First Thrills - Lee Child [134]
Finally, in the heat of an argument, she had mentioned John’s fitful nights and he had turned on her like an animal, accused her of being cold, of not dealing with her emotions.
There was a switch.
John was always the rational one, Pam the emotional one. He had always used logic to defeat her and invariably won every argument because he didn’t let his feelings get the best of him. Even nine years ago, when Pam had found out that he was cheating on her with one of the front office secretaries from school, he had outlogicked her.
“You’re not going to leave me, Pam,” he had told her, arrogance seeping from every pore. “You don’t have enough money to raise Zack on your own, and you won’t be able to teach at the same school as me because no one likes you there. They’ll all be on my side.”
Sobering to hear from the man you love, not least of all since every word he said was true.
Through almost twenty years of marriage, he had consistently been the more reasonable one, the one who said, “let’s just wait and see” when she was certain that a raspy cough from Zack’s room in the middle of the night was lung cancer or that the rolling papers that fell out of his notebook one day in the kitchen meant he was a meth freak.
“Let’s wait and see,” John had said when she told him she thought Zack had taken some wine from the refrigerator.
“Boys will be boys,” John had said when she found an empty bottle of vodka in the back of Zack’s closet. The cliché had made her want to scratch out his eyes, but she had listened to him, made herself calm down, because the irritated way John glanced at her, the quick shrug of his shoulders, made her feel like a hysterical mother instead of simply a concerned parent. At school, they both dealt with overreacting parents on a daily basis: mothers who screamed at the top of their lungs that grades must be changed or they would go to the school board; fathers who tried to bully teachers into not failing their sons by threatening to sue.
The phone call had come at nine o’clock on a Friday evening—not one in the morning, not a panicked, wake-up-to-catastrophe time of night. Zack had left home earlier with Casey and some friends, and John and Pam were watching a movie. The Royal Tenenbaums. Pam was making herself watch the entire movie—not because she enjoyed it that much but because she knew Zack did, and she wanted to talk to him about it in the morning. He was at that point in his teenage life where any sort of discussion with his mother was pained, and she sought out things—literally, things: movies, football games, funny articles in the paper—that they could comfortably talk about.
“I’ll get it.” John jumped for the phone—he always liked to answer it—as Pam fumbled with the remote control to mute the television.
“Yes, it is,” John had said, his tone of voice low, slightly annoyed. A telemarketer, she thought, then John’s face had turned white. What a silly phrase, Pam had thought, as she sat on the couch, her feet tucked underneath her, to say that someone’s face turned white—but it had. She sat there watching it happen, a line of color draining down his neck like a sink being suddenly unplugged until all the red was gone from John’s usually ruddy skin.
Then, he had whispered, “Yes, we have a son.”
“We have a son.” The first words John had said to her when she had come out of recovery. The birth had been difficult, and after sixteen hours of labor, the doctor had decided to do a caesarian. Pam’s last memory had been the sweet relief of the pain being taken away by the drugs (she would have freebased heroin by then), and John’s crouching trot beside the gurney as they rolled her into the OR, tears in his eyes as he whispered, “I love you.”
He whispered again into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”
Only he wasn’t right there. It was the ghost of John who had sat in the passenger seat of the car as she drove to the county hospital. It was his ghost who had floated through the front doors