Dreamcatcher(171)

Roberta looked at Owen, her face seeming to grow older with every sentence he spoke. It was as if some malign time-lapse photography were at work.

'Yes,' she said, 'yes, I understand you want to find Jonesy  -  to catch him  -  but what does he want to do? And if he came here, why didn't he do it here?'

'Ma'am, I can't answer those questions - '

'War,' Duddits said suddenly. 'Onesy ont war.'

War? Owen's mind asked Henry, alarmed. What war?

Never mind, Henry responded, and all at once the voice in Owen's head was faint, hard to hear. We have to go.

'Ma'am. Mrs Cavell.' Owen took her arms again, very gently. Henry loved this woman a lot, although he had ignored her quite cruelly over the last dozen years or so, and Owen knew why he'd loved her. It came off her like a sweet smoke. 'We have to go.'

'No. Oh please say no.' The tears coming again. Don't do that, lady, Owen wanted to say. Things are bad enough already. Please don't do that.

'There's a man coming. A very bad man. We have to be gone when he gets here.'

Roberta's distracted, sorrowing face filled with resolution. 'All right, then. If you have to. But I'm coming with you.'

'Roberta, no,' Henry said.

'Yes! Yes, I can take care of him . . . give him his pills . . . his Prednisone . . . I'll make sure to bring his lemon swabs and - '

'Umma, oo ay ere.'

'No, Duddie, no !'

'Umma, oo ay ere! Ayfe! Ayfe!' Safe, safe. Duddits growing agitated now.

'We really don't have any more time,' Owen said.

'Roberta,' Henry said. 'Please.'

'Let me come!' she cried. 'He's all I have!'

'Umma,' Duddits said. His voice was not a bit childish. 'Ooo . . . ay . . . ERE.'

She looked at him fixedly, and her face sagged. 'Allnight,' she said. 'Just one more minute. I have to get something.'

She went into Duddits's room and came back with a paper bag, which she handed to Henry.

'It's his pills,' she said. 'He has his Prednisone at nine o'clock. Don't forget or he gets wheezy and his chest hurts. He can have a Percocet if he asks, and he probably will ask, because being out in the cold hurts him.'

She looked at Henry with sorrow but no reproach. He almost wished for reproach. God knew he'd never done anything which had made him feel this ashamed. It wasn't just that Duddits had leukemia; it was that he'd had it for so long and none of them had known.

'Also his lemon swabs, but only on his lips, because his gums bleed a lot now and the swabs sting him. There's cotton for his nose if it bleeds. Oh, and the catheter. See it there on his shoulder?' Henry nodded. A plastic tube protruding from a packing of bandage. Looking at it gave him a weirdly strong feeling of déjà vu.

'If you're outside, keep it covered . . . Dr Briscoe laughs at me, but I'm always afraid the cold will get down inside . . . a scarf will work . . . even a handkerchief breaking through.

She was crying again, the sobs

'Roberta - ' Henry began. Now he was looking at the clock, too.

'I'll take care of him,' Owen said. 'I saw my Pop through to the end of it. I know about Prednisone and Percocet.' And more: bigger steroids, better painkillers. At the end, marijuana, methadone, and finally pure morphine, so much better than heroin. Morphine, death's sleekest engine.

He felt her in his head, then, a strange, tickling sensation like bare feet so light they barely touched down. Tickly, but not unpleasant. She was trying to make out if what he'd said about his father was the truth or a lie. This was her little gift from her extraordinary son, Owen realized, and she had been using it so long she no longer even knew she was doing it . . . like Henry's friend Beaver chewing on his toothpicks. It wasn't as powerful as what Henry had, but it was there, and Owen had never in his life been so glad he had told the truth.

'Not leukemia, though,' she said.

'Lung cancer. Mrs Cavell, we really have to - '

'I need to get him one more thing.'

'Roberta, we can't - ' Henry began.

'In a flash, in a flash.' She darted for the kitchen.

Owen felt really frightened for the first time. 'Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter  -  Henry, I can't tell where they are! I've lost them!'

Henry had unrolled the top of the bag and looked inside. What he saw there, lying on top of the box of lemon-flavored glycerine swabs, transfixed him. He replied to Owen, but his voice seemed to be coming from the far end of some previously undisclosed  -  hell, unsuspected  -  valley. There was such a valley, he knew that now. A trough of years. He would not, could not, say he had never suspected that such geography existed, but how in God's name could he have suspected so little?

'They just passed Exit 29,' he said. 'Twenty miles behind us now. Maybe even closer.'

'What's wrong with you?'

Henry reached into the brown bag and brought out the little creation of string, so like a cobweb, which had hung over Duddits's bed here, and over the bed at the Maple Lane house before Alfie had died.

'Duddits, where did you get this?' he asked, but of course he knew. This dreamcatcher was smaller than the one which had hung in the main room at Hole in the Wall, but was otherwise its twin.