Dean Koontz - False Memory

Satori. Here was Junior, as fair of face as his mother, blessed with her physical grace, as well. And bright. No denying how very bright he was. At her age, he would be her last child, and the only one with the prospect to fulfill her expectations. Here was her last chance to be not merely a woman of ideas, to be not merely the bride to a man of ideas, but to be the mother of a man of ideas. Indeed, in her mind, though not in reality, here was her last chance to be associated with ideas that might move the world, because her first three husbands had proved to be men whose big ideas had no solidity and had popped at the first prick. Even Derek, with all his success, was a chupaflor, not an eagle, and Claudette knew it. Dusty was, in her mind, too pigheaded to fulfill his potential, and Skeet was too fragile. And Dominique, her first child, was long and safely dead. Dusty had never known his half sister, had seen one photo of her, perhaps the only ever taken: her sweet, small, gentle face. Junior was the only hope that remained for Claudette, and she was determined to believe that his mind and his heart were as fair as his face.

While she was still browbeating Skeet, Dusty heard himself say, “Mother, how did Dominique die?”

The question, dangerous in this context, silenced Claudette as nothing else except perhaps another gunshot would have done.

He met her eyes and didn’t turn to stone, as she intended, and shame — rather than a lack of it — kept him from looking away. Shame that he had known the truth, intuitively at first and then through the application of logic and reflection, had known the truth since boyhood and yet had denied it to himself and had never spoken. Shame that he allowed her and Skeet’s pompous father and then Derek Lampton to grind Skeet down, when ferreting out the truth about Dominique might have disarmed them and given Skeet a better life.

“You must have been heartbroken,” Dusty said, “when your first child was born with Down’s syndrome. Such high hopes, and such sad reality.”

“What are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even more highly charged with anger.

The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger of being crushed alive.

“And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant death syndrome. How difficult to endure it. the whispers, the medical inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.”

Martie drew a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said, “Dusty,” meaning Maybe you shouldn’t do this.

He had never spoken up when it might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five, going on six… a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?”

“I guess,” Skeet said shakily.

“They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved not to be the case.”

“My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him.

“Maybe that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.”

Claudette regarded Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what she feared most.

He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph of Dominique.”

She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the air, the blow not struck.

In some respects, this was the hardest thing that Dusty had ever done, and yet in other way sit was so easy that it frightened him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the hallway outside the nursery.”

Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from Dusty.

His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him.

Junior stepped forward protectively.

“Better pick up your crossbow and load it,” Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.”

Although the violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s, Junior backed off.

“When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t remember what. But you knew I was there, and you… stopped. At the time, I didn’t know what had almost happened. But later… years later, I did understand, but wouldn’t face it.’

“Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”

Although Dusty had faith in the power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all.

Claudette’s teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws.

“A couple minutes ago, Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even give you pause. Which is odd, because that is a big idea. Worth discussion if ever anything was.”

“Are you done?”

“Not quite. After all these years of putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say. I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we all have, and we’re going to suffer more —”

Clawing at his hand, drawing two thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said, “If Dominique hadn’t been a Down’s baby, and if I hadn’t spared her that half life she would’ve led, and if she were alive here and now, wouldn’t that be worse? Wouldn’t that be infinitely worse?”

The sense she made diminished as the volume of her voice rose, and Dusty had no idea what she meant.

Junior moved closer to his mother’s side. They stood hand in hand, drawing a strange strength from each other.

Pointing toward the dead man sprawled in the foyer below, a gesture that seemed to have no connection to her words, she said, “Down’s was at least an obvious condition. What if she’d seemed normal but then… all grown up, what if she’d been just like her father?”

Dominique’s father, Claudette’s first husband, had been more than twenty years her senior, a psychologist named Lief Reissler, a cold fish with pale eyes and a pencil mustache, who had thankfully played no role in either Dusty’s or Skeet’s life. A cold fish, yes, but not the monster that her question implied he was.

Before Dusty could express his bafflement, Claudette clarified. After three days of shocks that he’d thought had forever inoculated him against surprise, she rocked him with eight words: “What if she’d been just like Mark Ahriman?” The rest was superfluous: “You say he burns down houses, he shoots people, he’s a sociopath, and this crazy man who’s dead downstairs is somehow associated with him. So would you want his child for your half sister?”