Bag of Bones 8 страница

I felt a start at my name coming from her mouth, but it was only momentary. She was the right age, after all, and my books were probably better for her than spending her afternoons in front of General hospital and One Life to Live. A little, anyway. “We had an argument about when we were going to the beach. I wanted to hang out the clothes, have lunch, and go this afternoon. Kyra wanted—” She broke off. “What? What did I say? ”

“Her name is Kia? Did—” Before I could say anything else, the most extraordinary thing happened: my mouth was full of water. So full I felt a moment’s panic, like someone who is swimming in the ocean and swallows a wave-wash. Only this wasn’t a salt taste; it was cold and fresh, with a faint metal tang like blood. I turned my head aside and spat. I expected a gush of liquid to pour out of my mouth—the sort of gush you sometimes get when commencing artificial respiration on a near-drowning victim. What came out instead was what usually comes out when you spit on a hot day: a little white pellet. And that sensation was gone even before the little white pellet struck the dirt of the shoulder. In an instant, as if it had never been there. “That man spirted, ” the girl said matter-of-factly. “Sorry, ” I said. I was also bewildered. What in God’s name had that been about? “I guess I had a little delayed reaction. ” Mattie looked concerned, as though I were eighty instead of forty. I thought that maybe to a girl her age, forty is eighty. “Do you want to come up to the house? I’ll give you a glass of water. ”

“No, I’m fine now. ”

“All right. Mr. Noonan. . . all I mean is that nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I was hanging sheets. . . she was inside watching a Mighty Mouse cartoon on the VCR. . .

then, when I went in to get more pins. . . ” She looked at the girl, who was no longer smiling. It was starting to get through to her now. Her eyes were big, and ready to fill with tears. “She was gone. I thought for a minute I’d die of fear. ” Now the kid’s mouth began to tremble, and her eyes filled up right on schedule. She began to weep. Mattie stroked her hair, soothing the small head until it lay against the Kmart smock top. “That’s all right, Ki, ” she said. “It turned out okay this time, but you can’t go out in the road. It’s dangerous. Little things get run over in the road, and you’re a little thing. The most precious little thing in the world. ” She cried harder. It was the exhausted sound of a child who needed a nap before any more adventures, to the beach or anywhere else. “Kia bad, Kia bad, ” she sobbed against her mother’s neck.

“No, honey, only three, ” Mattie said, and if I had harbored any further thoughts about her being a bad mother, they melted away then. Or perhaps they’d already gone—after all, the kid was round, comely, well-kept, and unbruised. On one level, those things registered. On another I was trying to cope with the strange thing that had just happened, and the equally strange thing I thought I was hearing—that the little girl I had carried off the white line had the name we had planned to give our child, if our child turned out to be a girl. “Kia, ” I said. Marvelled, really. As if my touch might break her, I tentatively stroked the back of her head. Her hair was sun-warm and fine. “No, ” Mattie said. “That’s the best she can say it now. Kyra, not Kia. It’s from the Greek. It means ladylike. ” She shifted, a little self-conscious. “I picked it out of a baby-name book. While I was pregnant, I kind of went Oprah. Better than going postal, I guess. ”

“It’s a lovely name, ” I said. “And I don’t think you’re a bad mom. ” What went through my mind right then was a story Frank Arlen had told over a meal at Christmas—it had been about Petie, the youngest brother, and Frank had had the whole table in stitches. Even Petie, who claimed not to remember a bit of the incident, laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks. One Easter, Frank said, when Petie was about five, their folks had gotten them up for an Easter-egg hunt. The two parents had hidden loo lol over a hundred colored hard-boiled eggs around the house the evening before, after getting the kids over to their grandparents’. A high old Easter morning was had by all, at least until Johanna looked up from the patio, where she was counting her share of the spoils, and shrieked.

There was Petie, crawling gaily around on the second-floor overhang at the back of the house, not six feet from the drop to the concrete patio.

Mr. Arlen had rescued Petie while the rest of the family stood below, holding hands, frozen with horror and fascination. Mrs. Arlen had repeated the Hail Mary over and over (“so fast she sounded like one of the Chipmunks on that old “Witch Doctor’ record, ” Frank had said, laughing harder than ever) until her husband had disappeared back into the open bedroom window with Petie in his arms. Then she had swooned to the pavement, breaking her nose. When asked for an explanation, Petie had told them he’d wanted to check the rain-gutter for eggs. I suppose every family has at least one story like that; the survival of the world’s Peties and Kyras is a convincing argument—in the minds of parents, anyway for the existence of God. “I was so scared, ” Mattie said, now looking fourteen again. Fifteen at most.

“But it’s over, ” I said. “And Kyra’s not going to go walking in the road anymore. Are you, Kyra? ” She shook her head against her mother’s shoulder without raising it. I had an idea she’d probably be asleep before Mattie got her back to the good old doublewide. “You don’t know how bizarre this is for me, ” Mattie said. “One of my favorite writers comes out of nowhere and saves my kid. I knew you had a place on the TR, that big old log house everyone calls Sara Laughs, but folks say you don’t come here anymore since your wife died. ”

“For a long time I didn’t, ” I said. “If Sara was a marriage instead of a house, you’d call this a trial reconciliation. ”

She smiled fleetingly, then looked grave again. “I want to ask you for something. A favor. ”

“Ask away. ”

“Don’t talk about this. It’s not a good time for Ki and me. ”

“Why not? ”

She bit her lip and seemed to consider answering the question—one I might not have asked, given an extra moment to consider—and then shook her head. “It’s just not. And I’d be so grateful if you didn’t talk about what just happened in town. More grateful than you’ll ever know. ”

“No problem. ”

“You mean it? ”

“Sure. I’m basically a summer person who hasn’t been around for awhile. . . which means I don’t have many folks to talk to, anyway. ” There was Bill Dean, of course, but I could keep quiet around him. Not that he wouldn’t know. If this little lady thought the locals weren’t going to find out about her daughter’s attempt to get to the beach by shank’s mare, she was fooling herself. “I think we’ve been noticed already, though. Take a look up at Brooksie’s Garage. Peek, don’t stare. ” She did, and sighed. Two old men were standing on the tarmac where there had been gas pumps once upon a time. One was very likely Brookshe himself; I thought I could see the remnants of the flyaway red hair which had always made him look like a downeast version of Bozo the Clown. The other, old enough to make Brooksie look like a wee slip of a lad, was leaning on a gold-headed cane in a way that was queerly vulpine. “I can’t do anything about them, ” she said, sounding depressed. “Nobody can do anything about them. I guess I should count myself lucky it’s a holiday and there’s only two of them. ”

“Besides, ” I added, “they probably didn’t see much. ” Which ignored two things: first, that half a dozen cars and pick-em-ups had gone by while we had been standing here, and second, that whatever Brooksie and his elderly friend hadn’t seen, they would be more than happy to make up. On Mattie’s shoulder, Kyra gave a ladylike snore. Mattie glanced at her and gave her a smile full of rue and love. “I’m sorry we had to meet under circumstances that make me look like such a dope, because I really am a big fan. They say at the bookstore in Castle Rock that you’ve got a new one coming out this summer. ” I nodded. “It’s called Helen’s Promise. ”

She grinned. “Good title. ”

“Thanks. You better get your buddy back home before she breaks your arm. ”

“Yeah. ” There are people in this world who have a knack for asking embarrassing, awkward questions without meaning to—it’s like a talent for walking into doors. I am one of that tribe, and as I walked with her toward the passenger side of the Scout, I found a good one. And yet it was hard to blame myself too enthusiastically. I had seen the wedding ring on her hand, after all. “Will you tell your husband? ” Her smile stayed on, but it paled somehow. And tightened. If it were possible to delete a spoken question the way you can delete a line of type when you’re writing a story, I would have done it. “He died last August. ”

“Mattie, I’m sorry. Open mouth, insert foot. ”

“You couldn’t know. A girl my age isn’t even supposed to be married, is she? And if she is, her husband’s supposed to be in the army, or something. ” There was a pink baby-seat—also Kmart, I guessed in the passenger side of the Scout.

Mattie tried to boost Kyra in, but I could see she was struggling. I stepped forward to help her, and for just a moment, as I reached past her to grab a plump leg, the back of my hand brushed her breast. She couldn’t step back unless she wanted to risk Kyra’s slithering out of the seat and onto the floor, but I could feel her recording the touch.

My husband’s dead, not a threat, so the big-deal writer thinks it’s okay to cop a little feel on a hot summer morning. And what can I say? Mr. Big Deal came along and hauled my kid out of the road, maybe saved her life. No, Mattie, I may be forty going on a hundred, but I was not copping a el. Except I couldn’t say that; it would only make things worse. I felt my cheeks flush a little. “How old are you? ” I asked, when we had the baby squared away and were back at a safe distance. She gave me a look. Tired or not, she had it together again. “Old enough to know the situation I’m in. ” She held out her hand. “Thanks again, Mr. Noonan.

God sent you along at the right time. ”

“Nah, God just told me I needed a hamburger at the Village Cafe, ” I said. “Or maybe it was His opposite number. Please say Buddy’s still doing business at the same old stand. ” She smiled. It warmed her face back up again, and I was happy to see it. “He’ll still be there when Ki’s kids are old enough to try buying beer with fake IDS. Unless someone wanders in off the road and asks for something like shrimp tetrazzini. If that happened he’d probably drop dead of a heart attack. ”

“Yeah. Well, when I get copies of the new book, I’ll drop one off. ” The smile continued to hang in there, but now it shaded toward caution. “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Noonan. ”

“No, but I will. My agent gets me fifty comps. I find that as I get older, they go further. ” Perhaps she heard more in my voice than I had meant to put there—people do sometimes, I guess. ’11 right. I’ll look forward to it. ” I took another look at the baby, sleeping in that queerly casual way they have—her head tilted over on her shoulder, her lovely little lips pursed and blowing a bubble. Their skin is what kills me—so fine and perfect there seem to be no pores at all. Her Sox hat was askew. Mattie watched me reach in and readjust it so the visor’s shade fell across her closed eyes. “Kyra, ” I said. Mattie nodded. “Ladylike. ”

“Kia is an African name, ” I said. “It means ’season’s beginning. ” “I left her then, giving her a little wave as I headed back to the driver’s side of the Chevy. I could feel her curious eyes on me, and I had the oddest feeling that I was going to cry. That feeling stayed with me long after the two of them were out of sight; was still with me when I got to the Village Cafe. I pulled into the dirt parking lot to the left of the off-brand gas pumps and just sat there for a little while, thinking about Jo and about a home pregnancy-testing kit which had cost twenty-two-fifty. A little secret she’d wanted to keep until she was absolutely sure. That must have been it; what else could it have been? “Kia, ” I said. “Season’s beginning. ” But that made me feel like crying again, so I got out of the car and slammed the door hard behind me, as if I could keep the sadness inside that way.

Buddy Jellison was just the same, all right—same dirty cooks’ whites and splotchy white apron, same black hair under a paper cap stained with either beef-blood or strawberry juice. Even, from the look, the same oatmeal-cookie crumbs caught in his ragged mustache. He was maybe fifty-five and maybe seventy, which in some genetically favored men seems to be still within the farthest borders of middle age. He was huge and shambly—probably six-four, three hundred pounds—and just as full of grace, wit, and joie de vivre as he had been four years before. “You want a menu or do you remember? ” he grunted, as if I’d last been in yesterday. “You still make the Villageburger Deluxe? ”

“Does a crow still shit in the pine tops? ” Pale eyes regarding me. No condolences, which was fine by me. “Most likely. I’ll have one with everything—a Villageburger, not a crow—plus a chocolate frappe. Good to see you again. ” I offered my hand. He looked surprised but touched it with his own. Unlike the whites, the apron, and the hat, the hand was clean. Even the nails were clean. “Yuh, ” he said, then turned to the sallow woman chopping onions beside the grill. “Villageburger, Audrey, ” he said.

“Drag it through the garden. ” I’m ordinarily a sit-at-the-counter kind of guy, but that day I took a booth near the cooler and waited for Buddy to yell that it was ready—Audrey short-orders, but she doesn’t waitress. I wanted to think, and Buddy’s was a good place to do it.

There were a couple of locals eating sandwiches and drinking sodas straight from the can, but that was about it; people with summer cottages would have to be starving to eat at the Village Cafe, and even then you’d likely have to haul them through the door kicking and screaming. The floor was faded green linoleum with a rolling topography of hills and valleys. Like Buddy’s uniform, it was none too clean (the summer people who came in probably failed to notice his hands). The woodwork was greasy and dark. Above it, where the plaster started, there were a number of bumper-stickers—Buddy’s idea of decoration.

HORN BROKEN—WATCH FOR FINGER.

WIFE AND DOG MISSING. REWARD FOR DOG.

THERE’s NO TOWN DRUNK HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS. Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin. Three overhead fans paddled apathetically at the hot air, and to the left of the soft-drink cooler were two dangling strips of flypaper, both liberally stippled with wildlife, some of it still struggling feebly. If you could look at those and still eat, your digestion was probably doing okay. I thought about a similarity of names which was surely, had to be, a coincidence. I thought about a young, pretty girl who had become a mother at sixteen or seventeen and a widow at nineteen or twenty. I thought about inadvertently touching her breast, and how the world judged men in their forties who suddenly discovered the fascinating world of young women and their accessories.

Most of all I thought of the queer thing that had happened to me when Mattie had told me the kid’s name—that sense that my mouth and throat were suddenly flooded with cold, mineral-tangy water. That rush. When my burger was ready, Buddy had to call twice. When I went over to get it, he said: “You back to stay or to clear out? ”

“Why? ” I asked. “Did you miss me, Buddy? ”

“Nup, ” he said, “but at least you’re from in-state. Did you know that “Massachusetts’ is Piscataqua for ’asshole’? ”

“You’re as funny as ever, ” I said. “Yuh. I’m going on fuckin Letterman. Explain to him why God gave seagulls wings. ”

“Why was that, Buddy? ”

“So they could beat the fuckin Frenchmen to the dump. ” I got a newspaper from the rack and a straw for my frappe. Then I detoured to the pay phone and, tucking my paper under my arm, opened the phone book. You could actually walk around with it if you wanted; it wasn’t tethered to the phone. Who, after all, would want to steal a Castle County telephone directory? There were over twenty Devores, which didn’t surprise me very much—it’s one of those names, like Pelkey or Bowie or Toothaker, that you kept coming across if you lived down here. I imagine it’s the same everywhere—some families breed more and travel less, that’s all. There was a Devore listing for “RD Wsp HI1 Rd, ” but it wasn’t for a Mattie, Mathilda, Martha, or M. It was for Lance. I looked at the front of the phone book and saw it was a 1997 model, printed and mailed while Mattie’s husband was still in the land of the living.

Okay. . . but there was something else about that name. Devote, Devote, let us now praise famous Devores; wherefore art thou Devore? But it wouldn’t come, whatever it was. I ate my burger, drank my liquefied ice cream, and tried not to look at what was caught on the flypaper.

While I was waiting for the sallow, silent Audrey to give me my change (you could still eat all week in the Village Cafe for fifty dollars. . . if your blood-vessels could stand it, that was), I read the sticker pasted to the cash register. It was another Buddy Jellison special:

CYBERSPACE SCARED ME SO BAD I DOWNLOADED IN MY PANTS. This didn’t exactly convulse me with mirth, but it did provide the key for solving one of the day’s mysteries: why the name Devore had seemed not just familiar but evocative. I was financially well off, rich by the standards of many. There was at least one person with ties to their, however, who was rich by the standards of everybody, and filthy rich by the standards of most year-round residents of the lakes region. If, that was, he was still eating, breathing, and walking around. “Audrey, is Max Devore still alive? ” She gave me a little smile. “Oh, ayuh. But we don’t see him in here too often. ” That got the laugh out of me that all of Buddy’s joke stickers hadn’t been able to elicit. Audrey, who had always been yellowish and who now looked like a candidate for a liver transplant, snickered herself. Buddy gave us a librarian’s prim glare from the far end of the counter, where he was reading a flyer about the holiday NASCAR race at Oxford Plains. I drove back the way I had come. A big hamburger is a bad meal to eat in the middle of a hot day; it leaves you feeling sleepy and heavy-witted. All I wanted was to go home (I’d been there less than twenty-four hours and was already thinking of it as home), flop on the bed in the north bedroom under the revolving fan, and sleep for a couple of hours. When I passed Wasp Hill Road, I slowed down. The laundry was hanging listlessly on the lines, and there was a scatter of toys in the front yard, but the Scout was gone. Mattie and Kyra had donned their suities, I imagined, and headed on down to the public beachie. I’d liked them both, and quite a lot. Mattie’s short-lived marriage had probably hooked her somehow to Max Devote. . .

but looking at the rusty doublewide trailer with its dirt driveway and balding front yard, remembering Mat-tie’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock top, I had to doubt that the hook was a strong one. Before retiring to Palm Springs in the late eighties, Maxwell William Devote had been a driving force in the computer revolution. It’s primarily a young people’s revolution, but Devore did okay for a golden oldie—knew the playing-field and understood the rules. He started when memory was stored on magnetic tape instead of in computer chips and a warehouse-sized cruncher called UNIVAC was state-of-the-art. He was fluent in COBOL and spoke FORTRAN like a native. As the field expanded beyond his ability to keep up, expanded to the point where it began to define the world, he bought the talent he needed to keep growing.

His company, Visions, had created scanning programs which could upload hard copy onto floppy disks almost instantaneously; it created graphic-imaging programs which had become the industry standard; it created Pixel Easel, which allowed laptop users to mouse-paint. . . to actually fingerpaint, if their gadget came equipped with what Jo had called “the clitoral cursor. ” Devore had invented none of this later stuff, but he’d understood that it could be invented and had hired people to do it. He held dozens of patents and co-held hundreds more. He was supposedly worth something like six hundred million dollars, depending on how technology stocks were doing on any given day.

On the TR he was reputed to be crusty and unpleasant. No surprise there; to a Nazarene, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And folks said he was eccentric, of course. Listen to the old-timers who remember the rich and successful in their salad days (and all the old-timers claim they do), and you’ll hear that they ate the wallpaper, fucked the dog, and showed up at church suppers wearing nothing but their pee-stained BVDS. Even if all that was true in Devore’s case, and even if he was Scrooge Mcduck in the bargain, I doubted that he’d allow two of his closer relatives to live in a doublewide trailer.

I drove up the lane above the lake, then paused at the head of my driveway, looking at the sign there: SAK LAUGHS burned into a length of varnished board nailed to a handy tree. It’s the way they do things down here. Looking at it brought back the last dream of the Manderley series.

In that dream someone had slapped a radio-station sticker on the sign, the way you’re always seeing stickers slapped on turnpike toll-collection baskets in the exact-change lanes.

I got out of my car, went to the sign, and studied it. No sticker. The sunflowers had been down there, growing out of the stoop—I had a photo in my suitcase that proved it—but there was no radio-station sticker on the house sign. Proving exactly what? Come on, Noonan, get a grip.

I started back to the car—the door was open, the Beach Boys spilling out of the speakers—then changed my mind and went back to the sign again. In the dream, the sticker had been pasted just above the of SAK and the LAU of LAUGHS. I touched my fingers to that spot and thought they came away feeling slightly sticky. Of course that could have been the feel of varnish on a hot day. Or my imagination.

I drove down to the house, parked, set the emergency brake (on the slopes around Dark Score and the dozen or so other lakes in western Maine, you always set your brake), and listened to the rest of “Don’t Worry, Baby, ” which I’ve always thought was the best of the Beach Boys’ songs, great not in spite of the sappy lyrics but because of them. If you knew how much I love you, baby, Brian Wilson sings, nothing could go wrong with you. And oh folks, wouldn’t that be a world.

I sat there listening and looked at the cabinet set against the right side of the stoop. We kept our garbage in there to foil the neighborhood raccoons. Even cans with snap-down lids won’t always do that; if the coons are hungry enough, they somehow manage the lids with their clever little hands.

You’re not going to do what you’re thinking of doing, I told myself. I mean. . . are you?

It seemed I was-or that I was at least going to have a go. When the Beach Boys gave way to Rare Earth, I got out of the car, opened the storage cabinet, and pulled out two plastic garbage cans. There was a guy named Stan Proulx who came down to yank the trash twice a week (or there was four years ago, I reminded myself), one of Bill Dean’s farflung network of part-timers working for cash off the books, but I didn’t think Stan would have been down to collect the current accumulation of swill because of the holiday, and I was right. There Were two plastic garbage bags in each can. I hauled them out (cursing myself for a fool even while I was doing it) and untwisted the yellow ties.

I really don’t think I was so obsessed that I would have dumped a bunch of wet garbage out on my stoop if it had come to that (of course I’ll never know for sure, and maybe that’s for the best), but it didn’t. No one had lived in the house for four years, remember, and it’s occupancy that produces garbage—everything from coffee-grounds to used sanitary napkins. The stuff in these bags was dry trash swept together and carted out by Brenda Meserve’s cleaning crew.

