Pet Sematary(19)

He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall to Ellie's room. She was sleeping peacefully, mouth open, wearing her blue baby-doll pajamas that she had really outgrown. My God, Ellie, he thought, you're sprouting like corn. Church lay between her splayed ankles, also dead to the world. You should pardon the pun.

Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Rachel's neat caps was THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D. V. M.-call for appointment re Church--if Jolander doesn't neuter animals, he will refer.

He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight-without even knowing he was deciding-that he didn't want Church crossing the road anymore if he could help it.

His old feelings on the subject rose up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the cat, would turn him into a fat old torn before his time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into his dish. He didn't want Church like that. He liked Church the way he was, lean and mean.

Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15, and that decided him. He tacked the memo up and went to bed.

11

The next morning at breakfast, Ellie saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant.

"It means he's going to have a very small operation," Louis said. "He'll probably have to stay over at the vet's for one night afterward. And when he comes home, he'll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much."

"Or cross the road?" Ellie asked.

She may be only five, Louis thought, but she's sure no slouch. "Or cross the road," he agreed.

"Yay!" Ellie said, and that was the end of the subject.

Louis, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Church being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquiesced. And he realized how worried she must have been.

Perhaps Rachel had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had had on her.

Rachel herself, who was feeding Gage his breakfast egg, shot him a grateful approving look, and Louis felt something loosen in his chest. The look told him that the chill was over; this particular hatchet had been buried. Forever, he hoped.

Later, after the big yellow school bus had gobbled Ellie up for the morning, Rachel came to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed his mouth gently.

"You were very sweet to do that," she said, "and I'm sorry I was such a bitch."

Louis returned her kiss, feeling a little uncomfortable nonetheless. It occurred to him that the I'm sorry! was such a bitch statement, while by no means a standard, was not exactly something he'd never heard before either. It usually came after Rachel had gotten her way.

Gage, meanwhile, had toddled unsteadily over to the front door and was looking out the lowest pane of glass at the empty road. "Bus," he said, hitching nonchalantly at his sagging diapers. "Ellie-bus."

"He's growing up fast," Louis said.

Rachel nodded. "Too fast to suit me, I think."

"Wait until he's out of diapers," Louis said. "Then he can stop. ', She laughed, and it was all right between them again-completely all right. She stood back, made a minute adjustment to his tie, and looked him up and down critically.

"Do I pass muster, Sarge?" he asked.

"You look very nice."

"Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart surgeon? A two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man?"

"No, just old Lou Creed," she said and giggled. "The rock-and-roll animal."

Louis glanced at his watch. "The rock-and-roll animal has got to put on his boogie shoes and go," he said.

"Are you nervous?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Don't be," she said. "It's sixty-seven thousand dollars a year for putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill-"

"Don't forget the crab-and-louse lotion," Louis said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprised him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Quell, which seemed to him enormous-more fitted to an army base infirmary than to one on a middle-sized university campus.

Miss Charlton, the head nurse, had smiled cynically. "Off campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You'll see. " He supposed he would.

"Have a good day," she said and kissed him again, lingeringly. But when she pulled away, she was mock-stem. "And for Christ's sake remember that you're an administrator, not an intern or a second-year resident!"

"Yes, Doctor," Louis said humbly, and they both laughed again. For a moment he thought of asking: Was it Zelda, babe? is that what's got under your skin? Is that the zone of low pressure?

Zelda and how she died? But he wasn't going to ask her that, not now. As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don't monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.