by Carrie Brown
She looked at Charlie, clutching the ice bucket against his chest. She thought for a minute of his three children, all of them big strong boys like Charlie himself. A fortune, he had, in those children. Lucky man.
You just don’t know, Charlie, she said. She gestured around at the old table, the two mismatched chairs, the old pots and pans hanging on a pegboard. There was a stain, she noticed, in one corner of the ceiling.
A long silence unfolded between them.
Charlie cleared his throat. Ruth, he said. I’m sorry. It’s just that—we’re a little worried about him. Worried about you.
She turned away abruptly, waving her hand. I’m fine, she said. I’ll be out in a minute with the cheese puffs. Go ahead.
She winced. How stupid she sounded. Cheese puffs.
I’m sorry, he repeated. Take your time.
She stared out the window. She could tell the storm was moving in, could feel the huge movement of the big trees outside. She heard the hinge of the swinging door behind Charlie as he left, the silence in the room that told her he was gone. She turned around from the sink. Automatically, she bent to look in the oven door. Peter had replaced the oven lightbulb the week before, and she looked now at the cheese puffs, growing brown inside. On the kitchen table, on the lazy Susan, were Peter’s various medications, her calcium pills, her multivitamins, her reading glasses, his reading glasses, a sticky plastic honey bear, a pair of salt and pepper shakers made in the shapes of lighthouses. They’d been a gift from someone, one of the boys.
Then she heard a noise at the back door, a scraping and breathing sound.
She always left the back door open unless it was too cold outside, the screen door closed against bugs. On the back porch they kept their mud boots and some tools, a shovel and a hoe, the rakes, a basket she used when weeding, the axe.
There was nothing of value there—not that anyone would ever try to steal anything, she knew. Somewhere they had a key to the front door of their house, but they’d never locked it, not in her memory. She didn’t even know where the key was.
She looked at the bright oven window, its heat and glow. From the living room and the front hallway she could hear the muted sound of conversation. People had come after all, she thought. But they sounded like people speaking after a funeral, a little careful about the volume, an awkward laugh escaping here and there. Life goes on.
Where was Peter? What was he doing? What was happening to him?
She heard the sound again, someone—something—outside the back door.
She looked at the telephone, hanging on the wall, but before she could reach for it, a voice—a cultivated, polite voice, quiet—said, Hello? Ma’am?
She turned slowly toward the door, aware that while she could not see him, whoever he was, standing in the darkness, he could see her perfectly, her navy blue dress and the big gold sunburst like a target on her chest, the lighted window of the oven and her cheese puffs rising inside, the pathetic, domestic clutter on the kitchen table, the jungle overtaking the windowsill. She heard the noise of the wind rising outside, a moaning.
They had come such a long way, she thought, she and Peter. Over the difficult terrain of the early years, over the long and sometimes fraught expanse of their middle age, into the plateau of old age … What would come next? When she had imagined it, she had thought of attractive country inns and beach vacations, the kinds of places she and Peter had stayed sometimes over the years, Peter doing recruiting business for the school here and there, the vacation house of a wealthy trustee loaned to them for repayment of hard service.
The voice from the darkness spoke again: Please help me.
Who is it? she said. She reached out for the edge of the table. Who is there?
I’ve been on the trail, the voice said. Hiking the trail. I need help. With my dog. It’s my dog.
Why did he not open the door, she thought? Why did he not come in?
Please, the voice said, and now there was a little command in it, less of a plea. The voice was young, though. She need not be frightened, she thought. It was only a hiker, some young fellow, a nature enthusiast, shy, too shy to come in, with a sick dog, an injured companion.
She moved slowly toward the door.
There was a whining sound from outside, but she could not tell if it was human or animal.
I’m coming, she said. Her hands were clumsy on the door handle.
