Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

“Sure.” He lied again. “Course.”

  “I’m so sick, honey,” she said, and pressed the flat of her hand to her chest.

  “I know,” he said softly. “I know you are, darlin’. It’s going to be all right, though. Papa’s going to make it all right.”

  “I have to lay down, honey.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I guess I better see somebody tomorrow if I’m not better.”

  “Sure,” he soothed, turning back the quilt and top sheet on the bed he’d made up with so much care. He helped her take her shoes off and pulled the covers over her once she lay down. “Now, isn’t that nice?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “You like it?”

  “It’s real nice, honey,” she whispered.

  “A house of your own.”

  “I’m so tired. Maybe you can call Bunny and ask her to come get me. I’ve never been tired like this before.”

  “It’s okay, though,” Bob said. “I’ll pour you a cup of tea.”

  He opened the Thermos he’d brought, but by the time he’d poured a cup Anita was asleep, breathing heavily. He could feel the heat rising off her. Should he wake her up and give her more aspirin? She seemed peaceful enough, though. And it wasn’t like she was going to get better. She could go very quickly, Gabriella Lewis had said. That would be the best thing. Maybe in her final sleep she’d dream of him: a joyful dream, a love poem. She’d be young again and wearing her gown, but in this dream she would be Miss Harrison County herself and not a runner-up, and he would lead her down the aisle on his arm, the satin sash across her bosom, the tiara of brilliants threaded through her hair. She would be weeping, leaning against him in the momentary weakness of her joy. And he would steady her.

  He pulled up an old cane bottom chair with a broken leg and ran his index finger over the pale veins in the back of her hand, veins he knew like a road map home. It was just the two of them now, him and Anita. It had never been just the two of them before. There had always been someone, Warren or Patrick or Doreen or Crystal. She hadn’t admired the place as much as he’d pictured, but she’d appreciated it in her own way, he was sure. She’d appreciated it and gone to sleep knowing him as a man of achievement. No one could take that away now. Once you knew something, you knew it.

  As he watched and stroked and settled more deeply into the weary old bones of his chair, Anita passed into a deepening fever sleep, and her lungs sounded like they were full of dishwashing detergent, bubbly and thick. He pressed her hand to his lips, stroked her forehead gently now and then. He sat and watched the shadows gather in the room and thought about him and Warren and Anita and all that had gone wrong, and all that had gone right, and it seemed to him that it had mostly been good.

  Anita was suspended in a well so dark and so deep she couldn’t tell which way was up, only that it was hot where she was, and airless. She sensed that she was drifting, but she wasn’t frightened by it, or even curious. She was working too hard to breathe.

  She heard Bob talking. What was he doing down here? The man had never been reliable, and now he was saying things that made no sense. It won’t be long before I’ll be there too, darlin’. And I’m thinking it’s going to be a nice place, all white, maybe, and clean and new and where all the walls and ceilings and floors meet without caulking, and the plumbing’s brand-new and the windows fit absolutely perfect. You think that’s how it’ll be, maybe, all white like that?

  Then Bunny was in the well too, or at least her voice was there saying the same thing over and over: Oh, my God. Anita would have liked to open her eyes, to ask Bunny what she was doing in this place, but she couldn’t seem to lift her eyelids she was so tired. She could hear, and she could breathe, but that was all, and the breathing was getting harder. It was like the atmosphere was turning to glue. Why would she be down there in a hot, airless well full of glue?

  Someone laid something cool on her forehead, cool and wet like paradise had arrived here on earth. Bunny. Bunny always knew what to do; her and Hack. So capable. So successful. You knew it just by looking at them. Not Anita, though. Not Bob. People like them had to struggle all their lives and still ended up in a dark, hot well, and she knew now that there wasn’t a damned thing she could have done to prevent it. She could have met Hack a thousand times over, and he would still have chosen someone else. She understood that from the time you were born you were given one thing to become—a great doctor, say, or a king. In Anita’s case, she was meant to love, even in the face of great trial. And so she had: She had loved Bob with all her might, through anger and disappointment, through famine and bitterness. She had done that for him, that one thing he needed so much. But she was finished now; she had been released in order to keep breathing. She heard someone weeping and felt the glue thickening in her lungs and fought for every single breath.

  She fought and she fought, and she failed, and she was so sorry.

  Then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

  Bunny stood at the foot of the bed, tears coursing unchecked down her face. If she and Hack had come earlier, right after Doreen’s phone call, they might have been able to save her. Should Bunny have sensed just how much trouble Anita was in? If a signal had come, it had been too weak for Bunny to hear over the din of her own troubles. Doreen had been frantic, but she’d been frantic before over things that meant nothing. It had been afternoon before Bunny finally asked Hack if he knew where Anita and Bob might be. To her surprise he seemed to know just where to go, and in minutes after dropping Crystal with Shirl, he and Bunny had been at the door of a small cabin way back in a lonely valley. She looked at Hack for an explanation, but he didn’t say anything, just pulled up next to Bob and Anita’s old car and, knocking, let them in the front door.

  Bunny could hear Anita’s terrible breathing the minute they were inside. She must have already been in a coma by then, though Bunny didn’t know that at first, only that Anita’s skin was pasty, hair soaked and oily against the pillow.

  “Jesus,” Hack had said, rushing to the bedside, pressing past Bob. “She’s drowning. Sit her up.” He pulled Anita up and propped pillows and rolled bedding under her. She moaned and slumped to one side without regaining consciousness.

  “Oh, my God,” Bunny said. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

  Bob stayed exactly where he was, rocking himself gently in a little three-legged chair by the side of the bed, watching Anita sink.

  “Cool her down,” Hack told Bunny. “Wet anything you can find. I’ll go find a phone and call an ambulance.”

  Bunny pulled the quilt off the bed, rushed into what passed for a tiny kitchen, and pumped the hand pump in the sink. The water came out clear and cold. When she laid a heavy swath of wet cloth over Anita’s forehead, Anita’s eyes flickered under the closed lids. Bunny whispered, “It’s okay, honey. I’m here.”

  But it wasn’t okay. When Bunny moved the wet cloth to put a new, cool length on Anita’s forehead, Anita twitched convulsively. Bunny jumped away, frightened.

  “I believe she’s going,” Bob said quietly. He stood, lifted one of Anita’s hands to his lips, and whispered, “Honey, you make sure you save me a place, ’cause I’ll be there soon myself.”

  Bunny laid her hand over Anita’s brow, as though she could will Anita to fight. For every labored breath of hers, Bunny drew three, fast and shallow until she started feeling faint. She held Anita’s free hand and keened a voiceless prayer: Let her stay here with me. But it was no good. Anita exhaled a convulsive breath, and her chest never rose again. Instead her eyes flew open, staring at Bunny. “Oh,” Bunny cried out. “Oh, no. Oh, my God.”

  Hack came around Bunny and closed Anita’s eyes with gentle fingertips. For the first time in years Bunny had no idea how long he’d been in the room.

  Hack leaned against the cabin doorjamb, his back to the room and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He’d stood beside Bob for a minute, then pressed his shoulder hard and walked away. In a world ordinarily filled with his o
wn noise, he didn’t have a thing to say.

  High up on the logging road, a siren wailed. Hack had stopped at the first house he’d come to and called 911.

  Now Bob fussed over Anita, crossing her hands over her bosom, turning her head slightly as though she were listening to celestial voices, straightening her legs. Bunny watched until she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Jesus Christ, Bob,” she hissed, “can’t you leave her alone? Just leave her the fuck alone.”

  “Bunny,” Hack warned, coming back into the room ahead of two paramedics wheeling a gurney.

