The Talisman

from blue to yellow, and his mother was fine and dandy, there was nothing to be scared of, nobody was dying, and danger was what a seagull meant to a clam. He closed his eyes and the elevator toiled upward.
    That thing in the sand had laughed at him.
    Jack squeezed through the opening as soon as the doors began to part. He trotted past the closed mouths of the other elevators, turned right into the panelled corridor and ran past the sconces and paintings toward their rooms. Here running seemed less a sacrilege. They had 407 and 408, consisting of two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room with a view of the long smooth beach and the vastness of the ocean. His mother had appropriated flowers from somewhere, arranged them in vases, and set her little array of framed photographs beside them. Jack at five, Jack at eleven, Jack as an infant in the arms of his father. His father, Philip Sawyer, at the wheel of the old DeSoto he and Morgan Sloat had driven to California in the unimaginable days when they had been so poor they had often slept in the car.
    When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he called out, ‘Mom? Mom?’
    The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no answer. ‘Mom!’ The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. ‘Mom!’ Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother’s window showed black waves rolling and rolling toward him.
    Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves nondescript, reaching for her . . .
    ‘Mom!’ he shouted.
    ‘I hear you, Jack,’ came his mother’s voice through the bathroom door. ‘What on earth . . .?’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, and felt all his muscles relax. ‘Oh, sorry. I just didn’t know where you were.’
    ‘Taking a bath,’ she said. ‘Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?’
    Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom. He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay –
    Still okay for now , a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.
    5
    Seven or eight miles up the coast road, just outside Hampton Township, they found a restaurant called The Lobster Chateau. Jack had given a very sketchy account of his day – already he was backing away from the terror he had experienced on the beach, letting it diminish in his memory. A waiter in a red jacket printed with the yellow image of a lobster across the back showed them to a table beside a long streaky window.
    ‘Would Madam care for a drink?’ The waiter had a stony-cold off-season New England face, and looking at it, suspecting the resentment of his Ralph Lauren sport coat and his mother’s carelessly worn Halston afternoon dress behind those watery blue eyes, Jack felt a more familiar terror needle him – simple homesickness. Mom, if you’re not really sick, what the hell are we doing here? The place is empty! It’s creepy! Jesus!
    ‘Bring me an elementary martini,’ she said.
    The waiter raised his eyebrows. ‘Madam?’
    ‘Ice in a glass,’ she said. ‘Olive on ice. Tanqueray gin over olive. Then – are you getting this?’
    Mom, for God’s sake, can’t you see his eyes? You think you’re being charming – he thinks you’re making fun of him! Can’t you see his eyes?
    No. She couldn’t. And that failure of empathy, when she had always been so sharp about how other people were feeling, was another stone against his heart. She was withdrawing . . . in all ways.
    ‘Yes, madam.’
    ‘Then,’ she said, ‘you take a bottle of vermouth – any brand – and hold it against the glass. Then you put the vermouth back on the shelf and bring the glass to me. ‘Kay?’
    ‘Yes, madam.’ Watery-cold New England eyes, staring at his mother with no love at all. We’re alone here , Jack thought, really realizing it for the first time. Jeez , are we . ‘Young sir?’
    ‘I’d like a Coke,’ Jack said miserably.
    The waiter left. Lily rummaged in her purse, came up with a package of Herbert Tarrytoons (so she had called them since he had been a baby, as in ‘Bring me my Tarrytoons from over there on the shelf, Jacky,’ and so he still thought them) and lit one.