Saw it in your eyes.”
“There was a fire,” Polly said, looking up at her. She had a tissue but it was too soggy to do any more business; she put it in her coat pocket and used her fists instead, screwing them into her eyes like a little girl who has fallen off her scooter and banged her knee.
“The young woman I hired to babysit him probably started it.”
“Ayuh,” Aunt Evvie said. “But do you want to know a secret, Trisha?”
Polly nodded her head, smiling a little. Her real name was Patricia, but she had been Polly to everyone since her babyhood.
Everyone except Aunt Evvie.
“Baby Kelton’s dead… but you’re not.” Aunt Evvie tossed her cigarette away and used one bony forefinger to tap against Polly’s chest for emphasis. “You’re not. So what are you going to do about it?”
Polly thought it over. “I’m going back to California,” she said finally. “That’s all I know.”
“Yes, and that’s all right for a start. But it’s not enough.”
And then Aunt Evvie said something very close to what Polly herself would say, some years later, when she went to dinner at The Birches with Alan Pangborn: “You’re not the culprit here, Trisha. Have you got that sorted out?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t. Until you realize that, it won’t matter where you go, or what you do. There won’t be any chance.”
“What chance?” she had asked, bewildered.
“Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?”
She had shaken her head slowly.
“Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evvie said.
“That’s what ghosts are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.”
“I feel…”
“Yes,” Aunt Evvie said. “I know you do. But they don’t. Your mother and my nephew don’t. Your chap, the one who died while you been Away, he don’t. Do you understand me?”
She had. A little, anyway.
“You’re right not to want to stay here, Polly-at least, you’re right for now. Go back where you were. Or go someplace newSalt Lake, Honolulu, Baghdad, wherever you want. It don’t matter, because sooner or later you will come back here. I know that; this place belongs to you and you belong to it. That’s written in every line of your face, in the way you walk, the way you talk, even the way you have of narrowin your eyes when you look at someone you ain’t met before.
Castle Rock was made for you and you for it. So there is no hurry.
’Go where ye list,’ as the Good Book says.
But go there alive, Trisha. Don’t be no ghost. If you turn into one of those, it might be better if you stayed away.”
The old woman looked around broodingly, her head rotating above her cane.
“Goddam town’s got enough ghosts already,” she said.
“I’ll try, Aunt Evvie.”
“Yes-I know you will. Trying-that’s built into you, too.” Aunt Evvie looked her over closely. “You were a fair child, and a likely child, although you weren’t ever a lucky child. Well, luck is for fools. It’s all they have to hope for, poor devils. It strikes me that you are still likely and fair, and that’s the important thing. I think you’ll make out.” Then, briskly, almost arrogantly: “I love you, Trisha Chalmers. I always have.”
“I love you, too, Aunt Evvie.”
Then, in that careful way which the old and young have of showing affection, they embraced. Polly had smelled the old aroma of Aunt Evvie’s sachet-a tremor of violets-and that made her weep again.
When she stood back, Aunt Evvie was reaching into her coat pocket.
Polly watched for her to bring out a tissue, thinking in an amazed way that at last, after all the long years, she would see the old woman cry. But she hadn’t. Instead of a tissue, Aunt Evvie brought out a single wrapped hard candy, just as she had in those days when Polly Chalmers had been a little girl with braids hanging over the front of her middy blouse.
“Would you like a sweet, honey?” she had asked cheerfully.
13
Twilight had begun to steal across the day.
Polly straightened up in the rocker, aware that she had almost fallen asleep. She bumped one of her hands, and a hard bolt of pain raced up her arm before being replaced once more by that hot anticipatory tingle. It was going to be bad, all right. Later tonight or tomorrow, it was going to be very bad indeed.
Never mind what you can’t change, Polly-there’s at least one thing you can change, must change. You have to tell Alan the truth about Kelton. You have to stop harboring that ghost in your heart.
But another voice rose up in response an angry, frightened, clamorous voice. The voice of pride, she supposed, just that, but she was shocked by its strength and ardor as it demanded that those old days, that old life, not be exhumed… not for Alan, not for anybody. That, above all, her baby’s short life and miserable death should not be given over to the sharp, wagging tongues of the town gossips.
Whatfoolishness is that, Trisha? Aunt Evvie asked in her mindAunt Evvie, who had died so full of years, double-pumping her beloved Herbert Tareytons to the last. What does it matter if Alan finds out how Kelton really died? What does it matter if every old gossip in town, from Lenny Partridge to Myrtle Keeton, knows? Do you think anyone cares a fig about your bun anymore, you silly goose? Don’t flatter yourself-it’s old news. Hardly worth a second cup of coffee in Nan’s.
Maybe so… but he had been hers, God damn it, hers. In his life and in his death, he had been hers. And she had been hers, too-not her mother’s, her father’s, Duke Sheehan’s. She had belonged to herself.
That frightened, lonely girl who had washed her panties out every night in the rusty kitchen sink because she had only three pairs, that frightened girl who always had a cold-sore waiting to happen at the corner of her lip or on the rim of one nostril, that girl who sometimes sat at the window overlooking the airshaft and laid her hot forehead on her arms and cried-that girl was hers. Her memories of herself and her son together in the dark of night, Kelton feeding at one small breast while she read a John D. MacDonald paperback and the disconnected sirens rose and raved through the cramped, hilly streets of the city, those memories were hers. The tears she had cried, the silences she had endured, the long, foggy afternoons in the diner trying to avoid Norville Bates’s Roman hands and Russian fingers, the shame with which she had finally made an uneasy peace, the independence and the dignity she had fought so hard and so inconclusively to keep… those things were hers, and must not belong to the town.
Polly, this is not a question of what belongs to the town, and you know it. It’s a question of what belongs to Alan.
She shook her head back and forth as she sat in the rocker, completely unaware she was making this gesture of negation. She supposed she had spent too many sleepless three o’clocks on too many endless dark mornings to give away her inner landscape without a fight.
In time she would tell Alan everything-she had not meant to keep the complete truth a secret even this long-but the time wasn’t yet. Surely not… especially when her hands were telling her that in the next few days she would not be able to think about much of anything at all except them.
The phone began to ring. That would be Alan, back from patrol and checking in with her. Polly got up and crossed the room to it.
She picked it up carefully, using both hands, ready to tell him the things she believed he wanted to hear. Aunt Evvie’s voice tried to intrude, tried to tell her this was bad behavior, childishly selfindulgent behavior, perhaps even dangerous behavior. Polly pushed that voice aside quickly and roughly.