Needful Things (28 page)

So he had gone to see Polly one day at closing time, and asked her if she would come up to the house for a drink, or, if she felt uncomfortable about doing that, if he could come over to her house.

Seated in his kitchen (
the right kitchen,
the interior voice asserted) with a mug of tea for her and coffee for him, he had begun to speak, slowly and stumblingly, of his nightmare.

“I need to know, if I can, if she was going through
periods of depression or irrationality that I either didn't know about or didn't notice,” he said. “I need to know if . . .” He stopped, momentarily helpless. He knew what words he needed to say, but it was becoming harder and harder to bring them out. It was as if the channel of communication between his unhappy, confused mind and his mouth was growing smaller and shallower, and would soon be entirely closed to shipping.

He made a great effort and went on.

“I need to know if she was suicidal. Because, you see, it wasn't just Annie who died. Todd died with her, and if there were sighs . . . signs, I mean,
signs
 . . . that I didn't notice, then I am responsible for his death, too. And that's something I feel I have to know.”

He had stopped there, his heart pounding dully in his chest. He wiped a hand over his forehead and was mildly surprised when it came away wet with sweat.

“Alan,” she said, and put a hand on his wrist. Her light-blue eyes looked steadily into his. “If I had seen such signs and hadn't told anyone, I would be as guilty as you seem to want to be.”

He had gaped at her, he remembered that. Polly might have seen something in Annie's behavior which he had missed; he had gotten that far in his reasoning. The idea that noticing strange behavior conveyed a responsibility to do something about it had never occurred to him until now.

“You didn't?” he asked at last.

“No. I've gone over it and over it in my mind. I don't mean to belittle your grief and loss, but you're not the only one who feels those things, and you're not the only one who has done a fair amount of soul-searching since Annie's accident. I went over those last few weeks until I was dizzy, replaying scenes and conversations in light of what the autopsy showed. I'm doing it again now, in light of what you've told me about that aspirin bottle. And do you know what I find?”

“What?”

“Zilch.” She said it with a lack of emphasis which was oddly convincing. “Nothing at all. There were times when I thought she looked a little pale. I can remember a couple of occasions when I heard her talking to herself while she
was hemming skirts or unpacking fabric. That's the most eccentric behavior I can recall, and I've been guilty of it myself many times. How about you?”

Alan nodded.

“Mostly she was the way she was ever since I first met her: cheerful, friendly, helpful . . . a good friend.”

“But—”

Her hand was still on his wrist; it tightened a little. “No, Alan. No buts. Ray Van Allen is doing it, too, you know—Monday-morning quarterbacking, I believe it's called. Do you blame
him?
Do you feel
Ray's
to blame for missing the tumor?”

“No, but—”

“What about me? I worked with her every day, side by side most of the time; we drank coffee together at ten, ate lunch together at noon, and drank coffee again at three. We talked very frankly as time went on and we got to know and like each other, Alan. I know you pleased her, both as a friend and as a lover, and I know she loved the boys. But if she was drifting toward suicide as the result of her illness . . . that I didn't know. So tell me—do you blame
me?”
And her clear blue eyes had looked frankly and curiously into his own.

“No, but—”

The hand squeezed again, light but commanding.

“I want to ask you something. It's important, so think carefully.”

He nodded.

“Ray was her doctor, and if it was there, he didn't see it. I was her friend, and if it was there, I didn't see it. You were her husband, and if it was there,
you
didn't see it, either. And you think that's all, that's the end of the line, but it's not.”

“I don't understand what you're getting at.”

“Someone else was close to her,” Polly had said. “Someone closer than either of us, I imagine.”

“Who are you talking ab—”

“Alan, what did
Todd
say?”

He could only gaze at her, not understanding. He felt as if she had spoken a word in a foreign tongue.

“Todd,”
she said, sounding impatient. “Todd, your
son.
The one who keeps you awake nights. It
is
him, isn't it? Not her, but him.”

“Yes,” he said. “Him.” His voice came out high and unsteady, not like his own voice at all, and he felt something starting to shift inside him, something large and fundamental. Now, lying here in Polly's bed, he could remember that moment at his kitchen table with almost supernatural clarity: her hand on his wrist in a slanting bar of late-afternoon sun, the hairs a fine spun gold; her light eyes; her gentle relentlessness.

“Did she force Todd into the car, Alan? Was he kicking? Screaming? Fighting her?”

“No, of course not, but she was his m—”

“Whose idea was it for Todd to go with her to the market that day? Hers or his? Can you remember?”

He started to say no, but suddenly he did. Their voices, floating in from the living room, as he sat at his desk, going through county warrant-orders:

Gotta run down to the market, Todd
—
you want to come?

Can I look at the new video-tapes?

I guess so. Ask your father if he wants anything.

“It was her idea,” he told Polly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. But she
asked
him. She didn't
tell
him.”

That thing inside, that fundamental thing, was still moving. It was going to fall, he thought, and it would rip almighty hell out of the ground when it did, for its roots were planted both deep and wide.

“Was he scared of her?”

Now she was almost cross-examining him, the way he had cross-examined Ray Van Allen, but he seemed helpless to make her stop. Nor was he sure he wanted to. There was something here, all right, something that had never occurred to him on his long nights. Something that was still alive.

“Todd scared of Annie? God, no!”

“Not in the last few months they were alive?”

