First Thrills - Lee Child [133]
Millions. It had to be several million by now. Biological Healing was still on several bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the “mind-body connection” to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.
“Grief,” John told an agreeable Larry King, “knows no one particular language.”
He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most: being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.
The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes about his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit and taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.
John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she were a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rocklike. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack—one of many, it turned out—had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.
Pam had been the strong one, the one everyone turned to. She steeled herself against any emotions, knowing that if she allowed them to come, she would be overwhelmed, stoned to death by the guilt and grief and anger that would rain down.
“Write about it,” she had told John, begged him, because she could not listen to his anguish anymore without unleashing her own. “Write it in your journal.”
He had always kept notebooks, and just about every day he jotted down his thoughts like a little girl keeping a diary. At first, she had thought this habit strange for a man but later came to accept it as just another one of his endearing eccentricities, like his fear of escalators and belief that eating raw cookie dough would cause intestinal worms. When it started, she was glad when he stayed in his office writing all night instead of coming to bed, where he invariably cried himself to sleep, tossing and turning from nightmares, calling out Zack’s name. She had ignored these terrible nights as long as she could, wished them away because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge