by Jack Ketchum
“Love me?” she said.
“Uh-huh. You?”
“Uh-huh.”
We kissed again. She tasted the way she’d always tasted. Cancer and chemo had changed that for awhile.
“What a gorgeous day,” she said.
“It is.”
“You think she’ll stick around?”
“Who? Lily? I don’t know. Might.”
“Be nice to really meet her. Conscious, that is.”
She turned and I looped my arms around her waist and we bobbed together in the water. I glanced up at Lily, who had settled down into a crouch and seemed to be gazing at something overhead.
“You still want to live forever?” I said.
I don’t know why I remembered that just then. I said it very softly. I think I may have said it as a kind of prayer.
She nodded. “Today I do.”
We let ourselves dry in the sun and then dressed and climbed to the ledge. I only had to help her twice. When we arrived at the top Lily was gone, vanished.
We sat and smelled the roses.
I had her back for about five months before it started again. The nurses, the treatments, the bedsores blooming far more fiercely than before. The enemy now was the Stage Four ulcer, where the sore blazes through skin and subcutaneous tissue to the underlying fascia, a fibrous network between the tissue and the underlying structure of muscle, bone and tendon, burns like a self-made acid. And finally to the bones, the muscles and tendons themselves. I turned her, washed her, cleaned and dried her when she soiled the bed. Held her head while she vomited up breakfast into a plastic kidney-shaped pan.
She fought hard and so did I and we beat the rap again. By February she was on her feet moving with the aid of the walker.
But something was different this time.
She didn’t come back the way she had before. February turned to March and March into April and she still only rarely bothered to cook or do any cleaning or laundry and left the Electrolux to me—which initially, at least, came as a relief. I didn’t have to worry about her falling.
But she seemed suddenly obsessed with money.
Money we didn’t have.
Jack Pace was still selling steadily, sure. He had his audience. But it was clear that barring a miracle the guy was never going to make us rich. I tried writing a partial-and-outline of a serious novel and my agent couldn’t sell that damn thing at all. It remains in my drawer to this day, testament to two months’ wasted energy. In the meantime Rita kept talking about money. She’d got it into her head that the reason she couldn’t lay the cancer for once and for all was that we couldn’t afford the best doctors, the best-equipped hospitals, the most state-of-the-art treatments.
As gently as possible our own doctors assured us otherwise.
You didn’t beat bone cancer at this stage, it beat you.
It was only a matter of time.
“I don’t believe them,” she said. “They’re just watching their asses.”
“You believed them before. Why not now?”
“I just don’t, that’s all. Do you?”
“Yes. Look, Rita, we’ve both read up on the subject. We know what there is to know. Come on.”
“Books! Books and magazines! You’re not the one who’s dying.”
She apologized to me right off. She wasn’t trying to make me feel guilty.
She just was.
Guilty and sad and frustrated and fearful. Her own fear passed to me as simply as you’d hand someone a flower.
Over the months I watched her sink into listlessness and a kind of quiet that I knew was simply despair. There was no other word for it. She was quitting the world and she knew it. The world was leaving her behind.
It got so we barely talked. Our walks were usually short and mostly silent.
Like we were both just waiting for another axe to fall.
And I remember lying awake beside her late one night thinking about what she’d said on that other evening so long ago over Almaden white wine and pot, that what drove you was fear. That limitless time would have the power to take away that fear. That you wouldn’t have to grasp for things like money and protection if time was on your side.
That time would empty hospitals.
I cried myself to sleep that night. Because what we didn’t have was time. Not time nor money nor protection of any kind.
Nothing to take away the fear. Her own fear and mine. That it was going to happen again. And worse this time. Much worse. It had to—that was the nature of the disease. And maybe if we were lucky or unlucky a fourth time or a fifth until the bedsores were deep as potholes, until the bones powdered to chalk, until she mercifully gasped and died.
She was groping for protection from all that, from that long slow slide. That was what all the talk about money was about. It was all about protection, wasn’t it? Something I couldn’t provide.
But I think that strangely, mysteriously, somehow deep in the night we tend to work out solutions—or that our dreams work out solutions for us—to problems we can’t solve in the light of day or tossing sleepless in our beds at night. You wake up in the morning and sometimes you’ve got an answer.
That morning I had mine.
It frightened me, saddened me and God help me, it relieved me too.
Against all my expectations I thought that maybe Jack Pace might be able to save us both after all.
I forged the documents carefully.
It wasn’t very hard. All I needed was a xerox machine and my word-processor. I took from my files an innocuous letter from my agent announcing the enclosure of royalty statements to Wild Side, my third Jack Pace novel and another letter from ABC announcing the same book’s rejection as a made-for-TV-movie, pasted plain white paper over the texts of both leaving only the letterheads and signatures and then brought them into Plymouth and copied them onto two slightly different grades of Mail Boxes, Etc.’s best paper stock. I took them home and went to work.
