by Homes, A. M.
Nathaniel gets home first; the car pulls into the driveway, and he climbs out, dragging an enormous duffel bag behind him.
With one hand on Tessie’s collar, I hold the kitchen door open. The dog is relieved to see the boy.
“Hi,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He puts his bag down and talks to the dog. “What is going on around here, Tessie?” he says, mussing her ears. “What is it, girl? It’s madness!”
He turns to me. “Can I give her a biscuit?”
“Sure,” I say, not expecting to be asked. “Give her a cookie, give her two. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich?”
Without waiting for an answer, I take things out of the refrigerator and pile them on the table: bread, cheese, turkey, mustard, mayo, tomatoes, cornichons, the same things Jane and I were snacking on all last week. I get him a plate, a knife and fork and napkin.
“Aren’t you having anything?” he asks, after he’s built his sandwich and is about to sink in.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Do we have any cream soda?” he asks. It seems odd at a time like this to ask for something so specific. Digging around in the fridge, I find, on the bottom shelf, in the back, a six-pack of Dr. Brown’s. I take out two.
Ashley arrives with only a small My Little Pony rolling suitcase that’s clearly a holdover from her childhood.
She is immediately down on her knees with the dog. “Tessie,” she says. “Oh, Tessie.”
“Would you like a sandwich?”
“A glass of milk,” she says.
I pour one for her.
She sips. “It’s on the edge,” she says.
I nod.
“The milk, it’s going bad,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “We’ll get some more.”
There is silence.
“Is Dad coming home?” Ashley asks, and I don’t quite know what to say.
“No,” I offer.
“Where is our car?” Nate asks.
“I don’t know if your mother mentioned it, but this whole thing started when your father had an accident. The car is in the shop, but I’ve got mine. Do you want to go to the hospital?”
The children nod. They’ve not gone upstairs. They’ve done nothing but pet the dog.
As we head out, I feel a flash of childhood memory, my uncle Leon pushing me out the door, his knuckles digging into my back, my bones taking the knuckle with a great impression, fear and dependency. It still hurts.
I hold the door for the children. “Take your time,” I say.
At the hospital, walking from the car across the parking lot, Ashley slips her hand into mine.
“What is it going to be like?” Nate asks.
“Your mother is in Intensive Care, so it’s very bright. She’s hooked up to a lot of equipment; there’s a machine helping her to breathe, and she’s got an IV in her arm which gives her medicines and food. Her head is bandaged from the surgery, and she looks a little like a raccoon—she’s got two black eyes.”
“My father punched her in the eyes?” Nathaniel asks.
“It’s bruising from the surgery.”
In the elevator Ashley squeezes my hand so hard it hurts; she squeezes the whole way down the hall and into the ICU.
Jane’s mother bursts into tears when the children come in.
“Stop, you’re scaring them,” her husband says.
“Too many, too many, too many,” the nurse says, shooing people out.
The children are left alone with their mother
Jane’s parents stand in the hall, glaring at me. “Son of a bitch,” the father says.
“Let’s get some coffee,” he says to his wife.
I press myself to the glass. Ashley takes her mother’s hand. I imagine it warm, even though it is limp; she rubs her cheek and face with it, stroking herself, giving herself her mother’s affection. Nathaniel stands next to her, crying and then stopping himself from crying. A little later, when Ashley’s head is on her mother’s stomach, she looks up smiling and points to her mother’s stomach. “It gurgled,” she says, through the glass, as though a gurgle is a sign of improvement.
When the nurse needs to do something to Jane, I take the children to the cafeteria.
“What happens next?” Nathaniel asks, as he’s eating a second lunch.
“You should spend as much time with your mom as you want, let her know you love her, and know how much she loves you.”
When Ashley excuses herself to go to the bathroom, Nathaniel leans over.
“Did you fuck my mother?”
I don’t answer.
“She was into you; she used to tease my father by talking about you.”
Again, I say nothing.
“Where is Dad?” Ashley asks when she gets back to the table.
“He’s here.”
“This hospital?” Nate asks.
I nod. “Do you want to see him?”
“Should we see him?” Ashley asks.
“Entirely up to you.”
“I need to think he’s dead,” Nate says. “That’s the only way I can make sense of it. He did this and then turned the gun on himself.”
“There was no gun,” I say.
“You know what I mean. Why didn’t you stop him, why didn’t you kill him?” Nate asks.
Why didn’t I?
All too familiar with the hospital layout, I lead the children to the Emergency Room. George is parked in a back hallway, bound to a chair, slumped like he’s been sleeping for days, his face roughened with stubble.
“Either we sedate him or he’s out of control,” the nurse remarks, spotting me.
“These are the children,” I say, “Ashley and Nathaniel.”
“He ate a good lunch, and we’re awaiting his disposition,” the nurse says, slightly more chipper.
“Is that like his mood?” Ashley asks.
“It’s paperwork telling us where he’ll go from here,” the nurse says.
George opens his eyes.
“The children are here,” I say.
“Hi, Dad,” Ashley says. Nathaniel says nothing.
“Sorry,” George says.
There is an awkward silence. We all stare at the floor, at the patterns in the linoleum.
“George, I’ve been meaning to ask you, there’s a cat who scratches at the kitchen door, gray, with green eyes and a dab of white on the tail. It’s gotten into the house a couple of times. And it looks like no one feeds it, so I bought some kibble.”
“That’s Muffin,” George says. “Our cat.”
“Since when do you have a cat?”
“Years. Her litter box is in the guest bathroom—you’d better clean it.”
“She likes canned food,” Ashley says, softly.
“What were you thinking?” Nathaniel asks his father.
“No idea,” George says. “What day is it?”
We go back to Intensive Care. The doctor is there. “She’s recovering well from the procedure itself,” he says.
“Of course she is, she’s a good girl,” her father says.
“There’s still no sign of activity. Have you thought about organ donation?” the doctor asks.
“Would that help her? A donation?” Jane’s father asks.
“He means Mom being a donor,” Nate clarifies.
“Don’t you have to be dead to do that?” Jane’s mother asks.
“Something to keep in mind. We’ll know more soon,” the doctor says.
“We can stay if you want, or we can go and come back after dinner,” I say to the children.
“Let’s take a break,” Ashley says.
I take them to the mall. “Is this where you usually go? Is this what you do with your mother?” I buy them sneakers and frozen yogurt. The mall is uncomfortably empty; it’s a weekday, no one is there.
“Why are you being so nice?” Nathaniel asks.
I say nothing.
“It sucks. It all sucks,” he says. Back in the car, Nate asks, “Ca
n you take me for a ride?”
“Where?”
“I want to get out of here.”
“Do you have a bike? Maybe when we get home you can go for a ride. It’s certainly warm enough out.”
“I’m not asking if I can go for a ride,” he says. “I’m asking you to take me on a ride.” There’s a pause. “I took some pills.”
“What do you mean, ‘pills’?”
“Not too many, but enough.”
“Enough to kill yourself?”
“No, to calm down. I’m a wreck.”
“Where did you get them?”
“From the medicine cabinet at home.”
“How did you know which ones to take?”
Nate stares at me as if to say, I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.
“Okay, so where do you want to go?” I ask.
“Amusement park.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Apparently not.
At Nate’s insistence I phone the amusement park and find that due to the odd and unseasonably warm winter, they haven’t closed for the season. “The owner thought it was better to keep folks employed and have a snow day if needed—which so far hasn’t happened,” the guy says. Nate goes on ride after ride, roller coaster, Zipper, Bungee Rocket, Tower of Terror, Gravitron, which spins so fast he’s plastered to the side with an expression on his face like he’s been whipped through a wind tunnel.
“Do you think it’s weird?” he asks as we walk to the next ride.
“Who am I to judge?”
“I carry a diagnosis,” he says.
“Like what?”
“Like supposedly there’s something wrong with me.”
“What’s your point?”
“Do you think it’s true?” he asks.
“Do you?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“Do you want to go on a ride?” I ask Ashley, who at eleven is holding my hand and seeming more like six. She shakes her head no. “Are you sure? I’ll go with you.” She shrugs.
“I miss the snow,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “When I was young it used to snow in the winter.”
“It will snow again,” I say.
“When?” she asks.
“When you least expect it,” I say.
We leave Nate at the roller coaster. He seems relieved by the spinning, by hurling through the air again and again. Ashley picks out something called the Wave Swinger; it seems innocent enough.
Like the mall, the amusement park is empty. Nate and Ashley both have their own attendants, ride operators who are like mechanical tour guides. They walk with us from ride to ride, turning each one on and giving it a test spin before letting the kids board.
“Isn’t it hard to spend your days in an empty amusement park?” I ask one of the operators.
“Beats sitting home with my wife,” the guy says, shrugging like I’m the idiot.
“My mother’s in the hospital,” Ashley tells the operator as he’s turning on the chair swing. “We were sent home from school. Our father hit her in the head.”
“Rough,” the operator says, and it vaguely sounds like he’s saying “Ruff,” as in barking more than talking.
The Wave Swinger lifts gently off the ground. I am in the chair ahead of Ashley, suspended by twenty feet of galvanized chain. It makes a couple of graceful spins in a wide circle, rising higher each time, and then it takes off, spinning faster and faster. The chair swings out wide, it tilts, now we’re flying up high and then swooping down low. I am dizzy, nauseous, trying to find one thing to fix on, one thing that is not moving. I stare at the empty chairs in front of me, the blue sky overhead. I am losing my sense of balance; I fear I will pass out and somehow slip out of the chair and fall to the ground.
Nate is waiting for us when we land. I stumble getting off the ride and knock my head into the chains.
We head for the Haunted House, all hopping into our own cars, and the train bangs through the double doors and into the darkness. It’s warm inside and smells like sweat socks. Overhead there are howls and ear-piercing screeches from the dead, timbers crack, and ghosts fall from the sky, stopping inches short of our faces before being snatched away again. The mechanical soundtrack is punctuated by a frightful choking sound.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s Ashley,” Nate says.
