The Passage (120 page)

Theo didn’t want to let him in the house, but Maus was determined. The moment the door was open he bounded up the stairs, moving through every room like he owned the place, his long nails tapping excitedly on the floor. Maus cooked him a breakfast of fish and potatoes fried in lard and set it in a bowl beneath the kitchen table. Conroy had already taken his place on the sofa, but at the sound of crockery hitting the floor he leapt into the kitchen and buried his face in the bowl, pushing it across the room with his long nose as he ate. Maus filled a second bowl with water and put that down as well. When Conroy was finished with his breakfast and had taken a long, slurping drink of water, he loped from the room and returned to the sofa, where he settled back down with a windy sigh of satisfaction.

Conroy the dog. Where had he come from? It was obvious he’d been around people before; somebody had taken care of him. He was thin, but not what Theo would have called malnourished. His hair was thick with mats and burrs, but he seemed otherwise healthy.

“Fill the tub,” Maus ordered him. “If he’s going to sit on the sofa like that, I want to give him a bath.”

Outside, Theo set a fire to boil water; by the time the tub was ready, the morning sun stood high over the yard. Winter waited at their doorstep, but the middle of the day could be mild like this, warm enough for shirtsleeves. Theo sat on a log and watched while Maus bathed the dog, rubbing handfuls of their precious soap through his silvery fur, using her fingers to smooth out the mats as best she could and picking out the burrs. The dog’s face was a portrait of abject humiliation; he seemed to be saying, A bath? Whose idea was this? When she had finished, Theo lifted him from the tub, a great soggy thing, and Maus eased down to her knees once more—it was getting harder each day for her to perform even these simple movements—to wrap him with a blanket.

“Don’t look so jealous.”

“Was I?” But she had him, dead to rights; that was exactly how he was feeling. Conroy had thrown the blanket off to give himself a hard shake, sending drops of water arcing everywhere.

“Better get used to it,” Maus said.

It was true; the baby wouldn’t be long now. Every part of her seemed enlarged, swollen with some benign inhabitation; even her hair looked bigger. Theo expected her to complain about this, but she never did. Watching her with Conroy, who had finally submitted to her belated and unnecessary attempts to dry him with the blanket, he found himself suddenly and deeply glad, glad for everything. Back in the cell, he’d wanted only to die. Before that, even. Part of him had always struggled with it. The ones who let it go: Theo knew that pull, a longing as sharp as any hunger. To hand himself over; to step into the wild darkness. It had become a kind of game he played, watching himself go about his days as if he weren’t already half dead, fooling everyone, even Peter. The worse the feeling was, the easier this deception became, until, in the end, it was the deception itself that sustained him. When Michael had told him about the batteries that afternoon on the porch, part of him had thought: thank God it’s over.

And now look at him. His life had been restored. More than that; it was as if he’d been given an entirely new one.

They finished the day and retired with the sun. Conroy took up residence at the foot of the bed; as they did every night, Theo and Maus made love, feeling the baby kick between them. A persistent, attention-seeking tapping, like a code. Theo had found this disquieting at first but did no longer. It was all of a piece, the kicks and jabs of the baby in its pocket of warm flesh, and the soft cries Mausami made, and the rhythm of their movements, even, now, the sounds of Conroy on the floor, watchfully shifting his bones. A blessing, Theo thought. That was the word that came to his mind as sleep eased toward him. That’s what this place was. A blessing.

Then he remembered the barn door.

He
knew
he’d dropped the latch. The memory was clear and specific in his mind: pulling the door closed on its squeaking hinges and dropping the latch into its cradle before walking back to the house.

But if that was true, how could Conroy have gotten inside?

In another instant he was shoving his legs into a pair of gaps, wedging on his boots with one hand and pulling on a sweater with the other. All day long, moving in and out of the house, he hadn’t once done it.

He’d never looked inside the barn.

“What is it?” Mausami was saying. “Theo, what’s wrong?”

She was sitting up now, the blanket pulled over her chest. Conroy, sensing the excitement, had sprung to his feet and was prancing around the room on his long, tapping nails.

He grabbed the shotgun from its place by the door. “Stay here.”

He would have left Conroy with her, but the dog would have none of it; the moment Theo opened the front door of the house, Conroy flew into the yard. For the second time in a day Theo crept toward the barn, the stock of the shotgun pressed to his shoulder. The door was still open, just as they’d left it. Conroy dashed ahead of him, disappearing into the darkness.

He crept through the door, the shotgun raised, poised to fire. He could hear the dog moving in the dark, snuffling the ground.

“Conroy?” he whispered. “What is it?”

As his eyes adjusted, he saw the dog circling the ground just beyond the parked Volvo. Resting on the floor by the woodpile was a lantern Theo had left there, days before. Bracing the shotgun against his leg, he quickly knelt and lit the wick. He could hear that Conroy had found something, in the dirt.

It was a can. Theo picked it up, holding it by its crinkled edges, where someone had used a blade to open it. The interior walls of the can were damp, smelling of meat. Theo lifted the lantern higher, spreading its cone of light over the floor. Footprints. Human footprints, in the dust.

Someone had been here.

SIXTY-FIVE

It was the doctor who had done it. It was the doctor who had saved her and to whom, in the end, Lacey hoped she had brought some small measure of comfort.

Strange, what the years did to Lacey’s memory of the things of that night so long ago, back at the beginning. The screams and smoke. The calls of the dying and the dead. A great black tide of endless night sweeping over the world. Sometimes it all came back to her as clearly as if it were not decades but days that had passed; at other times, the pictures she saw and the feelings she felt seemed small and doubtful and distant, like chips of straw adrift on a broad sweeping current of time in which she floated also, through all the years and years.

