Free Umbrella Man (9786167611204) by Jake Needham Page A

like a cosmic phone card which provided them only limited
minutes to communicate with the living, or was his mother just
following her usual pattern of trying to keep their conversations
as short as possible?
    “Are you listening, Samuel? Are you listening carefully ?”
    “Yes, Mother. I am listening carefully.”
    “What you are doing is important. Because he
was only one man, do not think finding out what happened to him,
and why it happened, is any less important than finding out why the
many died.”
    Tay had no idea what to say to that. He
wasn’t even sure what it meant.
    “It’s all connected, Samuel. All of it.”
    “What’s connected?”
    “For Christ’s sake, Samuel, listen to
yourself! Pay attention, boy!”
    Tay was paying attention. He was fairly sure
he was imagining this entire conversation, of course, but he was
still paying attention. He didn’t have the vaguest idea what his
mother was talking about. If he was talking to her at all. Which
obviously he wasn’t.
    “You must find someone to help you,” his
mother went on when he didn’t reply.
    “Help me do what, Mother?”
    “Help you to remember, Samuel. That’s what
life is really about: remembering. In the end, remembering is all
we have left to us.”
    Tay hoped that wasn’t true. There were
all sorts of things in his life he didn’t want to
remember.
    “Mother, I don’t really understand—”
    “Find somebody to help you. Do you
understand?”
    “Who?”
    “For God’s sake, do you expect me to do everything for you?”
    “No, Mother.”
    “Maybe this will help. It will be a
woman.”
    “A woman,” Tay repeated flatly.
    “Yes, Samuel. A woman. You do still remember
what a woman is, don’t you?”
    “Yes, Mother. I remember what a woman
is.”
    “Good. Then what are you going to do?”
    Tay said nothing. Everything he did say just
seemed to give his mother another way to take a shot at him.
    “Tell me what you are going to do, Samuel,”
his mother prompted.
    Before he could stop them, the reflexes of
his childhood kicked in. “I am going to find someone to help me
remember,” he responded dutifully. “A woman.”
    Then something suddenly occurred to him.
    “How do you know about the man at the
Woodlands, Mother?”
    “Because you know about him.”
    “You know everything I know?”
    “Of course, Samuel. Being dead doesn’t have
many benefits, but that’s one of them.”
    That gave Tay pause. His mother now knew
everything he knew? Did she know everything everyone knew,
or just everything he knew? He paused to formulate a careful
question.
    “Mother, does that mean—”
    “Never mind what it means, Samuel. Just do
what I tell you to do.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    “I’ve got to go. I’m almost out of time. For
once in your life, do what I tell you to do. It’s important.”
    “Mother, please don’t—”
    “Good-bye, Samuel. Don’t be a stranger.”
    “Mother?”
    Silence.
    “Are you there, Mother?”
    Silence.
    ***
    Tay sat perfectly still and threaded what had
just happened back and forth through his mind as if it had been
preserved on the spinning reels of an old fashioned tape
recorder.
    Had he experienced a psychotic episode of
some kind? Most people would say so, of that he had no doubt, and
he wasn’t ready to argue with them. Samuel Tay was a rational man
above all else, and rational men knew people don’t carry on
conversations with the dead.
    Still, he knew what he had heard. God help
him, he felt like he really had just talked to his mother,
whether he had or not. Perhaps the dead laid greater claim to us
than did the living. Perhaps they had found both significance and
permanence inside their own demise.
    And what was all this about finding someone
to help him remember? Remember what ? Who the dead man
was?
    Surely he had just imagined the entire
conversation. That had to be all there was to it.
    But then again, even if he altogether
discarded the possibility of supernatural intervention,