Needful Things by Stephen King
(only a little, the interior voice agreed mournfully)
but only a little, because nobody takes a hundred and ninety aspirin caplets in a single week; nobody. Annie told him he was being silly. She had been wiping the counter beside the sink, she said, and had knocked the bottle over. The top hadn't been on tight, and most of the caplets had poured into the sink. They'd started to melt, and she'd thrown them away.
She said.
But he was a cop, and even when he was off-duty he could not put away the automatic habits of observation which came with the territory. He could not turn off the lie detector. If you watched people when they answered the questions you asked, really watched them, you almost always knew when they were lying. Alan had once questioned a man who signalled every lie he told by picking at his eyetooth with his thumbnail. The mouth articulated the lies; the body, it seemed, was doomed to signal the truth. So he had stretched his hand across the table of the booth in Nan's where they had been sitting, had grasped Annie's hands in his own, and had asked her to tell the truth. And when, after a moment's hesitation, she told him that, yes, the headaches were a little worse, and yes, she had been taking quite a few aspirin, but no, she hadn't taken all the caplets which were missing, that the bottle really had spilled in the sink, he had believed her. He had fallen for the oldest trick in the book, the one con-men called bait-and-switch: if you tell a lie and get caught, back up and tell half the truth. If he had watched her more closely, he would have known Annie still wasn't being straight with him. He would have forced her to admit something which seemed nearly impossible to him, but which he now believed to be the truth: that the headaches were bad enough for her to be taking at least twenty aspirin a day. And if she had admitted that, he would have had her in a Portland or Boston neurologist's office before the week was out. But she was his wife, and in those days he had been less observant when he was off-duty.
He had contented himself with making an appointment for her with Ray Van Allen, and she had kept the appointment. Ray had found nothing, and Alan had never held that against him. Ray had run through the usual reflex tests, had looked into her eyes with his trusty ophthalmoscope, had tested her vision to see if there was any doubling, and had sent her to Oxford Regional for an X-ray. He had not, however, ordered a CAT scan, and when Annie said the headaches were gone, Ray had believed her. Alan suspected he might have been right to believe her. He knew that doctors are almost as attuned to the body's language of lies as cops. Patients are almost as apt to lie as suspects, and from the same motive: simple fear. And when Ray saw Annie, he had not been off-duty. So maybe, between the time Alan had made his discovery and the time Annie went to see Dr. Van Allen, the headaches had gone away. Probably they had gone away. Ray had told Alan later, in a long conversation over glasses of brandy at the doctor's Castle View home, that the symptoms often came and went in cases where the tumor was located high on the stem of the brain. "Seizures are often associated with stem tumors," he told Alan. "If she'd had a seizure, maybe ..." And he had shrugged. Yes. Maybe. And maybe a man named Thad Beaumont was an unindicted co-conspirator in the deaths of his wife and son, but Alan could not find blame in his heart for Thad, either.
Not all the things which happen in small towns are known to the residents, no matter how sharp their ears are or how energetically their tongues wag. In Castle Rock they knew about Frank Dodd, the cop who went crazy and killed the women back in Sheriff Bannerman's day, and they knew about Cujo, the Saint Bernard who had gone rabid out on Town Road #3, and they knew that the lakeside home of Thad Beaumont, novelist and local Famous Person, had burned to the ground during the summer of 1989, but they did not know the circumstances of that burning, or that Beaumont had been haunted by a man who was really not a man at all, but a creature for which there may be no name. Alan Pangborn knew these things, however, and they still haunted his sleep from time to time. All that was over by the time Alan became fully aware of Annie's headaches ... except it really wasn't over. By virtue of Thad's drunken phonecalls, Alan had become an unwilling witness to the crash of Thad's marriage and the steady erosion of the man's sanity. And there was the matter of his own sanity, as well. Alan had read an article in some doctor's office about black holes--great celestial empty places that seemed to be whirlpools of anti-matter, voraciously sucking up everything within their reach. In the late summer and fall of 1989, the Beaumont affair had become Alan's own personal black hole. There were days when he found himself questioning the most elementary concepts of reality, and wondering if any of it had actually happened. There were nights when he lay awake until dawn stained the east, afraid to go to sleep, afraid the dream would come: a black Toronado bearing down on him, a black Toronado with a decaying monster behind the wheel and a sticker reading HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH on the rear bumper. In those days, the sight of a single sparrow perched on the porch railing or hopping about on the lawn had made him feel like screaming. If asked, Alan would have said, "When Annie's trouble began, I was distracted." But it wasn't a matter of distraction; somewhere deep down inside of his mind he had been fighting a desperate battle to hold onto his sanity. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH-how that came back to him. How it haunted him. That, and the sparrows.
