Needful Things - Stephen King [90]
Something that was still alive.
"Todd scared of Annie? God, no!"
"Not in the last few months they were alive?"
"No."
"In the last few weeks?"
"Polly, I wasn't in much condition to observe things then. There was this thing that happened with Thad Beaumont, the writer this crazy thing-" "Are you saying you were so out Of it you never noticed Annie and Todd when they were around, or that you weren't at home much, anyway?"
"No yes I mean of course I was home, but-" It was an odd feeling, being on the receiving end of these rapid fire questions. It was as if Polly had doped him with Novocain and then started using him for a punching bag. And that fundamental thing, whatever it was, was still in motion, still rolling out toward the boundary where gravitation would begin working not to hold it up but to pull it down.
"Did Todd ever come to you and say 'I'm scared of Mommy'?"
"No-" "Did he ever come and say 'Daddy, I think Mommy's planning to kill herself, and take me along for company'?"
"Polly, that's ridiculous! I-" "Did he?"
"No!"
"Did he ever even say she was acting or talking funny?"
"No-" "And Al was away at school, right?"
"What does that have to do with-" "She had one child left in the nest. When you were gone, working, it was just the two of them in that nest. She ate supper with him, helped him with his homework, watched TV with him-" "Read to him-" he said. His voice was blurred, strange.
He hardly recognized it.
"She was probably the first person Todd saw each morning and the last person he saw at night," Polly said. Her hand lay on his wrist.
Her eyes looked earnestly into his. "If anyone was in a position to see it coming, it was the person who died with her. And that person never said a word."
Suddenly the thing inside fell. His face began to work. He could feel it happening-it was as if strings had been attached to it in a score of different places, and each was now being tugged by a gentle but insistent hand. Heat flooded his throat and tried to close it.
Heat flooded his face. His eyes filled with tears; Polly Chalmers doubled, trebled, and then broke into prisms of light and image.
His chest heaved but his lungs seemed to find no air. His hand turned over with that scary quickness he had and clamped on hersit must have hurt her terribly, but she made no sound. "I miss her!" he cried out at Polly, and a great, painful sob broke the words into a pair of gasps- "I miss them both, ah, God, how I miss them both!"
"I know," Polly said calmly. "I know. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? How you miss them both."
He began to weep. Al had wept every night for two weeks, and Alan had been there to hold him and offer what comfort he could, but Alan had not cried himself Now he did. The sobs took him and carried him just as they would; he had no power to stop or stay them. He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.
He pushed the coffee cup blindly aside, heard it hit the floor in some other world and shatter there. He laid his overheated, throbbing head on the table and wrapped his arms around it and wept.
At some point, he had felt her raise his head with her cool hands, her misshapen, kindly hands, and place it against her stomach. She held it there and he wept for a long, long time.
8
Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there. anyway.
That had been the beginning between them, even though he felt more like the end had not recognized it as a beginning; it had he had finally musof something. Between then and the day when tered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner