Safe Passage

__________________________

SAFE PASSAGE

by

Ellyn Bache

__________________________

BOSON BOOKS

Raleigh

Published by
Boson Books

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

ISBN 1-886420-09-2

An imprint of
C&M Online Media Inc
.

Copyright 1995 Ellyn Bache

All rights reserved
  

For Information contact

C&M Online Media Inc
.

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

Tel: (919) 233-8164

e-mail
: [email protected]

URL:
http://www.bosonbooks.com

Cover art by Joel Barr

CHAPTER 1

  
At four-thirty on Sunday morning
Mag
came up from sleep with her heart thumping and sweat pouring from her, the way she'd awakened years ago when her son
Izzy
was out delivering newspapers and she found him two blocks away lying on the street with a broken ankle. She sat up in bed, wide awake, sick to her stomach. She hated motherly premonitions; she thought she was through with them. Except for Simon, the seven boys were grown.

   
  
She pulled her gown in and out from her chest to cool herself, but the sweat kept coming. Once you had children, you were vulnerable forever. Alfred, her oldest, her most dependable, was plunging a knife into her heart, plotting to get her house away from her so he could live in it himself with a divorced woman and her two sons. Percival was off to war; Simon was debating his ear operation. The others were not currently in states of crisis, but you never knew. Even Gideon was so overwrought that all he thought about was running races.

    
Patrick, snoring beside her, turned over and groaned. He groaned when he dreamed about going blind-a possibility, not a certainty. For the past year, without warning, his pupils would close to pinpoints and then shut entirely, leaving him with vacant blobs of color in the centers of his eyes, but no light-absorbing black. Minutes or hours later the pupils would begin to reappear, though he did not see well until the next day. At the Wilmer Eye Clinic in Baltimore, where they'd been going since the problem started, the doctors said, finally: "This is something you just never see." But Patrick believed you either solved a problem or ignored it. When he wasn't changing his diet or experimenting with other possible cures, he pretended the blindness didn't exist. He even waited out the actual attacks with jokes and sarcasm, which the rest of the family was supposed to find amusing. But in his dreams he groaned.

     
Mag
fanned herself, and Patrick flung a hand into her lap, making a high, wheezing sound like a child's whine. For a moment she believed his thrashing was what had awakened her. It seemed unlikely. Normally his noises and bumping roused her only enough to move away so he could dream on, because maybe his dreams were a kindness that made the reality less harsh. Certainly his nightmares never left her sweating, or with this lingering sense of menace. A hot flash, probably; she'd been expecting them sooner or later. Relax, go back to sleep. Don't
spaz
, Mother, the twins would say. Then she thought: Why should she sleep? Was she a masochist, that she had to stay in bed with her heart palpitating and her husband groaning and sweat running down the inside of her gown?

    
She put on her robe and went barefoot down the dark stairs to the family room. Outside a heavy rain beat against the house. She would turn on the lights to make it seem warmer, a trick she'd learned in their poverty-stricken years. The darkness was absolute. She passed through the hallway, walked around the coffee table, touched nothing. Patrick often wandered around in darkness like this, negotiating the
rooms
blind.
A soft, unexpected lump at ankle level.
She tripped. "Oh, shit, Lucifer!"
Flying, flying, catching herself on the edge of the couch.
Cats! For ten years Lucifer had believed, erroneously, that the only way to get food was to put himself directly in the path of any possible provider. She flung a foot out to kick him. Missed. Heard him scurrying off. Rage filled her. An image came to her of Patrick being knocked flat by such an encounter during a blind spell-of Patrick flailing around on the floor with people looking on.
No
. The cat would have to go. In this house at least, the terrain was familiar and Patrick had a right to be safe.

    
But even security seemed impossible. For weeks, responsible, clean-cut Alfred had been pretending that he would be doing them a favor by watching the house for the winter while
Mag
and Patrick vacationed, but clearly he was only finagling to move his big-busted girlfriend Cynthia in because this house was a better place for raising her children than a little apartment. She couldn't understand it-that Alfred would try to snatch Patrick's sanctuary from him in his very time of need.
Alfred, of all people, snared by an oversized bosom.
Percival she might have imagined; or
Izzy
with his fickleness. But Alfred!

    
Then her rage was replaced by the sense of menace that had awakened her. No ordinary fear this, but a terrible prickling beneath the skin, called up by some awful aberration in the course of things-not imagination but something real, she knew it-and when the knowledge came it would be destructive, deadly, black. The feeling lit momentarily on Percival in the Marines, on Gideon at school in Utah, then settled on Alfred, convincing her he was probably lying dead somewhere on a rainy street. Her heart did double-time in her chest, and sweat drenched her gown. She'd never wanted children. Half her life she'd wished they would leave her alone. But Alfred was her firstborn. How could she hate him when she was having palpitations? Why-now that she had raised them-did she spend her time imagining the horrors of her sons not being there, in some permanent way?

    
She turned on a light, which made her feel more logical. Always be logical, Patrick said. Probably she'd gotten up in a sweat not because of premonition but because Alfred made her feel guilty. It was unthinkable-wasn't it?-to expect his parents to move out of their house for the winter when one of them might be going blind. Unthinkable to want to move the divorced mother of two in
in
their place, just because Cynthia needed more room for raising her boys. Alfred didn't put it that way, but there it was. Naturally
Mag
was resentful, no matter how benevolent Alfred made it sound. Any mother would wake sweating in the middle of the night.

    
But she didn't feel better for thinking it through. Her breath was ragged and uneven, edging out of control. Already she had said terrible things, and if something happened to Alfred, there would be no taking them back. "You're only twenty-four years old, the last thing you need is a ready-made family," she had screamed. "The next thing you know, you'll want kids of your own, and you'll be stuck with half a dozen of them and you won't be able to do a damned thing for yourself." Her tone had been cruel, sarcastic,
unmotherly
. But it was no idle threat.
Mag
had married young and had seven unplanned sons, and the moment they started coming, her spirit was enclosed and she hadn't been able to do a damned thing for herself. Why should she take anything back?

    
"Cynthia and I are sensible people," Alfred had said. "We believe in birth control. We believe in abortion." Alfred had always been practical. He had learned to dress himself at two because he didn't like to be left in pajamas while
Mag
tended to
Izzy
. Later he'd taught himself to cook French toast and eggs because his brothers were hungry in the morning and
Mag
was busy with the current infant of the house. At the time,
Mag
had been grateful for his help. Now she feared her inattention had made him too practical and superficial, leaving him with a set of rules he followed but no inner life at all. When he was nine she had started him on piano lessons to develop his soul. It was too late. He practiced dutifully, listened intently, but always (she was sure) in the interest of being able to imitate the sound, never because he was carried away by the music as she had hoped. Abortion! As if there were no more to such decisions than logic. She herself wouldn't have had abortions even if they'd been legal, no matter that she hadn't wanted children. She didn't tell him that; she wanted to let him wonder. But where was the satisfaction in that, if he was lying dead somewhere on a rain-soaked street?

    
The logical thing, if she was so worried, would be to pick up the phone and call him. That was what Patrick would say.

     
Never.

    
It was Alfred's idea that Patrick, blind, would be happier in the Keys. Patrick had mentioned briefly that moving south might be nice, at least for the winter. In the Keys even a sightless man could feel the sun, Patrick said. Perhaps do some fishing.

    
"Nobody but you is convinced you're going blind,"
Mag
said.

    
But Alfred seized the moment. "No telling what a blind man could invent for fishermen," he told his father. Patrick had been inventing things for twenty-five years and could never resist a challenge.
Mag
realized that Alfred had always had a diabolical mind.