The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating
heavily by the time he had checked Rachel's and Elllie's baggage through and
gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy
was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last
time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. That had been
Gage's first and last plane trip.
Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had
looked up and had seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.
Conspirator's complex working overtime, boyo, he told himself.
She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy
first, perhaps for the whole summer, only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa
Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes
Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on
her sled to the airport with her, and she had sat calmly in one of the plastic
contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the
loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.
Mr and Mrs Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight-time. Irwin
Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of
the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in
while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Ellie.
Louis and Irwin Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was
a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the my-son my-son playlet, but he was
spared. Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered
hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the
certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.
They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking
much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of the new Erica Jong novel
but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little anxiously, at the picture Ellie was
holding.
Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with
him and pick out something to read on the plane.
Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn't like it.
It made him nervous.
'Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda's?' he asked her as they walked
over.
'Yes,' she said. 'Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there's
a truant officer and he gets school-skippers.'
'Don't you worry about the truant officer,' he said. 'I'll take care of the school,
and you can start again in the fall with no trouble.'
'I hope I'll be okay in the fall,' Ellie said. 'I never was in a grade before. Only
kindergarten. I don't know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.'
'You'll be fine.'
'Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?'
He gaped at her. 'Why in the world would you think I was… that I didn't like
your grandda, Ellie?'
She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. 'When you talk
about him you always look pissed off.'
'Ellie, that's vulgar.'
'Sorry.'
She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of
kid-books—Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scary and Beatrix
Potter and that famous old stand-by, Dr Seuss. How do they find this stuff out? Or
do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How's it affecting her? Ellie, what's
behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him, Christ!
'Can I have these, Daddy?' She was holding out a Dr Seuss and a book Louis
hadn't seen since his own childhood—the story of Little Black Sambo and how the
tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.
Christ, I thought they'd made that one an un-book, Louis thought, bemused.
'Yes, fine,' he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash-register. 'Your
Grandda and I like each other fine,' he said, and thought again of his mother's
story of how, when a woman really wanted a baby, she 'found' one. He
remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own
children. Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he
felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.
'Oh,' she said, and fell silent.
The silence made him uneasy. To say something and break the silence,
he said: 'So do you think you'll have a good time in Chicago?'
'No.'
'No? Why not?'
She looked up at him with that fey expression. 'I'm scared.'
He put his hand on her head. 'Scared? Honey, what for? You're not scared of the
plane, are you?'
'No,' she said. 'I don't know what I'm scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at
Gage's funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I
dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage's crib and that was empty, too. But
there was dirt in it.'
Lazarus, come forth.
Then, for the first time in months, he consciously remembered the dream he
had had after Pascow's death—the dream, and then waking up to find his feet
dirty and the foot of the bed caked with fir needles and muck.
The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred.
'Just dreams,' he said to Ellie, and his voice sounded, to his ears at least,
perfectly normal. 'They'll pass.'
'I wish you were coming with us,' she said, 'or that we were staying here. Can
we stay, Daddy? Please? I don't want to go to Grandma and Grandda's… I just
want to go back to school. Okay?'
'Just for a little while, Ellie,' he said. 'I've got…' he swallowed '…a few things to
do here, and then I'll be with you. We can decide what to do next.'
He expected an argument, perhaps even an Ellie-style tantrum. He might
even have welcomed it; a known quantity, as that look was not. But there was only
that pallid, disquieting silence which seemed so deep. He could have asked her
more, but found he didn't dare; she had already told him more than he perhaps
wanted to hear.
Shortly after he and Ellie returned to the boarding lounge, the flight was
called. Boarding passes were produced, and the four of them got in line. Louis
embraced his wife, kissed her hard. She clung to him for a moment and then let
him go so he could pick Ellie up and buss her cheek.
Ellie gazed at him solemnly with sybil's eyes. 'Your lips are so cold,' she said.
'Why is that, Daddy?'
'I don't know,' he said, now more uneasy than ever. He set her down. 'You be
good, pun'kin.'
'I don't want to go,' she said again, but so low only Louis could really hear over
the shuffle and murmur of the boarding passengers. 'I don't want Mommy to go,
either.'
'Ellie, come on,' Louis said. 'You'll be fine.'
'I'll be fine,' she said, 'but what about you? Daddy, what about you?'
The line had begun to move, now. People were walking down the jetway to the
727. Rachel pulled Ellie's hand and for a moment she resisted, holding up the line,
her eyes fixed on her father, and Louis found himself remembering her impatience
last time, her cries of come on-come on-come on.
'Daddy?'
'Go now, Ellie. Please.'
Rachel looked at Ellie and saw that dark, dreamy look for the first time. 'Ellie?'
she said, startled and, Louis thought, a little afraid. 'You're holding up the line,
baby.'
Ellie's lips trembled and grew white. Then she allowed herself to be led into the
jetway. She looked back at him, and he saw naked terror in her face. He raised his
hand to her in false cheeriness.
Ellie did not wave back.