About an hour later I had a letter from my agent confirming that per her phone call we did indeed have a deal for a TV series based on the novels at such and such an exhorbitant price and enclosing the letter from the ABC exec which outlined the deal. I tucked them in my drawer under some other papers to await the time.
It didn’t take long. It was a morning right after the Fourth of July weekend. Like most people I guess we get the usual number of phone solicitations unless we leave the answering machine on to screen them. And for a week or so I got purposely absent-minded about using it.
I don’t know what the woman on the other end was trying to sell me but I must have confused her plenty because as soon as she got started in on her free trial offer and money-back guarantee I started yelling you’re kidding! I can’t believe it! how much? into the handset because the timing was just perfect, there was Rita sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her watching me acting up a storm, and when I put down the receiver I shook my head like I was dumbstruck and by then she was across the room to me wondering what in hell was going on.
“Larry, what is it?”
More acting.
Like I was about to tell her. But then thought better of it.
“No. I want to wait,” I said. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. Let’s just say it’s good news. It could be really good news.”
“Larry!”
“Sorry. Call me superstitious. You tell somebody, you might screw the deal. Alice is sending me a memo. It’ll only take a couple of days, maybe a week or so.”
“A week? That’s not fair,” she said. “No way that’s fair!”
But she was smiling.
I let a week go by and then a few days more for good measure and they were happy days for us though I was sleeping very little and badly. She didn’t press me any more about the deal. I knew she wanted to but that was Rita—she’d trust me to let her know when the time came. There was no more talk about money and treatments, either. I worked on the novel as best I could
and we’d shop in town and go out for our walks and watch TV and read at night as though we hadn’t a care in the world nor any limit to our time at all.
“Let’s go up to Kaltsas’ pool,” I said. “I’ve got something I want to show you.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a kind of a trek.”
“Come on. You know you like it there.”
We’d just that morning had a series of rainshowers but now at nearly noon the sky was bright as crystal. You could still smell the rain in the grass.
I was afraid to wait any longer. Afraid the strain was showing.
“We’ll get wet,” she said.
I gave her a look and laughed.
“That never stopped you before. Remember?”
We hiked through our back yard over the hill and through the trees down to the water and then we walked upstream. The air was cool and still. Her cane clattered against the rocks. Our sneakers crunched the smooth gravel along the banks. We took it very slowly. I didn’t want to exhaust her.
The pool was high that day because of the rainshowers, the stream pouring wide and fast from the rocks above. We sat down to catch our breath.
“Can you manage the top?”
“I think so. I got all this way, I might as well give it a try. Just let me sit a few minutes. What is it you want me to see?”
“Show you when we get there, okay?”
“Okay.”
We sat until she was rested and then we started up. Midway to the ledge it began to rain again. Heavy at first and then fading fast. We waited under some birch trees until it stopped. A very long wait for me. But I suppose that by then Rita needed the break anyhow. Then the sun burned down again and water steamed off the rocks as we climbed.
I think now that I could not have gone through with it had it not been for the cat.
The cat and the roses.
My heart was pounding too hard, my hands were doing too much shaking.
My confidence was all gone and with it my resolve.
Then, Shhh. Wait, Rita said and nodded toward the ledge just ahead.
And there was Lily.
Sprawled across the steaming rock. Basking in the sun.
There’s something about the light here after a rain. I’d noticed it before but never so completely, never with such a shock of recognition. The light will plays tricks on your eyes and alter the color of things. Usually you’re barely aware of it. A rock will take on subtle shades of blue. There’s yellow in the leaves.
Lily was a white cat.
Yet here in this light she was green.
Green as the leaves overhead, as the tall grass in the valley down below us, as the leaves of the wild roses which I saw had finally attained the summit of my ledge and among which she was lying so that from where we stood at some distance it almost seemed that one bright splash of red was growing from the tip of her tail, growing out of her, red echoed in her eyes as though rose and cat and foliage surrounding were all of one nature burst from the earth, out of decay, out of foment and death which I saw in that moment was only the proper way of things after all. Rita was wrong. Not eternal life, never. Because only death and decay could breed life in the first place and though, like the roses, Rita and I could strive and climb on and on, the earth was intractable and without remedy and each of us was rooted there, in loam and dirt and crumbled stone.
The light shifted. We made our way.
We got to the top of the ledge and this time Lily stayed. A white cat again lying languid in the sun.
I showed Rita the letters. I watched hope brighten her face and then saw doubt. As though it couldn’t be true, we just weren’t that lucky. Look, I said. There’s the proof. There. It’s why I brought you here. And I pointed down to the valley below. All that, I said. It’s ours. I bought it a week ago. Look. We’ll build there when you’re better.
She turned and looked.
The rock was where I’d placed it days before.
I took it up and then I brought it down.
Thanks to McPheeters again for telling me about a dream of his, and of course, to Alan.
Gone
Seven-thirty and nobody at the door. No knock, no doorbell.
