“Want to give it a try, old fella?” Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.
“Sure, why not? But the coffee-”
“I’ll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,” Gretchen said. “Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?”
“In the fridge.” Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. “They learn fast, don’t they?”
“Yes,” she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. “I can’t get over how easy she is with you, Ralph-she wasn’t that way before, was she?”
“I don’t really remember,” he lied. She hadn’t been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.
“Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay?
Otherwise she’ll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.”
“Roger.” He glanced over at Gretchen. “Doing okay?”
“Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?”
“Just in a cup’s fine.”
She laughed and put the cup on the table out of Natalie’s reach.
When she sat down and crossed her legs, Ralph checked-he was helpless not to. When he looked up again, Gretchen was wearing a small, ironic smile.
What the hell, Ralph thought. No goat like an old goat, I guess.
Even an old goat that can’t manage much more than two or two and a half hours’ worth of sleep a night.
“Tell me about your job,” he said as Helen sat down and sipped her coffee.
“Well, I think they ought to make Mike Hanlon’s birthday a national holiday-does that tell you anything?”
“A little, yes,” Ralph said, smiling.
“I was all but positive I’d have to leave Derry. I sent away for applications to libraries as far south as Portsmouth, but I felt sick doing it. I’m going on thirty-one and I’ve only lived here for six of those years, but Derry feels like home-I can’t explain it, but it’s the truth.”
“You don’t have to explain it, Helen. I think home’s just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.”
Gretchen was nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”
“Mike called Monday and told me the assistant’s position in the Children’s Library had opened up. I could hardly believe it. I mean, I’ve been walking around all week just pinching myself. Haven’t I, Gretchen?”
“Well, you’ve been very happy,” Gretchen said, and that’s been very good to see.”
She smiled at Helen, and for Ralph that smile was a revelation.
He suddenly understood that he could look at Gretchen Tillbury all he wanted, and it wouldn’t make any difference. If the only man in this room had been Tom Cruise, it still would have made no difference.
He wondered if Helen knew, and then scolded himself for his foolishness. Helen was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
“When do you start?” he asked her.
“Columbus Day week,” she said. “The twelfth. Afternoons and evenings. The salary’s not exactly a king’s ransom, but it’ll be enough to keep us through the winter no matter how the… the rest of my situation works out. Isn’t it great, Ralph?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very great.”
The baby had drunk half the bottle and now showed signs of losing interest. The nipple popped halfway out of her mouth, and a little rill of milk ran down from the corner of her lips toward her chin.
Ralph reached to wipe it away, and his fingers left a series of delicate gray-blue lines in the air.
Baby Natalie snatched at them, then laughed as they dissolved in her fist. Ralph’s breath caught in his throat.
She sees. The baby sees what I see, That’s nuts, Ralph. That’s nuts and you know it.
Except he knew no such thing. He had just seen it-had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.
“Ralph?” Helen asked. “Are you all right?”
“Sure.” He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon-string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. “Will you be moving back into the house?”
Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn’t need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen’s now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange.
Helen’s, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.
And her own helplessness, Ralph thought. That infuriates her even more.
“I’m going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer,” Helen was saying.
“Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actuilly buys it-and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark-the money goes into an escrow account.
That account will be divided according to the decree. You know-the divorce decree.”
Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.
“You’re telling me two things,” he said. “That you’re going ahead with the divorce and that you’re still scared of him.”
“She’s been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage,” Gretchen said. “Of course she’s still scared of him.”
She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal-furnaces.
He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother’s, but otherwise identical… like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie’s balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band belly and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen’s and Gretchen’s balloon-strings were also rippling.
And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing, he thought. It’s real-whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They’re real and I’m seeing them.
He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.
“I feel like I’m spending most of my time in an emotional washingmachine these days,” Helen said. “My mom’s mad at me… she’s done everything but call me a quitter outright. and sometimes I feel like a quitter… ashamed…”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie’s balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.
“I guess I know that,” Helen said, “but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like, ’Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.” And I think I could have gone down the line with that-I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?”