Insomnia (98 page)

‘What son of a bitch? Ralph, what in the world are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about Natalie Deepneau. She’s supposed to die this morning, only I’m not going to let that happen.’

‘
Nat?
Ralph, why would anyone want to hurt Nat?’

She looked very bewildered, very
our Lois
 . . . but wasn’t there something else beneath that daffy exterior? Something careful and calculating? Ralph thought the answer was yes. Ralph had an idea Lois wasn’t half as bewildered as she was pretending to be. She had fooled Bill McGovern for years with that act – him, too, at least part of the time – and this was just another (and rather brilliant) variation of the same old scam.

What she was
really
trying to do was hold him here. She loved Nat deeply, but to Lois, a choice between her husband and the little girl who lived up the lane was no choice at all. She didn’t consider either age or questions of fairness to have any bearing on the situation. Ralph was her man, and to Lois, that was all that mattered.

‘It won’t work,’ he said, not unkindly. He disengaged himself and started for the door again. ‘I made a promise, and I’m all out of time.’

‘Break it, then!’ she cried, and the mixture of terror and rage in her voice stunned him. ‘I don’t remember much about that time, but I remember we got involved with things that almost got us killed, and for reasons we couldn’t even understand. So break it, Ralph! Better your promise than my heart!’

‘And what about the kid? What about
Helen,
for that matter? Nat’s all she lives for. Doesn’t Helen deserve something better from me than a broken promise?’

‘I don’t
care
what she deserves! What
any
of them deserve!’ she shouted, and then her face crumpled. ‘Yes, all right, I suppose I do. But what about
us,
Ralph? Don’t we count?’ Her eyes, those dark and eloquent Spanish eyes of hers, pleaded with him. If he looked into them too long, it would become all too easy to cry it off, so Ralph looked away.

‘I mean to do it, honey. Nat’s going to get what you and I have already had – another seventy years or so of days and nights.’

She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead, she began to cry. ‘Foolish old man!’ she whispered. ‘Foolish, willful old man!’

‘Yes, I suppose,’ he said, and lifted her chin. ‘But I’m a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I’d like that.’

‘All right, Ralph.’ She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red. ‘What is it? What’s going to happen to her?’

‘She’s going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she’s going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue . . . and Helen’s going to see it happen.’

As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension – a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dream – but of course she hadn’t been there during Ralph’s final confrontation with Atropos. Ralph told her of it now – of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans. He told her of how he’d extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.

‘I have an idea that . . . the decision was made . . . very near the top of this crazy building . . . this Tower . . . they kept talking about. Maybe . . . at the
very
top.’ He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.

Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs Perrine was at the bus stop half a block further up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.

‘He came from nowhere to save that little girl. Do you follow me?
From nowhere.’

The accident made the front page of the following day’s Derry
News
. Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath
. The headline of the sidebar read: ‘
IT WAS LIKE HE CAME FROM NOWHERE
,’
EYEWITNESS TO TRAGEDY SAYS
.

When she read it, Mrs Perrine was not at all surprised.

‘In the end I got what I wanted,’ Ralph said, ‘but only because Clotho and Lachesis – and whoever it is they work for on the upper levels – were desperate to stop Ed.’

‘Upper levels? What upper levels? What
building
?’

‘Never mind. You’ve forgotten, but remembering wouldn’t change anything. The point is just this, Lois: they didn’t want to stop Ed because thousands of people would have died if he’d hit the Civic Center dead-on. They wanted to stop him because there was one person whose life needed to be preserved at any cost . . . in
their
reckoning, anyway. When I was finally able to make them see that I felt the same about my kid as they did about theirs, arrangements were made.’

‘That’s when they cut you, wasn’t it? And when you made the promise. The one you used to talk about in your sleep.’

He shot her a wide-eyed, startled, and heartbreakingly boyish glance. She only looked back.

‘Yes,’ he said, and wiped his forehead. ‘I guess so.’ The air lay in his lungs like metal shavings. ‘A life for a life, that was the deal – Natalie’s in exchange for mine. And—’

[
Hey! Quit tryin to wiggle away! Quit it, Rover, or I’ll kick your asshole square!
]

Ralph broke off at the sound of that shrill, hectoring, horridly familiar voice – a voice no human being on Harris Avenue but him could hear – and looked across the street.

‘Ralph? What—’

‘Shhh!’

He pulled her back against the summer-dry hedge in front of the Applebaums’ house. He wasn’t doing anything so polite as perspiring now; his whole body was crawling with a stinking sweat as heavy as engine oil, and he could feel every gland in his body dumping a hot load into his blood. His underwear was trying to crawl up into the crack of his ass and disappear. His tongue tasted like a blown fuse.

