The Talisman

(Haahhhhhhhhh . . . )

washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill.

“Jack!”

Suddenly the lighted ball in the figure’s hands flashed up brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jack’s face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home.

The figure broke into a run.

Jack!

Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks.

8

“Mom!”

Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the old-fashioned telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awful —it had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window.

“Mom!”

He pounded up the stairs, first by twos, then by threes, the Talisman stuttering one burst of pink-red light and then falling dark in his hands.

“Mom!”

Down the hallway to their rooms, feet flying, and now, at last, he heard her voice—no brassy bellow or slightly throaty chuckle now; this was the dusty croak of a creature on the outer edge of death.

“Jacky?”

“Mom!”

He burst into the room.

9

Down in the car, a nervous Richard Sloat stared upward through his polarized window. What was he doing here, what was Jack doing here? Richard’s eyes hurt. He strained to see the upper windows in the murky evening. As he bent sideways and stared upward, a blinding white flash erupted from several of the upstairs windows, sending a momentary, almost palpable sheet of dazzling light over the entire front of the hotel. Richard put his head between his knees and moaned.

10

She was on the floor beneath the window—he saw her there finally. The rumpled, somehow dusty-looking bed was empty, the whole bedroom, as disordered as a child’s room, seemed empty . . . Jack’s stomach had frozen and words backed up in his throat. Then the Talisman had shot out another of its great illuminating flashes, in and for an instant turning everything in the room a pure colorless white. She croaked, “Jacky?” once more, and he bellowed, “MOM!” seeing her crumpled like a candy wrapper under the window. Thin and lank, her hair trailed on the room’s dirty carpet. Her hands seemed like tiny animal paws, pale and scrabbling. “Oh Jesus, Mom, oh jeepers, oh holy moe,” he babbled, and somehow moved across the room without taking a step, he floated, he swam across Lily’s crowded frozen bedroom in an instant that seemed as sharp to him as an image on a photographic plate. Her hair puddled on the grimy carpet, her small knotty hands.

He inhaled the thick odor of illness, of close death. Jack was no doctor, and he was ignorant of most of the things so wrong with Lily’s body. But he knew one thing—his mother was dying, her life was falling away through invisible cracks, and she had very little time left. She had uttered his name twice, and that was about all the life left in her would permit. Already beginning to weep, he put his hand on her unconscious head, and set the Talisman on the floor beside her.

Her hair felt full of sand and her head was burning. “Oh Mom, Mom,” he said, and got his hands under her. He still could not see her face. Through her flimsy nightgown her hip felt as hot as the door of a stove. Against his other palm, her left shoulder blade pulsed with an equal warmth. She had no comfortable pads of flesh over her bones—for a mad second of stopped time it was as though she were a small dirty child somehow left ill and alone. Sudden unbidden tears squirted out of his eyes. He lifted her, and it was like picking up a bundle of clothes. Jack moaned. Lily’s arms sprawled loosely, gracelessly.

(Richard)

Richard had felt . . . not as bad as this, not even when Richard had felt like a dried husk on his back, coming down the final hill into poisoned Point Venuti. There had been little but pimples and a rash left of Richard at that point, but he, too, had burned with fever. But Jack realized with a sort of unthinking horror that there had been more actual life, more substance, to Richard than his mother now possessed. Still, she had called his name.

(and Richard had nearly died)

She had called his name. He clung to that. She had made it to the window. She had called his name. It was impossible, unthinkable, immoral to imagine that she could die. One of her arms dangled before him like a reed meant to be cut in half by a scythe . . . her wedding ring had fallen off her finger. He was crying steadily, unstoppably, unconsciously. “Okay, Mom,” he said, “okay, it’s okay now, okay, it’s okay.”

From the limp body in his arms came a vibration that might have been assent.

He gently placed her on the bed, and she rolled weightlessly sideways. Jack put a knee on the bed and leaned over her. The tired hair fell away from her face.

11

Once, at the very beginning of his journey, he had for a shameful moment seen his mother as an old woman—a spent, exhausted old woman in a tea shop. As soon as he had recognized her, the illusion had dissipated, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had been restored to her unaging self. For the real, the true Lily Cavanaugh could never have aged—she was eternally a blonde with a quick switchblade of a smile and a go-to-hell amusement in her face. This had been the Lily Cavanaugh whose picture on a billboard had strengthened her son’s heart.

The woman on the bed looked very little like the actress on the billboard. Jack’s tears momentarily blinded him. “Oh don’t don’t don’t,” he said, and laid one palm across her yellowed cheek.

She did not look as though she had enough strength to lift her hand. He took her tight dry discolored claw of a