“No.”

“In the last few weeks?”

“Polly, I wasn't in much condition to observe things
then. There was this thing that happened with Thad Beaumont, the writer . . . this crazy thing—”

“Are you saying you were so out of it you never noticed Annie and Todd when they were around, or that you weren't at home much, anyway?”

“No . . . yes . . . I mean of
course
I was home, but—”

It was an odd feeling, being on the receiving end of these rapid-fire questions. It was as if Polly had doped him with Novocain and then started using him for a punching bag. And that fundamental thing, whatever it was, was still in motion, still rolling out toward the boundary where gravitation would begin working not to hold it up but to pull it down.

“Did Todd ever come to you and say ‘I'm scared of Mommy'?”

“No—”

“Did he ever come and say ‘Daddy, I think Mommy's planning to kill herself, and take me along for company'?”

“Polly, that's ridiculous! I—”

“Did
he?”

“No!”

“Did he ever even say she was acting or talking funny?”

“No—”

“And Al was away at school, right?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“She had one child left in the nest. When you were gone, working, it was just the two of them in that nest. She ate supper with him, helped him with his homework, watched TV with him—”

“Read to him—” he said. His voice was blurred, strange. He hardly recognized it.

“She was probably the first person Todd saw each morning and the last person he saw at night,” Polly said. Her hand lay on his wrist. Her eyes looked earnestly into his. “If anyone was in a position to see it coming, it was the person who died with her.
And that person never said a word.”

Suddenly the thing inside fell. His face began to work. He could feel it happening—it was as if strings had been attached to it in a score of different places, and each was now
being tugged by a gentle but insistent hand. Heat flooded his throat and tried to close it. Heat flooded his face. His eyes filled with tears; Polly Chalmers doubled, trebled, and then broke into prisms of light and image. His chest heaved but his lungs seemed to find no air. His hand turned over with that scary quickness he had and clamped on hers—it must have hurt her terribly, but she made no sound.

“I miss her!”
he cried out at Polly, and a great, painful sob broke the words into a pair of gasps.
“I miss them both, ah, God, how I miss them both!”

“I know,” Polly said calmly. “I know. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? How you miss them both.”

He began to weep. Al had wept every night for two weeks, and Alan had been there to hold him and offer what comfort he could, but Alan had not cried himself. Now he did. The sobs took him and carried him just as they would; he had no power to stop or stay them. He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.

He pushed the coffee cup blindly aside, heard it hit the floor in some other world and shatter there. He laid his overheated, throbbing head on the table and wrapped his arms around it and wept.

At some point, he had felt her raise his head with her cool hands, her misshapen, kindly hands, and place it against her stomach. She held it there and he wept for a long, long time.

Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there anyway.

That had been the beginning between them, even though he had not recognized it as a beginning; it had felt
more like the end of something. Between then and the day when he had finally mustered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner with him, he had thought often of the look of her blue eyes and the feel of her hand lying on his wrist. He thought of the gentle relentlessness with which she had forced him toward ideas he had either ignored or overlooked. And during that time he tried to deal with a new set of feelings about Annie's death; once the roadblock between him and his grief had been removed, these other feelings had poured out in a flood. Chief and most distressing among them had been a terrible rage at her for concealing a disease that could have been treated and cured . . . and for having taken their son with her that day. He had talked about some of these feelings with Polly at The Birches on a chilly, rain-swept night last April.

“You've stopped thinking about suicide and started thinking about murder,” she'd said. “That's why you're angry, Alan.”

He shook his head and started to speak, but she had leaned over the table and put one of her crooked fingers firmly against his lips for a moment. Shush, you. And the gesture so startled him that he
did
shush.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm not going to catechize you this time, Alan—it's been a long time since I've been out to dinner with a man, and I'm enjoying it too much to play Ms. Chief Prosecutor. But people don't get angry at other people—not the way you're angry, at least—for being in accidents, unless there has been a big piece of carelessness involved. If Annie and Todd had died because the brakes in the Scout failed, you might blame yourself for not having had them checked, or you might sue Sonny Jackett for having done a sloppy job the last time you took it in for maintenance, but you wouldn't blame
her.
Isn't that true?”

“I guess it is.”

“I
know
it is. Maybe there
was
an accident of some kind, Alan. You know she might have had a seizure while she was driving, because Dr. Van Allen told you so. But has it ever occurred to you that she might have swerved to avoid a deer? That it might have been something as simple as that?”

It had. A deer, a bird, even an oncoming car that had wandered into her lane.

“Yes. But her seatbelt—”

“Oh,
forget
the goddam seatbelt!” she had said with such spirited vehemence that some of the diners close to them looked around briefly. “Maybe she had a headache, and it caused her to forget her seatbelt that one time, but that still doesn't mean she deliberately crashed the car. And a headache—one of her bad ones—would explain why Todd's belt
was
fastened. And it still isn't the point.”

“What is, then?”

“That there are too many maybes here to support your anger. And even if the worst things you suspect are true, you'll never know, will you?”

“No.”

“And if you
did
know . . .” She looked at him steadily. There was a candle on the table between them. Her eyes were a darker blue in its flame, and he could see a tiny spark of light in each one. “Well, a brain tumor is an accident, too. There is no culprit here, Alan, no—what do you call them in your line of work?—no perpetrator. Until you accept that, there will be no chance.”

“What chance?”