Стивен Кинг: Later

“I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“You don’t have to do that.” The subtext being that I’d never really known him anyway, at least not when he was a smart guy building a career for himself and his sister in the world of tough New York publishing. Which can be a tough world indeed. Now that I was also working in the office—only a few hours a week, mostly filing—I knew that was true. And it was true that I had only vague memories of a smart guy who should have stayed smart a lot longer, but it wasn’t him I’d be going for.

“I’ll take the bus.” Which I could do with ease, because the bus was how we’d always gone to New Jersey in the days when Ubers and Lyfts were beyond our budget.

“Your tests… you have to study for your finals…”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic. I read that somewhere. I’ll bring ’em. See you there.”

“We may have to stay overnight,” she said. “Are you sure?”

I said I was.

I don’t know exactly where I was when Uncle Harry died. Maybe in New Jersey, maybe still crossing the Hudson, maybe even while I could see Yankee Stadium from my bird-beshitted bus window. All I know is that Mom was waiting for me outside the care home—his final care home—on a bench under a shade tree. She was dry-eyed, but she was smoking a cigarette and I hadn’t seen her do that in a long time. She gave me a good strong hug and I gave it right back to her. I could smell her perfume, that old sweet smell of La Vie est Belle, which always took me back to my childhood. To that little boy who thought his green hand-turkey was just the cat’s ass. I didn’t have to ask.

“Not ten minutes before I got here,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Sad, but also relieved that it’s finally over. He lasted much longer than most people who suffer from what he had. You know what, I was sitting here thinking about three flies, six grounders. Do you know what that is?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“The other boys didn’t want to let me play because I was a girl, but Harry said if they wouldn’t let me play, he wouldn’t play, either. And he was popular. Always the most popular. So I was, as they say, the only girl in the game.”

“Were you good?”

“I was terrific,” she said, and laughed. Then she wiped at one of her eyes. Crying after all. “Listen, I need to talk to Mrs. Ackerman—she’s the boss-lady here—and sign some papers. Then I need to go down to his room and see if there’s anything I need to take right away. I can’t imagine there is.”

I felt a stirring of alarm. “He’s not still…?”

“No, honey. There’s a funeral home they use here. I’ll make arrangements tomorrow about getting him to New York and the… you know, final stuff.” She paused. “Jamie?”

I looked at her.

“You don’t… you don’t see him, do you?”

I smiled. “No, Ma.”

She grabbed my chin. “How many times have I told you not to call me that? Who says maa?”

“Baby sheep,” I said, then added, “Yeah yeah yeah.”

That made her laugh. “Wait for me, hon. This won’t take long.”

She went inside and I looked at Uncle Harry, who was standing not ten feet away. He’d been there all along, wearing the pajamas he’d died in.

“Hey, Uncle Harry,” I said.

No reply. But he was looking at me.

“Have you still got the Alzheimer’s?”

“No.”

“So you’re okay now?”

He looked at me with the merest glint of humor. “I suppose so, if being dead fits into your definition of okay.”

“She’s going to miss you, Uncle Harry.”

No reply, and I didn’t expect one because it wasn’t a question. I did have one, though. He probably didn’t know the answer, but there’s an old saying that goes if you never ask, you never get.

“Do you know who my father is?”

“Yes.”

“Who? Who is it?”

“I am,” Uncle Harry said.

Almost done now (and I remember when I thought thirty pages was a lot!), but not quite, so don’t give up before you check this out:

My grandparents—my only set of grandparents, as it turns out—died on their way to a Christmas party. A guy full of too much Christmas cheer swerved across three lanes of a four-lane highway and hit them head-on. The drunk survived, as they so often do. My uncle (also my father, as it turns out) was in New York when he got the news, making the rounds of several Christmas parties, schmoozing publishers, editors, and writers. His agency was brand-new then, and Uncle Harry (dear old dad!) was kind of like a guy in the deep woods, tending a tiny pile of burning twigs and hoping for a campfire.

He came home to Arcola—that’s a small town in Illinois—for the funeral. After it was over, there was a reception at the Conklins’. Lester and Norma had been well liked, so lots of people came. Some brought food. Some brought booze, which serves as godfather to a great many surprise babies. Tia Conklin, at that time not long out of college and working at her first job in an accounting firm, drank a good deal. So did her brother. Uh-oh, right?

After everybody goes home, Harry finds her in her room, lying on her bed in her slip, crying her heart out. Harry lies down beside her and takes her in his arms. Just for comfort, you understand, but one kind of comfort leads to another. Just that once, but once is enough, and six weeks later Harry—back in New York—gets a phone call. Not long after that, my pregnant mother joins the firm.

Would the Conklin Literary Agency have succeeded in that tough, competitive field without her, or would my father/uncle’s little pile of twigs and leaves have fizzled out in a little runner of white smoke before he could begin to add the first bigger pieces of wood? Hard to say. When things took off, I was lying around in a bassinet, peeing in my Pampers and going goo-goo. But she was good at the job, that I know. If she hadn’t been, the agency would have gone under later, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets.

Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars—I couldn’t have been more than four or five—Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. “Easy-peasy,” she said.

And of course there’s that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can’t carry a tune in a tin pail can produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer. Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

Except, hold it, wait one.

That whole story is fiction.

I don’t know how Tia and Harry became the parents of a bouncing baby boy named James Lee Conklin, because I never asked Uncle Harry for any of the details. He would have told me—the dead can’t lie, as I think we have established—but I didn’t want to know. After he said those two words— I am— I turned away and walked back into the care home to find my mother. He didn’t follow, and I never saw him again. I thought he might come to his funeral, or turn up at the graveside ceremony, but he didn’t.