Black House

It staggers him, this unexpected beauty; for a fraction of a second it slows him with the deep, grainy nostalgia of its fragmentary, not-quite evocation of another's face. Grace Kelly? Catherine Deneuve? No, neither of these; it comes to him that Judy's profile reminds him of someone he has still to meet.

Then the odd second passes: Fred Marshall gets to his feet, Judy's face in three-quarter profile loses its regal quality as she watches her husband sit beside her on the bench, and Jack rejects what has just occurred to him as an absurdity.

She does not raise her eyes until he stands before her. Her hair is dull and messy; beneath the hospital gown she is wearing an old blue lace-trimmed nightdress that looked dowdy when it was new. Despite these disadvantages, Judy Marshall claims him for her own at the moment her eyes meet his.

An electrical current beginning at his optic nerves seems to pulse downward through his body, and he helplessly concludes that she has to be the most stunningly beautiful woman he has ever seen. He fears that the force of his reaction to her will knock him off his feet, then ¡ª even worse! ¡ª that she will see what is going on and think him a fool. He desperately does not want to come off as a fool in her eyes. Brooke Greer, Claire Evinrude, Iliana Tedesco, gorgeous as each of them was in her own way, look like little girls in Halloween costumes next to her. Judy Marshall puts his former beloveds on the shelf; she exposes them as whims and fancies, riddled with false ego and a hundred crippling insecurities. Judy's beauty is not put on in front of a mirror but grows, with breathtaking simplicity, straight from her innermost being: what you see is only the small, visible portion of a far greater, more comprehensive, radiant, and formal quality within.

Jack can scarcely believe that agreeable, good-hearted Fred Marshall actually had the fantastic luck to marry this woman. Does he know how great, how literally marvelous, she is? Jack would marry her in an instant, if she were single. It seems to him that he fell in love with her as soon as he saw the back of her head.

But he cannot be in love with her. She is Fred Marshall's wife and the mother of their son, and he will simply have to live without her.

She utters a short sentence that passes through him in a vibrating wave of sound. Jack bends forward muttering an apology, and Judy smilingly offers him a sweep of her hand that invites him to sit before her. He folds to the floor and crosses his ankles in front of him, still reverberating from the shock of having first seen her.

Her face fills beautifully with feeling. She has seen exactly

what just happened to him, and it is all right. She does not think less of him for it. Jack opens his mouth to ask a question. Although he does not know what the question is to be, he must ask it. The nature of the question is unimportant. The most idiotic query will serve; he cannot sit here staring at that wondrous face.

Before he speaks, one version of reality snaps soundlessly into another, and without transition Judy Marshall becomes a tired-looking woman in her mid-thirties with tangled hair and smudges under her eyes who regards him steadily from a bench in a locked mental ward. It should seem like a restoration of his sanity, but it feels instead like a kind of trick, as though Judy Marshall has done this herself, to make their encounter easier on him.

The words that escape him are as banal as he feared they might be. Jack listens to himself say that it is nice to meet her.

"It's nice to meet you, too, Mr. Sawyer. I've heard so many wonderful things about you. "

He looks for a sign that she acknowledges the enormity of the moment that has just passed, but he sees only her smiling warmth. Under the circumstances, that seems like acknowledgment enough. "How are you getting on in here?" he asks, and the balance shifts even more in his direction.

"The company takes some getting used to, but the people here got lost and couldn't find their way back, that's all. Some of them are very intelligent. I've had conversations in here that were a lot more interesting than the ones in my church group or the PTA. Maybe I should have come to Ward D sooner! Being here has helped me learn some things. "

"Like what?"

"Like there are many different ways to get lost, for one, and getting lost is easier to do than anyone ever admits. The people in here can't hide how they feel, and most of them never found out how to deal with their fear. "

"How are you supposed to deal with that?"

"Why, you deal with it by taking it on, that's how! You don't just say, I'm lost and I don't know how to get back ¡ª you keep on going in the same direction. You put one foot in front of the other until you get more lost. Everybody should know that. Especially you, Jack Sawyer. "

"Especial ¡ª " Before he can finish the question, an elderly woman with a lined, sweet face appears beside him and touches his shoulder.

