Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The garage was open.

He took her into the garage and kicked an old pile of rags into place with one foot and then laid her gently on the rags. She whimpered again in pain, and he wondered, What shall I do? Jesus Christ, what shall I do?

“Amanda!” he shouted, and then remembered he had not seen the station wagon in the driveway. “Kate! Kate!” There was no answer. Her blood was spreading into the rags, staining them a bright red, her life was draining out of her as she whimpered in pain, and he thought, I’m alone in the house, I’ll call Julia, Julia will know what to do, Julia will help me, Julia.

And the dog whimpered again.

And he knew there was no time to call Julia, no time to pick up a phone and dial her number and explain about Beverly who was bleeding and dying and ask her to come over to help him, Help me, Julia, he thought, and knew Julia could not help him, no one could help him now, he was Matthew Anson Bridges, alone with a bleeding dog in an empty house, alone.

She died before his eyes. She died swiftly. He closed his eyes, and stood over her with his head bent.

He had not cried when his mother died and they walked through the stifling hot sunshine in Glen City, he had not cried when they lowered his father into his grave and cousin Birdie took a yellow handkerchief from her black purse, he had not cried. Now, standing over the dead dog with his eyes shut, the first tear came.

It squeezed from his closed lids, and he felt it slipping down his cheek, swift and hot. And then, as if this single tear released a larger flow inside him, he began trembling, and his shoulders shook, and he opened his eyes and looked down at the lifeless dog, and began to cry unashamedly and openly, began to cry in great chest-racking sobs because something he had loved very dearly was gone.

He accepted the death.

At long last, he accepted the death, and he cried brokenly in the stillness of the garage.

She saw Matthew’s car parked on the side of the road just ahead of their driveway, and she was puzzled for a moment, but not alarmed. She seemed to be driving effortlessly, the wheel in her hands seemed to move of its own accord as she sat with her thoughts and wondered what she had done to her daughter, wondered what it was she really wanted of her life, thinking quite logically and calmly as she had been thinking for the past hour while driving slowly and effortlessly. She turned into the driveway. A lassitude seemed to have come over her, a resignation perhaps, and yet there was no sadness in the resignation, there was instead a sort of peace. She saw the bloodstains on the garage floor as she made the turn. When she got out of the car, she saw the pile of bloodied rags.

“Matthew!” she called.

He did not answer. She listened for a moment and heard an odd sound behind the house, a scraping sound, coming from out back near the brook. A frown came onto her forehead. She quickened her pace and went around the house.

He was standing silhouetted against the slope of the land, beside the brook, a shovel in his hands, digging silently. She walked to where he was working.

“Hello, Amanda,” he said. He put the shovel down and looked at her, and then very softly said, “Beverly’s dead. I think she got hold of some poison.”

Amanda nodded. She could not think of anything to say to him.

“I was just burying her,” he said. “I thought this would be a good spot, here by the brook.”

“Yes, that’s a good spot, Matthew,” she said.

He picked up the shovel and began digging again. He had wrapped the dog in a tarpaulin, and she lay beside the half-dug grave as he worked.

“I went for a drive,” Amanda said.

“Yes, I did, too.”

He had been crying, she could see that. His eyes were puffed and red-rimmed, there were streaks on his face. She wanted suddenly to touch his face.

“Matthew,” she said, “do you love me?”

She asked the question as if it had been on her mind for a very long time. The words sounded curiously young in the stillness of the day. The brook was the only other sound as Matthew worked with the shovel, and heard her words, and stopped digging, and looked up at her suddenly and with surprise, surprise at her question, and then another curious sort of surprise as he gave his answer, as if his answer were unexpected and startling even to himself.

“Amanda, I love you more than anything in this world,” he said.

She nodded as if she had always known. She lowered her eyes.

“Didn’t you know that, Amanda?” he asked.

She did not answer. She kept looking at the ground. When he stooped to pick up the dog, she said quickly, “Let me help you.”

She took one end of the tarpaulin, and together they lowered the dog gently into the shallow grave. Matthew gave a curious, uncompleted shrug, and then began shoveling the earth back again.

“Where will we go, Matthew?” she asked.

“Wherever we want to,” he said.

“Because... I’d like to go, Matthew. I’d like very much to go with you,” she said.

The trip didn’t matter any more, it didn’t seem as important any more, but he took her hand and smiled limply and said, “All right, Amanda.”

She began shivering in the automobile.

The top was down, and the Talmadge countryside blurred by on either side of the road, and overhead the giant old trees arced, and wind rushed past the car and over it, and she began trembling.

She said, “What am I doing wrong, Mrs. Regan? I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”

And Julia, sitting beside her, driving in the direction of Lake Abundance, took one hand off the wheel and patted her gently on the knee, and tried to console her. The sky overhead had turned a clear startling blue, cloudless. The countryside was rich and orderly, the old homes, the wide vista of lawns, a peacefulness seemed to pervade the landscape, and in the car a young girl trembled and an old woman tried to understand what was happening.

“She said ‘daughter,’” Kate said. “‘Daughter’ and I felt hatred. Why should... why is she pushing me this way? I don’t want to! I want to live my own... my own... daughter! I hate that word! If she’s my mother, why doesn’t she understand?”

“She was trying to understand,” Julia said. “I’m sure she’s only thinking of what’s best for you.”

“It’s best to leave me alone!” Kate said. There was anger and desperation in her voice. “If she were my mother, if she...”

“She is your mother,” Julia said.

“Then why can’t we... she sat there, she sat there like a rock and she said, ‘I want, I want, I want!’ Well, what about what I want? Me! Isn’t that important? I’m getting... my head is burning, it’s... everything is rushing inside. I feel as if...”

“Kate, now stop it!”

“She hit him,” Kate said. “She hit him, and then she sat like a rock and told me what to do, told me cold and... I didn’t know her, she was... her face was different. I looked at her, and I didn’t recognize her, she was just another... another woman sitting there, cold, cold, nothing... my father... they ran, everybody ran... there’s no one there, I feel... oh, everything burning! Oh!” She covered her face with her hands. She would not let the tears come, confusion, everything was confusion, she knew she would lose her mind, she knew without doubt.

The car raced along the Talmadge roads, Julia’s foot pressed tight to the accelerator as if absorbing Kate’s tension and translating it to speed. She sat beside Kate, and she thought, This is what it’s like to have a daughter, and she took one hand from the wheel and squeezed Kate’s hand, and then recovered the wheel again immediately when she saw the car ahead of her. Kate looked up and through the windshield as Julia prepared to overtake and pass.