"I didn't cut my leg on the crust. There isn't any crust. It's all powdery snow. It won't even stick together to make snowballs. Remember we tried to have a snowball fight and couldn't?"
He felt his father stiffen against him. "The porch step, then."
Danny pulled away. Suddenly he had it. It had flashed into his mind all at once, the way things sometimes did, the way it had about the woman wanting to be in that gray man's pants. He stared at his father with widening eyes.
"You know I'm telling the truth," he whispered, shocked.
"Danny-"Jack's face, tightening.
"You know because you saw-"
The sound of Jack's open palm striking Danny's face was flat, not dramatic at all. The boy's head rocked back, the palmprint reddening on his cheek like a brand.
Wendy made a moaning noise.
For a moment they were still, the three of them, and then Jack grabbed for his son and said, "Danny, I'm sorry, you okay, doc?"
"You hit him, you bastardl" Wendy cried. "You dirty bastard!"
She grabbed his other arm and for a moment Danny was pulled between them.
"Oh please stop pulling me!" he screamed at them, and there was such agony in his voice that they both let go of him, and then the tears had to come and he collapsed, weeping, between the sofa and the window, his parents staring at him helplessly, the way children might stare at a toy broken in a furious tussle over to whom it belonged. In the fireplace another pine-knot exploded like a hand grenade, making them all jump.
Wendy gave him baby aspirin and Jack slipped him, unprotesting, between the sheets of his cot. He was asleep in no time with his thumb in his mouth.
"I don't like that," she said. "It's a regression."
Jack didn't reply.
She looked at him softly, without anger, without a smile, either. "You want me to apologize for calling you a bastard? All right, I apologize. I'm sorry. You still shouldn't have hit him.
"I know," he muttered. "I know that. I don't know what the hell came over me."
"You promised you'd never hit him again."
He looked at her furiously, and then the fury collapsed. Suddenly, with pity and horror, she saw what Jack would look like as an old man. She had never seen him look that way before.
(?what way?)
Defeated, she answered herself. He looks beaten.
He said: "I always thought I could keep my promises."
She went to him and put her hands on his arm. "All right, it's over. And when the ranger comes to check us, we'll tell him we all want to go down. All right?"
"All right," Jack said, and at that moment, at least, he meant it. The same way he had always meant it on those mornings after, looking at his pale and haggard face in the bathroom mirror. I'm going to stop, going to cut it off flat. But morning gave way to afternoon, and in the afternoons he felt a little better. And afternoon gave way to night. As some great twentieth-century thinker had said, night must fall.
He found himself wishing that Wendy would ask him about the hedges, would ask him what Danny meant, when he said You know because you saw- If she did, he would tell her everything. Everything. The hedges, the woman in the room, even about the fire hose that seemed to have switched positions. But where did confession stop? Could he tell her he'd thrown the magneto away, that they could all be down in Sidewinder right now if he hadn't done that?
What she said was, "Do you want tea?"
"Yes. A cup of tea would be good."
She went to the door and paused there, rubbing her forearms through her sweater. "It's my fault as much as yours," she said. "What were we doing while he was going through that... dream, or whatever it was?"
"Wendy-"
"We were sleeping," she said. "Sleeping like a couple of teenage kids with their itch nicely scratched."
"Stop it," he said. "It's over."
"No," Wendy answered, and gave him a strange, restless smile. "It's not over."
She went out to make tea, leaving him to keep watch over their son.
Chapter 36. The Elevator
Jack awoke from a thin and uneasy sleep where huge and ill-defined shapes chased him through endless snowfields to what he first thought was another dream: darkness, and in it, a sudden mechanical jumble of noises-clicks and clanks, hummings, rattlings, snaps and whooshes.
Then Wendy sat up beside him and he knew it was no dream.
"What's that?" Her hand, cold marble, gripped his wrist. He restrained an urge to shake it off-how in the hell was he supposed to know what it was? The illuminated clock on his nightstand said it was five minutes to twelve.
The humming sound again. Loud and steady, varying the slightest bit. Followed by a clank as the humming ceased. A rattling bang. A thump. Then the humming resumed.
It was the elevator.
Danny was sitting up. "Daddy? Daddy?" His voice was sleepy and scared.
"Right here, doc," Jack said. "Come on over and jump in. Your mom's awake, too."
The bedclothes rustled as Danny got on the bed between them. "It's the elevator," he whispered.
"That's right," Jack said. "Just the elevator."