"Jude? Judy?"
She's sitting in the corner. Her eyes are wide and blank, just as they were in his dream. A corsage of crumpled paper is protruding from her mouth. Her throat is grotesquely swelled, looks to Fred like a sausage that has been grilled until the casing is ready to pop.
More paper, he thinks. Christ, she's choking on it.
Fred rolls himself across the bed, falls off, and lands on his knees like a gymnast doing a trick. He reaches for her. She makes no move to evade him. There's that, at least. And although she's choking, he still sees no expression in her eyes. They are dusty zeros.
Fred yanks the corsage of paper from her mouth. There's another behind it. Fred reaches between her teeth, tweezes this second ball of paper between the first two fingers of his right hand (thinking Please don't bite me, Judy, please don't), and pulls it out, too. There's a third ball of paper behind this one, way at the back of her mouth. He gets hold of this one as well, and extracts it. Although it's crumpled, he can see the printed words GREAT IDEA, and knows what she's swallowed: sheets of paper from the notepad Ty gave her for her birthday.
She's still choking. Her skin is turning slate.
Fred grabs her by her upper arms and pulls her up. She comes easily, but when he relaxes his hold her knees bend and she starts to go back down. She's turned into Raggedy Ann. The choking sound continues. Her sausage throat —
"Help me, Judy! Help me, you bitch!"
Unaware of what he is saying. He yanks her hard — as hard as he yanked the fishing pole in his dream — and spins her around like a ballerina when she comes up on her toes. Then he seizes her in a bear hug, his wrists brushing the undersides of her br**sts, her bottom tight against his crotch, the kind of position he would find extremely sexy if his wife didn't happen to be choking to death.
He pops his thumb up between her br**sts like a hitchhiker, then says the magic word as he pulls sharply upward and backward. The magic word is Heimlich, and it works. Two more wads of paper fly from Judy's mouth, propelled by a jet of vomit that is little more than bile — her intake of food over the last twelve hours amounts to three cups of coffee and a cranberry muffin.
She gives a gasp, coughs twice, then begins to breathe more or less normally.
He puts her on the bed . . . drops her on the bed. His lower back is spasming wildly, and it's really no wonder; first Ty's dresser, now this.
"Well, what did you think you were doing?" he asks her loudly. "What in the name of Christ did you think you were doing?"
He realizes that he has raised one hand over Judy's upturned face as if to strike her. Part of him wants to strike her. He loves her, but at this moment he also hates her. He has imagined plenty of bad things over the years they've been married — Judy getting cancer, Judy paralyzed in an accident, Judy first taking a lover and then demanding a divorce — but he has never imagined Judy going chickenshit on him, and isn't that what this amounts to?
"What did you think you were doing?"
She looks at him without fear . . . but without anything else, either. Her eyes are dead. Her husband lowers his hand, thinking: I'd cut it off before I hit you. I might be pissed at you, I am pissed at you, but I'd cut it off before I did that.
Judy rolls over, face-down on the coverlet, her hair spread around her head in a corona.
"Judy?"
Nothing. She just lies there.
Fred looks at her for a moment, then uncrumples one of the slimy balls of paper with which she has tried to strangle herself. It is covered with tangles of scribbled words. Gorg, abbalah, eeleelee, munshun, bas, lum, opopanax: these mean nothing to him. Others — drudge, asswipe, black, red, Chicago, and Ty — are actual words but have no context. Printed up one side of the sheet is IF YOU'VE GOT PRINCE ALBERT IN A CAN, HOW CAN YOU EVER GET HIM OUT? Up the other, like a teletype stuck in repeat mode, is this: BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK
If you waste time looking for sense in this, you're as crazy as she is, Fred thinks. You can't waste time —
Time.
He looks at the clock on his side of the bed and cannot believe its news: 4:17 P.M. Is that possible? He looks at his watch and sees that it is.
Knowing it's foolish, knowing he would have heard his son come in even if in a deep sleep, Fred strides to the door on big nerveless legs. "Ty!" he yells. "Hey, Ty! TYLER!"
Waiting for an answer that will not come, Fred realizes that everything in his life has changed, quite possibly forever. People tell you this can happen — in the blink of an eye, they say, before you know it, they say — but you don't believe it. Then a wind comes.
Go down to Ty's room? Check? Be sure?