struck suddenly by such a complex wave of despair and sorrow that he groaned aloud and grabbed his forehead, squeezing his temples. The old thoughts swarmed back in, as predictable as summer mosquitoes and just as maddening. Six months ago, things had been okay. Now his son was sitting in a jail cell somewhere. What were the watershed moments? How could he, Michael, have changed things? What was the history of it, exactly? Where had the sickness started to creep in?
'Jesus - '
He squeezed harder, listening to the winter-whine outside the windows. He and Arnie had put the storms on just last month. That had been a good day, hadn't it? First Arnie holding the ladder and looking up, then him down and Arnie up there, him shouting for Arnie to be careful, the wind in his hair and dead brown leaves blowing over his shoes, their colours gone. Sure, it had been a good day. Even after that beastly car had come, seeming to overshadow everything in their son's life like a fatal disease, there had been some good days. Hadn't there?
'Jesus,' he said again in a weak, teary voice that he despised.
Unbidden images rose behind his eyes. Colleagues looking at him sideways, maybe whispering in the faculty club. Discussions at cocktail parties in which his name bobbed uneasily up and down like a waterlogged body. Arnie wouldn't be eighteen for almost two months and he supposed that meant his name couldn't be printed in the paper, but everyone would still know. Word got around.
Suddenly, crazily, be saw Arnie at four, astride a red trike he and Regina had gotten at a rummage sale (Arnie at four had called them 'Momma's rubbage sales'). The trike's red paint was flaked with scales of rust, the tyres were bald, but Arnie had loved it; he would have taken that trike to bed with him, if he could. Michael closed his eyes and saw Arnie riding up and down the sidewalk, wearing his blue corduroy jumper, his hair flopping in his eyes, and then his mind's eye blinked or wavered or did something and the rusty rubbage-sale trike was Christine, her red paint scummed with rust, her windows milky-white with age.
He gritted his teeth together. Someone looking in might have thought he was smiling crazily. He waited until he had some kind of control, and then got up and went downstairs to tell Regina what had happened. He would tell her and she would think of what they were going to do, just as she always had; she would steal the forward motion from him, taking whatever sorry balm that actually doing things had to give, and leave him with only sick sorrow and the knowledge that now his son was someone else.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 41 THE COMING OF THE STORM
She took the keys to my Cadillac car,
Jumped in my kitty and drove her far.
- Bob Seger
The first of that winter's great northeast storms came to Libertyville on Christmas Eve, beating its way across the upper third of the US, on a wide and easily predictable storm track. The day began in bright thirty-degree sunshine, but morning deejays were already cheerfully predicting doom and gloom, urging those who had not finished their last-minute shopping to do so by mid-afternoon. Those planning trips to the old homestead for an old-fashioned Christmas were urged to rethink their plans if the trip could not be made in four to six hours.
'If you don't want to be spending Christmas Day in the breakdown lane of I-76 somewhere between Bedford and Carlisle, I'd leave early or not at all,' the FM-104 jock advised his listening audience (a large part of which was too stoned to even consider going anyplace), and then resumed the Christmas Block Party with Springsteen's version of 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town'.
By 11:00 A.M., when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the slightest trace or snow and ice He paused by the family car, turning his face up