Lois followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Rosalie!’ she cried. ‘Rosalie, you bad dog! What are
you
doing over there?’

The black-and-tan beagle she had given Ralph on their first Christmas was across the street, standing (except
cringing
was actually the word for what she was doing) on the sidewalk in front of the house where Helen and Nat had lived until Ed had popped his wig. For the first time in the years they’d had her, the beagle reminded Lois of Rosalie #1. Rosalie #2 appeared to be all alone over there, but that did not allay Lois’s sudden terror.

Oh, what have I done?
she thought.
What have I done?

‘
Rosalie!
’ she screamed. ‘
Rosalie, get over here!
’

The dog heard, Lois could see that she did, but she didn’t move.

‘Ralph? What’s happening over there?’

‘
Shhhh!
’ he said again, and then, just a little further up the street, Lois saw something which stopped her breath. Her last, unstated hope that all this was happening only in Ralph’s head, that it was a kind of flashback to their previous experience, disappeared, because now their dog had company.

Holding a skip-rope looped over her right arm, six-year-old Nat Deepneau came to the end of her walk and looked down the street toward a house she didn’t remember ever living in, toward a lawn where her shirtless father, an undesignated player named Ed Deepneau, had once sat among intersecting rainbows, listening to the Jefferson Airplane as a single spot of blood dried on his John Lennon spectacles. Natalie looked down the street and smiled happily at Rosalie, who was panting and watching her with miserable, frightened eyes.

Atropos doesn’t see me,
Ralph thought.
He’s concentrating on Rosie . . . and on Natalie, of course . . . and he doesn’t see me
.

Everything had come around with a sort of hideous perfection. The house was there, Rosalie was there, and Atropos was there, too, wearing a hat cocked back on his head and looking like a wiseacre news reporter in a 1950s B-picture – something directed by Ida Lupino, perhaps. Only this time it wasn’t a Panama with a bite gone from the brim; this time it was a Boston Red Sox cap and it was too small even for Atropos because the adjustable band in the back had been pulled all the way over to the last hole. It had to be, in order to fit the head of the little girl who owned it.

All we need now is Pete the paperboy and the show would be perfect,
Ralph thought.
The final scene of
Insomnia, or, Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, a Tragi-Comedy in Three Acts.
Everyone takes a bow and then exits stage right
.

This dog was afraid of Atropos, just as Rosalie #1 had been, and the main reason the little bald doc hadn’t seen Ralph and Lois was that he was trying to keep her from running off before he was ready. And here came Nat, headed down the sidewalk toward her favorite dog in the whole world, Ralph and Lois’s Rosalie. Her jump-rope

(
three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine
)

was slung over her arm. She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly fragile in her sailor shirt and blue shorts. Her pigtails bounced.

It’s happening too fast,
Ralph thought.
Everything is happening much too fast
.

[
Not at all, Ralph! You did splendidly five years ago; you’ll do splendidly now.
]

It sounded like Clotho, but there was no time to look. A green car was coming slowly down Harris Avenue from the direction of the airport, moving with the sort of agonized care which usually meant a driver who was very old or very young. Agonized care or not, it was unquestionably
the
car; a dirty membrane hung over it like a shroud.

Life is a wheel,
Ralph thought, and it occurred to him that this was not the first time the idea had occurred to him.
Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again
.

Rosie made another abortive lunge for freedom, and as Atropos yanked her back, losing his hat, Nat knelt before her and patted her. ‘Are you lost, girl? Did you get out by yourself? That’s okay, I’ll take you home.’ She gave Rosie a hug, her small arms passing through Atropos’s arms, her small, beautiful face only inches from his ugly, grinning one. Then she got up. ‘Come on, Rosie! Come on, sugarpie.’

Rosalie started down the sidewalk at Nat’s heel, looking back once at the grinning little man and whining uneasily. On the other side of Harris Avenue, Helen came out of the Red Apple, and the last condition of the vision Atropos had shown Ralph was fulfilled. Helen had a loaf of bread in one hand. Her Red Sox hat was on her head.

Ralph swept Lois into his arms and kissed her fiercely. ‘I love you with all my heart,’ he said. ‘Remember that, Lois.’

‘I know you do,’ she said calmly. ‘And I love
you
. That’s why I can’t let you do it.’

She seized him around the neck, her arms like bands of iron, and he felt her breasts push against him hard as she drew in all the breath her lungs would hold.

‘Go away, you rotten bastard!’
she screamed. ‘
I can’t see you, but I know you’re there! Go away! Go away and leave us alone!
’