Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“That’s how we knew he was allergic,” Teresa said. “It was that first time.”

“How old was he then?” Caroline said. Caroline was standing behind them. They didn’t know she’d come back. Caroline was thinking of her own children. Had they all been stung by bees? She tried to remember.

Teresa closed her eyes. She was counting her children up, arranging them in her memory according to size. “He must have been seven. Albie was just trying to walk, so the girls would have been three and five. I think that’s right. Cal and Holly were playing in the backyard and I had the little ones inside. Four children on my own, it was really something. Do you girls have children?”

“Three,” Caroline said. “A boy and two girls.”

“Two boys,” Franny said.

“But they aren’t hers,” Fix said.

“Cal was stung by a bee,” Caroline said, trying to steer the ship.

“Medications?” the Latin girl asked.

Franny dug back into Teresa’s purse and pulled the two bottles she’d found on the sink in the bathroom, Lisinopril and Restoril.

Teresa looked at the orange plastic bottles on the desk and then looked at Franny.

“I thought they might ask,” Franny said, though maybe collecting medication had been overstepping. She wouldn’t want anyone going through her medicine cabinet.

“I always taught the girls to be thorough,” Fix said.

“Next of kin?”

They looked at each other. “Albie, I guess,” Franny said.

“Local?” the girl asked, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.

“Oh, me then. Frances Mehta.” She gave the girl her phone number.

“Relationship?”

“Stepdaughter,” Franny said.

“Wait,” Fix said. He was doing the math in his head, trying to figure out the right word for what Teresa and his daughter actually were to one another.

“That’s right,” Caroline said to the girl.

When she was finished with the forms, the girl at reception told them where to wait. “The nurse will come get you.”

“It needs to be soon,” Caroline said to her in that very direct way she was capable of. “She’s very sick.”

“I understand that, missus,” the girl said. The weight of her eyelashes was a burden to her. She looked like she was just about to fall asleep.

Franny wheeled Teresa and Caroline wheeled their father as far away from the television set as was possible. It was still light outside.

“You should go home now,” Teresa said when they were settled in their corner. “I’m here, they’ll come and get me. You don’t have to worry about me running out.”

“I’ll take Dad home,” Caroline said. “Then I’ll come back for Franny.”

“Too much traffic,” Fix said. “It’s better that we stay together, see this through. If I get sick they can always admit me. I like Torrance. Lots of cops used to live out here.”

“Finish your story,” Franny said to Teresa.

Fix answered instead. “I worked an accident once, a guy was stopped at a traffic light with his windows down and a bee flew in and stung him. That was that. His foot fell off the brake and the car went out into the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. He was probably already dead at that point. Nobody knew what had happened until the autopsy. I went back to the site a couple of days later, not that I was looking for a bee exactly, but I wanted to take a look around. There was a bottlebrush tree just before that traffic light and it was swarming. I mean half of it was bees.”

Teresa nodded, as if the story were perfectly relevant. “When Cal came in from the backyard he was dead white. I remember his little face, how terrified he was, and really, I thought it was Holly. They were always going after each other with rakes and brooms and I thought something had happened to her. I said, ‘Cal, where’s Holly?’ And when I started to turn away from him to go out to the yard to find her, he made this horrible high-pitched noise, like he was trying to suck air through a pinhole. He held his arm up to stop me and then he fell straight back. His lips were swelling, his hands. I went to pick him up and there was a bee on his shirt. The bee was right there on him, like someone who commits a murder and then sticks around.”

“It happens,” Fix said.

Caroline reached over and took her sister’s hand. No one would have thought a thing about it. They were listening to a terrible story, that was all. Franny wrapped her fingers around Caroline’s fingers.

“If it hadn’t been for that bee I feel sure he would have died when he was seven, but somehow I understood exactly what had happened. I was up and out the door like lightning. I had him in the car in two seconds. It isn’t far to the hospital, you know that, and in those days there wasn’t half the traffic. I just kept telling him to slow down, slow down and concentrate on breathing.”

“What did you do with the rest of them?” Caroline said.

“I left them there. I don’t think I even closed the door. Bert was so mad at me when I told him what had happened. I was scared to death at the time, but really I was proud of myself too. I’d saved Cal’s life! Bert said, you can’t leave children alone like that. You should have put them in the car. But Bert wasn’t there, and he thought I was a terrible mother anyway. If I’d rounded up all those kids and thrown them in the car Cal would have died. The doctor told me so. He told me how serious a bee sting was for Cal, and how the next time it would be even worse. But you can’t keep a boy inside for the rest of his life, at least not a boy like Cal. I was always on him about carrying his pills, and I had a vial of epinephrine and a syringe in the house, but Bert hadn’t brought the epinephrine to his parents’ house, and I doubt they would have known how to give the shot anyway. No one ever checked to make sure Cal had his pills.” Teresa shook her head. “I don’t blame Bert though. I used to but I don’t anymore. The things you really need are never there when you need them. I know that. It could have happened when he was home with me.”

“There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

“Bert swore he was going to cut down the orange trees in the back. They’re always covered in bees when they’re in bloom. He was in a rage about those trees, like they had done this to his son, but after a couple of days he forgot all about them. We all did.”

She stopped and looked around the place they were now. “The emergency room was in the back of the hospital in those days. It’s a lot nicer now. All of this is new.”

After the CAT scan and an examination, the doctor came out to talk to them. “Mr. Cousins?” he said to Fix.

“Nope,” Fix said.

This didn’t seem to trouble the doctor a bit. He was there to relay the news and so he went ahead. “It looks like Mrs. Cousins has a diverticular abscess in her sigmoid colon. We’re going to cool things down with antibiotics, give her something to keep her comfortable. We’ll watch her white blood count and fever through the night. Keep her NPO, then we’ll reexamine her in the morning and see how she’s doing. Has she been sick very long?”

Caroline looked at Franny. “Maybe three days?” Franny said.

The doctor nodded. He made a note in the file he carried, told them she had been transferred to a room, and then excused himself. They imagined him imagining their neglect. Why hadn’t they brought such a sick old woman to him sooner? There was no point in explaining themselves.

“Not cancer,” Teresa said to the Keatings when they came to tell her goodbye. “But it still looks like I’m going to have to spend the night.” She had a heart monitor now, an IV dripping into the back of her hand.