"Which cupboard?"
She pointed, and Jack took one of the bottles down. He poured a hefty dollop into the teacup, put the sherry back, and filled the last quarter of the cup with milk. Then he added three tablespoons of sugar and stirred. He brought it to Danny, whose sobs had tapered off to snifflings and hitchings. But he was trembling all over, and his eyes were wide and starey.
"Want you to drink this, doc," Jack said. "It's going to taste frigging awful, but it'll make you feel better. Can you drink it for your daddy?"
Danny nodded that he could and took the cup. He drank a little, grimaced, and looked questioningly at Jack. Jack nodded and Danny drank again. Wendy felt the familiar twist of jealousy somewhere in her middle, knowing the boy would not have drunk it for her.
On the heels of that came an uncomfortable, even startling thought: Had she wanted to think Jack was to blame? Was she that jealous? It was the way her mother would have thought, that was the really horrible thing. She could remember a Sunday when her Dad had taken her to the park and she had toppled from the second tier of the jungle gym, cutting both knees. When her father brought her home, her mother had shrieked at him: What did you do? Why weren't you watching her? What kind of a father are you?
(She had hounded him to his grave; by the time he divorced her it was too late.)
She had never even given Jack the benefit of the doubt. Not the smallest. Wendy felt her face burn yet knew with a kind of helpless finality that if the whole thing were to be played over again, she would do and think the same way. She carried part of her mother with her always, for good or bad.
"Jack-" she began, not sure if she meant to apologize or justify. Either, she knew, would be useless.
"Not now," he said.
It took Danny fifteen minutes to drink half of the big cup's contents, and by that time he had calmed visibly. The shakes were almost gone.
Jack put his hands solemnly on his son's shoulders. "Danny, do you think you can tell us exactly what happened to you? It's very important."
Danny looked from Jack to Wendy, then back again. In the silent pause, their setting and situation made themselves known: the whoop of the wind outside, driving fresh snow down from the northwest; the creaking and groaning of the old hotel as it settled into another storm. The fact of their disconnect came to Wendy with unexpected force as it sometimes did, like a blow under the heart.
"I want... to tell you everything," Danny said. "I wish I had before." He picked up the cup and held it, as if comforted by the warmth.
"Why didn't you, son?" Jack brushed Danny's sweaty, tumbled hair back gently from his brow.
"Because Uncle Al got you the job. And I couldn't figure out how it was good for you here and bad for you here at the same time. It was..." He looked at them for help. He did not have the necessary word.
"A dilemma?" Wendy asked gently. "When neither choice seems any good?"
"Yes, that." He nodded, relieved.
Wendy said: "The day that you trimmed the hedges, Danny and I had a talk in the truck. The day the first real snow came. Remember?"
Jack nodded. The day he had trimmed the hedges was very clear in his mind.
Wendy sighed. "I guess we didn't talk enough. Did we, doc?"
Danny, the picture of woe, shook his head.
"Exactly what did you talk about?" Jack asked. "I'm not sure how much I like my wife and son-"
"-discussing how much they love you?"
"Whatever it was, I don't understand it. I feel like I came into a movie just after the intermission."
"We were discussing you," Wendy said quietly. "And maybe we didn't say it all in words, but we both knew. Me because I'm your wife and Danny because he... just understands things."
Jack was silent.
"Danny said it just right. The place seemed good for you. You were away from all the pressures that made you so unhappy at Stovington. You were your own boss, working with your hands so you could save your brain-all of your brain- for your evenings writing. Then... I don't know just when... the place began to seem bad for you. Spending all that time down in the cellar, sifting through those old papers, all that old history. Talking in your sleep-"
"In my sleep?" Jack asked. His face wore a cautious, startled expression. "I talk in my sleep?"
"Most of it is slurry. Once I got up to use the bathroom and you were saying, 'To hell with it, bring in the slots at least, no one will know, no one will ever know. ' Another time you woke me right up, practically yelling, `Unmask, unmask, unmask. "'
"Jesus Christ," he said, and rubbed a hand over his face. He looked ill.
"All your old drinking habits, too. Chewing Excedrin. Wiping your mouth all the time. Cranky in the morning. And you haven't been able to finish the play yet, have you?"
"No. Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. I've been thinking about something else... a new project-"