He went back upstairs and dressed her. It was hard work, dressing an unconscious person, and he found himself cursing her again. He apologized. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said. When he was finished dressing her, he stepped back. She looked sort of unkempt. Well, an evening spent tossing and turning in a truck before finally falling asleep was going to make a girl somewhat disheveled, now wasn’t it?
He took the truck keys from her pocket, put on his coat, and went outside. The snow was still coming down, gathering reassuring momentum. The nearest house was two hundred yards away, and while someone might have been able to see him in broad daylight, he was certainly unobserved now.
He pulled the truck into the garage, got out and closed the garage door. Leaving the truck’s motor running, he went to fetch Anna.
17
A snowplow humped along Main Street; a blade scraped the street now and again, sending a fountain of sparks in the air. I got out of my car and ran across the street to the telephone booth. Luck was with me; no one had ripped off the phone book. What luck? Parrish wasn’t listed.
I called Diane. She answered on the second ring, sounding sleepy.
“Diane, this is David.”
“Hi, David.”
She didn’t sound delighted to hear from me.
I told her that Anna had run away, that I was in a phone booth in downtown Newburg. Her response was a less than enthusiastic “Oh.”
“I’ve got to have Parrish’s address,” I said. “I think that’s where she was going.”
There was a long silence, and then Diane said, “David, I’m not giving you that information.”
Outside the phone booth, the storm was going wild, as though emphasizing the urgency of the moment.
“Information? I don’t want any fucking information. I just want to know where he lives.”
“You don’t sound reasonable. I don’t know what the problem is exactly, but I can guess. And I’m not going to endorse your insanity if you know what I mean.”
I lowered my voice. “I don’t have time to explain, but I’ve got to see her.”
“Story of your life,” Diane said. “I can’t be a party—”
A man’s voice suddenly boomed on the line, the no-nonsense voice of Charlie. “Livingston,” he said. “That you, Livingston?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
I did. It was late and getting later. I hung up the phone and dialed the hospital.
I opened the phone booth door and let the storm howl into the receiver as I spoke.
“Harmon Pharmacy here,” I shouted into the phone. “I’ve been trying to deliver these prescriptions Dr. Parrish ordered, but I can’t find the house.”
“I beg your pardon,” said a voice, timid enough to give me hope.
“The address I’ve got is one one two seven …” I held the receiver up into the obliging shriek of the wind, then spoke again. “I don’t know if I’ve got the wrong address or what, but I’m lost, and I don’t fancy driving around all night in this stuff. Could you read back the proper address?”
“I’m new here,” the voice said. I envisioned a white-haired woman—small, very small.
“I am going to have to forget this order if you can’t verify the address.”
“Just a minute, please.” She put the phone down with a thunk, and I heard her rummaging around. Then she came back on the line, her thin voice fat with satisfaction. “Here it is!” she shouted. “Twenty-seven fourteen Windover Street.”
“Twenty-seven fourteen!” I shouted. “No wonder I couldn’t find it. Look, thanks lady, thanks very much. Goodby.”
I got back in the car. I pulled a map of Newburg out of the glove compartment and studied it under the weak overhead light. Windover looked to be fifteen minutes away, just a short run through town and then a couple of lefts amid the stately, mapled streets of the rich.
I had the road to myself. The snowplow had vanished, leaving a wake of frozen waves. The plow had uncovered ice, and the car weaved past mired storefronts, ice-encrusted trees, darkened streetlights. The moment of elation, of having discovered my destination, was brief. The triumph went out of me, leaving nothing but foreboding. I was too late. I had always been too late.
18
It was done. Anna, once again in her long coat, slept peacefully in the truck’s cab, slept like a baby full of warm milk. Parrish had run the garden hose from the exhaust to the truck’s window and taped it in place, sealing the window airtight. A job well done.
He came back into the living room and sank into the armchair. Later there would be work, a hard, cold business with nerve-racking risks, but for the moment he could relax.
He stretched his arms over his head, smiled ruefully at the wine bottle on the coffee table. Anna’s little peace offering—her fancy wine. He picked up the bottle of wine and studied it. He was no connoisseur of wines, and Anna certainly wasn’t either. Still, it did have the look of something expensive.
He couldn’t pull the cork out with his fingers, but he managed to get a hold of it with his teeth and slowly work it out. Some of the wine spilled on his pants. Hardly elegant. He laughed at himself.
He poured the wine into his glass and held it to the light. It was dark red.
He had loved her. But he was a realist, like his father. Sometimes you had to amputate. Love doesn’t solve everything. “No way,” Parrish told the empty room.
The wine smelled like flowers, hot and sweet.
He sipped the wine slowly. It had a strange, sensual texture, seemed to move of its own accord, caressing his tongue, exploring his throat, his stomach.
His eyes fell on the white envelope on the table. Of course, it was what Anna had been holding in her hand when she came to the door. He lifted it up. The single word, IMPORTANT, was printed on the envelope.
Amused, Parrish addressed the room again, “Ah, let’s just see what’s important, shall we?”
There was a single page of ruled paper, and the handwriting was large and executed with care.
