The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,1

with her, and after she and her father had emptied out her brother’s room and taken down his old pennants and posters—Jose Canseco, a music group called Killer Picnic, the Bud Girls—and seen how faded and banged up the walls were, they painted it a color the label on the can called “Dreamtime,” which somehow was both pink and blue at once—good whatever the baby turned out to be. Her father hung a wallpaper border along the edge of the ceiling, a repeating pattern of ducks splashing in a puddle, and cleaned up an old maple rocking chair he’d found at the auction hall, so that when Jeanette brought the baby home, she’d have a place to sit and hold her.

The baby came in summer, the girl she’d wanted and named Amy Harper Bellafonte; there seemed no point in using the name Reynolds, the last name of a man Jeanette guessed she’d never see again and, now that Amy was here, no longer wanted to. And Bellafonte: you couldn’t do better than a name like that. It meant “beautiful fountain,” and that’s what Amy was. Jeanette fed and rocked and changed her, and when Amy cried in the middle of the night because she was wet or hungry or didn’t like the dark, Jeanette stumbled down the hall to her room, no matter what the hour was or how tired she felt from working at the Box, to pick her up and tell her she was there, she would always be there, you cry and I’ll come running, that’s a deal between us, you and me, forever and ever, my little Amy Harper Bellafonte. And she would hold and rock her until dawn began to pale the window shades and she could hear birds singing in the branches of the trees outside.

Then Amy was three and Jeanette was alone. Her father had died, a heart attack they told her, or else a stroke. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone needed to check. Whatever it was, it hit him early one winter morning as he was walking to his truck to drive to work at the elevator; he had just enough time to put down his coffee on the fender before he fell over and died, never spilling a drop. She still had her job at the Box, but the money wasn’t enough now, not for Amy or any of it, and her brother, in the Navy somewhere, didn’t answer her letters. God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back. She wondered what she would do.

Then one day a man came into the diner. It was Bill Reynolds. He was different, somehow, and the change was no good. The Bill Reynolds she remembered—and she had to admit she still thought of him from time to time, about little things mostly, like the way his sandy hair flopped over his forehead when he talked, or how he blew over his coffee before he sipped it, even when it wasn’t hot anymore—there was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow. This was the same man, but the glow was gone. He looked older, thinner. She saw he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair, which was greasy and standing all whichaway, and he wasn’t wearing a pressed polo like before but just an ordinary work shirt like the ones her father had worn, untucked and stained under the arms. He looked like he’d spent all night out in the weather, or in a car somewhere. He caught her eye at the door and she followed him to a booth in back.

—What are you doing here?

—I left her, he said, and as he looked at where she stood, she smelled beer on his breath, and sweat, and dirty clothes. I’ve gone and done it, Jeanette. I left my wife. I’m a free man.

—You drove all this way to tell me that?

—I’ve thought about you. He cleared his throat. A lot. I’ve thought about us.

—What us? There ain’t no us. You can’t come in like you’re doing and say you’ve been thinking about us.

He sat up straight. —Well, I’m doing it. I’m doing it right now.

—It’s busy in here, can’t you see that? I can’t be talking to you like this. You’ll have to order something.

—Fine, he answered, but he didn’t