  She walked out of the house and across the scrubby lawn to the little creek—Homesick Creek, Bob had called it. When someonedies, the angels sing to guide their spirit home, Shirl used to tell her when she was little, as though death were no more than a trip to Disneyland. Bunny knew now that that was a crock. No expression of wonder had filled Anita’s face, nor any glimmer of joy at being received at the Lord’s heavenly gates. Anita had simply left them, without drama, without moment, without recognition of her impending death. She died the way she had lived, underrecognized and without gratitude or celebration.

  It was June and warm. There was a fog bank looming like a solid wall just over the hill, but it wouldn’t reach this far back in the valley. Bunny slipped off her shoes and stepped into the creek, gasping at the cold. Underwater her feet were white and pretty, the toenails painted bright red just that morning. Anita had always admired Bunny’s feet. Her own third and fourth toes were fused together and she’d always kept them covered no matter what the circumstance or weather. Bunny hadn’t thought they were so bad, but Anita held on to that one vanity even after she’d gained so much weight and let the rest of herself go. Bunny should say something to somebody so Anita was buried with her feet covered. Whom did you tell about something like that, that Anita wouldn’t want to go through all eternity with her toes showing?

  The cold-water pain in Bunny’s feet was terrible, but she made herself stand it and stand it until the pain became unbearable and moved straight up into her heart.

  “Are you riding in the ambulance?” Hack asked Bob.

  “Yeah, I’ll ride.” He smoothed the sheet back over the bed. It had been tossed aside by the medics when they’d moved Anita onto the gurney.

  “Doreen called us,” Hack said, watching him. “She was afraid something had happened to you.”

  Outside, an ambulance door slammed.

  “You want us to tell her?” Hack said.

  “Yeah, you could tell her.”

  “Do you have some way of getting hold of Patrick?”

  “What? Naw, Nita’s got something somewhere about that.”

  One of the paramedics appeared in the doorway. “We’re ready, sir.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Hack clapped Bob on the back as he passed in front of him, thinking he’d never noticed before how small a man he was.

  Bob followed the paramedic to the ambulance. He was young, maybe Patrick’s age. What would Patrick and Doreen say when they heard Anita was gone? Doreen would be annoyed, probably, the girl not being one to see farther than the end of her own nose. Patrick now, Patrick might be different. The boy would suspect. He had seen Bob and Warren together once, in the woods where they’d gone to play. They’d been done and were cleaning themselves up, but Bob was sure Patrick had figured it out, his being eighteen by then. He’d stopped twenty feet away, stricken. Bob hadn’t said anything. What was there to say? The boy had fled without a word, blindly snapping twigs and tripping over ferns and roots. Next day he’d told Anita he’d enlisted in the army. Yes, when he heard about Anita, Patrick might figure things out. If Anita hadn’t already written to Patrick that Warren had died, Bob would keep it from him. Patrick didn’t need to know right now. Bob couldn’t have him knowing.

  What had Gabriella Lewis said? I don’t know if you pray at all, but if you do, this might be a good time to step things up a little . Well, all that was past now. Bob would have to stop by and see her one day, let her know that Anita was out of danger. He figured she’d be glad.

  Hack wondered how many deaths he had witnessed. Dozens, certainly. In Vietnam, death had waited around every bend in the road, in every jungle clearing, every town and field and paddy. You could kill with the most basic technology: a can of nails, a canister of fuel, a trip wire attached to a forty-year-old grenade. He once saw a soldier sheared in half by a spinning saw blade. Even the smallest child could carry a bomb.

  Death doesn’t hurt, Buddy. You should know that.

  It doesn’t?

  No.

  Well.

  It was brave of you, offering to tell the daughter like that.

  I figured it was my turn. Minna had to tell me.

  She loved you.

  Did she?

  Yes, Buddy, she did. Too much. It scared her. She’d never loved anyone like that before.

  Like what?

  So much it was hard to breathe after we were gone. Like being on the moon without a spacesuit.

  She never forgave me.

  She never blamed you in the first place.

  No?

  No. Only in your mind, Buddy.

  I don’t want to talk about that.

  She used to say people don’t mourn death; they mourn their inability to prevent it.

