Gute_9780307271068_3p_all_r1.qxp
6/3/11
5:45 PM
Ed
Page 38
King
crossed. Oh well, so there you have it. Another weird dream. It’s meaningless.” Walter checked out and returned to Maternity, where Diane and Baby Doe, he found, were gone. They’d left the hospital—but that couldn’t be. What was she thinking? What was going on? “Oh no, no, no,” thought Walter, and called the adoption agency. He was put on hold twice, passed along twice, until the director informed him that she knew already. She’d gotten in touch with the prospective adoptive family, and the prospective adoptive family was opting out for reasons it wasn’t obligated to divulge, but also didn’t mind, in these circumstances, divulging—namely, that the birth mother had had a change of heart, and they didn’t want a birth mother who couldn’t let go, and also, what about the birth mother’s state of mind right now, how was she treating the baby? There were too many danger signals. The beater car was gone from the hospital parking lot. It was the middle of April—a chilly wind, stirred pollens. Walter scratched his head and weighed his choices. He could just go home and take what fate dealt him, or not go home, never go home, or— “Wait,” he thought. “What am I doing? How many times am I going to do this? What have I gotten from evaluating options? Look where it’s gotten me—to this, right now. God, what a misery it’s been, and what a breath of fresh air it would be if somehow, some way, I could just live again, free of all these problems.” He sat in his car feeling cheated by Diane, and banging his hand against the steering wheel. “I navigated so carefully through everything,” he thought. “I did everything right. I did everything I could. And look at me now, I’m sitting here like an idiot. And now I’m thinking about sitting here like an idiot. And I don’t have a reason to start my car. What would I do? Where would I go?” Diane, he remembered then, had only a little money—whatever she’d saved from the cash he’d bled. It couldn’t be much. Maybe enough for a few motel nights, but then what? She didn’t have an income. She had a new baby, and—she had Walter over a barrel. “That’s the key,” he thought. “That’s the main thing. She has me on the hook for three hundred a month. Why would she run away from that? She wouldn’t run away from that. No way is she running away from that. Why didn’t I think of this? If I just sit back, I’ll hear from the little minx—she’ll call me at the office and soak me good.” In fact, he saw, she would soak him good