Black House (Page 106)

Jack breaks into a wide grin, and he bends to kiss her hand, in a gesture much like her husband’s.

Gently, she takes her hand from his grasp. "When Fred told me he had met you, and that you were helping the police, I knew that you were here for a reason."

What this woman has done astonishes Jack. At the worst moment of her life, with her son lost and her sanity crumbling, she used a monumental feat of memory to summon all of her strength and, in effect, accomplish a miracle. She found within herself the capacity to travel. From a locked ward, she moved halfway out of this world and into another known only from childhood dreams. Nothing but the immense courage her husband had described could have enabled her to have taken this mysterious step.

"You did something once, didn’t you?" Judy asks him. "You were there, in Faraway, and you did something — something tremendous. You don’t have to say yes, because I can see it in you; it’s as plain as day. But you have to say yes, so I can hear it, so say it, say yes."

"Yes."

"Did what?" Fred asks. "In this dream country? How can you say yes?"

"Wait," Jack tells him, "I have something to show you later," and returns to the extraordinary woman seated before him. Judy Marshall is aflame with insight, courage, and faith and, although she is forbidden to him, now seems to be the only woman in this world or any other whom he could love for the rest of his life.

"You were like me," she says. "You forgot all about that world. And you went out and became a policeman, a detective. In fact, you became one of the best detectives that ever lived. Do you know why you did that?"

"I guess the work appealed to me."

"What about it appealed to you in particular?"

"Helping the community. Protecting innocent people. Putting away the bad guys. It was interesting work."

"And you thought it would never stop being interesting. Because there would always be a new problem to solve, a new question in need of an answer."

She has struck a bull’s-eye that, until this moment, he did not know existed. "That’s right."

"You were a great detective because, even though you didn’t know it, there was something — something vital — you needed to detect."

I am a coppiceman, Jack remembers. His own little voice in the night, speaking to him from the other side of a thick, thick wall.

"Something you had to find, for the sake of your own soul."

"Yes," Jack says. Her words have penetrated straight into the center of his being, and tears spring to his eyes. "I always wanted to find what was missing. My whole life was about the search for a secret explanation."

In memory as vivid as a strip of film, he sees a great tented pavilion, a white room where a beautiful and wasted queen lay dying, and a little girl two or three years younger than his twelve-year-old self amid her attendants.

"Did you call it Faraway?" Judy asks.

"I called it the Territories." Speaking the words aloud feels like the opening of a chest filled with a treasure he can share at last.

"That’s a good name. Fred won’t understand this, but when I was on my long walk this morning, I felt that my son was somewhere in Faraway — in your Territories. Somewhere out of sight, and hidden away. In grave danger, but still alive and unharmed. In a cell. Sleeping on the floor. But alive. Unharmed. Do you think that could be true, Mr. Sawyer?"

"Wait a second," Fred says. "I know you feel that way, and I want to believe it, too, but this is the real world we’re talking about here."

"I think there are lots of real worlds," Jack says. "And yes, I believe Tyler is somewhere in Faraway."

"Can you rescue him, Mr. Sawyer? Can you bring him back?"

"It’s like you said before, Mrs. Marshall," Jack says. "I must be here for a reason."

"Sawyer, I hope whatever you’re going to show me makes more sense than the two of you do," says Fred. "We’re through for now, anyhow. Here comes the warden."

Driving out of the hospital parking lot, Fred Marshall glances at the briefcase lying flat on Jack’s lap but says nothing. He holds his silence until he turns back onto 93, when he says, "I’m glad you came with me."

"Thank you," Jack says. "I am, too."

"I feel sort of out of my depth here, you know, but I’d like to get your impressions of what went on in there. Do you think it went pretty well?"

"I think it went better than that. Your wife is . . . I hardly know how to describe her. I don’t have the vocabulary to tell you how great I think she is."

Fred nods and sneaks a glance at Jack. "So you don’t think she’s out of her head, I guess."

"If that’s crazy, I’d like to be crazy right along with her."

The two-lane blacktop highway that stretches before them lifts up along the steep angle of the hillside and, at its top, seems to extend into the dimensionless blue of the enormous sky.

Another wary glance from Fred. "And you say you’ve seen this, this place she calls Faraway."

"I have, yes. As hard as that is to believe."

"No crap. No b.s. On your mother’s grave."

"On my mother’s grave."

"You’ve been there. And not just in a dream, really been there."

"The summer I was twelve."

"Could I go there, too?"

"Probably not," Jack says. This is not the truth, since Fred could go to the Territories if Jack took him there, but Jack wants to shut this door as firmly as possible. He can imagine bringing Judy Marshall into that other world; Fred is another matter. Judy has more than earned a journey into the Territories, while Fred is still incapable of believing in its existence. Judy would feel at home over there, but her husband would be like an anchor Jack had to drag along with him, like Richard Sloat.