the house, from the front door to the kitchen. She opened her mouth to call him ... and then shut it again. She was intimidated by the sleeping house that wasn't her house.
Something about the way he had been walking... the set of his body ... but it had been years since
She descended the stairs quickly and quietly in her bare feet. She followed Brett into the kitchen. He was dressed only in light blue pajama bottoms, their white cotton drawstring hanging down to below the neat fork of his crotch. Although it was barely midsummer he was already very brown - he was naturally dark, like his father, and tanned easily.
Standing in the doorway she saw him in profile, that same fine, clear morning light pouring over his body as he hunted along the line of cupboards above the stove and the counter and the sink. Her heart was full of wonder and fear.
She saw it clearly because Brett wasn't awake. As a child there had been episodes of sleepwalking; about two dozen of them in all, between the ages of four and eight. She had finally gotten worried enough - scared enough - to consult with Dr. Gresham (without Joe's knowledge). She wasn't afraid that Brett was losing his mind -anyone who was around him could see he was bright and normal - but she was afraid that he might hurt himself while he was in that
strange state. Dr. Gresham had told her that was very unlikely, and that most of the funny ideas people had about somnambulism came from cheap, badly researched movies.
'We only know a Iittle about sleepwalking,' he had told her, 'but we do know that it is more common in children than it is in adults. There's a constantly growing, constantly maturing interaction between the mind and body, Mrs. Camber, and a lot of people who have done research in this field believe that sleepwalking may be a sympton of a temporary and not terribly significant imbalance between the two.'
'Like growing pains?' she had asked doubtfully.
'Very much like that,' Gresham had said with a grin. He drew a bell curve on his office pad, suggesting that Brett's somnambulism would reach a peak, hold for a while, then begin to taper off. Eventually it would disappear.
She had gone away a little reassured by the doctor's conviction that Brett would not go sleepwalking out a window or down the middle of a highway, but without being much enlightened. A week later she had brought Brett in. He had been just a month or two past his sixth birthday then. Gresham had given him a complete physical and had pronounced him normal in every way. And indeed, Gresham had appeared to be right. The last of what Charity thought of as his 'nighwalks' had occurred more than two years ago.
The last, that was, until now.
Brett opened the cupboards one by one, dosing each neatly before going on to the next, disclosing Holly's casserole dishes, the extra elements to her Jenn-Aire range, her dishtowels neatly folded, her coffee-and-tea creamer, her as-yet-incomplete set of Depression glassware. His eyes were wide and blank, and she felt a cool certainty that he was seeing the contents of other cabinets, in another place.
She felt the old, helpless terror that she had almost completely forgotten as parents do the alarms and the excursions of their children's early years: the teething, the vaccination that brought the frighteningly high fever as a little extra added attraction, the croup, the car infection, the hand or leg that suddenly began to spray. irrational blood.
He opened the last cupboard and took down a pink gravy boat. He put it on the counter. He picked up empty air and mimed pouring something into the gravy boat. Her arms suddenly broke out in gooseflesh as she realized where he was and what this dumbshow was all about. It was a routine he went through each day at home. He was feeding Cujo.
She took an involuntary step toward him and then stopped. She didn't believe those wives' tales about what might happen if you woke a sleepwalker - that the soul would be forever shut out of the body, that madness might result, or sudden death -and she hadn't needed Dr. Gresham to reassure her on that score. She had gotten a book on special loan from the Portland City Library ... but she hadn't really needed that, either. Her own good common sense told her what happened when you woke up a sleepwalker was that they woke up - no more and no less than just that. There might be tears, even mild hysteria, but that sort of reaction would be provoked by simple disorientation.
Still, she had never wakened Brett during one of his nightwalks, and she didn't dare to do so now. Good common sense was one thing. Her unreasoning fear was another, and she was suddenly very afraid, and unable to think why. What could be so dreadful in Brett's acted-out dream of feeding his dog? It was perfectly natural, as worried as he had been about Cujo.
He was bent over now, holding the gravy boat out, the drawstring of his pajama trousers making a right-angled white line to the horizontal plane of the red and black linoleum floor. His face went though a slow-motion pantomime of sorrow. He spoke then, muttering the words as sleepers so often do, gutturally, rapidly, almost unintelligibly. And with no emotion in the words themselves, that was all inside, held in the cocoon of whatever dream had been vivid enough to make him nightwalk again, after two quiet years. There was nothing inherently melodramatic about the words, spoken all of a rush in a quick sleeping sigh, but Charity's hand went to her throat anyway. The flesh there was cold, cold.
'Cujo's not hungry no more,' Brett said, the words riding out on that sigh. He stood up again, now holding the gravy boat cradled to his chest. 'Not no more, not no more.'
He stood immobile for a short time by the counter, and Charity did likewise by the kitchen door. A single tear had slipped down his face. He put the gravy boat on the counter and headed for the door. His eyes were open but they slipped indifferently and unseeingly over his mother. He stopped, looking back.
'Look in the weeds,' he said to someone who was not there.
Then be began to walk toward her again. She stood aside, her hand still pressed against her throat. He passed her quickly and noiselessly on his bare feet and was gone up the hall toward the stairs.
She turned to follow him and remembered the gravy boat. It stood by itself on the bare, ready-for-the-day counter like the focal point in a weird painting. She picked it up and it slipped through her fingers - she hadn't realized that her fingers were slick with sweat. She juggled it briefly, imagining the crash in the still, sleeping hours. Then she had it cradled safely in both hands. She put it back on the shelf and closed the cupboard door and could only stand there for a moment, listening to the heavy thud of her heart, feeling her strangeness in this kitchen. She was an intruder in this kitchen. Then she followed her son.
She got to the doorway of his room just in time to see him climb into bed. He pulled the sheet up and rolled over on his left side, his usual sleeping position. Although she knew it was over now, Charity stood there yet awhile longer.
Somebody down the hall coughed, reminding her again that this was someone else's house. She felt a strong wave of homesickness; for a few moments it was as if her stomach were full of some numbing gas, the kind of stuff dentists use. In this fine still morning light, her thoughts of divorce seemed as immature and without regard for the realities as the thoughts of a child. It was easy for her to think of such things here. It wasn't her house, not her place.
Why had his pantomime of feeding Cujo, and those rapid, sighing words, frightened her so much? Cujo's
She went back to her own room and lay there in bed as the sun came up and brightened the room. At breakfast,
