For a while, she couldn't get enough air. Felt suffocated. She drew great, raw, shuddering breaths, and thought that she would never be able to quiet herself but quiet came.
Worried that tears would frighten Barty, that indulging in a few would result in a ruinous flood, Agnes held back the salt tides. A mother's duty proved to be the stuff from which dams were built.
She got up from the chair, went to the window, and raised the venetian blind rather than look out between its slats.
The night, the stars.
The universe was vast and Barty small, yet the boy's immortal soul made him as important as galaxies, as important as anything in Creation. This Agnes believed. She couldn't tolerate life without the conviction that it had meaning and design, though sometimes she felt that she was a sparrow whose fall had gone unnoticed. Barty sat on the edge of the doctor's desk, legs dangling, holding Red Planet, his place marked by an inserted finger.
Agnes had lifted him to this perch. Now she smoothed his hair, straightened his shirt, and retied his loosened shoelaces, finding it even harder than she had expected to say what needed to be said. She thought she might require Dr. Chan's presence, after all.
Then suddenly she found the right words. More accurately, they seemed to come through her, for she was not conscious of formulating the sentences. The substance of what she said and the tone in which she said it were so perfect that it almost seemed as though an angel had relieved her of this burden by possessing her long enough to help her son understand what must happen and why.
Barty's math and reading skills exceeded those of most eighteen year-olds, but regardless of his brilliance, he was a few days shy of his third birthday. Prodigies were not necessarily as emotionally mature as they were intellectually developed, but Barty listened with sober attention, asked questions, and then sat in silence, staring at the book in his hands, with neither tears nor apparent fear.
At last he said, 'Do you think the doctors know best?'
'Yes, honey. I do.'
'Okay.'
He put the book aside on the desk and reached for her.
Agnes drew him into her arms and lifted him off the desk and embraced him tightly, with his head on her shoulder and his face nestled against her neck, as she'd held him when he was a baby.
'Can we wait till Monday?' he asked.
Some information she'd withheld from him: that the cancer might already have spread, that he might still die even after his eyes were removed-and that if it hadn't yet spread, it might soon do so.
'Why Monday?' she asked.
'I can read now. The twisties are gone.'
'They'll be back.'
'But over the weekend, maybe I could read a few last books.'
'Heinlein, huh?'
He knew the titles that he wanted: 'Tunnel in the Sky, Between Planets, Starman Jones. '
Carrying him to the window, gazing up at the stars, the moon, she said, 'I'll always read to you, Barty.'
'That's different though.'
'Yes. Yes, it is.'
Heinlein dreamed of traveling to far worlds. Prior to his death, John Kennedy had promised that men would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. Barty wanted nothing so grand, only to read a few stories, to lose himself in the wonderful private pleasure of books, because soon each story would be a listening experience only, no longer entirely a private journey.
His breath was warm against her throat: 'And I want to go back home to see some faces.'
'Faces.
'Uncle Edom. Uncle Jacob. Aunt Maria. So I can remember faces after? you know.'
The sky was so deep and cold.
The moon shimmered, and the stars blurred-but only briefly, for her devotion to this boy was a fiery furnace that tempered the steel of her spine and brought a drying heat to her eyes. Without Franklin Chan's full approval but with his complete understanding, Agnes took Barty home. On Monday, they would return to Hoag Hospital, where Barty would receive surgery on Tuesday.
The Bright Beach Library was open until nine on Friday evening. Arriving an hour before closing, they returned the Heinlein novels that Barty had already read and checked out the three that he wanted. In a spirit of optimism, they borrowed a fourth, Podkayne of Mars.
In the car again, a block from home, Barty said, 'Maybe you could just not tell Uncle Edom and Uncle Jacob until Sunday night. They won't handle it real well. You know?'
She nodded. 'I know.'
'If you tell them now, we won't have a happy weekend.'
Happy weekend. His attitude amazed her, and his strength in the face of darkness gave her courage.
At home, Agnes had no appetite, but she fixed Barty a cheese sandwich, spooned potato salad into a dish, added a bag of corn chips and a Coke, and served this late dinner on a tray, in his room, where he was already in bed and reading Tunnel in the Sky.
Edom and Jacob came to the house, asking what Dr. Chan had said, and Agnes lied to them. 'There are some test results we won't have until Monday, but he thinks Barty is going to be all right.'
If either of them suspected that she was lying, it was Edom. He looked puzzled, but he didn't pursue the issue.
She asked Edom to stay in the main house, so Barty wouldn't be alone while she visited Maria Gonzalez for an hour or two. He was pleased to oblige, settling down to watch a television documentary about volcanoes, which promised to include stories about the 1902 eruption of Mont Pelee, on Martinique, which killed 28,000 people within minutes, and other disasters of colossal proportions.
She knew Maria was home, waiting for a call about Barty.
The apartment above Elena's Fashions could be reached by a set of exterior stairs at the back of the building. The climb had never before taxed Agnes in the least, but now it took away her breath and left her legs trembling by the time she reached the top landing.
Maria looked stricken when she answered the doorbell, for she intuited that a visit, instead of a call, meant the worst.
In Maria's kitchen, still just four days past Christmas, Agnes let dissolve her stoic mask, and wept at last.
Later, at home, after Agnes sent Edom back to his apartment, she opened a bottle of vodka that she had bought on the way back from Maria's. She mixed it with orange juice in a waterglass.
She sat at the kitchen table, staring at the glass. After a while she emptied it in the sink without having taken a sip.
She poured cold milk and drank it quickly. As she was rinsing the empty glass, she felt as if she might throw up, but she didn't.
For a long time, she sat alone in the dark living room, in the armchair that had been Joey's favorite, thinking about many things but returning often to the memory of Barty's dry walk in wet weather.
When she went upstairs at 2:10 in the morning, she found the boy fast asleep in the soft lamplight, Tunnel in the Sky at his side.
She curled up in the armchair, watching Barty. She was greedy for the sight of him. She thought she would not doze off, but would spend the night watching over him, yet exhaustion defeated her.
Shortly after six o'clock, Saturday morning, she stirred from a fretful dream and saw Barty sitting up in bed, reading.
During the night, he had awakened, seen her in the chair, and covered her with a blanket.
Smiling, pulling the blanket more tightly around herself, she said, 'You look after your old mom, don't you?'
'You make good pies.'
Caught unaware by the joke, she laughed. 'Well, I'm glad to know I'm good for something. Is there maybe a special pie you'd like me to make today?'