Parrish sipped the wine and read:
Dear Friends,
Please do not grieve for us. Richard and I have chosen to be with our baby. We have taken our earthly lives in order to be with him. There is no sin in this. We act with duty and love. I know that our baby, David, will be glad to see us, and I hope …
The letter slipped away from his fingers. The strength fled from his hands. Parrish discovered he could not stand up. It was as though invisible hands gripped his shoulders, dark angels held him down.
Anna—
19
It took three-quarters of an hour to get to twenty-seven fourteen Windover Street. It was a little after three in the morning. I brushed snow off the mailbox to read the numbers. The house was hidden amid plump, snowy evergreens.
The house was dark, unwelcoming. There were faint indentations leading up the walk, footsteps the snow was quickly erasing. I didn’t see Anna’s truck. Maybe I had been wrong about her destination.
My original sense of urgency had fled. I felt tired, stupid. I was tired of chasing Anna down, of trying to shore up the walls of a dream that I had slapped together out of plasterboard guilts and adolescent yearning. It was no good anymore.
But I had come the distance, propelled by a crazy sense of purpose, and so I put my head down and waded through the snow to the door. I knocked and waited, vaguely wondering what I would say when the door was opened by an irate Dr. Parrish, routed from sleep by a lovesick stranger. He wouldn’t be happy.
I knocked again, louder. I waited, snow melting down my collar. I reached down and turned the knob and the door swung open. I entered the room.
“Hello?” I called.
I saw him in the armchair then, and I knew he was dead but the fear that jumped in me had nothing to do with Parrish.
“Anna!” I shouted. “Anna!”
I ran through the house, shouting her name, upstairs, then downsta
irs again.
I stopped in the living room, holding myself very still, listening, as though some revelation, some inspired thought, would speak in the silence. That’s when I heard it: the truck’s engine.
I found her in the garage.
Anna was alive. I carried her upstairs, opened a window. She started to come around.
“My head hurts,” she said. Her face was grey, almost blue under her eyes.
I lifted her onto the bed and pulled the covers up around her. I said, “I want you to rest for a few minutes. I’ve got something I have to do. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
I went back to the living room. I didn’t look at Parrish. I left the house and drove my car back down Windover and parked it on a parallel street. Nobody was apt to remark on a car abandoned in inclement weather. I cut through a yard and discovered that I had gauged the distance pretty well. I came out on Windover about two hundred yards from the house and I was back inside Parrish’s fifteen minutes after I’d left.
I looked at Parrish this time. He was pressed back in the armchair, eyes closed, grinning. Some G-force, some acceleration of sudden death, had shoved him back in the chair, straightened his legs. I picked up the sheet of paper in his lap and read it. I read it twice, and then I understood it.
“You met your match,” I said to the corpse. “I could have told you. I could have told you about Anna Shockley. But you didn’t ask. You shrinks never ask the right questions.” I felt something slipping in my mind, some gear failing to engage as I stood in the living room, speaking to a man with a dried snail’s trail of blood issuing from one nostril, cheeks mottled with death’s purple hickies.
I sighed. The gear engaged. A heaviness that was the last of my sanity descended. “Hey, I’ve got to get things cleaned up here,” I said. I turned away from the corpse and got to work. I put Anna’s letter in my pocket. I emptied the wine bottle in the sink and turned the tap water on. I decided to take the empty bottle with me. I cleaned up as well as I could and went back upstairs.
Anna stirred in the passenger seat as we drove back to Walker’s. The truck moved with assurance through the snow, which was still falling relentlessly.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Anna said.
The words alarmed me. I turned and blinked at Anna. I had almost forgotten she was there, intent on navigating the treacherous night.
I looked at her. She looked very small, a dark mass of troubled hair and those large, surprised eyes peering over her drawn-up knees.
“I was just trying to do the right thing,” she said.
I laughed. A single, short laugh, involuntary as a sneeze, but it hooked a vast, absurd chain and the laughter rushed out of me. The truck caught the mood and swooped off the road, and my foot on the brake spun us around and we lurched to a stop facing the way we had come and the laughter wouldn’t stop.
Finally, wheezing, feeling the reawakening of boyhood asthma in my aching chest, I stopped laughing. I felt shaken by some cosmic mugger, my pockets turned out, emptied.
Anna looked alarmed. But she didn’t say anything.
I caught my breath and said, “Sorry.” I turned the truck around and drove on into the storm.
“Why did you laugh?” Anna asked.
I looked at her. She looked wary, maybe offended. I didn’t want to offend her.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just had a sort of revelation. Everything struck me funny. I realized—this isn’t gonna sound like the funniest joke you ever heard—but I just realized I was out of my depth.”
“You don’t love me anymore,” she said.
I looked at her again, and she was actually pouting, lower lip thrust forward in classic, kittenish pique. She looked quite sweet, actually. I didn’t have any more laughter in me, however.
“Anna, I love you.” I said it sternly, a reprimand, and her lower lip retreated. Resilient Anna, she smiled.
