In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed’s meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, aind when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.
And after that, stuff started to ha sometimes think. just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion… that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn’t even know it.
A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart-attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall’s Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door-315-a fierce sense of deja vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn had finished her last illness jus up the hall, and then he remembered that jimmy V. had died in this very room. He and Lois had visited jimmy just before the end, and Ralph thought jimmy had recognized them both, although he couldn’t be sure; his memories of the time when he had first begun to really notice Lois were mixed up and hazy in his mind. He supposed some of that was love, and probably some of it had to do with getting on in years, but probably most of it had been the insomnia-he’d gone through a really bad patch of that in the months after Carolyn’s death, although it had eventually cured itself, as such things sometimes did.
Still, it seemed to him that something ([hello woman hello man we’ve been waiting for you]) far out of the ordinary had happened in this room, and as he took Faye’s dry, strengthless hand and smiled into Faye’s frightened, confused eyes, a strange thought came to him: They’re standing right over there in the corner and watching us.
He looked over. There was no one at all in the corner, of course, but for a moment… for just a moment…
Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in midDecember and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too.
In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker’s Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.
In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer, He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr. Pickard or. Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head.
Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr. Pickard’s memorable phrase, “popped its top.” He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. “Lousy,” he said, “but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don’t you think?”
repliee stiffly. MY mind,” Ralph One da dury ing the winter of 1997, Lois took it into her head to slide dow her favorite hill in Strawford Park on Nat Deepneau’ n plastic flying-saucer sled. She went down “fstern a Pig in a greaseds chute” (this was Don Veazie’s phrase; he just happened to be there that day, watching the actio) and crashed into the side of the Portosan marked WOMEN. She sprained her knee and twisted her back, and although Ralph knew he had no business doing so-it was unsympathetic, to say the least-he laughed hilariously most of the way to the emergency room. The fact that Lois was also howling with laughter despite the pain did nothing to help Ralph regain control.
He laughed until tears poured from his eyes and he thought he might have a stroke. She had just looked so goddamned Our LOIS going down the hill on that thing, spinning around and around with her legs crossed like one of those yogis from the mysterious East, and she had almost knocked the Portosan over when she hit it. She was completely recovered by the time spring rolled around, although that knee always ached on rainy nights and she did get tired of Don Veazie asking, almost every time he saw her, if she’d slid into any shithouses lately. -first life, going on as it always does-which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins. It’s what happens while we’re making other plans, according exceptionally going to some sage or other, and if life was od to Ralph Roberts during those years, itlmight have been because he had no other plans to make. He maintained friendships with Toe Wyzer and during those years was his lohn Leydecker, but his best friend Is wife. They went almost everywhere together, had no secrets, and fought so seldom one might just as well have said never. He also had Rosalie the beagle, the rocker that had once been Mr. Chasse’s and was now his, and almost daily visits from Natalie (who had begun calling them Ralph and Lois instead of Wall and Roiss, a change neither of them found to be an improvement). And he was healthy, which was maybe the best thing of all. It was just life, full of Short-Time rewards and setbacks, and Ralph lived it with’enjoyment and serenity until mid-March of 1998, when he awoke one morning, glanced at the digital clock beside his bed, and saw it was 5:49 a.m.
He lay quietly beside Lois, not wanting to disturb her by getting up, and wondering what had awakened him.
You know what, Ralph.
No I don’t.
Yes, you do. Listen.
So he listened. He listened very carefully. And after awhile he began to hear it in the walls: the low, soft ticking of the deathwatch.
Ralph awoke at 5:47 the following morning, and at 5:44 the morning after that. His sleep was whittled away, minute by minute, as winter slowly loosened its grip on Derry and allowed spring to find its way back in. By May he was hearing the tick of the deathwatch everywhere, but understood it was all coming from one place and simply projecting itself, as a good ventriloquist can project his voice. Before, it had been coming from Carolyn. Now it was coming from him.
He felt none of the terror that had gripped him when he’d been so sure he had developed cancer, and none of the desperation he vaguely remembered from his previous bout of insomnia. He tired more easily and began to find it more difficult to concentrate and remember even simple things, but he accepted What was happening calmly.