by Susan Wilson
“I’m all right, Paxy. You can go back to bed.” Rick sets the water glass down on the bedside table. “Just counting.”
Pax sits, his amber eyes on the man. He yawns, releasing a tension he’s picking up from Rick.
“You’re just like him, you know. Always watching me.” Rick makes a little pile out of his collection. He’s a miser hoarding gold coins. “Are you wondering what I’m waiting for? Is that it? Should I be dramatic, or just efficient? Will they figure out my reason?”
Pax sets one paw on the edge of the bed, noses Rick’s dead leg as if trying to push him into getting up. It was what the dog once did, a hundred years ago, when they were both young and vigorous and had a wide-open future. When Rick would flop down on the sofa of his bachelor apartment to catch a few z’s after practice, the puppy would poke at him with his nose, up and down his arm, into the back of his knee. Get up! Play with me! Rick mildly wonders if the dog really understands what is wrong with him, if he thinks that Rick is just being lazy. “I wish I could take you out, run you on the beach, race you home. I wish that almost more than anything else.”
Francesca left the window open a little when she came in to bid him good night. A light breeze stirs the curtains, a spring zephyr reminding Rick of those taken-for-granted days of spring training. That very first practice, when the morning air was still cold but the sun promised an afternoon warmth that would have them stripping off their shirts by lunchtime. There was a taste to the air, as if excitement had a flavor. Now all he can taste is the metallic flavor of medication.
“You want something, don’t you, Pax? You want me to jump up and play with you like Keller does?” Rick hates it that the dog’s head cocks in an ever-so-cute fashion at the sound of Keller’s name. “You like him better than me?”
In answer, Pax stands and shakes, as if Rick is asking him unanswerable questions. He sits again to stare at Rick. It’s as if the dog will keep his eye on Rick all night long, making sure that the man doesn’t do anything rash. He’s a guardian and defender, a preventer of final acts. Rick points to the basket. “Go to bed, Pax. Now.”
With an almost human reluctance, the dog peels himself away from Rick’s bedside and goes to sit in his basket. But his eyes never leave Rick’s face. He’s looking at him with human eyes—Keller’s eyes—that portray a deep concern. A trick of the bedside lamp, and the dog’s eyes become Francesca’s, filled with an ancient love. She still loves him; she does. Despite Rick’s night terrors, his middle-of-the-night paranoia about Keller and Francesca, deep down he knows that whatever is growing between his wife and his caretaker, she still loves him. This tripartite living has cast them all into mutable roles. Husband, patient, wife, friend, sister, brother, stranger, caregiver, war veteran, war hero, fool. The only immutable quality is their love of Pax.
Rick digs deeper into the empty cloth pouch, his fingers searching for another morphine pill. Maybe he’s missed one. He is so tired. His wife and his friend might blame him for leaving them behind, but he is more cursed than blamed for having survived when his buddies had not. The one irreconcilable, the one factor that transcends all the other reasons for ending this struggle, the one he might scrawl on a piece of notepaper laden with his awkward left-handed writing, is his colossal and unforgiveable screwup. Keller idly remarks about coaching Little League, as if Rick could ever again lead a group of boys. Boys just a little younger than the ones in his squad, slaughtered because he thought he could pitch his way out of the situation. Killed by his own grenade, or finished off by the laughing Germans. How can he ever confess the shame of that? Yet without that confession, how can he ever make Francesca understand the magnitude of his despair? He allows her to think it’s his wounds that grieve him, and she allows that partial truth to be enough to account for his gloom. But maybe not enough for the desperate act he intends.
Keller will get it, the truth of why Rick has done this thing, and maybe he can leave Keller to tell Francesca the story of the grenade and Rick’s hubris. If he hasn’t already. Is there a code between them as there is between husband and wife—no outside secrets? Some code. Rick has hung on to his shameful secret, keeping it from Francesca and letting the sharp edges of guilt chisel away at his self-esteem. He doesn’t know if he’s more afraid that she’ll forgive him for putting his squad in danger, and try and make him forget that it happened, or hate him for it, for not being the man she thought he was.
Pax is back at his bedside. His eyes are no longer asking questions; they are zeroed in on what his hand is doing, the gathering together of his delivery from the constant pain of failure. He lifts his eyes to Rick’s, makes a tiny vocalization that sounds almost like the word no. Rick puts the pills, one by one, into the handy cloth bag, counting them yet again. There are still twenty-two.
Chapter Seventy
Pax dreams a running dream and his feet twitch and his chest compresses with silent barks. He’s chasing a man through trees and grass, across streets and into the deepest woods imaginable. The dream scent is as potent an aggression aphrodisiac as any he encountered while performing his duties as a member of the K-9 Corps. This threat is only six feet in front of him; he just needs to put on more speed to catch his man. But something holds him back; some weight prevents him from that final burst of speed and energy. Frustrated, he yelps like a kicked puppy. And then he wakes up.
Keller’s arm is what’s holding him down; in sleep, he’s flung it over the dog’s body. A thin gray light is visible in the bedroom window, filling the frame with a new day being sung in by the first bird. Pax raises his head, listens, sniffs the air. Something.
Pax extricates himself from Keller’s embrace and slips to the floor. His ears move back and forth, judging the outside sounds against the inside sounds. Birdsong. The milkman two streets over. Breathing. Keller’s. He walks through the breezeway passage, stands still. Francesca’s soft breathing. Two are sleeping deeply. One is not. Rick.
The fur between his shoulders rises and Pax lowers his head, centers his weight over his strong forelimbs. As did his hunting forebears, Pax moves in a slow, liquid motion through the house on noiseless pads, as alert to danger as he had ever been on patrol. Something.
Chapter Seventy-one
Rick has decided that twenty-two is enough. One makes him feel good. Two make him drowsy. Surely, now that he’s half the man he used to be, twenty-two should be more than enough. The trick isn’t to swallow them all at once, but parcel them out over fifteen minutes, not long enough to fall asleep before the deed is done, but long enough between pills that he won’t throw them up. Oh yes. He’s thought a lot about this.
The pills are lined up on his tray table like a row of ammunition. His bedside lamp is on, casting a cheery yellow warmth to the white tablets. He’s said good night to everyone. Francesca didn’t understand that his kiss good night was the final farewell; the lingering sweetness of her surprised response to his kiss is almost enough in itself to make him step back from this ledge. And when Keller popped his head in to say good night on his way to the garage, Rick smiled and maybe confused him a little when he said, “Good night. And thanks. For everything.” Keller just said “Sleep well” and left. Rick heard the kitchen light snap off and the sound of the connecting door being opened.
The prompt to this being the night was so simple. Johnny Antonelli, at age eighteen, had become a starting pitcher for the Boston Braves. Eighteen. The age of cannon fodder not long ago. Kid would have been a schoolboy during the war. The age when your body seems invulnerable. At twenty-eight, Rick was already ten years older than Antonelli when he got what should have been his big break. And even then he was already icing a sore pitching arm after every practice. This kid can probably pitch a whole game and then go play tennis. Even if he had come back whole and been put back on the Braves roster, a kid like this would have shown up sooner or later and shoved Rick out. Traded probably, or rarely played. It seems so unfair. Rick knows that this is crazy thinking, but it’s been enough to ge
t him to empty out the pouch and line up the pills. Rick has assiduously avoided the sports page, refuses to listen to games, but even he heard about this player, this paragon. This upstart wearing his number.
The pills are lined up on the tray table. Pretty little things.
He just can’t go on this way. The darkness always there, the weight of his sin; the sharp point of his professional disappointment. His utter failure as a husband, unable to give his wife a child.
Keller will take care of Francesca, take care of Pax. He, too, is wearing Rick’s number.
Rick swallows the first pill. Pax is suddenly there, his eyes fixed on him with a stare that is a thin degree from hostile. He should have known the dog would be in as soon as he stirred from the sleep he’d been feigning. Rick has spent the night tallying up his grievances, weighing out his justification, letting the pain in his phantom limb keep him awake. He’s not sure if he wants the dog to be there for this final sleep, to be a silent witness to his cowardice, because, yes, Rick knows that he’s taking the coward’s way out, but that’s okay. Rather a dead coward than a live fool.
