“Don’t touch me!”

“You do it the way you want to do it, son,” the cop said, removing his hand. He opened the cruiser’s rear door for Arnie and handed him in.

Do you cry in dreams? Of course you could—hadn’t he read about people waking up from sad dreams with tears on their cheeks? But, dream or no dream, he wasn’t going to cry.

Instead he would think of Christine. Not of his mother or father, not of Leigh or Will Darnell, not of Slawson—all the miserable shitters who had betrayed him.

He would think of Christine.

Arnie closed his eyes and leaned his pale, gaunt face, forward into his hands and did just that. And as always, thinking about Christine made things better. After a while he was able to straighten up and look out at the passing scenery and think about his position.

Michael Cunningham put the telephone back into its cradle slowly—with infinite care—as if to do less might cause it to explode and spray his upstairs study with jagged black hooks of shrapnel.

He sat back in the swivel chair behind his desk, on which there sat his IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, an ashtray with the blue-and-gold legend HORLICKS UNIVERSITY barely legible across the dirty bottom, and the manuscript of his third book, a study of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac. He had been halfway through a page when the telephone rang. Now he flipped the paper release on the right side of the typewriter and pulled the page bonelessly out from under the roller, observing its slight curve clinically. He put it down on top of the manuscript, which was now little more than a jungle of pencilled-in corrections.

Outside, a cold wind whined around the house. The morning’s cloudy warmth had given way to a frigid, clear December evening. The earlier melt had frozen tight, and his son was being held in Albany on charges of what amounted to smuggling: no Mr Cunningham it is not marijuana it is cigarettes, two hundred cartons of Winston cigarettes with no tax stamps.

From downstairs he could hear the whir of Regina’s sewing machine. He would have to get up now, go to the door and open it, go down the hall to the stairs, walk down the stairs, walk into the dining room, then into the plant-lined little room that had once been a laundry but which was now a sewing room, and stand there while Regina looked up at him (she would be wearing her half-glasses for the close work), and say “Regina, Arnie has been arrested by the New York State Police.”

Michael attempted to begin this process by getting up from his desk chair, but the chair seemed to sense he was temporarily off-guard. It swivelled and rolled backward on its casters at the same moment, and Michael had to clutch the edge of his desk to keep from failing. He slipped heavily back into the chair, heart thudding with painful rapidity in his chest.

He was struck suddenly by such a complex wave of despair and sorrow that he groaned aloud and grabbed his forehead, squeezing his temples. The old thoughts swarmed back in, as predictable as summer mosquitoes and just as maddening. Six months ago, things had been okay. Now his son was sitting in a jail cell somewhere. What were the watershed moments? How could he, Michael, have changed things? What was the history of it, exactly? Where had the sickness started to creep in?

“Jesus—”

He squeezed harder, listening to the winter-whine outside the windows. He and Arnie had put the storms on just last month. That had been a good day, hadn’t it? First Arnie holding the ladder and looking up, then him down and Arnie up there, him shouting for Arnie to be careful, the wind in his hair and dead brown leaves blowing over his shoes, their colours gone. Sure, it had been a good day. Even after that beastly car had come, seeming to overshadow everything in their son’s life like a fatal disease, there had been some good days. Hadn’t there?

“Jesus,” he said again in a weak, teary voice that he despised.

Unbidden images rose behind his eyes. Colleagues looking at him sideways, maybe whispering in the faculty club. Discussions at cocktail parties in which his name bobbed uneasily up and down like a waterlogged body. Arnie wouldn’t be eighteen for almost two months and he supposed that meant his name couldn’t be printed in the paper, but everyone would still know. Word got around.

Suddenly, crazily, he saw Arnie at four, astride a red trike he and Regina had gotten at a rummage sale (Arnie at four had called them “Momma’s rubbage sales”). The trike’s red paint was flaked with scales of rust, the tyres were bald, but Arnie had loved it; he would have taken that trike to bed with him, if he could. Michael closed his eyes and saw Arnie riding up and down the sidewalk, wearing his blue corduroy jumper, his hair flopping in his eyes, and then his mind’s eye blinked or wavered or did something and the rusty rubbage-sale trike was Christine, her red paint scummed with rust, her windows milky-white with age.

He gritted his teeth together. Someone looking in might have thought he was smiling crazily. He waited until he had some kind of control, and then got up and went downstairs to tell Regina what had happened. He would tell her and she would think of what they were going to do, just as she always had; she would steal the forward motion from him, taking whatever sorry balm that actually doing things had to give, and leave him with only sick sorrow and the knowledge that now his son was someone else.

The first of that winter’s great northeast storms came to Libertyville on Christmas Eve, beating its way across the upper third of the US, on a wide and easily predictable storm track. The day began in bright thirty-degree sunshine, but morning deejays were already cheerfully predicting doom and gloom, urging those who had not finished their last-minute shopping to do so by mid-afternoon. Those planning trips to the old homestead for an old-fashioned Christmas were urged to rethink their plans if the trip could not be made in four to six hours.

“If you don’t want to be spending Christmas Day in the breakdown lane of I-76 somewhere between Bedford and Carlisle, I’d leave early or not at all,” the FM-104 jock advised his listening audience (a large part of which was too stoned to even consider going anyplace), and then resumed the Christmas Block Party with Springsteen’s version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”.

By 11:00 A.M… when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the slightest trace or snow and ice. He paused by the family car, turning his face up slightly into the freshening breeze. Being outside was like a resurrection. He felt he could stand here for hours and not have enough of it.

By one o’clock that afternoon, the Cunningham family station wagon had reached the outskirts of Ligonier, ninety miles east of Libertyville. The sky had gone a smooth and pregnant slate-grey by this time, and the temperature had dropped six degrees.

It had been Arnie’s idea that they not cancel the traditional Christmas Eve visit with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, Regina’s sister and her husband. The two families had created a casual, loosely rotating ritual over the years, with Vicky and Steve coming to their house some years, the Cunninghams going over to Ligonier on others. This year’s trip had been arranged in early December. It had been cancelled after what Regina stubbornly called “Arnie’s trouble”, but at the beginning of last week, Arnie had begun restlessly agitating for the trip.