You had better extend the reservation, then, Polly said.
She had wanted to talk with them as much as she could before coming to any final decision-a more intimate form of the testing which had gone on in their letters. But that first night had been the only night they had had. It was the last night she had ever seen her father well and strong, and she had spent most of it in a red rage at him.
The old arguments, so easy to avoid in correspondence, had begun again even before pre-dinner glasses of wine were drunk.
They were brush-fires at first, but as her father continued to drink, they developed into an uncontrollable wall of fire. He had struck the spark, saying they both felt Polly had learned her lesson and it was time to bury the hatchet. Mrs. Chalmers had fanned the flames, dropping into her old cool, sweetly reasonable voice. Where is the baby, dear? You might at least tell us that much. You turned him over to the Sisters, I suppose.
Polly knew these voices, and what they meant, from times long past. Her father's indicated his need to re-establish control; at all costs there must be control. Her mother's indicated that she was showing love and concern In the only way she knew, by demanding information. Both voices, so familiar, so loved and despised, had ignited the old, wild anger in her.
They left the restaurant halfway through the main course, and the next day Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers had flown back to Maine alone.
After a three-month hiatus, the correspondence had begun again, hesitantly. Polly's mother wrote first, apologizing for the disastrous evening. The pleas to come home had been dropped.
This surprised Polly... and filled some deep and barely acknowledged part of her with anxiety. She felt that her mother was finally denying her. This was, under the circumstances, both foolish and self-indulgent, but that did not change those elemental feelings in the slightest.
I suppose you know your own mind best, she wrote to Polly. That's hard for your father and me to accept, because we still see you as our little girl. I think it frightened him to see you looking so beautiful and so much older. And you mustn't blame him too much for the way he acted.
He hasn't been feeling well; his stomach has been kicking up on him again. The doctor says it's only his gall bladder, and once he agrees to have it taken out all will be well, but I worry about him.
Polly had replied in the same conciliatory tone. She found it easier to do so now that she had started taking business-school classes and shelved her plans to return to Maine indefinitely. And then, near the end of 1975, the telegram had come. It was short and brutal: YOUR DAD HAS CANCER. HE IS DYING. PLEASE COME HOME. LOVE, MOM.
He was still alive when Polly got to the hospital in Bridgton, her head spinning with let-lag and the old memories seeing all the old places had prodded forth. The same wondering thought arose in her mind at each new turn of the road which led from the Portland jetport into the high hills and low mountains of western Maine.
The last time I saw that, I was a child!
Newton Chalmers lay in a private room, dozing in and out of consciousness, with tubes in his nose and machines gathered around him in a hungry semicircle. He died three days later. She had intended to go back to California right away-she almost thought of it as her home now-but four days after her father was buried, her mother suffered a crippling heart attack.
Polly had moved into the house. She nursed her mother for the next three and a half months, and at some point every night she would dream of Norville, the short-order cook at Yor Best Diner.
Norville turned to her again and again in these dreams, holding the telephone out in his right hand, the one with the eagle and the words DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on the back. Polly, it's the police, Norville said. They want to talk to you.
Her mother was out of bed, on her feet again and talking about selling the house and moving to California with Polly (something she would never do, but Polly did not disabuse her of her dream-she was older by then, and a little kinder) when the second heart attack struck. So it was that on a raw afternoon in March of 1976, Polly had found herself in Homeland Cemetery, standing next to her Great-aunt Evelyn, and looking at a coffin which stood on bands next to her father's fresh grave.
His body had lain in the Homeland crypt all winter, waiting for the earth to unlimber enough so it could be interred. In one of those grotesque coincidences which no decent novelist would dare invent, the interral of the husband had taken place just one day before the wife died. The sods on top of Newton Chalmers's final apartment had not yet been replaced; the earth was still raw and the grave looked obscenely naked. Polly's eyes kept straying from the coffin of her mother to the grave of her father. It was as if she was just waiting for him to be decently buried, she thought.
When the short service was over, Aunt Evvie had called her aside.
Polly's last surviving relative stood by the Hay amp; Peabody funeral hack, a thin stick of a woman dressed in a man's black overcoat and strangely jolly red galoshes, a Herbert Tareyton tucked into the corner of her mouth. She flicked a wooden match alight with one thumbnail as Polly approached, and set fire to the tip of her cigarette. She inhaled deeply and then hacked the smoke back out into the cold spring air. Her cane (a simple ash stick; it would be three years yet before she would be awarded the Boston Post Cane as the town's oldest citizen) was planted between her feet.
Now, sitting in a Boston rocker that the old lady undoubtedly would have approved of, Polly calculated that Aunt Evvie must have been eighty-eight that spring-eighty-eight years old and still smoking like a chimney-although she had not looked much different to Polly than she had when Polly was a little girl, hoping for a penny sweet from the apparently endless supply Aunt Evvie kept in the pocket of her apron.
Many things in Castle Rock had changed in the years she had been gone, but Aunt Evvie was not one of them.
"Well, that's over," Aunt Evvie had said in her cigarette-raspy voice. "They're in the ground, Polly. Mother and father both."
Polly had burst into tears then, a miserable flood of them. She thought at first that Aunt Evvie would try to comfort her, and her flesh was already shrinking from the old woman's touch-she didn't want to be comforted.
And need not have worried. Evelyn Chalmers had never been a woman who believed in comforting the grief-stricken; might in fact have believed, Polly sometimes thought later, that the very idea of comfort was an illusion. In any case, she only stood there with her cane planted between her red galoshes, smoking and waiting for Polly's tears to give way to sniffles as she brought herself under control.
When this had been accomplished, Aunt Evvie asked: "Your chap-the one they spent so much time fussing over-is dead, isn't he?"
Though she had guarded this secret jealously from everyone, Polly found herself nodding. "His name was Kelton."
"A goodish name," Aunt Evvie said. She drew on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly from her mouth so she could draw the smoke back up her nose-what Lorraine Chalmers had called a "double-pump," wrinkling her nose in distaste as she said it. "I knew it the first time you come over to see me after you got home.
Saw it in your eyes."
"There was a fire," Polly said, looking up at her. She had a tissue but it was too soggy to do any more business; she put it in her coat pocket and used her fists instead, screwing them into her eyes like a little girl who has fallen off her scooter and banged her knee.
"The young woman I hired to babysit him probably started it."
"Ayuh," Aunt Evvie said. "But do you want to know a secret, Trisha?"
Polly nodded her head, smiling a little. Her real name was Patricia, but she had been Polly to everyone since her babyhood.
Everyone except Aunt Evvie.
"Baby Kelton's dead... but you're not." Aunt Evvie tossed her cigarette away and used one bony forefinger to tap against Polly's chest for emphasis. "You're not. So what are you going to do about it?"
Polly thought it over. "I'm going back to California," she said finally. "That's all I know."
"Yes, and that's all right for a start. But it's not enough."
And then Aunt Evvie said something very close to what Polly herself would say, some years later, when she went to dinner at The Birches with Alan Pangborn: "You're not the culprit here, Trisha. Have you got that sorted out?"
"I... I don't know."
"Then you don't. Until you realize that, it won't matter where you go, or what you do. There won't be any chance."
"What chance?" she had asked, bewildered.
"Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?"
She had shaken her head slowly.
"Men and women who can't get over the past," Aunt Evvie said.
"That's what ghosts are. Not them." She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. "The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay."
"I feel..."
"Yes," Aunt Evvie said. "I know you do. But they don't. Your mother and my nephew don't. Your chap, the one who died while you been Away, he don't. Do you understand me?"
She had. A little, anyway.
"You're right not to want to stay here, Polly-at least, you're right for now. Go back where you were. Or go someplace newSalt Lake, Honolulu, Baghdad, wherever you want. It don't matter, because sooner or later you will come back here. I know that; this place belongs to you and you belong to it. That's written in every line of your face, in the way you walk, the way you talk, even the way you have of narrowin your eyes when you look at someone you ain't met before.