Stephen King: A Face in the Crowd

And now, thanks to God only knew what agency, here was Lester Embree at Tropicana Field, standing with the other fans watching the play at the plate. His fingers were mostly gone, but he still seemed to have his thumbs. His eyes and nose, too. Well, most of his nose. Lester was looking through the television screen at Dean Evers, just like Miss Nancy looking through her magic mirror on the old Romper Room show. “Romper, stomper, bomper, boo,” Miss Nancy liked to chant in the way-back-when. “My magic mirror can see you.”

Lester’s pointing finger-stub. Lester’s moving mouth. Saying what? Evers only had to watch it twice to be sure: You murdered me .

“Not true!” he yelled at the boy in the red-and-blue striped shirt. “Not true! You fell in Marsden’s! You fell in the pond! You fell in the pond and it was your own goddamned fault! ”

He turned off the TV and went to bed. He lay there awhile thrumming like a wire, then got up and took two Ambiens, washing them down with a healthy knock of scotch. The pill-and-booze combo killed the thrumming, at least, but he still lay wakeful, staring into the dark with eyes that felt as large and smooth as brass doorknobs. At three he turned the clock-radio around to face the wall. At five, as the first traces of dawn backlit the drapes, a comforting thought came to him. He wished he could share this comforting thought with Soupy Embree, but since he couldn’t, he did the next best thing and spoke it aloud.

“If it were possible to go back in a time machine and change the stupid things some of us did in grammar school and junior high, Soups old buddy, that gadget would be booked up right into the twenty-third century.”

Exactamundo. You couldn’t blame kids. Grown-ups knew better, but kids were stupid by nature. Sometimes malevolent by nature too. He seemed to remember something about a girl in New Zealand who’d bludgeoned her best friend’s mother to death with a brick. She’d hit the poor woman fifty times or more with that old brick, and when the girl was found guilty she went to jail for… what? Seven years? Five? Less? When she got out, she went to England and became an airline stewardess. Later she became a very popular mystery novelist. Who’d told him that story? Ellie, of course. El had been a great reader of mysteries, always trying—and often succeeding—in guessing whodunit.

“Soupy,” he told his lightening bedroom, “you can’t blame me. I plead diminished capacity.” That actually made him smile.

As if it had just been waiting for this conclusion, another comforting thought arose. I don’t need to watch the game tonight. Nothing’s forcing me to .

That was finally enough to send him off. He woke shortly after noon, the first time he’d slept so late since college. In the kitchen he briefly considered the oatmeal, then fried himself three eggs in butter. He would have tossed in some bacon, if he’d had any. He did the next-best thing, adding it to the grocery list stuck to the fridge with a cucumber magnet.

“No game tonight for me,” he told the empty condo. “Ah b’leeve Ah maht…”

He heard what his voice was doing and stopped, bewildered. It came to him that he might not be suffering from dementia or early-onset Alzheimer’s; he might be having your ordinary everyday garden-variety nervous breakdown. That seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation for recent events, but knowledge was power. If you saw what was happening, you could stop it, right?

“I believe I might go out to a movie,” he said in his own voice. Quietly. Reasonably. “That’s all I meant to say.”

In the end, he decided against a film. Although there were twenty screens in the immediate area, he could find nothing he wanted to watch on a single one of them. He went to the Publix instead, where he picked up a basketful of goodies (including a pound of the good thick-sliced pepper bacon Ellie loved). He started for the ten-items-or-less checkout lane, saw the girl at the register was wearing a Rays shirt with Matt Joyce’s number 20 on the back, and diverted to one of the other lanes instead. That took longer, but he told himself he didn’t mind. He also told himself he wasn’t thinking about how someone would be singing the national anthem at the Trop right now. He’d picked up the new Harlan Coben in paperback, a little literary bacon to go with the literal variety. He’d read it tonight. Baseball couldn’t match up to Coben’s patented terror-in-the-burbs, not even when it was Jon Lester matched up against Matt Moore. How had he ever become interested in such a slow, boring sport to begin with?

He put away his groceries and settled onto the sofa. The Coben was terrific, and he got into it right away. Evers was so immersed that he didn’t realize he’d picked up the TV remote, but when he got to the end of chapter six and decided to break for a small piece of Pepperidge Farm lemon cake, the gadget was right there in his hand.

Won’t hurt to check the score, he thought. Just a quick peek, and off it goes .

The Rays were up one to nothing in the eighth, and Dewayne Staats was so excited he was burbling. “Don’t want to talk about what’s going on with Matt Moore tonight, folks—I’m old-school—but let’s just say that the bases have been devoid of Crimson Hose.”

No-hitter, Evers thought. Moore’s pitching a damn no-hitter and I’ve been missing it .

Close-up on Moore. He was sweating, even in the Trop’s constant 72 degrees. He went into his motion, the picture changed to the home plate shot, and there in the third row was Dean Evers’s dead wife, wearing the same tennis whites she’d had on the day of her first stroke. He would have recognized that blue piping anywhere.

Ellie was deeply tanned, as she always was by this time of summer, and as was the case more often than not at the ballpark, she was ignoring the game entirely, poking at her iPhone instead. For an unfocused moment, Evers wondered who she was texting—someone here, or someone in the afterlife?—when, in his pocket, his cell phone buzzed.

She raised the phone to her ear and gave him a little wave.

Pick up, she mouthed, and pointed to her phone.

Evers shook his head no slowly.

His phone vibrated again, like a mild shock applied to his thigh.

“No,” he said to the TV, and thought, logically: She can just leave a message.

Ellie shook her phone at him.

“This is wrong,” he said. Because Ellie wasn’t like Soupy Embree or Lennie Wheeler or Young Dr. Young. She loved him—of that Evers was sure—and he loved her. Forty-six years meant something, especially nowadays.

He searched her face. She seemed to be smiling, and while he didn’t have a speech prepared, he guessed he did want to tell her how much he missed her, and what his days were like, and how he wished he was closer to Pat and Sue and the grandkids, because, really, there was no one else he could talk to.

He dug the phone from his pocket. Though he’d deactivated her account months ago, the number that came up was hers.

On TV, Moore was pacing behind the mound, juggling the rosin bag on the back of his pitching hand.

And then there she was, right behind David Ortiz, holding up her phone.

He pressed TALK.

“Hello?” he said.

“Finally,” she said. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“What’s weird?”

“I don’t know. You not being here and all.”

“Dead, you mean. Me being dead.”

“That.”

“So you don’t want to talk to me because I’m dead.”

“No,” he said. “I always want to talk to you.” He smiled—at least, he thought he was smiling. He’d have to check the mirror to be sure, because his face felt frozen. “You’re wanted, sweetheart, dead or alive.”