The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,215

She pointed her eyes at Peter again, squinting through her glasses. “But you didn’t ask that, did you? What all do I write in there, wasn’t it?”

Her mind was like this: doubling back, forming strange connections, dipping into the past. She spoke often of Terrence, who had ridden with her on the train. Sometimes he seemed to be her brother, sometimes her cousin. There were others. Mazie Chou. A boy named Vincent Gum, a girl named Sharise. Lucy and Rex Fisher. But these wanderings through time could be interrupted, at any moment, by intervals of startling lucidity.

“Have you written about Theo?”

“Theo?”

“My brother.”

Auntie’s eyes drifted a moment. “He told me he was going down to the station. When he coming back?”

So, she didn’t know. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten, the news blending in her mind with other such stories.

“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Peter said. “That’s what I came to tell you. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t go being sorry now,” she said. “The things you don’t know would fill a book. That’s a joke now, ain’t it? A book. Go on now. Drink your tea.”

Peter decided not to press. What good would it do the old woman to hear about one more person dying? He took another sip of the bitter liquid. If anything, it actually tasted worse. He felt a little burble of nausea.

“That the birch bark you feeling. For the digestion.”

“It’s good, really.”

“No it ain’t. But it does the trick all right. Clean you out like a white tornado.”

Peter remembered his other news then. “I meant to tell you, Auntie. I saw the stars.”

At this, the old woman brightened. “Well, there you go.” She quickly touched the back of his hand with the tip of a weathered finger. “There’s something good to talk about. Tell me now, how they look to you?”

His thoughts returned to that moment on the roof, lying on the concrete next to Lish. The stars so thick above their faces it was as if he could brush them with his hand. It seemed like something that had happened years ago, the final minutes of a life he’d left behind.

“It’s hard to put into words, Auntie. I never knew.”

“Well, ain’t that a thing.” Her eyes, pointed to the wall behind his head, seemed to twinkle, as if with remembered starlight. “I ain’t seen them since I was a girl. Your father used to come in just like you’re doing now and tell me all about them. I saw them, Auntie, he’d say, and I’d say to him, How they doing, Demo? How those stars of mine? And the two of us would have a nice visit about them, just like we’re doing now.” She sipped her tea and returned her mug to the table. “Why you looking so surprised?”

“He did?”

A quick frown of correction; but her eyes, still lit with an inner brightness, seemed to be laughing at him. “Why you think he wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Peter managed. And it was true: he didn’t. But when Peter tried to imagine this scene—his father, the great Demetrius Jaxon, drinking tea with Auntie in her overheated kitchen, talking about the Long Rides—he somehow couldn’t. “I guess I never realized he told anyone else.”

She gave a little laugh. “Oh, your father and me, we talked. About a lot of things. About the stars.”

It was all so confusing. More than confusing: it was as if, in the space of just a few days—since the night the viral had been killed in the nets by Arlo Wilson—some fundamental precept of the world had changed, only nobody had told Peter what this change might be.

“Did he ever tell you … about a Walker, Auntie?”

The old woman sucked in her cheeks. “A Walker, you say? Now, I don’t recall anything about that. Theo see a Walker?”

He heard himself sigh. “Not Theo. My father.”

But she had given up listening; her eyes, pointed at the wall behind him, had gone far away again. “Now, Terrence, I believe he did tell me something about a Walker. Terrence and Lucy. She always was the littlest thing. It was Terrence who made her stop crying, you know. He always could do that.”

It was hopeless. Once Auntie went off like this, it could be hours, even days, before she came back to the present. He almost envied her, this power.

“Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”

“That’s okay, Auntie. It can keep.”

She lifted her bony shoulders in a shrug. “You say so.” A silent moment passed. Then: