Dreamcatcher (72 page)

Never mind,
Henry responded, and all at once the voice in Owen's head was faint, hard to hear.
We have to go.

“Ma'am. Mrs. Cavell.” Owen took her arms again, very gently. Henry loved this woman a lot, although he had ignored her quite cruelly over the last dozen years or so, and Owen knew why he'd loved her. It came off her like a sweet smoke. “We have to go.”

“No. Oh please say no.” The tears coming again.
Don't do that, lady,
Owen wanted to say.
Things are bad enough already. Please don't do that.

“There's a man coming. A very bad man. We have to be gone when he gets here.”

Roberta's distracted, sorrowing face filled with resolution. “All right, then. If you have to. But I'm coming with you.”

“Roberta, no,” Henry said.

“Yes! Yes, I can take care of him . . . give him his pills . . . his Prednisone . . . I'll make sure to bring his lemon swabs and—”

“Umma, oo ay ere.”

“No, Duddie, no!'

“Umma, oo ay ere! Ayfe! Ayfe!” Safe, safe. Duddits growing agitated now.

“We really don't have any more time,” Owen said.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Please.”

“Let me come!” she cried. “He's all I have!”

“Umma,” Duddits said. His voice was not a bit childish.
“Ooo . . . ay . . . ERE.”

She looked at him fixedly, and her face sagged. “All right,” she said. “Just one more minute. I have to get something.”

She went into Duddits's room and came back with a paper bag, which she handed to Henry.

“It's his pills,” she said. “He has his Prednisone at nine o'clock. Don't forget or he gets wheezy and his chest hurts. He can have a Percocet if he asks, and he probably
will
ask, because being out in the cold hurts him.”

She looked at Henry with sorrow but no reproach. He almost wished for reproach. God knew he'd never done anything which had made him feel this ashamed. It wasn't just that Duddits had leukemia; it was that he'd had it for so long and none of them had known.

“Also his lemon swabs, but only on his lips, because his gums bleed a lot now and the swabs sting him. There's cotton for his nose if it bleeds. Oh, and the catheter. See it there on his shoulder?”

Henry nodded. A plastic tube protruding from a packing of bandage. Looking at it gave him a weirdly strong feeling of
déjà vu.

“If you're outside, keep it covered . . . Dr. Briscoe laughs at me, but I'm always afraid the cold will get down inside . . . a scarf will work . . . even a handkerchief . . .” She was crying again, the sobs breaking through.

“Roberta—” Henry began. Now he was looking at the clock, too.

“I'll take care of him,” Owen said. “I saw my Pop
through to the end of it. I know about Prednisone and Percocet.” And more: bigger steroids, better painkillers. At the end, marijuana, methadone, and finally pure morphine, so much better than heroin. Morphine, death's sleekest engine.

He felt her in his head, then, a strange, tickling sensation like bare feet so light they barely touched down. Tickly, but not unpleasant. She was trying to make out if what he'd said about his father was the truth or a lie. This was her little gift from her extraordinary son, Owen realized, and she had been using it so long she no longer even knew she was doing it . . . like Henry's friend Beaver chewing on his toothpicks. It wasn't as powerful as what Henry had, but it was there, and Owen had never in his life been so glad he had told the truth.

“Not leukemia, though,” she said.

“Lung cancer. Mrs. Cavell, we really have to—”

“I need to get him one more thing.”

“Roberta, we can't—” Henry began.

“In a flash, in a flash.” She darted for the kitchen.

Owen felt really frightened for the first time. “Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter—Henry, I can't tell where they are! I've lost them!”

Henry had unrolled the top of the bag and looked inside. What he saw there, lying on top of the box of lemon-flavored glycerine swabs, transfixed him. He replied to Owen, but his voice seemed to be coming from the far end of some previously undisclosed—hell,
unsuspected
—valley. There
was
such a valley, he knew that now. A trough of years. He would not,
could not, say he had never suspected that such geography existed, but how in God's name could he have suspected so
little
?

“They just passed Exit 29,” he said. “Twenty miles behind us now. Maybe even closer.”

“What's wrong with you?”

Henry reached into the brown bag and brought out the little creation of string, so like a cobweb, which had hung over Duddits's bed here, and over the bed at the Maple Lane house before Alfie had died.

“Duddits, where did you get this?” he asked, but of course he knew. This dreamcatcher was smaller than the one which had hung in the main room at Hole in the Wall, but was otherwise its twin.

“Eeeyer,” Duddits said. He had never taken his eyes off Henry. It was as if he could still not entirely believe that Henry was here. “Eeeyer ent ooo eee. Or eye Issmuss ass-eek.”

Although his mind-reading ability was fading rapidly as his body beat back the byrus, Owen understood this easily enough;
Beaver sent to me,
Duddits said.
For my Christmas last week.
Down's sufferers had difficulty expressing concepts of time past and time to come, and Owen suspected that to Duddits the past was always last week, the future always next week. It seemed to Owen that if everyone thought that way, there would be a lot less grief and rancor in the world.

Henry looked at the little string dreamcatcher a moment longer, then returned it to the brown bag
just as Roberta bustled back in. Duddits broke into a huge grin when he saw what she'd gone for. “Oooby-Doo!” he cried. “Ooby-Doo unnox!” He took it and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Owen,” Henry said. His eyes were bright. “I have some
extremely
good news.”

“Tell me.”

“The bastards just hit a detour—jackknifed tractor-trailer just shy of Exit 28. It's going to cost them ten, maybe twenty minutes.”

“Thank Christ. Let's use them.” He glanced at the coat-tree in the corner. Hanging from it was a huge blue duffel coat with
RED SOX WINTER BALL
printed on the back in bright scarlet. “That yours, Duddits?”

“Ine!” Duddits said, smiling and nodding. “I-acket.” And, as Owen reached for it: “Ooo saw us ine Osie.” He got that one, too, and it sent a chill up his back.
You saw us find Josie.

So he had . . . and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, nineteen years ago? Did Duddits's gift also involve a kind of time travel?

This wasn't the time to ask such questions, and Owen was almost glad.

“I said I wouldn't pack his lunchbox, but of course I did. In the end, I did.”

Roberta looked at it—at Duddits holding it, shifting it from hand to hand as he struggled into the enormous parka, which had also been a gift from the Boston Red Sox. His face was unbelievably pale against the bright blue and even brighter yellow
of the lunchbox. “I knew he was going. And that I wasn't.” Her eyes searched Henry's face. “Please may I not go, Henry?”

“If you do, you could die in front of him,” Henry said—hating the cruelty of it, also hating how well his life's work had prepared him to push the right buttons. “Would you want him to see that, Roberta?”

“No, of course not.” And, as an afterthought, hurting him all the way to the center of his heart: “Damn you.”

She went to Duddits, pushed Owen aside, and quickly ran up her son's zipper. Then she took him by the shoulders, pulled him down, and fixed him with her eyes. Tiny, fierce little bird of a woman. Tall, pale son, floating inside his parka. Roberta had stopped crying.

“You be good, Duddie.”

“I eee ood, Umma.”

“You mind Henry.”

“I-ill, Umma. I ine Ennie.”

“Stay bundled up.”

“I-ill.” Still obedient, but a little impatient now, wanting to be off, and how all this took Henry back: trips to get ice cream, trips to play minigolf (Duddits had been weirdly good at the game, only Pete had been able to beat him with any consistency), trips to the movies; always
you mind Henry
or
you mind Jonesy
or
you mind your friends;
always
you be good, Duddie
and
I eee oood, Umma.

She looked him up and down.

“I love you, Douglas. You have always been a good
son to me, and I love you so very much. Give me a kiss, now.”

He kissed her; her hand stole out and caressed his beard-sandy cheek. Henry could hardly bear to look, but he
did
look, was as helpless as any fly caught in any spiderweb. Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.

