Full Dark, No Stars

Elvid’s smile widened, and Streeter saw a wonderful, terrible thing: the man’s teeth weren’t just too big or too many. They were sharp.

Janet was folding clothes in the laundry room when he got back. “There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry. Did you have a nice drive?”

“Yes,” he said. He surveyed his kitchen. It looked different. It looked like a kitchen in a dream. Then he turned on a light, and that was better. Elvid was the dream. Elvid and his promises. Just a loony on a day pass from Acadia Mental.

She came to him and kissed his cheek. She was flushed from the heat of the dryer and very pretty. She was fifty herself, but looked years younger. Streeter thought she would probably have a fine life

after he died. He guessed May and Justin might have a stepdaddy in their future.

“You look good,” she said. “You’ve actual y got some color.”

“Do I?”

“You do.” She gave him an encouraging smile that was troubled just beneath. “Come talk to me while I fold the rest of these things. It’s so boring.”

He fol owed her and stood in the door of the laundry room. He knew better than to offer help; she said he even folded dish-wipers the wrong way.

“Justin cal ed,” she said. “He and Carl are in Venice. At a youth hostel. He said their cabdriver spoke very good English. He’s having a bal .”

“Great.”

“You were right to keep the diagnosis to yourself,” she said. “You were right and I was wrong.”

“A first in our marriage.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Jus has so looked forward to this trip. But you’l have to fess up when he gets back. May’s coming up from Searsport for Gracie’s wedding, and that would be the right

time.” Gracie was Gracie Goodhugh, Tom and Norma’s oldest child. Carl Goodhugh, Justin’s traveling companion, was the one in the middle.

“We’l see,” Streeter said. He had one of his puke-bags in his back pocket, but he had never felt less like upchucking. Something he did feel like was eating. For the first time in days.

Nothing happened out there—you know that, right? This is just a little psychosomatic elevation. It’ll recede.

“Like my hairline,” he said.

“What, honey?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, and speaking of Gracie, Norma cal ed. She reminded me it was their turn to have us to dinner at their place Thursday night. I said I’d ask you, but that you were awful y busy at the bank, working

late hours, al this bad-mortgage stuff. I didn’t think you’d want to see them.”

Her voice was as normal and as calm as ever, but al at once she began crying big storybook tears that wel ed in her eyes and then went rol ing down her cheeks. Love grew humdrum in the later

years of a marriage, but now his swel ed up as fresh as it had been in the early days, the two of them living in a crappy apartment on Kossuth Street and sometimes making love on the living-room rug. He stepped into the laundry room, took the shirt she was folding out of her hands, and hugged her. She hugged him back, fiercely.

“This is just so hard and unfair,” she said. “We’l get through it. I don’t know how, but we wil .”

“That’s right. And we’l start by having dinner on Thursday night with Tom and Norma, just like we always do.”

She drew back, looking at him with her wet eyes. “Are you going to tel them?”

“And spoil dinner? Nope.”

“Wil you even be able to eat? Without…” She put two fingers to her closed lips, puffed her cheeks, and crossed her eyes: a comic puke-pantomime that made Streeter grin.

“I don’t know about Thursday, but I could eat something now,” he said. “Would you mind if I rustled myself up a hamburger? Or I could go out to McDonald’s… maybe bring you back a chocolate

shake…”

“My God,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “It’s a miracle.”

“I wouldn’t cal it a miracle, exactly,” Dr. Henderson told Streeter on Wednesday afternoon. “But…”

It was two days since Streeter had discussed matters of life and death under Mr. Elvid’s yel ow umbrel a, and a day before the Streeters’ weekly dinner with the Goodhughs, this time to take place at

the sprawling residence Streeter sometimes thought of as The House That Trash Built. The conversation was taking place not in Dr. Henderson’s office, but in a smal consultation room at Derry Home

Hospital. Henderson had tried to discourage the MRI, tel ing Streeter that his insurance wouldn’t cover it and the results were sure to be disappointing. Streeter had insisted.

“But what, Roddy?”

“The tumors appear to have shrunk, and your lungs seem clear. I’ve never seen such a result, and neither have the two other docs I brought in to look at the images. More important—this is just

between you and me—the MRI tech has never seen anything like it, and those are the guys I real y trust. He thinks it’s probably a computer malfunction in the machine itself.”

“I feel good, though,” Streeter said, “which is why I asked for the test. Is that a malfunction?”

“Are you vomiting?”