by Unknown
Not that there was much worth remembering him for since then. Certainly the rest of his family wouldn't quarrel with that judgment.
"You should have gone back to grad school once you got back," his sister in Columbus had advised him with twenty-twenty and twenty-year hindsight. "What have you done with your life instead? When was the last time you held on to a job for more than a year?"
At least she hadn't added: Or held on to a wife? Marsden had sipped his Coke and vodka and meekly accepted the scolding. They were seated in the kitchen of their parents' too-big house in Cincinnati, trying not to disturb Papa as he dozed in his wheelchair in the family room.
"It's bad enough that Brett and I keep having to drive down here every weekend to try to straighten things out here," Nancy had reminded him. "And then Jack's had to come down from Detroit several times since Momma went to Brookcrest, and Jonathan flew here from Los Angeles and stayed two whole weeks after Papa's first stroke. And all of us have jobs and families to keep up with. Where were you during all this time?"
"Trying to hold a job in Jersey," Marsden explained, thinking of the last Christmas he'd come home for. He'd been nursing a six-pack and the late night movie when Momma drifted into the family room and angrily ordered him to get back to mowing the lawn. It was the first time he'd seen Momma naked in his life, and the image of that shrunken, sagging body would not leave him.
"I'm just saying that you should be doing more, Michael," Nancy continued.
"I was here when you needed me," Marsden protested. "I was here to take Momma to the nursing home."
"Yes, but that was after the rest of us did all the work—finding a good home, signing all the papers, convincing Papa that this was the best thing to do, making all the other arrangements."
"Still, I was here at the end. I did what I had to do," Marsden said, thinking that this had been the story of his life ever since the draft notice had come. Never a choice.
They hadn't wanted to upset Momma, so no one had told her about the nursing home. Secretly they'd packed her things and loaded them into the trunk of Papa's Cadillac the night before. "Just tell Momma that she's going for another checkup at the hospital," they'd told him to say, and then they had to get home to their jobs and families. But despite her advanced Alzheimer's, Momma's memory was clear when it came to remembering doctors' appointments, and she protested suspiciously the next morning when he and Papa bundled her into the car. Momma had looked back over her shoulder at him as they wheeled her down the hall, and her eyes were shadowed with the hurt of betrayal. "You're going to leave me here, aren't you?" she said dully.
The memory of that look crowded memories of Nam from his nightmares.
After that, Marsden had avoided going home. He did visit Momma briefly when Papa had his first stroke, but she hadn't recognized him.
Papa had survived his first stroke, and several months later had surprised them all again and survived his second stroke. But that had been almost a year ago from the night Marsden and his sister had sat talking in the kitchen while Papa dozed in his wheelchair. That first stroke had left him weak on one side; the second had taken away part of his mind. The family had tried to maintain him at home with live-in nursing care, but Papa's health slowly deteriorated, physically and mentally.
It was time to call for Michael.
And Michael came.
"Besides," Nancy reassured him, "Papa only wants to be near Momma. He still insists on trying to get over to visit her every day. You can imagine what a strain that's been on everyone here."
"I can guess," said Michael, pouring more vodka into his glass.
"Where are we going, son?" Papa had asked the next morning, as Marsden lifted him into the Cadillac. Papa's vision was almost gone now, and his voice was hard to understand.
"I'm taking you to be with Momma for a while," Marsden told him. "You want that, don't you?"
Papa's dim eyes stared widely at the house as they backed down the driveway. He turned to face Michael. "But when are you bringing Momma and me back home again, son?"
Never, as it turned out. Marsden paused outside his mother's room, wincing at the memory. Over the past year their various health problems had continued their slow and inexorable progress toward oblivion. Meanwhile health care bills had mushroomed—eroding insurance coverage, the last of their pensions, and a lifetime's careful savings. It was time to put the old family home on the market, to make some disposal of a lifetime's possessions. It had to be done.
Papa called for Michael.
"Don't let them do this to us, son." The family held power of attorney now. "Momma and I want to go home."
So Michael came home.
The white-haired lady bent double over her walker as she inched along the hallway wasn't watching him. Marsden took a long swig of vodka and replaced the pint bottle. Momma didn't like to see him drink.
She was sitting up in her jerry cart, staring at the television, when Marsden stepped inside her room and closed the door. They'd removed her dinner tray but hadn't cleaned her up, and bits of food littered the front of her dressing gown. She looked up, and her sunken eyes showed recognition.
"Why, it's Michael!" She held out her food-smeared arms to him. "My baby!"
Marsden accepted her slobbery hug. "I've come for you, Momma," he whispered as Momma began to cry.
She covered her face with her hands and continued weeping as Marsden stepped behind her and opened the flight bag.
The silencer was already fitted to the Hi-Standard .22, and Marsden quickly pumped three hollow-points through the back of his mother's head. It was over in seconds. Little noise, and surely no pain. No more pain.
Marsden left his mother slumped over in her jerry cart, picked up his canvas bag, and closed the door. Then he walked on down the hall to his father's room.
He went inside. Papa must have been getting up and falling again, because he was tied to his wheelchair by a bath towel about his waist. "Who's that?" he mumbled, turning his eyes toward Marsden.
