Insomnia (24 page)

True, but Ralph had lived long enough to know there was a world of difference between charitable thinking and illusions. If the wino with the dark green aura was going to the bus station, then Ralph was going to Washington to be Secretary of State.

‘You shouldn’t do that, Ralph,’ McGovern said reprovingly. ‘It just encourages them.’

‘I suppose,’ Ralph said wearily.

‘What were you saying when we were so rudely interrupted?’

The idea of telling McGovern about the auras now seemed an incredibly bad one, and he could not for the life of him imagine how he had gotten so close to doing it. The insomnia, of course – that was the only answer. It had done a number on his judgement as well as his short-term memory and sense of perception.

‘That I got something in the mail this morning,’ Ralph said. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’ He passed Helen’s postcard over to McGovern, who read it and then reread it. The second time through, his long, horsey face broke into a broad grin. The combination of relief and honest pleasure in that expression made Ralph forgive McGovern his self-indulgent bathos at once. It was easy to forget that Bill could be generous as well as pompous.

‘Say, this is great, isn’t it? A job!’

‘It sure is. Want to celebrate with some lunch? There’s a nice little diner two doors down from the Rite Aid – Day Break, Sun Down, it’s called. Maybe a little ferny, but—’

‘Thanks, but I promised Bob’s niece I’d go over and sit with him awhile. Of course he’s doesn’t have the slightest idea of who I am, but that doesn’t matter, because
I
know who
he
is. You
capisce
?’

‘Yep,’ Ralph said. ‘A raincheck, then?’

‘You got it.’ McGovern scanned the message on the postcard again, still grinning. ‘This is the berries – the absolute berries!’

Ralph laughed at this winsome old expression. ‘I thought so, too.’

‘I would have bet you five bucks she was going to walk right back into her marriage to that weirdo, and pushing the baby in front of her in its damn stroller . . . but I would have been glad to lose the money. I suppose that sounds crazy.’

‘A little,’ Ralph said, but only because he knew it was what McGovern expected to hear. What he really thought was that Bill McGovern had just summed up his own character and world-view more succinctly than Ralph ever could have done himself.

‘Nice to know someone’s getting better instead of worse, huh?’

‘You bet.’

‘Has Lois seen that yet?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘She’s not home. I’ll show it to her when I see her, though.’

‘You do that. Are you sleeping any better, Ralph?’

‘I’m doing okay, I guess.’

‘Good. You look a little better. A little stronger. We can’t give in, Ralph, that’s the important thing. Am I right?’

‘I guess you are,’ Ralph said, and sighed. ‘I guess you are, at that.’

Two days later Ralph sat at his kitchen table, slowly eating a bowl of bran flakes he didn’t really want (but supposed in some vague way to be good for him) and looking at the front page of the Derry
News
. He had skimmed the lead story quickly, but it was the photo that kept drawing his eye back; it seemed to express all the bad feelings he had been living with over the last month without really explaining any of them.

Ralph thought the headline over the photograph –
WOMANCARE DEMONSTRATION SPARKS VIOLENCE
– didn’t reflect the story which followed, but that didn’t surprise him; he had been reading the
News
for years and had gotten used to its biases, which included a firm anti-abortion stance. Still, the paper had been careful to distance itself from The Friends of Life in that day’s tut-tut, now-you-boys-just-stop-it editorial, and Ralph wasn’t surprised. The Friends had gathered in the parking lot adjacent to both WomanCare and Derry Home Hospital, waiting for a group of about two hundred pro-choice marchers who were walking across town from the Civic Center. Most of the marchers were carrying signs with pictures of Susan Day and the slogan
CHOICE, NOT FEAR
on them.

The marchers’ idea was to gather supporters as they went, like a snowball rolling downhill. At WomanCare there would be a short rally – intended to pump people up for the coming Susan Day speech – followed by refreshments. The rally never happened. As the pro-choice marchers approached the parking lot, the Friends of Life people rushed out and blocked the road, holding their own signs (
MURDER IS MURDER, SUSAN DAY STAY AWAY, STOP THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
) in front of them like shields.

The marchers had been escorted by police, but no one had been prepared for the speed with which the heckling and angry words escalated into kicks and punches. It had begun with one of The Friends of Life recognizing her own daughter among the pro-choice people. The older woman had dropped her sign and charged the younger. The daughter’s boyfriend had caught the older woman and tried to restrain her. When Mom opened his face with her fingernails, the young man had thrown her to the ground. That had ignited a ten-minute mêlée and provoked more than thirty arrests, split roughly half and half between the two groups.

The picture on the front page of this morning’s
News
featured Hamilton Davenport and Dan Dalton. The photographer had caught Davenport in a snarl which was entirely unlike his usual look of calm self-satisfaction. One fist was raised over his head in a primitive gesture of triumph. Facing him – and wearing Ham’s
CHOICE, NOT FEAR
sign around the top of his head like a surreal cardboard halo – was The Friends of Life’s
grand fromage
. Dalton’s eyes were dazed, his mouth slack. The high-contrast black and white photo made the blood flowing from his nostrils look like chocolate sauce.

Ralph would look away from this for awhile, try to concentrate on finishing his cereal, and then he would remember the day last summer when he had first seen one of the pseudo ‘wanted’ posters that were now pasted up all over Derry – the day he had nearly fainted outside Strawford Park. Mostly it was their faces his mind fixed on: Davenport’s full of angry intensity as he peered into the dusty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, Dalton’s wearing a small, disdainful smile that seemed to suggest that an ape like Hamilton Davenport could not be expected to understand the higher morality of the abortion issue, and they both knew it.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.