Hearts In Atlantis (75 page)

Of course; wasn't that why he had come himself? Surely not for Sully, or not just for Sully. And yet at the same time he had been so sure she was dead. From the instant he'd seen the picture of that burned-out house in Los Angeles, he had been positive. And how that had hurt his heart, not as if he had last seen her forty years before, running across Commonwealth Avenue, but as if she had always remained his friend, as close as a phone-call or a trip up the street.

While he was still trying to blink away the floating sunspot afterimage hanging before his eyes, the woman kissed him firmly on the mouth, and then whispered in his ear: “I have to go home. I have to make the salad. What's that?”

“The last thing you ever said to me when we were kids,” he replied, and turned to her. “You came. You're alive and you came.”

The sunset light fell on her face, and the afterimage had diminished enough for him to see her. She was beautiful in spite of the scar which began at the corner of her right eye and ran down to her chin in a cruel fishhook . . . or perhaps because of it. There were tiny sprays of crow's-feet beside her eyes, but no lines on her forehead or bracketing her paintless mouth.

Her hair, Bobby saw with wonder, was almost entirely gray.

As if reading his mind, she reached out and touched his head. “I'm so sorry,” she said . . . but he thought he saw her old merriness dancing in her eyes. “You had the
most gorgeous hair. Rionda used to say that was half of what I was in love with.”

“Carol—”

She reached out and put her fingers over his lips. There were scars on her hand, as well, Bobby saw, and her little finger was misshapen, almost melted. These were burn scars.

“I told you, I don't know anyone named Carol. My name is Denise. Like in the old Randy and The Rainbows song?” She hummed a snatch of it. Bobby knew it well. He knew all the oldies. “If you were to check my ID, you'd see Denise Schoonover all up and down the line. I saw you at the service.”

“I didn't see you.”

“I'm good at not being seen,” she said. “It's a trick someone taught me a long time ago. The trick of being
dim
.” She shuddered a little. Bobby had read of people shuddering—mostly in bad novels—but had never actually seen it done. “And when it comes to crowd scenes, I'm good at standing all the way at the back. Poor old Sully-John. Do you remember his Bo-lo Bouncer?”

Bobby nodded, starting to smile. “I remember one time when he tried to get extra-cool with it, hit it between his legs as well as between his arms and behind his back? He bopped himself a good one in the balls and we all just about killed ourselves laughing. A bunch of girls ran over—you were one of them, I'm pretty sure—wanting to know what happened, and we wouldn't tell you. You were pretty mad.”

She smiled, a hand going to her mouth, and in that old gesture Bobby could see the child she had been with complete clarity.

“How did you know he died?” Bobby asked.

“Read it in the New York
Post
. There was one of those horrible headlines that are their specialty—
JAMBO!
, it said—and pictures of him. I live in Poughkeepsie, where the
Post
is regularly available.” She paused. “I teach at Vassar.”

“You teach at Vassar and you read the
Post
?”

She shrugged, smiling. “Everyone has their vices. How about you, Bobby? Did you read it in the
Post
?”

“I don't get the
Post
. Ted told me. Ted Brautigan.”

She only sat there looking at him, her smile fading.

“You remember Ted?”

“I thought I'd never be able to use my arm again and Ted fixed it like magic. Of course I remember him. But Bobby—”

“He knew you'd be here. I thought that as soon as I opened the package, but I don't think I believed it until I saw you.” He reached out to her and with the unself-consciousness of a child traced the course of the scar on her face. “You got this in L.A., didn't you? What happened? How did you get out?”

She shook her head. “I don't talk about any of that. I've never talked about what went on in that house. I never will. That was a different life. That was a different girl. That girl died. She was very young, very idealistic, and she was tricked. Do you remember the Monte Man at Savin Rock?”

He nodded, smiling a little. He took her hand and she gripped his own tightly. “Now they go, now they slow, now they rest, here's the test. His name was McCann or McCausland or something like that.”

“The name doesn't matter. What matters is that he always let you think you knew where the queen was. He always let you think you could win. Right?”

“Right.”

“This girl got involved with a man like that. A man who could always move the cards just a little faster than you thought he could. He was looking for some confused, angry kids, and he found them.”

“Did he have a yellow coat?” Bobby asked. He didn't know if he was joking or not.

She looked at him, frowning a little, and he understood she didn't remember that part. Had he even told her about the low men? He thought so, he thought he had told her just about everything, but she didn't remember. Perhaps what had happened to her in L.A. had burned a few holes in her memory. Bobby could see how a thing like that might happen. And it wouldn't exactly make her unique, would it? A lot of people their age had worked very hard to forget who they had been and what they had believed during those years between the murder of John Kennedy in Dallas and the murder of John Lennon in New York City.

“Never mind,” he said. “Go on.”

She shook her head. “I've said all I'm going to about that part. All I can. Carol Gerber died on Benefit Street in Los Angeles. Denise Schoonover lives in Poughkeepsie. Carol hated math, couldn't even get fractions, but Denise
teaches
math. How could they be the same person? It's a ridiculous idea. Case closed. I want to know what you mean about Ted. He
can't
still be alive, Bobby. He'd be over a hundred. Well over.”

“I don't think time means much if you're a Breaker,” Bobby said. Nor did it mean much on WKND, where Jimmy Gilmer was now singing about the Sugar Shack to the tooting accompaniment of what sounded like a sweet potato.