He had still been distracted on the day in March when Annie and Todd had gotten into the old Scout they kept for around-town errands and had headed off to Hemphill's Market. Alan had gone over and over her behavior that morning, and could find nothing unusual about it, nothing out of the ordinary. He had been in his study when they left. He had looked out the window by his desk and waved goodbye. Todd had waved back before getting in the Scout. It was the last time he saw them alive. Three miles down Route 117 and less than a mile from Hemphill's, the Scout had veered off the road at high speed and had struck a tree. The State Police estimated from the wreckage that Annie, ordinarily the most careful of drivers, had been doing at least seventy. Todd had been wearing his seatbelt. Annie had not. She had probably been dead as soon as she went through the windshield, leaving one leg and half an arm behind. Todd might still have been alive when the ruptured gas-tank exploded. That preyed on Alan more than anything else. That his ten-year-old son, who wrote a joke astrology column for the school paper and lived for Little League, might still have been alive. That he might have burned to death trying to work the clasp on his seatbelt.
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 hand briefly and kindly. "It was a terrible accident, but that's all it 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. Th
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 was a conclusion that the misery which the sufferer feels is a 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 seatbelt.
Mostly it was the seatbelt that hung in the back of Alan's mind--a 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.
Yet even now, lying here in Polly's bed with Polly sleeping beside him, he found it hard advice to take. His mind went back to work on it, like a puppy worrying an old and ragged strip of rawhide with its sharp little teeth.
An image had always come to him at this point, a nightmarish image which had finally driven him to Polly Chalmers, because Polly was the woman Annie had been closest to in town--and, considering the Beaumont business and the psychic toll it had taken on -Alan, Polly had probably been there for Annie more than he had during the last few months of her life.
The image was of Annie unbuckling her own seatbelt, jamming the gas pedal to the floor, and taking her hands off the wheel. Taking them off the wheel because she had another job for them in those last few seconds.
Taking them off so she could unbuckle Todd's belt, as well.
That was the image: the Scout roaring down the road at seventy, veering to the right, veering toward the trees under a white March sky that promised rain, while Annie struggled to unbuckle Todd's belt and Todd, screaming and afraid, struggled to beat her hands away. He saw Annie's well-loved face transformed into the haglike mask of a witch, saw Todd's drawn long with terror. Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night, his body dressed in a clammy jacket of sweat, with Todd's voice ringing in his ears: The trees, Mommy! Look out for the TREEEES!
So he had gone to see Polly one day at closing time, and asked her if she would come up to the house for a drink, or, if she felt uncomfortable about doing that, if he could come over to her house.
Seated in his kitchen (the right kitchen, the interior voice asserted) with a mug of tea for her and coffee for him, he had begun to speak, slowly and stumblingly, of his nightmare.
"I need to know, if I can, if she was going through periods of depression or irrationality that I either didn't know about or didn't notice," he said. "I need to know if ..." He stopped, momentarily helpless. He knew what words he needed to say, but it was becoming harder and harder to bring them out. It was as if the channel of communication between his unhappy, confused mind and his mouth was growing smaller and shallower, and would soon be entirely closed to shipping.
