"Starting in at the university?"
Louis nodded. "The kids don't come back for two weeks, but by then I ought to know what I'm doing, don't you think?"
"Yeah, if you don't know where the pills are, I guess you'll have trouble."
Crandall offered his hand and Louis shook it, mindful again of the fact that old bones pained easily. "Come on over any evening," he said. "Want you to meet my Norma. Think she'd enjoy you."
"I'll do that," Louis said. "Nice to meet you, Jud."
"Same goes both ways. You'll settle in. May even stay awhile."
"I hope we do."
Louis walked down the crazy-paved path to the shoulder of the road and had to pause while yet another-truck, this one followed by a line of five cars headed in the direction of Bucksport, passed by. Then, raising his hand in a short salute, he crossed the street (road, he reminded himself again) and let himself into his new house.
It was quiet with the sounds of sleep. Ellie appeared not to have moved at all, and Gage was still in his crib, sleeping in typical Gage fashion, spread-eagled on his back, a bottle within easy reach. Louis paused there looking in at his son, his heart abruptly filling with a love for the boy so strong that it seemed almost dangerous. He supposed part of it was simply homesickness for all the familiar Chicago places and Chicago faces that were now gone, erased so efficiently by the miles that they might never have been at all. There's a lot more moving around than there used to be... used to be you picked a place out and stuck to it. There was some truth in that.
He went to his son, and because there was no one there to see him do it, not even Rachel, he kissed his fingers and then pressed them lightly and briefly to Gage's cheek through the bars of the crib.
Gage clucked and turned over on his side.
"Sleep well, baby," Louis said.
He undressed quietly and slipped into his half of the bed that was for now just two single mattresses pushed together on the floor. He felt the strain of the day beginning to pass. Rachel didn't stir. Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the mom.
Just before sleep, Louis hiked himself up on one elbow and looked out the window. Their room was at the front of the house, and he could look across the road at the Crandall place. It was too dark to see shapes-on a moonlit night it would not have been-but be could see the cigarette ember over there. Still up, he thought. He'll maybe be up for a long rime. The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.
Against what?
Louis was thinking about that when he slipped into sleep. He dreamed he was in Disney World, driving a bright white van with a red cross on the side. Gage was beside him, and in the dream Gage was at least ten years old. Church was on the white van's dashboard, looking at Louis with his bright green eyes, and out on Main Street by the l890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.
7
The next two weeks were busy ones for the family. Little by little Louis's new job began to shake down for him (how it would be when ten thousand students, many of them drug and liquor abusers, some afflicted with social diseases, some anxious about grades or depressed about leaving home for the first time, a dozen of them-girls, mostly-anorexic... how it would be when all of them converged on the campus at once would be something else again). And while Louis began getting a handle on his job as head of University Medical Services, Rachel began to get a handle on the house.
Gage was busy taking the bumps and spills that went with getting used to his new environment, and for a while his nighttime schedule was badly out of whack, but by the middle of their second week in Ludlow, he had begun to sleep through again. Only Ellie, with the prospect of beginning kindergarten in a new place before her, seemed always overexcited and on a hair-trigger. She was apt to go into prolonged giggling fits or periods of almost menopausal depression or temper tantrums at the drop of a word. Rachel said Ellie would get over it when she saw that school was not the great red devil she had made it out to be in her own mind, and Louis thought Rachel was right. Most of the time, Ellie was what she had always been-a dear.