The Meridians(30)
How can I go on? she asked herself more than once as the seconds ticked by in the night that seemed like it must last forever. How can I do this without him?
Each time she listened in the silence and darkness for an answer. Each time she was disappointed. There was no knowledge to be had in the deep, no enlightenment to be found beneath the light of a moon whose brilliance had seemed to fade in the last three days.
Then her shivering changed. It was a subtle effect, hardly noticeable at first. Then she became aware that she was shivering, not with cold or with the repressed despair that had threatened to swallow her up at any moment, but with a kind of manic energy. It felt as though she had stuck her finger in a light socket and was now serving as a living conduit for energies so strong that they should have burned her out from the inside. Instead of scorching and leaving her a dried husk, however, the force that possessed her had energized her, changed her from a being enervated by grief to one wound up by an unseen hand, like a clock whose spring was coiled too tightly and was on the verge of breaking.
Lynette became aware of a sound. The soft tones of a whispered word. She automatically looked beside her, half-expecting to see Robbie, speaking softly in his sleep as he had been wont to do from time to time.
But Robbie was not there.
Robbie is gone. Robbie is gone. Robbie is -
The thought was interrupted by the recurrence of the sound. Unable to convince herself that it was some sort of phantom noise, a memory made audible by her grief-riddled mind, she stood and tried to sense where the low, tumultuous sound was coming from.
Somewhere outside of her room.
She followed the sound out into the hall. The force that had previously energized her now made her feel logy, tired, adrift in a sea that she had no power to control. She was a tiny boat in the grasp of a wave that was drawing her inexorably forward. But whether the wave would deposit her safely on a beach or would toss her to be cruelly crushed on nearby rocks, she could not say. She only knew that, for the moment, she was not the pilot of her ship. If ever she had been.
Pulled by the magnetic force of the sound, she walked slowly down the short hallway in the home that had until recently been shared by her, Robbie, and Kevin. She put a hand out, touching the wall as though to steady herself, and was more than a little surprised to find it solid and whole. She half-expected to find it insubstantial as a cloud, unreal as a dream. Its solidity reassured her, reminded her that she was not insane, that some rules still applied, even in a world so mad that it had seen fit to steal her husband from her.
She traced figures on the wall as she walked. Gradually she became aware that she was writing the word "Robbie" over and over again, as though her hand was, of and for itself and independent of any of the thoughts of her mind, aching for the need to touch him, to feel him beneath her fingers, to trace her hands upon his broad chest and back.
She stopped herself from writing the name, holding her hand tightly against her chest. Forget being the captain of her own ship, apparently she could no longer even control the movement of her own body.
As though to confirm that suspicion, she felt a pressing in her body, and realized that she needed desperately to urinate. But she knew she would not be able to use the bathroom until she found out what the noise was that was still drawing her forth like iron fillings to a magnet.
The noise grew in volume as she walked down the hall, and gradually she realized where it was coming from.
Kevin's room.
She flashed to the image of the gray man who had appeared out of nowhere three days before. She had not confided in anyone what had really happened, sure that if she did so she would immediately be at risk of losing Kevin as well as losing her husband. She could not let that happen. Not for the world. Kevin was all that she had left, and without him she really would be lost, afloat and adrift in an endless sea of solitude and misery.
So no, she did not tell anyone what she had seen. She merely said that Robbie had slipped. Had fallen in a puddle of water from one of the party-goers and slipped and died in a tragic accident. No mention of the gray man. No mention of the threatening manner in which he loomed over her son. No mention of the last brave lunge that her husband took in what she knew intuitively to be a protective move that had gone horribly awry.
Doris, the hostess of the fateful party, had been aghast. But in the sick, litigious society that inhabited the southern regions of the state of California, Lynette had been unable to tell if the horror had been at the fact that Robbie had died, or born of a fear that Lynette would sue her because the accident had happened on her property.
Lynette had no such desires. For one, she believed that Robbie would not have condoned any such action. But more importantly, she knew that it was in no way Doris' fault. Somehow it was the fault of the other man. The intruder.
The gray man.
The thought of the interloper who had turned her life so completely inside out gave speed to her feet and quieted her trembling. She moved quickly now, on legs as fleet as those of Hermes, messenger of the gods of old. She ran the few short steps to Kevin's doorway, then turned the handle and was inside his room in an instant.
Kevin insisted on perfect darkness when he slept. As though, even as a toddler, he had already not only passed through the fear of the dark that troubled most children, but had actually grown contemptuous of it. So when she entered the room, only darkness greeted her.
Darkness, and the sound.
She reached for the light switch, found it almost instantly, but something stopped her from flicking it up. She felt a sudden dread, not at finding the source of the sound, but at the prospect of frightening it away before she could examine it more closely. So rather than turn on the light, she froze in place and listened, gradually becoming aware that the sound was coming from Kevin's direction.