There were nine vacuum-cleaner disposal bags containing forty-eight months of dust, dirt, and dead flies. There were wads of paper towels, some smelling of aromatic furniture polish and others of the sharper but still pleasant aroma of Windex. There was a moldy mattress pad and a silk jacket which had that unmistakable dined-upon-by-moths look. The jacket certainly caused me no regrets; a mistake of my young manhood, it looked like something from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” era.

Goo-goo-joob, baby. There was a box filled with broken glass. . . another filled with unrecognizable (and presumably out-of-date) plumbing fixtures. . . a torn and filthy square of carpet. . . done-to-death dishtowels, faded and ragged. . . the old oven-gloves I’d used when cooking burgers and chicken on the barbecue. . . The sticker was in a twist at the bottom of the second bag. I’d known I would find it—from the moment I’d felt that faintly tacky patch on the sign, I’d known—but I’d needed to see it for myself. The same way old Doubting Thomas had needed to get the blood under his fingernails, I suppose. I placed my find on a board of the sunwarmed stoop and smoothed it out with my hand.

It was shredded around the edges. I guessed Bill had probably used a putty-knife to scrape it off. He hadn’t wanted Mr. Noo-nan to come back to the lake after four years and discover some beered-up kid had slapped a radio-station sticker on his driveway sign. Gorry, no, ’t’wouldn’t be proper, deah. So off it had come and into the trash it had gone and here it was again, another piece of my nightmare unearthed and not much the worse for wear. I ran my fingers over it. WBLM, 102. 9, PORTLAND’s ROCK AND ROLL BLIMP. I told myself didn’t have to be afraid. That it meant nothing, just as all the rest of it meant nothing. Then I got the broom out of the cabinet, swept all the trash together, and dumped it back in the plastic bags. The sticker went in with the rest.

I went inside meaning to shower the dust and grime away, then spied my own bathing suitie, still lying in one of my open suitcases, and decided to go swimming instead. The suit was a jolly number, covered with spouting whales, that I had purchased in Key Largo. I thought my pal in the Bosox cap would have approved. I checked my watch and saw that I had finished my Villageburger forty-five minutes ago. Close enough for government work, kemo sabe, especially after engaging in an energetic game of Trash-Bag Treasure Hunt. I pulled on my suit and walked down the railroad-tie steps which lead from Sara to the water. My flip-flops snapped and flapped. A few late mosquitoes hummed. The lake gleamed in front of me, still and inviting under that low humid sky. Running north and south along its edge, bordering the entire east side of the lake, was a right-of-way path (it’s called “common property” in the deeds)

which folks on the TR simply call The Street. If one were to turn left onto The Street at the foot of my steps, one could walk all the way down to the Dark Score Marina, passing Warrington’s and Buddy Jellison’s scuzzy little eatery on the way. . . not to mention four dozen summer cottages, discreetly tucked into sloping groves of spruce and pine. Turn right and you could walk to Halo Bay, although it would take you a day to do it with The Street overgrown the way it is now. I stood there for a moment on the path, then ran forward and leaped into the water. Even as I flew through the air with the greatest of ease, it occurred to me that the last time I had jumped in like this, I had been holding my wife’s hand. Touching down was almost a catastrophe. The water was cold enough to remind me that I was forty, not fourteen, and for a moment my heart stopped dead in my chest. As Dark Score Lake closed over my head, I felt quite sure that I wasn’t going to come up alive. I’d be found drifting facedown between the swimming float and my little stretch of The Street, a victim of cold water and a greasy Villageburger. They’d carve Your Mother Always Said To Wait At Least An Hour on my tombstone.

Then my feet landed in the stones and slimy weedstuffgrowing along the bottom, my heart kick-started, and I shoved upward like a guy planning to slam-dunk home the last score of a close basketball game. As I returned to the air, I gasped. Water went in my mouth and I coughed it back out, patting one hand against my chest in an effort to encourage my heart—come on, baby, keep going, you can do it. I came back down standing waist-deep in the lake and with my mouth full of that cold taste—lakewater with an undertinge of miner als, the kind you’d have to correct for when you washed your clothes. It was exactly what I had tasted while standing on the shoulder of Route 68. It was what I had tasted when Mattie Devore told me her daughter’s name. I made a psychological connection, that’s all. From the similarity of the names to my dead wi) to this lake. Which-“Which I have tasted a time or two before, ” I said out loud. As if to underline the fact, I scooped up a palmful of water—some of the cleanest and clearest in the state, according to the analysis reports I and all the other members of the so-called Western Lakes Association get each year—and drank it down.

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