Falling in Place (42 page)

He pulled the small chair up to her bed. “Was lunch good?” he said.

“Suck-o,” Mary said.

“I was down in the sitting room, and I thought over what you said. Do you think it would be nice for all of us if there was a dog? We could get a dog when we come back from the vacation.”

“You’re moving back?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. Her eyes glazed when he said it, like a sick person’s. “In any case, we’re taking a vacation, and I think that you’re right—your mother might like a dog, and you might like it, too. What do you say?”

“You forgot
him,”
Mary said. “He’s coming back too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Sure. After a little while. He’s talking to some doctors now, and he’s going to be staying with Grandma for a while.”

“She must think the sky is falling.”

“I imagine she does. She doesn’t cover up very well. When she’s upset she cries and raves. She knocked over one of her vases. You would have liked to have seen it. Pilar ran into the room and dealt with it. Pilar can deal with anything. I once saw Pilar swatting a fly with one hand while she was using a whisk to beat an egg with the other, and she never missed a beat.”

“Unhygienic,” the nurse said. “This is your mother’s cook? I like your mother, though. She’s a fine lady. I’m sure this cook is the right person for the job if your mother thinks so.”

He took Mary’s hand. It was small and tender. He moved his hand over hers, stroking, wondering how her hand could be so warm in such a cool room if she had no fever. He remembered Nina’s hand on his head, and the way she had asked, “Are you in shock?” In fact, he had been—or out of his mind, at least.
To prove that he was sane, he had tried to re-create for Nina his trip into New York, but he had gotten bogged down trying to remember whether he said goodbye to Louise or not. He thought he had been in the house and then left, but maybe he had been in the house only when Tiffy was there, before he knew what had happened, when he came home and saw the police car blocking his driveway. He had once joked to Nina that there were pillars, and she had believed it. He could imagine pillars, rising up, 2001 music playing as they went higher and higher. He could not imagine living in that house again, and he wondered if Mary could, either. He was holding her hand, and it was still as warm, as clammy. He bent over and kissed her hand, and she drew it away. There was a Band-Aid in the crook of her arm, from the intravenous. A bruise spread out beneath the Band-Aid. The nurse had put it there, because, she said, looking at needle marks and bruises was upsetting. “Everyone isn’t like me. Other people aren’t accustomed to things that are physically ugly, and it’s easy to forget that. I always try to remember that the patient is the patient, and I am me.

Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit. Mary in her white bag of a hospital gown. Mary herself. He had been so surprised to have a baby, and then two, and then three. Different-sized children. Mary the first of them. It made him sentimental in a way he couldn’t remember being sentimental before. If she could be born again, it would be in low light, with music playing, and he would be there, humming along with the music. That would certainly make him pass out, if just being in the hospital made him queasy. Mary’s birth. The time before Mary. The time before Louise. If you could only go backward, however awkwardly, like running backward without looking, depending on memory so that you didn’t crash into something, hoping some sixth sense would protect you. Going backward that way as an adult would be like a small child’s going forward—your footing unsure, trusting a hand to be outstretched at the crucial moment, for a table to be sturdy and not light. To be able to walk, to balance, to progress. He remembered Mary toddling, Louise luring her with some toy, shaking an elephant or a lion, calling to her, “Come on, Mary. That’s right.” Mary hanging back, gripping his thumb, wanting
to go but afraid of all that space between hands, the gap between what was behind her and the lion. Then she had half-run forward, awkwardly, and grabbed the prize. Someone had told him (Tiffy? One of the policemen? Somebody, anyway) that she had just fallen, and there had been no scream that Louise or Tiffy had heard. (That’s right, Tiffy had told him.) They had just gone out into the backyard and there they all were, four of them standing and one on the ground, as silent as actors about to begin a pantomime. But then Louise had started screaming. Her screaming had made Parker cry, and John Joel. And then Parker ran across the field, shouting back that the gun wasn’t his, that John Joel had done it, and John Joel had waited in the house, upstairs in his room. He had been sent to his room, like a bad boy, until the ambulance got there. Louise kept trying to move Mary, to shake her, tug at her. Tiffy had had a hard time convincing her to let her be still. His daughter, lying still on the ground. Still in a hospital bed. Her stillness had made him move erratically, frantically. Suddenly he was not at the hospital, not at the house in Connecticut, but in New York, in the familiar garage, talking to a taxi driver, getting out at Columbus Avenue, opening the door and going up the stairs. It hadn’t been until then that the tiredness had hit him—the tiredness and the shock. It was like trying to wish yourself awake from a bad dream, steps and more steps, like layers upon layers, and he couldn’t make a sound. There had been a little noise on the street, but inside the building, nothing. It was quiet, like the floor of the ocean, and he was trying to reach the top. He could feel the sweat running down his face, and from somewhere far-off—not from any place he could identify—he was watching himself move forward, step after step, moving in slow motion to reach the landing. Moving deliberately in slow motion, perhaps, because what could he say? And if he said it, what could she do? What did he want her to do? What had John Joel wanted from Mary? He had wanted to be rid of her. He had wondered if telling Nina would frighten her, make her go. He didn’t want that. He wanted her, he wanted not to be swimming, to bound up the stairs, minus bouquet and top hat but still charming, ready for… She did not open the door, of course, in a long gown, and he did not take her in his arms for a dance. There was no graceful movement
at all. He was exhausted from the climb, and the man-he had stood and gaped at the man as surprised as if the man were naked. And then Nina had said the man’s name, and that she had not slept with him, no matter what he was thinking. He was thinking: I’m alive. Even Mary is alive. My son shot my daughter. But it was impossible to talk about it. Everything went on, in slow motion. His following her into the kitchen, his legs so heavy that he could not believe that they were not ballooning. She had been cutting fruit. Simply fixing breakfast, cutting fruit. He had walked into ordinary life, and the little accidents of ordinary life—Nina’s cut finger. While she was gone he had continued to peel and chop the orange. The juice ran down his hands and wrists. He was holding the peeled orange, baseball-sized but soft, soft and juicy, it must have been like something the doctors had seen inside Mary’s body. Didn’t medical students practice cutting oranges because oranges were like certain tissues in the body? Oranges punctured with needles, as they learned to give injections? He held the peeled orange and stared at it. Then he put it on the chopping board and chopped it, sprinkled the wet pieces over her bowl of cereal. He waited for her to come back. He went to the bathroom door and saw her, washing her sleeve, bandaging the finger. He had wanted to tell her all of it, in detail, but he hadn’t been there, he would have to make the details up. He could describe the field, the day, but the blood—he hadn’t been there to see the blood, or Tiffy in the field, then Louise, Parker streaking past them, screaming that he had not done it. And what happened from there? How did John Joel go to his bedroom? How had
he
driven into New York? He was in Nina’s apartment and she was right—he loved it, small as a womb. He was comfortable with the small movements he could make. And how had he gotten from the bathroom door into Nina’s bedroom? In time. Floating. The dead-man’s float. Lying face down on her mattress, arms outstretched. He had wanted to tell her, before any more time passed, before she left the bathroom; but she had pushed past him, and he had said nothing, only that he had peeled the orange. Chopped the orange. He wanted to say: Am I crazy? But she would have thought he was talking about his peeling the orange when he knew she was angry with him. When he realized that it was right
not to have spoken, he also realized that then he wasn’t crazy. If he wasn’t crazy, then he would just be a normal person, telling a story about a crazy person. The crazy person was his son. Born of his genes. Seeds of the orange.

