NOS4A2(67)

“It’s okay, innit? You aren’t worried—” Linda jerked a thumb meaningfully at the oxygen tank.

“What? That you’ll blow up my life?” Vic asked. “Too late, Mom. Beat you to it.”

Vic had not spent a day in the same house with her mother since leaving the place for good the summer she turned eighteen. She had not realized, as a child, how dark it was inside her childhood home. It stood in the shade of tall pines and received almost no natural light at all, so that even at noon you had to switch lights on to see where the hell you were going. Now it stank of cigarettes and incontinence. By the end of January, she was desperate to escape. The darkness and lack of air made her think of the laundry chute in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House.

“We should go someplace for the summer. We could rent a place up on The Lake, like we used to.” She didn’t need to say Lake Winnipesaukee. It had always just been The Lake, as if there were no other body of water worth mentioning, in the same way The Town had always meant Boston. “I’ve got money.”

Not so much, actually. She had managed to drink up a fair portion of her earnings. Much of what she hadn’t swallowed had been devoured by legal fees or paid out to various institutions. There was still enough, though, to leave her in a better financial position than the average recovering alcoholic with tattoos and a criminal record. There would be more, too, if she could finish the next Search Engine book. Sometimes she thought she had gotten sane and sober to finish the next book, God help her. It should’ve been for her son, but it wasn’t.

Linda smiled in a sly, drowsy way that said they both knew she wasn’t going to make it to June, that she would be vacationing that summer three blocks away, in the cemetery, where her older sisters and her parents were buried. But she said, “Sure. Get your boy offa Lou, bring him along. I’d like to spend some time with that kid—if you don’t think it would ruin him.”

Vic let that one go. She was working on the eighth step of her program and was here in Haverhill to make amends. For years she had not wanted Linda to know Wayne, to be a part of his life. She took pleasure in limiting her mother’s contact with the boy, felt it was her job to protect Wayne from Linda. She wished now there had been someone to protect Wayne from herself. She had amends to make to him, too.

“You could introduce your father to his grandson while you’re at it,” Linda said. “He’s there, you know. In Dover. Not far from The Lake. Still making things go boom. I know he’d love to meet the boy.”

Vic let that one go, too. Did she need to make amends to Christopher McQueen as well? Sometimes she thought so—and then she remembered him rinsing his raw knuckles under cold water and dismissed the notion.

It rained all spring, cornering Vic inside the Haverhill house with the dying woman. Sometimes the rain fell so hard it was like being trapped inside a drum. Linda coughed fat blobs of red-specked phlegm into a rubber trough and watched the Food Network with the volume turned up too loud. Getting away—getting out—began to seem a desperate thing, a matter of survival. When Vic shut her eyes, she saw a flat reach of lake at sunset, dragonflies the size of swallows gliding over the surface of the water.

But she didn’t decide to rent a place until Lou called one night from Colorado to suggest Wayne and Vic spend the summer together.

“Kid needs his mom,” Lou said. “Don’t you think it’s time?”

“I’d like that,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level. It hurt to breathe. It had been a good three years since she and Lou had hung it up. She couldn’t stomach being loved so completely by him and doing so poorly by him in return. Had to deal herself out.

It was one thing to quit on Lou, though, and another to quit on the boy. Lou said the kid needed his mother, but Vic thought she needed Wayne more. The prospect of spending the summer with him—of starting again, taking another shot at being the mother Wayne deserved—gave Vic flashes of panic. Also flashes of brilliant, shimmering hope. She didn’t like to feel things so intensely. It reminded her of being crazy.

“You’d be okay with that? Trusting him with me? After all the shit I pulled?”

“Aw, dude,” he said. “If you’re ready to get back in the ring, he’s ready to climb in there with you.”

Vic didn’t mention to Lou that when people climbed into the ring together, it was usually to clobber the shit out of each other. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad metaphor. God knew Wayne had plenty of valid reasons for wanting to throw a few roundhouses her way. If Wayne needed a punching bag, Vic was ready to take the hits. It would be a way of making amends.

How she loved that word. She liked that it almost sounded like “amen.”

She began to hunt, feverishly, for a place to spend the summer, somewhere that would match the picture in her head. If she’d still possessed her Raleigh, she could have found her way to the perfect spot in a matter of minutes, one quick trip across the Shortaway and back. Of course, she knew now that there had never been any trips across the Shorter Way Bridge. She had learned the truth about her finding expeditions while she was in a Colorado mental hospital. Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go—or got careless and crushed it.

Without the Shorter Way, Vic had to rely on Google, same as everyone else. It took her until late April to find what she wanted, a spinster’s cottage with a hundred feet of frontage, its own dock, float, and carriage house. It was all on one floor, so Linda wouldn’t have to climb any stairs. By then a part of Vic really believed that her mother was coming with them, that amends would be made. There was even a ramp around the back of the house, for Linda’s wheelchair.