“Go to bed.”
Instead of going to his basket, the dog stands beside Rick, chucks his nose under Rick’s hand to get a pat. That first pill has relaxed him, the pain in his phantom limb throbbing with less intensity. Rick spends a long time stroking the dog, whispering things into his tattooed ear that he’ll never say again. Telling him that he needs to be a good dog. “You’re a lucky dog, Pax. You have good people to keep loving you.”
Pax doesn’t wriggle with pleasure; he stiffens instead, the same kind of immobility he displays when a squirrel comes along. The same kind of immobility that Keller speaks of when talking about Pax’s years as an army scout dog. A dog for defense. The silent alert to danger. It’s almost enough to make Rick look up to see if there is an intruder. The dog’s body is rock solid with tension. His eyes aren’t on some distant mark, but looking right at Rick. As if he is the intruder. He backs away and lowers his head, eyes fixed on Rick’s. He growls, a soft inquiring sound.
“It’s all right. Go to bed.” The last thing Rick wants is for the dog to alert Keller.
Pax remains where he is.
“So be it.” Rick reaches for a pill, picks up the glass, washes it down. Sets the glass down, reaches for another pill. The dog’s nostrils twitch, as if he can smell it and is repulsed by the odor of the morphine. Rick takes another. And another. Ten go down. He’s got to be careful; he’s swallowed nearly half the glass of water that Keller has left for him should he get thirsty in the night. He’s not sure he could manage to chew his way through the remaining collection of pills.
Rick sets the glass down to gather up the rest of the pills for one last swallow. As he does, Pax suddenly leaps up onto the bed, knocking the tray table over, scattering the remaining morphine pills to all four corners of the room. And he commences barking an alert, a warning as vital as any alarm he made during the war.
Rick doesn’t hear the dog or feel the weight of him standing on his chest. Rick gives in to the weight of the morphine as it pulls him down and down.
Chapter Seventy-two
The dog’s first bark puts Keller on his feet. A purposed bark, a warning and a threat. Pax barks and barks, and barks until Keller, barefoot and shivering in his boxers and T-shirt, is in Rick’s room. Not for an instant does he interpret the barking as a sign that there’s an intruder or a squirrel. The dog’s meaning is as clear to him as if the animal is speaking to him in English. Danger, danger. The moment Keller steps into the room, the dog ceases his alert, jumps down from the bed.
Rick is sleeping peacefully. Impossible. Not with all this noise. Not with the eighty-five-pound dog on him, barking in his face. Keller feels as if he’s stepped on a land mine; his gut twists and he can’t remember to breathe. In seconds, Francesca will be down, grasping her tattered housecoat around herself, looking to him to solve this problem. He touches Rick’s face with shaking fingers. Still warm. He feels for a wrist pulse, but his own pulse is beating so hard, he can’t distinguish the difference.
“Rick, wake up!” Keller manhandles Rick’s pajama front, lifting him and slapping his cheeks. “Wake up!” Where is Francesca? Why isn’t she here? Surely the noise has awakened her, too. He just can’t figure out what’s wrong. Rick was fine when they went to bed. And thanks. For everything. Rick’s words now seem sinister. And then he sees it, a single white pill caught in the folds of the blanket. Morphine. “Oh shit.”
Keller tries for a pulse in Rick’s neck. Maybe there’s something. Please let there be something. Rick can’t do this to them.
It’s what he wants, Keller thinks. He lowers Rick back to the pillow. Leave him. From some deep, impulsive place, an unspeakable thought snakes into his brain: Just let him go. Everyone will be better off. The thought is outrageous enough to freeze him into a moment of hesitation that might be seen as his not knowing what to do, not as if he’s impaled on the sharp point of treason. He has to get to the phone, the new extension he had installed is on the other side of the bed, but he can’t move. She would be free, he thinks.
