Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(112)

"Eddie!" she shouted into the microphone. "Eddie or Roland!" And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. "Jake! Pere Callahan! We've reached the Dixie Pig and we're going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!"

She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words DIXIE PIG? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn't hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.

"Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it!I love you! This is..." Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.

Unless something went wrong, that was.

She realized she was still gripping the mike.

"This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka."

She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.

Twelve

Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she'd reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia's mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had calledhim was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned wasfraught, like still air before a violent September storm.

Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!

Yes, Mia.

I agreed to mortality.

So you said.

And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal andterribly pregnant.

Yet I've missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven't I?The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse.And there's no time for you to tell me. Not now.

Go somewhere else,Susannah said, with no hope at all.Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We'll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge -

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we'll die with it.She spoke with utter certainty.And I willhave it. I've been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But...Susannah...before we go in...you spoke of your mother.

I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!

There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

Look,she said.

Thirteen

In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman's throat. She's sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

"Odetta, come and sit with me," says the woman at the table, she who is mother. "Have something sweet. You lookgood, girl."

And she smiles.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

Fourteen

Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann's tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia's breath

(you lookgood,girl )

and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be...if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

The rewards?

Immeasurable.

In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun.You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood's harbor. You could be the wind in that child's unfurled sails.

You.

Odetta, come and sit with me.

Mia's breath began to hitch in her chest.

Have something sweet.

Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

You lookgood,girl.

Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years - or three - was better than no time at all. She couldn't read, hadn't been to Morehouse, hadn't been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.

Oh...

Oh, but...

Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!

She began to weep.

What have I donewas a terrible question.What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.

O Discordia!

Fifteen

This was Susannah's one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesk?ldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia's white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.