the fortunes of merchant families—only straight rows of small white headstones and long, level stretches of unbroken ground.
Stacy Talbot’s grave lay at the far end of the occupied section. The mounds of excavated earth had been covered with strips of imitation grass of an unearthly, chemical green. The young priest from St. Robert’s stood beneath a canopy and performed with what looked to Poole like fussy satisfaction in his own elegance. The schoolchildren, presumably considered too young for an actual burial, were not present. William and Mary Talbot stood with bowed heads among their relatives and neighbors. Poole knew better than half of the crowd of neighbors, who appeared more numerous outside in the cemetery than inside St. Robert’s. They were parents of his patients, some of them his own neighbors. Poole stood a little distance away from these people. He had really only been a doctor here: none of these people were his friends. Judy had been too busy and too anxious to invite people to their house; she had been secretly scornful of their lives and their ambitions. During the service Poole saw a few of them notice him—a little outburst of whispers, a few glances and smiles.
Because this was a child’s burial, Poole found himself remembering Robbie’s. He felt drained by too much recent grief: an era, in many ways the calmest and most productive of his life, seemed to be sliding into the ground with Stacy Talbot’s coffin. His heart ached for William and Mary Talbot, who had no other children and whose daughter had been so bright and brave. For an instant this grief pierced him like an arrow, and Stacy Talbot’s death was an abyss—a monster had taken her, whittled at her body, killed her inch by inch. Poole wished he had someone to hold, someone with whom he could cry, but he stood at the edge of the mourners and cried by himself.
It was over soon, and the people who had known Stacy turned away toward their cars. William Talbot came up to Michael and put his arms around him and then backed away, too moved to speak. Mary Talbot put her patrician face beside his and embraced him. “Oh, I miss her,” Michael said. “Thank you,” Mary Talbot whispered.
Poole said good-bye to the Talbots and turned away to walk deeper into the cemetery on one of the narrow paths that ran between the neat rows of stones.
In other years he had come here every week. Judy had come with him twice, then ceased to come—she said the visits were morbid. Maybe it was morbid: Poole did not care, because they were necessary. Eventually they had ceased to be so necessary. His last visit had been the day before he had gone to Washington to meet Beevers, Conor, and Tina.
Behind him he heard the slamming of car doors as Stacy Talbot’s mourners began to leave.
Poole wished that Tim Underhill was beside him—his was the company he most wanted now. Underhill could make sense of what was happening, he could do justice to sorrow. Poole felt that he had gone through the funeral in an unfeeling daze from which he had awakened at only the last possible minute. Poole left the path and began to walk a narrow invisible line between individual graves in the direction of the woods that bordered the cemetery.
A wave of dizziness went through him, and the air went very dark, then very light before the dizziness left him.
The scent of strong sunlight and massed flowers had suddenly filled the cooling air, a scent so powerful and beautiful that it nearly lifted Poole off the ground, and in another quick white dazzle of light Poole saw a man who must have been six and a half feet tall standing between himself and Robbie’s grave. The man was smiling at him. He had curly light brown hair and was a slim muscular man who looked as though he could move very quickly. Poole felt an instantaneous love for this man, and then realized that this was not a man at all. Time had stopped. Poole and the being were encased in a bubble of silence, and the being moved gracefully to one side to allow Poole the sight of Robbie’s headstone …
… and a car door slammed, and a few quiet voices murmured back at Stacy’s gravesite, and a tribe of sparrows wheeled over his head and settled onto the ground for an instant only before shooting off again toward the woods. Poole still felt light-headed, and his eyes hurt. He stepped forward again and found himself wrapped in the last traces of a strong clear scent of sunshine and flowers. The being was gone.
There was Robbie’s white stone before him: Robbie’s full name, which now seemed so formal, Robbie’s dates.
The unearthly odor was gone, but it seemed to Poole that as if in compensation all the natural earthly odors around him had doubled or tripled in intensity. He was inundated with the odors of the grass, the life and freshness of the soil, the fragrance of roses in one of the cemetery’s vases beside the next headstone, ALICE ALISON LEAF 1952–1978, even the clean strong slightly dusty smell of the gravel on the cemetery paths, the colors of all things about him boomed and snapped and sizzled. For a moment the world had split open like a peach to reveal an overpowering sweetness and goodness.
Who had appeared before him? What? A god?
The charged radiance was slipping away. Poole felt the priest’s eyes on him, and he turned around and found himself looking at an indifferent landscape. The last cars had nearly reached the cemetery gates, and only his Audi and the hearse were still drawn up on the narrow drive. The funeral director and one of his assistants busily dismantled the electronic scaffold that had lowered Stacy’s coffin. Two men in green pants and donkey jackets, cemetery employees, lifted the grassy carpet off the mounds of raw earth and made ready to fill the grave. A yellow earth-moving machine had appeared from behind a screen of bushes. Poole felt as if he had just passed through some kind of extraordinary psychic bubble that still had the power to invest these homely activities with its ebbing power, as if what Poole saw before him were only the visible traces of a great glory.
Certain that he was still being watched, Poole turned around again and sensed more than saw a quick, surprised movement at the edge of the woods. He looked up toward it just in time to see a shadowy figure melting back between the trees. Poole’s whole body felt a jolt. He was about thirty yards from the edge of the woods. The extraordinary feeling of well-being that had surrounded him until a few seconds ago completely vanished into its own afterglow. Whatever had withdrawn into the trees seemed to vanish back even further, flickering between the trunks of trees. Poole stepped forward between his son’s grave and Alice Alison Leaf’s.
This time Michael knew that he had seen Koko. Koko had somehow followed him to the cemetery, which meant that he had followed him to Conor’s apartment.
Poole walked between the graves until he reached the empty part of the graveyard and then walked over brown winter grass toward the trees. Far back in the darkness of the woods he thought he could see a still pale figure watching him from beside a tree. “Come on out!” Poole yelled. The figure far back in the woods did not move.
“Come on out and talk to me!” Poole shouted.
He heard the funeral director and the cemetery workmen stop whatever they were doing to look at him.
The figure in the woods wavered like a match flame. Poole moved closer to the first bare trees, and the figure disappeared backward to flicker out behind a massive trunk deep in the woods. “Come out here!” Poole yelled.
“You okay?” a voice called out, and Poole turned around to see a man as heavy as a professional wrestler standing on the bulldozer, his hands cupped around his mouth.
Poole waved him off and began to trot toward the woods. The figure had disappeared. The woods, of heavily overgrown birch, oak, and maple, home to several families of foxes and raccoons, ran for another fifty yards down into a ravine and up over a crest, and down to the expressway.
A dim shape, dark now instead of pale, moved like a deer between two oaks.
Poole yelled for him to stop and passed between the first of the trees. Ahead of him was a low bristling tangle of brush, the grey diagonal line of a dead toppled ash tree, the rough accidental suggestion of a path that led around the tangle of brush, beneath the toppled ash, and on between the trees until it split apart into a hundred narrow byways of fallen leaves and spangles of light. The little shadow was inching almost provocatively backward toward the ravine, coaxing him forward.
Poole glanced again over his shoulder and saw all four men around Stacy’s grave, including the beefy gravedigger on the bulldozer, staring at him.
He ran around the dry tangle of brush, thinking that a god standing by his son’s grave had beckoned him forward, ducked to pass beneath the slanting line of the fallen ash, and saw a silver wire thin as a strand from a
