Mrs. Jones had taken the coward"s way out, after all. She could be bold as bra.s.s when it came to heaping scorn on a seven-yearold in front of his cla.s.smates, but when it came to making up for it a little, she just couldn"t face it. Well, too bad.
"Dad," said Stevie, "what did you do to her?"
DeAnne, realizing that they needed some privacy for this, herded Robbie and the Cowper creatures out of the living room. Thanks, DeAnne, Step said silently. "Door Man, all I did was tell her the truth about what she was doing, and I made it clear that if she didn"t stop, I was going to tell the truth to everybody else, too. So she stopped. In fact, she stopped so completely that I wouldn"t be surprised if she never teaches again, even after this year."
"Wow," Stevie whispered.
"I mean, that"s what you do with bad people, when you can. You just name their sin to them. That"s what the prophets always did," said Step. "Just name their sins, and if they have any spark of goodness in them at all, they repent. Maybe she"s going to repent."
"What if they"re bad all the way through? What if they got no spark?"
"Well, it"s like Alma and Amulek. The Lord wouldn"t let the evil people harm them, even though a lot of other people got killed. They finished giving their message and then they left."
"The bad guys burned Abinadi," said Stevie.
"Yes," said Step. "But not until he finished naming their sins. And that"s what eventually stopped the wicked people from doing their wickedness. Telling the truth about them. They can only do their evil when they think that n.o.body knows."
"But Abinadi was dead."
"Son, I guess he knew and the Lord knew that death isn"t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is knowing that something really bad is going on and then not doing anything about it because you"re afraid. So when Abinadi died, death tasted sweet to him."
"Burning to death?"
"No, I don"t think that was sweet. But then it was over, and he went to live with his Father in Heaven. Anyway, Stevie, that isn"t the point. n.o.body was going to burn me to death for telling the truth about Mrs. Jones. I"m no Abinadi, I was just a very angry father of a very wonderful son who had been treated very badly and now it"s over. Mrs. Jones won"t be able to hurt you ever again, and my guess is that she won"t be able to hurt anybody."
Stevie threw his arms around Step"s neck and clung to him for a long time. Then Stevie pulled away and took off out of the room, probably a bit embarra.s.sed.
Step got up and wandered into the kitchen and joined in the conversation there. "You"re going to sleep on our bed because you"re pregnant, DeAnne," said Jenny.
"1"m not," said Step.
"Uh-oh," said Spike. "Hyper-courtesy alert."
"Oh, please," said Jenny. "We all know how this conversation goes. You protest that Step can sleep on the floor while DeAnne sleeps on the couch, only you both know perfectly well that DeAnne would wake up perfectly dead if she did that and we"d feel so guilty we couldn"t sleep a wink. Besides, what you don"t realize is that Spike and I went camping on our honeymoon."
"There"s a way to zip two bags together," said Spike, in a confidential tone. "I"ll show you sometime."
"It does not hurt our feelings to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor," said Jenny. "We actually find it romantic, not that anyone who knew our kids would think we needed any more romantic opportunities. So please, let"s just skip the arguing part and all agree right now, you on the bed and us in the bag."
Step and DeAnne were laughing, and DeAnne said, "That"s just fine."
It wasn"t until about nine that night, with the children bedded down, that DeAnne realized that she had never even checked the mail.
"We can always get it tomorrow," said Step.
"Or we could take a walk over there tonight," said DeAnne. "And check on the house while we"re at it."
Why not? The Cowper house was so intensely extraverted that Step was glad for a chance to get away for a while.
On the way to the mailbox he told her what had pa.s.sed between Stevie and him. "So I guess we"ve finally gotten over the hump," he said. "Stevie"s going to be fine."
"I hope," said DeAnne.
"You only hope?"
"Today when he got off the bus, I started to explain to him about the bug spray and how we couldn"t get in the house, and finally he says to me, "I know, Mom. Jack already told me about it. ""
The imaginary friends. "Well, I suppose we couldn"t expect them to just suddenly go away."
"I"m worried, Step. He"s way too old to have an imaginary friend. And besides, who ever heard of somebody having more than one? I mean, aren"t imaginary friends supposed to be like Snuffy on Sesame Street? Just one big strange creature or something?"
"Give him some time," said Step. "As things get better at school, he"ll let go of this fantasy life. I mean, let"s face it-these imaginary friends got him through what amounts to a concentration camp experience. Let"s not be too quick to kill them off!"
