Insomnia (45 page)

‘She tossed up her hands like I was the most unreasonable woman who ever walked the face of the earth, and left me with Harold. He was looking at me with those big brown eyes of his, like he expected me to apologize. I almost felt like I
should
apologize, too, if only to get that cocker spaniel look off his face, but I didn’t.
I wouldn’t
. I just looked back at him, and after awhile he couldn’t stand it anymore and told me I ought to stop being mad. He said he was just worried about me down here all by myself, that he was only trying to be a good son and Janet was only trying to be a good daughter.

‘“I guess I understand that,” I said, “but you should know that sneaking around behind a person’s back is no way to express love and concern.” He got all stiff then, and said he and Jan didn’t see it as sneaking around. He cut his eyes toward the bathroom for a second or two when he said it, and I pretty much got the idea that what he meant was
Jan
didn’t see it as sneaking around. Then he told me it wasn’t the way I was making it out to be – that
Litchfield
had called
him,
not the other way around.

‘“All right,” I said back, “but what kept you from hanging up once you realized what he’d called to talk to you
about
? That was just plain
wrong,
Harry. What in God’s good name got into you?”

‘He started to flutter and flap around – I think he might even have been starting to apologize – when Jan came back and the you-know-what really hit the fan. She asked where my diamond earrings were, the ones they’d given me for Christmas. It was such a change of direction that at first I could only sputter, and I suppose I sounded like I
was
going senile. But finally I managed to say they were in the little china dish on my bedroom bureau, same as always. I have a jewelry box, but I keep those earrings and two or three other nice pieces out because they are so pretty that looking at them always cheers me up. Besides, they’re only clusters of diamond chips – it’s not like anyone would want to break in just to steal
those
. Same with my engagement ring and my ivory cameo, which are the other two pieces I keep in that dish.’

Lois gave Ralph an intense, pleading look. He squeezed her hand again.

She smiled and took a deep breath. ‘This is very hard for me.’

‘If you want to stop—’

‘No, I want to finish . . . except that, past a certain point, I can’t remember what happened, anyway. It was all so horrible. You see, Janet said she
knew
where I kept them, but they weren’t there. My engagement ring was, and the cameo, but not my Christmas earrings. I went in to check myself, and she was right. We turned the place upside down, looked everywhere, but we didn’t find them. They’re
gone
.’

Lois was now gripping Ralph’s hands in both of her own, and seemed to be talking mostly to the zipper of his jacket.

‘We took all the clothes out of the bureau . . . Harold pulled the bureau itself out from the wall and looked behind it . . . under the bed and the sofa cushions . . . and it seemed like every time I looked at Janet, she was looking back at
me,
giving me that sweet, wide-eyed look of hers. Sweet as melting butter, it is – except in the eyes, anyway – and she didn’t have to come right out and say what she was thinking, because I already knew. “You see? You see how right Dr Litchfield was to call us, and how right
we
were to make that appointment? And how pigheaded
you’re
being? Because you
need
to be in a place like Riverview Estates, and this just proves it. You’ve lost the lovely earrings we gave you for Christmas, you’re having a
serious
decline in cognition, and this just proves it. It won’t be long before you’re leaving the stove-burners on . . . or the bathroom heater . . .”’

She began to cry again, and these tears made Ralph’s heart hurt – they were the deep, scouring sobs of someone who has been shamed to the deepest level of her being. Lois hid her face against his jacket. He tightened his arm around her.
Lois,
he thought.
Our Lois
. But no; he didn’t like the sound of that anymore, if he ever had.

My Lois,
he thought, and at that instant, as if some greater power had approved, the day began to fill with light again. Sounds took on a new resonance. He looked down at his hands and Lois’s, entwined on her lap, and saw a lovely blue-gray nimbus around them, the color of cigarette smoke. The auras had returned.

‘You should have sent them away the minute you realized the earrings were gone,’ he heard himself say, and each word was separate and gorgeously unique, like a crystal thunderclap. ‘The very second.’

‘Oh, I know that now,’ Lois said. ‘She was just waiting for me to stick my foot in my mouth, and of course I obliged. But I was so
upset
– first the argument about whether or not I was going to Bangor with them to look at Riverview Estates, then hearing my doctor had told them things he had no right to tell them, and on top of all that, finding out I’d lost one of my most treasured possessions. And do you know what the cherry on top was? Having
her
be the one to discover those earrings were gone! Do you blame me for not knowing what to do?’

‘No,’he said, and lifted her gloved hands to his mouth. The sound of them passing through the air was like the hoarse whisper of a palm sliding down a wool blanket, and for a moment he clearly saw the shape of his lips on the back of her right glove, printed there in a blue kiss.

Lois smiled. ‘Thank you, Ralph.’

‘Welcome.’

‘I suppose you have a pretty good idea of how things turned out, don’t you? Jan said, “You really
should
take better care, Mother Lois, only Dr Litchfield says you’ve come to a time of life when you really
can’t
take better care, and that’s why we’ve been thinking about Riverview Estates. I’m sorry we ruffled your feathers, but it seemed important to move quickly. Now you see why.”’

Ralph looked up. Overhead, the sky was a cataract of green-blue fire filled with clouds that looked like chrome airboats. He looked down the hill and saw Rosalie still lying between the Portosans. The dark gray balloon-string rose from her snout, wavering in the cool October breeze.

‘I got really mad, then –’ She broke off and smiled. Ralph thought it was the first smile he’d seen from her today which expressed real humor instead of some less pleasant and more complicated emotion. ‘No – that’s not right. I did more than just get mad. If my great-nephew had been there, he would have said, “Nana went nuclear.”’

