stars. He watched the turnpike, nearly deserted this late. It unrolled ceaselessly in front of them. They went through the tollgate at Augusta and Weizak took a time-and-toll ticket. Then they went on again—Gardener, Sabbatus, Lewiston.
Nearly five years, longer than same convicted murderers spend in the slam.
He slept.
Dreamed.
“Johnny,” his mother said in his dream. “Johnny, make me better, make me well.” She was in a beggar’s rags. She was crawling toward him over cobblestones. Her face was white. Thin blood ran from her knees. White lice squirmed in her thin hair. She held shaking hands out to him. “It’s the power of God working in you,” she said. “It’s a great responsibility, Johnny. A great trust. You must be worthy.”
He took her hands, closed his own over them, and said, “Spirits, depart from this woman.”
She stood up. “Healed!” she cried in a voice that was filled with a strange and terrible triumph. “Healed! My son has healed me! His work is great upon the earth!”
He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn’t want to do great works, or heal, or speak in tongues, to divine the future, or find those things that had been lost. He tried to tell her, but his tongue wouldn’t obey the command of his brain. Then she was past him, striding off down the cobbled street, her posture cringing and servile but somehow arrogant at the same time; her voice belled like a clarion: “Saved! Savior! Saved! Savior!”
And to his horror he saw that there had been thousands of others behind her, maybe millions, all of them maimed or deformed or in terror. The stout lady reporter was there, needing to know who the Democrats would nominate for the presidency in 1976; there was a death-eyed farmer in biballs with a picture of his son, a smiling young man in Air Force blues, who had been reported MIA over Hanoi in 1972, he needed to know if his son was dead or alive; a young woman who looked like Sarah with tears on her smooth cheeks, holding up a baby with a hydrocephalic head on which blue veins were traced like runes of doom; an old man with his fingers turned into clubs by arthritis; others. They stretched for miles, they would wait patiently, they would kill him with their mute, bludgeoning need.
“Saved!” His mother’s voice carried back imperatively. “Savior! Saved! Saved!”
He tried to tell them that he could neither heal nor save, but before he could open his mouth to make the denial, the first had laid hands on him and was shaking him.
The shaking was real enough. It was Weizak’s hand on his arm. Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day—it was nightmare light, turning Sam’s kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint.
“Where are we?” he asked thickly.
“The hospital,” Sam said. “Cumberland General.”
“Oh. All right.”
He sat up. The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.
“Are you ready to go in?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
They crossed the parking lot amid the soft creak of summer crickets in the woods. Fireflies stitched through the darkness. The image of his mother was very much on him—but not so much that he was unable to enjoy the soft and fragrant smell of the night and the feel of the faint breeze against his skin. There was time to enjoy the health of the night, and the feeling of health coming inside him. In the context of why he was here, the thought seemed almost obscene—but only almost. And it wouldn’t go away.
2
Herb came down the hallway to meet them, and Johnny saw that his father was wearing old pants, shoes with no socks, and his pajama shirt. It told Johnny a lot about the suddenness with which it had come. It told him more than he wanted to know.
“Son,” he said. He looked smaller, somehow. He tried to say more and couldn’t. Johnny hugged him and Herb burst into tears. He sobbed against Johnny’s shirt.
“Daddy,” he said. “That’s all right, Daddy, that’s all right.”
His father put his arms on Johnny’s shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away