Pet Sematary

“Stop it,” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
“Yes, but we’re going to,” he said, angry himself now. “You had your at-bats-how about giving me mine?”
“She’s not going up there anymore. And as far as I’m concerned, the subject is closed.”
“Ellie has known where babies come from since last year,” Louis said deliberately. “We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know where they come from.”
“That has nothing to do with-”
“It does, though!” he said roughly. “When I was talking to her in my office, about Church, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that old cabbage-leaf story when I asked her where women got babies. I’ve never forgotten that lie. I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”
“Where babies come from has nothing to do with a goddam pet cemetery!” Rachel cried at him, and what her eyes said to him was Talk about the parallels all night and all day, if you want to, Louis; talk until you turn blue, but I won’t accept it.
Still, he tried.
“She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It’s perfectly natural. In fact, I think it’s the most natural thing in the w-”
“Will you stop saying that!” she screamed suddenly-really screamed and Louis recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the.
open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Hour puffed up in a dry white cloud.
“Oh luck,” he said dismally.
In an upstairs room, Gage began to cry.
“That’s nice,” she said, also crying now. “You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stressless Sunday morning.”
She started by him and Louis put a hand on her arm. “Let me ask you something,”
he said, ‘“because I know that anything-literally anything-can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if her cat gets distemper or leukemia-cats are very prone to leukemia, you know-or if he gets run over in that road? Do you want to be the one, Rachel?”
“Let me go,” she nearly hissed. The anger in her voice, however, was overmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in her eyes-! don’t want to talk about this, Louis, and you can’t make me, that look said. “Let me go, I want to get Gage before he falls out of his a-”
“Because ‘maybe you ought to be the one,” he said. “You can tell her we don’t talk about it, nice people don’t talk about it, they just bury it-oops! but don’t say ‘buried,’ you’ll give her a complex.”
“I hate you!” Rachel sobbed and tore away from him.
Then he was of course sorry, and it was of course too late.
“Rachel-”
She pushed by him roughly, crying harder. “Leave me alone. You’ve done enough.”
She paused in the kitchen doorway, turning toward him, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “I don’t want this discussed in front of Ellie anymore, Lou. I mean it. There’s nothing natural about death. Nothing. You as a doctor should know that.”
She whirled and was gone, leaving Louis in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their voices. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept, he reflected on the last thing she had said and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world.
Taxes were not so sure; human conflicts were not; the conflicts of society were not; boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time. Even sea turtles and the giant sequoias had to buy out someday.
“Zelda,” he said aloud. “Christ, that must have been bad for her.”
The question was should he just let it ride or should he try to do something about it?
He tilted the dustpan over the wastebasket, and flour slid out with a soft foom, powdering the cast-out cartons and used-up cans.

“Hope Ellie didn’t take it too hard,” Jud Crandall said. Not for the first time Louis thought that the man had a peculiar-and rather uncomfortable-ability to put his finger gently on whatever the sore spot was.
He and Jud and Norma Crandall now sat on the Crandalls’ porch in the cool of the evening, drinking iced tea instead of beer. On 15, going-home-after-the-weekend traffic was fairly heavy-people recognized that every good late-summer weekend now might be the last one, Louis supposed. Tomorrow