The Dead Zone
PART ONE The Wheel of Fortune Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
1.
At some time a little past two A.M. on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.
Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged half-way across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.
Vera's voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. 'Phone.'
'Yeah,' he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.
He went down to what Vera liked to call 'the phone nook.' It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two hundred and forty pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader's Digests, and Fate magazines.
Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.
A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you'd be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.
Hoping for the middle choice, Herb lifted up the phone. 'Hello?'
A crisp male voice said: 'Is this the Herbert Smith residence?'
'Yes?'
'To whom am I speaking, please?'
'I'm Herb Smith. What...'
'Will you hold for a moment?'
'Yes, but who. -
Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone - bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions - the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modern life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, 'Hold the phone, willya?' and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn't they just say, 'Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?'
He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.
'Herbert?'
He turned round, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.
'Who is it?'
'I don't know yet. They've got me on hold.'
'On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?'
'Yes.'
'It's not Johnny, is it? Nothing's happened to Johnny?'
'I don't know,' he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about how these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension...
Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, 'Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet.' That would earn him Vera Smith's Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o'clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn't think he could take that particular smile.
The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, 'Hello, Mr. Smith?'
'Yes, who is this?'
'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.'
'Is it my boy? Something about my boy?'
Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.
Sergeant Meggs said, 'Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?'
'Is he all right? Is he okay?'
Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. 'What is it? What's happened to my Johnny?'
Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, 'I am handling this.'
She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.
'Mr. Smith, are you there?'
Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb's mouth. 'I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He's a teacher at the high school there.'
'He's been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I'm very sorry to have to give you this news.' The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.
'Oh, my God,' Herb. said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. 'Oh, my God,' he said again.
'He's dead?' Vera asked. 'He's dead? Johnny's dead?'
He covered the mouthpiece. 'No,' he said. 'Not dead.'
'Not dead! Not dead!' she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. '0 God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and...
'Vera shut up!'
For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face: Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.
'Mr. Smith?'
'Yes.I... I apologize for the ruckus.'
'Quite understandable,' Meggs said.
'My boy... Johnny.. was he driving his Volkswagen?'
'Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are death-traps,' Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.
'He was in a Bangor & Orono Yellow Cab,' Meggs said. 'I'll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved, two of them driven by kids from Cleaves Mills. They were dragging. They came up over what's known as Carson's Hill on Route 6, headed east. Your son was in the cab, headed west, toward Cleaves. The cab and the car on the wrong side of the road collided headon. The cab driver was killed, and so was the boy driving the other car. Your son and a passenger in that other car are at Eastern Maine Med. I understand both of them are listed as critical.'
'Critical,' Herb said.
'Critical! Critical! ' Vera moaned.
Oh, Christ, we sound like one of those weird off Broadway shows, Herb thought. He felt embarrassed for Vera, and for Sergeant Meggs, who must surely be hearing Vera, like some nutty Greek chorus in the back-ground. He wondered how many conversations like this Sergeant Meggs had held in the course of his job. He decided he must have had a good many. Possibly he had already called the cab driver's wife and the dead boy's mother to pass the news. How had they reacted? And what did it matter? Wasn't it Vera's right to weep for her son? And why did a person have to think such crazy things at a time like this?
'Eastern Maine,' Herb said. He jotted it on a pad. The drawing on top of the pad showed a smiling telephone handset. The phone cord spelled out the words PHONE PAL. 'How is he hurt?'
'I beg your pardon, Mr. Smith?'
'Where did he get it? Head? Belly? What? Is he burned?'
Vera shrieked.
'Vera can you please shut UP!'
'You'd have to call the hospital for that information,' Meggs said carefully. 'I'm a couple of hours from having a complete report.'
'All right. All right.'
'Mr. Smith, I'm sorry to have to call you in the middle of the night with such bad news ...
'It's bad, all right,' he said. 'I've got to call the hospital, Sergeant Meggs. Good-bye.'
'Good night, Mr. Smith.'
Herb hung up and stared stupidly at the phone. Just like that it happens, he thought. How 'bout that. Johnny.
Vera uttered another shriek, and he saw with some alarm that she had grabbed her hair, rollers and all, and was pulling it. 'It's a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on sin, on something! Herb, get down on your knees with me...'
'Vera, I have to call the hospital. I don't want to do it on my knees.'
'We'll pray for him... promise to do better... if you'd only come to church more often with me I know... may be it's your cigars, drinking beer with those men after work ... cursing... taking the name of the Lord God in vain... a judgment... it's a judgment...'
He put his hands on her face to stop its wild, uneasy whipping back and forth. The feel of the night cream was unpleasant, but he didn't take his hands away. He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania. Five years after Johnny was born, the doctor had found a number of benign tumors in her uterus and vaginal canal. Their removal had made it impossible for her to have another baby. Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of 'pure Christians' who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.
'Vera,' he said.
'We'll do better,' she whispered, her eyes pleading with him. 'We'll do better and he'll live. You'll see. You'll...'
'Vera.'
She fell silent, looking at him.
'Let's call the hospital and see just how bad it really is,' he said gently.
'A-All right. Yes.'
'Can you sit on the stairs there and keep perfectly quiet?'
'I want to pray,' she said childishly. 'You can't stop me.'
'I don't want to. As long as you pray to yourself.'
'Yes. To myself. All right, Herb.'
She went to the stairs and sat down and pulled her robe primly around her. She folded her hands and her lips began to move. Herb called the hospital. Two hours later they were headed north on the nearly deserted Maine Turnpike. Herb was behind the wheel of their '66 Ford station wagon. Vera sat bolt upright in the passenger seat. Her Bible was on her lap.
The telephone woke Sarah at quarter of nine. She went to answer it with half her mind still asleep in bed. Her back hurt from the vomiting she had done the night before and the muscles in her stomach felt strained, but otherwise she felt much better.
She picked up the phone, sure it would be Johnny. 'Hello?'
'Hi, Sarah.' It wasn't Johnny. It was Anne Strafford from school. Anne was a year older than Sarah and in her second year at Cleaves. She taught Spanish. She was a bubbly, effervescent girl and Sarah liked her very much. But this morning she sounded subdued.
'How are you, Annie? It's only temporary. Probably Johnny told you. Carnival hot dogs, I guess...'
'Oh, my God, you don't know. You don't ...' The words were swallowed in odd, choked sounds. Sarah listened to them, frowning. Her initial puzzlement turned to deadly disquiet as she realized Anne was crying.
'Anne? What's wrong? It's not Johnny, is it? Not...'
'There was an accident,' Anne said. She was now sobbing openly. 'He was in a cab. There was a head-on collision. The driver of the other car was Brad Freneau, I had him in Spanish II, he died, his girl friend died this morning, Mary Thibault, she was in one of Johnny's classes, I heard, it's horrible, just horr.
'Johnny!' Sarah screamed into the phone. She was sick to her stomach again. Her hands and feet were suddenly as cold as four gravestones. 'What about Johnny?'
'He's in critical condition, Sarah. Dave Pelsen called the hospital this morning. He's not expected ... well, it's very bad.'
The world was going gray. Anne was still talking but her voice was far and wee, as e.e. cummings had said about the balloon man. Flocked images tumbling over and over one another, none making sense. The carny wheel. The mirror maze. Johnny's eyes, strangely violet, almost black. His dear, homely face in the harsh, county fair lighting, naked bulbs strung on electric wire.
'Not Johnny,' she said, far and wee, far and wee. 'You're mistaken. He was fine when he left here.'
And Anne's voice coming back like a fast serve, her voice so shocked and unbelieving, so affronted that such a thing should have happened to someone her own age, someone young and vital. 'They told Dave he'd never wake up even if he survived the operation. They have to operate because his head... his head was...'
Was she going to say crushed? That Johnny's head had been crushed?
Sarah fainted then, possibly~to avoid that final irrevocable word, that final horror. The phone spilled out of her fingers and she sat down hard in a gray world and then slipped over and the phone swung back and forth in a decreasing arc, Anne Strafford's voice coming out of it: 'Sarah?... Sarah? . Sarah?'
3.
When Sarah got to Eastern Maine Medical, it was quarter past twelve. The nurse at the reception desk looked at her white, strained face, estimated her capacity for further truth, and told her that John Smith was still in OR. She added that Johnny's mother and father were in the waiting room.
'Thank you,' Sarah said. She turned right instead of left, wound up in a medical closet, and had to backtrack.
The waiting room was done in bright, solid colors that gashed her eyes A few people sat around looking at tattered magazines or empty space. A gray-haired woman came in from the elevators, gave her visitor's pass to a friend, and Sat down. The friend clicked away on high heels. The rest of them went on sitting, waiting their own chance to visit a father who had had gallstones removed, ~ mother who had discovered a small lump under one of her breasts a bare three days ago, a friend who had been struck in the chest with an invisible sledgehammer while jogging. The faces of the waiters were care fully made-up with composure. Worry was swept under the face like dirt under a rug. Sarah felt the unreality hovering again.
Somewhere a soft bell was ringing. Crepe-soled shoes squeaked. He had been fine when he left her place. Impossible to think he was in one of these brick towers, engaged in dying.
She knew Mr. and Mrs. Smith at once. She groped for their first names and could not immediately find them. They were sitting together near the back of the room, and unlike the others here, they hadn't yet had time to come to terms with what had happened in their lives.
Johnny's mom sat with her coat on the chair behind her and her Bible clutched in her hands. Her lips moved as she read, and Sarah remembered Johnny saying she was very religious - maybe too religious, somewhere in that great middle ground between holy rolling and snake-handling, she remembered him saying. Mr. Smith -Herb, it came to her, his name is Herb - had one of the magazines on his knees, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking out the window, where New England fall burned its way toward November and winter beyond.
She went over to them. 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith?'
They looked up at her, their faces tensed for the dreaded blow. Mrs. Smith's hands tightened on her Bible, which was open to the Book of Job, until her knuckles were white. The young woman before them was not in nurse's or doctor's whites, but that made no difference to them at this point. They were waiting for the final blow.
'Yes, we're the Smiths,' Herb said quietly.
'I'm Sarah Bracknell. Johnny and I are good friends. Going together, I suppose you'd say. May I sit down?'
'Johnny's girl friend?' Mrs. Smith asked in a sharp, almost accusing tone. A few of the others looked around briefly and then back at their own tattered magazines.
'Yes,' she said. 'Johnny's girl.'
'He never wrote that he had a lady friend,' Mrs. Smith said in that same sharp tone. 'No, he never did at all.'
'Hush, Mother,' Herb said. 'Sit down, Miss . -. Bracknell, wasn't it?'
'Sarah,' she said gratefully, and took a chair. 'I...'
'No, he never did,' Mrs. Smith said sharply. 'My boy loved God, but just lately he maybe fell away just a bit. The judgment of the Lord God is sudden, you know. That's what makes backsliding so dangerous. You know not the day nor the hour ...
'Hush,' Herb said. People were looking around again. He fixed his wife with a stern glance. She looked back defiantly for a moment, but his gaze didn't waver. Vera dropped her eyes. She had closed the Bible but her fingers fiddled restlessly along the pages, as if longing to get back to the colossal demolition derby of Job's life, enough bad luck to put her own and her son's in some sort of bitter perspective.
'I was with him last night,' Sarah said, and that made the woman look up again, accusingly. At that moment Sarah remembered the biblical connotation of being 'with' somebody and felt herself beginning to blush. It was as if the woman could read her thoughts.
'We went to the county fair...'
'Places of sin and evil,' Vera Smith said clearly.
'I'll tell you one last time to hush, Vera,' Herb said grimly, and clamped one of his hands over one of his wife's. 'I mean it, now. This seems like a nice girl here, and I won't have you digging at her. Understand?'
'Sinful places,' Vera repeated stubbornly.
'Will you hush?'
'Let me go. I want to read my Bible.'
He let her go. Sarah felt confused embarrassment. Vera opened her Bible and began to read again, lips moving.
'Vera is very upset, Herb said. 'We're both upset. You are too, from the look of you.'
'Yes.'
'Did you and Johnny have a good time last night?' he asked. 'At your fair?'
'Yes,' she said, the lie and truth of that simple word all mixed up in her mind. 'Yes we did, until... well, I ate a bad hot dog or something. We had my car and Johnny drove me home to my place in Veazie. I was pretty sick to my stomach. He called a cab. He said he'd call me in sick at school today. And that's the last time I saw him.' The tears started to come then and she didn't want to cry in front of them, particularly not in front of Vera Smith, but there was no way to stop it. She fumbled a Kleenex out of her purse and held it to her face.
