Hearts in Atlantis(174)

Too late by then, though. By then everything had changed.

He unzipped the gym bag, rummaged, and brought out a battery radio. It was nowhere as big as the boombox which had just gone past him toward the equipment sheds, but big enough for his purposes. All he had to do was turn it on; it was already tuned to WKND, Southern Connecticut's Home of the Oldies. Troy Shondell was singing 'This Time.' That was fine with Bobby.

'Sully,' he said, looking into the grove of trees, 'you were one cool bastard.'

From behind him, very prim, a woman said: 'If you swear, I won't walk with you.'

Bobby swivelled around so rapidly that the radio fell out of his lap and tumbled into the grass. He couldn't see the woman's face; she was nothing but a silhouette with red sky spread out on either side of her like wings. He tried to speak and couldn't. His breathing had come to a dead stop and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Far back in his brain a voice mused: So this is what seeing a ghost is like.

'Bobby, are you all right?'

She moved fast, coming around the bench, and the red setting sun smacked him full in the eyes when she did. Bobby gasped, raised a hand, shut his eyes. He smelled perfume . . . or was it summer grass? He didn't know. And when he opened his eyes again, he could still see nothing but the woman's shape; there was a hanging green afterimage of the sun where her face belonged.

'Carol?' he asked. His voice was hoarse and uneven. 'Dear God, is it really you?'

'Carol?' the woman asked. 'I don't know any Carol. My name is Denise Schoonover.'

Yet it was her. She'd only been eleven the last time he had seen her, but he knew. He rubbed his eyes frantically. From the radio on the grass the dj said, 'This is WKND, where your past is always present. Here's Clyde McPhatter. He's got "A Lover's Question."'

You knew if she was alive she'd come. You knew that.

Of course; wasn't that why he had come himself? Surely not for Sully, or not just for Sully. And yet at the same time he had been so sure she was dead. From the instant he'd seen the picture of that burned-out house in Los Angeles, he had been positive. And how that had hurt his heart, not as if he had last seen her forty years before, running across Commonwealth Avenue, but as if she had always remained his friend, as close as a phone-call or a trip up the street.

While he was still trying to blink away the floating sunspot afterimage hanging before his eyes, the woman kissed him firmly on the mouth, and then whispered in his ear: 'I have to go home. I have to make the salad. What's that?'

'The last thing you ever said to me when we were kids,' he replied, and turned to her. 'You came. You're alive and you came.'

The sunset light fell on her face, and the afterimage had diminished enough for him to see her. She was beautiful in spite of the scar which began at the corner of her right eye and ran down to her chin in a cruel fishhook . . . or perhaps because of it. There were tiny sprays of crow's feet beside her eyes, but no lines on her forehead or bracketing her paintless mouth.

Her hair, Bobby saw with wonder, was almost entirely gray.

As if reading his mind, she reached out and touched his bald head. 'I'm so sorry,' she said . . . but he thought he saw her old merriness dancing in her eyes. 'You had the most gorgeous hair. Rionda used to say that was half of what I was in love with.'

'Carol - '

She reached out and put her fingers over his lips. There were scars on her hand, as well, Bobby saw, and her little finger was misshapen, almost melted. These were burn scars.

'I told you, I don't know anyone named Carol. My name is Denise. Like in the old Randy and The Rainbows song?' She hummed a snatch of it. Bobby knew it well. He knew all the oldies. 'If you were to check my ID, you'd see Denise Schoonover all up and down the line. I saw you at the service.'

'I didn't see you.'

'I'm good at not being seen,' she said. 'It's a trick someone taught me a long time ago. The trick of being dim.' She shuddered a little. Bobby had read of people shuddering - mostly in bad novels - but had never actually seen it done. 'And when it comes to crowd scenes, I'm good at standing all the way at the back. Poor old Sully-John. Do you remember his Bo-lo Bouncer?'

Bobby nodded, starting to smile. 'I remember one time when he tried to get extra-cool with it, hit it between his legs as well as between his arms and behind his back? He bopped himself a good one in the balls and we all just about killed ourselves laughing. A bunch of girls ran over - you were one of them, I'm pretty sure - wanting to know what happened, and we wouldn't tell you. You were pretty mad.'

She smiled, a hand going to her mouth, and in that old gesture Bobby could see the child she had been with complete clarity.

'How did you know he died?' Bobby asked.

'Read it in the New York Post. There was one of those horrible headlines that are their specialty - JAMBO, it said - and pictures of him. I live in Poughkeepsie, where the Post is regularly available.' She paused. 'I teach at Vassar.'

'You teach at Vassar and you read the Post?'

She shrugged, smiling. 'Everyone has their vices. How about you, Bobby? Did you read it in the Post?'

'I don't get the Post. Ted told me. Ted Brautigan.'

She only sat there looking at him, her smile fading.