It

In the silence that followed Audra said: 'And I know one other thing. Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me.'

He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said: 'You know I had a brother, and yo u know he died, but you don't know he was murdered.'

Audra took in a quick snatch of breath.

'Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didn't you ever — '

'Tell you?' He laughed, that barking sound again. 'I don't know.'

'What happened?'

'We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadn't had the flu, maybe I could have saved him.'

He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beard-stubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful . . . but he was not looking at her.

'It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn't make a dime's worth of difference which it was.'

'Christ, Bill!'

'I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is I wonder myself. Here we've been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family — even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anyway — by osmosis. Or do you think I'm wrong?'

'No,' she said faintly. 'You're not wrong, Bill.'

'And we've always been able to talk to each other, haven't we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right?'

'Well,' she said, 'until today I always thought so.'

'Come on, Audra. You know everything that's happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud.'

'Especially the Grateful Dead,' she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back.

'You know the most important stuff, too — the things I hope for.'

'Yes. I think so. But this . . . ' She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. 'How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill?'

'Let me get to it ia my own way. Don't try to rush me into the center of it or you'll have me committed. It's so big . . . and so . . . so quaintly awful . . . that I'm trying to sort of creep up on it. You see . . . it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie.'

She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintly — I don't understand.

'What I'm trying to tell you, Audra, is that I haven't even thought of George in twenty years or more.'

'But you told me you had a brother named — '

'I repeated a fact,' he said. 'That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind.'

'But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams,' Audra said. Her voice was very quiet.

'The groaning? The crying?'

She nodded.

'I suppose you could be right,' he said. 'In fact, you're almost surely right. But dreams you don't remember don't really count, do they?'

'Are you really telling me you never thought of him at all'

'Yes. I am.'

She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. 'Not even the horrible way he die d?'

'Not until today, Audra.'

She looked at him and shook her head again.

'You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters, and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and you've got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But that's not all.'

'What do you mean?'

'It isn't just George that's been in that black hole. I haven't thought of Derry itself in twenty years. Not the people I chummed with — Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh . . . ' He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. 'It's like having a case of amnesia so bad you don't know you've got it. And when Mike Hanlon called — '

'Who's Mike Hanlon?'

'Another kid that we chummed with — that I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course he's no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, "Hello — have I reached the Denbrough residence?" and I said yes, and he said, "Bill? Is that you?" and I said yes, and he said, "This is Mike Hanlon." It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, "From Derry." And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened — '

Bill snapped his fingers.

'Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come.'

'Come back to Derry.'

'Yeah.' He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. 'Back to Derry. Because we promised, he said, and we did. We did. All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real.'

He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a close-set ladder of white lines that could have been scar-tissue. She had held his hand — both his hands — countless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would have believed —

And the party! That party!

Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed a perfect book-end to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the Pit of the Black Demon shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon 'do. ' Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other LA parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better

than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough.

What was the name of the self-proclaimed palmist? She couldn't remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup man's two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a very filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsy's scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening . . . or at least until she had passed out.

Audra could not remember now if the girl's readings had been good or bad, wit ty or stupid: she had been pretty high herself that night. What she did remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bill's palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were life-twins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernail — how stupid that was, in the weird LA film subculture where men patted women's fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery.