Stephen King - Joyland

The back door banged. We looked and saw Annie crossing the patio, heading for the boardwalk.

“Why would I need to know, Mike?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. But you can’t talk about it to Mom, okay? It just upsets her. I’m all she’s got.” He said this last not with pride but a kind of gloomy realism.

“All right.”

“Oh, one other thing. I almost forgot.” He shot a glance at her, saw she was only halfway down the boardwalk, and turned back to me. “It’s not white.”

“What’s not white?”

Mike Ross looked mystified. “No idea. When I woke up this morning, I remembered you were coming for smoothies, and that came into my head. I thought you’d know.”

Annie arrived. She had poured a mini-smoothie into a juice glass. On top was a single strawberry.

“Yum!” Mike said. “Thanks, Mom!”

“You’re very welcome, hon.”

She eyed his wet shirt but didn’t mention it. When she asked me if I wanted some more juice, Mike winked at me. I said more juice would be great. While she poured, Mike fed Milo two heaping spoonfuls of his smoothie.

She turned back to him, and looked at the smoothie glass, now half empty. “Wow, you really were hungry.”

“Told you.”

“What were you and Mr. Jones—Devin—talking about?”

“Nothing much,” Mike said. “He’s been sad, but he’s better now. ”

I said nothing, but I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. When I dared a look at Annie, she was smiling.

“Welcome to Mike’s world, Devin,” she said, and I must have looked like I’d swallowed a goldfish, because she burst out laughing. It was a nice sound.

That evening when I walked back from Joyland, she was standing at the end of the boardwalk, waiting for me. It was the first time I’d seen her in a blouse and skirt. And she was alone. That was a first, too.

“Devin? Got a second?”

“Sure,” I said, angling up the sandy slope to her. “Where’s Mike?”

“He has physical therapy three times a week. Usually Janice—she’s his therapist—comes in the morning, but I arranged for her to come this evening instead, because I wanted to speak to you alone.”

“Does Mike know that?”

Annie smiled ruefully. “Probably. Mike knows far more than he should. I won’t ask what you two talked about after he got rid of me this morning, but I’m guessing that his… insights… come as no surprise to you.”

“He told me why he’s in a wheelchair, that’s all. And he mentioned he had pneumonia last Thanksgiving.”

“I wanted to thank you for the kite, Dev. My son has very restless nights. He’s not in pain, exactly, but he has trouble breathing when he’s asleep. It’s like apnea. He has to sleep in a semi-sitting position, and that doesn’t help. Sometimes he stops breathing completely, and when he does, an alarm goes off and wakes him up. Only last night—after the kite—he slept right through. I even went in once, around two AM, to make sure the monitor wasn’t malfunctioning. He was sleeping like a baby. No restless tossing and turning, no nightmares—he’s prone to them—and no moaning. It was the kite. It satisfied him in a way nothing else possibly could. Except maybe going to that damned amusement park of yours, which is completely out of the question.” She stopped, then smiled. “Oh, shit. I’m making a speech.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“It’s just that I’ve had so few people to talk to. I have housekeeping help—a very nice woman from Heaven’s Bay—and of course there’s Janice, but it’s not the same.” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the other part. I was rude to you on several occasions, and with no cause. I’m sorry.”

“Mrs… . Miss…” Shit. “Annie, you don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Yes. I do. You could have just walked on when you saw me struggling with the kite, and then Mike wouldn’t have gotten that good night’s rest. All I can say is that I have problems trusting people.”

This is where she invites me in for supper, I thought. But she didn’t. Maybe because of what I said next.

“You know, he could come to the park. It’d be easy to arrange, and with it closed and all, he could have the run of the place.”

Her face closed up hard, like a hand into a fist. “Oh, no. Absolutely not. If you think that, he didn’t tell you as much about his condition as I thought he did. Please don’t mention it to him. In fact, I have to insist.”

“All right,” I said. “But if you change your mind…”

I trailed off. She wasn’t going to change her mind. She looked at her watch, and a new smile lit her face. It was so brilliant you could almost overlook how it never reached her eyes. “Oh boy, look how late it’s getting. Mike will be hungry after his PE, and I haven’t done a thing about supper. Will you excuse me?”

“Sure.”

I stood there watching her hurry back down the boardwalk to the green Victorian—the one I was probably never going to see the inside of, thanks to my big mouth. But the idea of taking Mike through Joyland had seemed so right. During the summer, we had groups of kids with all sorts of problems and disabilities—crippled kids, blind kids, cancer kids, kids who were mentally challenged (what we called retarded back in the unenlightened 70s). It wasn’t as though I expected to stick Mike in the front car of the Delirium Shaker and then blast him off. Even if the Shaker hadn’t been buttoned up for the winter, I’m not a total idiot.

But the merry-go-round was still operational, and surely he could ride that. Ditto the train that ran through the Wiggle-Waggle Village. I was sure Fred Dean wouldn’t mind me touring the kid through Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion, either. But no. No. He was her delicate hothouse flower, and she intended to keep it that way. The thing with the kite had just been an aberration, and the apology a bitter pill she felt she had to swallow.

Still, I couldn’t help admiring how quick and lithe she was, moving with a grace her son would never know. I watched her bare legs under the hem of her skirt and thought about Wendy Keegan not at all.

I had the weekend free, and you know what happened. I guess the idea that it always rains on the weekends must be an illusion, but it sure doesn’t seem like one; ask any working stiff who ever planned to go camping or fishing on his days off.

Well, there was always Tolkien. I was sitting in my chair by the window on Saturday afternoon, moving ever deeper into the mountains of Mordor with Frodo and Sam, when Mrs. Shoplaw knocked on the door and asked if I’d like to come down to the parlor and play Scrabble with her and Tina Ackerley. I am not at all crazy about Scrabble, having suffered many humiliations at the hands of my aunts Tansy and Naomi, who each have a huge mental vocabulary of what I still think of as “Scrabble shit-words”—stuff like suq, tranq, and bhoot (an Indian ghost, should you wonder). Nevertheless, I said I’d love to play. Mrs. Shoplaw was my landlady, after all, and diplomacy takes many forms.

On our way downstairs, she confided, “We’re helping Tina bone up. She’s quite the Scrabble-shark. She’s entered in some sort of tournament in Atlantic City next weekend. I believe there is a cash prize.”

It didn’t take long—maybe four turns—to discover that our resident librarian could have given my aunts all the game they could handle, and more. By the time Miss Ackerley laid down nubility (with the apologetic smile all Scrabble-sharks seem to have; I think they must practice it in front of their mirrors), Emmalina Shoplaw was eighty points behind. As for me… well, never mind.