Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

“Yeah. Of course it’s Jerry. Who’d you think it was?” Amelia let her foot off the clutch, and the car lurched into the lower gear. “Sorry. That was rude. I’m really sorry. I mean, we’re on pins and needles here. I’m a damn mess, is what it is. Yvonne’s a mess, too.”

“What is it? What’s going on?” There was another pause for the transatlantic long distance or for her brother’s hesitation. “Is it Catherine?”

“Yes, of course it’s Catherine. She’s taken a bad turn. The doctors have been saying that…actually, I don’t really know what they’ve been saying. It’s all a jumble to me. But like I say, she’s worse. Now her kidneys aren’t working. And that’s on top of everything else. The pneumonia. But I’m not saying you should come here. I’m not saying that.”

“Of course I’ll come,” Amelia said to her brother. “I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

“Thanks,” he said. “We could use some bucking up.” Amelia heard another voice in the background, and then her brother said goodbye and broke off the connection.

As soon as she had parked close to the villa, she emptied herself out of the car, looked at the package of cigarettes in her hand, and went inside. The table had been set, and Gwyneth and Jack were waiting for her on the sofa, both of them beautiful and radiant. This world was paradise, after all, when your son and his girlfriend, healthy and in love with each other, cooked dinner for you inside a cool dark Italian villa, and you could worry all day about a line of poetry that you couldn’t translate properly, and you could be annoyed by simpleton American tourists. To be bothered by trivialities was sheer heaven.

“Momma,” Jack said. “What happened to you?”

“Your cousin Catherine’s worse,” Amelia said, tossing the cigarettes onto a side table, as if she’d never bought them. “I’m going to have to fly to Minneapolis. You two will have to hold down the fort here for a few days. Can you do that? I’ll even leave you the Fiat if you drive me to the airport.”

Jack nodded. Gwyneth rose and walked over to Amelia, taking her hand as if she were offering preliminary condolences. “Do you still want dinner?” she asked. The girl gave off a musky odor, and her face was slightly flushed and sleepy; naturally they’d had quick sex in Amelia’s absence, and now they’d be soft and cuddly and compliant.

“Of course,” Amelia said. “Of course, of course. And let’s get drunk. Okay? Are you willing to do that?”

They all laughed. Laughing, Jack asked, “So what’s Catherine worse with?”

“She’s dying,” Amelia said. “She can’t breathe. That’s what she’s worse with.”

—

Although she loved him, of course, Amelia didn’t like her brother very much, mostly because of his employment situation. He worked for a Minneapolis real estate tycoon, Ben Schneiderman, a feral-looking man barely over five feet tall, whose customary expression —Amelia had met him once — was one of superpredatory avarice that mingled from time to time with his one other singular expression, massive sleepy indifference whenever matters of common human experience, those that were not for sale, were exposed to him. Schneiderman had run several newspapers into the ground, bought and sold a few major league teams, and built multiple granite-and-glass high-rises and shopping malls. His wife, Bitsy Christianson, was a patron of the arts. Their personal website (and editorial sounding board) was www.whatsi ttoyou.com. They owned eight or nine homes. Schneiderman had said many times that his motto was I never suffer. And neither should you. Jerry served as the primary consigliere for Schneiderman’s various enterprises and spent much of his life on a private jet, scurrying from one financial brush fire to another. He negotiated, threatened, and placated. Amelia’s brother was balding from all the stress and had taken to brushing his remaining hair, like tendrils or waterweeds, across the top of his scalp.

And of course there was the other thing: Jerry supported his sister financially. Some of Schneiderman’s money trickled down to her. He had paid for Jack’s private schools in Switzerland and Italy. Her brother’s charity was Amelia’s safety net, along with alimony from Jack’s father, the man who had caused Amelia to swear off love forever. Well, no one’s hands were clean.

But now, in the St. Mary’s Hospital’s ICU, while Yvonne sat next to the bed holding her daughter’s hand, Jerry leaned back against the window, and the blank stare on his face showed Amelia exactly how inwardly broken her brother actually was. She went up to him and hugged him and pecked him on the cheek and quickly did the same to Yvonne, whose cheeks were tear-streaked. In the bed, her niece seemed to be gasping for breath. Another man was in the room, introduced to Amelia as the child’s pediatrician, Dr. Elijah Jones, who wore rainbow suspenders with cartoon faces on them. Everybody thanked Amelia for coming.

“Anyone would have done it,” she said. “You would have done it for me, if Jack, God forbid, got sick. Where’s Gerald?” Gerald was Catherine’s little brother.

“He’s home with the babysitter,” Jerry said, with a sigh. “The poor kid. We’ve been neglecting him. Can’t be helped.”

The pediatrician, after a few pleasantries, took Amelia down the hall and told her that her brother needed as much comfort and solace as she could give him, and that it was a good thing she was there. He pulled off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his Donald Duck necktie. He explained about the gradual impairment of Catherine’s muscular control. Amelia nodded. “You have to try to love everybody,” the doctor said, embarrassed but also in earnest, as he smiled sadly. “They all need it. All of them.” When Amelia asked about the prognosis, the doctor shrugged. “Your brother and sister-in-law have been holding on. They’re the ones I’m worried about. Your niece…well, we’re doing everything we can.”

She left the hospital with her heart pounding. She had always desperately loved pediatricians.

—

So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another, Amelia found herself at two a.m. walking outside her hotel and then along the Mississippi River. Catherine had been a beautiful baby but had been sickly, and, like Sorovinct’s son, she had multiple afflictions that had prevented her from growing into adolescence. She had remained a child for her entire life. One time when Amelia had been visiting, Catherine had approached her with a calendar she’d made herself with a ruler and crayons. Two pages: the months of April and May. Her niece had listed a price for the calendar at the top: fifty cents for each page. Amelia had bought the two calendar months and taken them home and put them up on the refrigerator, only to discover that they were inaccurate and in some sense imaginary. Her niece had filled in the date boxes any way she wanted to. They were surrealist calendars, with dates that would never exist: Tuesday, May 14, 2011, for example. Wednesday, May 15. There would never be such days.

Amelia had loved Catherine. Why should such a child suffer? Or any child? Sitting on a bench that looked out at the Stone Arch Bridge, Amelia thought of Ivan Karamazov speaking of the suffering of children and saying, “I don’t understand anything, and I don’t want to understand anything,” and as the river flowed past her on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico, she leaned forward and put her head in her hands before straightening up again to wipe her face free of the tears that had accumulated there. Lucky me with my son, Jack; lucky Jack with his girlfriend; lucky me, she thought, and if I could only share my luck with everybody, every living soul, I would.