She wanted a dog, and Daddy was willing to buy a puppy, but she needed to find out if she could be a good mother. What if she got a dog, which could live twelve or fourteen years, and then discovered, after a year, that she didn’t want to walk the poor thing any longer or exercise it or even just hang out with it. People changed, didn’t want the same things anymore, and then they broke hearts. If she failed a dog, broke its heart, Amity would hate herself, she really would, totally and forever.
The man at the pet store had said that Snowball, a unique breed with a glossy coat, would live maybe four years. She’d had him two years, and she wasn’t the least bored with him yet. She loved him to the extent that a person could love a mouse that didn’t have a big personality like a dog.
Before she risked getting a dog, she also had to find out how she would deal with the loss of Snowball when he died. If losing a mouse wrecked her, then a dog’s death would absolutely destroy her, no doubt about it, none at all. She’d been only four, much too little to understand what was happening, when her mother walked out. She hardly remembered Michelle. Yet the loss was still with her, not really a pain, more like an emptiness, as if something that ought to be inside of her were missing. She worried that more losses would leave other empty spaces in her, until she would be as hollow as a shell from which the egg had been drained through a pinhole.
Sometimes, like now, she couldn’t remember what her mother looked like, which kind of scared her. A few weeks ago, in a mood, she had taken the framed photograph of Michelle off her desk, where Daddy encouraged her to keep it, and put it in a bottom drawer. Maybe the time had come to display the photo again.
On her lap, Snowball had closed his eyes. His mouth hung open. He was a picture of bliss as she stroked his belly.
His chisel-edged teeth were bared. The teeth of mice never stopped growing. Snowball had to gnaw at something for a significant part of every day to keep his teeth from becoming so long that they inhibited his ability to eat, which was why his cage featured three gnawing blocks.
No living thing on the earth was without its burdens.
Daddy said our burdens made our spirits stronger and therefore were blessings. He knew a lot and was right about most things, but this burdens-as-blessings business was bu
llsugar, really and truly, at least based on her experience. Daddy probably believed it. He said that beyond every darkness, dawn approached. He was crazy patient and rarely got angry.
Amity wasn’t as patient as her father, though she wanted to be. A lot of things pissed her off. Recently, she’d made a list of what pissed her off, so she wouldn’t forget anything and go all squishy like one of those morning-TV kid-show puppets that always wanted you to be “nicer than twice as nice as nice.” The list looked stupid, so she tore it up and threw it away. But she remembered everything on it, including that it pissed her off, really and truly, not to have a mother. When you were angry about something, you couldn’t at the same time be crushingly sad about it, which was a blessing.
As she continued to stroke Snowball’s tummy, she wondered what bullsugar Mr. Spooky was spouting out there on the porch with her patient father.
4
The eerie ululation of coyotes on the hunt issued from the farther end of the canyon, and a scrim of cloud diminished the moon, so that the silvered yard grew tarnished.
“I’m leaving this with you,” Ed solemnly intoned, holding forth the soiled, string-tied box, “because the fate of humanity depends on it never falling into the wrong hands and because, of everyone I have known in my life, I trust no one more than you, Jeffrey Wallace Coltrane.”
“That’s very sweet, but you hardly know me,” Jeffy said.
“Damn if I don’t!” Ed roared. “I know your heart. I trust my gut about you. My gut, your heart. If you don’t do this, if you don’t help me, you will be condemning your daughter to a life of terror, perhaps slavery or death! ”
Even in the soft amber glow of the porch lamps, Jeffy could see that Ed’s face had darkened with a rush of blood. His rapid pulse grew visible in both his neck and temples, as though he were working himself into a stroke or aneurysm.
The old man slid forward on his rocking chair, holding out the box. His voice quieted to an intense whisper. “Listen to me. Listen, listen. I’ve used the key to everything over a hundred times. I’ve seen horrors indescribable. I should destroy it, but I can’t. It’s my baby, my beautiful work of genius. I can’t put it in a safe-deposit box, because they’ll search bank records coast to coast. I can’t leave it with anyone I’ve ever known in my former life. They’re watching those people. I can’t dig a hole and bury the damn thing, because what if some poor fool who hasn’t been warned about the danger of it finds it and turns it on? You must hide it well. They’ll suspect everyone in the canyon, anyone with whom I might have come into contact. They’ll skulk around, looking, searching, those swine. After all, it cost seventy-six billion dollars.”
“What did?”
Ed shook the box gently. “This.”
“Expensive,” said Jeffy.
“Oh, it’s worth much more than that. It’s worth the world. They’ll never stop looking for it.”
If a screw had been loose in Ed’s head, it evidently had fallen away from whatever parts of his mind it had previously kept securely connected. He was wide-eyed, suddenly glistening with a thin sweat, in great distress. Jeffy felt sorry for him. Ed was a well-educated man, a scholar, perhaps once a highly regarded professor of history or literature or philosophy, now succumbing to dementia. A tragedy.
The kind thing to do, the only thing to do, was to humor him. It would be cruel to disrespect him and treat his paranoid fantasy as the delusion that it was. Jeffy slid forward in his rocker and accepted the package.
Ed wagged one finger in admonishment. “Never open it. Never touch it. Keep it safe for a year. If I don’t return for it in a year, I’ll be dead. I should get a gun and kill the bastards when they come to kill me, but I can’t. I’ve seen too much horror to perpetrate horrors of my own. I’m a pacifist. A helpless pacifist. If I don’t return in a year, I’ll be dead.”
“I’m certain you’ve got a long life ahead,” Jeffy assured him.
“After a year, obtain a barrel. Can you do that?”
“A barrel?”
Ed seized Jeffy by one knee and squeezed for emphasis. “Barrel, oil drum, an enclosed cylindroid of metal. Can you obtain one?”
“Yes, of course.”