Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“Lucky you,” Fix said. He was happy for her.

“Oh,” Teresa said, touching her untethered hand to her forehead. “Cancer. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. They’re giving me morphine now. I’m loopy.”

Fix gave a little wave to say it meant nothing.

“I’ll come back later tonight and check on you,” Franny said.

Teresa told her not to. “I talked to Albie. He’ll be here first thing in the morning. I’m going to sleep straight through until then. To tell you the truth I’m very tired. And anyway, you’ve come out here to be with your father, not me. I’ve eaten up half your day.”

“I just wish you could have had all of it,” Caroline said. “The second half was definitely better than the first.”

“We can wait here until you go to sleep,” Fix said, feeling both chivalrous and uncertain. He’d been in the wheelchair too long. He needed to get home and into his recliner. It had felt good to take someone else to the hospital for a change, to think of Teresa’s condition rather than his own. But pain was only going to be ignored for so long. It had come back on him with a baseball bat.

“I’m closing my eyes now. By the time you get to the door I’ll be asleep.” She smiled at Fix in his wheelchair and then, true to her word, closed her eyes. She should have married Fix Keating, that’s what she was thinking when sleep wrapped her up in its soft arms. Fix Keating was a good man. But he was sick now, and she was sick. How was she going to be able to take care of him?

Caroline and Franny wheeled Fix down to the elevator. They were in a different part of the hospital now, having come in through the emergency room and then traveled to the other side of the world to get to the patient rooms. When they came outside they were someplace they’d never seen before and it took Caroline a while to find the car. By the time they got the wheelchair in the trunk and found the exit to the parking lot, Fix was asleep in the front seat, leaving Franny to put the address to the Santa Monica house into her phone.

Neither Caroline nor Franny said anything for a long time. Maybe they were each waiting to be sure their father wasn’t going to hear them, but why? What had they done? Fix’s head fell back against the headrest. His mouth was open. If he hadn’t been snoring very lightly they might have wondered if he was dead.

“When she said that about Cal turning white, and then making a noise,” Caroline said.

Franny nodded. Kumar’s oldest son, Ravi, had asthma. There had been the summer at the lake in Wisconsin when she was clawing through his backpack trying to find the inhaler. The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing.

“It’s so hard to remember what I was thinking,” Caroline said. “Cal was already dead but I still felt like I could do something about it. I could make sure no one knew we’d given Albie the Benadryl. I could get the gun back to the car. Why did Cal have that goddamn gun?” Caroline said, turning to look at her. “Who leaves a gun in the car and never knows their teenaged son has it tied to his leg? And why did I care? Cal was dead and the gun didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up leaves so no one would notice what had happened.”

“We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.”

“I made it worse,” Caroline said.

Franny shook her head. “You couldn’t have made it worse. There isn’t anything worse.” She laid her forehead on the seat in front of her.

“Maybe I should have told her.”

“Told her what?”

“I don’t know, that Cal wasn’t alone, that we were all there with him when he died.”

“Holly and Jeanette were there too and they never told her. Or who knows, maybe they did. We have no idea what Teresa knows about what happened in Virginia.”

“Unless she goes to the movies this weekend.”

“Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”

Caroline and Franny lost their father’s eighty-third birthday. The traffic, which had been manageable driving over to Teresa’s, was at a standstill going out to the beach from Torrance, and so they got home well after dark. The consequence of their kindness was that Fix had been too long in his wheelchair and too long in the car. His pain radiated out to his feet and hands and into the bones of his face, though it was nothing like the pain that concentrated into the white-hot center of himself.

“Just let me go to sleep,” he said to Marjorie when they got him in the house. She had to bend over to hear him he had so little voice left. “I can’t stand this,” he said. He was tugging at his shirt, trying to get it off.

Marjorie helped him with the buttons. During the course of his illness, Fix had lost his reserves. He had no buffer to carry him through the unexpected. They had stayed out too long and now he was bone on bone.

“You were with Teresa Cousins?” Marjorie said to Franny, in the same way she might have said, You took him to South Central to smoke crack?

“Her son called right after we got out of the movie. She had to go to the hospital,” Franny said.

All she had to do was bring him home first. They were practically at the house when Albie called, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she was the one to make that decision, not Fix. “We didn’t know it was going to take this long.”

Caroline put a Lortab in a tiny spoonful of applesauce and gave it to her father. The pills were easier to swallow that way.

“Doesn’t she have her own family?” Marjorie had always been so patient with the girls, right from the beginning when Fix used to bring them over to her mother’s house to take them swimming. But dragging their dying father along on an errand of mercy for someone they didn’t know was tantamount to trying to kill him.

“She does,” Franny said. “But none of them live in town. Dad said he wanted to see her.”

“He didn’t know her. Why would he want to see her?” Marjorie ran her hands across the shoulders of his rumpled undershirt. “I’ll get you to bed,” she told him.

Franny looked at her sister, the two of them still standing in the den once Marjorie had rolled Fix away. “If there’s anything else I can fuck up today you let me know.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Caroline said, and rubbed her face. Neither of them had eaten and neither of them would. “You didn’t know. And anyway, we had to go, all three of us. We owed her that. I understand that it makes no sense to Marjorie, but even if it was a mistake, we owed it to Teresa.”

Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?”

“We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.

Caroline went up to the bedroom they shared to call Wharton and say goodnight. Franny went into the backyard to call Kumar.

“Did you find the checkbook?” Franny asked.

“I did, but you could have texted me back six hours ago when I asked you.”

“Really, I couldn’t have.” She yawned. “If you’d been here today you’d be overwhelmed with sympathy for me right now. Did the boys make it home from soccer practice okay?”

“I haven’t seen them,” Kumar said.

“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not up for it.”

“Ravi’s in the shower. Amit is pretending to do his homework on the computer but he switches over to some horrible video game whenever I stop watching him.”

“Are you watching him now?” Franny asked.

“I am,” her husband said.