The Meridians (13 page)

"Too tired to re-form like this," continued Mr. Gray. "How can I do it?" Another laugh, then: "Water. Water on the floor. That's what'll do it. That's what I see."

And suddenly the breath was gone from Scott's cheek. The rancid smell that had accompanied the gray man dissipated.

He opened his eyes.

The gray man...was gone.

***

13.

***

The screaming continued until Lynette and Robbie took Kevin from the party. Until they did that, all the autistic children in the birthday crowd continued screaming at Kevin as though he were a warlock that they were going to stone. It was only when Robbie and Lynette took their son to the kitchen of Doris' house that the screaming subsided, like a wave leaving the beach with the tide.

There was a window that provided a view into the backyard, and Robbie watched the children as Lynette dealt with Kevin. Kevin had not seemed to be aware of the tumult all around him, but had pitched an absolute fit when they tried to take him inside. It was only after they grabbed all his cars - and the two balls that had appeared as if by magic - that he consented to move from his space on the lawn into the house.

The other autistic children were milling around aimlessly, as though their reasons and purposes in life had suddenly been stolen. It creeped Robbie out how fully and completely they had oriented on his child, acting almost as though they were puppets whose limbs and vocal cords were all tied to the same strings, moving as one without any visible or aural difference in the timing of their pointing and their screams.

"It's okay, Kevin, it's okay," Lynette was whispering beside him, though Robbie felt it was more likely she was saying the words for her own benefit than for Kevin's. The young boy was playing on the floor, cherubic face twisted in concentration as he lined up his cars, then put the two balls at the end of the line, then mixed them up, then replaced them in their earlier positions.

"Kevin, honey," said Lynette. "What happened out there?"

Robbie wanted to point out that their son had never spoken a word at all, let alone discussed the intricacies of autistic group behavior, but before he could a miracle happened.

Kevin spoke.

"Gray," he said.

Robbie looked at Lynette with a look that, if it appeared anything like hers, included widened eyes and a mouth open wide enough that it was in danger of becoming the center of a newly formed black hole.

"Did you hear that?" she asked. Then before she waited for his reply, she knelt down and touched Kevin lightly on the arm. "Honey," she said, removing her hand when Kevin started to shy away from her, "what did you say?"

Kevin said nothing. He said nothing for long enough that Robbie started to wonder if he had really heard what he had heard. Lynette looked at him again. "Did you hear that?" she repeated.

"Gray," Robbie said, his head starting to throb for some reason. "He said 'gray.'"

"What does that mean?" asked Lynette.

Robbie shook his head. "How should I know?" he said. He said it in a sharper tone than he intended, but he was suddenly very tired. Tired of the difficulties entailed with being the parent of a special needs child, tired of being a parent in general, and most of all tired of being expected to have answers to questions he didn't understand. It was all too much in that instant, too much work, too much loss, too much heartbreak. But then the moment passed. He suddenly felt a headache coming on, deep in his sinuses, like the mother of all hay fever attacks coming on in an instant.

And Lynette screamed.

Robbie turned in time to see the man bending down over Kevin.

"Hello, little one," said the man. He was very old, and wearing a gray outfit, a suit that had once no doubt been quite costly but had been reduced in value by the muck and blood that spattered it and by the ruined shoulder that it sported. "Hello."

The man's face was a latticework of old scars and ruined bones.

The man reached out a hand and, almost tenderly, touched Kevin's head.

Robbie was reeling inside, completely incapable of understanding what was going on. Where had the old man come from? What was he doing there?

Lynette apparently was not gripped by any of the quasi-paralysis that afflicted Robbie, for she screamed once, loudly, "Kevin!" and darted toward her son.

"Kevin?" said the man. He sounded amused. "Little Kevin," he repeated, even as Lynette moved toward him with the speed of a cheetah.

Kevin did nothing, just continued playing with his cars and his two new balls in his usual stolid, focused manner.

Lynette knelt down to scoop her son off the floor, and Robbie finally broke his paralysis. He, too, moved toward his son and wife.

Before he could do more than take a half-step, however, the old man moved. He furrowed his brow in concentration, and said a few words that Robbie did not understand.

"I can't kill the boy, but I can hurt him. I can hurt him forever."

And suddenly, as fast as he had appeared, the man disappeared. But before he did, he swept his aged arm over the nearby kitchen island, knocking a glass of water to the floor.

Robbie saw the glass shatter against the floor, saw the water pooling right where he was about to step, but he had no time to alter his movement, and stepped in the watery patch. It was as though he was experiencing the most powerful déjà vú in history, a sweeping tide of foreknowledge that he could see in its entirety but whose path he had no power to vary in the least bit.

The water squeaked under his sneakers for an instant, and his arms pinwheeled in wide circles as he felt himself lose balance. His foot slipped out from under him, and in a way that was both slow as molasses and yet fast as blood spurting from a severed artery, he felt himself falling toward the kitchen island.

Lynette screamed a single word. It was all there was time for. Just a single, anguished, "Robbie!" and then he felt his head hit the corner of the kitchen island.

Falling from over six feet high, with his bearlike bulk propelling him with greater momentum than the body of a smaller man would have done, the fall was incredibly hard and powerful. He felt his skin puncture in a wash of blood, then felt the corner of the island go through his skull, shattering it with a crackle that resounded through his head in the instant that Robbie had left.

And then all was dark.

***

14.

***

Lynette was numb. She felt like her mind was swathed in cotton, a layer of cloth that insulated her from seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling,
feeling
. In the short days between Robbie's death and his funeral, she had endured too many questions, too few answers.

What had happened? Doris had asked. And Lynette had no answer, because all she knew of the moment she lost her husband was that it had been a moment of insanity; a second of complete loss. Similarly, the next few days swept past in a torrent of activity that was so overpowering it actually intensified her feelings of disorientation and disengagement. Just as a car, when driven slowly over potholes will jitter and shake, but when driven at a reckless speed will drive more smoothly, so the many details that had to be attended to with Robbie's death rendered her almost a wraith, gliding across the surface of her life.

Robbie was gone.

That was the one thought that kept recurring, that kept waking her up at night and kept her wanting to fall asleep during the day as an escape from its rhythmic pounding.

Robbie is gone.

Robbie is gone.

Robbie is gone.

A mortuary had to be contacted, the body handled, and Robbie is gone.

The funerary arrangements had to be made, and Robbie is gone.

Robbie is gone.

Robbie is gone.

Robbie is gone.

Only Kevin seemed unaware of all the activity around him. As long as he had his cars and his two red balls, he was happy. Lynette hated those round red spheres, hated them for what they represented and the change in her life that they had wrought. Though of course they were in and of themselves neither evil nor even capable of any kind of action or activity, still she thought of them in the darkness of the night as being evil totems, mischievous spirits that had come to dwell with her child and in so doing had signaled the loss of her husband.

The funeral itself was almost impossible to bear. Not merely because she had to say goodbye to her beloved Robbie, but also because she had to reject her pastor's offer to eulogize him. She had no desire to hear of the tender mercies of God when it was that same God who had stolen her husband from her, and stolen him most cruelly. She gave the eulogy herself, as much as she was able, though she broke down crying halfway through and had to be helped away from the microphone.

Robbie was a much loved man among his students, among the Friends of Autistic Children, in their church, and in the community generally. So his funeral was a standing room only affair, full of well-wishers and grief-givers. But Lynette found no solace in the many hands that reached out to take hers; found no sharing of her grief possible, though many offered her their shoulders to cry on and to give them any of her burdens that they could carry for her.

But that was the problem. There were no burdens that she could shift. She was a single mother now, and had to find some way to take care of herself while at the same time caring for a son who had been hard enough to care for when that was all she devoted herself to.

Luckily - blessedly, her pastor insisted, though Lynette continued to keep her own opinions about God and His blessings - Robbie had been well-insured through his job. The salary of a teacher was poor, but there were perks to be found in the benefits. He left her with just over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, which was enough to permit her some time to grieve, and some time to figure out what to do with herself and with Kevin.

Kevin. He was asleep, his tired body not able to keep up with the single-minded intensity he brought to bear on every aspect of his activities. But sleep would not come for Lynette, no matter how hard she willed it. She kept reaching over onto Robbie's side of the bed, as though by doing so she could somehow call him back from the brink of eternity, could summon him to her side once again. No matter how often she reached over, however, she always found the same thing: an empty bedspread, cold and unruffled by her cover-hog of a husband. Finally, she took off her own covers and wadded them on his side of the bed, as though she were sleeping on one of the many nights where he had stolen the spreads from her. She shivered, and not from cold.

How can I go on? she asked herself more than once as the seconds ticked by in the night that seemed like it must last forever. How can I do this without him?

Each time she listened in the silence and darkness for an answer. Each time she was disappointed. There was no knowledge to be had in the deep, no enlightenment to be found beneath the light of a moon whose brilliance had seemed to fade in the last three days.

Then her shivering changed. It was a subtle effect, hardly noticeable at first. Then she became aware that she was shivering, not with cold or with the repressed despair that had threatened to swallow her up at any moment, but with a kind of manic energy. It felt as though she had stuck her finger in a light socket and was now serving as a living conduit for energies so strong that they should have burned her out from the inside. Instead of scorching and leaving her a dried husk, however, the force that possessed her had energized her, changed her from a being enervated by grief to one wound up by an unseen hand, like a clock whose spring was coiled too tightly and was on the verge of breaking.

Lynette became aware of a sound. The soft tones of a whispered word. She automatically looked beside her, half-expecting to see Robbie, speaking softly in his sleep as he had been wont to do from time to time.

But Robbie was not there.

Robbie is gone. Robbie is gone. Robbie is -

The thought was interrupted by the recurrence of the sound. Unable to convince herself that it was some sort of phantom noise, a memory made audible by her grief-riddled mind, she stood and tried to sense where the low, tumultuous sound was coming from.

Somewhere outside of her room.

She followed the sound out into the hall. The force that had previously energized her now made her feel logy, tired, adrift in a sea that she had no power to control. She was a tiny boat in the grasp of a wave that was drawing her inexorably forward. But whether the wave would deposit her safely on a beach or would toss her to be cruelly crushed on nearby rocks, she could not say. She only knew that, for the moment, she was not the pilot of her ship. If ever she had been.

Pulled by the magnetic force of the sound, she walked slowly down the short hallway in the home that had until recently been shared by her, Robbie, and Kevin. She put a hand out, touching the wall as though to steady herself, and was more than a little surprised to find it solid and whole. She half-expected to find it insubstantial as a cloud, unreal as a dream. Its solidity reassured her, reminded her that she was not insane, that some rules still applied, even in a world so mad that it had seen fit to steal her husband from her.