“Rick!” Francesca appears exactly as he imagined, the threadbare housecoat sloppily tied with the frayed belt. What he hadn’t seen in his mind’s eye is the frantic reach of her hands, pushing him aside, as if she has a greater influence on this outcome. Keller grabs the telephone, vastly relieved to be shoved out of the way.
* * *
They are sitting in a small windowless room, more closet than something meant for anxious family members. The emergency room’s waiting area had been overcrowded with people, as if there was a white sale going on in this cheerless place. Two for one! Stock up! A nurse, capped and starched into authority, had taken them out of the general waiting room to leave them here in this closet with its two hard chairs and tainted scent of used linen. Keller wonders if it’s a room designated for the bereaved, for people who need to be out of the general population because of the weight of their particular emergency. Not a room for those bringing in vomiting drinking buddies or kids with broken bones or babies with a rash, a fever. This is a special room for those whose lives are about to be changed.
Francesca sits quietly, her gaze upon her clasped hands, a handkerchief woven between her fingers. He paces, a useless exercise in this ten-by-ten room—really more dramatic than meaningful. Around and around he goes, a prisoner in his cell. He’s pacing out of habit; this place is so like the isolation room at Meadowbrook. Sentenced for crimes as varied as insolence or instigating a food fight, Keller spent his incarcerations in that room, walking a perfect square, north, south, east, and west. It was better than huddling on the bare floor and straining to hear the sound of someone coming to release him from his punishment.
“I just don’t understand.” Francesca is still keeping her eyes on her hands, as if by addressing her clenched fists she can say what’s on her mind. “I don’t understand.”
Keller stops pacing; waits until she can articulate her thoughts.
“How could he do this to me?”
Keller tips the door to the tiny room closed, kneels beside Francesca, and gently holds her in his arms. “It’s really complicated.”
She leans her weight against him and he thinks that he can stay like that forever. She pulled on a simple housedress to come to the hospital, the one she had been wearing all day, his favorite, a pale yellow sprigged with tiny roses. He thinks she looks lovely, even with her curls uncombed in her haste to dress. Maybe especially. She looks young, vulnerable, and willing to let him contain her within the strength of his arms. Arms bulked up with the daily effort of lifting an inert man. These are the wrong thoughts to be having. His place is to comfort and console, not desire.
“Can I tell you something?”
He feels the vibration of her voice against his chest.
“Of course.”
“Doesn’t he know how much it would kill me if he died?” Francesca laughs a little. “
How easily we use those words—kill, die. But it would. I would die if anything happened to him. Happens.”
Suddenly, it’s uncomfortable, this kneeling on the hard linoleum floor. Keller shifts, squats in front of her. His hands are on her arms, and he shakes her to make her look up, away from her hands, into his eyes. He can’t help himself: He strokes away one of the more unruly curls, the one that lingers by the side of her mouth. He takes her face in his hands. “It’s more than that, Francesca. I mean, his pain is more than his wounds.” How hard it is to put into words the answer she needs. “Sometimes what happens on the battlefield is so awful that it’s impossible to talk about, but it never leaves you.”
She looks at him blankly, puzzled, but doesn’t try to take her face away from his cupped hands. “What has he told you?” She unlinks her hands and places them on his, which cup her face. He can’t tell if she means to pull his hands away or secure them there. She studies his eyes, desperate to understand what he means.
“It’s what happened, the day he was wounded.”
“They were attacked from above. It was only a miracle that he survived.” She drops her hands.
“Rick thinks that it was his fault that everyone was killed.” Keller wraps his arms around Francesca so that he doesn’t have to look her in the eye when he tells her an abridged version of the story Rick told him. Keller feels like he’s betraying a confidence, yet without this betrayal, Francesca will never understand the truth behind Rick’s self-destructive act.
“He told you this?”
“Yes.”
“And not me.” Francesca’s face is so close to his, he can feel the soft puffs of her agitated breathing on his cheek. “Why couldn’t he tell me? Abruptly, she sits back, pulling away from his touch.