"Excuse me. " She tucks her chin toward her throat with the shyness of a child. "I want to ask you a question. Are you my father?"

Jack smiles at her. "Let me ask you a question first. Is your name Estelle Packard?"

Eyes shining, the old woman nods.

"Then yes, I am your father. "

Estelle Packard clasps her hands in front of her mouth, dips her head in a bow, and shuffles backward, glowing with pleasure. When she is nine or ten feet away, she gives Jack a little bye-bye wave of one hand and twirls away.

When Jack looks again at Judy Marshall, it is as if she has parted her veil of ordinariness just wide enough to reveal a small portion of her enormous soul. "You're a very nice man, aren't you, Jack Sawyer? I wouldn't have known that right away. You're a good man, too. Of course, you're also charming, but charm and decency don't always go together. Should I tell you a few other things about yourself ?"

Jack looks up at Fred, who is holding his wife's hand and beaming. "I want you to say whatever you feel like saying. "

"There are things I can't say, no matter how I feel, but you might hear them anyhow. I can say this, however: your good looks haven't made you vain. You're not shallow, and that might have something to do with it. Mainly, though, you had the gift of a good upbringing. I'd say you had a wonderful mother. I'm right, aren't I?"

Jack laughs, touched by this unexpected insight. "I didn't know it showed. "

"You know one way it shows? In the way you treat other people. I'm pretty sure you come from a background people around here only know from the movies, but it hasn't gone to your head. You see us as people, not hicks, and that's why I know I can trust you. It's obvious that your mother did a great job. I was a good mother, too, or at least I tried to be, and I know what I'm talking about. I can see. "

"You say you were a good mother? Why use ¡ª "

"The past tense? Because I was talking about before. "

Fred's smile fades into an expression of ill-concealed concern. "What do you mean, 'before'?"

"Mr. Sawyer might know," she says, giving Jack what he thinks is a look of encouragement.

"Sorry, I don't think I do," he says.

"I mean, before I wound up here and finally started to think a little bit. Before the things that were happening to me stopped scaring me out of my mind ¡ª before I realized I could look inside myself and examine these feelings I've had over and over all my life. Before I had time to travel. I think I'm still a good mother, but I'm not exactly the same mother. "

"Honey, please," says Fred. "You are the same, you just had a kind of breakdown. We ought to talk about Tyler. "

"We are talking about Tyler. Mr. Sawyer, do you know that lookout point on Highway 93, right where it reaches the top of the big hill about a mile south of Arden?"

"I saw it today," Jack says. "Fred showed it to me. "

"You saw all those farms that keep going and going? And the hills off in the distance?"

"Yes. Fred told me you loved the view from up there. "

"I always want to stop and get out of the car. I love everything about that view. You can see for miles and miles, and then ¡ª whoops! ¡ª it stops, and you can't see any farther. But the sky keeps going, doesn't it? The sky proves that there's a world on the other side of those hills. If you travel, you can get there. "

"Yes, you can. " Suddenly, there are goose bumps on Jack's forearms, and the back of his neck is tingling.

"Me? I can only travel in my mind, Mr. Sawyer, and I only remembered how to do that because I landed in the loony bin. But it came to me that you can get there ¡ª to the other side of the hills. "

His mouth is dry. He registers Fred Marshall's growing distress without being able to reduce it. Wanting to ask her a thousand questions, he begins with the simplest one:

"How did it come to you? What do you mean by that?"

Judy Marshall takes her hand from her husband and holds it out to Jack, and he holds it in both of his. If she ever looked like an ordinary woman, now is not the time. She is blazing away like a lighthouse, like a bonfire on a distant cliff.

"Let's say . . . late at night, or if I was alone for a long time, someone used to whisper to me. It wasn't that concrete, but let's say it was as if a person were whispering on the other side of a thick wall. A girl like me, a girl my age. And if I fell asleep then, I would almost always dream about the place where that girl lived. I called it Faraway, and it was like this world, the Coulee Country, only brighter and cleaner and more magical. In Faraway, people rode in carriages and lived in great white tents. In Faraway, there were men who could fly. "

"You're right," he says. Fred looks from his wife to Jack in painful uncertainty, and Jack says, "It sounds crazy, but she's right. "

"By the time these bad things started to happen in French Landing, I had pretty much forgotten about Faraway. I hadn't thought about it since I was about twelve or thirteen. But the closer the bad things came, to Fred and Ty and me, I mean, the worse my dreams got, and the less and less real my life seemed to be. I wrote words without knowing I was doing it, I said crazy things, I was falling apart. I didn't understand that Faraway was trying to tell me something. The girl was whispering to me from the other side of the wall again, only now she was grown up and scared half to death. "

"What made you think I could help?"

