Phantom (13 page)

But now—what was happening to Linda that was
changing her friendship with Janice? Since the Covingtons had
moved, the two women had seen each other exactly twice. That in
itself was not too surprising, as Janice's work kept her quite busy
and Linda had more than she could handle between Ned and the new
house. No, there was something else, the tone perhaps, of those two
encounters, that bothered Linda.

The first time had been shortly after the
move, when Janice came to Lynnhaven to inspect the place. She
thought the house and site were wonderful, and she stayed for most
of the afternoon. The two women chatted comfortably over wine and
pate and coffee and pastry. There had been no awkward silences or
strained moments; it had been an easy, pleasant occasion, like many
others they had spent together. Yes, and ... ? Linda remembered. A
few minutes before she went back to Washington, Janice had looked
around and said, "Well, you really are here now." But it wasn't so
much what she had said, nor even how she had said it that stayed
with Linda. It was the look in Janice's eyes, an expression that
was there for a brief instant and then gone. Even now, a couple of
months later, Linda couldn't say what it meant. Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps she had imagined it. And yet, it stayed with her.

Not long after that they saw each other
again. It was a Friday, Linda remembered. She had called the office
to say that Michael was sick and wouldn't be to work that day.
Actually, he was fine and just wanted a three-day weekend. That
freed Linda and she immediately decided to go into Washington.
Janice had to be at a reception at noon, but she was able to sneak
away early and meet Linda for a quick bite of lunch and a drink.
They had a little less than an hour together but it seemed longer,
Linda recalled unhappily.

"How was your reception?"

"Terrible, which means good," Janice said.
"Full of lecherous cops and ambitious young congressional
aides."

"What was it for?"

"Teflon-coated bullets."

"You're kidding." Linda smiled, but then she
saw that Janice was serious. "Why—"

"Believe me, you don't want to know."

The conversation moved in fits and starts
for the next half hour, going nowhere. Janice seemed not tired but
weary. It was strange, and it made Linda feel self-conscious. All
of a sudden she realized she didn't have much to say. It was as if
a vacuum had formed over the table between them, and they could do
nothing about it. Both women felt relieved when it was time to
go.

"Are you all right?" Linda asked as they
stood outside the restaurant.

"Sure. Why?"

"I don't know. You look like you could use a
vacation."

What a terrible thing to say, Linda thought.
But it was too late, the words were already spoken.

"I probably could," Janice admitted. "How
about you? How are you doing out there in the sticks?"

Linda recalled answering: "Oh, fine."

On the way back to Lynnhaven she tried to
reason her way out of her melancholy. Just one of those days. Two
people in off-moods. Janice working too hard. Me not yet fully
adjusted to my new environment. Et cetera. Blah blah blah. Fine?
Pretty good? Okay? So-so? Or ... what?

Since then she'd had no desire to go back in
to Washington, but she did hope Janice would come out to visit
again. Their friendship was too solid to shake apart in a little
turbulence. But she knew now that Janice could not solve her
problems for her. Linda had known how easy it was to feel invisible
in a big city; since moving to Lynnhaven she had learned that a
person could be equally alone in a small town. And the only one who
can do anything about it, she told herself once more, is you.

Linda looked up from her cold tea and
unopened magazine.

Had she heard something, or was it just her
imagination? A voice. Ned was talking to someone. Linda left the
kitchen and went quietly through the dining room. She saw Ned
standing at the far end of the living room. He was looking straight
ahead at nothing.

"Who were you talking to?"

Ned wheeled around, startled by his mother's
presence.

"Nobody."

"I thought I heard you talking just a minute
ago."

Bright afternoon sunshine poured through the
wide window and Ned moved to step out of the glare that only
increased his discomfort.

"No .... I guess I just read something out
loud from the newspaper." He pointed to the comics page lying open
on the coffee table. "That's all."

"Are you all right, Ned?"

"Sure."

"Well, don't forget. Your father wants you
to do some weeding in the garden."

