Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  There was an all-night drugstore in Bessemer. He’d had to wait in line behind a kid with bad skin buying Trojans and breath mints. Skip dumped four kinds of baby medicine on the counter, for fever, for congestion, for coughs and colds just in case. The older man behind the counter rang them all up. “It’s always the dads that get sent out on an emergency in the middle of the night,” the man said. “It’s probably nothing to worry about.”

  Nothing to worry about, Skip said to himself in the car, nothing to worry about. He was afraid to turn on the radio because he didn’t want the sound to hurt Faith’s ears, just in case it was her ears that were bothering her. Maybe the doctor would have to come back. Maybe he’d ask more questions this time about the grandmother and the traveling parents, a story that even Skip had thought sounded a little lame. As he drove back on the twisty roads over the mountain, Faith whined softly. It was October, and though the air was as warm and still as it had been all summer, the leaves were starting to fall from the black walnuts and the water in the pond to chill almost imperceptibly. The trout had slowed down, and most mornings when he came back up the cellar stairs he saw the bright yellow flash of the school bus through the trees along the road. Maybe someday it would stop at the end of the drive at Blessings. Mrs. Blessing would be eighty-one years old just before Thanksgiving, and he figured with luck she could be living here ten or even fifteen years from now. She still moved really well, although she said the arthritis in the one arm was bothering her, and her mind was still certainly as sharp as anything.

  Faith snuffled in the backseat of the car. The doctor had not said a word about congestion. A fever in a few days. That’s all.

  Mrs. Blessing’s lawyer had come in a big boxy black car. He carried a black briefcase as thick and square as a tool box. “I am trying to get that child a birth certificate, Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had said when she called him into the house after the man left. It gave him hope, the notion of lawyers, made the future seem more certain. For just a moment he’d been able to see Faith with a pink book bag on her narrow back walking down the long driveway with him, hand in hand, straining to climb the steep steps of the bus, turning at the bleary window to hold up one hand as she settled in her seat. Mrs. Blessing would watch her from the sleeping porch with her binoculars. “Was that child properly dressed?” she would call down. “The thermometer says it’s not much above freezing.”

  “It’s not as simple as I had hoped,” Mrs. Blessing had said after the lawyer was gone. “But I have a man working on it.”

  Nadine had come in then and cut off the conversation. “This crazy place,” she said. “Too many people come and go.”

  On the drive back from the drugstore there were whirling things, in the air, on the road, so that the world seemed strange and vaguely dangerous, and he kept glancing over at the baby, who had fallen asleep pitched to one side in that boneless posture that sleep brought when she was sitting up. Moths flew into, then off, the windshield, and a raccoon trundled across the road. Skip realized that he’d once been a nocturnal animal himself, sleeping with the flat of his hand over his face to keep the sun from waking him, closing McGuire’s with the guys. But always there had been the sense that he was out of place, the same sense he’d had in his aunt and uncle’s house, and sleeping beside Shelly, and in Debbie and Joe’s trailer. He didn’t have that sense anymore.

  He drove past the bar on his way down into the valley, saw that part of the neon had burned out, so that it said MCGU E’S. Joe’s truck was in the lot, and Shelly’s mother’s car, and for a moment he had that feeling of a mug cold in his fist, the beer cold in his mouth, and the smoke and the bright eyes peering out of it, saying, “Yo, man, you want to buy my brother’s Camaro?” or “Yo, man, you want to buy some really good Hawaiian?” or “Yo, man, you want to crash at my place?” He remembered once when Chris’s mother said that if you missed the soaps for a month or two it was no big deal because by the time you got back to them people might be divorced or have amnesia or whatever but in some way it would all be the same, you could get the drift in a day or two. And that was what it was like in McGuire’s, except without the amnesia. When he got out of the county jail on a Wednesday morning he’d walked in that night and Pat, who was tending bar, had said, “Beer, Skipper?” exactly the way he’d said “Beer, Skipper?” the night Skip got busted ten months before.

  “I just got out,” he’d said to Pat.

  “Yeah, it’s cool,” the bartender had replied, pulling the draft handle.

