AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD (20 page)

“Huh? Oh, I’m all right. I’m okay. I just have a few things on my mind, that’s all.”

“Things on your mind?”

“Yes.”

“A heavy burden for so light a vehicle,” remarked Bernard, reaching for the pepper.

Snooky looked embittered. “I’m thinking about what Gertie said today. I’m worried about her. She didn’t look well at all. She said she had come home to do her cataloging, but I don’t think that was true. Her face was all red.”

“High blood pressure,” said Bernard.

“And a heart condition, like Irma. Amazing, with all the activity she gets.”

“She could probably go on like that for years.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I nearly always am.”

“Just like Mrs. Woolly,” said Snooky pointedly. “One of her more annoying traits.”

It was Bernard’s turn to look annoyed. “Don’t start in on Mrs. Woolly.”

“Why not?”

“She happens to be my livelihood.”

“That’s not my fault. I never wanted you to write about sheep. I don’t find sheep particularly appealing.”

“What would you rather I wrote about?”

“Well, I’ve always liked marsupials. Kangaroos, you know. Wallabies. Or how about wombats? Nothing nicer than a wombat. They look like little bears. Or how about an opposum?”

“No.”

“Bernard likes sheep,” said Maya. “And rats. He likes writing about them.”

“But Bernard, they’re so boring.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about lizards?”

“No.”

“Spiders?”

“No.”

“Birds?”

“No.”

“Extinct reptiles?”

Bernard gazed at him with a faint frown. “What?”

“Dinosaurs. Pterodactyls. Triceratops. You know what I mean.”

“Oh. No.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t try to help out.”

“I like Mrs. Woolly,” said Bernard stiffly.

“Nothing wrong with Mrs. Woolly.”

“Apparently you think so.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You haven’t said much of anything, as far as I can tell.”

“I like Snooky’s idea about lizards,” Maya said mildly. “You remember that snake you had when you were a little boy, darling? Why not try a book about snakes? You’ve always liked them.”

“I have not. And that snake hated me. It escaped as soon as it could.”

“Escaped?” said Snooky. “Where did it go?”

“Down the drain in the sink in my parents’ bathroom. When my mother turned on the water to brush her teeth, it reared up out of the drain into her face.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.”

“What happened to her?”

“My father claimed she was never quite the same afterward.” Bernard sullenly stabbed at his meat with a fork.

“All of Bernard’s pets met some kind of gruesome death,” said Maya affectionately. “Every single one of them. It’s tragic, really.”

“Every single one of them? What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on, Bernard.”

“I refuse to parade my personal tragedies for the sake of satisfying your idle curiosity,” Bernard snapped. He stabbed with increasing fervor at his steak.

“My curiosity isn’t idle, Bernard. It’s active—extremely active. Now, what happened?”

“A series of hideous and tragic accidents in which you could not possibly be interested.”

“But I am interested. I am very interested. I couldn’t be more interested.”

“Tell him about Piggy,” said Maya.

“Piggy?”

“Bernard’s dog when he was young. Go ahead, darling, tell him about Piggy.”

“Piggy died,” Bernard said grudgingly.

“How?”

“A friend of my mother’s ran him over in our driveway. He liked to sleep in the driveway in the sun. My parents and most of their friends would check for him before they drove in or out. But one day my mother had an acquaintance over for lunch, and when she was leaving she ran over Piggy.”

“How sad, Bernard.”

“Thank you.”

“The saddest part of it is, she didn’t run over him just once,” said Maya. “She ran over him five or six times.”

“Five or six times?”

“The idiot lost her head,” said Bernard. “She ran back and forth over him, and then jumped out of the car and ran into the house screaming and crying.” He brooded on this. “Once would have been enough. Piggy was not a very large dog.”

“I’m sorry, Bernard. Sorrier than I can say. Did you get another dog?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t the same. My other dog wasn’t as smart as Piggy. Piggy was special.” Bernard put a large lump of butter in his potatoes and mashed it down dispiritedly with his fork.

“What about your other pets?”

“Well, there was an aquarium of tropical fish.”

“What happened to them?”

“They bred for a few months, then they all died.”

Snooky was thoughtful. “Kind of a metaphor for all life, wouldn’t you say, Bernard? First we breed, and then we die.”

Bernard forked some of the mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“That’s why Bernard is so solicitous about Misty,” said Maya, smiling at him. “He’s worried she’ll go the way of the rest.”