Ralph laughed and Lois laughed with him, but her half sounded a trifle forced.

‘What galls me is that Janet knew I would,’ she said. ‘She
wanted
me to go nuclear, I think, because she knew how guilty I’d feel later on. And God knows I
do
. I screamed at them to get the hell out. Harold looked like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards – shouting has always made him so embarrassed – but Jan just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, smiling and actually
nodding her head,
as if to say “That’s right, Mother Lois, you go on and get all that nasty old poison out of your system, and when it’s gone, maybe you’ll be ready to hear sense.”’

Lois took a deep breath.

‘Then something happened. I’m not sure just what. This wasn’t the first time, either, but it was the
worst
time. I’m afraid it was some kind of . . . well . . . some kind of seizure. Anyway, I started to see Janet in a really funny way . . . a really
scary
way. And I said something that finally got to her. I can’t remember what it was, and I’m not sure I want to know, but it certainly wiped that sweety-sweety-sweet smile I hate so much off her face. In fact, she just about
dragged
Harold out. The last thing I remember her saying is that one of them would call me when I wasn’t so hysterical that I couldn’t help making ugly accusations about the people who loved me.

‘I stayed in my house for a little while after they were gone, and then I came out to sit in the park. Sometimes just sitting in the sun makes a body feel better. I stopped in the Red Apple for a snack, and that’s when I heard you and Bill had a fight. Are you and he really on the outs, do you think?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘Nah – we’ll make it up. I really like Bill, but—’

‘– but you have to be careful what you say with him,’ she finished. ‘Also, Ralph, may I add that you can’t take what he says back to you too seriously?’

This time it was Ralph who gave their linked hands a squeeze. ‘That might be good advice for you, too, Lois – you shouldn’t take what happened this morning too seriously.’

She sighed. ‘Maybe, but it’s hard not to. I said some terrible things at the end, Ralph.
Terrible
. That awful smile of hers . . .’

A rainbow of understanding suddenly hit Ralph’s consciousness. In its glow he saw a very large thing, so large it seemed both unquestionable and preordained. He fully faced Lois for the first time since the auras had returned to him . . . or since he had returned to them. She sat in a capsule of translucent gray light as bright as fog on a summer morning which is about to turn sunny. It transformed the woman Bill McGovern called ‘Our Lois’ into a creature of great dignity . . . and almost unbearable beauty.

She looks like Eos,
he thought.
Goddess of the dawn
.

Lois stirred uneasily on the bench. ‘Ralph? Why are you looking at me that way?’

Because you’re beautiful, and because I’ve fallen in love with you,
Ralph thought, amazed.
Right now I’m so in love with you that I feel as if I’m drowning, and the dying’s fine
.

‘Because you remember
exactly
what you said.’

She began to play nervously with the clasp of her purse again. ‘No, I—’

‘Yes you do. You told your daughter-in-law that
she
took your earrings. She did it because she realized you were going to stick to your guns about not going with them, and not getting what she wants makes your daughter-in-law crazy . . . it makes her go nuclear. She did it because you pissed her off. Isn’t that about the size of it?’

Lois was looking at him with round, frightened eyes. ‘How do you know that, Ralph?
How do you know that about her?
’

‘I know it because
you
know it, and you know it because you saw it.’

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘No, I didn’t see anything. I was in the kitchen with Harold the whole time.’

‘Not
then,
not when she did it, but when she came back. You saw it in her and all around her.’

As he himself now saw Harold Chasse’s wife in Lois, as if the woman sitting beside him on the bench had become a lens. Janet Chasse was tall, fair-skinned, and long-waisted. Her cheeks were spattered with freckles she covered with makeup, and her hair was a vivid, gingery shade of red. This morning she had come to Derry with that fabulous hair lying over one shoulder in a bulky braid like a sheaf of copper wire. What else did he know about this woman he had never met?

Everything, everything.

(the old bitch)

Ralph saw her coming out of Lois’s tiny bathroom. Saw her shoot an intense, furious glance toward the kitchen door – there is no sign of the sweety-sweety-sweet smile on that narrow, intense face now – and then scoop the earrings out of the china dish. Saw her cram them into the left front pocket of her jeans.

No, Lois had not actually witnessed this small, ugly theft, but it had changed the color of Jan Chasse’s aura from pale green to a complex, layered pattern of browns and reds which Lois had seen and understood at once, probably without the slightest idea of what was really happening to her.

‘She took them, all right,’ Ralph said. He could see a gray mist drifting dreamily across the pupils of Lois’s wide eyes. He could have looked at it for the rest of the day.

‘Yes, but—’

‘If you’d agreed to keep the appointment at Riverview Estates after all, I bet you would have found them again after her next visit . . . or
she
would have found them, I guess that’s more likely. Just a lucky accident – “Oh, Mother Lois, come see what
I
found!” Under the bathroom sink, or in a closet, or lying in some dark corner.’

‘Yes.’ She was looking into his face now, fascinated, almost hypnotized. ‘She must feel terrible . . . and she won’t dare bring them back, will she? Not after the things I said. Ralph, how did you
know
?’

‘The same way you did. How long have you been seeing the auras, Lois?’

‘Auras? I don’t know what you mean.’ Except she did.

‘Litchfield told your son about the insomnia, but I doubt if that alone would have been enough to get even Litchfield to . . . you know, tattle. The other thing – what you said he called sensory problems – went right by me. I was too amazed by the idea of anyone thinking you could possibly be prematurely senile, I guess, even though I’ve been having my own sensory problems lately.’