The Regulators - Stephen King [153]
As much of the week as I could, I spent with Jan.
Then, today, while I was trying to clean up a little (mostly I'm too exhausted and dispirited to even try), I broke my mother's favorite plate, the one with the Currier Ives sledding scene on it. Tak had nothing to do with it; I picked it up off the mantel-shelf in the dining room where I keep it displayed, wanting to give it a little dusting, it simply slipped through my stupid fingers broke on the floor. At first I thought my heart had broken with it. It wasn't the plate, of course, as much as I have always liked it. All at once it was like it was my life I was looking at instead of an old china plate smashed to shit on the dining-room floor. Cheap symbolism, Peter Jackson from across the street would probably say. Cheap sentimental. Probably true, but when we are in pain we are rarely creative.
I got a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen began picking up the pieces, sobbing all the while I did it. I didn't even hear the TV go off — Tak Seth had been having a MotoKofs 2200 festival most of the day — but then a, shadow fell over me and I looked up and there he was.
At first I thought it was Tak — Seth has been mostly gone this last week, or lying low — but then I saw the eyes. They both use the same set, you'd think they wouldn't change, couldn't, but they do. Seth's are lighter, and have a range of emotion Tak can never manage.
'I broke my mother's plate,' I said. 'It was all I had of her, and it slipped through my fingers.'
It came on worse than ever then. I put my arms around my knees, put my face down on them, just cried. Seth came closer, put his own arms around my neck, hugged me. Something wonderful happened when he did. I can't explain it, exactly, but it was so good that it made visiting with Jan at Mohonk seem ordinary in comparison. Tak can make me feel bad — terrible, in fact, as if the whole world is nothing but a ball of mud squirming with worms just like me. Tak likes it when I feel bad. He licks those bad feelings right off my skin, like a kid with a candy cane. I know he does.
This was the opposite . . . and more. My tears stopped, my feelings of sadness were replaced by such a sense of joy and . . . not ecstasy, exactly, but like that. Serenity optimism all mixed together, as if everything couldn't help but turn out all right. As if everything was already all right, I just couldn't see that in my ordinary state of mind. I was filled up, the way good food fills you up when you're hungry. I was renewed.
Seth did that. He did it when he hugged me. And he did it, I think (know), in exactly the same way Tak makes me feel the bad things and the sad things. Maroon is what I call it. When Tak wants to, it makes me feel maroon. But it can only do it because it has Seth's power to draw on. I think that when Seth took away my sadness this afternoon, he was able to do it because he had Tak's power to draw on. And I don't think Tak knew he was doing that, or it would have made him stop.
Here's something that's never occurred to me until today: Seth may be stronger than Tak knows.
Much stronger.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
Johnny didn't know how long he sat in the kitchen chair, head down, body racked with sobs as strong as shivers, tears pouring out of his eyes, before he felt a soft hand on the back of his neck and looked up to see the girl from the market, the one with the schizo hair. Steve was no longer with her. Johnny looked through the living-room picture window — the angle was just right for him to be able to do that from where he was — and saw him standing on the dispirited grass of the Wyler lawn and looking down the street. Some of the sirens had died as the vehicles they belonged to reached the street and