"It was just a feeling I had, back when you arrested that Kinderling man and your picture was in the paper. The first thing I thought when I looked at your picture was, He knows about Faraway. I didn't wonder how, or how I could tell from looking at a picture; I simply understood that you knew. And then, when Ty disappeared and I lost my mind and woke up in this place, I thought if you could see

into some of these people's heads, Ward D wouldn't be all that different from Faraway, and I remembered seeing your picture. And that's when I started to understand about traveling. All this morning, I have been walking through Faraway in my head. Seeing it, touching it. Smelling that unbelievable air. Did you know, Mr. Sawyer, that over there they have jackrabbits the size of kangaroos? It makes you laugh just to look at them. "

Jack breaks into a wide grin, and he bends to kiss her hand, in a gesture much like her husband's.

Gently, she takes her hand from his grasp. "When Fred told me he had met you, and that you were helping the police, I knew that you were here for a reason. "

What this woman has done astonishes Jack. At the worst moment of her life, with her son lost and her sanity crumbling, she used a monumental feat of memory to summon all of her strength and, in effect, accomplish a miracle. She found within herself the capacity to travel. From a locked ward, she moved halfway out of this world and into another known only from childhood dreams. Nothing but the immense courage her husband had described could have enabled her to have taken this mysterious step.

"You did something once, didn't you?" Judy asks him. "You were there, in Faraway, and you did something ¡ª something tremendous. You don't have to say yes, because I can see it in you; it's as plain as day. But you have to say yes, so I can hear it, so say it, say yes. "

"Yes. "

"Did what?" Fred asks. "In this dream country? How can you say yes?"

"Wait," Jack tells him, "I have something to show you later," and returns to the extraordinary woman seated before him. Judy Marshall is aflame with insight, courage, and faith and, although she is forbidden to him, now seems to be the only woman in this world or any other whom he could love for the rest of his life.

"You were like me," she says. "You forgot all about that world. And you went out and became a policeman, a detective. In fact, you became one of the best detectives that ever lived. Do you know why you did that?"

"I guess the work appealed to me. "

"What about it appealed to you in particular?"

"Helping the community. Protecting innocent people. Putting away the bad guys. It was interesting work. "

"And you thought it would never stop being interesting. Because there would always be a new problem to solve, a new question in need of an answer. "

She has struck a bull's-eye that, until this moment, he did not know existed. "That's right. "

"You were a great detective because, even though you didn't know it, there was something ¡ª something vital ¡ª you needed to detect. "

I am a coppiceman, Jack remembers. His own little voice in the night, speaking to him from the other side of a thick, thick wall.

"Something you had to find, for the sake of your own soul. "

"Yes," Jack says. Her words have penetrated straight into the center of his being, and tears spring to his eyes. "I always wanted to find what was missing. My whole life was about the search for a secret explanation. "

In memory as vivid as a strip of film, he sees a great tented pavilion, a white room where a beautiful and wasted queen lay dying, and a little girl two or three years younger than his twelve-year-old self amid her attendants.

"Did you call it Faraway?" Judy asks.

"I called it the Territories. " Speaking the words aloud feels like the opening of a chest filled with a treasure he can share at last.

"That's a good name. Fred won't understand this, but when I was on my long walk this morning, I felt that my son was somewhere in Faraway ¡ª in your Territories. Somewhere out of sight, and hidden away. In grave danger, but still alive and unharmed. In a cell. Sleeping on the floor. But alive. Unharmed. Do you think that could be true, Mr. Sawyer?"

"Wait a second," Fred says. "I know you feel that way, and I want to believe it, too, but this is the real world we're talking about here. "

"I think there are lots of real worlds," Jack says. "And yes, I believe Tyler is somewhere in Faraway. "

"Can you rescue him, Mr. Sawyer? Can you bring him back?"

