Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

“You said you’d pay my bills!”

“Annie, I said nothing of the sort.”

“You said you’d take care of me!”

“That’s right, I took you to the hospital...”

“What good is taking me to the hospital if you won’t pay my bills!”

“Annie, I can’t get into debt to a goddamn hospital!”

“Oh, but I can, right?”

“They’ll make some arrangement with you, I’m sure. They have ways of dealing with people who don’t have health insurance. I’ve already told them I’m not responsible for your bills.”

“You went back on your word, is what you mean.”

“I never said I’d...”

“You promise me one thing, and then you do another.”

“I did not promise...”

“You think I don’t know how much school teachers make?”

“A fortune, I’m sure. The point is...”

“Sure, joke about it. You always joke about it when it gets serious.”

“The point is I never said I’d pay your bills, and I’m not responsible for them now. I can’t stop you from leaving the hospital if you want to...”

“Damn right you can’t.”

“But if you want my advice...”

“Shove your advice.”

“... you’ll stay here till they’re sure they’ve got all the bugs.”

“I’m not staying here. I’m waiting for my discharge papers right this minute. You think I’m going to stay m a place that’s charging me a fortune for giving me medication I never asked for?”

“You were burning alive with fever and shaking yourself to death. Annie, what the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you see...?”

“Oh, now there’s something wrong with me. You break your word, so there’s something wrong with me. ”

“Look,” I said, “if you want to check out, check out. I can’t stop...”

“Fine, asshole,” she said. “Just go fuck yourself, okay?”

I stood there speechless, and then I nodded, and turned, and walked out of the room without saying goodbye. I did not begin crying until I was in the corridor outside. A woman was standing by the elevators down the hall. I turned away from her, and dried my eyes and my face with a clean white handkerchief. When the elevator arrived, I let the woman precede me into it. I looked off once down the corridor toward Annie’s room. Then I stepped into the car, and the doors closed.

When I told Maggie what had happened, she said, “Why didn’t you take her to a psychiatrist when I asked you to?”

“Because I really felt you were overreacting.”

“No, it’s because you didn’t want to hear she was sick, Andy.”

“That wasn’t it. Don’t you think I’d help Annie if I thought she needed help? I’d be the very first person to...”

“No, you’d be the very last person.”

“She’s my twin, Maggie. Of course I’d...”

“That’s right.”

“... help her. I’d do anything in my power to help her.”

“Your twin, yes,” Maggie said. “You’re afraid that if she’s nuts, you may be nuts, too.”

“No, Maggie, that’s not it,” I said.

“Then what is it, Andy?”

“That’s not it,” I said again.

By the summer of 1991, my mother had almost succeeded in murdering the Connecticut house. She never had it painted, never took care of any problems with running toilets or leaky roofs, never replaced broken or cracked flagstones in the walk leading to the front door, never patched gutters or leaders, allowed weeds to overcome and finally overthrow what had once been a vast green lawn, permitted yellow jackets to infest the turrets and gables, never had the chimneys cleaned or the trees pruned, just stood back from the house as if enjoying its slow and inevitable demise, as if watching my father himself dying in its stead. And when at last one night my father’s studio did in fact collapse to the ground in a horrendous thunder storm that almost destroyed the main house as well, she put the property on the market, and would have been content to sell it for a third of what it might have been worth had she lovingly nurtured it over the years.

By that summer, my mother could no longer convince any prospective New York renters that the house was worth occupying even on a week-to-week basis. When she invited Maggie and me up for the weekend, we were frankly surprised. We didn’t know she was even using the house anymore. But it was a sweltering day in the city, so we packed a bag, and caught an eleven-oh-five train from Grand Central, and were in Connecticut shortly after noon. A taxi dropped us at the house at twenty to one. My mother was already in a bathing suit.

“Hello, hello,” she said, “how was the ride up?”

“Easy,” I said, and took her hands, and kissed her on both cheeks. “Are we going to the beach?”

“Later.”

“Not me,” Maggie said. “Not today.”

“Come,” my mother said. “I have a surprise for you.”

The surprise was Annie.

I had not seen her since that day in the hospital, almost seven months ago, when she’d memorably advised me to go fuck myself. I wasn’t sure I was too tickled to see her now. She was wearing pink shorts and a purple tube-top blouse, her blond hair pulled to the back of her head in a pony tail, her face still festooned with all her little silver rings. Except for the ornaments, she looked much the way she’d looked when we were growing up together in this house, barefoot and suntanned, a big bashful grin on her face as she came down the steps from the porch, and opened her arms wide to me, and said, “I’m sorry, bro, forgive me.”

I hugged her close.

Maggie stood apart, watching us.

“Will you forgive me?” Annie asked. “Please? I don’t know what got into me, Andy, I really don’t. I never use such language, you know I don’t. I guess it was just the trauma of learning I had malaria, of all things... I mean, who gets malaria these days? And then discovering Sally Jean had let my HMO lapse like that, how could she have been so irresponsible? Please forgive me, Andy. Pretty please?”

“Twenty lashes,” I said. “Bread and water for a week.”

Annie laughed and hugged me close again, and then took my hands in both of hers, and held me at arms’ length and said, “Let me look at you. Have you put on weight?”

“Just a few pounds.”

“You should make sure he watches his diet, Magg.”

“You’re looking well,” Maggie said.

“Thanks,” my sister said. “Clean Maine living, you should come up sometime.”

My mother was standing by, listening to all this apprehensively, pleased now that Annie and I seemed to have put our differences behind us.

“So who’s for the beach?” she asked.

“I’m not a beach person,” Annie said.

“I just got my period,” Maggie said.

“Thank you for sharing that, darling,” my mother said. “Looks like you and me, Andrew. Are you game?”

The way Maggie later tells the story, my mother had left some white wine in the fridge and some sandwiches on the kitchen table. The women carry those out to the back of the house, and are sitting on the lawn, eating, drinking, chatting, when Annie mentions that she plans to take another trip sometime soon, for parts as yet unknown...

“I’m still doing research, in fact,” she says. “I thought I might go back to Sweden. The people there are very tolerant of religions not in the mainstream.”

“I’ve never been there,” Maggie says.

“You should go sometime. You’d enjoy it.”

“Will Sally Jean be going with you?”

“I haven’t seen Sally Jean for months now,” Annie says. “We had quite an argument, you know, about her letting my insurance lapse. She claimed she made all the payments when they came due, tried to put the blame on the company, can you believe it? I knew she was lying, she’s such a damn liar. I mean, it was bad enough I had to be in a hospital, the things I know about the health care system. But to have them doubt my word? To have them suspect me that way?”