'There, now,' Herb said, and put an arm around her.
'There, now.' She cried, and it seemed to her in some unclear way that he felt better for having someone to comfort; his wife had found her own dark brand of comfort in Job's story and it didn't include him.
A few people turned around to gawk; through the prisms of her tears they seemed like a crowd. She had a bitter knowledge of what they were thinking: Better her than me, better all three of them than me or mine, guy must be dying, guy must have gotten his head crushed for her to cry like that. Only a matter of time before some doctor comes down and takes them into a private room to tell them that -Somehow she choked off the tears and got hold of her-self. Mrs. Smith sat bolt upright, as if startled out of a nightmare, noticing neither Sarah's tears nor her husband's effort to comfort her. She read her Bible.
'Please,' Sarah said. 'How bad is it? Can we hope?'
Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: 'There's hope in God, Missy.'
Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb's eyes and thought: He thinks it's driven her crazy. And maybe it has.
4.
A long afternoon stretching into evening.
Sometime after two P.M., when the schools began to let out, a number of Johnny's students began to come in, wearing fatigue coats and strange hats and washed-out jeans. Sarah didn't see many of the kids she thought of as the button-down crowd - upward-bound, college-oriented kids, clear of eye and brow. Most of the kids who bothered to come in were the freaks and long-hairs.
A few came over and asked Sarah in quiet tones what she knew about Mr. Smith's condition. She could only shake her head and say she had heard nothing. But one of the girls, Dawn Edwards, who had a crush on Johnny, read the depth of Sarah's fear in her face. She burst into tears. A nurse came and asked her to leave.
'I'm sure she'll be all right,' Sarah said. She had a protective arm around Dawn's shoulders. 'Just give her a minute or two.
'No, I don't want to stay,' Dawn said, and left in a hurry, knocking one of the hard plastic contour chairs over with a clatter. A few moments later Sarah saw the girl sitting out on the steps in the cold, late, October sunshine with her head on her knees.
Vera Smith read her Bible.
By five o'clock most of the students had left. Dawn had also left; Sarah had not seen her go. At seven P.M., a young man with DR. STRAWNS pinned askew to the lapel of his white coat came into the waiting room, glanced around, and walked toward them.
'Mr. and Mrs. Smith?' he asked.
Herb took a deep breath. 'Yes. We are.'
Vera shut her Bible with a snap.
'Would you come with me, please?'
That's it, Sarah thought. The walk down to the small private room, and then the news. Whatever the news is. She would wait, and when they came back, Herb Smith would tell her what she needed to know. He was a kind man.
'Have you news of my son?' Vera asked in that same clear, strong, and nearly hysterical voice.
'Yes.' Dr. Strawns glanced at Sarah. 'Are you family, ma'am?'
'No,' Sarah said. 'A friend.'
'A close friend,' Herb said. A warm, strong hand closed above her elbow, just as another had closed around Vera's upper arm. He helped them both to their feet. 'We'll all go together, if you don't mind.'
'Not at all.'
He led them past the elevator bank and down a hall-way to an office with CONFERENCE ROOM on the door. He let them in and turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. The room was furnished with a long table and a dozen office chairs.
Dr. Strawns closed the door, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burned match into one of the ashtrays that marched up and down the table. 'This is difficult,' he said, as if to himself.
'Then you had best just say it out,' Vera said.
'Yes, perhaps I'd better.'
It was not her place to ask, but Sarah could not help it. 'Is he dead? Please don't say he's dead...
'He's in a coma.' Strawns sat down and dragged deeply on his cigarette. 'Mr. Smith has sustained serious head injuries and an undetermined amount of brain damage. You may have heard the phrase "subdural hematoma" on one or the other of the doctor shows. Mr. Smith has suffered a very grave subdural hematoma, which is localized cranial bleeding. A long operation was necessary to relieve the pressure, and also to remove bone-splinters from his brain.'
Herb sat down heavily, his face doughy and stunned. Sarah noticed his blunt, scarred hands and remembered Johnny telling her his father was a carpenter.
'But God has spared him,' Vera said. 'I knew he would. I prayed for a sign. Praise God, Most High! All ye here below praise His name!'
'Vera,' Herb said with no force.
'In a coma,' Sarah repeated. She tried to fit the information into some sort of emotional frame and found it wouldn't go. That Johnny wasn't dead, that he had come through a serious and dangerous operation on his brain - those things should have renewed her hope. But they didn't. She didn't like that word coma. It had a sinister, stealthy sound. Wasn't it Latin for 'sleep of death'?
'What's ahead for him?' Herb asked.
'No one can really answer that now,' Strawns said. He began to play with his cigarette, tapping it nervously over the ashtray. Sarah had the feeling he was answering Herb's question literally while completely avoiding the question Herb had really asked. 'He's on life support equipment, of course.'
'But you must know something about his chances,' Sarah said. 'You must know ...' She gestured helplessly with her hands and let them drop to her sides.
'He may come out of it in forty-eight hours. Or a week. A month. He may never come out of ......... there is a strong possibility that he may die. I must tell you frankly that's the most likely. His injuries... grave.
'God wants him to live,' Vera said. 'I know it.'
Herb had put his face into his hands and was scrubbing it slowly.
Dr. Strawns looked at Vera uncomfortably. 'I only want you to be prepared for... any eventuality.'
'Would you rate his chances for coming out of it?' Herb asked.
Dr. Strawns hesitated, puffed nervously on his cigarette. 'No, I can't do that,' he said finally.
5.
The three of them waited another hour and then left. It was dark. A cold and gusty wind had come up and it whistled across the big parking lot. Sarah's long hair streamed out behind her. Later, when she got home, she would find a crisp yellow oak leaf caught in it. Overhead, the moon rode the sky, a cold sailor of the night.
Sarah pressed a scrap of paper into Herb's hand. Written on it was her address and phone number. 'Would you call me if you hear something? Anything at all?'
'Yes, of course.' He bent suddenly and kissed her cheek, and Sarah held his shoulder for a moment in the blowing dark.
'I'm very sorry if I was stiff with you earlier, dear,' Vera said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. 'I was upset.'
'Of course you were,' Sarah said.
'I thought my boy might die. But I've prayed. I've spoken to God about it. As the song says, "Are we weak and heavy-laden? Cumbered with a load of care? We must never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in 'prayer."'
