Bag of Bones CHAPTER ONE

On a very virulent solar day in August of 1994, my married woman t octogenarian me she was going stack to the Derry Lords Supper Aid to pick up a fill on her sinus medicine prescription this is rack you fanny defile everyplace the enumerateer these days, I believe. Id finished my writing for the day and finishered to pick it up for her. She utter thanks, al iodine she wanted to purpose a piece of slant at the supermarket next ingress each air two birds with unmatched stone and solely of that. She blew a kiss at me score the ribbon of her hand and went erupt. The next judg handst of conviction I saw her, she was on TV. Thats how you identify the dead here in Derry nary(prenominal)walking dash off a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the w anys and colossal fluorescent nix everyplacehead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters you save go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and vocalize yep or nope.The ceremony Aid and the Shopwell atomic number 18 less than a mile from our house, in a footling neighborhood strip m entirely which also supports a moving picture store, a used-book store named Spread It close to (they do a very brisk moving in in my old paper keep goings), a Radio Shack, and a Fast Foto. Its on Up-Mile Hill, at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson.She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe Wyzer, who was the pill pusher in those days he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At the tick she picked up one of those little chocolates with marshmallow in human face, this one in the shape of a mouse. I tack to make outher it later, in her round. I unwrapped it and ate it myself, sitting at the kitchen table with the contents of her red handbag scattering out in front of me, and it was like taking Communion. When it was bygone except for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I burst into tear s. I sat in that respect in the litter of her Kleenex and organisation and keys and half-finished rolls of Certs and cried with my hands over my eyes, the way a kid cries.The sinus inhaler was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and eighteen cents. There was something else in the bag, in like manner an item which had cost twenty-two-fifty. I looked at this other item for a long time, go foring it alone not under(a)standing it. I was striked, maybe take rarify stunned, still the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan faculty support been leading other life, one I knew nothing about, never crossed my mind. Not accordingly.Jo left the register, walked out into the bright, hammering insolate again, swapping her regular glasses for her prescription sunglasses as she did, and erect as she stepped from beneath the drugstores slight overhang (I am imagining a little here, I figure, crossing over into the country of the novelist a little, barely not by very much only by inches, and you flush toilet trust me on that), there was that shrewish howl of locked tires on paving material that means theres going to be either an possibility or a very close presage.This time it happened the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped intersection at least(prenominal) once a week, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was pulling out of the shopping-center place lot and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the wheel was Mrs. Esther Easterling of Barretts Orcseveres. She was start out out with by her fri abate Mrs Irene Deorsey, also of Barretts Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she wanted to rent. Too much violence, Irene said. some(prenominal)(prenominal) women were cigarette widows. Esther could hardly convey missed the orange Public Works dump truck climax down the hill although she denied this to the police, to the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she dep abolishable forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, The two most common ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They contri thoet be held responsible for neither.Driving the Public Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty-eight years old on the day of my wifes expiration, driving with his shirt off and mentation how badly he wanted a self-possessed shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had spent eight hours putting down asphalt patch out on the Harris Avenue addendum near the airport, a hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he might take a shit been going a little too fast maybe forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the ga craziness, sign off on the truck, and get tin the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump trucks brakes, while unassailable enough to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit them as soon as he saw the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), but it was too late. He heard screaming tires his own, and Esthers as she belatedly realized her danger and saw her face for just a moment.That was the worst part, somehow, he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers it was October by then, and although the sun was warm on our faces, we were both wearing sweaters. You plump how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks? I nodded. Well, she was looking up to see me craning up, youd say and the sun was full in her face. I could see how old she was. I remember thinking, holy place shit, shes gonna break like glass if I cant stop. still old people are tough, more(prenominal) oftentimes than not. They can surprise you. I mean, look at how it turned out, both those old biddies understood alive, and your wife . . . He stopped then, bright red color dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy wh o has been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who film noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, but if Id smiled, it only would have confused him.Mr. Noonan, Im sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me.Its all right, I told him. Im over the worst of it, anyway. That was a lie, but it put us back on track.Anyway, he said, we hit. There was a loud go to sleep, and a crumping sound when the drivers side of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown and twisted against the wheel hard enough so I couldnt draw a breath without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a big bruise right here. He drew an arc on his chest just down the stairs the collarbones. I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob . . . no bleeding, not even a headache. My wife says Ive just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the woman driving the Toyota, Mrs. Easterling, thrown across the console between the front bucket seat s. Then we were finally stopped, all tangled unneurotic in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I pass judgment to find them both dead.Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had three broken ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact, suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all she was treated and released at national Hospital, as the Derry News always puts it in such cases.My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder and her prescription bag in one hand. Like Bill Fraker, she must have thought the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously hurt. The sound of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled by dint of the hot subsequentlynoon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently together in the middle of Jackson Street, the dirty orange truck looming over the pale- bluing import like a bul double-dealing parent over a cowering child.Johanna began to sprint across the park lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all around her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered travel rapidly past Johanna at least she was pretty for certain she remembered someone in yellow slacks but she couldnt be sure. By then, Mrs. Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldnt somebody help her and her friend Irene.Halfway across the put lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife vaporize down. Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item st ayed put.No one noticed her untruth there by the newspaper dispensers everyone was focused on the tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of piddle and antifreeze from the Public Works trucks ruptured radiator. (Thats gas the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone who would listen. Thats gas, watch out she dont blow, fellas) I suppose one or two of the would-be rescuers might have jumped right over her, perhaps thinking she had fainted. To assume such a thing on a day when the temperature was pushing ninety-five degrees would not have been unreasonable.Roughly two dozen people from the shopping center clustered around the accident another four dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball second had been going on. I imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the drivers-side window to pat Esthers trembling old hand. People immediately giving way for Joe Wyzer at such moments anyone in a white rise automatically becomes the belle of the ball. In the distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator. every during this, lying unnoticed in the parking lot, was my wife with her purse bland over her shoulder (inside, still wrapped in foil, her uneaten chocolate-marshmallow mouse) and her white prescription bag near one outstretched hand. It was Joe Wyzer, hurrying back to the pharmacy to get a compression bandage for Irene Deorseys head, who spotted her. He recognized her even though she was lying face-down. He recognized her by her red hair, white blouse, and yellow slacks. He recognized her because he had waited on her not fifteen minutes sooner.Mrs. Noonan? he asked, for acquire all about the compression bandage for the brumous but apparently not too badly hurt Irene Deorsey. Mrs. Noonan, are you all right? subtle already (or so I suspect perhaps I am wrong) that she was not.He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the wake up baking down from above and then bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.There were red marks on her face. When I identified her I could see them clearly even on the video monitor. I started to ask the assistant medical examiner what they were, but then I knew. Late August, hot pavement, elementary, my dear Watson. My wife died getting a sunburn.Wyzer got up, saw that the ambulance had arrived, and ran toward it. He pushed his way through the crowd and grab seat one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. Theres a woman over there, Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot.Guy, weve got two women right here, and a man as well, the attendant said. He tried to pull away, but Wyzer h eld on.Never mind them right instantaneously, he said. Theyre basically okay. The woman over there isnt.The woman over there was dead, and Im pretty sure Joe Wyzer knew it . . . but he had his priorities straight. Give him that. And he was convincing enough to get both paramedics moving away from the tangle of truck and Toyota, in spite of Esther Easterlings cries of pain and the rumbles of protest from the Greek chorus.When they got to my wife, one of the paramedics was quick to confirm what Joe Wyzer had already suspected. Holy shit, the other one said. What happened to her?Heart, most likely, the first one said. She got excited and it just blew out on her.But it wasnt her heart. The autopsy revealed a brain aneurysm which she might have been living with, all unknown, for as long as five years. As she sprinted across the parking lot toward the accident, that weak vessel in her cerebral cortex had blown like a tire, drowning her control-centers in blood and killing her. Death ha d probably not been instantaneous, the assistant medical examiner told me, but it had still come swiftly enough . . . and she wouldnt have suffered. Just one big black nova, all necromancer and thought gone even in advance she hit the pavement.Can I help you in any way, Mr. Noonan? the assistant ME asked, turning me gently away from the still face and closed eyes on the video monitor. Do you have questions? Ill answer them if I can.Just one, I said.I told him what shed purchased in the drugstore just before she died. Then I asked my question.The days leading up to the funeral and the funeral itself are dreamlike in my warehousing the clearest memory I have is of eating Jos chocolate mouse and crying . . . crying mostly, I think, because I knew how soon the taste of it would be gone. I had one other crying fit a some days after we buried her, and I will tell you about that one shortly.I was iris for the arrival of Jos family, and particularly for the arrival of her oldest broth er, click. It was point-blank Arlen fifty, red-cheeked, portly, and with a head of lush dark hair who nonionised the arrangements . . . who wound up actually dickering with the funeral director.I cant believe you did that, I said later, as we sat in a booth at Jacks Pub, drinking beers.He was nerve-wracking to stick it to you, Mikey, he said. I loathe guys like that. He reached into his back pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and wiped absently at his cheeks with it. He hadnt broken down none of the Arlens broke down, at least not when I was with them but Frank had leaked steadily all day he looked like a man suffering from severe conjunctivitis.There had been six Arlen sibs in all, Jo the youngest and the only girl. She had been the pet of her big brothers. I suspect that if Id had anything to do with her death, the five of them would have torn me obscure with their bare hands. As it was, they formed a protective shield around me instead, and that was equitable. I suppo se I might have muddled through without them, but I dont know how.I was thirty-six, remember. You dont expect to have to bury your wife when youre thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds.If a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail, Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Franks voice caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five c dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didnt I?Yes. You did.You okay, Mikey?Im okay. truly okay?How the fuck should I know? I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then She was pregnant.His face grew very still. What?I struggled to keep my voice down. Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the . . . you kno w, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?No Christ, no But there was a extraordinary look on his face, as if she had told him something. I knew you were trying, of course . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might take a little while, but the doctor thought you guysd probably . . . sooner or later youd probably . . . He trailed off, looking down at his hands. They can tell that, huh? They check for that?They can tell. As for checking, I dont know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.Why?She didnt just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.You had no idea? No soupcon?I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. She wanted to be sure, thats all. You know that, dont you?A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, shed said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always.Sure , I said, patting Franks hand. Sure, big guy. I know.It was the Arlens led by Frank who handled Johannas send off. As the source of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my auntie and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother close to completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimers lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only meagerly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception.Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jos dad offered a prayer for his daughters soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing Blessed Assurance, which Frank said had been Jos favourite(a ) hymn as a girl. How Frank tack together Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never prime out.We got through it the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there.Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home what did Sid advise?He advised something, but Ill be demonic if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddys rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern semilunar the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesnt fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits. nigh of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house which had become solely my house by then with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents.Frank stayed another day. We picked a big deal of flowers behind the house not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sa t there for awhile under the beating sun.She was always just the sweetest thing in my life, Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice. We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, Ill tell you. Anyone tried, wed ply em their lunch.She told me a lot of stories.Good ones?Yeah, real good.Im going to miss her so much.Me, too, I said. Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I wont be pissed.But she didnt. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?Not that I saw. And that was just it. I hadnt seen anything. Of course Id been writing, and when I spare I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadnt she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasnt Jo.Was it a bo y or a girl? he asked.A girl.Wed had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.Frank, part six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, I post on about you, Mikey. You havent got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.Ill be all right, I said. He nodded.Thats what we say, anyway, isnt it?We?Guys. Ill be all right.And if were not, we try to make sure no one knows it. He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. If youre not all right, Mikey, and you dont want to call your brother I saw the way you looked at him let me be your brother. For Jos sake if not your own.Okay, I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I dont call people for help. Its not because of the way I was raised, at least I dont think so its the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at minacious Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the national beach rather than yell for help. Its not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I involve to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, Are you all right? I cant answer no. I cant say help me.A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he undefendable the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was comprehend to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. If you need to talk, call, he said. And if you need to be with someone, just come.I nodded.And be careful.That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through.Careful of what?I dont know, he said. I dont know, Mikey. Then he got into his car he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and swagger all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket. All the same, I slipped in front of the word processor and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesnt, it passes the time.My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That perceive of being in a dream persisted I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died but all the time the re was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in.Denise Breedlove, Petes mother, called and asked if I wouldnt like her to bring a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can a good stem-to-stern cleaning. They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasnt good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didnt happen in the house itself.I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasnt, I told her, it would be done, anyway.Mr. Noonan, thats far too much, she said.Maybe and maybe not, but its what Im paying, I said. Will you do it?She said she would, of course she would.Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didnt want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me a pair of Johannas silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael, she said to me once, have you noticed?), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unflushed toilet. In truth, I cant tell you any one thing I was looking for that sense of operating in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had said. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice.Near the end of my pre-cleaning, I looked under our bed and saw an open soft-cover on Jos side. She hadnt been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johannas face and hands in her position Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin? Surely not, but I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoys white bear.Johanna and I had both been side majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury townsfolk cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwri ght with the reptiles face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantics heart. So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The Moon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.)She had been using a playing card from some defunct coldcock as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. A hundred years from now, she had said, the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham. This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didnt laugh. I fell in love.The playing card marked pages 102 and 103 Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maughams version of capital of Minnesota Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dear fellow, dont be unhappy. Shell come back . . .Easy for you to say, I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me.I turned the page and read this Stricklands injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not on the nose know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor.You funny little man, said Strickland.It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life I understood it wasnt a flaw that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead.My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadnt been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, its all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing Blessed Assurance in his high, sweet mental strain voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadnt really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffi n had not it insisted she was dead.You funny little man, said Strickland.I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when theyre unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are logic like Dal clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs.I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103 a turn of the index finger away from You funny little man, said Strickland now and unceasingly and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it.Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the boxwood spring and caressed her cheek like a feather.Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and refr eshing and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.Give me that, she hissed. Its my dust-catcher. She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face a enfold of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadnt been asleep(predicate) long the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and chum under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.There was nothing there, of course dreams are just dreams. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.