"I know. I'll do it later, when it's cooler
out."

Ned went upstairs to his room. Linda
refolded the newspaper and then wandered back into the kitchen. Out
loud? Yes, Ned followed the daily strips and he had stacks of comic
books in his room. But reading them out loud—that just didn't seem
like Ned's style. Ned loved to read; he took after his father in
that respect. Michael, in the absence of anything better to read
while sitting on the toilet, would study the labels on bottles of
disinfectant or shampoo. Once he had emerged from the throne room
denouncing skin cremes as an extravagant waste of petroleum
products. But Ned was the kind of boy who could sit reading for
hours on end without making a sound. He never even laughed at those
comics, let alone read them 'out loud.

Don't go making something out of nothing
again, Linda reproached herself. What did it matter if Ned was
reading out loud, or even holding an imaginary conversation? Kids
do that all the time. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, but
sometimes it's even good for a child, all the books said so. But
Ned was almost ten and he'd never done it before. At least, not as
far as she knew ....

She could talk to Michael about it, but—was
there really anything to talk about? He would listen, as he always
did, attentive, sympathetic; concerned, but in the end he would
say: What did you hear? No single word. Not even a syllable to
ponder. Nothing. It's nothing.

And he'd probably be right, Linda thought.
She'd just have to be more alert. The important thing was to be
prepared if her son was ever threatened, prepared to do whatever
was necessary to ensure his safety. She would protect Ned. She
would die for him, if it came to that. No question.

* * *

11. Explanations

Michael Covington sipped the gin cooler he
had made for himself. It was somehow wetter and more refreshing
than bourbon on a hot languid evening like this. Washington had
been a pressure cooker all day. The air conditioning in the office
had broken down for three hours and the humidity was such that
sweat poured off people even when they sat still. He felt better
now, stretched out on a chaise lounge in the backyard at dusk with
a tall drink; better, but still pretty dam hot. And here was his
son, sprawled on the grass, looking up, waiting for Michael to say
something.

"Ned, I'm going to tell you something that
happened to me once, when I was a boy about your age. It's a true
story and I can still remember it vividly. Maybe it'll help you
understand a little better some of the things you've been wondering
about."

Michael paused, staring at the clear, icy
drink in his hand as if it were a crystal ball geared to reveal the
past in an exemplary light.

"I think I told you before,"
he went on, "that for a few years when I was a youngster I had a
paper route. I used to deliver the Sunday newspapers to a lot of
houses in our old neighborhood—in fact, I had a hundred and eight
customers at one time, so you can see it was a pretty big route.
And in those days we had to handle quite a few different newspapers
that no longer exist, like the
Journal-American
, the
Herald Tribune
and
the
Mirror
. I even
carried a Polish newspaper, but I can't remember the name of it
now. I bet I could walk through that neighborhood in my mind and
still tell you the names of all my customers and which papers they
took .... Not that it means anything now.

"In Buffalo the weather is a
lot rougher than down here in the winter. The snow falls by the
ton. Remember the pictures Grandpa Fred sent the year before last,
with the snow piled up higher than a grown man? Well, it was that
bad or worse every winter when I was a boy, or it seemed that way.
And you know how fat and heavy
The New York
Times
is on Sunday—imagine lugging it
through snow drifts that come up to your chin, trying to keep it
dry and get it safely behind someone's storm door that is frozen
half-shut. I'd be kidding you if I told you I enjoyed it, because I
didn't; I hated every minute of it. The weather, the dogs, the
waking up at six in the morning, the crabby customers who'd try
every trick in the book to avoid paying you a lousy fifteen or
twenty cents .... But it was all good experience, I guess, and the
money, while it wasn't a great deal, did help in those
days.

"Anyhow, the thing I was going to tell you
about happened on a Friday night. It was in the summer and it was a
hot night like this one. I was riding around on my bike collecting
money from some of my customers, and it must have been nine o'clock
or a little after, because I remember it was fully dark. I stopped
in to Benny's, our neighborhood grocery store, to get some candy.
Junior Mints and Necco Wafers, those were my favorites. When I came
out of the store and started to pedal my bike away, I noticed the
moon. It was huge, it was like an enormous golden pumpkin in the
sky, bigger than I'd ever seen the moon before.