  It was a boring life, and Skip had confused it with an orderly one. It turned out that Skip liked an orderly life, too, just like Mrs. Blessing. She’d changed since he’d been working at Blessings, but she still relied on rules so much that she sometimes talked in them, like fortune cookies for the well-behaved. No alcohol before four P.M. No mowing after five. Early supper on Sunday, even if it was something Nadine had left with a yellow note in the freezer: put in microwave three minutes. Gutters cleaned in spring and fall. If he was ever tempted to forget that there was still a dividing line between them, each morning he was reminded, when he gave the baby her bottle, burped her, and wound her mobile to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while he went across and up the cellar stairs to make the coffee.

  “People of her generation are really into routine,” Jennifer Foster had said to him. “That’s why they basically like being in the hospital. The mealtimes are the same, the lights out. They like an orderly life.”

  Skip was not sure that Mrs. Blessing liked it, exactly, but that it was necessary to her, that somehow the smell of the coffee and the lunch on a tray and the light in the hallway were a hedge, the way the awnings were there so the upholstery would not fade. He wondered sometimes if she’d ever done anything wild in her life, and then he remembered what Jennifer had told him the doctor had said about the Cadillac in the pond. And maybe the conspiracy around the baby, too, was a piece of wildness. It had certainly made her livelier, livelier, Jennifer said, than she’d ever been before.

  When he pulled into the driveway he caught the glitter of eyes in the headlights. It was only the barn cat, with something small and limp and gray in his mouth. A bird cried out at the end of the pond, something like a child’s cry, something like a cat itself, and the animal raised its head suddenly, dropping its prey. The small thing lay frozen, then began to crawl toward the flower beds, disappearing into a patch of daisies and lavender at the foot of the stone foundation. But the cat sprang after it and emerged again with it in its jaws. A second cry came from across the water, but the cat wasn’t fooled this time and ran off to finish killing and eating. As Skip turned the car toward his space in the garage he saw a languid angular ghost fly toward and then past him, banking over the water and then disappearing into the clouds. The heron, come to find fresh fish.

  “You take out one of her old rifles and shoot those things, no one’ll ever know,” one of the Taylors had said. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  A light came on upstairs when he slammed the car door, and for just a moment he saw another ghost, the white face, white hair, white gown behind the wavy glass of the hallway window. He raised a hand and the light went out. Faith was still sleeping heavily, and she sucked on the medicine dropper without opening her eyes and only flexed her fingers as he put her down in her crib. She had the funny old bear that Mrs. Blessing had brought down from upstairs, and a stuffed elephant now, that Jennifer had brought over one day, and a light summer quilt, white stitches on white cotton, slightly yellowed and smelling of camphor, that Mrs. Blessing had found somewhere in the attic. “There are some more things in the attic in the garage,” she said. “Don’t you go up there. I’ll go up and find whatever is appropriate.”

  The fan blew warm air over him, not so he didn’t sweat but so the sweat turned cool. The sound it made, rr rr rr, lulled him into a light sleep. He woke once when the baby whimpered softly, but when he got up to feel her forehead it felt cooler than it had before, and he fell q
uickly back into a deeper sleep. He was roused again for a moment when a big beetle flew into the fan blades and bumped around with a noise like a pebble in a bike chain. It was velvet black out when he woke for the third time, deepest night, with one of the constellations hanging low over the pond like a reflection of the string of lights that he had resurrected around it. The clock said it had been four hours since he’d given Faith the medicine, and he slipped the dropper into the side of her mouth with another dose and she swallowed lazily, a string of pink drool making a dark stain on her crib sheet. On his way back to bed he saw a long V-shaped ruffle in the pond where something was swimming smoothly, a muskrat maybe, or an otter, another one looking to pluck the trout out before Mrs. Blessing had even sent the check to the Taylors. He thought of her looking out at him, and he turned to the window that looked toward the house and saw a faint light on the first floor and wondered what was keeping her awake. He thought he saw her pass in front of one of the kitchen windows, and then he saw another silhouette, and another, and, oh, Jesus, he thought. And he got that all-slowed-down feeling again.

  “Goddamnit, she should have put a phone in here,” he thought, and a certain movement in the air made him realize he’d spoken aloud.

  Someone else passed by the kitchen windows, and then he heard a faint click as a man stepped through the door and onto the back steps. The man ducked his head as he carried a lumpy pillowcase down the path that led to the barn, but there were things Skip knew as well as he knew the curves of the baby’s face, and one was how Joe walked when he was trying to lay low.

  He checked the baby once but she was snoring slightly, a bubble of saliva coming and going at the corner of her mouth, her forehead cool and dry. He put on the dirty clothes that he’d worn for the drive to the drugstore and he could smell himself but he wasn’t sure if it was old sweat or rank fear or rage. He knew who else was in the house; he wasn’t even surprised when he slid in the door that Joe had left unlatched and saw Chris sprawled on the brocade sofa in the living room, his bad leg up on the coffee table, his shoe propped on those old art books that were always lined up in the same order in the same place. The faces in all the pictures in silver frames looked at them stoically: Meredith in a riding habit with a blue ribbon in her fist, old Mr. Blessing holding a book as a kind of noble prop, Mrs. Blessing in the white gown with bare shoulders for what Jennifer said was her presentation to society, Mrs. Blessing’s brother with his head tilted back and a big smile on his face. All of them in black-and-white on the smooth shining surfaces: it reminded him of an audience. In the dining room he could hear the soft clink of metal. Tea sets. Loving cups. Forks and spoons. He felt like the room was somehow dirty, and he realized that that was why he hadn’t been permitted in in the beginning, that Mrs. Blessing had thought he was a guy like these guys. He was ashamed for himself.

  “You sorry fuck,” he whispered to Chris, who looked at him impassively.

  “Chill, Skipper. You should have just stayed over the way and minded your own business. We’ll be out of here in five. She’ll get an insurance check. We’ll get the cash. No one gets hurt. Everything is cool.”

  Ed walked softly into the living room the long way, so he wouldn’t have to pass the stairs up to the second floor. “Oh, man,” he said when he saw Skip.

  “You help cut the alarm lines?” Skip hissed at him. Ed looked away. Skip pushed past him to the den, opened the old wooden armoire against one wall, turned the latch on the false back, and reached inside. He almost ran into Joe in the kitchen doorway, pushed past him, and went back into the living room. The gun he pointed at Chris was an old Beretta, an over-under with a stock carved with vines and birds. He’d used it on a groundhog who’d been eating the tops off the day lilies by the side of the garage. “I have no qualms about destroying pests,” Mrs. Blessing had said. He’d blown the thing in half with the charge from the shotgun, and that evening turkey vultures had taken care of the rest.

  “Leave all the stuff here and get out,” he hissed. “You’re fucking lucky I didn’t call the sheriff’s office from my place.”

  “Your place don’t have a phone, asshole,” said Chris. “Your place is this pathetic little skank hole and you’re a pathetic little skank who thinks you’re something now because you fetch and carry for some old lady who thinks she’s the Virgin Mary. And you forgot who you are and who your friends are but you best not forget that nobody fucks with me.” Chris got to his feet slowly, one leg stiff and straight, and looked all around the room, the piano and the tables and the pictures all shades of gray in the light from the outdoor lanterns on either side of the porch. “Place is like a damn museum,” he said. He picked up an old army duffel bag from in front of the fireplace, and Skip could see that the candlesticks and the big silver bowl were gone from the middle of the mantel. The teapot from the dining room was on the floor at one edge of the Oriental carpet, and Skip picked it up in his left hand and was filled with a rage so huge that he wanted to take the teapot, with its curving handle and its engraved curlicues, and beat somebody with it until they bled. Ed was holding another pillowcase at his side, but he wouldn’t look at Skip, and Chris was staring a challenge straight at him, so that Skip was the only one who was looking toward the drive, the only one who could see through the big windows and see the three black-and-whites that were coming toward the house, moving fast. Skip heard them pull into the driveway turnaround, heard the doors of the cars opening. Then the police radios started bleating, and Chris dropped the duffel and sat back down.