“Are you choking?” I ask, unfastening my seat belt and trying to turn and look at her.
“She’s crying,” Nate says. “That’s the way she cries.”
As lightning is crashing around me and we’re climbing a hill into a dark castle, I’m turning and trying to crawl out of my car and into hers. Suddenly strobe lights are flashing and, as in some slow-motion Marx Brothers movie, I’m on my hands and knees on top of the train car. The train is heading straight for the closed door of the castle, and right before it hits, the train turns sharply and I am thrown overboard, banging into a wall, reaching out and grabbing at anything for balance, worried about landing on the third rail—if there is such a thing in a haunted house. And then it all stops. It’s pitch-dark. “Don’t move,” we hear a voice overhead. Ashley is still crying, sobbing in the dark. A minute later, the Haunted House is flooded with bright fluorescent light; every secret of the night is revealed—the lousy papier-mâché walls, the cheaply strung-together skeletons suspended on wire hangers, the yellow and purple glow-in-the-dark paint on everything.
“What the fuck,” the ride operator says, coming down the tracks.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Sorry, shmorry,” he says to me.
“The little girl was crying.”
“Are you all right, sweetheart?” the operator asks Ashley, genuinely concerned. “Is anybody injured?”
We all shake our heads. “We’re all right.”
The operator grabs a tow rope at the front of the train and pulls us all down the tracks, bending his head at the front doors, and we bang out into the daylight.
“You sure you’re all okay?”
“As okay as we can be, given the circumstances,” I say. I hand the guy twenty bucks. I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels necessary.
“Let’s go home,” I say to the children, herding them to the parking lot.
“It was all good until we got to the Haunted House,” Nate says.
“It was good,” I say.
For dinner we have Jane’s spaghetti sauce from the freezer.
“I love Mom’s spaghetti,” Ashley says.
“Great,” I say, worried that there are only two more containers in the freezer and they’re going to have to last a lifetime. I’m wondering if spaghetti sauce can be cloned. If we save a sample or take a swab of Jane’s sauce, can someone make more?
Spaghetti and frozen broccoli and cream soda and Sara Lee pound cake. You would almost think things are under control.
The cat walks by, flicking her tail at my ankles under the table. Ashley gets up and shows me the cabinet where forty cans of cat food are stacked in neat order.
“She likes the salmon the best,” Ashley says.
After dinner I take the children back to the hospital. Everything is slightly more hushed; the ICU has a dimmed glow-in-the-dark quality. The large space is divided into eight glass-walled rooms, of which six are occupied.
“Anything?” I ask the nurse.
She shakes her head. “Nothing.”
The children visit with their mother. Nathaniel has brought a paper he wrote for school. He reads it aloud to her and then asks if she thinks it needs something more. He waits for an answer. The ventilator breathes its mechanical breath. After he reads the paper, he tells her about the amusement park, he tells her about a boy at school that apparently she already knows a lot about, he tells her that he’s calculated that by the time he’s ready to start college it will cost about seventy-five thousand dollars a year and that by the time Ashley is ready to start it will be more than eighty. He tells her he loves her.
Ashley rubs her
mother’s feet. “Does that feel good?” she asks, smoothing cream over her toes and up her ankles. “Maybe tomorrow I can bring polish from home and do your nails.”
Later, I walk through the house, turning out lights. It’s nearly midnight. Ashley is in her room, playing with her old toys; all the dolls from her shelves are down on the floor, and she’s in the middle.
“Time for bed,” I say.
“In a minute,” she says.
Nate is down the hall, in his parents’ room, splayed out on their bed asleep and fully clothed. Tessie is with him, her head on the pillow, filling in for Jane.
In the morning, a van pulls up outside. A man gets out, unloads six boxes. From inside I watch him carry them one by one to the front door. At first I’m thinking it’s a box bomb delivered by the surviving relatives of the family George killed. But there’s something so methodical, so painstaking about the way this guy works that clearly he’s a professional of another sort. The last thing out of the van is the enormous plant. He’s got everything all lined up before he rings the bell.
Tessie barks.
I open the door carefully.
“Delivery,” he says. “Can you sign for these?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Your property.”
“My property?”
“Office supplies,” the guy says, turning to leave. “How the fuck would I know? I’m just the messenger. Eight o’clock in the morning and people are already asking questions. When is enough enough?” He walks back to the van, yelling the whole way.
I drag the boxes into the house. It’s the contents of George’s office.
“Did you order something?” Ashley asks.
“It’s for your dad,” I say, and the three of us drag it all into his office and close the door.
“Can I have the plant?” Nate asks.
The decision is made to take Jane off life support, to donate her organs. “I didn’t sleep all night,” her mother says. “I made up my mind and then I changed my mind and then I made up my mind and I changed my mind.”
“Who will tell the children?” someone asks.