“A Breaker? What's—”

“I don't know and it doesn't matter,” Bobby said. “This part might, so listen closely. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I live in Philadelphia. I've got a lovely wife who's a professional photographer, three lovely grown children, a lovely old dog with bad hips and a good disposition, and an old house which is always in desperate need of repairs. My wife says that's because the shoemaker's kids always go barefoot and the carpenter's house always has a leaky roof.”

“Is that what you are? A carpenter?”

He nodded. “I live in Redmont Hills, and when I remember to get a paper, the Philly
Inquirer
is the one I buy.”

“A carpenter,” she mused. “I always thought you'd wind up a writer, or something.”

“I did, too. But I also went through a period when I thought I'd wind up in Connecticut State Prison and
that
never happened, so I guess things have a way of balancing out.”

“What was in the package you mentioned? And what does it have to do with Ted?”

“The package came FedEx, from a guy named Norman Oliver. A banker. He was Sully-John's executor. This was inside.”

He reached into the gym bag again and brought out a battered old baseball glove. He laid it in the lap of the woman sitting next to him on the bench. She tipped it at once and looked at the name inked on the side.

“My God,” she said. Her voice was flat, shocked.

“I haven't seen this baby since the day I found you
over there in those trees with your arm dislocated. I suppose some kid came along, saw it lying on the grass, and just gleeped it. Although it wasn't in very good shape, even then.”

“Willie stole it,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Willie Shearman. I thought he was nice. You see what a fool I was about people? Even back then.”

He looked at her in silent surprise, but she didn't see his look; she was gazing down at the old Alvin Dark–model glove, plucking at the tangle of rawhide strings somehow still holding the webbing in place. And then she delighted and touched him by doing what he had done as soon as he opened the box and saw what was there: she lifted the baseball glove to her face and smelled the sweet oil-and-leather aroma of the pocket. Only he had slipped it on his hand first, without even thinking about it. It was a baseball-player thing to do, a kid-thing, automatic as breathing. Norman Oliver must have been a kid at some point, but he'd apparently never been a ballplayer, because he hadn't found the piece of paper poked deep into the last finger of the glove—the finger with the deep scratch in the old cowhide. Bobby was the one who found the paper. The nail of his little finger poked against it and made it crackle.

Carol put the glove down again. Gray hair or no gray hair, she looked young again, and fully alive. “Tell me.”

“It was on Sully's hand when they found him sitting dead in his car.”

Her eyes went huge and round. In that instant she did not just look like the little girl who had ridden the Ferris wheel with him at Savin Rock; she
was
that little girl.

“Look on the heel of the glove, there by Alvin Dark's signature. Do you see?”

The light was fading fast now, but she saw, all right.

B.G.

1464 Dupont Circle Road

Redmont Hills, Pennsylvania

Zone 11

“Your address,” she murmured. “Your address
now
.”

“Yes, but look at this.” He tapped the words
Zone 11
. “The post office quit zoning mail in the sixties. I checked. Ted either didn't know or forgot.”

“Maybe he put it that way on purpose.”

Bobby nodded. “It's possible. In any case, Oliver read the address and sent me the glove—said he saw no need to put an old fielder's mitt through probate. He mostly wanted me to know that Sully had died, if I didn't know already, and that there was going to be a memorial service in Harwich. I believe he wanted me to come so he could hear the story of the glove. I couldn't help him much with that, though. Carol, are you sure Willie—”

“I saw him wearing it. I told him to give it back so I could send it to you, but he wouldn't.”

“Do you suppose he gave it to Sully-John later?”

“He must have.” Yet it did not ring true to her, somehow; she felt the truth must be stranger than that. Willie's attitude to the glove itself had been strange, although she could no longer exactly remember how.

“Anyway,” he said, tapping the address on the heel of the glove, “that's Ted's printing. I'm sure it is. Then I put my hand up inside the glove, and I found something. It's really why I came.”

He reached into the gym bag a third time. The redness was going out of the light now; the remains of the day were a fading pink, the color of wild roses. The radio, still lying in the grass, played “Don'tcha Just Know It,” by Huey “Piano” Smith and The Clowns.

Bobby brought out a crumpled piece of paper. It had been stained in a couple of places by the glove's sweaty innards, but otherwise it looked remarkably white and fresh. He handed it to Carol.

She held it up to the light and slightly away from her face—her eyes, Bobby saw, were not as good as they once had been. “It's the title-page from a book,” she said, and then laughed. “
Lord of the Flies
, Bobby! Your favorite!”

“Look at the bottom,” he said. “Read what's there.”

“Faber and Faber, Limited . . . 24 Russell Square . . . London.” She looked at him questioningly.

“It's from the Faber paperback edition published in 1960,” Bobby said. “That's on the back. But look at it, Carol! It looks brand-new. I think the book this page came from might have been in 1960 only
weeks
ago. Not the glove, that's a
lot
more beat-up than when I found it, but the title-page.”

“Bobby, not all old books turn yellow if they're kept well. Even an old paperback might—”

“Turn it over,” he said. “Take a look at the other side.”

Carol did. Printed below the line reading
All rights reserved
was this:
Tell her she was as brave as a lion
.

“That's when I knew I had to come because
he
thought you'd be here, that you were still alive. I couldn't believe that, it was easier to believe in him than it was to believe—Carol? What's wrong? Is it the thing at the very bottom? What
is
that thing at the very bottom?”

She was crying now, and crying hard, holding the torn-out title-page in her hand and looking at what had been placed there on the back, squeezed into the scant white space below the conditions of sale: