All for One (30 page)

At first she thought something close had exploded, something very close, maybe even in the phone booth, but there was no sound to match the power of the burst. Then the familiar cold terror she’d become reacquainted with in the recent days began to rise again, exactly at the instant she realized she could no longer see the numbers on the phone. Or the phone itself. She blinked, could feel her eyes rapidly closing and opening again, but she could see nothing. Nothing but blackness and...

...the two distant dots of light poking through the black veil.

The air she’d swallowed froze in her throat.

She was looking inside again.

The twin beacons pulsed, going black and bright, again and again, and very quickly Mary made the terrifying connection that the lights, no,
the eyes
, were blinking when she blinked. Opening, closing, opening, closing. And when she grasped this knowledge she closed her own eyes tight, trying to make the eyes inside go shut. They did.

And then they opened again of their own accord, wide and red now, and growing bigger, stretching out like pointed ovals. The eyes of the hound. Angry. Hungry. Coming.

At her.

In her.

From her.

And then she screamed, the cry punching the fright from her throat and filling the glassed-in booth with the sound of pure panic, pure despair. Panic and despair stripped to what they would have been when early man first found himself hunted by a ravenous jungle beast. She pounded on the clear walls with her fists, the handset falling and dancing at the end of its cord, Dr. Cleary’s number tumbling forgotten to the floor. Flesh against the shatterproof glass, beating and clawing for the door, her eyelids flickering wildly like a sightless madwoman. And screaming, screaming still, cars whizzing by on the road.

And with one powerful slam of her fist against the glass it cracked down the center of the pane, the resulting sound sharp like close thunder in the confined space. Louder than the sobbing ebb between her screams. Loud enough that the (spell?) waking nightmare fizzled to black again, and her sight swung outward to see her own hands flailing against the damaged glass.

As if thrown, Mary fell back against the opposite wall of the booth. Her scream dried to gasps. Her hands, bloodied fists now from small cuts on the knuckles, pulled to her chest.

All was suddenly very still, very quiet. Silent.

Mary looked slowly left, through the phone booth’s hinged-in-the-middle glass door, at the traffic whizzing by on Roman Boulevard. Just forty or so feet away the cars moved east and west as blurs. Big blurs, little blurs, blue blurs, white blurs. All zipping by.

All zipping by silently. As in,
without sound
.

Mary’s eyes puzzled at the too-quiet world beyond the glass, and that was when the hound screamed at her from within.

DON’T DO IT!

Every muscle in her body twitched at once, and then all began to work in concert, carrying her
out
of the phone booth and
into
her car, and then a group of muscles took the keys
from
her purse and put them
in
the ignition. And then, once again, she was in control of her body, not the autopilot with one setting—
survive
. She turned the keys—
I’m starting the car! I’m in control of me!
—and dropped the car into drive. Her foot stomped on the accelerator, the back tires spun, and the car shot toward the boulevard. It bounced down the driveway’s slant, heeled right, and sped toward Crestline Drive.

But she never started up the mountain. Instead, nearing the dark, square hole that was the interstate bridge over Roman, Mary, her thoughts frazzled but her own, eased right, following the curve of the onramp. She was on the interstate now. Heading west.

Three hours later, standing close to a phone kiosk, she called the school district and requested a substitute for the following day, taking her first personal day of the school year. When she hung up that phone she squeezed the slick ticket folder between her fingers and headed for the gate. An unflappable female voice had just announced the boarding of her flight over the public address system.

She was in the air thirty minutes after that, Seattle falling behind her, the United 757 winging east. Taking her home.

That all happened Wednesday.

Thursday morning Mary woke late, naked atop the covers in her motel room, her eyes winking open as if closed only a second in thought. She’d slept nine hours.

She stared at the ceiling and listened to the planes roar low overhead as they landed at O’Hare, tires grabbing the runways with distant shrieks. The room was sweltering, hot, dry air spewing from the wall heater. The thermostat read eighty-five. Mary had set it there before laying down to sleep, imagining it a warm, tropical breeze caressing her as she lounged on some desolate Caribbean beach, her skin bare to the glorious sun. She had fallen into sleep with that thought, the transition from the waking world seizing it and making it her first dream of the night, adding sounds of the waves lapping at white sands, and birds flapping and
keeaww
ing across the blue sky.