She remembered the one, Carter. Carter, who had come to her as she had run from Wolgast’s car, shouting and waving; Carter, who had answered her call and swooped down toward her, alighting before her like a great, sorrowful bird.
I … am … Carter
. He was not like the others. She could see, behind the monstrous vision he’d become, that he took no pleasure in his doing, that his heart was broken inside him. Chaos all around them, the screams and the gunfire and the smoke: men were running past her, yelling and shooting and dying, their fates already written when the world began, but Lacey was in that place no more; for as Carter placed his mouth upon her neck, calling the soft beat of her heart to his own, she felt it. All his pain and puzzlement, and the long sad story of who he was. The bed of rags and bundles under the roadway, and the sweat and soil of his skin and of his long journey; the great gleaming car stopping beside him with its grille of jeweled teeth, and the voice of the woman, calling out to him over the dirty roar of the world; the sweetness of mown grass and the sweating coolness of a glass of tea; the pull of the water, and the arms of the woman, Rachel Wood, holding fast, pulling him down and down. It was his life that Lacey felt inside her, his little, human life, which he had never loved as much as he loved the woman whose spirit he now carried inside him—for Lacey felt that also—and as his teeth cut into the soft curve of her neck, filling Lacey’s senses with the heat of his breath, she heard her own voice rising, bubbling past.
God bless you. God bless and keep you, Mr. Carter
.

Then he was gone. She was lying on the ground, bleeding, time passing, the sickness starting; that which was to pass between them had found its way, she knew. Lacey closed her eyes and prayed for a sign, but no sign came. As it had been in the field after the men had left her, when she was just a girl. It seemed, in that dark hour, that God had forgotten about her, but then as dawn opened the sky above her face, from out of the stillness came the figure of a man. She could hear the soft tread of his steps upon the earth, could smell the smoke of his skin and hair. She tried to speak but couldn’t; neither did the man address her, nor tell her his name. In silence he lifted her into her arms, cradling her like a child, and Lacey thought that it was God Himself, come to take her to His home in heaven. His eyes were hooded in shadow; his hair was a dark corona, wild and beautiful, like his beard, a dense mass of gray upon his face. He carried her through the smoking ruins, and she saw that he was weeping. Those are God’s own tears, Lacey thought, yearning to reach out and touch them. It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop. An exhausted peacefulness swept through her; for a time she slept. She did not recall what happened next, but when it was over and the sickness had passed, she opened her eyes and knew that he had done it; he had saved her. She had found the way to Amy, she had found the way at last.

Lacey
, she heard.
Listen
.

She did. She listened. The voices moved over her like a breeze on water, like a current in the blood. Everywhere and all around.

Hear them, Lacey. Hear them all
.

And so it was that through the years she’d waited. She, Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, and the man who had carried her through the forest, who was not God after all but human, a human being. The good doctor—for that was how she thought of him; that was the name she used in her mind, though his given name, his Christian name, was Jonas. Jonas Lear. The saddest man in all the world. Together they had built the house in the glen where Lacey lived still—not much larger than the shacks she recalled from the dusty roads and red-clay fields of her youth—but sturdier, and made to last. The doctor once told her that he had built a house before, a cabin on a lake in the woods of Maine. That he had built this cabin with Elizabeth, his wife who had died, he did not say, but he did not have to. The abandoned compound was a bounty, waiting to be harvested. They had taken the lumber from the burnt remains of the Chalet; in the storage buildings they found hammers and saws and planes and sacks of nails, as well as sacks of concrete and a mixer, to pour the posts that would serve as the cabin’s foundation and to mortar the fieldstones that the two of them lifted into place to build the hearth. For one whole summer they stripped roofing shingles off the old barracks, only to find that they leaked, the asphalt torn in too many places; in the end they piled sod on top, making a roof of dirt and grass. There were guns, too, guns by the hundreds, guns of every sort and nature; it was not easy, getting rid of so many guns. For a period of time that was how they occupied themselves, dismantling the soldiers’ guns until all that remained was a vast mound of nuts and bolts and glossy metal pieces, not even worth burying.

He left her only one time, their third summer on the mountain, to go in search of seeds. He took the one gun he had kept, a rifle, with the food and fuel and other supplies he would need, all packed in the pickup that he had prepared for his journey. Three days, he said, but two whole weeks had come and gone before Lacey heard the sound of the pickup’s engine, driving up the mountain. He emerged from the cab wearing a look of such despair she knew it was only his pledge to return that had brought him back to her. He’d driven as far as Grand Junction, he confessed, before deciding to turn around. In the truck were the promised packs of seeds. That night he lit the hearth and sat by it in a terrible, desolated silence, staring into the flames. Never had she seen such pain in a man’s eyes, and although she knew she could not lift this grief from him, it was that same night she went to him and said she believed that they should live together from that day forward as man and wife, in every respect. It seemed a small thing, to offer him this love, this taste of forgiveness; and when this came about, as it did in due course, she understood that the love she had tendered was also love sought. An end to the journey she had begun in the fields of her childhood, all those years ago.

He never left again.

Through the years she loved him with her body, which did not age, as his did. She loved him and he loved her, each in their way, the two of them alone together on their mountain. Death came to him slowly over the years, first one thing and then another, nibbling away at the edges, then moving deeper. His eyes and hair. His teeth and skin. His legs and heart and lungs. There were many days when Lacey wished she could die also, so that he would not have to make this final voyage alone.