the men who wore them, and after awhile his dismayed eyes would wander back to the news photo. Two men stood close behind Dalton, both carrying pro-life signs and watching the confrontation intently. Ralph didn't recognize the skinny man with the hornrimmed glasses and the cloud of receding gray hair, but he knew the man beside him. It was Ed Deepneau. Yet in this context, Ed seemed almost not to matter. What drew Ralph - and frightened him - were the faces of the two men who had done business next door to each other on Lower Witcham Street for years - Davenport with his caveman's snarl and clenched fist, Dalton with his dazed eyes and bloody nose.
He thought, If you're not careful with your passions, this is where they get you. But this is where things had better stop, because--
'Because if those two had had guns, they'd've shot each other,' he muttered, and at that moment the doorbell rang - the one down on the front porch. Ralph got up, looked at the picture again, and felt a kind of vertigo sweep through him. With it came an odd, dismal surety: it was Ed down there, and God knew what he might want.
Don't answer it then, Ralph!
He stood by the kitchen table for a long undecided moment, wishing bitterly that he could cut through the fog that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his head this year. Then the doorbell chimed again and he found he had decided. It didn't matter if that was Saddam Hussein down there; this was his place, and he wasn't going to cower in it like a whipped cur.
Ralph crossed the living room, opened the door to the hall, and went down the shadowy front stairs.
4
Halfway down he relaxed a little. The top half of the door which gave on the front porch was composed of heavy glass panes. They distorted the view, but not so much that Ralph could not see that his two visitors were both women. He guessed at once who one of them must be and hurried the rest of the way down, running one hand lightly over the banister. He threw the door open and there was Helen Deepneau with a tote-bag (BABY FIRST-AID STATION was printed on the side) slung over one shoulder and Natalie peering over the other, her eyes as bright as the eyes of a cartoon mouse. Helen was smiling hopefully and a little nervously.
Natalie's face suddenly lit up and she began to bounce up and down in the Papoose carrier Helen was wearing, waving her arms excitedly in Ralph's direction.
She remembers me, Ralph thought. How about that. And as he reached out and let one of the waving hands grasp his right index finger, his eyes flooded with tears.
'Ralph?' Helen asked. 'Are you okay?'
He smiled, nodded, stepped forward, and hugged her. He felt Helen lock her own arms around his neck. For a moment he was dizzy with the smell of her perfume, mingled with the milky smell of healthy baby, and then she gave his ear a dazzling smack and let him go.
'You are okay, aren't you?' she asked. There were tears in her eyes, too, but Ralph barely noticed them; he was too busy taking inventory, wanting to make sure that no signs of the beating remained. So far as he could see, none did. She looked flawless.
'Better right now than in weeks,' he said. 'You are such a sight for sore eyes. You too, Nat.' He kissed the small, chubby hand that was still wrapped around his finger, and was not entirely surprised to see the ghostly gray-blue lip-print his mouth left behind. It faded almost as soon as he had noted it and he hugged Helen again, mostly to make sure that she was really there.
'Dear Ralph,' she murmured in his ear. 'Dear, sweet Ralph.'
He felt a stirring in his groin, apparently brought on by the combination of her light perfume and the gentle puffs her words made against the cup of his ear . . . and then he remembered another voice in his ear. Ed's voice. I called about your mouth, Ralph. It's trying to get you in trouble.
Ralph let her go and held her at arm's length, still smiling. 'You're a sight for sore eyes, Helen. I'll be damned if you're not.'
'You are, too. I'd like you to meet a friend of mine. Ralph Roberts, Gretchen Tillbury. Gretchen, Ralph.'
Ralph turned toward the other woman and took his first good look at her as he carefully folded his large, gnarled hand over her slim white one. She was the kind of woman that made a man (even one who had left his sixties behind) want to stand up straight and suck in his gut. She was very tall, perhaps six feet, and she was blonde, but that wasn't it. There was something else - something that was like a smell, or a vibration, or (an aura) yes, all right, like an aura. She was, quite simply, a woman you couldn't not look at, couldn't not think about, couldn't not speculate about.
Ralph remembered Helen's telling him that Gretchen's husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife and left her to bleed to death. He wondered how any man could do such a thing; how any man could touch a creature such as this with anything but awe.
Also a little lust, maybe, once he got beyond the 'She walks in beauty like the night' stage. And just by the way, Ralph, this might be a really good time to reel your eyes back into their sockets.