"I rode along on my bike, cruising, eating
candy and collecting money at a few more houses, but I went more
slowly and I couldn't keep from looking at that moon. It was so
large it seemed to me there had to be something wrong. And then I
began to get scared. The only reason the moon could be growing so
big was that it had to be coming closer. The more I looked and the
more I thought about it, the more I was sure that the moon was
going to crash into the earth that very night. It would be the end
of the world, and the worst part of it was that I had no doubt the
moon would hit smack in the middle of Buffalo.

"I know it sounds silly now, but I believed
it at the time, and boy did it scare me. Could I be the only person
in the world who knew what was about to happen? Why were there no
sirens, no emergency measures being taken? The neighborhood was
perfectly quiet and peaceful. Surely there were scientists
somewhere who were supposed to keep an eye out for possible
catastrophes like this. But then I thought, maybe there's nothing
they could do. How could anybody stop the moon from plowing into
the earth, if that's what was in the cards? Maybe they deliberately
weren't telling anyone, so there wouldn't be a panic.

"Ned, that moon hung so big in the sky I was
sure I was going to die that night, and my family and everyone else
in the world along with me. I wanted to race through the streets on
my bike, yelling and warning all the people about the disaster that
was about to take place, like a kind of newsboy Paul Revere. But it
seemed crazy to me that nobody else had noticed it, so I decided to
tell one person first, an adult, and see what kind of reaction I
got.

"The next customer on my
list was Mr. Trunk, an insurance man who took the
Times
and was always nice
to me. I rang his doorbell, collected the money and the usual dime
tip, and I almost didn't say anything, I was so nervous.

"But just as he was closing the door I said,
'Mr. Trunk, take a look at that moon.'

"He came out onto the front porch and gazed
up at the sky. 'Yeah, that's quite a moon,' he said, calm as could
be.

'''It's really
big
,' I said.

"Mr. Trunk nodded his head and said, 'Sure
is. It's a beautiful moon tonight.' And then he said goodnight and
went back into his house. It hadn't bothered him at all.

"The idea that the world was going to end
began to fade in my mind from that moment, and by the time I got
home I didn't even mention it to anyone in my family. But it was
still hard to believe that I could be so wrong. The moon that had
filled me with visions of death and destruction, oceans boiling and
cities being ground to dust, had brought the completely opposite
reaction to Mr. Trunk. He thought it was beautiful, and he was
right. I didn't know what to make of it for a while, but I'll tell
you this: I was glad when I woke up the next morning and found that
I was still alive and the world still existed. And here's another
interesting thing: if the moon really was going to crash into the
earth, it wouldn't make any difference whether it was day or night,
right? But we think such thoughts only at night; they never occur
to us during the day, for some reason.

"So you see, Ned, you can look at something
and think you know what it is, what it means and what's going to
come of it. You can be so sure that your heart booms and you can
barely put two words together. But you can still be wrong, one
hundred per cent wrong. The important thing to remember is that
there's always an explanation for everything. We may not know what
that explanation is, or we may not understand it completely, but
that doesn't mean that anything our minds dream up is true. It just
means we haven't found the truth yet, that it's still hidden,
waiting for us to uncover it:

"You asked me if I believe in ghosts and
phantoms and things like that, and I have to tell you that I don't.
Plenty of people do, even adults. Maybe I'm wrong, but in all the
centuries that people have talked about such things no one has been
able to come up with a bit of solid proof. And why not? I believe
it's because they just don't exist, however much people would like
them to. Wouldn't it be nice if we could talk to a friend or a
relative who had died? I'd love to be able to talk to my older
brother, Jim. I hardly knew him when he was shot down over Korea,
but wishing isn't enough, and imagining that something is real
doesn't make it real.