Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“So you did say ‘soon.’ ‘Mommy will be home soon,’ you said.”

“Yes.”

“Even though you told me ‘in a while,’ you told my children I’d be coming home ‘soon.’”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And what’d they say back?”

“When I told them ‘soon’?”

“Yes. ‘Mommy’s coming home soon.’”

“Max nodded, you know, like a judge granting a motion. Allison looked at me, squinched her eyes together, and then she smiled.”

“Yes,” Linda said. “Good. Good.” She got hold of soft flesh under her thumbnail and worked it up and out. She put her thumb in her mouth as if it stung, then said something around it.

“I couldn’t hear you, Lin.”

“I said I was glad to be getting out of here soon. These people are all nuts. Whereas I,” she said, “am only tired. Ask my dad. And what should I know about Matthew?”

“He calls and talks to the kids.”

“Do they cry afterwards?”

“No. It’s always a very short call, and I think he keeps it light. They seem fine with it.”

“Do they ask when he’s coming home?”

“Not so far.”

“You’re lying, Dad. Lie, lie, lie. You’re telling me what you think I should hear. You know, I didn’t get terminally stupid to get myself locked away in here. I got crazy is all. I’m still smart enough to tell when you lie to me about the children, et cetera.”

“You’re not locked away, Lin. You admitted yourself — you know: you asked them to let you in. You wanted to be safe. You wanted to feel better. Nobody’s locking you in here.”

“Every door you go inside of, they can lock. It’s up to them .”

“That’s the paradox of psychiatric hospitals, I guess. People volunteer so they can feel safe. I imagine—”

“What is it that you imagine about me and my overdose and my children and my husband who left me and them and us and everybody else except some guy—”

“Oh, Lin, the guy couldn’t help it. Matthew couldn’t help it. He didn’t know who he was when you got married.”

“He knew. People know. They’re all too goddamned glad to tell you how they always knew and always felt and always wondered and always hoped. And then they met the guy, who was always knowing and feeling and whatevering and praying to meet my absolutely heterosexual husband and convert him.” She stopped and looked at me the way you would make an apologetic face to a stranger and ask if they knew the time. “Am I making any sense, Dad? Am I being logical?” She smiled a smile I knew from her childhood. “Did I just say it was Matthew’s fault or it wasn’t? I can’t remember. Was it he knew or he didn’t and the guy converted him? I mean, I know I’m making sense about possibly not making sense, but I’m not sure, at this juncture, whether Matthew volunteered to leave his wife and children and room and board and the meal plan plus activities fee, or whether he had this attack of not-heterosexual that kind of set fire to existence. At least as we know that we know it.”

She set her face close to the thumb tissue she was tearing. Two lunch tables over, the sad girl with dull blonde hair was leaning over her journal. A smiling man in aqua pajama bottoms, T-shirt, double-breasted blue suit coat, and aquamarine hospital slip-ons came into the room adjusting his dark blue beret. What had looked like a moustache seemed, as he passed our table, to be a double line of scab from deep cuts. Across the room, a very fat woman in a bright red bathrobe was using a hole puncher on the pages of a glossy magazine.

When she saw me watching, she waved. “Don’t worry,” she called, “I know to clean up after myself. I’m responsible.”

I waved back. Linda watched me. I shrugged at her. She said, “You didn’t answer.”

I almost muffled my sigh. I said, “To tell you the truth, Lin, I can’t remember the question.”

“Right,” she said. “Me, too. It’s the meds. They try and keep you stupid with pills here. It makes you more tractable. Was I a tractable child? Do you think I was a tractable wife?”

“I’m sure you were a fine wife.”

“And the other category I mentioned?”

“You were my beloved child. You still are.”

“Do you think I’d try and kill you, Dad?”

“No.”

“Do you think a child would ever try and kill her parents? His parents? You know: general, all-inclusive whoever the parents are the parents of? Do you think they’d try?”

My throat closed down and I shook my head.

She said, “Depressives or women whose husbands get converted to gay will often get very, very down on the anniversary of something bad that happened to them. You probably knew that.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t. But it makes sense.”

“Oh, it all makes sense,” she said, “if you renounce the logic you’re used to and accept either the word of your doctor or the policemen who took you away.”

“No one took you away, sweetheart. Remember? I came here with you.”

“And who’s to say you aren’t the cop?”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh,’” she said, in a deep tone. Then, in her own voice, she said, “Now, what could have happened five years ago to the day I was arrested and locked up?”

“You weren’t arrested, sweetheart.”

“No. All right. If not five years, then maybe three. Maybe it was only the one-year anniversary of the event. Who’s to say? Except your doctor or the cops. But in either case, what was it the anniversary of that flipped me out and I drank all that horrible whiskey — what was it, Dad?”

“Lagavulin.”

“Matthew’s favorite Scotch. Plus Ambien plus Darvocet plus precious, pure, and dependable Bayer baby aspirin. Puke City, huh? So: what was the question? Ah! Anniversaries. Well, the group and I have been pondering the matter. Did you know that it turns out I like group? I bore the asses off of them all, but I talk and talk and talk. And they’re so crazy, they’ll join in about anything after a while. So they pondered my pondering. And they decided it’s you, Dad.”

All I could say was, “Me?”

She gave me the toothy, unfelt grin. “I predicted you’d say that. Well, to be fair, I thought you’d say, ‘Who? Me?’ But that was close enough.”

“Linda,” I said, “me?”

The man with the beret and the suit coat was bleeding from the upper lip and it had dripped onto his T-shirt and the table he leaned over. A tall, fat nurse in a pink uniform held a little green towel to his face and helped him to stand. She led him out of the room. “Don’t you be dripping blood all over me ,” she told him.

Linda came around the table. She sat on the chair beside mine. I could smell her sweat and something salty and sweet at once. I was so tired, then, that I almost put my head on her shoulder. “Dad,” she said. “Daddy.”

“Sweetheart,” I said.

“You looked so bewildered.”

I nodded.

“I am, too,” she said.

“I know.”

“You do know.”

“I think I do, Lin. Matthew, and the children, and plain damned fatigue. It tears the wings off airplanes, you know. Metal stress fatigue. The plane looks fine and unless you examine it very, very closely, and often they don’t, it takes off and then a piece of the wing tears away.”

“The plane comes down,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And everyone on board is killed.”

I didn’t answer.

“And they reassemble all the little pieces they collected on the floor of some huge airplane hangar in Queens or Texas. They put it back together.”

“But not to fly it. Just to know.”

“Like here,” she said.