Safe Passage (18 page)

    
"Mother, it's only a cat,"
Izzy
said.

    
"Yes, with its whiskers in my face and its tail in your father's every night."

    
"At least you get the front end,"
Izzy
said.

    
"If you think it's such a good deal, then
you
 
sleep
with it."

    
"Okay, I will."
Izzy
retrieved the animal from the kitchen and held it in his arms.
Mag
thought it was bizarre the way he defended Lucifer, considering his work.

    
"Come on. Upstairs," Patrick said. "We're so tired, we're sniping at each other over nothing."

    
"I don't think I could sleep," Darren said.

    
"Go," Patrick said. "You'll be surprised."

To
Mag's
astonishment, the twins got up. He had the whole family trained so well.

    
In bed, they lay side by side looking at the ceiling. She didn't know if they were both pretending to be asleep or if they just had nothing to say.

    
"Whatever happens," Patrick told her finally, "I think we should still consider going to the Keys for the winter."

    
It seemed, at the moment, the most totally selfish thing he could utter. "I would have to quit my job," she said.

    
"You've quit jobs before. If something happens, I know the routine would be comforting. But there would be other jobs."

    
"Do you really think I work because the routine is comforting?"

    
"I want you to have a future to look forward to," he said. "The Keys could be something to look forward to."

    
"I don't see how." But she sighed. He sounded like he was trying to be kind. Maybe his head was still hurting. She might have weakened toward him except that the cat, which
Izzy
had taken to the other room, had found its way down the hall and at that moment jumped onto the bed.

    
"That took exactly ten minutes,"
Mag
said.

    
"There's no point getting excited over the cat. It isn't the cat that's really bothering you.

    
"No shit, Patrick."

    
"It's the uncertainty. It can be worse than knowing almost anything."

    
"Not necessarily. There are some things I'd rather be uncertain of than know for sure."

    
Patrick closed his eyes tighter.

    
"Are you all right?"

    
"I'm all right. The Valium gives me a hangover. My eyes feel like they've been splattered with sand. 0ther than that, I'm terrific."

    
"Well, if it's only that, I won't worry," she said.

    
The cat found its usual place between their pillows. It was not true that she didn't hate the cat. It was not true that she could look forward to the Keys. She was about to say something on those subjects. It was stupid to lie here looking at the ceiling. Better to have it out. Something. His breathing changed. She couldn't believe it. Right there, in the middle of a conversation, he had fallen asleep.

    
She lay there like a fool. There was no sound in the house. Percival might be crushed and his own father slept through it. She stayed awake alone.

    
A long time passed—hours, she thought. She dreamed waking dreams, reruns of what they had already seen on television. Watching TV, she'd kept hoping one of the rescuers' faces would be
Percival's
, and she'd know he was all right. In the dream she was walking through the rubble, past men with blowtorches, with pneumatic drills. The faces of the men were dim. She knew Percival was among them, but she did not know if he was above the rubble, drilling, or beneath it, being drilled toward.

    
The doorbell woke her. She could not have been sleeping. But the clock said…what?
After three.

    
The sound again, a jarring into consciousness.
Then rational thought. No one would ring at this hour of the night. No normal visitor would come now. So it must be the Marines. The rest of them did not even stir, which struck her as odd. She had feared, always, a moment she couldn't take back—one irrevocable moment when a son would be snatched beyond her and there would be nothing she could do. She had not thought it would come in the darkness, or that she would have to face it alone.

    
She slid out of bed and pulled her robe on, which she had left on her night table, as if she had known she would need it. Her heart hammered in her throat, but she did not cry as she walked down the steps; she would not cry until they told her.

    
She turned on the porch light and peered through the peephole. She expected to see a khaki uniform, or a formal blue one, out there in the dark. She was prepared for that. A head of curly blond hair shined beneath the porch light, matted down from the rain. There was no cap and no uniform. The curls were wiry and golden. Only one person had hair quite like that. She opened the door. "Gideon," she said. She'd known he would come.

CHAPTER 7

MONDAY October 24, 1983

    
Gideon's watch was still on Utah time and he did not know how to adjust it. The first thing he said to his mother was, "What time is it here?" because when he looked at his watch, he could not remember whether to add two hours or subtract them or how to do simple math. His arms and legs weighed a ton. After he got off the plane at Dulles airport, he took the Metro into D.C. and then out to Maryland. He rode two buses. When it got so late the buses stopped running, he hitched a ride and then walked. Each time his feet touched the ground, they were so heavy he did not think he could lift them again. But he did.

    
"Twenty after three," his mother said, looking up at the family room clock. She was combing her hair with her hands. He had thought she would be awake, conducting a vigil of sorts, but from her hair he could tell she had been sleeping. It seemed wrong. There were wrinkles on her forehead, and her eyes seemed sunken back into their sockets. She was younger than most of his friends' mothers, but now he could see that she was old.

    
"I guess you haven't heard anything, then," he said. If they'd heard, they would all be up.

