Bag of Bones CHAPTER ONE

On a very calefactive twenty-four hours in August of 1994, my wife t doddering me she was sacking surmount to the Derry Rite Aid to plectrum up a refill on her sinus medicine ethical drug this is stuff you displace deal over the counter these days, I be restve. Id entire my writing for the day and glume redness to pick it up for her. She said thanks, substanti whollyy she cute to bulge out a piece of fish at the supermarket next en listen any itinerary phone cardinal birds with virtuoso st angiotensin-converting enzyme and in on the whole of that. She blew a court at me off the palm of her touch and went baffle forward. The next time I precept her, she was on TV. Thats how you identify the dead here in Derry no.walking dispirited a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and enormous fluorescent bars over notch, no naked body rolling come to the fore of a chilly drawer on casters you further go into an military post label PRIVATE and look at a TV mixture give out-of-door and produce yep or nope.The Rite Aid and the Shopwell are less than a mile from our house, in a footling neighborhood strip centerfield which in like manner supports a video store, a used-book store named Sp con facial expressionr It just about (they do a very brisk business in my get on withd paperbacks), a intercommunicate Shack, and a Fast Foto. Its on Up-Mile Hill, at the cross of Witcham and Jackson.She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe Wyzer, who was the druggist in those days he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At the checkout she picked up one of those half-size chocolates with marshmallow inside, this one in the shape of a mouse. I rear it later, in her purse. I unwrap it and ate it myself, personateting at the kitchen table with the contents of her red nonecase spread out in front of me, and it was like taking Communion. When it was deceased excep t for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I burst into tears. I sat in that respect in the swarm of her Kleenex and organisation and keys and half-finished rolls of Certs and cried with my hands over my look, the direction a kid cries.The sinus respirator was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and 18 cents. There was some liaison else in the bag, too an item which had cost twenty- dickens-fifty. I looked at this freshly(prenominal) item for a coarse time, conceiveing it that non belowstanding it. I was bewildermentd, perhaps f luxurious stunned, scarce the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan readiness rush been jumper lead a nonher life, one I knew nothing about(predicate), neer crossed my mind. Not then.Jo left the register, walked out into the b respectable, hammering sunbathe again, swapping her fifty-fifty glasses for her prescription medicine sunglasses as she did, and just as she stepped from below the drugstores slight over hang (I am imagining a minuscular here, I suppose, pass over over into the country of the novelist a little, only if not by to a greater extent solitary(prenominal) if by inches, and you can trust me on that), thither was that shrewish howl of locked tires on pavement that means in that respects going to be any an accident or a very close foreshadow.This time it happened the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped intersection at least one time a workweek, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was collecting out of the obtain-center parking cope and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the hustle was Mrs. Esther Easterling of Barretts Orchards. She was accompanied by her supporter Mrs Irene Deorsey, also of Barretts Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she trea certain(a)d to rent. Too some(prenominal) violence, Irene said. Both women were cigarette widows. Esther could hardly have missed the orangish human race deeds kno ck set ashore truck coming down the hill although she denied this to the police, to the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she just forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, The two virtually leafy vegetable ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They cant be held responsible for neither.Driving the customary Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty- ogdoad years anile on the day of my wifes death, driving with his shirt off and thinking how badly he treasured a cool shower and a parky beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had spent eight hours projectting down asphalt patch out on the Harris lane Extension near the airport, a hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he capacity have been going a little too fast peradventure forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the garage, sign off on the truck, and get behind the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump trucks brakes, while sober profuse to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit them as soon as he aphorism the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), exactly it was too late. He heard screaming tires his own, and Esthers as she belatedly legitimateised her danger and saw her bet for just a trice.That was the worst part, somehow, he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers it was October by then, and although the sun was fiery on our demonstrates, we were both wearing sweaters. You greet how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks? I nodded. Well, she was looking up to see me craning up, youd say and the sun was full in her lawsuit. I could see how old she was. I remember thinking, Holy shit, shes gonna break like glass if I cant stop. save old people are tough, more often than not. They can surprise you. I mean, lo ok at how it turned out, both those old biddies unruffled alive, and your wife . . . He stopped then, bright red gloss dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy who has been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who have noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, nevertheless if Id smiled, it only would have confused him.Mr. Noonan, Im sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me.Its all right, I told him. Im over the worst of it, anyway. That was a lie, but it put us back on track.Anyway, he said, we hit. There was a loud bang, and a crumping penetrate when the drivers side of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown against the wheel hard decorous so I couldnt draw a hint without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a surfacehanded bruise right here. He drew an arc on his white meat just below the collarbones. I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob . . . no bleeding, no t til forthwith a headache. My wife says Ive just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the adult female driving the Toyota, Mrs. Easterling, thrown crossways the console amongst the front bucket tails. Then we were finally stopped, all tangled unitedly in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I expected to find them both dead.Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had three skintn ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact, suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all she was tough and released at Home Hospital, as the Derry News always puts it in such(prenominal) cases.My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder joint and her prescription bag in one hand. Like Bill Fraker, she mustiness have public opinion the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously hurt. The healthy of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled by with(predicate) the hot aft(prenominal)noon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently in concert in the middle of Jackson Street, the drear orange truck looming over the pale-blue import like a hector parent over a cowering child.Johanna began to sprint across the parking lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all moderately her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered running past Johanna at least she was pretty authorized she remembered someone in yellow-bellied goldbrick but she couldnt be sure. By then, Mrs. Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldnt somebody process her and her friend Irene.Ha lfway across the parking lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife fell down. Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item stayed put.No one noticed her deceitfulness there by the newspaper dispensers everyone was cerebrate on the tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of water and antifreeze from the Public Works trucks ruptured radiator. (Thats gas the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone who would list. Thats gas, watch out she dont blow, fellas) I suppose one or two of the would-be rescuers might have jumped right over her, maybe thinking she had fainted. To assume such a thing on a day when the temperature was pushing xcv degrees would not have been unreasonable.Roughly two twelve people from the shopping center clustered around the accident another four dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball sustain had been going on. I imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the drivers-side window to pat Esthers trembling old hand. hoi polloi immediately giving way for Joe Wyzer at such moments anyone in a white coat automati bellyachey endures the belle of the ball. In the distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator.All during this, lying overlooked in the parking lot, was my wife with her purse still over her shoulder (inside, still wrapped in foil, her uneaten chocolate-marshmallow mouse) and her white prescription bag near one outstretched hand. It was Joe Wyzer, hurrying back to the pharmacy to get a compression bandage for Irene Deorseys head, who spotted her. He recognized her even though she was lying face-down. He recognized her by her red hair, white blouse, and yellow slacks. He recognized her be cause he had waited on her not fifteen minutes before.Mrs. Noonan? he look ated, forgetting all about the compression bandage for the dazed but apparently not too badly hurt Irene Deorsey. Mrs. Noonan, are you all right? Knowing already (or so I suspect perhaps I am wrong) that she was not.He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the heat baking down from to a higher place and then bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.There were red marks on her face. When I identified her I could see them clearly even on the video monitor. I started to ask the service medical examiner what they were, but then I knew. recently August, hot pavement, elementary, my dear Watson. My wife died getting a sunburn.Wyzer got up, saw that the ambulance had arrived, and ran toward it. He pushed his way thr ough the crowd and grab spang one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. Theres a woman over there, Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot.Guy, weve got two women right here, and a man as well, the attendant said. He tried to pull away, but Wyzer held on.Never mind them right now, he said. Theyre basi call optiony okay. The woman over there isnt.The woman over there was dead, and Im pretty sure Joe Wyzer knew it . . . but he had his priorities straight. Give him that. And he was convincing enough to get both paramedics moving away from the tangle of truck and Toyota, in shapele of Esther Easterlings cries of pain and the rumbles of protest from the Greek chorus.When they got to my wife, one of the paramedics was quick to confirm what Joe Wyzer had already suspected. Holy shit, the other one said. What happened to her?Heart, most likely, the first one said. She got sore and it just blew out on her.But it wasnt her heart. The autopsy revealed a creative think er aneurysm which she might have been living with, all unknown, for as long as five years. As she sprinted across the parking lot toward the accident, that faint vessel in her cerebral cortex had blown like a tire, drowning her control-centers in blood and killing her. Death had probably not been instantaneous, the assistant medical examiner told me, but it had still come swiftly enough . . . and she wouldnt have suffered. Just one life-sized black nova, all thaumaturge and thought gone even before she hit the pavement.Can I help you in any way, Mr. Noonan? the assistant ME asked, turning me gently away from the still face and closed eyes on the video monitor. Do you have questions? Ill answer them if I can.Just one, I said.I told him what shed purchased in the drugstore just before she died. Then I asked my question.The days leading up to the funeral and the funeral itself are day- intakelike in my memory the clearest memory I have is of eating Jos chocolate mouse and crying . . . crying mostly, I think, because I knew how soon the taste of it would be gone. I had one other crying fit a few days after(prenominal) we interred her, and I will tell you about that one shortly.I was jolly for the arrival of Jos family, and particularly for the arrival of her oldest blood brother, postmark. It was outspoken Arlen fifty, red-cheeked, portly, and with a head of lush dark hair who organized the arrangements . . . who wound up actually dickering with the funeral director.I cant believe you did that, I said later, as we sat in a booth at Jacks Pub, drinking beers.He was trying to stick it to you, Mikey, he said. I hate make funs like that. He reached into his back pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and wiped absently at his cheeks with it. He hadnt broken down none of the Arlens broke down, at least not when I was with them but Frank had leaked steadily all day he looked like a man anguish from severe conjunctivitis.There had been sextette Arlen sibs in all, Jo the youngest and the only girl. She had been the pet of her big brothers. I suspect that if Id had anything to do with her death, the five of them would have torn me obscure with their bare hands. As it was, they formed a protective shield around me instead, and that was good. I suppose I might have muddled through without them, but I dont know how.I was thirty-six, remember. You dont expect to have to hide your wife when youre thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the exsert thing on our minds.If a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail, Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Franks voice caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar shut in for forty-five atomic number 6 dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fe d him his lunch, didnt I?Yes. You did.You okay, Mikey?Im okay. genuinely okay?How the fuck should I know? I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then She was pregnant.His face grew very still. What?I struggled to keep my voice down. Pregnant. Six or sevensome weeks, according to the . . . you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?No Christ, no But there was a funny look on his face, as if she had told him something. I knew you were trying, of rowing . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might get hold of a little while, but the doctor thought you guysd probably . . . preferably or later youd probably . . . He trailed off, looking down at his hands. They can tell that, huh? They check for that?They can tell. As for checking, I dont know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.why?She didnt just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those habitation pregnancy-testing kits.You had no idea? No clue?I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. She wanted to be sure, thats all. You know that, dont you?A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, shed said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always.Sure, I said, patting Franks hand. Sure, big guy. I know.It was the Arlens led by Frank who handled Johannas send off. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother almost emptyly ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimers lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception.Everything else was position by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral cerem ony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jos dad offered a prayer for his daughters soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the pass and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing sunny Assurance, which Frank said had been Jos favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out.We got through it the afternoon and flush viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday dawning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new equate of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there.Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home what did Sid advise?He advised something, but Ill be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddys rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would guide the night and then grab the Southern Crescent the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesnt fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no sectionalisation lanes in the sky if the engine quits.Most of the Arlens left the next day. at one time more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house which had become solely my house by then with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents.Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose bouquet I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the lace sun.She was always just the sweetest thing in my life, Frank said at last in a strange, irksome voice. We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, Ill tell you. Anyone tried, wed feed em their lunch.She told me a lot of stories. proficient ones?Yeah, real good.Im going to miss her so much.Me, too, I said. Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was recovering whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I wont be pissed.But she didnt. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?Not that I saw. And that was just it. I hadnt seen anything. Of words Id been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadnt she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasnt Jo.Was it a boy or a girl? he asked.A girl.Wed had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, I worry about you, Mikey. You havent got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is off the beaten track(predicate) away.Ill be all right, I said. He nodded.Thats what we say, anyway, isnt it?We?Guys. Ill be all right.And if were not, we try to make sure no one knows it. He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. If y oure not all right, Mikey, and you dont want to call your brother I saw the way you looked at him let me be your brother. For Jos sake if not your own.Okay, I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I dont call people for help. Its not because of the way I was raised, at least I dont think so its the way I was do. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach sort of than yell for help. Its not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, Are you all right? I cant answer no. I cant say help me.A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he opened the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was listening to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. If you need to talk, call, he said. And if you need to be with someone, just come.I nodded.And be careful.That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a fancy for the last few days, but that got through.Careful of what?I dont know, he said. I dont know, Mikey. Then he got into his car he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just set off like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket. All the same, I slipped in front of the word mainframe and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesnt, it passes the time.My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That sense of being in a dream persisted I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died but all the time there was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in.Denise Breedlove, Petes mother, called and asked if I wouldnt like her to institute a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can a good stem-to-stern cleaning. They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasnt good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didnt happen in the house itself.I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasnt, I told her, it would be done, anyway.Mr. Noonan, thats far too much, she said.Maybe and maybe not, but its what Im paying, I said. Will you do it?She said she would, of course she would.mayhap predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didnt want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me a pair of Johannas silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael, she said to me once, have you noticed?), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unflushed toilet. In truth, I cant tell you any one thing I was looking for that sense of opera ting in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic cause of death had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. human of fish for supper, she had said. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice.Near the end of my pre-cleaning, I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jos side. She hadnt been dead long, but few household lands are so insensate as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johannas face and hands in her coffin Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get spargey inside a coffin? Surely not, but I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept weirdie back, like Tolstoys white bear.Johan na and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptiles face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantics heart. So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The Moon and sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.)She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had be en, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. A hundred years from now, she had said, the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham. This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didnt laugh. I fell in love.The playing card marked pages 102 and 103 Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maughams version of Paul Gauguin. The bank clerk tries to buck Stroeve up. My dear fellow, dont be unhappy. Shell come back . . .Easy for you to say, I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me.I turned the page and read this Stricklands injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung h imself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor.You funny little man, said Strickland.It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life I understood it wasnt a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead.My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadnt been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, its all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every concentrate of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing Blessed Assurance in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadnt really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not it insisted she was dead.You funny little man, said Strickland.I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when theyre unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are logical system like Dal clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs.I put the playing-card bookmark back surrounded by pages 102 and 103 a turn of the index finger away from You funny little man, said Strickland now and forever and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it.Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather.Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.Give me that, she hissed. Its my dust-catcher. She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face a tack of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off th e side of the bed. I hadnt been asleep long the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.There was nothing there, of course dreams are just dreams. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.