There had been an autopsy. The autopsy revealed the brain tumor.
It was, Van Allen told him, a small one. About the size of a peanut-cluster was how he put it. He did not tell Alan it would have been operable if it had been diagnosed; this was information Alan gleaned from Ray's miserable face and downcast eyes. Van Allen said he believed she had finally had the seizure which would have alerted them to the real problem if it had come sooner. It could have galvanized her body like a strong electric shock, causing her to jam the gas pedal to the floor and lose control. He did not tell Alan these things of his own free will-, he told them because Alan interrogated him mercilessly, and because Van Allen saw that, grief or no grief, Alan meant to have the truth... or as much of it as he, or anyone who hadn't actually been in the car that day, could ever know. "Please," Van Allen had said, and touched Alan's 'ble accident, but that's all it hand briefly and kindly. "It was a terri was. You have to let it go. You have another son, and he needs you now as much as you need him. You have to let it go and get on with your affairs." He had tried. The irrational horror of the business with Thad Beaumont, the business with the (sparrows the sparrows are flying) birds, had begun to fade, and he had honestly tried to put his life back together-widower, small-town cop, father of a teenaged boy who was growing up and growing away too fast... not because of Polly but because of the accident. Because of that horrible, numbing trauma: Son, I've got some awful news; you've got to brace yourself... And then, of course, he had begun to cry, and before long, Al had been crying, too.
Nonetheless, they had gone about the business of reconstruction, and were still going about it. Things were better these days... but two things refused to go away.
One was that huge bottle of aspirin, almost empty after only a week.
The other was the fact that Annie hadn't been wearing her seatbelt.
But Annie always wore her seatbelt.
After three weeks of agonizing and sleepless nights, he made an appointment with a neurologist in Portland after all, thinking of stolen horses and barn doors locked after the fact as he did it. He went because the man might have better answers to the questions Alan needed to ask, and because he was tired of dragging answers out of Ray Van Allen with a chainfall. The doctor's name was Scopes, and for the first time in his life, Alan hid behind his job: he told Scopes that his questions were related to an ongoing police investigation. The doctor confirmed Alan's central suspicions: yes, People with brain tumors sometimes suffered bursts of irrationality, and they sometimes became suicidal. When a person with a brain tumor committed suicide, Scopes said, the act was often committed on impulse, after a period of consideration which might last a minute or even seconds. Might such a person take someone with them?
Alan asked.
Scopes was seated behind his desk, cocked back in his chair with his hands laced behind his neck, and could not see Alan's own hands, which were clasped so tightly together between his knees that the fingers were dead white. Oh yes, Scopes said. That was a not uncommon pattern in such cases; tumors of the brain stem often caused behaviors the layman might think of as psychotic. One which the sufferer feels is a misery was a conclusion that the misery which is shared by either his loved ones or the whole human race; another was the idea that the sufferer's loved ones would not want to live if he was dead. Scopes mentioned Charles Whitman, the Eagle Scout who had climbed to the top of the Texas Tower and killed more than two dozen people before making an end to himself, and a substitute grammar-school teacher in Illinois who had killed several of her students before going home and putting a bullet in her own brain. Autopsies had revealed brain tumors in both cases. it was a pattern, but not one which held true in all cases, or even most of them. Brain tumors sometimes caused odd, even exotic symptoms; sometimes they caused no symptoms at all. It was impossible to say for sure.
Impossible. So let it alone.
Good advice, but hard to swallow. Because of the aspirin bottle.
And the seatbeltMostly it was the seatbelt that hung in the back of Alan's minda small black cloud that simply wouldn't go away. She never drove without buckling it. Not even down to the end of the block and back. Todd had been wearing his, just like always, though. Didn't that mean something? If she had decided, sometime after she had backed down the driveway for the last time, to kill herself and take Todd with her, wouldn't she have insisted that Todd unbuckle his belt as well?
Even hurt, depressed, confused, she wouldn't have wanted Todd to suffer, would she?
impossible to say for sure. Let it alone.