Mary’s eyes were closed. Mrs. Patterson, seeing that they were, allowed herself to look directly at John. She moved her head, telling him silently that he should go away from the bed. He moved back, cocked his head. She was lying there, suddenly asleep. People got heavier when they were unconscious. He remembered carrying her, when she was a child, taking her along with them when they had dinner with friends, putting her down to rest in the friend’s bed, then picking her up again and taking her home, dead weight pressed against him. The awkwardness of it, the way all her weight seemed to be concentrated in the middle of her body: Her arms and legs were so light they dangled and flapped. Inadvertently she would kick. As she got larger, her foot hit against him, kicking him in the balls. He knew she would not kick in her sleep, but still he would hunch forward, warding off the pain, and as he hunched she would slip down farther and farther. He had been awkward in a lot of ways. He had been awkward about leaving, coming back the way a drunken guest returns, apologizing, for a sweater, and then for a wallet, everyone knowing the person is drunk, the person wanting to appear only forgetful. He had wanted to appear sensible, and they had all known that what he was doing did not make sense. There had been the excuse of his mother’s illness, but when that passed it was so awkward that he did not go back. He could not go back, because for a long time, for years, he had felt like a guest, like someone who could only go so far, and then have to stop: feet on the footstool, but not tucked under you on the chair; a long soak in the bathtub, but then you had to scrub the ring away; a plant to be admired, but how could you know how much water it needed? Everything was being taken care of. He was visiting. He even had the manners to bring flowers, occasionally. A bottle of wine. He knew the things they liked, and they knew what he liked. It could have gone on. If it had, things might even have changed. It could have gone on like a reel of movie film spinning, but he started to get dizzy, to lose his breath. He started to edge away, delicately, as
delicately as he could. Like shaving with a safety razor—you could only do it so delicately. You could know the strokes, the feel of the blade on the skin, just how much lather to put on; but still the skin would pull an unexpected way, a microscopic imperfection of the blade would result in a nick. He had told Louise, shaving, that the move was going to be permanent for a while. That was the way he had said it—awkwardly, like some bumbling child. An adolescent, cutting himself shaving. Lies: because he couldn’t stand the commute; because his mother needed him, even if she wasn’t dying. A trickle of blood had come up through the lather—a little cut he hadn’t even felt. “Do you want me to feel sorry for you?” she had said. She had not moved off the side of the tub, where she sat. She had watched him continue shaving, watched him hold the styptic stick to his cheek, cursing that it wasn’t working and he was in a hurry. He suddenly remembered what she had said to him: She had come up behind him, put her arms around him, and said, with her head buried in his back, “You hate blood, don’t you?” She was right. She knew him very well. And she was clever, too. Because she had not been talking about blood.

He had not rinsed the washcloth well enough. The razor wasn’t put carefully on the back of the sink, but dropped on the small table among her make-up. He was a bad guest. The guest who brings flowers, then gets drunk and chews off the heads. When he left, and didn’t come back for two weeks, he had been such a coward that he had sent tulips. Then guilt caught up, and he began the weekend visits. Then his son shot his daughter. In between, there was life with his mother and Brandt, life with Nina, working with Nick, dealing with Metcalf. And then his son had shot his daughter.

Leaving Mary’s room, he went to the phone booth. He was about to call Nick, when he realized that he couldn’t remember what he wanted to talk to him about. He was standing there, dime in hand, trying to think, when Mrs. Patterson came toward him, carrying his raincoat.

“Thanks,” he said. “I knew I’d forgotten something.”

When she turned to go back to Mary’s room, he continued to stand by the phone, holding the raincoat. The weather. People
called other people and talked about the weather. He would call Nick and talk about the weather, the thunder outside the hospital, and it would come to him why he had tried to reach him before.

Nick answered.

“It’s raining like hell here,” he said. He waited. He tried to think. He thought: I would have walked out into the rain and never remembered bringing my raincoat. Maybe I would have remembered. Gone back. He had tested himself a lot of times, and as little as he thought he could stand it, he was always able to walk into Mary’s room. Over and over.

“Do people die from guilt?” he said to Nick.

“No,” Nick said. “They die from being interrupted when they’re screwing, because some nut calls to talk about the weather. Call me back in half an hour.”