turns up on your doorstep, wanting to shoot film of your resurrected son?

Did any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things could not be dealt With? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?

Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return… well… diminished. But would that change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were born blind, children born as Siamese twins, children who were born with their guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicial mercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder and the torture of the innocent.

Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could he simply dismiss his son as a.

a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?

But, Louis, my God, you don’t live in a vacuum! People will say-He cut that thought off with rude, angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.

Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage’s grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course through him. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern in the dirt-he had drawn a spiral.

He swept the fingers of both hands through the dirt, rubbing the pattern out.

Then he left Pleasantview, hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned at every turn of the path.

He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it was semicold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay.

Louis ate one piece and then tossed the rest out the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn’t a litterbug by nature, but he did not want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in her mind-that a pizza wasn’t really what he’d had in mind when he went to Bangor.

Louis now began to think about the time and circumstance.

Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a good while before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot the nineteenth… Timmy was buried-don’t hold me to this, but I think it was July twenty-second. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn… saw Timmy walking up the road.

All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son’s original interral… no. If he was going to err, let him err on the side of conservatism. Say three days. For the sake of argument, assume that Timmy Baterman returned from the dead on July twenty-fifth. That made six days between the boy’s death and his return, and that was a conservative estimate. It might have been as long as ten days. For Gage, it had now been four days. Time had already gotten away from him to a degree, but it was still possible to cut Bifi Baterman’s best time considerably. If If he could bring about circumstances similar to those which had made the resurrection of Church possible. Because Church had died at the best possible time, hadn’t he? His family had been away when Church was struck and killed. No one was the wiser, except for him and Jud.

His family had been in Chicago.

For Louis, the final piece fell into place with a neat little click.

“You want us to what?” Rachel asked, staring at him, astounded.

It was a quarter of ten. Ellie had gone to bed. Rachel had taken another Valium after cleaning up the detritus of the funeral party (“funeral party” was another of those horrible phrases full of unstated paradox, like “visiting hours,” but there seemed no other phrase for the way they had spent their afternoon) and had seemed dazed and quiet ever since he returned from Bangor… but this had gotten through.

“To go back to Chicago with your mother and father,” Louis repeated patiently.

“They’ll be going tomorrow. If you call them now and Delta right after, you may be able to get on the same plane with them.”

“Louis, have you lost your mind? After the fight you had with my father-”

Louis found himself speaking with a quick glibness that was totally unlike him.

It afforded him a cheesy sort of exhilaration. He felt like a football sub who suddenly gets the ball and makes a seventy-yard touchdown run, cutting and weaving, outthinking potential tacklers with a delirious one-time-only ease. He had never been a particularly good liar, and he had not planned this encounter in any detail at all, but now a string of plausible lies, half-truths, and inspired justification poured out of him.

“The fight we had is one of the reasons I want you and Ellie to go back with them. It’s time we sewed up this wound, Rachel. I knew that… felt it…

at the funeral parlor. When the fight started, I was trying to patch things up.”

“But this trip… I don’t think it’s a good idea at all, Louis. We need you.

And you need us.” Her eyes measured him doubt-fully. “At least, I hope you need us. And neither of us are in any shape to-”

“-in any kind of shape to stay here,” Louis said forcefully. He felt as if he might be coming down with a fever. “I’m glad you need me, and I do need you and Ellie. But right now this is the worst damn place in the world for you, honey.

Gage is everywhere in this house, around every corner. For you and me, sure. But it’s even worse for Ellie, I think.”

He saw pain flicker in her eyes and knew he had touched her. Some part of himself felt shame at this cheap victory. All the textbooks he’d read on the subject of death told him that the bereaved’s first strong impulse is to get away from the place where it happened… and that to succumb to such an impulse may turn out to be the most harmful course of action because it allows the bereaved the dubious luxury of refusing to come to terms with the new reality. The books said it was best to remain where you were, to battle grief on its home ground until it subsided into remembrance. But Louis simply did not dare make the experiment with his family at home. He had to get rid of them, at least for a while.

“I know,” she said. “It just… hits you all over the place. I moved the couch while you were in Bangor… I thought running the vacuum around would take my mind off… off things and I found four of his little Matchbox cars under there.

as if they were waiting for him to come back and… you know, play with them.

… “ Her voice, already wavering, now broke. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “And that’s when I took the second Valium because I started crying again, the way I’m crying now… oh what a fucking soap opera all of this is… hold me, Lou, will you hold me?”

He did hold her, and he did it well, but he felt like an imposter. His mind spun with ways to turn these tears to his further benefit. Some nice guy, all right.

Hey-ho, let’s go.

“How long does it go on?” she wept. “Does it ever end? If only we could have him back, Louis, I swear I’d watch him better, it would never happen, and just because that driver was going too fast that doesn’t let me-us-off the hook. I didn’t know there could ever be hurt like this, and that’s the truth. It comes, over and over it comes, and it hurts so much, Louis, there’s no rest from it even when I go to sleep, when I go to sleep I dream it, over and over again, I see him running to the road… and I scream to him…

. “ “Shhh,” he said. “Rachel, shhhh.”

She lifted her puffy face to him. “It wasn’t even as if he were being bad, Louis. It was just a game to him… the truck came at the wrong time… and Missy Dandridge called while I was still crying… and said she read in the Ellsworth American that the driver tried to kill himself.”