Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) Read Online Free PDF

together, sitting by the fire, opening packages under the tree—it brought back memories. The cozy warmth of earlier days. It was almost, though certainly not quite, normal. For this day alone I could almost begin to forget my worries about them, forget that Danny would be going into the hospital the next morning—with the twins, no doubt, following pretty close behind. For her part Susan seemed to have no worries. It was as though in joining them in their fast she had also somehow partaken of their lack of concern for it. As though the fast were itself a drug.

    I remember laughter from that day, plenty of laughter. Nobody’s new clothes fit but my own but we tried them on anyway—there were jokes about the Amazing Colossal Woman and the Incredible Shrinking Man. And the toys and games all fit, and the brand-new hand-carved American-primitive angel I’d bought for the tree.

    Believe it or not, we were happy.

    But that night I lay in bed and thought about Danny in the hospital the next day and then for some reason about the whispered conversation I’d overheard that seemed so long ago and then about the man with the box and the day it had all begun. I felt like a fool, like somebody who was awakened from a long confused and confusing dream.

    I suddenly had to know what
Danny
knew.

    I got up and went to his room and shook him gently from his sleep.

    I asked him if he remembered that day on the train and the man with the box and then looking into the box and he said that yes he did and then I asked him what was in it.

    “Nothing,” he said.

    “Really
nothing?
You mean it was actually empty?” He nodded.

    “But didn’t he . . . I remember him telling us it was a
present
.”

    He nodded again. I still didn’t get it. It made no sense to me.

    “So you mean it was some kind of joke or something? He was playing some kind of joke on somebody?”

    “I don’t know. It was just . . . the box was empty.”

    He looked at me as though it was impossible for him to understand why
I
didn’t understand. Empty was empty. That was that.

    I let him sleep. For his last night, in his own room.

    I told you that things happened rapidly after that and they did, although it hardly seemed so at the time. Three weeks later my son smiled at me sweetly and slipped into a coma and died in just under thirty-two hours. It was unusual, I was told, for the IV not to have sustained a boy his age but sometimes it happened. By then the twins had beds two doors down the hall. Clarissa went on February 3rd and Jenny on February 5th.

    My wife, Susan, lingered until the 27th.

    And through all of this, through all these weeks now, going back and forth to the hospital each day, working when I was and
am
able and graciously being granted time off whenever I can’t, riding into the City from Rye and from the City back to Rye again alone on the train, I look for him. I look through every car. I walk back and forth in case he should get on one stop sooner or one stop later. I don’t want to miss him. I’m losing weight.

    Oh, I’m eating. Not as well as I should be I suppose but I’m eating.

    But I need to find him. To know what my son knew and then passed on to the others. I’m sure that the girls knew, that he passed it on to them that night in the bedroom—some terrible knowledge, some awful peace. And I thinksomehow, perhaps by being so very much closer to all of my children than I was ever capable of being, that Susan knew too. I’m convinced it’s so.

    I’m convinced that it was my essential loneliness that set me apart and saved me, and now of course which haunts me, makes me wander through dark corridors of commuter trains waiting for a glimpse of him—him and his damnable present, his gift, his box.

    I want to know. It’s the only way I can get close to them.

    I want to see. I
have
to see.

    I’m
hungry
.

    For Neal McPheeters

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