The young man standing on the porch was wild-haired, dreadlocks down to his waist, a mossy beard over his chin. His face was dirty, his knapsack rising behind him on a metal frame like a horrible hunchback. He held a gun pointed at her chest, at the starburst there. At his feet lay a dog, some sort of beagle, old and grizzled, with a gray muzzle. The dog’s eyes were closed, its belly heaving.
She remembered, from long ago in her childhood, another gun. In all these intervening years she had not seen a single other gun, yet the black eye of it seemed now so familiar, as if she had been waiting for all these decades for it to reappear, to reassert itself. It was as if she had known that one day it would, just as she had come to anticipate her nightmares and their familiar landscapes.
She closed her eyes, opened them again. The man was still there.
My dog is old and sick, he said. You have a car. That’s your car in the driveway, I know because I’ve waited for you. Give me your car keys.
She did not reply for a minute, her voice stuck in her throat, as if he had wedged the gun into her windpipe.
They had shot her father that day, the day they finally found him, but they had not killed him.
I need to get him to a vet, the man said, louder, as if she were hard of hearing. Get me your keys.
She was stunned by his filth, by the depth and extent of it, his clothes like something that had been buried and then unearthed, by the wealth of objects hanging from his backpack, pots and hanks of cloth and rope, a tattered paperback somehow threaded by fishing line, stuffed animals, one of them a purple spotted giraffe, one of them a fish, she thought, with big, fleshy lips.
As she stood there, he reached with one hand, still pointing the gun at her, and swung one of the stuffed animals toward her, shaking it, as if it were speaking.
Please help me, he said, without moving his lips, his voice high and childish-sounding, like a ventriloquist’s voice. His eyes slid away from hers.
I am desperately ill and need the attention of a doctor, he said in the voice of the creature he held, and she saw now that it was not a fish, but a dog, his ears worn away, a grotesquerie.
Over the years, Ruth had met several of Dr. Wenning’s patients. She’d kept only a few private patients, by the end, people she had met at the extreme exigency of their need, after they’d been arrested or admitted to the hospital, but who had responded well to drugs and treatment, and whose stories had moved her particularly. Her manner with them, when she came out of her inner office to greet them, Ruth primly engaged in filing or typing, had been respectful, friendly, and intimate … as if she were glad to see them.
Yes. My old friends, she had called them. Why else would I spend time with them?
There had been no mistaking these people, these desperately ill people, for other, normal people, Ruth had seen. Passing them in the street, you could see in an instant that there was something terribly wrong with them. Her own father, she’d realized, had been an anomaly—apparently perfectly sane, even gentle with her, but all the while his hidden life piling up behind him, like heaps of debris shoved helter-skelter into a closet, her father leaning against the door—legs crossed, casual as you please—to keep it from spilling open. Mental illness, Dr. Wenning had said, took just as many forms as physical illness.
The man before her, she realized, was one of these sad victims.
He whipped away the stuffed animal behind his back, returned his hand to the gun, and shook it at her. In his normal voice, he said, I’ll shoot you if you don’t give me your keys. His eyes, when he turned them to her again, were full of despe
ration.
I have to go inside, she said. I have to get the car keys from my purse.
He made a sound of anguish, as if the options before him were unbearable.
She realized that a smell drifted off of him, a sickening smell of filth and human sweat. She stepped back, and he gave out a high cry, a squeak. At his feet, the dog stirred.
The vet’s office is on Main Street, she said.
You turn right here, out of the house, and just follow the road straight into Wyeth. It’s about three miles. They won’t be open now, but they put a telephone number on the door, for emergencies. It’s a building with a brown roof, like a Swiss chalet. You can’t miss it. You can call them from there.
Give me your cell phone, he said, suddenly completely lucid-sounding. It was shocking, hearing the words cell phone come from him, as if someone from the eighteenth century in doublet and ruff had stepped forward and started talking about Internet access and automobiles.
She wondered if he’d been putting her on, the voice part of whatever the wretched pathology was from which he suffered.
But he said to her then, in a malevolent whisper: Hurry.
In the kitchen, her legs wavered.
