Pet Sematary

beating the cake batter even faster. “it’s that damned place. It’s unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path.
fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don’t want Ellie to catch it.”
Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends’ marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery-the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic.
And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.
“Honey, it’s just a pet cemetery,” he said.
“The way she was crying in there just now,” Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, “do you think it’s just a pet cemetery to her? It’s going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She’s not going up there anymore. It’s not the path, it’s the place. Here she is already thinking Church is going to die.”
For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother’s dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same-set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.
He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery… or that aloneness. He groped because it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn’t do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.
“Rachel,” he said, “Church is going to die.”
She stared at him angrily. “That is hardly the point,” she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. “Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow-”
“I tried to tell her that-”
“Or the day after that, or probably for years-”
“Honey, we can’t be sure of th-”
“Of course we can!” she shouted. “We take good care. of him, he’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here, and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can’t understand until she’s much older?”
“Rachel, listen.”
But Rachel had no intention of listening. She was blazing. “It’s bad enough to try and cope with a death-a pet or a friend or a relative-when it happens, without turning it into a… a goddam tourist attraction… a F-F-Forest Lawn for a-animals… “ Tears were running down her cheeks.
“Rachel,” he said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.
“Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about.”
He sighed. “I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant Mixmaster,” he said, hoping for a smile. He got none; only her eyes, locked on his, black and blazing. She was furious, he realized; not just angry, but absolutely furious. “Rachel,” he said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out, “how did you sleep last night?”
“Oh boy,” she said scornfully, turning away-but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. “That’s really intelligent. Really intelligent. You never change, Louis. When something isn’t going right, blame Rachel, right? Rachel’s just having one of her weird emotional reactions.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No?” She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.
He said patiently, “There’s nothing wrong with a child finding out something about death, Rachel. In fact, I’d call it a necessary thing. Ellie’s reaction-her crying-that seemed perfectly natural to me. It-”
“Oh, it sounded natural,” Rachel said, whirling on him again. “It sounded very natural to hear her weeping her heart out over her cat which is perfectly fine-”