She moved closer to get a look at the inscription of the headstone:
THOMAS WARREN BULMER
Tommy, we hardly knew ye.
Her throat tightened. She took another step to see the dates at the bottom of the brass plaque. The date of birth was eight years ago today. She caught her breath involuntarily when she saw that the date of death was only three months later.
Oh, God! I didn't know!
Filled with guilt and embarrassment for intruding on him at a moment like this, she spun and began to hurry back down the rise.
"Don't go," he said.
Sylvia stopped, turned. He was still squatting, but he was looking up at her. His eyes were dry and he was smiling.
"Come say happy birthday to Tommy."
She went and stood at his side while he gathered up the toy packaging.
"I didn't know."
"No reason you should." He stood up and surveyed the toys he had displayed on the headstone. "How's it look?"
"Great." She didn't know what else to say.
"Well, it won't last long. One of the groundskeepers will rip them off for his kids. But that's okay. Better than having them ground up by the lawnmowers. At least somebody will be getting something out of them. Tommy would have loved Star Wars, you know. Especially Jabba the Hutt. Mean as he was, big fat Jabba would have made Tommy laugh."
"How did he—?" She caught herself. The question had filled her mind since the instant she had read the plaque, but she hadn't meant to ask.
Alan didn't seem to mind. "Tommy had a congenital heart defect: endocardial fibroelastosis. For the sake of simplicity, let's just say that his heart wasn't up to the job. We took him to the city. We had every specialist in Manhattan look at him. They tried everything they knew. But nobody could save him." His voice cracked. "And so he died. He was just learning to smile when he up and died on us."
He raised his free hand to his eyes as a sob racked him. Then another. He dropped the wrappings and covered his face with both hands.
Sylvia didn't know what to do. She had never seen a man cry before, and Alan's grief was so deep that she wanted to cry herself. She put an arm around his hunched shoulders. Touching him and feeling the tremors within him made his pain a physical thing. She wanted to say something comforting… but what could she say?
Alan suddenly regained control and wiped his face dry on his sleeves.
"Sorry," he said, looking away, obviously embarrassed. "I'm not a crybaby. I come here every May twenty-seventh, and I haven't cried for the last five or six times." He sniffed. "Don't know what's the matter with me today."
A thought struck Sylvia with the force of an explosion. "Is it because you think that maybe if he had been born this year, you could have saved him?"
Alan's eyes were wide as he turned toward her.
"Ba told me," she said.
"Ba?" It almost seemed as if he didn't recognize the name.
"You know—the big Vietnamese guy. He says he saw you do something at the party."
"The party," Alan said in a flat, vacant tone. "It seems so long ago." And then his eyes lit. "The party! That MTA guy's head! Yeah… Ba could have seen."
There was silence for a moment, then Alan took a deep, shuddering breath. "It's true, you know. I can… do things I would have laughed off as utterly impossible two months ago. I… I can cure just about anything when the time is right. Anything. But it doesn't do Tommy any good, does it? I mean, what goddamn good is it if I can't use it on Tommy, who was the most important little sick person in my life!"
Biting his lip, he turned and walked a few steps away, then returned.
"You know something?" he said, slightly more composed. "Before you came I was sitting there actually thinking of digging up the grave and seeing if I could bring him back."
With a quake of fear, Sylvia remembered the old story of The Monkey's Paw.
"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy," he said, shaking his head sharply.
Sylvia smiled and tried to lighten the mood. "Why should you be any different from the rest of us?"
Alan managed to return the smile. "Did you come here to see someone?"
Sylvia thought of Greg, whose marker was on the other side of the field. She had buried him close to home rather than in Arlington, but she had never returned to the site.
"Only you." He gave her a puzzled look. "Ba has some things to tell you."
He shrugged. "Let's go."
___18.___
Alan
"And you say this man simply touched you?"
Ba nodded in response to the question.
Alan sat with Sylvia in the back of the Graham; it was the first time he had been in the car, and he marveled at its plush interior. Ba sat up front, half-turned toward them. The car was still parked in the cemetery.
Ba had told them of his freakish growth as a teenager and how his mother feared he would grow too tall to live among others. When the man who had what Ba called the Dat-tay-vao came to his village, his mother had brought him forward for healing.
"What did you feel?" Alan asked. He could barely suppress his excitement. The folky-mythical aspects of Ba's tale were hokey, but they didn't matter. Here was proof! Eyewitness corroboration that such a power existed!
"I felt a pain deep in my head and almost fell to the ground. But after that I grew no taller."
"That backs up the Vietnam connection. It all fits!"
"What's the Vietnam connection?" Sylvia asked.
Alan decided it was best to start at the beginning, so he told her about the derelict, Walter Erskine, and the incident in the emergency room.
"The healings started shortly after that. I've always been sure that bum passed on the power to me—how and why, I don't know, but I had my lawyer, Tony DeMarco, look into Erskine's past. Tony found out he was a medic in Vietnam. Came home crazy. Thought he could heal people. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by the V.A. Joined a faith-healing tent show in the South but got kicked off the tour because he wasn't healing anybody and was never sober."
"Alcohol puts the Dat-tay-vao to sleep," Ba said.
Alan wondered if that could be why Erskine became a drunk—to stifle the power. "Evidently he lived on the Bowery for years when for some reason he came out here to Monroe and found me, gave me some sort of electric shock, and died. Is that how the Dat-tay-vao is passed on?"
Ba said, "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I do not know. It is said that the Buddha himself brought the Dat-tay-vao to our land."
"But why me, Ba?" Alan desperately wanted to know the answer to that question.
"I cannot say, Doctor. But as the Song tells: 'It seeks the one who would touch, / Who would cut away pain and ill.' '
" 'Seeks'?" Alan was uneasy about the idea of being sought out by this power. He remembered the derelict's words: You! You're the one! "Why seek me?"
Ba spoke simply and with conviction. "You are a healer, Doctor. The Dat-tay-vao knows all healers."
Alan saw Sylvia shudder. "Do you still have that poem, Ba?" The driver handed her a folded sheet of paper and Sylvia passed it to Alan. "Here."
Alan read the poem. It was confusing and sounded more like a riddle than a song. He found one line particularly disturbing. He said, "I'm not too keen on this part about the balance. What's that mean?"
"I'm sorry, Doctor," Ba said. "I do not know. But I fear it might mean that there is a price to be paid."
"I don't like the sound of that!" Sylvia said.
"Neither do I," Alan said, his uneasiness growing. "But so far I've kept my health. And I haven't got any rotting portrait in the attic. So I think I'll just keep on doing what I've been doing—only a little more discreetly."