'Vera, we ought to go along,' Herb said. 'We ought to get some sleep and see how things look in the...'
'But now I've heard from my God,' Vera said, looking dreamily up at the moon. 'Johnny isn't going to die. It isn't in God's plan for Johnny to die. I listened and I heard that still, small voice speaking in my heart, and I am comforted.'
Herb opened the car door. 'Come on, Vera.'
She looked back at Sarah and smiled. In that smile Sarah suddenly saw Johnny's own easy, devil-may-care grin - but at the same time she thought it was the most ghastly smile she had ever seen in her life.
'God has put his mark on my Johnny,' Vera said, 'and I rejoice.'
'Good night, Mrs. Smith,' Sarah said through numb lips.
'Good night, Sarah,' Herb said. He got in and started the car. It pulled out of its space and moved across the parking lot to State Street, and Sarah realized she hadn't asked where they were staying. She guessed they might not know themselves yet.
She turned to go to her own car and paused, struck by the river that ran behind the hospital, the Penobscot. It flowed like dark silk, and the reflected moon was caught in its center. She looked up into the sky, standing alone in the parking lot now. She looked at the moon.
God has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.
The moon hung above her like a tawdry carnival toy, a Wheel of Fortune in the sky with the odds all slugged in favor of the house, not to mention the house numbers - zero and double zero. House numbah, house numbah,
y'all pay the house, hey-hey-hey.
The wind blew rattling leaves around her legs. She went to her car and sat behind the wheel. She felt suddenly sure she was going to lose him. Terror and loneliness woke in her. She began to shiver. At last she started her car and drove home.
6.
There was a great outpouring of comfort and good wishes from the Cleaves Mill student body in the following week; Herb Smith told her later that Johnny received better than three hundred cards. Almost all of them contamed a hesitant personal note saying they hoped Johnny would be well soon. Vera answered each of them with a thank-you note and a Bible verse.
Sarah's discipline problem in her classes disappeared. Her previous feeling that some returning jury of class consciousness was bringing in an unfavorable verdict changed to just the opposite. Gradually she realized that the kids were viewing her as a tragic heroine, Mr. Smith's lost love. This idea struck her in the teacher's room during her free period on the Wednesday following the accident, and she went off into sudden gales of laughter that turned into a crying jag. Before she was able to get herself under control she had frightened herself badly. Her nights were made restless with incessant dreams of Johnny - Johnny in the Halloween Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, Johnny standing at the Wheel of Fortune concession while some disembodied voice chanted, 'Man, I love to watch this guy get a beatin,' over and over. Johnny saying, 'It's all right now, Sarah, everything's fine,' and then coming into the room with his head gone above the eyebrows.
Herb and Vera Smith spent the week in the Bangor House, and Sarah saw them every afternoon at the hospital, waiting patiently for something to happen. Nothing did. Johnny lay in a room on the intensive care ward on the sixth floor, surrounded by life-support equipment, breathing with the help of a machine. Dr. Strawns had grown less hopeful. On the Friday following the accident, Herb called Sarah on the phone and told her he and Vera were going home.
'She doesn't want to,' he said, 'but I've gotten her to see reason. I think.'
'Is she all right?' Sarah asked.
There was a long pause, long enough to make Sarah
think she had overstepped the bounds. Then Herb said, 'I don't know. Or maybe I do and I just don't want to say right out that she isn't. She's always had strong ideas about religion and they got a lot stronger after her operation. Her hysterectomy. Now they've gotten worse again. She's been talking a lot about the end of the world. She's connected Johnny's accident with the Rapture, somehow. Just before Armageddon, God is supposed to take all the faithful up to heaven in their actual bodies.'
Sarah thought of a bumper sticker she had seen somewhere: IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY, SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL ! 'Yes, I know the idea,' she said.
'Well,' Herb said uncomfortably, 'some of the groups she ... she corresponds with... they believe that God is going to come for the faithful in flying saucers. Take them all up to heaven in flying saucers, that is. These ... sects ... have proved, at least to themselves, that heaven is somewhere out in the constellation of Orion. No; don't ask me how they proved it. Vera could tell you. It's ... well, Sarah, it's all a little hard on me.
'Of course it must be.'
Herb's voice strengthened. 'But she can still distinguish between what's real and what's not. She needs time to adjust. So I told her she could face whatever's coming at home as easily as here. I've...' He paused, sounding embarrassed, then cleared his throat and went on. 'I've got to get back to work. I've got jobs. I've signed contracts...
'Sure, of course.' She paused. 'What about insurance? I mean, this must be costing a Denver mint...' It was her turn to feel embarrassed.
'I've talked with Mr. Pelsen, your assistant principal there at Cleaves Mills,' Herb said. 'Johnny had the standard Blue Cross, but not that new Major Medical. The Blue Cross will cover some of it, though. And Vera and I have our savings.'
Sarah's heart sank. Vera and I have our savings. How long would one passbook stand up to expenses of two hundred dollars a day or more? And for what purpose in the end? So Johnny could hang on like an insensible animal, pissing brainlessly down a tube while he bankrupted his dad and mom? So his condition could drive his mother mad with unrealized hope? She felt the tears start to slip down her cheeks and for the first time - but not the last - she found herself wishing Johnny would die and be at peace. Part of her revolted in horror at the thought, but it remained.
'I wish you all the best,' Sarah said.
'I know that, Sarah. We wish you the best. Will you write?'
'I sure will.'
'And come see us when you can. Pownal's not so far away.' He hesitated. 'Looks to me like Johnny had picked himself out the right girl. It was pretty serious, wasn't it?'
'Yes,' Sarah said. The tears were still coming and the past tense was not lost on her. 'It was.'
'Good-bye, honey.'
'Good-bye, Herb.'
She hung up the phone, held the buttons down for a second or two, and then called the hospital and asked about Johnny. There had been no change. She thanked the intensive care nurse and walked aimlessly back and forth through the apartment. She thought about God sending out a fleet of flying saucers to pick up the faithful and buzz them off to Orion. It made as much sense as anything else about a God crazy enough to scramble John Smith's brains and put him in a coma that was probably never going to end - except in an unexpected death.
There was a folder of freshman compositions to correct. She made herself a cup of tea and sat down to them. If there was any one moment when Sarah Bracknell picked up the reins of her post-Johnny life again, that was
1.