What am I? The wicked old witch from Hansel and Gretel?
The jack-o-lantern flickered out into the world from the window ledge, the jointed cardboard skeleton swayed dangling from the transom. Both there by way of invitation, which so far had been ignored. In a wooden salad bowl on the coffee table in front of her bite-sized Milky Ways and Mars Bars and Nestle’s Crunch winked at her reassuringly—crinkly gleaming foil-wrap and smooth shiny paper.
Buy candy, and they will come.
Don’t worry, she thought. Someone’ll show. It’s early yet.
But it wasn’t.
Not these days. At least that’s what she’d gathered from her window on Halloweens previous. By dark it was pretty much over on her block. When she was a kid they’d stayed out till eleven—twelve even. Roamed where they pleased. Nobody was afraid of strangers or razored apples or poisoned candy. Nobody’s mother or father lurked in attendance either. For everybody but the real toddlers, having mom and Dad around was ludicrous, unthinkable.
But by today’s standards, seven-thirty was late.
Somebody’ll come by. Don’t worry.
ET was over and NBC were doing a marathon Third Rock every half hour from now till ten. What Third Rock had to do with Halloween she didn’t know. Maybe there was a clue in the Mars Bars. But Third Rock was usually okay for a laugh now and then so she padded barefoot to the kitchen and poured herself a second dirty Stoli martini from the shaker in the fridge and lay back on the couch and picked at the olives and tried to settle in.
The waiting made her anxious, though. Thoughts nagged like scolding parents.
Why’d you let yourself in for this, idiot?
You knew it would hurt if they didn’t come.
You knew it would hurt if they did.
“You’ve got a no-win situation here,” she said.
She was talking to herself out loud now. Great.
It was a damn good question, though.
Years past, she’d avoided this. Turned off the porch light and the lights in the living room. Nobody home. Watched TV in the bedroom.
Maybe she should have done the same tonight.
But for her, holidays were all about children. Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve being the exceptions. Labor Day and the Presidents’ days and the rest didn’t even count—they weren’t real holidays. Christmas. That was Santa. Easter. The Easter Bunny. The Fourth of July. Firecrackers, sparklers, fireworks in the night sky. And none was more about kids than Halloween. Halloween was about dress-up and trick or treat. And trick or treat was children.
She’d shut out children for a very long time now.
She was trying to let them in.
It looked like they weren’t buying.
She didn’t know whether to be angry, laugh or cry.
She knew it was partly her fault. She’d been such a god damnmess.
People still talked about it. Talked about her. She knew they did. Was that why her house seemed to have PLAGUE painted on the door? Parents talking to their kids about the lady down the block? She could still walk by in a supermarket and stop somebody’s conversation dead in its tracks. Almost five years later and she still got that from time to time.
Five years—shy three months, really, because the afternoon had been in August—over which time the MISSING posters gradually came down off the store windows and trees and phone poles, the police had stopped coming round long before, her mother had gone from calling her over twice a day to only once a week—she could be glad of some things, anyhow—and long-suffering Stephen, sick of her sullenness, sick of her brooding, sick of her rages, had finally moved in with his dental assistant, a pretty little strawberry blonde named Shirley who reminded them both of the actress Shirley Jones.
The car was hers, the house was hers.
The house was empty.
Five years since the less than three minutes that changed everything.
All she’d done was forget the newspaper—a simple event, an inconsequential event, everybody did it once in a while—and then go back for it and come out of the 7-Eleven and the car was there with the passenger door open and Alice wasn’t. It had occured with all the impact of a bullet or head-on collision and nearly that fast.
Her three-year-old daughter, gone. Vanished. Not a soul in the lot. And she, Helen Teal, nee Mazik, went from preschool teacher, homemaker, wife and mother to the three p’s—psychoanalysis, Prozac and paralysis.
She took another sip of her martini. Not too much.
Just in case they came.
By nine-twenty-five Third Rock was wearing thin and she was considering a fourth and final dirty martini and then putting it to bed.
At nine-thirty a Ford commercial brought her close to tears.
There was this family, two kids in the back and mom and Dad in front and they were going somewhere with mom looking at the map and the kids peering over her shoulder and though she always clicked the MUTE button during the commercials and couldn’t tell what they were saying they were a happy family and you knew that.
To hell with it, she thought, one more, the goddamn night was practically breaking her heart here, and got up and went to the refrigerator.
She’d set the martini down and was headed for the hall to turn out the porch light, to give up the vigil, the night depressing her, the night a total loss finally, a total waste, when the doorbell rang.
She stepped back.
Teenagers, she thought. Uh-oh. They’d probably be the only ones out this late. With teenagers these days you never knew. Teens could be trouble. She turned and went to the window. The jack-o-lantern’s jagged carved top was caving slowly down into its body. It gave off a half-cooked musky aroma that pleased her. She felt excited and a little scared. She leaned over the windowsill and looked outside.