He made a great effort and went on.
"I need to know if she was suicidal. Because, you see, it wasn't just Annie who died. Todd died with her, and if there were sighs ... signs, I mean, signs... that I didn't notice, then I am responsible for his death, too. And that's something I feel I have to know."
He had stopped there, his heart pounding dully in his chest. He wiped a hand over his forehead and was mildly surprised when it came away wet with sweat.
"Alan," she said, and put a hand on his wrist. Her light-blue eyes looked steadily into his. "If I had seen such signs and hadn't told anyone, I would be as guilty as you seem to want to be."
He had gaped at her, he remembered that. Polly might have seen something in Annie's behavior which he had missed; he had gotten that far in his reasoning. The idea that noticing strange behavior conveyed a responsibility to do something about it had never occurred to him until now.
"You didn't?" he asked at last.
"No. I've gone over it and over it in my mind. I don't mean to belittle your grief and loss, but you're not the only one who feels those things, and you're not the only one who has done a fair amount of soul-searching since Annie's accident. I went over those last few weeks until I was dizzy, replaying scenes and conversations in light of what the autopsy showed. I'm doing it again now, in light of what you've told me about that aspirin bottle. And do you know what I find?"
"What?"
"Zilch." She said it with a lack of emphasis which was oddly convincing. "Nothing at all. There were times when I thought she looked a little pale. I can remember a couple of occasions when I heard her talking to herself while she was hemming skirts or unpacking fabric. That's the most eccentric behavior I can recall, and I've been guilty of it myself many times. How about you?"
Alan nodded.
"Mostly she was the way she was ever since I first met her: cheerful, friendly, helpful ... a good friend."
"But--"
Her hand was still on his wrist; it tightened a little. "No, Alan. No buts. Ray Van Allen is doing it, too, you know--Monday-moming quarterbacking, I believe it's called. Do you blame him? Do you feel Ray's to blame for missing the tumor?"
"No, but--"
"What about me? I worked with her every day, side by side most of the time; we drank coffee together at ten, ate lunch together at noon, and drank coffee again at three. We talked very frankly as time went on and we got to know and like each other, Alan. I know you pleased her, both as a friend and as a lover, and I know she loved the boys. But if she was drifting toward suicide as the result of her illness ... that I didn't know. So tell me--do you blame me?" And her clear blue eyes had looked frankly and curiously into his own.
"No, but--"
The hand squeezed again, light but commanding.
"I want to ask you something. It's important, so think carefully."
He nodded.
"Ray was her doctor, and if it was there, he didn't see it. I was
"I don't understand what you're getting at."
"Someone else was close to her," Polly had said. "Someone closer than either of us, I imagine."
"Who are you talking ab--"
"Alan, what did Todd say?"
He could only gaze at her, not understanding. He felt as if she had spoken a word in a foreign tongue.
"Todd," she said, sounding impatient. "Todd, your son. The one who keeps you awake nights. It is him, isn't it? Not her, but him."
"Yes," he said. "Him." His voice came out high and unsteady, not like his own voice at all, and he felt something starting to shift inside him, something large and fundamental. Now, lying here in Polly's bed, he could remember that moment at his kitchen table with almost supernatural clarity: her hand on his wrist in a slanting bar of late-afternoon sun, the hairs a fine spun gold; her light eyes; her gentle relentlessness.
"Did she force Todd into the car, Alan? Was he kicking? Screaming? Fighting her?"
"No, of course not, but she was his m--"
"Whose idea was it for Todd to go with her to the market that day? Hers or his? Can you remember?"
He started to say no, but suddenly he did. Their voices, floating in from the living room, as he sat at his desk, going through county warrant-orders:
Gotta run down to the market, Todd--you want to come?
Can I look at the new video-tapes?
I guess so. Ask your father if he wants anything.