'Not at all,' I said, although I agreed with her.
'Don't mention it.'
I got into the elevator and pushed for the lobby. The nurse raised her hand and twiddled her fingers. I twid- dled my own in return, and then the door slid between us. The car started down. I looked at the fin-gernail marks on the backs of my hands and thought that I was an awful creature, the lowest of the low. Even if it had only been a dream, I was the lowest of the goddam low. Take her, I'd said. She was my mother but I had said it just the same: Take my ma, don't take me. She had raised me, worked overtime for me, waited in line with me under the hot summer sun in a dusty little New Hampshire amusement park, and in the end I had hardly hesitated. Take her, don't take me. Chickenshit, chickenshit, you fucking chickenshit.
When the elevator door opened I stepped out, took the lid off the litter basket, and there it was, lying in someone's almost-empty paper coffee cup: i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia.
I bent, plucked the button out of the cold puddle of
coffee it was lying in, wiped it on my jeans, put it in
my pocket. Throwing it away had been the wrong idea. It was my button now-good luck charm or bad luck charm, it was mine. I left the hospital, giving Yvonne a little wave on my way by. Outside, the moon rode the roof of the sky, flooding the world with its strange and perfectly dreamy light. I had never felt so tired or so dispirited in my whole life. I wished I had the choice to make again. I would have made a different one. Which was funny-if I'd found her dead, as I'd expected to, I think I could have lived with it. After all, wasn't that the way stories like this one were supposed to end?
Nobody wants to give a fella a ride in town, the old man with the truss had said, and how true that was. I walked all the way across Lewiston-three dozen blocks of Lisbon Street and nine blocks of Canal Street, past all the bottle clubs with the jukeboxes playing old songs by Foreigner and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC in French-without putting my thumb out a single time. It would have done no good. It was well past eleven before I reached the DeMuth Bridge. Once I was on the Harlow side, the first car I raised my thumb to stopped. Forty minutes later I was fishing the key out from under the red wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed, and ten minutes after that I was in bed. It occurred to me as I dropped off that it was the first time in my life I'd slept in that house all by myself.
...
It was the phone that woke me up at quarter past noon. I thought it would be the hospital, someone from the hospital saying my mother had taken a sud-den turn for the worse and had passed away only a few minutes ago, so sorry. But it was only Mrs. McCurdy, wanting to be sure I'd gotten home all right, wanting to know all the details of my visit the night before (she took me through it three times, and by the end of the third recitation I had begun to feel like a criminal being interrogated on a murder charge), also wanting to know if I'd like to ride up to the hospital with her that afternoon. I told her that would be great. When I hung up, I crossed the room to the bedroom door. Here was a full-length mirror. In it was a tall, unshaven young man with a small potbelly, dressed only in baggy undershorts. 'You have to get it together, big boy,' I told my reflection. 'Can't go through the rest of your life thinking that every time the phone rings it's someone calling to tell you your mother's dead.'
Not that I would. Time would dull the memory,
time always did . . . but it was amazing how real and
immediate the night before still seemed. Every edge
and corner was sharp and clear. I could still see
Staub's good-looking young face beneath his turned-around
cap, and the cigarette behind his ear, and the
way the smoke had seeped out of the incision on his
neck when he inhaled. I could still hear him telling the story of the Cadillac that was selling cheap. Time would blunt the edges and round the corners, but not for awhile. After all, I had the button, it was on the dresser by the bathroom door. The button was my souvenir. Didn't the hero of every ghost story come away with a souvenir, something that proved it had all really happened?
There was an ancient stereo system in the corner of the room, and I shuffled through my old tapes, hunt-ing for something to listen to while I shaved. I found one marked folk mix and put it in the tape player. I'd made it in high school and could barely remember what was on it. Bob Dylan sang about the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, Tom Paxton sang about his old ramblin' pal, and then Dave Van Ronk started to sing about the cocaine blues. Halfway through the third verse I paused with my razor by my cheek. Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin, Dave sang in his rasping voice. Doctor say it kill me but he don't say when. And that was the answer, of course. A guilty conscience had lead me to assume that my mother would die immediately, and Staub had never corrected that assumption-how could he, when I had never even asked?-but it clearly wasn't true. Doctor say it kill me but he don't say when.
What in God's name was I beating myself up about?
Didn't my choice amount to no more than the natu-
