Stephen King - Duma Key

She said, “He never should have got that thing, but he didn’t know.”

“What thing?”

“What thing,” she agreed, and nodded. “I want the train. I want to get out of here before the big boy comes.”

After that we both lapsed into silence. Elizabeth closed her eyes and appeared to doze off in her wheelchair.

For something to do, I got out of my own chair, which would have looked at home in a gentlemen’s club, and approached the table. I plucked up a china girl and boy, looked at them, then put them aside. I scratched absently at the arm that wasn’t there, studying the senseless litter before me. There had to be at least a hundred figures on the polished length of oak. Maybe two hundred. Among them was a china woman with an old-fashioned cap on — a milkmaid’s cap, I thought — but I didn’t want her, either. The cap was wrong, and besides, she was too young. I found another woman with long painted hair, and she was better. That hair was a little too long and a little too dark, but —

No it wasn’t, because Pam had been to the beauty parlor, sometimes known as the Midlife Crisis Fountain of Youth.

I held the china figure, wishing I had a house to put her in and a book for her to read.

I tried to switch the figurine to my right hand — perfectly natural because my right hand was there, I could feel it — and it fell to the table with a clack. It didn’t break, but Elizabeth’s eyes opened. “Dick! Was that the train? Did it whistle? Did it cry?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Why don’t you nap a little?”

“Oh, you’ll find it on the second floor landing,” she said as if I had asked her something else, and closed her eyes again. “Call me when the train comes. I’m so sick of this station. And watch for the big boy, that cuntlicker could be anywhere.”

“I will,” I said. My right arm itched horribly. I reached into my back pocket, hoping my notebook was there. It wasn’t. I’d left it on the kitchen counter back at Big Pink. But that made me think of the Palacio kitchen. There was a notepad for messages on the counter where I’d left the tin. I hurried back, snatched up the pad, stuck it between my teeth, then almost ran back to the China Parlor, already pulling my Uni-ball pen from my breast pocket. I sat down in my wingback chair and began to sketch the china doll rapidly while the rain whipped the windows and Elizabeth sat leaning in her wheelchair across the table from me, dozing with her mouth ajar. The wind-driven shadows of the palms flew around the walls like bats.

It didn’t take long, and I realized something as I worked: I was pouring the itch out through the tip of the pen, decanting it onto the page. The woman in my drawing was the china figure, but she was also Pam. The woman was Pam, but she was also the china figure. Her hair was longer than when I’d last seen her, and spread out on her shoulders. She was sitting in

( the BURN, the CHAR )

a chair. What chair? A rocking chair. Hadn’t been any such item in our house when I left it, but there was now. Something was on the table beside her. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it emerged from the tip of the pen and became a box with printing across the top. Sweet Owen? Did it say Sweet Owen? No, it said Grandma’s. My Uni-ball put something on the table beside the box. An oatmeal cookie. Pam’s favorite. While I was looking at it, the pen drew the book in Pam’s hand. Couldn’t read the title because the angle was wrong. By now my pen was adding lines between the window and her feet. She’d said it was snowing, but now the snow was over. The lines were meant to be sunrays.

I thought the picture was finished, but apparently there were two more things. My pen moved to the far left side of the paper and added the television, quick as a flash. New television, flat screen like Elizabeth’s. And below it —

The pen finished and fell away. The itch was gone. My fingers were stiff. On the other side of the long table, Elizabeth’s doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man’s dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there’s a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.

I had seen a phone in the library as well as the kitchen, and the library was closer to the China Parlor. I decided neither Wireman nor Elizabeth would begrudge me a long-distance call to Minnesota. I picked up the phone, then paused with it curled to my chest. On a wall next to the suit of armor, highlighted by several cunning little pin-spots in the ceiling, was a display of antique weapons: a long-barreled muzzle-loader that looked of Revolutionary War vintage, a flintlock pistol, a derringer that would have been at home in a riverboat gambler’s boot, a Winchester carbine. Mounted above the carbine was the gadget Elizabeth had been holding in her lap the day Ilse and I had seen her. To either side, making an inverted V, were four loads for the thing. You couldn’t call them arrows; they were too short. Harpoonlets still seemed like the right word. Their tips were very bright, and looked very sharp.

I thought, You could do some real damage with a thing like that. Then I thought: My father was a skin diver .

I pushed it out of my mind and called what used to be home.

“Hi, Pam, it’s me again.”

“I don’t want to talk to you any more, Edgar. We finished what we have to say.”

“Not quite. But this will be short. I have an old lady to look after. She’s sleeping now, but I don’t like to leave her long.”

Pam, curious in spite of herself: “What old lady?”

“Her name’s Elizabeth Eastlake. She’s in her mid-eighties, and she’s got a good start on Alzheimer’s. Her principal caregiver is taking care of an electrical problem with someone’s sauna, and I’m helping out.”

“Did you want a gold star to paste on the Helping Others page of your workbook?”

“No, I called to convince you I’m not crazy.” I had brought in my drawing. Now I crooked the handset between my shoulder and my ear so I could pick it up.

“Why do you care?”

“Because you’re convinced that all this started with Ilse, and it didn’t.”

“My God, you’re unbelievable! If she called from Santa Fe and said she’d broken a shoelace, you’d fly out there to take her a new one!”

“I also don’t like you thinking that I’m down here going insane when I’m not. So… are you listening?”

Only silence from the other end, but silence was good enough. She was listening.

“You’re ten or maybe fifteen minutes out of the shower. I think that because your hair is down on the back of your housecoat. I guess you still don’t like the hairdryer.”

“How—”

“I don’t know how. You were sitting in a rocking chair when I called. You must have gotten it since the divorce. Reading a book and eating a cookie. A Grandma’s oatmeal cookie. The sun’s out now, and it’s coming in the window. You have a new television, the kind with a flat screen.” I paused. “And a cat. You got a cat. It’s sleeping under the TV.”

Dead silence from her end. On my end the wind blew and the rain slapped the windows. I was about to ask her if she was there when she spoke again, in a dull voice that didn’t sound like Pam at all. I had thought she was done hurting my heart, but I was wrong. “Stop spying on me. If you ever loved me — stop spying on me.”

“Then stop blaming me,” I said in a hoarse, not-quite-breaking voice. Suddenly I remembered Ilse getting ready to go back to Brown, Ilse standing in the strong tropical sun outside the Delta terminal, looking up at me and saying, You deserve to get better. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that. “What’s happened to me isn’t my fault. The accident wasn’t my fault and neither is this. I didn’t ask for it.”