Hearts In Atlantis

“Yes,” she said without turning. “But I can still hear her, far away. She’s screaming.”

“Who’s screaming?” Liz asked. Carol didn’t answer her. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Liz looked at it for a moment, as if to make sure Carol wasn’t going to pop back out again, then turned to Ted. “Who’s screaming?”

Ted only looked at her warily, as if expecting another ICBM attack at any moment.

Liz began to smile. It was a smile Bobby knew: her I’m-losing-mytemper smile. Was it possible she had any left to lose? With her black eyes, broken nose, and swollen lip, the smile made her look horrid: not his mother but some lunatic.

“Quite the Good Samaritan, aren’t you? How many feels did you cop while you were fixing her up? She hasn’t got much, but I bet you checked what you could, didn’t you? Never miss an opportunity, right? Come on and fess up to your mamma.”

Bobby looked at her with growing despair. Carol had told her everything—all of the truth—and it made no difference. No differ-ence! God!

“There is a dangerous adult in this room,” Ted said, “but it isn’t me.”

She looked first uncomprehending, then incredulous, then furious. “How dare you? How dare you? ”

“He didn’t do anything!” Bobby screamed. “Didn’t you hear what Carol said? Didn’t you—”

“Shut your mouth,” she said, not looking at him. She looked only at Ted. “T he cops are going to be very interested in you, I think. Don called Hartford on Friday, before . . . before. I asked him to. He has friends there. You never worked for the State of Connecticut, not in the Office of the Comptroller, not anywhere else. You were in jail, weren’t you?”

“In a way I suppose I was,” Ted said. He seemed calmer now in spite of the blood flowing down the side of his face. He took the cig-arettes out of his shirt pocket, looked at them, put them back. “But not the kind you’re thinking of.”

And not in this world, Bobby thought.

“What was it for?” she asked. “Making little girls feel better in the first degree?”

“I have something valuable,” Ted said. He reached up and tapped his temple. The finger he tapped with came away dotted with blood. “There are others like me. And there are people whose job it is to catch us, keep us, and use us for . . . well, use us, leave it at that. I and two others escaped. One was caught, one was killed. Only I remain free. If, that is . . .” He looked around. “. . . you call this freedom.”

“You’re crazy. Crazy old Brattigan, nuttier than a holiday fruit-cake. I’m calling the police. Let them decide if they want to put you back in the jail you broke out of or in Danbury Asylum.” She bent, reached for the spilled phone.

“No, Mom!” Bobby said, and reached for her. “Don’t—”

“Bobby, no!” Ted said sharply.

Bobby pulled back, looking first at his mom as she scooped up the phone, then at Ted.

“Not as she is now,” Ted told him. “As she is now, she can’t stop biting.”

Liz Garfield gave Ted a brilliant, almost unspeakable smile— Good try, you bastard— and took the receiver off the cradle.

“What’s happening?” Carol cried from the bathroom. “Can I come out now?”

“Not yet, darling,” Ted called back. “A little longer.”

Liz poked the telephone’s cutoff buttons up and down. She stopped, listened, seemed satisfied. She began to dial. “We’re going to find out who you are,” she said. She spoke in a strange, confiding tone. “That should be pretty interesting. And what you’ve done. That might be even more interesting.”

“If you call the police, they’ll also find out who you are and what you’ve done,” Ted said.

She stopped dialing and looked at him. It was a cunning sideways stare Bobby had never seen before. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“A foolish woman who should have chosen better. A foolish woman who had seen enough of her boss to know better—who had overheard him and his cronies often enough to know better, to know that any ‘seminar’ they attended mostly had to do with booze and sex-parties. Maybe a little reefer, as well. A foolish woman who let her greed overwhelm her good sense—”

“What do you know about being alone?” she cried. “I have a son to raise!” She looked at Bobby, as if remembering the son she had to raise for the first time in a little while.

“How much of this do you want him to hear?” Ted asked.

“You don’t know anything. You can’t.”

“I know everything. The question is, how much do you want Bobby to know? How much do you want your neighbors to know? If the police come and take me, they’ll know what I know, that I promise you.” He paused. His pupils remained steady but his eyes seemed to grow. “I know everything. Believe me—don’t put it to the test.”

“Why would you hurt me that way?”

“Given a choice I wouldn’t. You have been hurt enough, by your-self as well as by others. Let me leave, that’s all I’m asking you to do. I was leaving anyway. Let me leave. I did nothing but try to help.”

“Oh yes,” she said, and laughed. “Help. Her sitting on you practi-cally naked. Help.”