Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Janey and Tina were here all day. Zack, too.”

Another long blink.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so…,” he began, then stopped. “I’m sorry I made you worry about me. They wanted to do this down at the VA weeks ago,” he said, laying a hand on his chest.

Yes.

“You’re out of the woods, too. You know that, right?”

Yes. She knew.

“Maybe while we’re here they’ll fix everything. Make us young again.”

Her head moved to the side ever so slightly.

“You don’t want to be young again? Me neither. Make do with being alive, I guess.”

Yes.

He wanted to, he realized. Live, that is. For a while longer, anyway. For the last month or so he’d been wondering if maybe he’d lost his taste for it, but apparently not. Rub would have to muck out the basement of the old mill by himself, but he’d manage. So would Carl, at least until Sully could get back on his feet.

“Well,” said a voice behind him. “Look who’s up and disobeying orders.”

The older nurse was standing in the doorway. “Uh-oh,” he told Ruth. “The gig is up. This one’s going to throw me under the bus for sure.”

Small pressure from Ruth’s hand. Small, but not imaginary. Then they both let go.

A middle-aged man was leaning against the door to Sully’s room when the two nurses escorted him there, and it took Sully a moment to recognize his son. “You’re back,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you until Tuesday.”

“Keep moving,” the older nurse prodded, “before you fall over.” She looked at Peter. “Is he always like this?”

“Stubborn, you mean? Ornery? Cantankerous? Impossible?”

When the nurses had Sully tucked back into bed and they were alone, Peter said, “I can’t leave you alone for two minutes, can I.”

Sully ignored this. “I’ve got a job for you. I’d do it myself, but it could be a couple days before they let me go back to work.”

Peter was grinning at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You know where Rub lives?”

“Did he move?”

“Pick him up at seven. You know how to operate a backhoe?”

“Better than you.”

“Yeah?”

“In my sleep.”

“What?” Sully asked, because Peter was still grinning at him.

“I missed you, too,” he said.

“Good,” Sully told him, pleased to hear it. “I wasn’t sure you would.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. The oxygen, bless it, ran right through him. “How’d you know where I was?” it occurred to him to wonder, opening his eyes again when Peter didn’t respond.

The room was dark. Apparently he’d slept. Had he imagined the conversation with his son? No, he decided, it had been real. There was a hint of gray in the eastern sky. Another day, he thought. Sunday, in fact, and him around to see it. Imagine that.

—

IT HAD BEGUN to rain. Not violently, like the night before, but steadily, another drenching. Unless Raymer missed his guess, more of Hill would slalom into Dale by morning, Bath’s dead slip-sliding, in clear violation of their unspoken covenant, into the terrain of the living.

He parked behind the station and let himself in the back door. He would be inside just long enough to lock his gun and badge and SUV keys in the large bottom drawer of his desk so he wouldn’t have to come in tomorrow. He was turning the bolt when he heard a sound, and there, standing in the doorway, was Charice, her eyes swollen from crying. Tears for Jerome, of course, Raymer thought bitterly.

“There’s some things I need to say before you sneak off,” she told him, tossing his gym bag, which he’d left in her car the night before, onto the sofa.

Sneak off, he thought, hearing in that phrase a judgment. Well, he was sneaking off, wasn’t he, so maybe he deserved it. He motioned to a chair. “There’s no need to apologize—”

“Good,” she said, sitting down, “because I’m not.”

Raymer sat across from her, his desk and so much more between them. Charice, who was seldom at a loss for words, was silent so long that he began to wonder if she’d changed her mind and decided she had nothing to tell him after all.

“The first thing you have to understand,” she said at long last, “is that from the time we were little I’ve kept Jerome’s secrets. After our parents died, it was him and me against the world, you know? He was my protector. I was an adult before it finally occurred to me that I was protecting him more than he was me. ”

“When did you learn? About him and Becka?” In other words, for how many days, weeks and months had she sided with her brother when she might’ve sided with him?

“I knew from the start,” she told him, with unmistakable defiance. “He couldn’t wait to tell me. Like I said, him and me against the world. That’s the next thing you need to understand. Jerome? For him, this was no fling. It was love.”

Raymer didn’t doubt it, since his words were still ringing in his ears. We were so in love…You have no idea…Do you even know what it’s like to love somebody…I mean really love somebody…Do you even know what love is? And of course that single word on the florist’s card: Always. This had been seared into his brain much like the staple had been into his palm.

“He’d had a lot of girlfriends,” she continued, “but love was a completely new experience — and it was complicated by this crazy idea he had.”

“Which was?”

“He believed she’d cured him.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything. Of being Jerome. All his obsessions and anxieties? Gone. He didn’t need to perform his rituals anymore. The counting, touching, reciting, sanitizing. He might not act like it, but — deep down? — Jerome’s the most anxious, insecure man you’ve ever met.”

No, Raymer thought. I am. By far.

“You probably think he wanted me to move here so he could look after me, right? Not true. Whenever he has one of his panic attacks, I’m the only one who can help. Before I packed it in down home, I had a life. I was engaged to be married.”

“And you let that go?”

“Did I have a choice?”

Of course you did, Raymer thought, but he couldn’t help being moved by the fact that she thought she didn’t.

She chuckled mirthlessly, shaking her head. “That James Bond stuff? ‘The name is Bond’ ”—she was doing her brother’s voice now, and it was spooky how well she nailed it—“ ‘Jerome Bond.’ He did that as much for himself as for other people, the poor guy. But then just about everything he does is for other people.”

“And Becka cured him?”

“That’s what he believed.”

“And what do you believe?”

She shrugged. “A man who has to clean the bathroom twice a day his whole adult life suddenly doesn’t have to? The change was pretty dramatic. He kept saying, ‘For the first time in my life, I feel… well, as in not ill. When I’m with her I feel safe.’ I told him how crazy that sounded. I mean, here he was, six-six in his socks, strong as a bull, a pro at martial arts. And Becka was maybe five-eight? A hundred and twenty pounds? She made him feel safe? But you couldn’t talk to him. He felt what he felt. When she was around, he wasn’t tied up in his usual knots.”

“That’s exactly how she made me feel,” Raymer admitted.

“We fought, Jerome and me. For the first time in our lives. You wouldn’t believe how we fought.”

“Why?”

“Lots of reasons,” she said, causing Raymer to wonder if he might be one of them. It would’ve been nice to think he’d meant that much to her, at least. “I wasn’t a big fan of Becka’s.”