Joyland(48)

"All right."

"Oh, one other thing. I almost forgot." He shot a glance at her, saw she was only halfway down the boardwalk, and turned back to me. "It's not white."

"What's not white?"

Mike Ross looked mystified. "No idea. When I woke up this morning, I remembered you were coming for smoothies, and that came into my head. I thought you'd know."

Annie arrived. She had poured a mini-smoothie into a juice glass. On top was a single strawberry.

"Yum!" Mike said. "Thanks, Mom!"

"You're very welcome, hon."

She eyed his wet shirt but didn't mention it. When she asked me if I wanted some more juice, Mike winked at me. I said more juice would be great. While she poured, Mike fed Milo two heaping spoonfuls of his smoothie.

She turned back to him, and looked at the smoothie glass, now half empty. "Wow, you really were hungry."

"Told you."

'What were you and Mr. Jones-Devin-talking about?"

"Nothing much," Mike said. "He's been sad, but he's better now."

I said nothing, but I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. When I dared a look at Annie, she was smiling.

"Welcome to Mike's world, Devin," she said, and I must have looked like I'd swallowed a goldfish, because she burst out laughing. It was a nice sound .

?



joy land

That evening when I walked back from Joyland, she was standing at the end of the boardwalk, waiting for me. It was the first time I'd seen her in a blouse and skirt. And she was alone. That was a first, too.

"Devin? Got a second?"

"Sure," I said, angling up the sandy slope to her. "Where's Mike?"

"He has physical therapy three times a week. Usually Janiceshe's his therapist-comes in the morning, but I arranged for her to come this evening instead, because I wanted to speak to you alone."

"Does Mike know that?"

Annie smiled ruefully. "Probably. Mike knows far more than he should. I won't ask what you two talked about after he got rid of me this morning, but I'm guessing that his . . .insights . . .

come as no surprise to you."

"He told me why he's in a wheelchair, that's all. And he mentioned he had pneumonia last Thanksgiving."

"I wanted to thank you for the kite, Dev. My son has very restless nights. He's not in pain, exactly, but he has trouble breathing when he's asleep. It's like apnea. He has to sleep in a semi-sitting position, and that doesn't help. Sometimes he stops breathing completely, and when he does, an alarm goes off and wakes him up. Only last night-after the kite-he slept right through. I even went in once, around two AM, to make sure the monitor wasn't malfunctioning. He was sleeping like a baby.

No restless tossing and turning, no nightmares-he's prone to them-and no moaning. It was the kite. It satisfied him in a way nothing else possibly could. Except maybe going to that damned amusement park of yours, which is completely out of 162

STEPHEN K I N G

the question." She stopped, then smiled. "Oh, shit. I'm making a speech."

"It's all right," I said.

"It's just that I've had so few people to talk to. I have housekeeping help-a very nice woman from Heaven's Bay-and of course there's Janice, but it's not the same." She took a deep breath. "Here's the other part. I was rude to you on several occasions, and with no cause. I'm sorry."

"Mrs . . . . Miss . . . " Shit. "Annie, you don't have anything to apologize for."

"Yes. I do. You could have just walked on when you saw me struggling with the kite, and then Mike wouldn't have gotten that good night's rest. All I can say is that I have problems trusting people."

This is where she invites me in for supper, I thought. But she didn't. Maybe because of what I said next.

"You know, he could come to the park. It'd be easy to arrange, and with it closed and all, he could have the run of the place."

Her face closed up hard, like a hand into a fist. "Oh, no.

Absolutely not. If you think that, he didn't tell you as much about his condition as I thought he did. Please don't mention it to him. In fact, I have to insist."

"All right," I said. "But if you change your mind . . . "

I trailed off. She wasn't going to change her mind. S he looked at her watch, and a new smile lit her face. It was so brilliant you could almost ove.rlook how it never reached her eyes. "Oh boy, look how late it's getting. Mike will be hungry after his PE, and I haven't done a thing about supper. Will you excuse me?"

"Sure.,





Joyland

I stood there watching her hurry back down the boardwalk to the green Victorian-the one I was probably never going to see the inside of, thanks to my big mouth . But the idea of taking Mike through Joyland had seemed so right. During the summer, we had groups of kids with all sorts of problems and disabilities-crippled kids, blind kids, cancer kids, kids who were mentally challenged (what we called retarded back in the unenlightened 70s). It wasn't as though I expected to stick Mike in the front car of the Delirium Shaker and then blast him off.

Even if the Shaker hadn't been buttoned up for the winter, I'm not a total idiot.