"It's Michael, Papa. I'm here to take you home."
Papa lost sphincter control as Marsden untied the knotted towel. He was trying to say something—it sounded like "Bless you, son"—then Marsden lovingly shot him three times through the back of his skull. Papa would have fallen out of the wheelchair, but Marsden caught him. He left him sitting upright with the Monday night football game just getting underway on the tube.
Marsden finished the vodka, then removed the silencer from the pistol and replaced the clip. Shoving the Hi-Standard into his belt, he checked over the flight bag and left it with Papa.
He heard the first screams as the elevator door slowly closed. Someone must have finally gone to clean Momma's dinner off her.
A uniformed security guard—Marsden hadn't known that Brookcrest employed such—was trying to lock the lobby doors. A staff member was shouting into the reception desk phone.
"Hold it, please! Nobody's to leave!" The guard actually had a revolver.
Marsden shot him through the left eye and stepped over him and through the glass doors. Marsden regretted this, because he hated to kill needlessly.
Unfortunately, the first police car was slithering into the parking lot as Marsden left the nursing home. Marsden continued to walk away, even when the car's spotlight pinned him against the blacktop.
"You there! Freeze!"
They must have already been called to the home, Marsden thought. Time was short. Without breaking stride, he drew his .22 and shot out the spotlight.
There were still the parking lot lights. Gunfire flashed from behind both front doors of the police car, and Marsden sensed the impact of buckshot and 9mm slugs. He was leaping for the cover of a parked car, and two more police cars were hurtling into the parking lot, when the twenty pounds of C4 he'd left with Papa went off.
The blast lifted Marsden off his feet and fragged him with shards of glass and shattered bricks. Brookcrest Health Care Center burst open like the birth of a volcano.
Marsden rolled to his feet, brushing away fragments of debris. He retrieved his pistol, but there was no need for it just now. His clothes were in a bad state but they could be changed. There was no blood, just as he had known there would not be.
They couldn't kill him in Nam, that day in the paddy when he learned what he was and why he was. They couldn't kill him now.
Was it any easier when they were your own loved ones? Yes, perhaps it was.
Michael Marsden melted away into the darkness that had long ago claimed him.
STEPHEN
Elizabeth Massie
Some stories come bursting out of us fully formed, already worked out, down to final line, by that strange unconscious process only vaguely understood by even the best of us. While other tales, perhaps because of the delicate territory they explore, need to be cattle-prodded into being, shocked and whipped on until they function independently. These stories, the tough ones, are usually the best ones we’re capable of writing—probably because they need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world. Because they come from the darkest, most secret places in ourselves—from our engine rooms, down there where it’s sweaty and stinking and full of creativity’s grime.
Beth Massie’s “Stephen” is one of those stories from one of those places. When I read her earliest draft, I knew I was onto something special, but felt she needed to travel a bit farther into the dark land she’d mapped out for herself I asked her to rewrite it three times, and I wasn’t sure she’d put up with my demands. But she did, and the results are truly stunning. Born in 1953 in Virginia, Beth has always lived in that state which is the gateway to the South. She’s written lots of short stories for the small press magazines and several anthologies, and her agent tells me she’s turned in a brilliant first novel entitled Sineater. I have no fear in predicting Elizabeth Massie will be a major voice in the Nineties.
Michael and Stephen shared a room at the rehabilitation center. Michael was a young man with bright, frantically moving eyes and an outrageous sense of nonstop, bitter humor. He had been a student at the center for more than a year, and with his disability, would most likely be there much longer. This was true, also, for the others housed on the first floor of the west wing. Severe cases, all of them, living at the center, studying food services, auto mechanics, computer operating, art, and bookkeeping, none of them likely to secure a job when released because when hiring the disabled, businesses would usually go for the students who lived on east wing and on the second floor. The center had amazing gadgets that allowed people like Michael to work machines and press computer keys and dabble in acrylics, but the generic factory or office did not go in for space-age, human-adaptive robotics. And Michael himself was a minor miracle of robotics.
Anne arrived at the center late, nearly ten thirty, although her meeting had been scheduled for ten o’clock. The cab dropped her off at the front walk and drove away, spraying fine gravel across her heels. Inside her shoes, her toes worked an awkward rhythm that neither kept them warm nor calmed her down. A cool November wind threw a piece of paper across the walk before her. On its tail followed the crumbled remains of a dead oak leaf. Anne’s full skirt flipped and caught her legs in a tight embrace. It tugged, as if trying to pull her backward and away. In her mouth she tasted hair and sour fear. When she raked her fingers across her face the hair was gone, but not the fear.
The center was large and sterile, a modern bit of gray stone architecture. The largest building was marked with a sign to the left of the walkway: ADMINISTRATION AND ADMISSIONS. Almost the entire front of this building was composed of plate glass with borders of stone. Anne could not see behind the glass for the harsh glare of morning sun, but in the wind the glass seemed to bulge and ripple.
Like a river.
Like water.
“Christ.”
Anne scrunched her shoulders beneath the weight of her coat and glanced about for a place to sit and compose herself. Yes, she was late, but screw them if they wanted to complain about volunteer help. There were several benches just off the walkway on the lawn, but she didn’t want to sit in full view. And so she took the walk leading to the right, following along until it circled behind the main building beside what she assumed was a long, gray stone dormitory. The walk ended at a paved parking lot, marked off for visitors and deliveries. She crossed the lot, skirting cars and food trucks and large vans equipped for hauling wheelchairs, heading for a grove of trees on the other side. A lone man pushing an empty wheeled cot crossed in front of Anne and gave her a nod. She smiled slightly and then looked away.
The trees across the lot encircled a park. Picnic tables were clustered beneath the largest of the oaks, and concrete benches made a neat border about the pond in the center. The pond itself was small, no more than two acres, but it was dark and clearly deep. Dead cattails rattled on the water’s edge. A short pier jutted into the water from the shore, with a weathered rowboat tethered to the end. Leaves blew spastic patterns on the black surface.
Anne sat on a bench and wrapped her fingers about her knees. There was no one else in the park. She looked at the brown grass at her feet, then at her hands on her knees, and then at the pond. The sight of the bobbing boat and the dull shimmering of the ripples made her stomach clamp. What a raw and ugly thing the pond was.
A cold thing, enticing and deadly, ready to suck someone under and drag them down into its lightless depths. Licking and smothering with its stinking embrace.
Phillip would have loved this pond.
Phillip would have thought it just right.
The fucking bastard.
If she was to go to the water’s edge, she thought she might see his reflection there, grinning at her.
But she did not go. She sat on the concrete bench, her fingers turning purple with the chill, her breath steaming the air. She did not look at the pond again, but at the grass and her knees and the picnic tables. She studied the gentle slopes the paths made about the park, all accessible to wheeled means of movement. Accessible to the people who lived here. To the people Anne’s mother had protected her from as a child, who her mother had hurried Anne away from on the street, whispering in her ear, “Don’t stare, now, Anne. Polite people don’t react. Do you hear me?
“There but for the grace of God go you, Anne. Don’t look now. It’s not nice.”
Anne closed her eyes, but the vision of the park and the tables and the sloped pathways stayed inside her eyes. She could hear the wind on the pond.
“Damn you, Mother,” she said. “Damn you, Phillip.” She sat for another twenty minutes.
When she crossed the parking lot again, her eyes in the sun and her hands in her pockets, her muscles were steeled and her face carried a tight, professional smile.
Janet Warren welcomed Anne into the center at ten fifty-six, barely mentioning the tardiness. She took Anne into her office, and, as assistant administrator, explained the functions of the center. She gave Anne a brief summary of the students with whom Anne would work, then led her off to the west wing.
Anne entered Michael’s room after Janet gave an obligatory tap on the door. Michael grunted and Anne walked in, still holding her coat, which Janet had offered to take, clutched tightly to her stomach.
“Michael,” said Janet to the man on the bed. “This is Miss Zaccaria, the lady I said would be coming to help us out.”
Michael propped up on his elbow, straightening himself, patting his blanket down about the urinary bag as if it were an egg in an Easter basket. He gave Anne a wide grin.
“Well, if it ain’t my dream lady come to see me in the flesh!” he crowed. “Are you real or just a vision of delight?”
Anne licked her lips and looked back at Janet Warren. “Thank you, Mrs. Warren. I’ll be fine now. I’ll let you know if we need anything.�
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“Hell, I know what I need,” said Michael. “And she’s standing right in front of me.”
Janet nodded, her motion seeming to be both acknowledgment of what Anne had said and a sisterly confirmation of what she had come to do. Janet turned and left the room.
“Come on,” said Michael, and Anne looked back at him.
“Come on? What do you mean?” There was only a small comfort in her professional ability at conversation. It wasn’t enough to overcome her discomfort at seeing the physical form of Michael before her. He was legless, with hipbones flattened into a shovel-shaped protrusion. The thin blanket emphasized rather than hid his lower deformity. He was missing his right arm to the elbow, and there was no left arm at all. A steel hook clipped the air in cadence with the blinking of Michael’s eyes.
“Come on and tell me. You ain’t really no shrink, are you? I was expecting some shriveled-up old bitch. You really is my dream lady, ain’t you?”
Anne focused on Michael’s face and took a slow breath. “No, sorry,” she said. “I’m from Associated Psychological. I’m a clinical social worker.”
Michael grappled with a button and pressed it with the point of his hook. The bed rolled toward Anne. She held her position.
“No, you ain’t. I dreamed about you last night. Dreamed I still had my parts and you was eating them nice as you please.”
Anne’s face went instantly hot. She could have kicked herself for not being ready for anything. “I was told you’ve had a rough time these past months,” she said. “Not getting along with the other students like you used to do. I’d like to help.”
“Sure. Just sit on my face for a few hours.”
Anne glanced at the withered body, then back at his face. Of all the students she would be working with through the volunteer-outreach program, Michael was the most disabled. “Is that all you think about, Michael? Sex?”
“When it comes to sex,” he said, “all I can do is think.” He laughed out loud and wheeled closer. “You like me?”