Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  Mr. Redding’s head is propped at an uncomfortable-looking angle now, his chin cocked down against his chest. But he’s smiling. A shift has occurred; his eyes seem brighter, more alert. Perhaps he’s just begun to wake up more fully. ‘Perfect. You clearly have a knack for this.’

  Dan can still feel the heat of the older man’s skull against his palms, and he has to resist, consciously, the urge to wipe his hands on his pants legs. Mr. Redding’s eyes follow him as he retreats to the foot of the bed, sits in the chair again. There’s the sound of footsteps approaching from down the hallway, and Dan turns to glance at the door, half-hoping Jill might have arrived, even though he knows it’s still too early. One of the nurses strides by the room, with an air of purpose, a clipboard in her hand, her footsteps fading as she continues up the corridor.

  Mr. Redding’s voice pulls Dan’s attention back to the bed: ‘She talked a bit, you know. About you. Last time she was here.’

  ‘Good things, I hope?’

  Mr. Redding smiles in a way that seems to imply it perhaps wasn’t all good things. Or maybe not. Maybe Dan is just starting to feel unsure of his footing here. Maybe he needs to get up and use the bathroom, wash his hands, find a way to calm down. Before he can excuse himself, though, Mr. Redding continues: ‘I asked her what your three best qualities are.’

  ‘And…?’

  Mr. Redding gives the impression that he’s ticking the words off on his fingers, even though his hands remain motionless on top of the covers, chest-high, curled into tight, painful-looking fists. ‘Curiosity…intelligence…kindness. Sound fair?’

  Dan smiles. He can’t help it. He’s pleased. ‘I’ll take them.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Show me evidence of your purported curiosity.’

  The only question that comes to mind seems so inappropriate Dan can’t bring himself to utter it. He waits for another to arrive, but nothing does. Finally, the pause begins to seem too long, and so—regretting the words even as he speaks them—Dan offers what he has: ‘What’s it like? Living here like this?’

  Mr. Redding laughs. He seems genuinely amused. ‘She should’ve said ‘direct!’’

  Dan laughs, too, relieved at the older man’s response. ‘Maybe that was number four?’

  He feels his phone vibrate in his hand, and he glances at it, hoping for a text from Jill, an announcement that she’s arriving now, that she caught an earlier bus than she anticipated. But it’s just a news alert. There’s a fire in a high rise on the Upper East Side.

  When he looks up, Mr. Redding is watching him. ‘Know how it happened?’

  ‘How what happened?’

  ‘My accident.’

  ‘Just the basics.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Two days after your wife’s funeral, you were cleaning dead leaves from the gutters. And you fell off the roof.’

  Mr. Redding lifts an eyebrow. ‘Why that particular detail?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘That it was two days after my wife’s funeral?’

  ‘That’s just how Jill told it.’

  Mr. Redding smiles. ‘She suspects I jumped, is that it? In my grief?’

  Dan quickly shakes his head. ‘She didn’t say so. Not outright.’ This isn’t true, though: Jill had said so, delivering the idea not as hypothesis but as inarguable truth.

  ‘I’m not an idiot, Dan. If I’d been planning to do something like that, I wouldn’t have jumped off a three-story roof.’

  Mr. Redding shuts his eyes, and Dan wonders if they might’ve reached the end of their conversation, if he’s crossed an irrevocable line, and Jill will find the two of them like this, sitting in silence. He feels a measure of relief at the possibility, even though he knows—if this encounter has indeed been a test—that such an outcome would surely count as a failure on his part.

  His phone vibrates again, and Dan glances at the screen to find an update on the fire: three fatalities. He pictures the scene, the trucks with their flashing lights, the hoses uncoiled across the pavement, the press of the bystanders, all of it happening right now, even as he sits here, wondering where Jill is, and how much longer he’ll need to wait.

  ‘What else has she told you?’ Mr. Redding asks. ‘About me?’

  The older man is watching Dan once more, his head cocked at that uncomfortable-looking angle. Dan thinks for a moment: what else has Jill told him? There’s really only one thing, though, or at least one thing that matters. ‘That you’re unhappy,’ he says.

  Mr. Redding gives a mordant laugh. ‘Unhappy doesn’t begin to describe how I feel, living like this.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dan says. He manages to stop himself before adding sir.

  ‘Of course you are. You’d have to be a soulless monster not to be. But what does that do for me?’

  ‘Nothing, I guess.’

  ‘Her grandfather was a mailman. Has she told you?’

  Dan shakes his head. He and Jill have known each other for just over six weeks. They haven’t touched on each other’s grandparents yet.

  ‘Forty years,’ Mr. Redding says. ‘Can you imagine a life like that? Getting up every morning? Walking the same route? The big leather bag over your shoulder?’

  Again, Dan shakes his head. Because it’s true: there’s so much he can’t imagine. Not only Jill’s grandfather, walking from house to house for four decades, slipping envelopes through mail slots, but also Jill’s father, waking each morning in this room, and even Jill herself, so cheerful and chatty all day long, but disappearing into the bathroom some evenings, locking the door behind her so she can cry in the shower.

  ‘He was a happy man,’ Mr. Redding says. ‘It was just his nature, you know? No matter what was happening, he was always ready with a smile. I’m guessing he could be in here, living like this, and it wouldn’t matter. Not to him. He’d handle it. How does it go? “Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night—”’

  The phone vibrates, and Dan glances down. A text from Jill: ‘Bus about to leave. How you doing?’

  Dan taps a pair of quick emojis—a thumbs-up, a smiley face—and presses send.

  ‘Is there somewhere you need to be?’ Mr. Redding asks.

  Dan lifts his eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘Then stop looking at your fucking phone. It’s rude.’

  There’s that rush of warmth, again: up Dan’s neck, into his face. ‘I’m sorry. I was just…Jill’s on her way.’

  Mr. Redding doesn’t react to this news: he lies there, watching Dan slide his phone back into his pocket. ‘There’s a point to all this,’ he says. ‘What I’m telling you. I need you to pay attention.’

  ‘I am. Your father was a mailman. For forty years.’

  This seems to satisfy Mr. Redding. He continues: ‘He was a storyteller. You know the type? All day long, telling tales. Looking back, when I got older? I took most of it with a grain of salt. But as a kid? You believe everything.’

  Dan isn’t certain how to respond to this, or if a response is even necessary. He can feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. Jill is responding to his emojis, he assumes. He sits on his hands, one under either thigh, worried that otherwise he might reach for the phone, reflexively, without even intending to.

  ‘He kept three postcards on our fridge. At first there was just one. A picture of a stone church. Mexico. A cactus in the foreground. Then—maybe when I was ten or eleven? The second showed up. Main Street, Martha’s Vineyard: two kids on bikes, an American flag, a blue Volkswagen. And finally, just before my sixteenth birthday—I remember because I was studying for my driver’s license—the third appeared. A photo of an open Bible, with a verse marked. ‘And this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life.’’ Mr. Redding’s gaze has been unfocused while he recalled these details—or focused elsewhere, into the past—but now his eyes seem to snap back onto Dan. ‘You know how when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily question certain things? They just are what they are an
d you accept them?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘That’s how it was with the first two cards. I never really thought about them. They were there on the fridge, but I never questioned, you know…why? They weren’t addressed to anyone in my family. The pictures honestly weren’t all that interesting. Same with the messages on the back. But then the third card appeared, and maybe I was old enough to wonder. Because I finally asked my father about them. Did you know it’s a federal crime to take someone else’s mail?’

  Dan shakes his head.

  ‘It is. And yet those three cards? My father stole them. From people on his route. That much I’m pretty sure is true. But the rest…?’ He purses his lips. ‘I still don’t know what to make of it.’

  A nurse taps a knuckle against the open doorway. ‘Guess what time it is, Mr. Redding?’ She’s a tall, heavyset woman with short, bleached blonde hair, and a toothy smile. She pushes a rolling cart into the room.

  ‘Cocktail hour?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it, Mr. Redding.’ The nurse winks at Dan; it’s clearly an exchange the two of them have on a daily basis. She lifts a blood pressure cuff off the cart, and as she starts to take Mr. Redding’s vitals, Dan surreptitiously pulls his phone from his pocket, gives its screen a quick glance. There are two texts from Jill. ‘Stuck in tunnel. Might take a bit.’ And: ‘You okay?’

  Dan quickly types: ‘We’re good. Family history lesson in progress.’ Then he slides his phone back into his pocket.

  The nurse removes the blood pressure cuff, stares down at Mr. Redding, her hands on her hips. ‘This young man getting you a little worked up, Mr. Redding?’ She winks at Dan again as she speaks.

  ‘He has the effrontery to be dating my daughter, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I got a klonopin for you, if you want it.’

  ‘That the good stuff?’

  ‘It’s all the good stuff, Mr. Redding. That’s what I’m about here.’

  ‘I mean the one that makes things a little blurry around the edges. That’s the only stuff I’d call the good stuff.’

  ‘Your wish is my command, Mr. Redding.’

  She takes a pill bottle off the cart, shakes out a tablet. Mr. Redding opens his mouth, and the nurse places the pill on his tongue, then holds a cup of water to his lips, lifting his head slightly to help him swallow. She gives Mr. Redding’s shoulder a pat. ‘He seems like a nice enough young man to me,’ she says. ‘You go easy on him, hear?’ With that, she starts to push her cart back toward the doorway.

  Mr. Redding calls after her: ‘By ‘dating,’ just to be clear, I mean sleeping with her!’

  The nurse laughs, but she’s already gone, vanishing up the hallway.

  Mr. Redding closes his eyes again, and for a moment Dan thinks he might’ve drifted off, nudged into unconsciousness by the pill. But then, with his eyes still shut, the older man picks up right where he left off. ‘My father claimed that mailmen…there was an understanding among them. Sort of like a secret society. This was back in the day, remember—I don’t know if it’s still the same now. But in a smaller town, in those years? The mailman, he’d know the people on his route, know them in a way that’s probably pretty rare today. Some of them he’d see every day, but even the ones he didn’t, he’d have a sense of their lives just from glimpsing the mail they received. Personal letters, bill, catalogs…he’d have these little mosaic tiles of a person’s day-to-day existence. And sometimes, you know, there’d be a situation where someone was suffering. At home, stuck in a bed, dying maybe, but not fast enough. The person suffering, the family suffering.’ He opens his eyes, peers at Dan. ‘Does Jill talk about that much?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How hard my being here is on her?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘It doesn’t take much imagination to see though, does it?’

  Dan is silent, thinking of those late night showers, standing outside the bathroom, listening through the shut door, Jill’s crying barely audible over the rush of water. He chooses his words carefully: ‘I know she worries.’

  ‘Oh, it’s beyond worry. She’s twenty-eight years old, for fuck’s sake. And she’s out here every weekend, sitting by my bedside, even when I tell her not to come. It’s no way for a young woman to live. And then, you now, there’s the question of money. I worked hard. In all modesty, I did pretty well for myself. But by the time this place is through with me? There’ll be nothing left for her.’

  Mr. Redding’s voice has been steadily rising, and Dan glances toward the doorway, wondering if he’s handling this encounter poorly, if he should try to change the subject, calm the man down. He wishes the nurse would return, but the hallway is empty.

  ‘My father said that mailmen, when they see a situation like that…a person suffering, their families suffering, they call a meeting among themselves, they talk it through, and then they vote on whether something ought to be done.’

  He stares down his body at Dan: an expectant look. But Dan shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Those postcards? They were addressed to the three people my father offered assistance to over the course of his career. Or at least that’s what he told me.’

  There’s another silence. Dan lifts his hands, palms up.

  ‘Come on, Dan,’ Mr. Redding says. ‘You can follow this.’

  ‘You’re saying he killed them?

  ‘I’m saying he released them from their cage of suffering.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s pretty simple. Press a pillow over the person’s face, hold it down. Keep an eye on your watch. After five minutes or so, you can be relatively confident the job is done. Old people. Or people in situations like mine? Nobody really wonders too much when they end up dying. It’s sort of expected, I guess. And generally something of a relief for all involved.’

  Dan can feel his phone vibrating against his thigh. It’s either another update on the fire or a text from Jill. He reaches into his pocket, grasps the phone, but then catches himself. He sits there, leaning slightly to his left, his right hand sunk in his pocket.

  Mr. Redding continues: ‘He told me: sometimes someone has to step forward and do the hard thing that needs doing, the thing that no one else is prepared to attempt. I remember feeling pretty impressed with that. I remember wanting to be that type of person when I grew up.’

  Mr. Redding yawns suddenly, shuts his eyes. One second passes, then another, and Dan starts to ease the phone free from his pocket. But almost immediately he has to stop: Mr. Redding has opened his eyes again. He’s peering toward him.

  ‘One of the problems here?’ he says. ‘In this place? We never see our mailman. Or woman, I guess—they have women doing it too nowadays. They drop what little mail we get downstairs.’ He gives another yawn. His eyes start to drift shut; then they jump back open. ‘Know what’s funny?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I told Carter this story? And he thought I was asking him to kill me. Poor kid. He got a little freaked out. I didn’t see him much after that.’

  ‘What about the one before him? With the beard?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve told a lot of people, I guess. Anyone who will listen.’

  Dan lets go of his phone, takes his hand from his pocket. He leans forward, elbows on knees. ‘Are you asking?’

  Mr. Redding smiles. ‘There’s that curiosity again. The directness too.’ His eyes are drifting shut again. He can’t seem to keep them open. ‘I guess if you’re as smart as she seems to think, you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself. What was the third one again?’

  ‘Kindness.’

  ‘There you go. As crucial as the others, I suppose.’ Mr. Redding’s voice is starting to slur, ever so slightly. ‘Would you find it terribly rude if I rested for a bit?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Mr. Redding drags his eyelids open. ‘Can you close the door? That way the nurses know not to intrude.’

  He watches as Dan gets up,
quietly pushes shut the door.

  ‘And take the pillow away, will you?’

  Dan gently eases the extra pillow out from under Mr. Redding’s skull. Then he stands there beside the bed, holding the pillow before him with both hands.

  When Dan was a child, his family would vacation at a lake in New Hampshire. Dan’s father would take him out in a rowboat and toss silver dollars over the side, so that Dan could dive for them. The water was fifteen feet deep, twenty at the most, the bottom a hard gray clay. Dan can remember the sensation of being almost out of breath, of straining for a few more seconds under the surface, his pulse thumping in his head. He can remember how it felt to glimpse one of the coins—that flash of silver in the depths—but know for certain it was out of his reach, that he didn’t have what it took to grasp it.

  Mr. Redding peers up at him. ‘I heard someone say once—if we could all be kind for just five minutes in a day, the world would be a much better place. What do you think of that?’

  And then there were times when Dan would glimpse a coin, and somehow feel certain that even if he didn’t reach it this time, he knew where it was now—he knew how to find it—so he’d surely manage the feat on the next attempt, or the one after that, or the one after that. It was simply a matter of waiting for the right moment, of trusting in himself, in his stamina and determination—his luck. Dan can remember the pleasure he felt in this knowledge, something close to serenity, and he wishes he could convey some shadow of this feeling to Mr. Redding now. ‘Makes sense to me,’ he says.

  Mr. Redding watches him for a long moment, searching his face. Then he smiles. ‘I like you, Dan,’ he says. He shuts his eyes, breathes deep. ‘I really think Jill could be onto something this time. You might be a keeper.’

  FROM THE LIVING ROOM OF COTTAGE 6

  JOSH MALERMAN

  OF ALL THE PERKS AND PRIVILEGES people look for in a bed and breakfast, a hotel, an overnight stay, none are perhaps as desired as the view. To most vacationers, a bed is the place where the world stops spinning, or begins, depending on the number of drinks. A couch will do. And while a spacious shower helps settle the nerves of the night before, a view does the same thing, but better.