The Touch

Sylvia

"There he is now," Sylvia said as she spotted Alan's Eagle. She leaned forward and pointed past Ba's shoulder.

Ba nodded from the driver's seat. "I see him, Missus."

"We'll follow him to his office and catch him before he goes in."

Jeffy had been dropped off at the Stanton School and Sylvia was on her way to Alan's office, determined to speak to him before he saw his first patient.

She leaned back in the rear seat, wondering how she would broach the subject to Alan. Last night she almost had been able to accept what Ba had said about this healing touch, this Dat-tay-vao, as he called it. Now, with the sun flickering and slanting through the oaks along the road on a beautiful spring morning, it seemed preposterous. But she had decided to follow through with her decision to speak to Alan about it, and pass on Ba's warning. She owed him at least that much.

They were approaching the office now. But Alan didn't turn into the parking lot. She saw his car slow momentarily as it passed, then pick up speed again. There were two cars and a van in the parking lot, and one man sitting on the front steps.

"Do I follow him, Missus?" Ba said as he slowed the car.

Sylvia hesitated. He wasn't headed toward the hospital— that was in the other direction. "Yes. Let's see where he's going. Maybe we'll still get a chance to speak to him."

They didn't have far to go. He turned into Tall Oaks Cemetery. Ba stopped the car at the gate and waited.

Sylvia sat tense and quiet while invisible fingers of ice encircled her stomach and squeezed.

"Go on," she said at last.

Ba turned the Graham through the gate and followed the winding asphalt strip through the trees. They found Alan's car pulled to the side about a third of the way along the drive. Sylvia spotted him a few hundred feet off to the left, kneeling in the grass on a gentle rise.

She watched him a moment, puzzled. She didn't know much about his past, but she knew he was not from around here and had no family in the area. On impulse she got out of the car and walked toward him.

She knew Tall Oaks well. Too well. It was one of those modern cemeteries that didn't allow standing markers. All headstones had to be flat little slabs laid in the ground in neat rows to facilitate groundskeeping. Gone was the old-fashioned creepy cemetery with its mausoleums and cracked, tilted headstones. In its place was this open, grassy field ringed by trees.

As she came up behind Alan she saw that the ground around him was littered with colorful cardboard and clear plastic packaging, all torn to pieces. When she saw what he was doing, she stopped in shock.

He was lining up little Star Wars action figures along the edges of a headstone plaque. The three human leads were there, plus a variety of bizarre aliens, of which Jabba the Hutt was the only one she knew by name.

She moved closer to get a look at the inscription of the headstone:

THOMAS WARREN BULMER

Tommy, we hardly knew ye.

Her throat tightened. She took another step to see the dates at the bottom of the brass plaque. The date of birth was eight years ago today. She caught her breath involuntarily when she saw that the date of death was only three months later.

Oh, God! I didn't know!

Filled with guilt and embarrassment for intruding on him at a moment like this, she spun and began to hurry back down the rise.

"Don't go," he said.

Sylvia stopped, turned. He was still squatting, but he was looking up at her. His eyes were dry and he was smiling.

"Come say happy birthday to Tommy."

She went and stood at his side while he gathered up the toy packaging.

"I didn't know."

"No reason you should." He stood up and surveyed the toys he had displayed on the headstone. "How's it look?"

"Great." She didn't know what else to say.

"Well, it won't last long. One of the groundskeepers will rip them off for his kids. But that's okay. Better than having them ground up by the lawnmowers. At least somebody will be getting something out of them. Tommy would have loved Star Wars, you know. Especially Jabba the Hutt. Mean as he was, big fat Jabba would have made Tommy laugh."

"How did he—?" She caught herself. The question had filled her mind since the instant she had read the plaque, but she hadn't meant to ask.

Alan didn't seem to mind. "Tommy had a congenital heart defect: endocardial fibroelastosis. For the sake of simplicity, let's just say that his heart wasn't up to the job. We took him to the city. We had every specialist in Manhattan look at him. They tried everything they knew. But nobody could save him." His voice cracked. "And so he died. He was just learning to smile when he up and died on us."

He raised his free hand to his eyes as a sob racked him. Then another. He dropped the wrappings and covered his face with both hands.

Sylvia didn't know what to do. She had never seen a man cry before, and Alan's grief was so deep that she wanted to cry herself. She put an arm around his hunched shoulders. Touching him and feeling the tremors within him made his pain a physical thing. She wanted to say something comforting… but what could she say?

Alan suddenly regained control and wiped his face dry on his sleeves.

"Sorry," he said, looking away, obviously embarrassed. "I'm not a crybaby. I come here every May twenty-seventh, and I haven't cried for the last five or six times." He sniffed. "Don't know what's the matter with me today."

A thought struck Sylvia with the force of an explosion. "Is it because you think that maybe if he had been born this year, you could have saved him?"

Alan's eyes were wide as he turned toward her.

"Ba told me," she said.

"Ba?" It almost seemed as if he didn't recognize the name.

"You know—the big Vietnamese guy. He says he saw you do something at the party."

"The party," Alan said in a flat, vacant tone. "It seems so long ago." And then his eyes lit. "The party! That MTA guy's head! Yeah… Ba could have seen."

There was silence for a moment, then Alan took a deep, shuddering breath. "It's true, you know. I can… do things I would have laughed off as utterly impossible two months ago. I… I can cure just about anything when the time is right. Anything. But it doesn't do Tommy any good, does it? I mean, what goddamn good is it if I can't use it on Tommy, who was the most important little sick person in my life!"

Biting his lip, he turned and walked a few steps away, then returned.

"You know something?" he said, slightly more composed. "Before you came I was sitting there actually thinking of digging up the grave and seeing if I could bring him back."

With a quake of fear, Sylvia remembered the old story of The Monkey's Paw.

"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy," he said, shaking his head sharply.

Sylvia smiled and tried to lighten the mood. "Why should you be any different from the rest of us?"

Alan managed to return the smile. "Did you come here to see someone?"

Sylvia thought of Greg, whose marker was on the other side of the field. She had buried him close to home rather than in Arlington, but she had never returned to the site.

"Only you." He gave her a puzzled look. "Ba has some things to tell you."

He shrugged. "Let's go."