Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No. Here they help you get back up in the air.”

She leaned in close. Her breath had something like iodine on it, and the phlegm you smell on a sick, small child. “I don’t want to fly anymore,” she said.

“Sweetheart, they’re going to help you do whatever you want.”

“Can I still be married to Matthew? And he’ll love me,” she said.

I said, “I don’t know.”

“That’s not what you told your father.”

“What about my father?”

“You know. Shh.” She looked behind her, at the girl with the journal. She looked across the table toward the woman with the hole puncher, and the others, at farther tables with their visitors. She whispered, “When they cut off his leg.”

“That was diabetes, Lin. It was very bad, and he was old by then. His heart was in awful shape.”

She sat back. “And he asked you to help him.”

“Yes, he did.”

“And you said you thought he should die. He told me,” she said in very reasonable tones. “I know about it.”

“It was the night before the procedure — the amputation. He was very frightened, very upset. He hadn’t much hope. He told me he had already discussed it with his doctor. He’d told his doctor he didn’t think he wanted to live like that anymore. ‘Like this,’ he told me, and he pointed at the leg they were going to take. It caused him terrible pain. He was in pain all the time that we talked. And he had angina very badly, his heart was pretty much shot. He told me his doctor said, ‘All you have to do is stop taking the medication. I’ll write it up as heart failure.’ And he looked at me, Lin.”

She said, “Like this?” She stared with a cowlike innocence, and she looked silly. I shook my head. “Then like this?” She looked pointedly at me, just as my father had. I looked away. “Got you,” she said.

“So I told him I would help.”

“Help what?”

“Help take the medicines away, or pour them out into the sink, or whatever he wanted. I really didn’t have much of an idea. I just thought he was asking me for help, and I wanted him to know I would give it. Even if it meant I’d go to jail.”

“They’d have put you in jail?”

“If somebody wanted to accuse me of euthanasia, yes. It’s murder, or manslaughter, or something terrible. It means years and years in jail.”

“I am not staying here for years and years.”

“No. But you aren’t in jail, Lin. You’re in a hospital and you’re getting out soon to be with Max and Allison. You never told me you talked to my father about this.”

“After they cut off his leg and he didn’t stop taking his medicine. When he was alive until he died of old age.” Then her face was alight again, and she said, “But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he finally died of you .”

“We never talked about it again. I thought he’d forgotten.”

“Yes, but how can anybody really know you didn’t talk about it again and then what if you did it, Dad? You see?”

“Well, because I didn’t do it and he didn’t do it and he lived for several more months, almost a year.”

“Except he told me.”

“Told you what, Lin?”

“He said, ‘Harold wants me to die. Harold told me to stop taking my pills. My son Harold said he wants me to die.’”

“No.”

“He did. He told me. I was there with him and the nurse went out and he told me. I was his only grandchild, remember. He and I always talked.”

“Yes. He loved you plenty. But he couldn’t have said I wanted to kill him.”

“Wanted him to die, he said.”

“Yes. But I mean no , Lin. God. Sweetheart, once a person hears something like that about himself and somebody dead, he can’t fix it. I can’t fix that anymore.”

“Well, you heard it, Dad. So I guess it’s broken now because that’s what he said. And every time you think about Grandpa, you’ll think about him telling me how you wanted him to die. Maybe you weren’t clear when you and he had that conversation.”

“No,” I said, “maybe I didn’t make myself clear.”

The girl with the journal walked past us, reading her pages. She said, “Bye.”

“Bye-bye,” I said. “Good luck.”

“I guess maybe you wish I didn’t tell you about it,” Linda said.

“You told your group therapy session about it.”

“Oh, sure. We were wondering if it was the anniversary thing that could have flipped me out. Only, I couldn’t remember when Grandpa died. Whenever it was you did or didn’t kill him.”

“So why did you think it might have been some kind of anniversary, since you had no idea when it happened?”

She leaned in closer, until her shoulder fitted under my arm. She pushed up with her shoulder and I put my arm around her and hugged. “It’s a simple enough mistake to make,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“About me wanting to kill my father.”

“Right.”

“Right,” I said. “But it wasn’t an anniversary.”

“Good,” she said. “It would have been easier, if we could have blamed it on that. But good anyway.”

“Good,” I said. I looked at the hole puncher punching and the little scattering of glossy dots that lay across the woman’s table. She waved and nodded, and I waved back. I said, “I really think it was fatigue, Lin.”

“You’re saying my wings got tired.”

“It’s hard, staying up in the air.”

“Sometimes you have to come down,” she said. She said, “Okay.” She sat against me and then moved off to sit in a different chair at our table. She said, “Okay.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Buy Allison something pretty, Dad. Would you do that? I don’t know what. Just so it comes from me.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll find something.”

“And get Max something about ball. Any kind of ball. If it rolls or bounces, he wants to do it.”

“He’s a bouncer,” I said.

She yawned and shivered. “It’s late out, isn’t it?”

“Probably it feels like that,” I said, “because you’re tired.”

She closed her eyes and I remembered reading bedtime stories to her. Suddenly, her lids went up. She caught me looking. She said hoarsely, “We’ll find out for sure.”

“Find out what, Lin?”

“If you’re the one who goes to hospitals and visits people, then they die.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not.”

“Well, we’ll see,” she said.

HE KEPT HIS EYES closed because if he opened them he would see Murphy’s mad, bright stare. Since Marty Mason had been there, the bunchy, gleaming black dog had left his owner’s bedroom late each night to patrol the hallway outside the guest room and then the room itself, his claws ticking on the wooden floors while he investigated corners and spaces under furniture, his snuffling inspection punctuated by soft panting, as if he breathed in whispered tones on account of the hour. Then he would settle beside Mason’s bed and, head erect or laid on top of his extended paws, he would watch. He was ready, Mason knew, to slap his tail concussively against the bedroom floor if his owner’s guest should meet his devoted glare. Closing the guest bedroom door meant only that Murphy would scratch for admittance, whining softly until Mason opened the door so that the dog could check the room, then settle down to watch the guest.

After tonight’s long period of stillness, Mason lay between waking and sleep. He’d begun to think of himself as buoyed, like kelp or driftwood or a boat of shallow draft, on top of the waters of the cove. Now, at dawn, the radios of the lobster boats broke the rhythmic night noises — the regular panting of the dog interrupted by its small, strangled squirts of body gas, the rising tide and the slap of ocean on stone, the winds off the sea washing hard against the house — that had carried him out of nighttime and into the day.