At some time a little past two A.M. on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.
Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged half-way across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.
Vera's voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. 'Phone.'
'Yeah,' he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.
He went down to what Vera liked to call 'the phone nook.' It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two hundred and forty pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader's Digests, and Fate magazines.
Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.
A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you'd be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.
Hoping for the middle choice, Herb lifted up the phone. 'Hello?'
A crisp male voice said: 'Is this the Herbert Smith residence?'
'Yes?'
'To whom am I speaking, please?'
'I'm Herb Smith. What...'
'Will you hold for a moment?'
'Yes, but who. -
Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone - bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions - the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modern life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, 'Hold the phone, willya?' and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn't they just say, 'Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?'
He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.
'Herbert?'
He turned round, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.
'Who is it?'
'I don't know yet. They've got me on hold.'
'On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?'
'Yes.'
'It's not Johnny, is it? Nothing's happened to Johnny?'
'I don't know,' he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about how these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension...
Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, 'Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet.' That would earn him Vera Smith's Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o'clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn't think he could take that particular smile.
The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, 'Hello, Mr. Smith?'
'Yes, who is this?'
'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.'
'Is it my boy? Something about my boy?'
Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.
Sergeant Meggs said, 'Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?'
'Is he all right? Is he okay?'
Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. 'What is it? What's happened to my Johnny?'
Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, 'I am handling this.'
She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.
'Mr. Smith, are you there?'
Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb's mouth. 'I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He's a teacher at the high school there.'
'He's been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I'm very sorry to have to give you this news.' The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.
'Oh, my God,' Herb. said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. 'Oh, my God,' he said again.
'He's dead?' Vera asked. 'He's dead? Johnny's dead?'
He covered the mouthpiece. 'No,' he said. 'Not dead.'
'Not dead! Not dead!' she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. '0 God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and...
'Vera shut up!'
For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face: Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.
'Mr. Smith?'
'Yes.I... I apologize for the ruckus.'
'Quite understandable,' Meggs said.
'My boy... Johnny.. was he driving his Volkswagen?'
'Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are death-traps,' Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.
'He was in a Bangor & Orono Yellow Cab,' Meggs said. 'I'll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved, two of them driven by kids from Cleaves Mills. They were dragging. They came up over what's known as Carson's Hill on Route 6, headed east. Your son was in the cab, headed west, toward Cleaves. The cab and the car on the wrong side of the road collided headon. The cab driver was killed, and so was the boy driving the other car. Your son and a passenger in that other car are at Eastern Maine Med. I understand both of them are listed as critical.'
'Critical,' Herb said.
'Critical! Critical! ' Vera moaned.
Oh, Christ, we sound like one of those weird off Broadway shows, Herb thought. He felt embarrassed for Vera, and for Sergeant Meggs, who must surely be hearing Vera, like some nutty Greek chorus in the back-ground. He wondered how many conversations like this Sergeant Meggs had held in the course of his job. He decided he must have had a good many. Possibly he had already called the cab driver's wife and the dead boy's mother to pass the news. How had they reacted? And what did it matter? Wasn't it Vera's right to weep for her son? And why did a person have to think such crazy things at a time like this?
'Eastern Maine,' Herb said. He jotted it on a pad. The drawing on top of the pad showed a smiling telephone handset. The phone cord spelled out the words PHONE PAL. 'How is he hurt?'
'I beg your pardon, Mr. Smith?'
'Where did he get it? Head? Belly? What? Is he burned?'
Vera shrieked.
'Vera can you please shut UP!'
'You'd have to call the hospital for that information,' Meggs said carefully. 'I'm a couple of hours from having a complete report.'
'All right. All right.'
'Mr. Smith, I'm sorry to have to call you in the middle of the night with such bad news ...
'It's bad, all right,' he said. 'I've got to call the hospital, Sergeant Meggs. Good-bye.'
'Good night, Mr. Smith.'
Herb hung up and stared stupidly at the phone. Just like that it happens, he thought. How 'bout that. Johnny.
Vera uttered another shriek, and he saw with some alarm that she had grabbed her hair, rollers and all, and was pulling it. 'It's a judgment! A judgment on the way we live, on sin, on something! Herb, get down on your knees with me...'
'Vera, I have to call the hospital. I don't want to do it on my knees.'
'We'll pray for him... promise to do better... if you'd only come to church more often with me I know... may be it's your cigars, drinking beer with those men after work ... cursing... taking the name of the Lord God in vain... a judgment... it's a judgment...'
He put his hands on her face to stop its wild, uneasy whipping back and forth. The feel of the night cream was unpleasant, but he didn't take his hands away. He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania. Five years after Johnny was born, the doctor had found a number of benign tumors in her uterus and vaginal canal. Their removal had made it impossible for her to have another baby. Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of 'pure Christians' who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.
'Vera,' he said.
'We'll do better,' she whispered, her eyes pleading with him. 'We'll do better and he'll live. You'll see. You'll...'
'Vera.'
She fell silent, looking at him.
'Let's call the hospital and see just how bad it really is,' he said gently.
'A-All right. Yes.'
'Can you sit on the stairs there and keep perfectly quiet?'
'I want to pray,' she said childishly. 'You can't stop me.'
'I don't want to. As long as you pray to yourself.'
'Yes. To myself. All right, Herb.'
She went to the stairs and sat down and pulled her robe primly around her. She folded her hands and her lips began to move. Herb called the hospital. Two hours later they were headed north on the nearly deserted Maine Turnpike. Herb was behind the wheel of their '66 Ford station wagon. Vera sat bolt upright in the passenger seat. Her Bible was on her lap.
The telephone woke Sarah at quarter of nine. She went to answer it with half her mind still asleep in bed. Her back hurt from the vomiting she had done the night before and the muscles in her stomach felt strained, but otherwise she felt much better.
She picked up the phone, sure it would be Johnny. 'Hello?'
'Hi, Sarah.' It wasn't Johnny. It was Anne Strafford from school. Anne was a year older than Sarah and in her second year at Cleaves. She taught Spanish. She was a bubbly, effervescent girl and Sarah liked her very much. But this morning she sounded subdued.
'How are you, Annie? It's only temporary. Probably Johnny told you. Carnival hot dogs, I guess...'
'Oh, my God, you don't know. You don't ...' The words were swallowed in odd, choked sounds. Sarah listened to them, frowning. Her initial puzzlement turned to deadly disquiet as she realized Anne was crying.