Duddits gave her another perfunctory kiss, but his brilliant green eyes shifted between Henry and the door. Duddits was anxious to be off. Because he knew the people after Henry and his friend were close? Because it was an adventure, like all the adventures the five of them had had in the old days? Both? Yes, probably both. Roberta let him go, her hands leaving her son for the last time.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Why didn't you tell any of us this was happening? Why didn't you call?”

“Why didn't you ever come?”

Henry might have asked another of his own—Why didn't
Duddits
call?—but the very question would have been a lie. Duddits had called repeatedly since March, when Jonesy had had his accident. He thought of Pete, sitting in the snow beside the overturned Scout, drinking beer and writing
DUDDITS
over and over again in the snow. Duddits, marooned in Never-Never Land and dying there, Duddits sending his messages and receiving back only silence. Finally one of them had come, but only to take him away with nothing but a bag of pills and his old yellow lunchbox. There was no kindness in the dreamcatcher. They had meant only good for Duddits, even on that first day; they had loved him honestly. Still, it came down to this.

“Take care of him, Henry.” Her gaze shifted to Owen. “You too. Take care of my son.”

Henry said, “We'll try.”

15

There was no place to turn around on Dearborn Street; every driveway had been plowed under. In the strengthening morning light, the sleeping neighborhood looked like a town deep in the Alaskan tundra. Owen threw the Hummer in reverse and went flying backward down the street, the bulky vehicle's rear end wagging clumsily from side to side. Its high steel bumper smacked some snow-shrouded vehicle parked at the curb, there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and then they again burst through the frozen roadblock of snow at the intersection, swerving wildly back into Kansas Street, pointing toward the turnpike. During all this Duddits sat in the back seat, perfectly complacent, his lunchbox on his lap.

Henry, why did Duddits say Jonesy wants war? What war?

Henry tried to send the answer telepathically, but Owen could no longer hear him. The patches of byrus on Owen's face had all turned white, and when he scratched absently at his cheek, he pulled clumps of the stuff out with his nails. The skin beneath looked chapped and irritated, but not really hurt.
Like getting over a cold,
Henry marvelled.
Really not more serious than that.

“He didn't say war, Owen.”

“War,” Duddits agreed from the back seat. He leaned forward to look at the big green sign reading 95
SOUTHBOUND
. “Onesy ont
war.
”

Owen's brow wrinkled; a dust of dead byrus flakes sifted down like dandruff. “What—”

“Water,”
Henry said, and reached back to pat Duddits's bony knee. “Jonesy wants
water
is what he was trying to say. Only it's not Jonesy who wants it. It's the other one. The one he calls Mr. Gray.”

16

Roberta went into Duddits's room and began to pick up the litter of his clothes—the way he left them around drove her crazy, but she supposed she wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. She had been at it scarcely five minutes before a weakness overcame her legs, and she had to sit in his chair by the window. The sight of the bed, where he had come to spend more and more of his time, haunted her. The dull morning light on the pillow, which still bore the circular indentation of his head, was inexpressibly cruel.

Henry thought she'd let Duddits go because they believed the future of the whole world somehow hinged on finding Jonesy, and finding him fast. But that wasn't it. She had let him go because it was what Duddits wanted. The dying got signed baseball caps; the dying also got to go on trips with old friends.

But it was hard.

Losing him was so hard.

She put her handful of tee-shirts to her face in
order to blot out the sight of the bed and there was his smell: Johnson's shampoo, Dial soap, and most of all,
worst
of all, the arnica cream she put on his back and legs when his muscles hurt.

In her desperation she reached out to him, trying to find him with the two men who had come like the dead and taken him away, but his mind was gone.

He's blocked himself off from me,
she thought. They had enjoyed (
mostly
enjoyed) their own ordinary telepathy over the years, perhaps only different in minor degree from the telepathy most mothers of special children experienced (she had heard the word
rapport
over and over again at the support-group meetings she and Alfie sometimes attended), but that was gone now. Duddits had blocked himself off, and that meant he knew something terrible was going to happen.