Later - Stephen King Page 0,58

didn’t even come to the funeral.” I turned off the water. “She’s in a mental institution, Mom. He says she’ll be there for the rest of her life. She killed her baby, and then tried to kill herself.”

My mother was getting ready to put the salmon in the microwave, but she set it on the counter instead and plopped down on one of the stools. “Oh my God. Mona told me she was an assistant in a biology lab at Caltech. She seemed so proud.”

“Professor Burkett said she’s cata-whatsit.”

“Catatonic.”

“Yeah. That.”

My mother was looking down at our dinner-to-be, the salmon’s pink flesh kind of glimmering through its shroud of paper towels. She seemed to be thinking very deeply. Then the vertical line between her eyebrows smoothed out.

“So now we know something we probably shouldn’t. It’s done and can’t be undone. Everybody has secrets, Jamie. You’ll find that out for yourself in time.”

Thanks to Liz and Kenneth Therriault, I had found that out already, and I found out my mother’s secret, too.

Later.

52

Kenneth Therriault disappeared from the news, replaced by other monsters. And because he had stopped haunting me, he also disappeared from the forefront of my mind. As that fall chilled into winter, I still had a tendency to step back from the elevator doors when they opened, but by the time I turned fourteen, that little tic had disappeared.

I saw other dead people from time to time (and there were probably some I missed, since they looked like normal people unless they died of injuries or you got right up close). I’ll tell you about one, although it has nothing to do with my main story. He was a little boy no older than I had been on the day I saw Mrs. Burkett. He was standing on the divider that runs down the middle of Park Avenue, dressed in red shorts and a Star Wars tee-shirt. He was paper pale. His lips were blue. And I think he was trying to cry, although there were no tears. Because he looked vaguely familiar, I crossed the downtown side of Park and asked him what was wrong. You know, besides being dead.

“I can’t find my way home!”

“Do you know your address?”

“I live at 490 Second Avenue Apartment 16B.” He ran it off like a recording.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s pretty close. Come on, kid. I’ll take you there.”

It was a building called Kips Bay Court. When we got there, he just sat down on the curb. He wasn’t crying anymore, and he was starting to get that drifting-away look they all get. I didn’t like to leave him there, but I didn’t know what else to do. Before I left, I asked him his name and he said it was Richard Scarlatti. Then I knew where I’d seen him. His picture was on NY1. Some big boys drowned him in Swan Lake, which is in Central Park. Those boys all cried like blue fuck and said they had only been goofing around. Maybe that was true. Maybe I’ll understand all that stuff later, but actually I don’t think so.

53

By then we were doing well enough that I could have gone to a private school. My mother showed me brochures from the Dalton School and the Friends Seminary, but I chose to stay public and go to Roosevelt, home of the Mustangs. It was okay. Those were good years for Mom and me. She landed a super-big client who wrote stories about trolls and woods elves and noble guys who went on quests. I landed a girlfriend, sort of. Mary Lou Stein was kind of a goth intellectual in spite of her girl-next-door name and a huge cinephile. We went to the Angelika just about once every week and sat in the back row reading subtitles.

One day shortly after my birthday (I’d reached the grand old age of fifteen), Mom texted me and asked if I could drop by the agency office after school instead of going straight home—not a huge deal, she said, just some news she wanted to pass on in person.

When I got there she poured me a cup of coffee—unusual but not unheard-of by then—and asked if I remembered Jesus Hernandez. I told her I did. He had been Liz’s partner for a couple of years, and a couple of times Mom brought me along when she and Liz had meals with Detective Hernandez and his wife. That was quite awhile ago, but it’s hard to forget a six-foot-six detective