“Not Misty,” said Snooky. He lifted her up and held her with her little paws dangling in midair. “Not this little old Misty. Nothing’s going to happen to her. She’s smarter than Piggy was. By the way, Bernard, if Piggy was so very intelligent, why did he go to sleep in the driveway?”

Bernard did not reply. Misty woke up, smiled, and yawned hugely into Snooky’s face.

The next morning Bernard roused himself bright and early, crept out of bed without waking Maya, put on a heavy sweater and jeans and thick gray socks and went into the kitchen. He made himself a pot of coffee, poured himself a large mug, added thick cream and four sugars and wandered contentedly into the living room. The sun slanted across the floor, and the fire was still smoldering from the night before. He put on another log and stirred the fire a bit, hoping it would catch, which it didn’t. He sat down, shivering, at his typewriter. He took a sip of the coffee, which went down warm and sweet and boiling hot. By the time the others got up he was halfway through his second cup of coffee and typing away madly.

Snooky wandered into the kitchen, yawning, his tattered blue robe trailing after him, and Maya went into the bathroom to take a shower. Bernard paused for a moment to look over what he had done. On the floor by his side, the telephone began to ring.

It rang once, twice, three times. Bernard glanced through what he had written, grunted cheerfully to himself and put it back in the typewriter.

The phone shrilled four times, five times. Bernard began to type.

On the ninth ring, Snooky came out into the living
room and stood looking at the stolid figure of his brother-in-law.

“Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the phone?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the phone ringing?”

“Yes.”

“That phone there on the floor by your side?”

“Yes.”

Snooky sighed. “I see.” He picked up the telephone. “Hello?… Oh, hello, Sarah … I … what? What’s wrong? Calm down. I … 
what?
”

He listened intently for a moment.

“I’ll be right over,” he said, and put down the phone. His face had gone gray.

“What is it?”

“It’s Irma. She’s in bad shape. She’s at the hospital.”

“The hospital?”

“An overdose of her heart medication.”

Their eyes met.

“A suicide attempt,” said Snooky.

Bernard was frowning. He looked severe, like a judge. “Or somebody,” he said slowly, “doesn’t want to have to wait for their money.”

When Snooky arrived at the hospital, Detective Bentley was there, interviewing the family.

“Who found her?” he was saying, pen poised above a notepad. Sarah, Gertie, Dwayne and Roger were huddled in a small, miserable group in the waiting room.

“I did,” said Sarah. “Snooky, thank God you’re here.” Snooky sat down next to her and took her hands in his.

“What time was it?” asked Bentley.

“I don’t know. Around seven o’clock this morning, maybe. I came into her room, and she was having trouble breathing. I called an ambulance right away.”

“The doctors told me she’s suffering from an overdose of
digoxin, her heart medication,” said Bentley. “An overdose. Who usually gives her her medicine?”

“I do,” said Sarah.

“How often do you administer it?”

“Once a day, in the morning. I gave her her dose yesterday around nine o’clock, just as usual. And I only gave her one of the pills, just the way I always do. Not the whole bottle.”

“How many pills were left?”

“I don’t know. Maybe half the bottle.”

“The bottle was kept—where?”

“On the table next to her bed.”

“What kind of a mood has she been in recently?” asked Bentley, scribbling furiously. “Has she been depressed?”

“Yes … no. Up and down, ever since Bobby’s death. Yesterday was one of her bad days.”

“She wasn’t feeling well?”

“No. She stayed in bed most of the day.”

“Did she see anybody?”

“Just Gertie and me. I brought her her meals.”

“Any visitors?”

“No.”

“Let me ask you something, Miss Tucker,” said the detective. “Who else besides yourself would your aunt take her medication from?”

“Well, I always gave it to her personally. I don’t know who else she’d trust. Gertie, I guess. Any of the family.”

“Thank you.” Bentley strode away, his short legs working like pistons, to have a conference with one of the doctors. Sarah turned and buried her face in Snooky’s shirt. “He thinks I did it,” she said, her voice muffled.

Snooky said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.

“I’m going to her,” said Gertie.

Sarah looked up, startled. “Gertie, you can’t. They’re still working on her.”

“Fools,” said Gertie. “Doctors, I mean. Fools, the whole lot of them.” But she sat back down, her shapeless mass a large toadstool on the bright blue hospital chair.

Roger had his head in his hands. He was slumped forward at an awkward angle. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

Dwayne was staring across the waiting room with a strangely blank expression on his face. He seemed to Snooky to be calculating something inside his head—the look you get when you’re adding numbers, or trying to multiply in your head, and you carry the four, but you’ve already forgotten what the first number was, six or eight or twelve? He seemed withdrawn to a small, central, inner point, where calculations were being made rapidly and smoothly. At Snooky’s side, Sarah buried her face in his shoulder and began to sob.