'Anne? What's wrong? It's not Johnny, is it? Not...'
'There was an accident,' Anne said. She was now sobbing openly. 'He was in a cab. There was a head-on collision. The driver of the other car was Brad Freneau, I had him in Spanish II, he died, his girl friend died this morning, Mary Thibault, she was in one of Johnny's classes, I heard, it's horrible, just horr.
'Johnny!' Sarah screamed into the phone. She was sick to her stomach again. Her hands and feet were suddenly as cold as four gravestones. 'What about Johnny?'
'He's in critical condition, Sarah. Dave Pelsen called the hospital this morning. He's not expected ... well, it's very bad.'
The world was going gray. Anne was still talking but her voice was far and wee, as e.e. cummings had said about the balloon man. Flocked images tumbling over and over one another, none making sense. The carny wheel. The mirror maze. Johnny's eyes, strangely violet, almost black. His dear, homely face in the harsh, county fair lighting, naked bulbs strung on electric wire.
'Not Johnny,' she said, far and wee, far and wee. 'You're mistaken. He was fine when he left here.'
And Anne's voice coming back like a fast serve, her voice so shocked and unbelieving, so affronted that such a thing should have happened to someone her own age, someone young and vital. 'They told Dave he'd never wake up even if he survived the operation. They have to operate because his head... his head was...'
Was she going to say crushed? That Johnny's head had been crushed?
Sarah fainted then, possibly~to avoid that final irrevocable word, that final horror. The phone spilled out of her fingers and she sat down hard in a gray world and then slipped over and the phone swung back and forth in a decreasing arc, Anne Strafford's voice coming out of it: 'Sarah?... Sarah? . Sarah?'
3.
When Sarah got to Eastern Maine Medical, it was quarter past twelve. The nurse at the reception desk looked at her white, strained face, estimated her capacity for further truth, and told her that John Smith was still in OR. She added that Johnny's mother and father were in the waiting room.
'Thank you,' Sarah said. She turned right instead of left, wound up in a medical closet, and had to backtrack.
The waiting room was done in bright, solid colors that gashed her eyes A few people sat around looking at tattered magazines or empty space. A gray-haired woman came in from the elevators, gave her visitor's pass to a friend, and Sat down. The friend clicked away on high heels. The rest of them went on sitting, waiting their own chance to visit a father who had had gallstones removed, ~ mother who had discovered a small lump under one of her breasts a bare three days ago, a friend who had been struck in the chest with an invisible sledgehammer while jogging. The faces of the waiters were care fully made-up with composure. Worry was swept under the face like dirt under a rug. Sarah felt the unreality hovering again.
Somewhere a soft bell was ringing. Crepe-soled shoes squeaked. He had been fine when he left her place. Impossible to think he was in one of these brick towers, engaged in dying.
She knew Mr. and Mrs. Smith at once. She groped for their first names and could not immediately find them. They were sitting together near the back of the room, and unlike the others here, they hadn't yet had time to come to terms with what had happened in their lives.
Johnny's mom sat with her coat on the chair behind her and her Bible clutched in her hands. Her lips moved as she read, and Sarah remembered Johnny saying she was very religious - maybe too religious, somewhere in that great middle ground between holy rolling and snake-handling, she remembered him saying. Mr. Smith -Herb, it came to her, his name is Herb - had one of the magazines on his knees, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking out the window, where New England fall burned its way toward November and winter beyond.
She went over to them. 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith?'
They looked up at her, their faces tensed for the dreaded blow. Mrs. Smith's hands tightened on her Bible, which was open to the Book of Job, until her knuckles were white. The young woman before them was not in nurse's or doctor's whites, but that made no difference to them at this point. They were waiting for the final blow.
'Yes, we're the Smiths,' Herb said quietly.
'I'm Sarah Bracknell. Johnny and I are good friends. Going together, I suppose you'd say. May I sit down?'
'Johnny's girl friend?' Mrs. Smith asked in a sharp, almost accusing tone. A few of the others looked around briefly and then back at their own tattered magazines.
'Yes,' she said. 'Johnny's girl.'
'He never wrote that he had a lady friend,' Mrs. Smith said in that same sharp tone. 'No, he never did at all.'
'Hush, Mother,' Herb said. 'Sit down, Miss . -. Bracknell, wasn't it?'
'Sarah,' she said gratefully, and took a chair. 'I...'
'No, he never did,' Mrs. Smith said sharply. 'My boy loved God, but just lately he maybe fell away just a bit. The judgment of the Lord God is sudden, you know. That's what makes backsliding so dangerous. You know not the day nor the hour ...
'Hush,' Herb said. People were looking around again. He fixed his wife with a stern glance. She looked back defiantly for a moment, but his gaze didn't waver. Vera dropped her eyes. She had closed the Bible but her fingers fiddled restlessly along the pages, as if longing to get back to the colossal demolition derby of Job's life, enough bad luck to put her own and her son's in some sort of bitter perspective.
'I was with him last night,' Sarah said, and that made the woman look up again, accusingly. At that moment Sarah remembered the biblical connotation of being 'with' somebody and felt herself beginning to blush. It was as if the woman could read her thoughts.
'We went to the county fair...'
'Places of sin and evil,' Vera Smith said clearly.
'I'll tell you one last time to hush, Vera,' Herb said grimly, and clamped one of his hands over one of his wife's. 'I mean it, now. This seems like a nice girl here, and I won't have you digging at her. Understand?'
'Sinful places,' Vera repeated stubbornly.
'Will you hush?'
'Let me go. I want to read my Bible.'
He let her go. Sarah felt confused embarrassment. Vera opened her Bible and began to read again, lips moving.
'Vera is very upset, Herb said. 'We're both upset. You are too, from the look of you.'
'Yes.'
'Did you and Johnny have a good time last night?' he asked. 'At your fair?'
'Yes,' she said, the lie and truth of that simple word all mixed up in her mind. 'Yes we did, until... well, I ate a bad hot dog or something. We had my car and Johnny drove me home to my place in Veazie. I was pretty sick to my stomach. He called a cab. He said he'd call me in sick at school today. And that's the last time I saw him.' The tears started to come then and she didn't want to cry in front of them, particularly not in front of Vera Smith, but there was no way to stop it. She fumbled a Kleenex out of her purse and held it to her face.
