Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

Addie watches as the eating of the passion fruit becomes, between them, a hungry kiss. She turns and starts to run.

TWENTY-ONE

See? No black dogs.” Turning from the closet, Ran switched the flashlight off. “Okay?”

“Okay, Doddy.”

Nestling them on either side of him in his and Claire’s—or only Claire’s?—big bed, he opened The Bad Dream, one of Mercer Mayer’s Critter books, and read to Hope and Charlie about a sweet and fuzzy little creature who dreams he’s bad and turns into a sort of Critter Hyde with fangs and spiky hair. He acquires a gorilla sidekick and gets everything he wants, ice cream and pizza pie for breakfast. He gives up bathing, takes the other children’s toys, and does, in short, whatever the hell he feels like, only to find out in the end that no one loves him anymore, and then he cries and wants his mommy, but it all turns out to be a dream.

Maybe that’s what this is, too, thought Ran as he turned the pages on parental autopilot—mysterious intruders, vodou pots, black dogs, the antagonism between him and Claire—that, most of all. Last night, they seemed to have reached a truce—a place from which negotiation might begin—but here it was again tonight, hardened into old, familiar forms. And his manic depression—even after almost thirty years, it still sometimes seemed to Ran that this, too, was only a bad dream from which he’d presently awake.

As he watched the critter morph into his monster form, Ran remembered the first time it had struck him—alone in New York, not long after Delores closed the door, and Shanté, in the dormer, put her hand against the glass and watched him go; not long after Mel, at the bus station late at night, amid the tired winos and the lonely women sleeping with their handbags clutched and the drone of idling engines and the diesel smell, took a twenty from his wallet and said, “Don’t spend it all in one place, hot shot,” and left to be the first to go. A kid Ran met in group and never saw again gave him a thumbed paperback of The Mysterious Stranger, and Ran read the ending again and again till he had the words by heart…. “It’s all a dream…a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short…. You perceive now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!” How Ran had loved that story! And he believed it, too, what Satan said to Theodor—every word of it rang true.

Yet reading to his children, feeling their small, warm presences leaning in, Ransom felt such solipsism was a luxury he could no longer afford. He wanted the world to offer Hope and Charlie other, better sweetnesses than the despair he’d tasted in that book and been, like Twain, too partial to.

“Doddy, what’s a critter?” said Charlie as he closed the book.

“Hmm.” Ran studied the illustration. “Good question, buddy. I’m not sure. What do you think?”

“I’n’t know.”

“Maybe it’s a woodchuck.”

“It’s not a woodchuck, Dad,” Hope said, slathering his title with heavy irony.

“A groundhog?”

“Uh-uh.” She tossed her locks negatingly.

“Could it be, perhaps,” Ran proposed, with a trace of mincery, “a muskrat?”

“No musk cat!” Grinning, Charlie joined the game.

“Guys, you’re a tough audience,” he said. “A nutria? A capybara? I’m running out of options here.”

“Da-ad!”

“What do you think, Hope?”

“They’re guinea pigs,” she said, simply.

“Hmm,” said Ransom. “Hmm. Actually, you may be right.”

“I am right.” Her conviction was a cloudless, unwavering blue.

“Hey, Charlie-boy,” he said, “is it just me, or is your sister, La Princesa, a bit full of herself? A bit big for her cat pajama britches?”

“Hmph.” Hope shrugged up a shoulder and looked away, like a snooty princess on TV.

“What do you think, Charlie—does she need a tickle?”

“Yesssssssss!”

“Little or big?”

“Little…No, big!”

Ran made threatening claws at Hope, whose deadpan showed no signs of cracking under stress.

He went straight for the pits.

“Daddy! Daddy, stop!”

When Ransom did, she gave it up and squealed, “Again, Da-dee, a-gain!”

He arched a brow. “What, more?”

“Again!” said Charlie.

“Again! Again! Again!”

“What are you,” he asked her, laughing, too, “a guiner pig?”

Behind her eyes, the little cogwheels stopped. Then, like a starfish straddling a clam, she broke the seal and sucked the tender meat. “A guiner pig! A guiner pig! Oh, Dad! Da-dee!” Ransom’s heart went bump, as though he’d watched a tiny acrobat do her first flip on the trapeze.

“Lie down with me,” she said as Ransom carried her from Charlie’s room and laid her in her bed.

“Hope, it’s late.”

“Please, Daddy! Please? Just for a minute.”

“One.” He lay down beside her and clasped his hands behind his head.

“Daddy?”

“Go to sleep.”

“I have to ask you something.”

“What?”

“What happens when we die?”

Oh, Jesus, Ransom thought. “I don’t know, Pete. Some people say we have a soul inside us, and when we die it leaves and goes to live with God.”

“Do our bodies go, too?”

“No, we leave those here. Just our souls or spirits go.”

“What’s a spirit?”

Ransom sighed. “It’s hard to explain, Hope. You see this lamp? If the lightbulb is your body, then your spirit’s sort of like the light that shines out through the glass.” He tapped the bulb. “Even when the bulb wears out or breaks, the light goes on and on. Some people believe it goes to heaven and stays there. Others think it goes to a sort of waiting place, then gets reborn into another, different body. When we come back to earth, we don’t remember who we were before. Some very special people may, but not most of us.”

“Do you remember, Daddy?”

“No, sweetheart, I don’t.”

“Will you die, Daddy?”

He hesitated. “Someday, sweetie. Hopefully, not for a long time.”

“I don’t want you to.”

He turned and looked at her small face on the pillow.