  Is that true?

  What do you think?

  Bunny watched Hack step out the cabin’s front door and come to her as she stood in the creek.

  “Are you all right?” he said when he reached her.

  “No.”

  “No,” he said. They went back to the cabin’s front door and sat side by side on the sill with their knees drawn up. Hack drew lines in the dirt with a twig. “Would it help to know that she wasn’t in pain?” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen people die in pain. That’s not what it looks like.”

  “Do you think she knew what was happening to her?”

  “I think she might have.”

  “Was she scared?”

  Hack ran a blade of grass over the toe of his boot, tracing the decorative stitching. “I don’t know. No.”

  Bunny drew a deep, shuddering breath. “I keep thinking I could have done something. I should have done something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Known, or something.”

  “Listen to me. No one could have known about this,” Hack said. “It happened way too fast.”

  “But what if we’d looked for them sooner?”

  “Don’t.”

  Bunny looked directly at him for the first time, imploring, her eyes swollen and her nose running.

  “Don’t do that,” Hack said. “What if.”

  “I can’t believe she’s gone.” Bunny dropped her head into her arms. Hack leaned against her, pressed into her a little more deeply with the length of himself.

  “Say something,” she said after a while.

  “You want a Kleenex?”

  Bunny gave a half laugh, half sob and held up a sodden tissue she’d held balled in her fist. “God, what I must look like.”

  “You look okay,” Hack said. And she did.

  “Everyone’s leaving,” she said.

  “Leaving?”

  “Leaving me.” Bunny turned to him bleakly. “Anita. Vinny. You.”

  “I’m right here.” Hack patted the doorsill.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know it’s not what you mean.”

  “You’re in love with that girl,” Bunny said. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “Look.” Hack pulled away from her. He could feel her stiffen beside him, lock her eyes on her shoes, fortify herself against more bad news. He pressed his thumb and index finger into his eyes.

  Tell her about me, Buddy. Tell her about me now.

  “There are some things you should probably know.”

  Anita’s body had been secured and covered with a sheet on the gurney in
side the ambulance. That was all right with Bob. In death the body was nothing, not Anita or anybody else. He thought about telling the paramedics that, but it was too much of a struggle to find the words. As they climbed the valley wall— no siren now, everything so still, so over—he knew he would never come back to this place again. The memories were that perfect.

  chapter eighteen

  Hack sat in Gabriella Lewis’s office at the public health clinic, relaxed and expansive. It was two weeks before Christmas, and he was feeling good, all things considered. There was no official reason to keep her informed about Bob’s case, but he had found her insights comforting in the past, and she always seemed glad to see him.

  “He’s not eating. Drinking, yeah, but not eating. You think that’s going to bring the AIDS on?” Hack asked.

  “I don’t know. It could. Or not. Even HIV positive people can die of other causes. He certainly doesn’t appear to be symptomatic.”

  “No. He ever tell you how he got the thing in the first place?”

  “We discussed it briefly.”

  “He said he got it when he gave blood a couple years ago, remember that, when the blood banks were so low?”

  Gabriella started to say something and then evidently changed her mind, saying simply, “Yes, I remember.”

  “He says you’re an archangel. Do you know what that’s all about?”

  “He’s thinking of the angel Gabriel, I suppose.” The nurse’s face was as soft and worn as chamois. She regarded Hack with some amusement.

  “Are you the archangel Gabriel?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” She smiled at the thought.

  “Well, don’t tell him that, because he thinks you’re keeping an eye on him and Anita.”

  “I suppose that’s harmless enough.”

  “You think this whole AIDS thing might be God’s way of getting back at us for fucking things up?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have an inside track into the thoughts of the Almighty. For what it’s worth, I think it has more to do with viral mutation. The granddaughter—how is she?”

  “Good—she’s good.” Hack had told Gabriella about Crystal, even brought her in one day so the nurse could meet her. “She and my wife have gotten real close, closer than she ever was with Vinny.”