'Very pleased to meet you,' he said, letting go of her hand. 'Helen told me about how you came to see her in the hospital. Thank you for helping her.'
'Helen was a pleasure to help,' Gretchen said, and gave him a dazzling smile. 'She's the kind of woman that makes it all worthwhile, actually . . . but I have an idea you already know that.'
'I guess I might at that,' Ralph said. 'Have you got time for a cup of coffee? Please say yes.'
Gretchen glanced at Helen, who nodded.
'That would be fine,' Helen said. 'Because . . . well . . .'
'This isn't entirely a social call, is it?' Ralph asked, looking from Helen to Gretchen Tillbury and then back to Helen again.
'No,' Helen said. 'There's something we need to talk to you about, Ralph.'
5
As soon as they had reached the top of the gloomy front stairs, Natalie began to wriggle impatiently around in the Papoose carrier and to talk in that imperious baby pig Latin that would all too soon be replaced by actual words.
'Can I hold her?' Ralph asked.
'All right,' Helen said. 'If she cries, I'll take her right back. Promise.'
'Deal.'
But the Exalted & Revered Baby didn't cry. As soon as Ralph had hoisted her out of the Papoose, she slung an arm companionably around his neck and cozied her bottom into the crook of his right arm as if it were her own private easy-chair.
'Wow,' Gretchen said. 'I'm impressed.'
'Blig!' Natalie said, seizing Ralph's lower lip and pulling it out like a windowshade. 'Ganna-wig! Andoo-sis!'
'I think she just said something about the Andrews Sisters,' Ralph said. Helen threw her head back and laughed her hearty laugh, the one that seemed to come all the way up from her heels. Ralph didn't realize how much he had missed it until he heard it.
Natalie let Ralph's lower lip snap back as he led them into the kitchen, the sunniest room of the house at this time of day. He saw Helen looking around curiously as he turned on the Bunn, and realized she hadn't been here for a long time. Too long. She picked up the picture of Carolyn that stood on the kitchen table and looked at it closely, a little smile playing about the corners of her lips. The sun lit the tips of her hair, which had been cropped short, making a kind of corona around her head, and Ralph had a sudden revelation: he loved Helen in large part because Carolyn had loved her - they had both been allowed into the deeper ranges of Carolyn's heart and mind.
'She was so pretty,' Helen murmured. 'Wasn't she, Ralph?'
'Yes,' he said, putting out cups (and being careful to set them beyond the reach of Natalie's restless, interested hands). 'That was taken just a month or two before the headaches started. I suppose it's eccentric to keep a framed studio portrait on the kitchen table in front of the sugar-bowl, but this is the room where I seem to spend most of my time lately, so . . .'
'I think it's a lovely place for it,' Gretchen said. Her voice was low, sweetly husky. Ralph thought, If she'd been the one to whisper in my ear, I bet the old trouser-mouse
would have done a little more than just turn over in its sleep.
'I do, too,' Helen said. She gave him a fragile, not-quite-eye-contact smile, then slipped the pink tote-bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter. Natalie began to gabble impatiently and hold her hands out again as soon as she saw the plastic shell of the Playtex Nurser. Ralph had a vivid but mercifully brief flash of memory: Helen staggering toward the Red Apple, one eye puffed shut, her cheek lashed with beads of blood, carrying Nat on one hip, the way a teenager might carry a textbook.
'Want to give it a try, old fella?' Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.
'Sure, why not? But the coffee--'
'I'll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,' Gretchen said. 'Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?'
'In the fridge.' Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. 'They learn fast, don't they?'
'Yes,' she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. 'I can't get over how easy she is with you, Ralph - she wasn't that way before, was she?'
'I don't really remember,' he lied. She hadn't been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.
'Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay? Otherwise she'll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.'
'Roger.' He glanced over at Gretchen. 'Doing okay?'
'Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?'
'Just in a cup's fine.'
She laughed and put the cup on the table out of Natalie's reach. When she sat down and crossed her legs, Ralph checked - he was helpless not to. When he looked up again, Gretchen was wearing a small, ironic smile.
What the hell, Ralph thought. No goat like an old goat, I guess. Even an old goat that can't manage much more than two or two and a half hours' worth of sleep a night.
'Tell me about your job,' he said as Helen sat down and sipped her coffee.