Later she’d dreamt of a red piano in the middle of a winter-white field. Of sitting down to it, sans clothing, her body bronzed and stark against the snow. Her fingers hovering over the keys, floating in a hesitant stasis because she could not remember how to play.

She might have dreamed more, but that was all that had survived the jump back to consciousness. Staring at the ceiling she wondered why she hadn’t dreamt of the hound and its blinding eyes or its threatening growl. And she wondered why she hadn’t dreamt of Dooley.

She showered and put on the clothes she’d worn on the plane, the only clothes she had with her. She put the room key on the dresser and left in the rental she’d picked up at O’Hare, waving at the desk clerk as she drove past the office. A few blocks away she ordered a late breakfast at the McDonalds drive-thru and ate it behind the wheel.

For three hours she drove west.

Just after one, with gray clouds rolling in the distant southern sky, Mary crossed over the Pecatonica on Route 20 and pulled to the shoulder on the far side of the bridge. Gravel ground and crackled beneath the tires as the rental stopped. Her foot pressed firmly on the brake, keeping her there, right there, the cold river waters behind and her childhood home ahead.

For a moment she closed her eyes and listened. She heard only water rippling at the bridge supports and licking at the rocky banks. It was dark behind her eyes. Dark and quiet.

And she controlled the dark. That was most important of all. made it come and go as she pleased. Eyes open and it was light. Closed, and it was dark. Open again, and the blackness was gone.

Her foot eased up and switched to the gas pedal, her hands steering the car back onto the highway. A quarter mile further on she entered Chaplin, Illinois.

She’d lived in this town, this now tired place that looked like it might just want to roll over like an aged dog and die, from the time she was born until she was nine. Then she’d moved with her mother and sister to the green corner house in Waukegan. There had been nothing to keep them in Chaplin after her father died. Her mother had had his remains cremated, so there was no nearby grave to bring flowers to on special days. Like his birthday, or Veterans Day...

Forget the stop sign, Mrs. Austin. Your husband was a veteran. A jury will eat that up.

Mary frowned at that twitch of memory. But the stop sign was important, because the garbage truck ran right through it like there was important trash to pick up.

So they moved to Waukegan, close to Lake Michigan. Into a house her mother’s brother was going to sell but agreed to let them rent. Moved away from Chaplin.

Forget the bad. Move on.

But Chaplin was her childhood, Mary had always felt, had always believed. Even now as she rolled slowly down Main Street— it actually had a Main Street —past the whitewashed windows and the occasional business still open, even now something of her was here.

She let her eyes search Main, and quickly they found familiarity. The barber shop where Old Jim used to cut...

...his head clean off, Mrs. Austin. We can’t fix that.

...her father’s hair was still open. It was even called ‘Old Jim’s’ still. But Old Jim wouldn’t be cutting hair anymore. He’d be Dead Jim by now. You could only get so old.

The Woolworth’s had been swept out of Chaplin, she saw, looking down the right side of the street. The letters high on the flat facade were gone, stripped away to leave only grimy, letter-shaped shadows on the ancient paint behind. In that bustling old store she and Julie had sucked on sodas at the lunch counter while their mother shopped. And during the summer they’d brought their nickels with them and bought rootbeer floats. Then one day the lunch counter was closed and its space filled with more shelves of socks and underwear. And the next month her father was dead.

Mary smiled sadly at the vacant storefront as she drove by.

At the traffic signal she watched an old woman drag an ancient grocery cart backward across the street, her world in its caged basket. When the light turned green she turned right and drove slowly down Chatham Avenue. She knew this street and wondered if anyone from her childhood still lived here. Visions of surprise reunions filled her thoughts. Of her parking, going up to a door and knocking, and being greeted with a huge hug as a long ago friend welcomed her home.

