Oh but that felt like a lie.

'When? How long?'

'A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that.'

'A week!' she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. 'A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie! Pleeeeeee —

'Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop.'

For a wonder, she did: stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No . . . you could flush the supposed. He knew it was. Already he felt lik e something living in the wrong end of a telescope.

But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching Hardcastle and McCormick or Falcon Crest and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasn't all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator?

Or was it . . .

Could it be that . . .

These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one tune or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird.

Could it be that Myra was even more frightened than he was?

Could it be that his mother had been?

Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one day — he thought he could have been no more than five or six — and told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr Gardener, who was one of the shoe-

clerks, but he was only five (or maybe six), and after his mother had rejected the third pair of white pumps Mr Gardener showed her, Eddie got bored and walked over to the far corner to look at something he had spotted there. At first he thought it was just a big crate standing on end. When he got closer he decided it was some kind of desk. But it sure was the kookiest desk he had ever seen. It was so narrow! It was made of bright polished wood with lots of curvy inlaid lines and carved doojiggers in it. Also, there was a little flight of three stairs leading up to it, and he had never seen a desk with stairs. When he got right up to it, he saw that there was a slot at the bottom of the desk-thing, a button on one side, and on top of it — entrancing! — was something that looked exactly like Captain Video's Spacescope.

Eddie walked around to the other side and there was a sign. He must have been at least six, because he had been able to read it, softly whispering each word aloud:

DO YOUR SHOES FIT RIGHT? CHECK AND SEE!

He went back around, climbed the three steps to the little platform, and then stuck his foot into the slot at the bottom of the shoe-checker. Did his shoes fit right"? Eddie didn't know, but he was wild to check and see. He socked his face into the rubber faceguard and thumbed the button. Green light flooded his eyes. Eddie gasped. He could see a foot floating inside a shoe filled with green smoke. He wiggled his toes, and the toes he was looking at wiggled right back — they were his, all right, just as he had suspected. And then he realized it was not just his toes he could see; he could see his bones, too! The bones in his foot! He crossed his great toe over his second toe (as if sneakily warding off the consequences of telling a lie) and the eldritch bones in the scope made an X that was not white but goblin-green. He could see —

Then his mother shrieked, a rising sound of panic that cut through the quiet shoe store like a runaway reaper-blade, like a firebell, like doom on horseback. He jerked his startled, dismayed face out of the viewer and saw her pelting toward him across the store in her stocking feet, her dress flying out behind her. She knocked a chair over and one of those shoe-measuring things that always tickled his feet went flying. Her bosom heaved. Her mouth was a scarlet O of horror. Faces turned to follow her progress.

'Eddie get off there!' she screamed. 'Get off there! Those machines give you cancer! Get off there! Eddie! Eddieeeeeee — '

He backed away as if the machine had suddenly grown red-hot. In his startled panic he forgot the little flight of stairs behind him. His heels dropped over the top one and he stood there, slowly falling backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadn't he thought with a kind of mad joy I'm going to fall! I'm goingto find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me! . . . ? Hadn't he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own self –serving adult ideas over whatever his child's mind, always roaring with confused surmises and half-perceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought . . . or tried to think?

Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen.

Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr Gardener picking up the shoe-measuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesman's face again. Mostly he remembered his mother's wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, 'Don't you ever do that again, don't you ever do that again, don't you ever. ' It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the baby-sitter had taken Eddie to the

public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer day — this had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down. She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must never do that, never, never, and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang.

She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy. Eddie's terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward.

The threat had been serious, he knew that much.

She had been so scared. That was how he knew.

So terrified.

'Marty,' he said across this gulf of years, 'would you give me a kiss?'

She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. If we were in water, he thought, she'd drown us both.

'Don't be afraid,' he whispered in her ear.

'I can't help it!' she wailed.

'I know,' he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with rib-breaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. 'I know, Marty.'