Стивен Кинг: Later

Me and the cops and the county attorney went into the staff break room to wait for my mother, and as soon as she got there, the questions started. That night we stayed at the Renfield Stardust Motel, and the next morning there were more questions. My mother was the one who told them she and Elizabeth Dutton had been in a relationship that ended when Mom discovered Liz was involved in the drug trade. I was the one who told them how Liz had scooped me up after tennis practice and took me to Renfield, where she was expecting to rob a big haul of Oxy from Mr. Marsden’s house. He finally told her where the drugs were, and she killed him, either because she didn’t get the jackpot she was expecting or because of the other stuff she found in that room. The pictures.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Officer Caroline said as I gave her back her jacket, which I had kept wearing. Mom gave her a wary, ready-to-protect-my-cub look, but Officer Caroline didn’t see it. She was looking at me. “She tied the guy up—”

“She said she secured him. That was the word she used. Because she used to be a cop, I guess.”

“Okay, she secured him. And according to what she told you—also according to what we found upstairs—she tuned up on him a little. But not all that much.”

“Would you get to the point?” Mom said. “My son has been through a terrible experience and he’s exhausted.”

Officer Caroline ignored her. She was looking at me, and her eyes were very bright. “She could have done a lot more, tortured him until she got what she wanted, but instead she left him, drove all the way to New York City, kidnapped you, and brought you back. Why did she do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You had a two-hour ride with her, and she never said?”

“All she said was she was glad to see me.” I couldn’t remember if she’d actually said that or not, so I guess it was technically a lie, but it didn’t feel like one. I thought of those nights on the couch, sitting between them and watching The Big Bang Theory , all of us laughing our heads off, and I started to cry. Which got us out of there.

Once we were in the motel with the door shut and locked, Mom said, “If they ask you again, say that maybe she was planning to take you with her when she headed west. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I said. Wondering if maybe that idea had been knocking around someplace in Liz’s mind all along. It wasn’t a good thing to speculate on, but better than what I had thought (and still do today): that she planned to kill me.

I didn’t sleep in the connecting room. I slept on the couch in Mom’s. I dreamed that I was walking on a lonely country road under a sickle moon. Don’t whistle, don’t whistle , I told myself, but I did. I couldn’t help myself. I was whistling “Let It Be.” I remember that very clearly. I hadn’t gotten through more than the first six or eight notes when I heard footsteps behind me.

I woke up with my hands clapped over my mouth, as if to stifle a scream. I’ve woken up the same way a few times in the years since, and it’s never a scream I’m afraid of. I’m afraid I’ll wake up whistling and the deadlight thing will be there.

Arms outstretched to hug.

There are plenty of drawbacks to being a kid; check it out. Zits, the agony of choosing the right clothes to wear to school so you don’t get laughed at, and the mystery of girls are only three of them. What I found out after my trip to Donald Marsden’s house (my kidnapping, to be perfectly blunt) was that there are also advantages.

One of them was not having to run a gauntlet of reporters and TV cameras at the inquest, because I didn’t have to testify in person. I gave a video deposition instead, with the lawyer Monty Grisham found for me on one side and my mom on the other. The press knew who I was, but my name never appeared in the media because I was that magic thing, a minor. The kids at school found out (the kids at school almost always find out everything), but nobody ragged on me. I got respect instead. I didn’t have to figure out how to talk to girls, because they came up to my locker and talked to me.

Best of all, there was no trouble about my phone—which was actually Liz’s phone. It no longer existed, anyway. Mom tossed it down the incinerator, bon voyage, and told me to say I’d lost it if anyone asked. No one did. As for why Liz came to New York and snatched me, the police came to the conclusion Mom had already suggested, all on their own: Liz had wanted a kid with her when she went west, maybe figuring a woman traveling with a kid would attract less attention. No one seemed to consider the possibility that I’d try to escape, or at least yell for help when we stopped for gas and grub in Pennsylvania or Indiana or Montana. Of course I wouldn’t do that. I’d be a docile little kidnap victim, just like Elizabeth Smart. Because I was a kid.

The newspapers played it big for a week or so, especially the tabloids, partly because Marsden was a “drug kingpin” but mostly because of the pictures found in his panic room. And Liz came off as sort of a hero, weird but true. EX-COP DIES AFTER SLAYING TORTURE PORN DON, blared the Daily News . No mention that she’d lost her job as the result of an IAD investigation and a positive drug test, but the fact that she’d been instrumental in locating Thumper’s last bomb before it could kill a bunch of shoppers was mentioned. The Post must have gotten a reporter inside Marsden’s house (“Cockroaches get in everywhere,” Mom said), or maybe they had pix of the Renfield place on file, because their headline read INSIDE DONNIE BIGS’ HOUSE OF HORRORS. My mother actually laughed at that one, saying that the Post’ s understanding of the apostrophe was a nice parallel for their grasp of American politics.

“Not Bigs-apostrophe,” she said when I asked. “Bigs-apostrophe-S.”

Okay, Mom. Whatever.

Before long, other news drove Donnie Bigs’s House of Horrors from the front pages of the tabs, and my renown at school faded. It was like Liz said about Chet Atkins, how soon they forget. I found myself once more faced with the problem of talking to girls instead of waiting for them to come up to my locker, all round-eyed with mascara and pursed up with lip gloss, to talk to me. I played tennis and tried out for the class play. I ended up only getting a part with two lines, but I put my heart into them. I played video games with my friends. I took Mary Lou Stein to the movies and kissed her. She kissed me back, which was excellent.

Cue the montage, complete with flipping calendar pages. It got to be 2016, then 2017. Sometimes I dreamed I was on that country road and would wake up with my hands over my mouth thinking Did I whistle? Oh God, did I whistle? But those dreams came less frequently. Sometimes I saw dead folks, but not too often and they weren’t scary. Once my mother asked me if I still saw them and I said hardly ever, knowing it would make her feel better. That was something I wanted, because she had been through a hard time, too, and I got that.

“Maybe you’re growing out of it,” she said.

“Maybe I am,” I agreed.

This brings us to 2018, with our hero Jamie Conklin over six feet tall, able to grow a goatee (which my mother fucking loathed), accepted at Princeton, and almost old enough to vote. I would be old enough when the elections came around in November.

I was in my room, hitting the books for finals, when my phone buzzed. It was Mom, calling from the back of another Uber, this time on her way to Tenafly, where Uncle Harry was now residing.

“It’s pneumonia again,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s going to get better this time, Jamie. They told me to come, and they don’t do that unless it’s very serious.” She paused, then said: “Mortal.”