"You?" Jack looks at him, startled. Long experience has immediately suggested that Henry is about to ask for some kind of unofficial investigative help. Henry is facing the windshield, giving nothing away. "What kind of problem can you have? Did your socks get out of order? Oh — are you having trouble with one of the stations?"
"That, I could deal with." Henry pauses, and the pause stretches into a lengthy silence. "What I was going to say is, I feel like I'm losing my mind. I think I'm going sort of crazy."
"Come on." Jack eases up on the gas pedal and cuts his speed in half. Has Henry witnessed a feather explosion? Of course he hasn't; Henry cannot see anything. And his own feather explosion was merely a waking dream.
Henry quivers like a tuning fork. He is still facing the windshield.
"Tell me what's going on," Jack says. "I'm starting to worry about you." Henry opens his mouth to a crack that might accommodate a communion wafer, then closes it again. Another tremor runs through him.
"Hmm," he says. "This is harder than I thought." Astonishingly, his dry, measured voice, the true voice of Henry Leyden, wobbles with a wide, helpless vibrato.
Jack slows the pickup to a crawl, begins to say something, and decides to wait.
"I hear my wife," Henry says. "At night, when I'm lying in bed. Around three, four in the morning. Rhoda's footsteps are moving around in the kitchen, they're coming up the stairs. I must be losing my mind."
"How often does this happen?"
"How many times? I don't know, exactly. Three or four."
"Do you get up and look for her? Call out her name?"
Henry's voice again sails up and down on the vibrato trampoline. "I've done both those things. Because I was sure I heard her. Her footsteps, her way of walking, her tread. Rhoda's been gone for six years now. Pretty funny, huh? I'd think it was funny, if I didn't think I was going bats."
"You call out her name," Jack says. "And you get out of bed and go downstairs."
"Like a lunatic, like a madman. ‘Rhoda? Is that you, Rhoda?' Last night, I went all around the house. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda?' You'd think I was expecting her to answer." Henry pays no attention to the tears that leak from beneath his aviator glasses and slip down his cheeks. "And I was, that's the problem."
"No one else was in the house," Jack says. "No signs of disturbance. Nothing misplaced or missing, or anything like that."
"Not as far as I saw. Everything was still where it should have been. Right where I left it." He raises a hand and wipes his face.
The entrance to Jack's looping driveway slides past on the right side of the cab.
"I'll tell you what I think," Jack says, picturing Henry wandering through his darkened house. "Six years ago, you went through all the grief business that happens when someone you love dies and leaves you, the denial, the bargaining, the anger, the pain, whatever, acceptance, that whole range of emotions, but afterward you still missed Rhoda. No one ever says you keep on missing the dead people you loved, but you do."
"Now, that's profound," Henry says. "And comforting, too."
"Don't interrupt. Weirdness happens. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Your mind rebels. It distorts the evidence, it gives false testimony. Who knows why? It just does."
"In other words, you go batshit," Henry says. "I believe that is where we came in."
"What I mean," Jack says, "is that people can have waking dreams. That's what is happening to you. It's nothing to worry about. All right, here's your drive, you're home."
He turns into the grassy entrance and rolls up to the white farmhouse in which Henry and Rhoda Leyden had spent the fifteen lively years between their marriage and the discovery of Rhoda's liver cancer. For nearly two years after her death, Henry went wandering through his house every evening, turning on the lights.
"Waking dreams? Where'd you get that one?"
"Waking dreams aren't uncommon," Jack says. "Especially in people who never get enough sleep, like you." Or like me, he silently adds. "I'm not making this up, Henry. I've had one or two myself. One, anyhow."
"Waking dreams," Henry says in a different, considering tone of voice. "Ivey-divey."
"Think about it. We live in a rational world. People do not return from the dead. Everything happens for a reason, and the reasons are always rational. It's a matter of chemistry or coincidence. If they weren't rational, we'd never figure anything out, and we'd never know what was going on."
"Even a blind man can see that," Henry says. "Thanks. Words to live by." He gets out of the cab and closes the door. He moves away, steps back, and leans in through the window. "Do you want to start on Bleak House tonight? I should get home about eight-thirty, something like that."
"I'll turn up around nine."
By way of parting, Henry says, "Ding-dong." He turns away, walks to his doorstep, and disappears into his house, which is of course unlocked. Around here, only parents lock their doors, and even that's a new development.