"It"s not a joke, Step," said DeAnne. "Stevie just absolutely refuses to admit that they"re pretend. I think he really believes in them."
"So what if he does? The fantasy wouldn"t have done him much good if it hadn"t seemed real."
"But these imaginary friends aren"t real, Step, and what if they don"t go away? What if he insists on having one of these imaginary friends as the best man at his wedding? It"s going to start interfering with his social life sometime, you know."
"But not today," said Step. "Give him some slack. He"s just come out of h.e.l.l into daylight, and it takes a while to shake off the shadows."
They were at the mailbox. Step opened it and checked for spiders, as he always did, ever since the black widow had scooted right up his sleeve when he was getting the mail one time in Orem. He had never known that you really could rip all the b.u.t.tons off your shirt in one smooth movement and tear a whole shirt off your body in less than a second. It hadn"t bit him, but he hadn"t forgotten, either.
DeAnne started tilting the letters so she could see the return addresses under the streetlight. "We can take them inside," said Step. "We do live here."
"I"m not going in there again till that stink is gone," said DeAnne.
"The Cowpers aren"t going to be thrilled about having us live with them forever, you know," said Step.
"They might. I was very helpful today with the housework. Here"s one from your brother." She tore it open and started scanning it.
"You know what Spike Cowper said to me?" said Step. "He said, I know you folks need a car, and we"ve got this ugly beat-up rusted-out Datsun B-210, it runs fine but it"s so ugly we"ll never get what it"s worth. So why don"t you take it off my hands? Five hundred bucks. And I said, We can"t afford anything right now. And he said, So we"ll send you our address, and you pay us when you can."
"I hope you said yes," said DeAnne.
"You think I"m an idiot? I almost kissed him. I can take the Datsun to work, and you can keep the wagon."
"It"ll feel like emanc.i.p.ation day," she said. "I think your brother"s letting you know that he needs you to pay him back the money we borrowed for the move."
"Blood from a stone," said Step. "I"ll call him. He"s probably just afraid that we"ve forgotten we owe it to him."
"I didn"t make the house payment in Indiana this month," said DeAnne.
"I didn"t think we could anyway," said Step.
"This is the second month in a row," said DeAnne. "I don"t think we"re going to be able to make up these missed payments unless we get a surprise royalty check or something."
"I know-I"ll ask Ray Keene for a raise. No, I"ll ask d.i.c.ky for a raise."
She held out the last envelope to him. A big manila envelope. "Agamemnon," she said.
"You"re kidding," said Step. He tore it open.
"I can"t believe we"re reading our mail out here on the street," said DeAnne, looking around the neighborhood. There was n.o.body outside.
"Isn"t that what everybody does when their house has been turned into a gas chamber?" asked Step. "It"s the contract. Arkasian came through."
"Took him long enough," said DeAnne.
"It just felt like a long time. It"s only been a few weeks. In fact, he probably did this right away and it just took this long to process it." He looked up from the letter. "You know, Fish Lady, if you had got the mail at the regular time and called me and told me this was here, I would have quit my job right then, before lunch, and that would have been really stupid and totally unnecessary, because after lunch things got better again at work. I mean, it was a really lucky thing that you didn"t get the mail then. Because I really can"t quit yet, not until I know whether Eight Bits Inc. is going to do IBM games or not."
"Lucky thing," said DeAnne.
"Yeah, right," said Step. He put his arms around her, there under the streetlight, each holding handfuls of mail behind the other"s back. "Maybe the Lord really is looking out for us a little bit."
"Or maybe the law of averages said it was about time," said DeAnne.
"Yeah, well, who do you think wrote the law of averages?" He kissed her and they headed back to the Cowpers" house. As they walked away, Step stole a look back at the house, wondering whether Stevie"s imaginary friends had also been driven out by the insecticide.
8: Shrink
This is how it happened that Step found a psychiatrist for Stevie, even though he had vowed that he would never take his son to one of those charlatans.
Not that Step had anything against psychiatrists individually. Their best friends in grad school in Vigor had been Larry and Sheila Redmond; Larry was a fellow history student, while Sheila was just starting a private practice as a psychotherapist. Step had made himself obnoxious, teasing her about how she had gone into the ministry. "The only difference between psychotherapists and ministers is that psychotherapists charge more, and more people believe in their brand of miracle cure."
Sheila took it all in good humor-after all, patience was the mark of a good therapist-and, because of her, Step had to admit to himself that even though he thought all psychological theories were nothing more than competing sects in a secular religion of self-obsession, it was still possible that an individual therapist might do genuine good for a patient, much the same way that a good friend might help someone who was going through inner turmoil. And even the money angle began to make sense to him when he remembered that in America, people tended to think that anything with a high price tended to be worth more-so that paying a whole lot of money to have someone listen to you and apply meaningless theories to your troubles would feel more valuable and therefore provide more solace than getting nonsense advice from a friend for free.
But the one thing Step knew he would never do, despite his new tolerance for the possibility of helpful therapy, was take one of his children to one of those witch doctors. "Why should we?" said Step to DeAnne. "If we took him to a Freudian, we"d find out that he wanted to kill me and sleep with you. A Jungian would link up his imaginary friends to the collective unconscious and some kind of dual hero myth. A Skinnerian would try to get him to perk up and smile at the ringing of a bell. And the new drug guys would dope him up and he"d sleep through the rest of his life."
"We"re out of our depth," said DeAnne. "And we need help."
"So does that mean we put our faith in the theories of men," said Step, "instead of trusting in what we claim we believe in? Is Stevie a physical machine, genes acting out the script we gave him? Or is he an eternal intelligence, responsible for his own actions? Do we try to help our own son find his own way out of his own problems? Or do we pay for a therapist to teach him strange new lies to believe in?"
DeAnne looked at him coldly, then, and said, "We"re not Christian Scientists, you know."
"And psychiatrists aren"t doctors, either," said Step.
"Yes they are," said DeAnne.
"Having an M.D. doesn"t make you a doctor," said Step. "People on the waiting lists at clinics get better at exactly the same rate as the people who are being treated."
"I read that article, too," said DeAnne. "But I also noticed that the clinics seemed to do no harm. And maybe if we take Stevie to a doctor he"ll realize how much we care about him."
"He"ll realize that we think he"s crazy," said Step.
"He plays with imaginary friends," said DeAnne.
"And psychiatrists cost thousands of dollars," said Step, knowing that his secret weapon in any argument with DeAnne was to say that they could not afford it.
"Ninety dollars," said DeAnne.
He realized how very serious she was about it. "You"ve already checked."
"On the cost, yes," said DeAnne. "I went to Jenny"s pediatrician, Dr. Greenwald, and he gave me the names of three child psychiatrists in Steuben, and I called them all and asked what they were charging and it"s ninety dollars an hour. The only question now is whether the insurance from Eight Bits Inc. will cover a psychiatrist."
"It won"t."
"You won"t even ask about it?"
And then it was Step"s turn to confess. "I already did."
She laughed, but she was angry. "You hypocrite."
"You"ve been hinting around about this ever since you noticed these imaginary friends," said Step. "I knew you were going to want to do it, and I had to know whether it would be covered. And it won"t."
She looked at him, wanting to say something really dangerous-he knew the look, knew she was deciding whether it was worth the fight that would ensue if she said what was on her mind.
He saved her the trouble of deciding. "You"re about to accuse me of lying about it," said Step.
"I was not!" she said.
"You were deciding whether or not to tell me that you were going to call Eight Bits Inc. and find out for yourself if it"s covered."
"That"s not calling you a liar," she said. "That"s checking to make sure. What if they thought you meant adult psychiatric treatment, and that"s not covered, but psychiatric treatment for children is."
"Oh, I see. It"s not that I"m a liar, it"s that I"m so incompetent that I can"t carry on an effective conversation with another adult. You have to check up to see if I missed a little thing like that."
"People can make mistakes!" she said.
"Yes, ma"am, they certainly can," said Step, and he started to leave the room.
"Don"t do that!" she shouted at him.
"Don"t do what?" he asked.
"Don"t walk out on me."
The words hung in the air.
"There"s a world of difference," said Step, "between walking out on you and walking out of a room. I"m walking out of a room right now." She started to say something, but he didn"t give her a chance. "Right now," he said.
He opened the bedroom door and went into the hall and realized that Robbie and Betsy were playing quietly in Robbie"s room, not in the family room as he had thought. Step and DeAnne had raised their voices during this argument-did the children hear? "Hi, kids," he said. "What brings you back here?"