When I reached The Home, all the lights were on in the main building. During the night, a nurse had discovered that the drug cabinet had been broken into. An inventory had revealed the missing, lethal drug—a bedcheck revealed the missing Anna. Dr. Simms had sheepishly admitted to being the recipient of some questions on the matter of doctors and drugs, lethal and otherwise.
Walker had abandoned his customary calm. “A suicidal patient asks her doctor what prescription drugs are lethal, and he tells her?”
It was then that I came to the young man’s defense.
“Anna’s got a way with her,” I said.
Walker looked at me like I was crazy. Being crazy, I didn’t take offense.
Walker and his staff were glad to see us.
They put Anna to bed, and I had a chat with Walker. I told him everything. I asked him if he could drive me into Newburg in a couple of days so I could pick up my car. He said he thought he could do that.
Later that night, Anna tried to kill herself. She had made only the most limited progress, sawing on her wrist with a dull scissors, when a nurse discovered her.
I stayed at Walker’s on into December. Parrish’s death was big news. It was being called a suicide. I felt that a close look would discover some problems with this assessment. I felt a sense of deja vu—Larry all over again. And, again, no hue and cry arose. In Larry’s case, no investigation had been initiated because no one gave a damn. In Parrish’s case, I suspected a powerful father-in-law might have had something to do with the limited scope of the investigation. Dr. Solomon had a daughter to protect.
20
Kalso came out to visit me. He was carrying a couple of Christmas presents and looking hearty.
“Come on, open your present,” he said. “I see you didn’t get me anything, but that’s all right. You were always a thoughtless boy. Besides, it is better to give than to receive.”
I tore the wrapping paper off and discovered a framed photo of Anna—the one that had brought me back to Newburg. There was Anna in Walker’s kitchen, her dark eyes firing point-blank out of the light, the kitchen sink, the stacked dishes, the homey detail that surrounded her, fey child-queen in a straight-backed chair.
A sharp pain raced through me. Tears sprang in my eyes.
“Goddam it, Kalso,” I said. I got up and walked into the bathroom.
When I came back, Kalso said, “Time to move, David. Time to haul ass.”
“I just felt a little incongruous there for a moment,” I said. “Incongruous” was Kalso’s own beloved word, used to describe every misstep on life’s path.
Kalso nodded, pursed his lips judiciously. “I’m not kidding. Time to bust loose.”
“I know I can’t stay here.”
“I saw Diane last week. She says you are paralyzed. She says, ‘David isn’t happy with me. I can’t say anything to him. But you can, Robert. So go do it.’ I love Diane with a love almost heterosexual in its blind mawkishness. So here I am. Do you want to know why that photograph made you cry?”
“No. I’m tired of amateur shrinks.”
“Because it is the photograph that you have coveted all these long years. Anna in her place, locked in beauty, cultivated by distant desire. What keeps you here isn’t the real Anna. It’s guilt. You feel you have to make things right.”
“No, it’s not that simple,” I said.
“Then why are you staying here?”
“I don’t know. I have to figure that out.”
Kalso sighed. “You are an irritating boy. You are irritating because you make me feel wise by comparison, and wisdom always suggests age, and age suggests the mortal end. So you depress me a little, making me play the doddering old sage. Nonetheless, I will pass on one more piece of hard-won wisdom: Understanding isn’t worth shit. Understanding keeps the shrinks busy, distracts us from the great, thundering engines of time. We talk a lot of nonsense, wonder what it all means. But God isn’t happy with all this understanding bullshit. He considers it the wildest presumption. It isn’t why he put us here.”
“I didn’t know you were religious,” I said
.
Kalso ignored me. “We aren’t here to figure stuff out. We are here to learn about acceptance. Acceptance, David. Stop holding your breath. Just exhale. You’ll feel a lot better.”
Kalso left soon after that, left on that heavy, pontifical note.
Christmas came. I gave Anna a framed original illustration from The Summer Troll. She gave me a tie. The new year came. Anna didn’t try to kill herself again, but she wasn’t very happy. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It isn’t right.”
Then, one more miraculous time, Anna got well.
She had the volume turned up on the stereo and she was dancing in circles to “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” when I came into the living room. It was late afternoon, shadows long in the room. She threw her arms around me.
“David! I’m so happy,” she said.
It was news to me, but it appeared to be true. That wild, strong light was in her eyes again.
“I’m glad.”
She saw that I was baffled, and she laughed at my confusion.
“You don’t know. But I just learned myself.”
She told me the good news.
She had had a physical examination that morning. She was pregnant.
“Congratulations, Anna.” I could see it was the required thing to say.
“I hope it’s a boy,” Anna said. “Richard would have wanted a boy.”
“Anna …”
“I always loved Richard. He was hard to know, but he was strong. I couldn’t help loving him. I don’t know if you can understand that.”
On the contrary, despite the limited utility of understanding, I understood.
I left that week. I was holding nothing together. I could not tell myself that I was staying for Anna. Anna was happy without me, and one incongruity too many had robbed me of the proper emotional responses. A leafless tree, poking up through muddy ground, might suddenly strike me as tragic. I would want to cry. A beautiful sunset might fill me with rage. My responses were “inappropriate” as the gimlet-eyed professionals are wont to say. I left before anyone threw a net over me.
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