'There, now,' Herb said, and put an arm around her.
'There, now.' She cried, and it seemed to her in some unclear way that he felt better for having someone to comfort; his wife had found her own dark brand of comfort in Job's story and it didn't include him.
A few people turned around to gawk; through the prisms of her tears they seemed like a crowd. She had a bitter knowledge of what they were thinking: Better her than me, better all three of them than me or mine, guy must be dying, guy must have gotten his head crushed for her to cry like that. Only a matter of time before some doctor comes down and takes them into a private room to tell them that -Somehow she choked off the tears and got hold of her-self. Mrs. Smith sat bolt upright, as if startled out of a nightmare, noticing neither Sarah's tears nor her husband's effort to comfort her. She read her Bible.
'Please,' Sarah said. 'How bad is it? Can we hope?'
Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: 'There's hope in God, Missy.'
Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb's eyes and thought: He thinks it's driven her crazy. And maybe it has.
4.
A long afternoon stretching into evening.
Sometime after two P.M., when the schools began to let out, a number of Johnny's students began to come in, wearing fatigue coats and strange hats and washed-out jeans. Sarah didn't see many of the kids she thought of as the button-down crowd - upward-bound, college-oriented kids, clear of eye and brow. Most of the kids who bothered to come in were the freaks and long-hairs.
A few came over and asked Sarah in quiet tones what she knew about Mr. Smith's condition. She could only shake her head and say she had heard nothing. But one of the girls, Dawn Edwards, who had a crush on Johnny, read the depth of Sarah's fear in her face. She burst into tears. A nurse came and asked her to leave.
'I'm sure she'll be all right,' Sarah said. She had a protective arm around Dawn's shoulders. 'Just give her a minute or two.
'No, I don't want to stay,' Dawn said, and left in a hurry, knocking one of the hard plastic contour chairs over with a clatter. A few moments later Sarah saw the girl sitting out on the steps in the cold, late, October sunshine with her head on her knees.
Vera Smith read her Bible.
By five o'clock most of the students had left. Dawn had also left; Sarah had not seen her go. At seven P.M., a young man with DR. STRAWNS pinned askew to the lapel of his white coat came into the waiting room, glanced around, and walked toward them.
'Mr. and Mrs. Smith?' he asked.
Herb took a deep breath. 'Yes. We are.'
Vera shut her Bible with a snap.
'Would you come with me, please?'
That's it, Sarah thought. The walk down to the small private room, and then the news. Whatever the news is. She would wait, and when they came back, Herb Smith would tell her what she needed to know. He was a kind man.
'Have you news of my son?' Vera asked in that same clear, strong, and nearly hysterical voice.
'Yes.' Dr. Strawns glanced at Sarah. 'Are you family, ma'am?'
'No,' Sarah said. 'A friend.'
'A close friend,' Herb said. A warm, strong hand closed above her elbow, just as another had closed around Vera's upper arm. He helped them both to their feet. 'We'll all go together, if you don't mind.'
'Not at all.'
He led them past the elevator bank and down a hall-way to an office with CONFERENCE ROOM on the door. He let them in and turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. The room was furnished with a long table and a dozen office chairs.
Dr. Strawns closed the door, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burned match into one of the ashtrays that marched up and down the table. 'This is difficult,' he said, as if to himself.
'Then you had best just say it out,' Vera said.
'Yes, perhaps I'd better.'
It was not her place to ask, but Sarah could not help it. 'Is he dead? Please don't say he's dead...
'He's in a coma.' Strawns sat down and dragged deeply on his cigarette. 'Mr. Smith has sustained serious head injuries and an undetermined amount of brain damage. You may have heard the phrase "subdural hematoma" on one or the other of the doctor shows. Mr. Smith has suffered a very grave subdural hematoma, which is localized cranial bleeding. A long operation was necessary to relieve the pressure, and also to remove bone-splinters from his brain.'
Herb sat down heavily, his face doughy and stunned. Sarah noticed his blunt, scarred hands and remembered Johnny telling her his father was a carpenter.
'But God has spared him,' Vera said. 'I knew he would. I prayed for a sign. Praise God, Most High! All ye here below praise His name!'
'Vera,' Herb said with no force.
'In a coma,' Sarah repeated. She tried to fit the information into some sort of emotional frame and found it wouldn't go. That Johnny wasn't dead, that he had come through a serious and dangerous operation on his brain - those things should have renewed her hope. But they didn't. She didn't like that word coma. It had a sinister, stealthy sound. Wasn't it Latin for 'sleep of death'?
'What's ahead for him?' Herb asked.
'No one can really answer that now,' Strawns said. He began to play with his cigarette, tapping it nervously over the ashtray. Sarah had the feeling he was answering Herb's question literally while completely avoiding the question Herb had really asked. 'He's on life support equipment, of course.'
'But you must know something about his chances,' Sarah said. 'You must know ...' She gestured helplessly with her hands and let them drop to her sides.
'He may come out of it in forty-eight hours. Or a week. A month. He may never come out of ......... there is a strong possibility that he may die. I must tell you frankly that's the most likely. His injuries... grave.
'God wants him to live,' Vera said. 'I know it.'
Herb had put his face into his hands and was scrubbing it slowly.
Dr. Strawns looked at Vera uncomfortably. 'I only want you to be prepared for... any eventuality.'
'Would you rate his chances for coming out of it?' Herb asked.
Dr. Strawns hesitated, puffed nervously on his cigarette. 'No, I can't do that,' he said finally.
5.
The three of them waited another hour and then left. It was dark. A cold and gusty wind had come up and it whistled across the big parking lot. Sarah's long hair streamed out behind her. Later, when she got home, she would find a crisp yellow oak leaf caught in it. Overhead, the moon rode the sky, a cold sailor of the night.
Sarah pressed a scrap of paper into Herb's hand. Written on it was her address and phone number. 'Would you call me if you hear something? Anything at all?'
'Yes, of course.' He bent suddenly and kissed her cheek, and Sarah held his shoulder for a moment in the blowing dark.
'I'm very sorry if I was stiff with you earlier, dear,' Vera said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. 'I was upset.'
'Of course you were,' Sarah said.
'I thought my boy might die. But I've prayed. I've spoken to God about it. As the song says, "Are we weak and heavy-laden? Cumbered with a load of care? We must never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in 'prayer."'