  “You sorry-ass bastard,” Chris said.

  Skip didn’t turn when he heard the officers coming in the back door. He was looking at the door from the living room to the dining room. Mrs. Blessing was standing there wearing some sort of long quilted robe, white and shiny so it glowed. She had taken the time to pull her hair back into a silver tail, and when Ed finally turned toward her he flinched and said, “Jesus!” like a cry, not a curse. Skip could just make out her eyes, flat and cold. She was looking him up and down, looking at the silver teapot in his one hand and the gun in the other, looking at him as if she’d never seen him before, never driven in his truck or watched him eat lunch on the lawn or held his baby. It was like all the hope and the happiness that had been building up inside him for so long drained out of him through an opening in his guts, that were grinding like an old motor with fear and misery. Then the sheriff’s men were everywhere, pushing them against the walls, leading her away, talking to her softly in the other room so she wouldn’t have to see the men who had invaded her house. Loud and clear he heard her say, “The one with the gun is named Charles Cuddy. He has done some work for me around the place. He sleeps over the garage.”

  “It was all his idea,” Chris murmured with a lazy smile, his eyes gleaming.

  Skip was still holding the silver teapot. One of the sheriff’s deputies, a guy named Collier who had known them all since they were kids, took it out of his hands and put it carefully on a table. Then he shook his head and said as he cuffed him, “Well, Charles, this is a helluva parole violation. So it looks like you’re going back to jail.”

  “You lunch ready,” Nadine hollered up at the window. “On the table now! One o’clock sharp.”

  From inside the apartment there was no answer. Nadine held a sweater close around her. From the back bedroom of the apartment Mrs. Blessing could hear her stomping her feet as though she were outside in the snow instead of in the slight cool breeze of an unseasonable Indian summer day. The shouting gave way to muttering, then the slam of the screen door, and finally no sound at all except the tap-tap of the old metal venetian blinds that had hung in the rooms over the garage for as long as the rooms over the garage had been there. It was a tinny melancholy sound, the sound of rooms that had been abandoned.

  The blanket was thrown back on the bed as though someone had just sprung from it, and the mobile over the cradle swung in the fresh breeze from the window nearby. The fans were still on, too, although the weather h
ad changed sharply overnight, the thick muggy air blown away and replaced by one of those clear blue-and-white days that were more spring than summer, so that, like Nadine, she wore a sweater buttoned over her blouse. Over the chest of drawers by the crib was a drawing of flowers in bright colors on which someone had written in calligraphy “Faith: Another Word for Love.” A handful of zinnias in oranges and reds had been placed in a small narrow glass vase. Slowly, carefully, she opened each shallow drawer and found stacks of clean rompers and shirts and booties. There were small sachets of lavender that she recognized as belonging, once upon a time, to her own mother, and she wondered if he had found them here, discarded, forgotten. All these years, and yet when she held one to her nose and rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, there was that faint familiar scent, the same one that came from between the stacks of stockings and white gowns in her own bureau drawers.

  “I made a mistake,” she had said that morning when the sheriff drove out to the house. Thinking about it now, she wondered if she had ever said those words with conviction before. Perhaps at Bertram’s, when her mathematics paper had been covered with the back-slanted red scrawl of Mrs. Popper. Perhaps to Sunny on the tennis court, or dragging the oar the wrong way as they pushed and pulled across the pond when they were small. That day when she had asked Meredith about mistakes, she had been thinking of her own, but she had never had to own up to them. Meredith had not asked her the question in return, and she would not have told the truth.

  “I made a terrible mistake,” she had said once she managed the words.

  “It was understandable, ma’am,” the short thick man with the red face had said, sitting gingerly right on the edge of the sofa in the living room. “Seeing him with the gun is probably what did it. And the shock of all those guys in your house. From what we can piece together, Mr. Cuddy saw what they were doing and came over to try and get them out of the house. At least that’s what one of them says, the Salzano boy. His father was apparently doing some work on your place. He’s not a bad kid, a follower rather than a leader, if you know what I mean. Neither is Joe Pratt, the other one. The ringleader is a different story. He’s the one I want to put away.”