I’m looking for them, she said to him, gazing around frantically. There was her purse, on Peter’s chair.
Oh, Peter, she thought.
She shook out the contents of her purse, all of it falling to the tabletop, checkbook and wallet, compact and notebook—when had she last used a compact, she thought?—a litter of pens and pencils, an old hairbrush, white hairs threaded through its bristles. The keys, on a ring with a red rubber Buddha that stuck out its tongue when you pressed its stomach—a joke gift from Peter, because Ruth could never find her car keys in her bag—landed with a jingle.
How quickly her life seemed to be moving toward its end, she thought then. After so many years of glorious tedium, of day after day in the kitchen, of mowing the lawn and climbing the steps to this building on campus or that one, cheering the boys on from the sidelines, making love with Peter or quarreling with him, sitting at boring dinners with trustees who sometimes couldn’t be bothered to remember her name, after car tune-ups and dentist appointments, crowns on her teeth and new glasses for Peter and more daffodil bulbs in the garden … now it was all speeding up. That was how it would be, she thought. He would shoot her, and then he would take the car.
Oh, Peter, she thought.
On the porch, she held out the keys. The man had not moved, the gun still pointing at her, as if she’d been a retinal image on his eye, present even when she wasn’t there.
Cell phone? he said.
I don’t have one, she said. It was the truth. Peter had one, of course, but she’d never really needed one.
He looked at her, suspicious.
I know, she said. She felt stupidly embarrassed. But I just don’t.
He took the keys from her. Then Ruth watched, horribly mesmerized, as he kissed the barrel of the gun and laid it on the porch floor. He knelt beside it, and for an awful moment, she thought he would shoot her, then shoot the dog, then shoot himself. Why? Why, she thought? There was no logic to it! But he only scooped up the dog in his arms, and then stepped backward off the porch.
She waited. A moment later, she heard the car’s engine start, her old Subaru. She hoped there was gas in it.
She went back inside the kitchen. The smell of the cheese puffs came to her, powerfully—she smelled sage and Parmesan cheese and egg—and she ducked quickly to peer in the oven window, saw that they would burn in another minute.
A moment later, Charlie Finney was in the kitchen and had her by the arm. She thought that someone had seen the man with the dog, that Charlie had burst in to save her. Charlie! she said, but he put his arm around her shoulders as if to comfort her and led her out of the kitchen.
In the front hall, there was great confusion. Ruth stood still. People moved around her as if she had turned to stone or salt and could no longer see or hear them. They came and went, opening and closing doors. At first, she began to turn away from them all gathered in the hallway, as if to go back into the kitchen, to begin the day all over again.
Where had she been? She had been in the kitchen, eating a ham sandwich for lunch, Schumann’s “Tangled Dreams” playing, then the tornado warning on the radio. She had been in the bathtub, soaking her tired back. Asleep on the bed, on the sun-warmed bedspread. The clock had stopped. The lights had gone out.
In the cracked silver surface of the mirror over the table across the hall, she caught a glimpse of a figure—herself, still a stranger with her newly short hair. Her face was white, her eyes wide open, dark. But she knew there was no going back, no undoing what Charlie Finney was saying to her.
Ruth, he said. Ruth, it’s Peter.
The lilies on the table that she’d arranged earlier that afternoon, a blaze of orange trumpets, seemed now to be turning toward her, listening. People crossed around her, back and forth, the closet door opening and closing. Someone handed her a raincoat. Her purse.
Here’s your purse, Ruth, someone said.
Someone else took away the raincoat; she won’t need that.
Here, Ruth, I’ll hold the umbrella. Come this way, Ruth. All right? Oh, my god. Where did this storm come from?
It just blew in, someone said, didn’t it? They weren’t calling for it …
Is she all right? Let’s just get her there.
I can’t believe it, someone said. Two in one day. And Peter.
She was gratified, hearing that tone, the clear grief in it. It was Charlie Finney speaking. She turned to gaze at him.
He looked undone. Ruth? he said. His voice shook. Let me help you.
Outside the house, her car was gone, as if it had never been there. Standing in the gravel driveway, she staggered against the wind, so powerful it nearly knocked her over. A fierce joy seized her: the wetness against her face, the storm’s upwelling sound, the big trees creaking and swaying overhead, tattered leaves flying through the air, a strong, green, grassy smell. The light was otherworldly, a strange shine on everything, rocks and grass gleaming, glittering below the darkness bearing down from overhead.
Scattered drops fell, striking hard. The rain was nearly there.
God, she loved weather, she thought; she always had. Peter, too, hunched over the radar maps on his computer, or the two of them on the beach, holding hands, watching storms roll in across the Atlantic.
Holy cow, Peter would say. Holy smokes. Look at that, Ruth. Look at the size of that thing.
They’d felt it, that wild joy.
Except it was not joy she felt now. Instead something like slime was spreading over her, disgusting, horrifying. She suppressed a shiver, convulsed, swallowed, tried to contain it.
She was having a memory of happiness, she realized, not the thing itself. Once she had loved weather. Now no more for joy.
She’d known it was going to happen, hadn’t she? All day, she’d known it.
Overhead, the trees’ branches lashed against the dark sky. It was funny, she had said to Peter once, pencil poised over her crossword, that the meaning of the word lash—stroke, whip, shake—was so oddly contrary to its synonyms: tie, bind, fasten. She remembered this moment of puzzling discovery, because at the time Peter had looked up and recited, in its entirety, a poem by Alexander Pope.
She had stared at him, astonished. Peter didn’t know any poems. She was the one who knew all the poetry, had smugly quoted things to him over the years.
It’s the only one I know, he had said. We were taught it in English class.
He’d begun again, as if she’d said he couldn’t do it twice: True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.…
She couldn’t remember any more of it now, but it had had the word lash in it somewhere.
Peter had said the whole thing and then shrugged, returning to the newspaper.
She had been baking a cake that morning
. She remembered that moment now, the smell of the cake, a lemon pound cake, and her sense of satisfaction at having gotten it in the oven so early in the day. She wasn’t usually that organized. It had been a Sunday, and Peter had not gone to work … but they’d had something to do later, something unpleasant, so the day had been clouded by her awareness of that duty awaiting them, that interruption to their rare, lazy domesticity, that thing that had sat there glumly ahead, like a toad.
What had it been? Oh, yes. God, of course. A funeral. Peter’s old secretary, Ellen.
The rain was moments away. She could feel it. Lifting her head, she could smell it, too, a fox catching a scent.
For a moment she stood alone on the driveway, no one touching her. Then a car appeared. She waited, like a queen who had never done a thing for herself, while someone opened the car door for her. She got in and obediently fastened her seat belt. Somehow the car moved forward—who on earth was driving?
There was a sudden cracking noise overhead, and she ducked involuntarily, crying out: a branch struck the roof of the car as it pulled past the stone pillars.
It was Charlie Finney, at the wheel. Peter’s enemy, her enemy.
No, she thought. Let it be said at the end that she was truthful; she had no real reason to accuse him. Why not think of him as Peter’s friend, her friend?
Pater, he’d called Peter.
Perhaps he’d had no father, she thought, as she herself had had no mother, no father.
Poor Charlie Finney, she thought.
She left her hands in place in her lap, but she turned her face away from Charlie now: she wanted to be alone. A flash of lightning—a shuddering exposure—and the field across the street flared into view for an instant, the gap in the stone wall through which the hiker and his dog must have come, minutes before. The tops of the trees were bent over nearly parallel to the ground. Lightning flared again, illuminating a darkly shining horizon. She felt as if she were crouched down inside the mouth of a cave, peering out at the last sight of the world.
Then a second crash sounded, thunder this time, and the noise of something enormous dividing in the air. The rain began. The windshield before her face dissolved.