    
"No, but I thought you were the Marines," she told him. "You know, they don't call you if it's bad news. They send a Marine." She stopped talking and smiled in a sad way. "I'm glad you came," she said. He felt as if she were tolerating him but really wishing the doorbell hadn't rung. He had a key somewhere but had forgotten to bring it. He should have brought his key. She was leading him into the family room. "Dad thought it would be easier for you to stay at school, but everyone else is here," she told him. "People kept coming over all day. They kept bringing food. Are you hungry?"

    
"I don't know," he said. He didn't think she was glad to see him. The weighted-down feeling was strong inside him. The legs had been his main problems, but now it was hard to move his hands.

    
"Well, you're probably hungry," she said. She walked through the family room to the kitchen, and he followed. The kitchen light flooded on, bright yellow, bringing the room up from dimness: refrigerator, range top, all of it sharp-edged, sudden. With the heaviness inside him, he wanted muted colors; it seemed to him now that the day, the planes, the Metro, the buses, all had been muted. Everything…muted, unreal—and now the kitchen was too bright. His mother was taking food out of the refrigerator; she didn't notice him squinting. She piled some macaroni and cheese onto a paper plate and put it into the microwave. She was always feeding them, but never what they liked. He had

always
hated macaroni.

    
"I don't think I can eat anything," he said. "I feel like I'm still moving."

    
She smiled then. "
That
shouldn't bother you."

    
"I mean still in a plane or car or something. Maybe I'll just take a shower and try to sleep."

    
"Everyone else is sleeping. They're all sleeping like babies." She sounded a little dazed. "When the doorbell rang, nobody heard it but me. You could've been the Marines."

    
"Yeah," Gideon said. He started to pick up his gear, to carry it to his room.

    
"Didn't you have a race the other day?"

    
"Yesterday. No…Saturday." Was it Sunday now, or Monday? If it was Monday, his physics lecture would begin in a few hours. He hadn't brought his book.

    
"Where was it? How'd you do?"

    
"Huh?"

    
"Your race," she said.

    
"Oh…the Idaho State Invitational. I came in second. Farley won."

    
"We didn't even ask you about the race on the phone. Dad felt bad about that afterward."

    
"It didn't matter," Gideon said. The race seemed a long time ago. She.
didn't
seem to notice that he could barely walk.

    
"How much did he beat you by?"

   
"Four seconds. No—five, I think. I can't remember."

    
She got a knowing look on her face. "Only five seconds, huh?"

    
Upstairs, Gideon showered and then went into the room he used to share with
Izzy
and Percival.
Izzy
was out cold. Gideon turned on the little reading lamp, figuring it wouldn't bother him. He was sure he wasn't going to be able to sleep, himself; it seemed to him somebody ought not to sleep.

    
The room was pretty much the way it had always been, though maybe less of a slop heap. It had never been big enough for three kids, but
Izzy
had always managed to keep his area more or less separate—an old desk shoved against his bed, where he did his science fair projects when they were younger and later kept his books. Gideon's bed and
Percival's
were along the opposite wall, with a chest of drawers between them. There wasn't enough space for trophy cases, so all the running medals from high school, his and
Percival's
both, were in an open bookcase, jumbled together. You couldn't tell whose were whose.

    
When they were younger, he and Percival used to like running in races where the prize was a trophy instead of a medal. Trophies took up more room on the shelf and looked more impressive. Some were lightweight, made of synthetic marble and ersatz silver, but others felt heavy in the hand, solid and expensive. Their father used to point out that the prize had nothing to do with the importance of the race, but still in the early years they had liked having trophies. One of them—he or Percival, he couldn't remember which—once had a trophy that fell apart entirely, cracked in what was supposed to be the marble base, revealing itself to be plastic weighted by sand in the middle, which trickled slowly to the floor. They had watched it empty its insides and laughed.

    
''Sand.
Do you believe that? Talk about tacky!"

    
He'd won some of the trophies and Percival had won some, and at first all they'd cared about was that their case was getting so full. It was a lot more impressive than
Izzy's
science certificates all over the wall. But the main thing was that the trophy shelf was a team effort.

    
Even in high school, Gideon and Percival were a team at first. Percival beat Gideon in every cross-country race Gideon's freshman year, but it was only what everybody expected an older brother to do. Together, the two of them helped the high school record a lot. In the spring, during track season, they ran in different events. Percival ran the three-thousand meter and almost always won. Gideon, because the coach insisted on it, ran the mile.

    
It wasn't one of his shining efforts. The first time Gideon ran the mile in an actual race, not a workout, his mouth went completely dry after the first quarter. His father had once said to Percival, "Whatever you do in a race, don't stop and don't walk."

 
   
Gideon had heard that, even though his father had been talking to his brother. So in that race, he didn't stop. He ran, touching his dry tongue to the top of his mouth, trying to conjure up some spit. Nothing came. His tongue and the roof of his mouth wanted to stick together. Someone passed him, but he didn't care. His tongue felt like it was swelling. He was not sure if he was still sweating. In heat stroke you stopped sweating, and maybe the first sign of heat stroke was that your tongue went dry.

 
   
He was running in last place. The dryness filled his whole mind; if his tongue got any bigger, he would choke.