Cell

in the dark. Clay went to the edge of the slope and called down to them. 'You don't have a doctor, do you?' he asked, without much hope.

The flashlights stopped. There was a murmur of consultation from the dark shapes below, and then a woman's voice called up to him, a rather beautiful voice. 'Leave us alone. You're off-limits.'

Tom joined Clay at the edge of the bank. ' 'And the Levite also passed by on the other side,' ' Tom called down. 'That's King James for fuck you, lady.'

Behind them, Alice suddenly spoke in a strong voice. 'The men in the car will be taken care of. Not as a favor to you but as a warning to others. You understand.'

Tom grabbed Clay's wrist with a cold hand. 'Jesus Christ, she sounds like she's awake.'

Clay took Tom's hand in both of his own and held it. 'That's not her. That's the guy in the red hoodie, using her as a . . . as a loudspeaker.'

In the dark Tom's eyes were huge. 'How do you know that?'

'I know,' Clay said.

Below them, the flashlights were moving away. Soon they were gone and Clay was glad. This was their business, it was private.

16

At half past three, in the ditch of the night, alice said: 'Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden's over.' Then her tone brightened. 'Will there be snow? We'll make a fort, we'll make a leaf, we'll make a bird, we'll make a bird, we'll make a hand, we'll make a blue one, we'll . . .' She trailed off, looking up at stars that turned on the night like a clock. The night was cold. They had bundled her up. Every breath she exhaled came out in white vapor. The bleeding had finally stopped. Jordan sat next to her, petting her left hand, the one that was already dead and waiting for the rest of her to catch up.

'Play the slinky one I like,' she said. 'The one by Hall and Oates.'

17

At twenty to five, she said, 'it's the loveliest dress ever.' They were all gathered around her. Clay had said he thought she was going.

'What color, Alice?' Clay asked, not expecting an answer—but she did answer.

'Green.'

'Where will you wear it?'

'The ladies come to the table,' she said. Her hand still squeezed the sneaker, but more slowly now. The blood on the side of her face had dried to an enamel glaze. 'The ladies come to the table, the ladies come to the table. Mr. Ricardi stays at his post and the ladies come to the table.'

'That's right, dear,' Tom said softly. 'Mr. Ricardi stayed at his post, didn't he?'

'The ladies come to the table.' Her remaining eye turned to Clay, and for the second time she spoke in that other voice. One he had heard coming from his own mouth. Only four words this time. ''Your son's with us.'

'You lie,' Clay whispered. His fists were clenched, and he had to restrain himself from striking the dying girl. 'You bastard, you lie.'

'The ladies come to the table and we all have tea,' Alice said.

18

The first line of light had begun to show in the east. tom sat beside Clay, and put a tentative hand on his arm. 'If they read minds,' he said, 'they could have gotten the fact that you have a son and you're worried to death about him as easily as you'd look something up on Google. That guy could be using Alice to fuck with you.'

'I know that,' Clay said. He knew something else: what she'd said in Harvard's voice was all too plausible. 'You know what I keep thinking about?'

Tom shook his head.

'When he was little, three or four—back when Sharon and I still got along and we called him Johnny-Gee —he'd come running every time the phone rang. He'd yell 'Fo-fo-me-me?' It knocked us out. And if it was his nana or his PeePop, we'd say 'Fo-fo-you-you' and hand it to him. I can still remember how big the fucking thing looked in his little hands . . . and against the side of his face . . .'

'Clay, stop.'

'And now . . . now . . .' He couldn't go on. And didn't have to.

'Come here, you guys!' Jordan called. His voice was agonized. 'Hurry up!'

They went back to where Alice lay. She had come up off the ground in a locked convulsion, her spine a hard, quivering arc. Her remaining eye bulged in its socket; her lips pulled down at the corners. Then, suddenly, everything relaxed. She spoke a name that had no meaning for them– Henry—and squeezed the sneaker one final time. Then the fingers relaxed and it slipped free. There was a sigh and a final white cloud, very thin, from between her parted lips.

Jordan looked from Clay to Tom, then back to Clay again. 'Is she—'

'Yes,' Clay said.

Jordan burst into tears. Clay allowed Alice another few seconds to look at the paling stars, then used the heel of his hand to close her eye.

19

There was a farmhouse not far from the orchard. they found shovels in one of the sheds and buried her under an apple tree, with the little sneaker in her hand. It was, they agreed, what she would have wanted. At Jordan's request, Tom once more recited Psalm Forty, although this time he had difficulty finishing. They each told one thing they remembered about Alice. During this part of the impromptu service, a flock of phone- people—a small one—passed north of them. They were noticed but not bothered. This did not surprise Clay in the slightest. They were insane, not to be touched . . . as he was sure Gunner and Harold would learn to their sorrow.

They slept away most of the daylight hours in the farmhouse, then moved on to Kent Pond. Clay no longer really expected to find his son there, but he hadn't given up hope of finding word of Johnny, or perhaps Sharon. Just to know she was alive might lift a little of the sorrow he now felt, a feeling so heavy that it seemed to weigh him down like a cloak lined with lead.

KENT POND

1

His old house—the house where johnny and sharon had lived at the time of the Pulse— was on Livery Lane, two blocks north of the dead traffic light that marked the center of Kent Pond. It was the sort of place some real estate ads called a 'fixer-upper' and some a 'starter home.' Clay and Sharon's joke—before the separation—was that their 'starter home' would probably also be their 'retirement home.' And when she'd gotten pregnant, they had talked about naming the baby Olivia if it turned out to be of what Sharon called 'the feminine persuasion.' Then, she said, they'd have the only Livvie of Livery Lane. How they had laughed.

Clay, Tom, and Jordan—a pallid Jordan, a thoughtfully silent Jordan who now usually responded to questions only if asked a second or even a third time—arrived at the intersection of Main and Livery at just past midnight on a windy night during the second week of October. Clay stared wildly at the stop sign on the corner of his old street, where he had come as a visitor for the last four months. NUCLEAR POWER was still stenciled there in spray-paint, as it had been before he'd left for Boston. STOP . . . NUCLEAR POWER. STOP . . . NUCLEAR POWER. He couldn't seem to get the sense of it. It wasn't a question of meaning, that was clear enough, just someone's clever little