it had been something about moving through dooms of love.
That line had seemed funny and perplexing to her then, but she thought she understood it now. What else did you call that heavy-duty invisible rubber band, if not love? Was she going to kid herself and say that she did not, even now, in some way love the man she had married? That she stayed with him only out of duty, or for the sake of the child (that was a bitter laugh; if she ever left him it would be for the sake of the child)? That he had never pleasured her in bed? That he could not, sometimes at the most unexpected moments (like the one back at the bus station), be tender?
And yet . . . and yet . . .
Brett was looking out the window, enrapt. Without turning from the view, he said, “You think Cujo’s all right, Mom?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” she said absently.
For the first time she found herself thinking about divorce in a concrete way—what she could do to support herself and her son, how they would get along in such an unthinkable (almost unthinkable) situation. If she and Brett didn’t come home from this trip, would he come after them, as he had vaguely threatened back in Portland? Would he decide to let Charity go to the bad but try to get Brett back by fair means . . . or foul?
She began to tick the various possibilities over in her mind, weighing them, suddenly thinking that maybe a little perspective wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Painful, maybe. Maybe useful, too.
The Greyhound slipped across the state line into New Hampshire and rolled on south.
The Delta 727 rose steeply, buttonhooked over Castle Rock—Vic always looked for his house near Castle Lake and 117, always fruitlessly—and then headed back toward the coast. It was a twenty-minute run to Logan Airport.
Donna was down there, some eighteen thousand feet below. And the Tadder. He felt a sudden depression mixed with a black premonition that it wasn’t going to work, that they were crazy to even think it might. When your house blew down, you had to build a new house. You couldn’t put the old one back together again with Elmer’s Glue.
The stewardess came by. He and Roger were riding in first class (“Might as well enjoy it while we can, buddy,” Roger had said last Wednesday when he made the reservations; “not everyone can go to the poorfarm in such impeccable style”), and there were only four or five other passengers, most of them reading the morning paper—as was Roger.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked Roger with that professional twinkly smile that seemed to say she had been overjoyed to get up this morning at five thirty to make the upsy-downsy run from Bangor to Portland to Boston to New York to Atlanta.
Roger shook his head absently, and she turned that unearthly smile on Vic. “Anything for you, air? Sweet roll? Orange juice?”
“Could you rustle up a screwdriver?” Vic asked, and Roger’s head came out of his paper with a snap.
The stew’s smile didn’t falter; a request for a drink before nine in the morning was no news to her. “I can rustle one up,” she said, “but you’ll have to hustle to get it all down. It’s really only a hop to Boston.”
“I’ll hustle,” Vic promised solemnly, and she passed on her way back up to the galley, resplendent in her powder-blue slacks uniform and her smile.
“What’s with you?” Roger asked.
“What do you mean, what’s with me?”
“You know what I mean. I never even saw you drink a beer before noon before. Usually not before five.”
“I’m launching the boat,” Vic said.
“What boat?”
“The R.M.S. Titanic,” Vic said.
Roger frowned. “That’s sort of poor taste, don’t you think?”
He did, as a matter of fact. Roger deserved something better, but this morning, with the depression still on him like a foul-smelling blanket, he just couldn’t think of anything better. He managed a rather bleak smile instead. But Roger went on frowning at him.
“Look,” Vic said, “I’ve got an idea on this Zingers thing. It’s going to be a bitch convincing old man Sharp and the kid, but it might work.”
Roger looked relieved. It was the way it had always worked with them; Vic was the raw idea man, Roger the shaper and implementer. They had always worked as a team when it came to translating the ideas into media, and in the matter of presentation.