skips over to the bed, kisses her on the cheek.
“Bye, Mom. See you right away when I get home.”
Hank kisses her, too. “I’ll call you when I get to work. I love you, Alison. Try to get out of bed.”
* * *
Harbor Hills Elementary School ripples with excitement and then opens its arms to Jimmy. Denise, Gary, and a few of the other teachers surround and hug him, which embarrasses him in front of the other boys.
“Jimmy,” Denise says, “you look really good.”
“Uh, thanks.”
She continues, “Honey, how’s your mom doing?”
Jimmy shifts from foot to foot and then says, “Okay, you know, kinda.”
“Did she say when she might come back to school?” Gary asks.
“Nope. She’s awful tired.”
“Of course,” Denise adds, “I stopped by yesterday. But there wasn’t any answer at the door.”
“Oh, she doesn’t answer the door.”
“Okay, tell her we miss her, okay?”
“Sure.”
Jimmy’s classmates are mesmerized by his commando experience and while it certainly seems peculiar, Jimmy suddenly finds himself very popular and the center of attention. The boys pepper him with questions. So he tells the story again and again, the sting of it lessens, and it begins to feel only like a story. The school counselor observes him and she is encouraged by his ability to concentrate on his schoolwork and to play during recess. When she pulls him aside he tells her it feels like he was just inside a video game and that it really didn’t happen. She sees this as a positive distancing mechanism and the report she sends home is even more encouraging than Hank had hoped.
Hank was sorely needed at Pump Up The Volume. He is the one who examines the demographics of the audience and creates the music playlist for the DJ events. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of music history and his playlists are a sought after commodity. Pump Up The Volume has started providing them over the Internet for a fee. They were almost making more money on that than on rental equipment. Sometimes when Hank is deep in the flood of chords and melodies he remembers his father, standing in the doorway of his bedroom yelling, “Damn it, Henry, turn off that music and study or you’ll never get a job.”
That morning, several clients called Hank, panicked with what they thought were emergencies. His definition of emergency has changed forever. All of this provided some distance for him, since it helped to place the island and its events, in time past.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-One
Alison refuses to leave the house. Doctor Cartwell who has come to the house two more times told Hank she is still in shock. He prescribed medications, which she pretends to take. She tried them one time but it made her feel murky. She needed to be clear-headed. Of that, she is certain.
When Jimmy leaves for school each morning she gets up infused with anxiety. She paces back and forth in the bedroom. How can they not feel it? How can they not sense the danger? It is so loud - it is practically screaming at them! Her head begins to shake back and forth with aggressive energy. What to do? What should she do? Damn it.
Doctor Cartwell asked her if she was having hallucinations and she decided not to tell him about seeing Theo’s eyes like two black bullet slugs glaring at her in the chrome of the toaster. Cartwell would not understand. How could she tell him that when she was cutting through the orange peel yesterday she felt the knife close in around Gravel’s skin? How would that help anything? These are not hallucinations. These are warnings. And she has them all the time: in the glass door of the microwave, on the stainless steel hood over the stovetop, hollow-eyed faces take shape in the fog of her shower. It startles her, but none of those visions with their hellish dead eyes are as fearsome as the living eyes of Ben at the bottom of the mudslide - at the bottom of the mudslide where she heard him make a promise. He’s coming. I know he’s coming. She waits.
In the evening, Jimmy jabbers on about his school day. He is giddy with school news. It feels good to have things to say again. Hank listens happily to his son’s tales from life on the outside. They have been imprisoned with each other, emotionally trapped on that island. Hank notices a genuine lifting-up in his chest.
Jimmy’s face comes alive as he talks, “But that wasn’t