to tell if that was a real shape or just a shadow) . The battery had to rest. Then she could try again. So why not sleep?
The package on his mailbox. That package from J. C. Whitney.
She sat up a little straighter, a puzzled frown creasing her brow. She turned her head, but from here the front corner of the house blocked her view of the mailbox. But she had seen the package, hung from the front of the box. Why had she thought of that? Did it have some significance?
She was still holding the Tupperware dish with the olives and slices of cucumbers inside, each wrapped neatly in Saran Wrap. Instead of eating anything else, she carefully put the white plastic cover on the Tupperware dish and stowed it back in Tad’s lunchbox. She did not let herself think much about why she was being so careful of the food. She settled back in the bucket seat and found the lever that tipped it back. She meant to think about the package hooked over the mailbox—there was something there, she was almost sure of it—but soon her mind had slipped away to another idea, one that took on the bright tones of reality as she began to doze off.
The Cambers had gone to visit relatives. The relatives were in some town that was two, maybe three hours’ drive away. Kennebunk, maybe. Or Hollis. Or Augusta. It was a family reunion.
Her beginning-to-dream mind saw a gathering of fifty people or more on a green lawn of TV-commercial size and beauty. There was a fieldstone barbecue pit with a shimmer of heat over it. At a long trestle table there were at least four dozen people, passing platters of corn on the cob and dishes of home-baked beans—pea beans, soldier beans, red kidney beans. There were plates of barbecued franks (Donna’s stomach made a low goinging sound at this vision). On the table was a homely checked tablecloth. All this was being presided over by a lovely woman with pure white hair that had been rolled into a bun at the nape of her neck. Fully inserted into the capsule of her dream now, Donna saw with no surprise at all that this woman was her mother.
The Cambers were there, but they weren’t really the Cambers at all. Joe Camber looked like Vic in a clean Sears work coverall, and Mrs. Camber was wearing Donna’s green watered-silk dress. Their boy looked the way Tad was going to look when he was in the fifth grade . . .
“Mommy?”
The picture wavered, started to break up. She tried to hold on to it because it was peaceful and lovely: the archetype of a family life she had never had, the type she and Vic would never have with their one planned child and their carefully programmed lives. With sudden rising sadness, she wondered why she had never thought of things in that light before.
“Mommy?”
The picture wavered again and began to darken. That voice from outside, piercing the vision the way a needle may pierce the shell of an egg. Never mind. The Cambers were at their family reunion and they would pull in later, around ten, happy and full of barbecue. Everything would be all right. The Joe Camber with Vic’s face would take care of everything. Everything would be all right again. There were some things that God never allowed. It would—
“Mommy!”
She came out of the doze, sitting up, surprised to find herself behind the wheel of the Pinto instead of at home in bed . . . but only for a second. Already the lovely. surreal image of the relatives gathered around the trestle picnic table was beginning to dissolve, and in fifteen minutes she would not even remember that she had dreamed.
“Huh? What?”
Suddenly, shockingly, the phone inside the Cambers’ house began to ring. The dog rose to its feet, moving shadows that resolved themselves into its large and ungainly form.
“Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom.”
Cujo began to roar at the sound of the telephone. He was not barking; he was roaring. Suddenly he charged at the house. He struck the back door hard enough to shake it in its frame.
No, she thought sickly, oh no, stop, please, stop—
“Mommy, I have to—”
The dog was snarling, biting at the wood of the door. She could hear the sick splintering sounds its teeth made.
“—go weewee.”
The phone rang six times. Eight times. Ten. Then it stopped.