"It's like you said before, Mrs. Marshall," Jack says. "I must be here for a reason. "

"Sawyer, I hope whatever you're going to show me makes more sense than the two of you do," says Fred. "We're through for now, anyhow. Here comes the warden. "

Driving out of the hospital parking lot, Fred Marshall glances at the briefcase lying flat on Jack's lap but says nothing. He holds his silence until he turns back onto 93, when he says, "I'm glad you came with me. "

"Thank you," Jack says. "I am, too. "

"I feel sort of out of my depth here, you know, but I'd like to get your impressions of what went on in there. Do you think it went pretty well?"

"I think it went better than that. Your wife is . . . I hardly know how to describe her. I don't have the vocabulary to tell you how great I think she is. "

Fred nods and sneaks a glance at Jack. "So you don't think she's out of her head, I guess. "

"If that's crazy, I'd like to be crazy right along with her. "

The two-lane blacktop highway that stretches before them lifts up along the steep angle of the hillside and, at its top, seems to extend into the dimensionless blue of the enormous sky.

Another wary glance from Fred. "And you say you've seen this, this place she calls Faraway. "

"I have, yes. As hard as that is to believe. "

"No crap. No b. s. On your mother's grave. "

"On my mother's grave. "

"You've been there. And not just in a dream, really been there. "

"The summer I was twelve. "

"Could I go there, too?"

"Probably not," Jack says. This is not the truth, since Fred could go to the Territories if Jack took him there, but Jack wants to shut this door as firmly as possible. He can imagine bringing Judy Marshall into that other world; Fred is another matter. Judy has more than earned a journey into the Territories, while Fred is still incapable of believing in its existence. Judy would feel at home over there, but her husband would be like an anchor Jack had to drag along with him, like Richard Sloat.

"I didn't think so," says Fred. "If you don't mind, I'd like to pull over again when we get to the top. "

"I'd like that," Jack says.

Fred drives to the crest of the hill and crosses the narrow highway to park in the gravel turnout. Instead of getting out of the car, he points at the briefcase lying flat on Jack's knees. "Is what you're going to show me in there?"

"Yes," Jack says. "I was going to show it to you earlier, but after we stopped here the first time, I wanted to wait until I heard what Judy had to say. And I'm glad I did. It might make more sense to you, now that you've heard at least part of the explanation of how I found it. "

Jack snaps open the briefcase, raises the top, and from its pale, leather-lined interior removes the Brewers cap he had found that morning. "Take a look," he says, and hands over the cap.

"Ohmygod," Fred Marshall says in a startled rush of words. "Is this . . . is it . . . ?" He looks inside the cap and exhales hugely at the sight of his son's name. His eyes leap to Jack's. "It's Tyler's. Good Lord, it's Tyler's. Oh, Lordy. " He crushes the cap to his chest and takes two deep breaths, still holding Jack's gaze. "Where did you find this? How long ago was it?"

"I found it on the road this morning," Jack says. "In the place your wife calls Faraway. "

With a long moan, Fred Marshall opens his door and jumps out of the car. By the time Jack catches up with him, he is at the far edge of the lookout, holding the cap to his chest and staring at the blue-green hills beyond the long quilt of farmland. He whirls to stare at Jack. "Do you think he's still alive?"

"I think he's alive," Jack says.

"In that world. " Fred points to the hills. Tears leap from his eyes, and his mouth softens. "The world that's over there somewhere, Judy says. "

"In that world. "

"Then you go there and find

him!" Fred shouts. His face shining with tears, he gestures wildly toward the horizon with the baseball cap. "Go there and bring him back, damn you! I can't do it, so you have to. " He steps forward as if to throw a punch, then wraps his arms around Jack Sawyer and sobs.

When Fred's shoulders stop trembling and his breath comes in gasps, Jack says, "I'll do everything I can. "

"I know you will. " He steps away and wipes his face. "I'm sorry I yelled at you like that. I know you're going to help us. "

The two men turn around to walk back to the car. Far off to the west, a loose, woolly smudge of pale gray blankets the land beside the river.

"What's that?" Jack asks. "Rain?"

"No, fog," Fred says. "Coming in off the Mississippi. "