You can’t go home again. You can never go home again.

Maybe that was true in one sense. Maybe there would be no reunions like the one she fantasized. But she was here. Home. Driving down Chatham Avenue toward Augusta Street. And at Augusta Street, in the hometown she had come back to, she would turn left. And at number 1675 she would stop. It would be a small house on the right side of the street, and there might still be a sign on a post in the front yard, and on that sign it might still say Roger Cleary, M.D. It might still say that.

Please let it say that.

But when she turned onto Augusta she could see quite clearly that, a dozen houses down from the corner, the steel post that rose from the yard of 1675 had rusted to an ugly reddish brown, and the square frame atop it that had held the frosted plastic sign that was lit when it got dark was now empty. The fluorescent tubes that must have been inside were gone, too, just a few ends of stout wire poking upward from the hollow post like the roots of a misdirected plant.

Mary drove to the spot and pulled up to the curb. Ahead, in a yard ringed by cheap and wasting chain link, two little girls rode up and down the incline of their driveway, two to a very big tricycle, one pedaling furiously and the other standing on the step between the back wheels. Across the street a man stood on the porch of a house, which had run down so badly that sheets of blue tarp hung from the weather-beaten eaves in flapping tatters. The man was staring at her and scratching the side of his enormous, tee-shirt covered belly. He was looking at her like she didn’t belong. Like an oddity.

She had come home, but home was different.

Suddenly frightened by the fear that this all had been in vain, Mary turned her head and looked past the skeletal sign and to the house at number 1675 Augusta Street. Almost immediately she began to smile. In the window, on a placard no bigger than a license plate, the words Roger Cleary, M.D. had been carefully printed in crisp black letters. And there was another sign, this one dangling from the doorknob on a thin chain. OPEN. She breathed deep, and the air tasted clean and fresh and safe.
It says, OPEN.

Mary put the car in park and made sure to lock it all around before she went to the door and let herself in.

The smell hit her like a happy, nostalgic wave. The old medicinal scent that, when she was very little, had filled her with the terrible fear that she was at the place where the man was going to stick a...

A what? A WHAT?!

...needle in her arm, but was now bringing a calm confidence to her. Everything was going to be all right. Dr. Cleary would be able to help her.

Mary whiffed the strong scent again and tapped the bell on the old counter where Nurse Angela usually sat. She peeked over; there wasn’t even a chair back there now.

“Coming,” someone said from the back of the office/house. “I’m coming.”

Mary recognized the harried old voice instantly, and the face and form when it poked through the spilt of curtains that hung in place of a door for the hall to the back. He was older, obviously. Twenty-two years had been tacked onto the fifty or so he’d already racked up when she last knew him. His gray hair had gone white and thin, and was long now. It spread from the spotted skin pulled tight over his skull in wispy strands. And he wore glasses now. Small, very clear ones that he removed with one gaunt hand when he came into the waiting room.

“Can I help you?” he asked, polite and smiling.

“Dr. Cleary,” Mary said. She took a step closer. “I was a... My mother used to bring me to you when we lived in Chaplin.”

His old eyes narrowed as he studied her face.

“My name...”

DON’T DO IT! LEAVE! NOW!

With all her inner strength she ignored the terrible, growling voice, and focused on Dr. Cleary’s kind, caring face.

“My name is Mary Austin.”

His eyes opened slowly, fully, and his lips parted noticeably.

A few quick gasps pierced Mary’s forced poise. Desperation invaded her gaze, making it wet at the source. “Do you remember me, Dr. Cleary?”

He nodded, speechless. He remembered. He certainly did.

“Dr. Cleary, the...the headaches are back,” Mary said, the words spilling from her as her knees started to go. She collapsed forward, her head swimming, the last thing clear in her mind the old wiry hands reaching out for her.

Twenty Six

Mary woke to the caustic smell of ammonia fuming in her nostrils. She coughed and put a hand to her face. Her eyes squelched tightly at the scent, then blinked open to see Dr. Cleary leaning over her, his hand pulling back from her, a small glass vial in it.