NOS4A2(109)
“What does it matter?” Vic cried. “Can we just think about Wayne?”
“Yes,” Hutter said, blinking, looking back down at her iPad. “That’s right. Let’s keep the focus on Wayne. How about that password?”
Vic pushed back her chair as Lou poked at the touchscreen with one thick finger. She rose, came around the corner of the table to look. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt her anticipation so keenly it was like being cut.
Hutter’s screen loaded the Find My iPhone page, which showed a map of the globe, pale blue continents against a background of dark blue ocean. In the upper right corner, a window announced:
Wayne’s iPhone
Locating
Locating
Locating
Locating
Located
A featureless field of gray blanked out the image of the globe. A glassy blue dot appeared in the silver smoothness. Squares of landscape began to appear, the map redrawing itself to show the location of the iPhone in close-up. Vic saw the blue dot traveling on a road identified as THE ST. NICK PARKWAY.
Everyone was leaning in, Daltry so close to Vic she could feel him pressing against her rear, feel his breath tickling her neck. He smelled of coffee and nicotine.
“Zoom out,” Daltry said.
Hutter tapped the screen once, and again, and again.
The map depicted a continent that somewhat resembled America. It was as if someone had made a version of the United States out of bread dough and then punched it in the center. In this new version of the nation, Cape Cod was almost half the size of Florida and the Rocky Mountains looked more like the Andes, a thousand miles of grotesquely tortured earth, great splinters of stone heaved up against one another. The country as a whole, however, had substantially shriveled, collapsing toward the center.
Most of the great cities were gone, but other points of interest had appeared in their places. In Vermont there was a dense forest, built up around a place called ORPHANHENGE; in New Hampshire there was a spot marked THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock. In Maine, around the Lewiston/Auburn/Derry area, there was a place called PENNYWISE CIRCUS. A narrow highway titled THE NIGHT ROAD led south, reddening the farther it went, until it was a line of blood trickling into Florida.
The St. Nick Parkway was particularly littered with stopping points. In Illinois, WATCHFUL SNOWMEN. In Kansas, GIANT TOYS. In Pennsylvania, THE HOUSE OF SLEEP and THE GRAVEYARD OF WHAT MIGHT BE.
And in the mountains of Colorado, high in the peaks, the point at which the St. Nick Parkway dead-ended: CHRISTMASLAND.
The continent itself drifted in a sea of black, star-littered wastes; the map was captioned not UNITED STATES OF AMERICA but UNITED INSCAPES OF AMERICA.
The blue dot twitched, moving through what should’ve been western Massachusetts toward Christmasland. But UNITED INSCAPES didn’t correspond exactly to America itself. It was probably a hundred fifty miles from Laconia, New Hampshire, to Springfield, Massachusetts, but on this map it looked barely half that.
They all stared.
Daltry took his hankie from his pocket, gave his nose a thoughtful squeeze. “Any of you see Candy Land down there?” He made a harsh, throat-clearing sound that was not quite a cough, not quite a laugh.
Vic felt the kitchen going away. The world at the edges of her vision was a distorted blur. The iPad and the table remained in crisp focus but were curiously distant.
She needed something to anchor her. She felt in danger of coming unmoored from the kitchen floor . . . a balloon slipping out of a child’s hand. She took Lou’s wrist, something to hold on to. He had always been there when she needed something to hold on to.
When she looked at him, though, she saw a reflection of her own ringing shock. His pupils were pinpricks. His breath was short and labored.
In a surprisingly normal tone of voice, Hutter said, “I don’t know what I’m looking at here. Does this mean anything to either of you two? This curious map? Christmasland? The St. Nick Parkway?”
“Does it?” Lou asked, staring helplessly at Vic.
What he was really asking, Vic understood, was DO we tell her about Christmasland? About the things you believed when you were crazy?
“No,” Vic breathed, answering all questions—spoken and unspoken—at the same time.
The Bedroom
VIC SAID SHE NEEDED TO REST, ASKED IF SHE COULD LIE DOWN FOR A while, and Hutter said of course and that she wasn’t going to do anyone any good by driving herself to collapse.
In the bedroom, though, Lou was the one who flung himself down on the bed. Vic couldn’t relax. She went to the blinds, picked them apart, looked out at the carnival in her front yard. The night was full of the chatter of radios, the murmur of male voices. Someone out there laughed softly. It was a wonder, to think that less than a hundred paces from the house it was possible for happiness to exist.
If any of the policemen in the street noticed her looking, they probably imagined she was gazing blankly up the road, hoping, pitifully, for a cruiser to come roaring down it, lights flashing, sirens splitting the air, her son in the backseat. Safe. Coming home. His lips sticky and pink with the ice cream the cops had bought him.
But she wasn’t looking at the road, hoping with all her heart that someone was going to bring Wayne back to her. If anyone was going to bring him back, it was her. Vic was staring at the Triumph, lying right where she had dropped it.