He tried to tell them that he could neither heal nor save, but before he could open his mouth to make the denial, the first had laid hands on him and was shaking him.
The shaking was real enough. It was Weizak's hand on his arm. Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day it was nightmare light, turning Sam's kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint.
“Where are we?” he asked thickly.
“The hospital,” Sam said. “Cumberland General.”
“Oh. All right.”
He sat up. The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.
“Are you ready to go in?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
They crossed the parking lot amid the soft creak of summer crickets in the woods. Fireflies stitched through the darkness. The image of his mother was very much on him-but not so much that he was unable to enjoy the soft and fragrant smell of the night and the feel of the faint breeze against his skin. There was time to enjoy the health of the night, and the feeling of health coming inside him. In the context of why he was here, the thought seemed almost obscene-but only almost. And it wouldn't go away.
Herb came down the hallway to meet them, and Johnny saw that his father was wearing old pants, shoes with no socks, and his pajama shirt. It told Johnny a lot about the suddenness with which it had come. It told him more than he wanted to know.
“Son,” he said. He looked smaller, somehow. He tried to say more and couldn't. Johnny hugged him and Herb burst into tears. He sobbed against Johnny's shirt.
“Daddy,” he said. “That's all right, Daddy, that's all right.”
His father put his arms on Johnny's shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.
Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Look at me, still in my pi top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.”
“No, you're not.”
“Well. “He shrugged. “Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.”
Sam shrugged. “It was nothing.”
Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. “Daddy, is she…”
“She's sinking,” Herb said. He seemed calmer now. “Conscious, but sinking. She's been asking for you,
Johnny. I think she's been holding on for you.”
“My fault,” Johnny said. “All this is my-…”
The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it firmly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn't remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.
“Don't you ever say that,” Herb said.
“Jeez Dad!”
Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. “Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.”
Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.
“Don't you ever blame yourself.”
“But she was watching that damned…
“News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled… then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water. “Herb leaned closer to his son. “The doctor won't come right out and tell me, but he asked me about “heroic measures”. I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don't you ever blame yourself for her mistake. “Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. “God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.”
“Can I see her?”
“Yes, she's at the end of the hall, Room ~ They're expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don't… let her die thinking it was all for nothing.”
“No. “He paused. “Are you coming with me?”
“Not now. Maybe later.”
Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.
Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn't remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches-later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn't have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.
He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That's what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.
“Are you Mrs. Smith's son?”
“Yes.”
“Johnny?” The voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice-God help him -made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.
“Is that you, John?”
“It's me, Ma.”
“Johnny? Is that you?”
“Yes, Ma.”
He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.
“I want my Johnny,” she said querulously.
The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found him-self wanting to smash his fist through it.
“Would you leave us alone?” he asked.
“I really shouldn't while…”
“Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,” Johnny said. “What about it?”
“Well…”
“Bring me my juice, Dad!” his mother cried hoarsely. “Feel like I could drink a quart!”
“Would you get out of here?” he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.
The nurse left.
“Ma,” he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him-seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.
“Ma,” he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.
“Gimme those nails, I can do that,” she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. “I want Johnny.”
“Ma, I'm here.”
“John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!”