questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: 'All the G.I. Joes.' Ev's back had crawled. lt was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.
The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, 'Jonathan.' It was David's middle name.
Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.
Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P.A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.
There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, non-specific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two days later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.
'I suspected something must have been wacky,' he told Ev.
'Why was that?'
The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. 'Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time ... if he was still alive at all.'
'I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly.'
'We're working on two or three lines of inquiry,' the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.
'Trying to find their other son.' Ev expected that would squash her.
It didn't. 'Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one.'
They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them - Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.
The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.
She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.
'What were they feeding him?' she asked abruptly.
Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. 'What?'
'What were they feeding him?'
'Why, just regular food,' he said.
'I doubt that.'
'You needn't,' he said. 'I took enough meals with 'em to know. Why do you ask?'
'Because ten of his teeth are gone,' she said curtly.
7
Ev clenched a fist tightly in spite of the dull throb of arthritis and brought it down on one leg, hard.
What are you going to do, old man? David's gone and it would be easier if you could convince yourself he was really dead, wouldn't it?
Yes. That would make things simpler. Sadder, but