After that first day, spent mostly in the hospital waiting room, time seemed to slow down for Irma’s family. The little white digoxin pills had caused a heart attack. Slow and clocklike, like automatons, dulled by the frightening nearness of death, her relatives went back and forth, back and forth between their houses and the hospital. Their lives were ruled by the clock now: visiting hours from ten to twelve, and again from four till six; home again for dinner; back to the hospital the next day, carrying flowers, candy, cards from neighbors. Only Gertie refused to be ruled by the hospital clock. She would sit for hours, ignoring the rules about visitors, holding her sister-in-law’s hand and scrutinizing her intently.

“I never knew they were so devoted,” Snooky said to Sarah at one point. “Gertie was there all last night, the nurses told me.”

Sarah was exhausted. There were pulsing blue veins in the hollows under her eyes. “Thank God for Gertie,” was all she said. “Whenever Irma wakes up, there’s somebody there.”

Gertie’s motives were, even for her, a little obscure. Part of it, she felt, sitting by the bed and clasping Irma’s frail hand in her own big comforting one, was the fact that Irma
was in many ways her last link to her brother Hugo. Irma had been his wife and the three of them had lived together in that house for many happy years. Also, much as she hated to admit it to herself, the proximity of death fascinated her. She sat and watched the life force ebb slowly from her sister-in-law’s body. The process fascinated and amazed her. Just so had she watched a sparrow die, crippled by a fall, its rapid breathing slowing gently to a stop. Once she had tried to feed a baby mole that had been abandoned by its parents, left for lost in the middle of the lawn, and halfway through the feeding of warm milk (Gertie didn’t know whether moles liked warm milk, but she thought most babies did, and figured it was worth a try), it had given an odd little hiccup and died right there in her hands. She had never forgotten the experience: the sorrow and the sense of loss. She sat for hours, looking at Irma. This was the last person who had truly known Hugo, and here she was fading before her eyes.

After the first drug-induced heart attack, Irma apparently had another, and another, or so the doctors told Sarah. Sarah did not care; she was dulled to all feeling, overwhelmed, insensate. Her life had become an endless round of meals cooked in a blur for the family at home, and long hours spent at Irma’s bedside at the hospital. Most of the time Irma slept; even when she was awake, she did not seem to know where she was. She did, however, get agitated if Gertie was not there. “Gertie,” she would call out feebly. “Gertie!” She did not seem to recognize any of the others in the family. This nearly broke poor Roger’s heart. He would hover for hours over her bed, watching her face, hoping against hope that when she woke up, she would smile and say his name; but she never did. During her wakeful periods, she would look around feebly and ramble on to herself and cry out for Gertie, never anyone else. She had one or two lucid periods, no more. Once, after a visit, Sarah found Roger in the hallway of the hospital. He was sobbing silently, his face distorted.

“She doesn’t know me,” he said over and over, burying his great shaggy head on Sarah’s shoulder. “She doesn’t know me!”

Sarah patted his arm and made soothing sounds, but she felt strangely far away and distant. She felt as if her head was floating far above the rest of her body, eyes averted, looking down scornfully at the chaos below her.

Snooky was there constantly, helping her cook for the family, driving her back and forth from the hospital, his face a study in anxiety. Bernard and Maya came and helped out, cleaning the house, bringing in food. Irma was in the hospital three, four, five days, hours that seemed like days, days that seemed like weeks. There was some muttering among the hospital staff that she might pull through, she might recover and get better; but then she would take a turn for the worse and the doctors would leave her room looking abstracted and vague, as if they had already dismissed her from the rolls of the living. Sarah would watch them as they went down the hallway carrying their official-looking clipboards, with their names printed black on white on tiny tags clipped to their pockets (
JOHN FALWORTHY, M.D.; LISA HEPPLER, M.D.
), the two small initials after their names somehow qualifying them (she thought with rage) to judge over her aunt’s life and death. They would murmur to each other in soft professional sympathy, and their faces would tighten and close up whenever a member of the family (of the
already bereaved
, perhaps they were thinking) approached them. They would say something noncommittal and escape, leaving their questioner stranded in the middle of the hall. Sarah would watch them, hating them for their professional competence and their professional indifference, and at times she would think, confusedly,
This can’t go on
 … 
this can’t go on
 … 
I can’t go on like this
.