Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

“ Eeeyer-eh!' ” for most of the hours between two and five- Beaver’s dead! Duddits seemingly inconsolable, finally bringing on a nosebleed. She feared these. When Duddits started bleeding, it was sometimes impossible to get him stopped without taking him to the hospital. This time she had been able to stop it by pushing cotton-wads into his nostrils and then pinching his nose high up, between the eyes. She had called Dr Briscoe to ask if she could give Duddits one of his yellow Valium tablets, but Dr Briscoe was off in Nassau, if you please. Some other doctor was on call, some whitecoat johnny who had never seen Duddits in his life, and Roberta didn’t even bother to call him. She just gave Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the lemon-flavored glycerine swabs that he liked-the inside of his mouth was always developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted. And the chemo was over. None of the doctors-not Briscoe, not any of them-would admit it, and so the plastic catheter stayed in, but it was over. Roberta would not let them put her boy through that hell again.

Once he’d taken his pill, she got in bed with him, held him (being careful of his left side, where the indwelling catheter hid under a bandage), and sang to him. Not Beaver’s lullaby, though. Not today.

At last he had begun to quiet, and when she thought he was asleep, she had gently pulled the cotton wads from his nostrils. The second one stuck a little, and Duddits’s eyes had opened-that beautiful flash of green. His eyes were his true gift, she sometimes thought, and not that other business… seeing the line and all that went with it.

“Urnma?”

“Yes, Duddie.”

“Eeeyer in hen?”

She felt such sorrow at that, and at the thought of Beaver’s absurd leather jacket, which he had loved so much and finally worn to tatters. If it had been someone else, anyone else but one of his four childhood friends, she would have doubted Duddie’s premonition. But if Duddits said Beaver was dead, then Beaver almost certainly was.

“Yes, honey, I’m sure he’s in heaven. Now go to sleep.”

For another long moment those green eyes had looked into hers, and she had thought he would start crying again-indeed, one tear, large and perfect, did roll down his stubbly cheek. It was so hard for him to shave now, sometimes even the Norelco started little cuts that dribbled for hours. Then his eyes had closed again and she had tiptoed out.

After dark, while she was making him oatmeal (all but the blandest foods were now apt to set off vomiting, another sign that the end was nearing), the whole nightmare started again. Terrified already by the increasingly strange news coming out of the Jefferson Tract, she had raced back to his room with her heart hammering. Duddits was sitting upright again, whipping his head from side to side in a child’s gesture of negation. The nosebleed had re-started, and at each jerk of his head, scarlet drops flew. They spattered his pillowcase, his signed photograph of Austin Powers (“Groovy,baby!” was written across the bottom), and the bottles on the table: mouthwash, Compazine, Percocet, the multi-vitamins that seemed to do absolutely no good, the tall jar of lemon swabs.

This time it was Pete he claimed was dead, sweet (and not terribly bright) Peter Moore. Dear God, could it be true? Any of it? All of it?

The second bout of hysterical grief hadn’t gone on as long, probably because Duddits was already exhausted from the first. She had gotten the nosebleed stanched again-lucky her-and had changed his bed, first helping him to his chair by the window. There he’d sat, looking out into the renewing storm, occasionally sobbing, sometimes heaving great, watery sighs that hurt her inside. Just looking at him hurt her: how thin he was, how pale he was, how bald he was. She gave him his Red Sox hat, signed across the visor by the great Pedro Martinez (you get so many nice things when you’re dying, she sometimes mused), thinking his head would be cold there, so close to the glass, but for once Duddits wouldn’t put it on. He only held it on his lap and looked out into the dark, his eyes big and unhappy.

At last she had gotten him back into bed, where once again her son’s green eyes looked up at her with all their terrible dying brilliance.

“Eeet in hen, ooo?”

“I’m sure he is.” She hadn’t wanted to cry, desperately hadn’t wanted to-it might set him off again-but she could feel the tears brimming. Her head was pregnant with them, and the inside of her nose tasted of the sea each time she pulled in breath.

“In hen wif Eeeyer?”

“Yes, honey.”

“I eee Eeeyer n Eeet in hen?”

“Yes, you will. Of course you will. But not for a long while.”

His eyes had closed. Roberta had sat beside him on the bed, looking down at her hands, feeling sadder than sad, more alone than lonely.

Now she hurried downstairs and yes, it was singing, all right. Because she spoke such fluent Duddits (and why not? it had been her second language for over thirty years), she translated the rolling syllables without even thinking much about them: Scooby-Dooby-Doo,where are you? We got some work to do now. I’ve been telling you, Scooby-Doo, we need a helping hand, now.

She went into his room, not knowing what to expect. Certainly not what she found: every light blazing, Duddits fully dressed for the first time since his last (and very likely final, according to Dr Briscoe) remission. He had put on his favorite corduroy pants, his down vest over his Grinch tee-shirt, and his Red Sox hat. He was sitting in his chair by the window and looking out into the night. No frown now; no tears, either. He looked out into the storm with a bright-eyed eagerness that took her back to long before the disease, which had announced itself with such stealthy, easy-to-overlook symptoms: how tired and out of breath he got after just a short game of Frisbee in the back yard, how big the bruises were from even little thumps and bumps, and how slowly they faded. This was the way he used to look when…

But she couldn’t think. She was too flustered to think.

“Duddits! Duddle, what-”

“Umma! Ere I unnox?”

Mumma! Where’s my lunchbox?

“In the kitchen, but Duddie, it’s the middle of the night. It’s snowing! You aren’t…”

Going anywhere was the way that one ended, of course, but the words wouldn’t cross her tongue. His eyes were so brilliant, so alive. Perhaps she should have been glad to see that light so strongly in his eyes, that energy, but instead she was terrified.

“I eed I unnox! I eed I unch!”

I need my lunchbox, I need my lunch.

“ No, Duddits.” Trying to be firm. “You need to take off your clothes and get back into bed. That’s what you need and all you need. Here. I’ll help you.”

But when she approached, he raised his amis and crossed them over his narrow chest, the palm of his right hand pressed against his left cheek, the palm of his left against the right cheek. From earliest childhood, it was all he could muster in the way of defiance. It was usually enough, and it was now. She didn’t want to upset him again, perhaps start another nosebleed. But she wasn’t going to put up a lunch for him in his Scooby lunchbox at one-fifteen in the morning. Absolutely not.

She retreated to the side of his bed and sat down on it. The room was warm, but she was cold, even in her heavy flannel nightgown. Duddits slowly lowered his arms, watching her wanly. “You can sit up if you want,” she said, “but why? Did you have a dream, Duddie? A bad dream?”

Maybe a dream but not a bad one. Not with that eager look on his face, and now she recognized it well enough: it was the way he had looked so often back in the eighties, in the good years before Henry, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy had all gone their separate ways, calling less frequently and coming by to see him less frequently still as they raced toward their grownup lives and forgot the one who had to stay behind.