[“Okay, Lois-tonight’s for sleeping.
She went into the bathroom and the shower went on. A few minutes later, Ralph heard her brushing her teeth. It was nice to know she still had them. During the ten minutes she was gone he managed to do a certain amount of undressing, although his throbbing ribs made it slow work. He finally succeeded in wriggling McGovern’s sweater off and pushing out of his shoes. His shirt came next, and he was fumbling ineffectually with the buckle of his belt when Lois came out with her hair tied back and her face shining.
Ralph was stunned by her beauty, and suddenly felt much too big and stupid (not to mention old) for his own good. She was wearing a long rose-colored silk nightgown and he could smell the lotion she had used on her hands. It was a good smell.
“Let me do that,” she said, and had his belt unbuckled before he could say much, one way or the other. There was nothing erotic about it; she moved with the efficiency of a woman who had often helped her husband dress and undress during the last year of his life.
“We’re down again,” he said. “This time I didn’t even feel it happening.”
“I did, while I was in the shower. I was glad, actually.
Trying to wash your hair through an aura is very distracting.”
The wind gusted outside, shaking the house and blowing a long, shivering note across the mouth of a downspout. They looked toward the window, and although he was back down on the SbortTime level, Ralph was suddenly sure that Lois was sharing his own thought: Atropos was out there somewhere right now, no doubt disappointed by the way things had gone but by no means crushed, bloody but unbowed, down but not out.
From now on they can call him Old One-Ear, Ralph thought, and shivered. He imagined Atropos swinging erratically through the scared, excited populace of the city like a rogue asteroid, peering and hiding, stealing souvenirs and slashing balloon-strings… taking solace in his work, in other words. ing Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitt’ f that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not on top so very long ago. How did I ever find the courage?
he wondered, but he supposed he knew. The diamond earrings the little monster had been wearing had provided most of it. Did Atropos know those earrings had been his biggest mistake? Probably not. In his way, Doc #3 had proved even more ignorant of Short-Time motivations than Clotho and Lachesis.
He turned to Lois and ras ed her hands. “I lost your earrings again.
This time they’re gone for good, I think. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. They were already lost, remember? And I’m not worried about Harold and Jan anymore, because now I’ve got a friend to help me when people don’t treat me right, or when I just get scared. Don’t I?”
“Yes. You most certainly do.”
She kissed him, ugged him tightly, and kissed him again. Lois had apparently not forgotten a single thing she’d ever learned about kissing, and it seemed to Ralph that she’d learned quite a lot. “Go on and hop in the shower.” He started to say that he thought he’d fall asleep the moment he got his head under a stream of warm water, but then she added something which changed his mind in a hurry: “Don’t take offense, but there’s a funny smell on you, especially on your hands.
It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.”
Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows.
10 Only When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts her face showed, and that was visible only from the nose up. Ralph crossed the room quickly, wearing only his undershorts and painfully conscious of his spindly legs and potbelly.
He tossed back the covers and slid in quickly, gasping a little as the cool sheets slid along his warm skin.
Lois slipped over to his side of the bed at once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.
“Thank God there’s a man in my bed,” Lois said sleepily.
“Thank God it’s me,” Ralph replied, and she laughed.
“Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin”
“Nope. I’m sure they’ll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up.” The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind-one that had probably been waiting there all along.
“Lois?”
“Mmmmm?”
In his mind’s eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world’s cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
“Do you think we’ll sleep through?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said unhesitatingly. “I think we’ll sleep just fine.”
A moment later, Lois was doing just that.
Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.
The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again-like the world’s biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world’s biggest pop-bottle-and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.
Except there was something better-one thing, at least-and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.
Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best, Ralph thought.
The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names-peace, serenity, fulfillment-but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are krown but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.
When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn’t hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o’clock in the morning. They slept-sometimes apart but mostly together-until just past seven o’clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.
Lois made them breakfast at sunset-splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind-to create that sensation of blink, He couldn’t do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.
“Just as well, she said, bringing their plates to the table.
“I suppose,” Ralph agreed, but he still felt as he would have if he had lost the ring Carolyn had given him instead of the one he had taken from Atropos-as if some small but essential object had gone rolling out of his life with a wink and a gleam. harder to believe what he did know. There was the scar between the elbow and wrist of his right arm, of course, but he even began to wonder if that wasn’t something he had acquired long ago, during those years of his life when there had been no white in his hair and he had still believed, deep in his heart, that old age was a myth, or a dream, or a thing reserved for people not as special as he was.
Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the auras had begun to fade, as well. By the following week they were gone, and Ralph began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing hadn’t been some strange dream. He knew that wasn’t so, but it became harder and Winding the Deathwatch Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape and so move forward, as someone in the woods at night might hear the sound of approaching feet and stop to listen; then, instead of silence he hears some creature trying to be silent.
What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks; the other ever closer, yet not really hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.
If I had some wings, I’d fly you all around;
If I had some money, I’d buy you the goddam town;
If I had the strength, then maybe I coulda pulled you through;
If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you, If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you.
On January 2, 1994, Lois Chasse became Lois Roberts.
Her son, Harold, gave her away. Harold’s wife did not attend the ceremony; she was up in Bangor with what Ralph considered a highly suspect case of bronchitis. He kept his suspicions to himself, however, being far from disappointed at Jan Chasse’s failure to appear.
The groom’s best man was Detective John Leydecker, who still wore a cast on his right arm but otherwise showed no signs of the assignment which had nearly killed him. He had spent four days in a coma, but Leydecker knew how lucky he was; in addition to the State Trooper who had been standing beside him at the time of the explosion, six cops had died, two of them members of Leydecker’s handpicked team.
The bride’s maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguav, and at the reception, the first toast was made by a fellow who liked to say he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. Trigger Vachon delivered a fractured but heartfelt follow-up, concluding with the wish that “Dese two people gonna live to a hunnert and fifty and never know a day of the rheumatiz or constipations!”
When Ralph and Lois left the reception hall, their hair still full of rice thrown for the most part by Faye Chapin and the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, an old man with a book in his hand and a fine cloud of white hair floating around his head came walking up to them.
He had a wide smile on his face.
“Congratulations, Ralph,” he said. “Congratulations, Lois.”
“Thanks, Dor,” Ralph said.
“We missed you,” Lois told him. “Didn’t you get your invitation?
