Faintly, sick and cloying, he smelled honeysuckle.
'What do you see out there?'
Brett turned a little toward the sound of his mothers voice. Not all the way - he did not want to lose sight of the steadily unrolling view even for a little while. The bus had been on the road for almost an hour. They had crossed the
Million Dollar Bridge into South Portland (Brett had stared with fascinated, wondering eyes at the two scum-caked, rustbucket freighters in the harbor), joined the Turnpike going south, and were now approaching the New Hampshire border.
Everything,' Brett said. 'What do you see, Mom?'
'She thought. Your reflection in the glass - very faint. That's what I see.
Instead she answered, 'Why, the world, I guess. I see the world unrolling in front of us.'
'Mom? I wish we could ride all the way to California on this bus.
See everything there is in the geography books at school.'
She laughed and ruffled his hair. 'You'd get damn tired of scenery, Brett.'
'No. No, I wouldn't.'
And he probably wouldn't, she thought. Suddenly she felt both sad and old. When she had called Holly Saturday morning to ask her if they could come, Holly had been delighted, and her delight had made Charity feel young. It was strange that her own son's delight, his almost palpable euphoria, would make her feel old.
Nevertheless ...
What exactly is there going to be for him? she asked herself, studying his ghostlike face, which was superimposed over the moving scenery like a camera trick. He was bright, brighter than she was and much brighter than Joe.
He ought to go to college, but she knew that when he got to high school Joe would press him to sign up for the shop and automotive maintenance courses so he could be more help around the place.
Ten years ago he wouldn't have been able to get away with it, the guidance counselors wouldn't have allowed a bright boy like Brett to opt for all manual trades course, but in these days of phase
electives and do your own thing, she was terribly afraid it might happen.
It made her afraid. Once she had been able to tell herself that school was far away, so very far away - high school, real school.
Grammar school was nothing but play to a boy who slipped through his lessons as easily as Brett did. But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heard clearly in the dreams of later years.
She gripped her elbows and shivered, not even kidding herself that it was because the Hound's air conditioning was turned up too high.
For Brett, high school was now just four years away.
She shivered again and suddenly found herself wishing viciously that she had never won the money, or that she had lost the ticket.
They had only been away from Joe for an hour, but it was the first time she had really been separated from him since they had married in late 1966. She hadn't realized that perspective would be so sudden, so dizzying and so bitter. Picture this: Woman and boy are let free from the brooding castle keep ... but there's a catch.
Stapled to their backs are large books, and slipped over the ends of the hooks are heavy-duty invisible rubber bands. And before you can get too far, presto-whizzo! You're snapped back inside for another fourteen years!
She made a little croaking sound in her throat.
'Did you say something, Mom?'
'No. just clearing my throat.'
She shivered a third time, and this time her arms broke out in gooseflesh. She had recalled a line of poetry from one of her own high school English classes (she had wanted to take the college
courses, but her father had been furious at the idea - did she think they were rich? - and her mother had laughed the idea to death gently and pityingly). It was from a poem by Dylan Thomas, and she couldn't remember the whole thing, but it had been something about moving through dooms of love.
That line had seemed funny and perplexing to her then, but she thought she understood it now. What else did you call that heavy-duty invisible rubber hand, if not love? Was she going to kid herself and say that she did not, even now, in some way love the man she had married? That she stayed with him only out of duty, or for the sake of the child (that was a bitter laugh; if she ever left him it would be for the sake of the child)? That he had never pleasured her in bed? That he could not, sometimes at the most unexpected moments (like the one back at the bus station), be tender?
And yet ... and yet ...
Brett was looking out the window, enrapt. Without turning from the view, he said, 'You think Cujo's all right, Mom?'
'I'm sure he's fine,' she said absently.
For the first time she found herself thinking about divorce in a concrete way - what she could do to support herself and her son, how they would get along in such an unthinkable (almost unthinkable) situation. If she and Brett didn't come home from this trip, would he come after them, as he had vaguely threatened back in Portland? Would he decide to let Charity go to the bad but try to get Brett back by fair means ... or foul?
She began to tick the various possibilities over in her mind, weighing them, suddenly thinking that maybe a little perspective wasn't such a bad thing after all. Painful, maybe. Maybe useful, too.
The Greyhound slipped across the state line into New Hampshire and rolled on south.
The Delta 727 rose steeply, buttonhooked over Castle Rock -Vic always looked for his house near Castle Lake and 117, always fruitlessly - and then headed back toward the coast. It was a twenty-minute run to Logan Airport.
Donna was down there, some eighteen thousand feet below. And the Tadder. He felt a sudden depression mixed with a black premonition that it wasn't going to work, that they were crazy to even think it might. When your house blew down, you had to build a new house. You couldn't put the old one back together again with Elmer's Glue.
The stewardess came by. He and Roger were riding in first class ('Might as well enjoy it while we can, buddy,' Roger had said last Wednesday when he made the reservations; 'not everyone can go to the poorfarm in such impeccable style'), and there were only four or five other passengers, most of them reading the morning paper - as was Roger.
'Can I get you anything?' she asked Roger with that professional twinkly smile that seemed to say she had been overjoyed to get up this morning at five thirty to make the upsy-downsy run from Bangor to Portland to Boston to New York to Atlanta.