'Well, I think they ought to make Mike Hanlon's birthday a national holiday - does that tell you anything?'
'A little, yes,' Ralph said, smiling.
'I was all but positive I'd have to leave Derry. I sent away for applications to libraries as far south as Portsmouth, but I felt sick doing it. I'm going on thirty-one and I've only lived here for six of those years, but Derry feels like home - I can't explain it, but it's the truth.'
'You don't have to explain it, Helen. I think home's just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.'
Gretchen was nodding. 'Yes,' she said. 'Just like that.'
'Mike called Monday and told me the assistant's position in the Children's Library had opened up. I could hardly believe it. I mean, I've been walking around all week just pinching myself. Haven't I, Gretchen?'
'Well, you've been very happy,' Gretchen said, 'and that's been very good to see.'
She smiled at Helen, and for Ralph that smile was a revelation. He suddenly understood that he could look at Gretchen Tillbury all he wanted, and it wouldn't make any difference. If the only man in this room had been Tom Cruise, it still would have made no difference. He wondered if Helen knew, and then scolded himself for his foolishness. Helen was many things, but stupid wasn't one of them.
'When do you start?' he asked her.
'Columbus Day week,' she said. 'The twelfth. Afternoons and evenings. The salary's not exactly a king's ransom, but it'll be enough to keep us through the winter no matter how the . . . the rest of my situation works out. Isn't it great, Ralph?'
'Yes,' he said. 'Very great.'
The baby had drunk half the bottle and now showed signs of losing interest. The nipple popped halfway out of her mouth, and a little rill of milk ran down from the corner of her lips toward her chin. Ralph reached to wipe it away, and his fingers left a series of delicate gray-blue lines in the air.
Baby Natalie snatched at them, then laughed as they dissolved in her fist. Ralph's breath caught in his throat.
She sees. The baby sees what I see.
That's nuts, Ralph. That's nuts and you know it.
Except he knew no such thing. He had just seen it - had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.
'Ralph?' Helen asked. 'Are you all right?'
'Sure.' He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon-string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. 'Will you be moving back into the house?'
Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn't need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen's now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange. Helen's, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.
And her own helplessness, Ralph thought. That infuriates her even more.
'I'm going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer,' Helen was saying. 'Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actually buys it - and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark - the money goes into an escrow account. That account will be divided according to the decree. You know - the divorce decree.'
Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.
'You're telling me two things,' he said. 'That you're going ahead with the divorce and that you're still scared of him.'
'She's been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage,' Gretchen said. 'Of course she's still scared of him.' She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal-furnaces.
He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother's, but otherwise identical . . . like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie's balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band bell and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen's and Gretchen's balloon-strings were also rippling.
And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing, he thought. It's real - whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They're real and I'm seeing them.
He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.
'I feel like I'm spending most of my time in an emotional washing-machine these days,' Helen said. 'My mom's mad at me . . . she's done everything but call me a quitter outright . . . and sometimes I feel like a quitter . . . ashamed . . .'
'You have nothing to be ashamed of,' Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie's balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.
'I guess I know that,' Helen said,'but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It's like,"Here's your Barbie, here's your Ken, here's your Host
ess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it'll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you'll get the blame." And I think I could have gone down the line with that - I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?'
'No. That's pretty much what happened, so far as I can see.'
Helen laughed - a jagged, bitter, guilty sound. 'Don't try to tell my mother that. She refuses to believe Ed ever did anything more than give me a husbandly swat on the fanny once in awhile . . . just to get me moving in the right direction again if I happened to slip off-course. She thinks I imagined the rest. She doesn't come right out and say it, but I hear it in her voice every time we talk on the phone.'
'I don't think you imagined it,' Ralph said. 'I saw you, remember? And I was there when you begged me not to call the police.'
He felt his thigh squeezed beneath the table and looked up, startled. Gretchen Tillbury gave him a very slight nod and another squeeze - this one more emphatic.
'Yes,' Helen said. 'You were there, weren't you?' She smiled a little, which was good, but what was happening to her aura was better - those tiny red flickers were fading, and the aura itself was spreading out again.
No, he thought. Not spreading out. Loosening. Relaxing.
Helen got up and came around the table. 'Nat's bailing out on you - better let me take her.'
Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.
I'm watching them breathe their last, Ralph thought. Oh my God, I'm never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise.
Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.