'Vera, we ought to go along,' Herb said. 'We ought to get some sleep and see how things look in the...'
'But now I've heard from my God,' Vera said, looking dreamily up at the moon. 'Johnny isn't going to die. It isn't in God's plan for Johnny to die. I listened and I heard that still, small voice speaking in my heart, and I am comforted.'
Herb opened the car door. 'Come on, Vera.'
She looked back at Sarah and smiled. In that smile Sarah suddenly saw Johnny's own easy, devil-may-care grin - but at the same time she thought it was the most ghastly smile she had ever seen in her life.
'God has put his mark on my Johnny,' Vera said, 'and I rejoice.'
'Good night, Mrs. Smith,' Sarah said through numb lips.
'Good night, Sarah,' Herb said. He got in and started the car. It pulled out of its space and moved across the parking lot to State Street, and Sarah realized she hadn't asked where they were staying. She guessed they might not know themselves yet.
She turned to go to her own car and paused, struck by the river that ran behind the hospital, the Penobscot. It flowed like dark silk, and the reflected moon was caught in its center. She looked up into the sky, standing alone in the parking lot now. She looked at the moon.
God has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.
The moon hung above her like a tawdry carnival toy, a Wheel of Fortune in the sky with the odds all slugged in favor of the house, not to mention the house numbers - zero and double zero. House numbah, house numbah,
y'all pay the house, hey-hey-hey.
The wind blew rattling leaves around her legs. She went to her car and sat behind the wheel. She felt suddenly sure she was going to lose him. Terror and loneliness woke in her. She began to shiver. At last she started her car and drove home.
6.
There was a great outpouring of comfort and good wishes from the Cleaves Mill student body in the following week; Herb Smith told her later that Johnny received better than three hundred cards. Almost all of them contamed a hesitant personal note saying they hoped Johnny would be well soon. Vera answered each of them with a thank-you note and a Bible verse.
Sarah's discipline problem in her classes disappeared. Her previous feeling that some returning jury of class consciousness was bringing in an unfavorable verdict changed to just the opposite. Gradually she realized that the kids were viewing her as a tragic heroine, Mr. Smith's lost love. This idea struck her in the teacher's room during her free period on the Wednesday following the accident, and she went off into sudden gales of laughter that turned into a crying jag. Before she was able to get herself under control she had frightened herself badly. Her nights were made restless with incessant dreams of Johnny - Johnny in the Halloween Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, Johnny standing at the Wheel of Fortune concession while some disembodied voice chanted, 'Man, I love to watch this guy get a beatin,' over and over. Johnny saying, 'It's all right now, Sarah, everything's fine,' and then coming into the room with his head gone above the eyebrows.
Herb and Vera Smith spent the week in the Bangor House, and Sarah saw them every afternoon at the hospital, waiting patiently for something to happen. Nothing did. Johnny lay in a room on the intensive care ward on the sixth floor, surrounded by life-support equipment, breathing with the help of a machine. Dr. Strawns had grown less hopeful. On the Friday following the accident, Herb called Sarah on the phone and told her he and Vera were going home.
'She doesn't want to,' he said, 'but I've gotten her to see reason. I think.'
'Is she all right?' Sarah asked.
There was a long pause, long enough to make Sarah
think she had overstepped the bounds. Then Herb said, 'I don't know. Or maybe I do and I just don't want to say right out that she isn't. She's always had strong ideas about religion and they got a lot stronger after her operation. Her hysterectomy. Now they've gotten worse again. She's been talking a lot about the end of the world. She's connected Johnny's accident with the Rapture, somehow. Just before Armageddon, God is supposed to take all the faithful up to heaven in their actual bodies.'
Sarah thought of a bumper sticker she had seen somewhere: IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY, SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL ! 'Yes, I know the idea,' she said.
'Well,' Herb said uncomfortably, 'some of the groups she ... she corresponds with... they believe that God is going to come for the faithful in flying saucers. Take them all up to heaven in flying saucers, that is. These ... sects ... have proved, at least to themselves, that heaven is somewhere out in the constellation of Orion. No; don't ask me how they proved it. Vera could tell you. It's ... well, Sarah, it's all a little hard on me.
'Of course it must be.'
Herb's voice strengthened. 'But she can still distinguish between what's real and what's not. She needs time to adjust. So I told her she could face whatever's coming at home as easily as here. I've...' He paused, sounding embarrassed, then cleared his throat and went on. 'I've got to get back to work. I've got jobs. I've signed contracts...
'Sure, of course.' She paused. 'What about insurance? I mean, this must be costing a Denver mint...' It was her turn to feel embarrassed.
'I've talked with Mr. Pelsen, your assistant principal there at Cleaves Mills,' Herb said. 'Johnny had the standard Blue Cross, but not that new Major Medical. The Blue Cross will cover some of it, though. And Vera and I have our savings.'
Sarah's heart sank. Vera and I have our savings. How long would one passbook stand up to expenses of two hundred dollars a day or more? And for what purpose in the end? So Johnny could hang on like an insensible animal, pissing brainlessly down a tube while he bankrupted his dad and mom? So his condition could drive his mother mad with unrealized hope? She felt the tears start to slip down her cheeks and for the first time - but not the last - she found herself wishing Johnny would die and be at peace. Part of her revolted in horror at the thought, but it remained.
'I wish you all the best,' Sarah said.
'I know that, Sarah. We wish you the best. Will you write?'
'I sure will.'
'And come see us when you can. Pownal's not so far away.' He hesitated. 'Looks to me like Johnny had picked himself out the right girl. It was pretty serious, wasn't it?'
'Yes,' Sarah said. The tears were still coming and the past tense was not lost on her. 'It was.'
'Good-bye, honey.'
'Good-bye, Herb.'
She hung up the phone, held the buttons down for a second or two, and then called the hospital and asked about Johnny. There had been no change. She thanked the intensive care nurse and walked aimlessly back and forth through the apartment. She thought about God sending out a fleet of flying saucers to pick up the faithful and buzz them off to Orion. It made as much sense as anything else about a God crazy enough to scramble John Smith's brains and put him in a coma that was probably never going to end - except in an unexpected death.
There was a folder of freshman compositions to correct. She made herself a cup of tea and sat down to them. If there was any one moment when Sarah Bracknell picked up the reins of her post-Johnny life again, that was
