Needful Things - Stephen King [110]
Now, sitting in a Boston rocker that the old lady undoubtedly would have approved of, Polly calculated that Aunt Evvie must have been eighty-eight that spring-eighty-eight years old and still smoking like a chimney-although she had not looked much different to Polly than she had when Polly was a little girl, hoping for a penny sweet from the apparently endless supply Aunt Evvie kept in the pocket of her apron.
Many things in Castle Rock had changed in the years she had been gone, but Aunt Evvie was not one of them.
"Well, that's over," Aunt Evvie had said in her cigarette-raspy voice. "They're in the ground, Polly. Mother and father both."
Polly had burst into tears then, a miserable flood of them. She thought at first that Aunt Evvie would try to comfort her, and her flesh was already shrinking from the old woman's touch-she didn't want to be comforted.
And need not have worried. Evelyn Chalmers had never been a woman who believed in comforting the grief-stricken; might in fact have believed, Polly sometimes thought later, that the very idea of comfort was an illusion. In any case, she only stood there with her cane planted between her red galoshes, smoking and waiting for Polly's tears to give way to sniffles as she brought herself under control.
When this had been accomplished, Aunt Evvie asked: "Your chap-the one they spent so much time fussing over-is dead, isn't he?"
Though she had guarded this secret jealously from everyone, Polly found herself nodding. "His name was Kelton."
"A goodish name," Aunt Evvie said. She drew on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly from her mouth so she could draw the smoke back up her nose-what Lorraine Chalmers had called a "double-pump," wrinkling her nose in distaste as she said it. "I knew it the first time you come over to see me after you got home.
Saw it in your eyes."
"There was a fire," Polly said, looking up at her. She had a tissue but it was too soggy to do any more business; she put it in her coat pocket and used her fists instead, screwing them into her eyes like a little girl who has fallen off her scooter and banged her knee.
"The young woman I hired to babysit him probably started it."
"Ayuh," Aunt Evvie said. "But do you want to know a secret, Trisha?"
Polly nodded her head, smiling a little. Her real name was Patricia, but she had been Polly to everyone since her babyhood.
Everyone except Aunt Evvie.
"Baby Kelton's dead but you're not." Aunt Evvie tossed her cigarette away and used one bony forefinger to tap against Polly's chest for emphasis. "You're not. So what are you going to do about it?"
Polly thought it over. "I'm going back to California," she said finally. "That's all I know."
"Yes, and that's all right for a start. But it's not enough."
And then Aunt Evvie said something very close to what Polly herself would say, some years later, when she went to dinner at The Birches with Alan Pangborn: "You're not the culprit here, Trisha. Have you got that sorted out?"
"I I don't know."
"Then you don't. Until you realize that, it won't matter where you go, or what you do. There won't be any chance."
"What chance?" she had asked, bewildered.
"Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?"
She had shaken her head slowly.
"Men and women who can't get over the past," Aunt Evvie said.
"That's what ghosts are. Not them." She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. "The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay."
"I feel "
"Yes," Aunt Evvie said. "I know you do. But they don't. Your mother and my nephew don't. Your chap, the one who died while you been Away, he don't. Do you understand me?"
She had. A little, anyway.
"You're