He turned, and Roger embraced him clumsily but with surprising strength. Vic hugged him back, his cheek against Roger's shoulder.
'I'll pray to God everything's okay,' Roger said hoarsely.
'Okay,' Vic said, and went out.
The elevator hummed faintly on the way down - not really moving at all, he thought. It's a sound effect. Two drunks supporting each other got on at lobby level as he got off. Extras, he thought.
He spoke to the doorman - another extra - and after about five minutes a cab rolled up to the blue hotel awning.
The cab driver was black and silent. He had his radio tuned to an FM soul station. The Temptations sang 'Power' endlessly as the cab took him toward Logan Airport through streets that were almost completely deserted. Helluva good movie set, he thought. As the Temptations faded out, a jiveass dj came on with the weather forecast. It had been hot yesterday, he reported, but you didn't see nuthin yesterday, brothers and sisters. Today was going to be the hottest day of the summer so far, maybe a record-breaker. The big G's weather prognosticator, Altitude Lou McNally, was calling for temperatures of over 100 degrees inland and not much cooler on the coast. A mass of warm, stagnant air had moved up from the south and was being held in place over New England by hands of high pressure. 'So if you gas gonna reach, you gotta head for the beach,' the jiveass dj finished. 'It ain't goan be too pretty if you hangin out in the city. And just to prove the point, here's Michael Jackson. He's goin "Off the Wall".'
The forecast meant little or nothing to Vic, but it would have terrified Donna even more than she already was, had she known.
As she had the day before, Charity awoke just before dawn. She awoke listening, and for a few moments she wasn't even sure what she was listening for. Then she remembered. Boards creaking.
Footsteps. She was listening to see if her son was going to go walking again.
But the house was silent.
She got out of bed, went to the door, and looked out into the hall.
The hall was empty. After a moment's debate she went down to Brett's room and looked in on him. There was nothing showing under his sheet but a lick of his hair. If he had gone walking, he had done it before she woke up. He was deeply asleep now.
Charity went back to her room and sat on her bed, looking out at the faint white line on the horizon. She was aware that her decision had been made. Somehow, secretly, in the night while she slept.
Now, in the first cold light of day, she was able to examine what she had decided, and she felt that she could count the cost.
It occurred to her that she had never unburdened herself to her sister Holly as she had expected she would do. She still might have, if not for the credit cards at lunch yesterday. And then last night she had told Charity how much this, that, and the other had cost - the Buick four-door, the Sony color set, the parquet floor in the hallway. As if, in Holly's mind, each of these things still carried invisible price tags and always would.
Charity still liked her sister. Holly was giving and kindhearted, impulsive, affectionate, warm. But her way of living had forced her to close off some of the heartless truths about the way she and Charity had grown up poor in rural Maine, the truths that had more or less force Charity into marriage with Joe Camber while luck -
really no different from Charity's winning lottery ticket - had allowed Holly to meet Jim and escape the life back home forever.
She was afraid that if she had told Holly that she had been trying to get Joe's permission to come down here for years, that this trip had only occurred because of brutal generalship on her part, and that even so it had almost come down to Joe's strapping her with his
leather belt... she was afraid that if she told Holly those things, her sister's reaction would be horrified anger rather than anything rational and helpful. Why horrified anger? Perhaps because, deep down in a part of the human soul where Buick station wagons, and Sony color TVs with Trinitron picture tubes, and parquet floors can never quite make their final stilling impact, Holly would recognize that she might have escaped a similar marriage, a similar life, by the thinnest of margins.
She hadn't told because Holly had entrenched herself in her upper-middle-class suburban life like a watchful soldier in a foxhole. She hadn't told because horrified anger could not solve her problems.
She hadn't told because no one likes to look like a freak in a sideshow, living through the days and weeks and months and years with an unpleasant, uncommunicative, sometimes frightening man.
Charity had discovered there were things you didn't want to tell.
Shame wasn't the reason. Sometimes it was just better - kinder - to keep up a front.
Mostly she hadn't told because these things were her problems.
What happened to Brett was her problem... and over the last two days she had come more and more to beheve that what he did with his life would depend less on her and Joe in the final reckoning than it would on Brett himself.
There would he no divorce. She would continue to fight her unceasing guerilla war with Joe for the boy's soul... for whatever good that would do. In her worry over Brett's wanting to emulate his father, she had perhaps forgotten - or overlooked -the fact that there comes a time when children stand in judgment and their parents ~ mother as well as father -must stand in the dock. Brett had noticed Holly's ostentatious display of credit cards. Charity could only hope Brett would notice that his father ate with his hat on ... among other things.
The dawn was brightening. She took her robe from the back of the door and put it on. She wanted a shower but would not take one
until the others in the house were stirring. The strangers. That was what they were. Even Holly's face was strange to her now, a face that bore only a faint resemblance to the snapshots in the family albums she had brought with them ... even Holly herself had looked at those photographs with a faint air of puzzlement.
They would go back to Castle Rock, back to the house at the end of Town Road No. 3, back to Joe. She would pick up the threads of her life, and things would continue. That would be best.
She reminded herself to call Alva just before seven o'clock, when he would be at breakfast.
It was just past 6 A.M. and the day was coming bright when Tad had his convulsion.
He had awakened from an apparently sound sleep around 5: 15 and had roused Donna from a low doze, complaining of being hungry and thirsty. As if he had pressed a button deep down inside her, Donna had become aware for the first time that she was hungry too. The thirst she had been aware of - it was more or less constant
- but she could not remember actually thinking of food since sometime yesterday morning. Now she was suddenly ravenous.
She soothed Tad as best she could, telling him hollow things that no longer meant anything real to her one way or another - that people would show up soon, the bad dog would be taken away, they would be rescued.
The real thing was the thought of food.
Breakfasts, for instance, take breakfasts: two eggs fried in butter, over easy if you don't mind, waiter. French toast. Big glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice so cold that moisture beaded the glass.
Canadian bacon. Home fries. Bran flakes in cream with a sprinkle of blueberries on top - bloobies, her father had always called them, another one of those comic irrationalities that had irritated her mother out of all proportion.
Her stomach made a loud rumbling sound, and Tad laughed. The sound of his laughter startled her and pleased her with its unexpectedness. It was like finding a rose growing in a rubbish heap, and she smiled back. The smile hurt her lips.
'Heard that, huh?'
'I think you must be hungry too.'
