Call If You Need Me (7 page)

“Good morning, children. Good morning, my loved ones.”

It’s true. That’s what their mother said to them. Then they were at the table, laughing about something, and one of the kids was banging his chair up and down, laughing.

“Michael, that’s enough,” Mary Rice said. “Finish your cereal, honey.”

In a minute, Mary Rice sent her kids out of the room to get themselves dressed for school. She began to hum as she cleaned a dish. I listened and, listening, I thought, I am a rich man. I have a wife who dreams something every night, who lies there beside me until she falls asleep and then she goes far away into some rich dream every night. Sometimes she dreams of horses and weather and people, and sometimes she even changes her sex in her dreams. I didn’t miss dreaming. I had her dreams to think about if I wanted to have a dream life. And I have a woman next door who sings or else hums all day long. All in all, I felt quite lucky.

I moved to the front window to watch the kids next door when they went out of their house to go to school. I saw Mary Rice kiss each of the children on the face, and I heard her say, “Good-bye, children.” Then she latched the screen, stood for a minute watching her children walk down the street, then turned and went back inside.

I knew her habits. She’d sleep in a few hours now—she didn’t sleep when she came in from her job at night, a little after five in the morning. The girl who baby-sat for her—Rosemary Bandel, a neighbor girl—would be waiting for her and would leave and go across the street to her own house. And then the lights would glow over at Mary Rice’s for the rest of the night. Sometimes, if her windows were open, like now, I’d hear classical piano music, and once I even heard Alexander Scourby reading
Great Expectations
.

Sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep—my wife sleeping and dreaming away beside me—I’d get up out of bed and go upstairs and sit at the table and listen to her music, or her talking records, and wait for her to pass behind a curtain or until I saw her standing behind the window shade. Once in a while the phone rang over there at some early and unlikely hour, but she always picked it up on the third ring.

The names of her children, I found out, were Michael and Susan. To my eye they were no different from any of the other neighborhood kids, except when I’d see them I’d think, you kids are lucky to have a mother who sings to you. You don’t need your father. Once they came to our door selling bath soap, and another time they came around selling seeds. We didn’t have a garden, of course not—how could anything grow where we lived—but I bought some seeds anyway, what the hell. And on Halloween they came to the door, always with their baby-sitter—their mother was working, of course—and I gave them candy bars and nodded to Rosemary Bandel.

My wife and I have lived in this neighborhood longer than anyone. We’ve seen almost everyone come and go. Mary Rice
and her husband and children moved in three years ago. Her husband worked for the telephone company as a lineman, and for a time he left every morning at seven o’clock and returned home in the evening at five. Then he stopped coming home at five. He came home later, or not at all.

My wife noticed it too. “I haven’t seen him home over there in three days,” she said.

“I haven’t either,” I said. I’d heard loud voices over there the other morning, and one or both of the children were crying.

Then at the market, my wife was told by the woman who lived on the other side of Mary Rice that Mary and her husband had separated. “He’s moved out on her and the children,” was what this woman said. “The son of a bitch.”

And then, not very long after, needing to support herself because her husband had quit his job and left town, Mary Rice had gone to work in this restaurant serving cocktails and, pretty soon, began staying up all night listening to music and talking records. And singing sometimes and humming other times. This same woman who lived next door to Mary Rice said she had enrolled in two correspondence courses from the university. She was making a new life for herself, this woman said, and the new life included her children too.

Winter was not so far away when I decided to put up the storm windows. When I was outside, using my ladder, those kids from next door, Michael and Susan, came charging out of the house with their dog and let the screen door bang shut behind them. They ran down the sidewalk in their coats, kicking piles of leaves.

Mary Rice came to the door and looked after them. Then she looked over at me.

“Hello there,” she said. “You’re getting ready for winter, I see.”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “It won’t be long.”

“No, it won’t,” she said. Then she waited a minute, as if she
was going to say something else. Then she said, “It was nice talking to you.”

“My pleasure,” I answered.

That was just before Thanksgiving. About a week later, when I went into the bedroom with my wife’s coffee and juice, she was already awake and sitting up and ready to tell me her dream. She patted the bed beside her, and I sat down.

“This is one for the book,” she said. “Listen to this if you want to hear something.”

“Go on,” I said. I took a sip from her cup and handed it to her. She closed both hands around it as if her hands were cold.

“We were on a ship,” she said.

“We’ve never been on a ship,” I said.

“I know that, but we were on a ship, a big ship, a cruise ship, I guess. We were in bed, a bunk or something, when somebody knocked at the door with a tray of cupcakes. They came in, left the cupcakes and went out. I got out of bed and went to get one of the cupcakes. I was hungry, you see, but when I touched the cupcake it burned the tips of my fingers. Then my toes began to curl up—like they do when you’re scared? And then I got back in bed but I heard loud music—it was Scriabin—and then somebody began to rattle glasses, hundreds of glasses, maybe thousands of glasses, all of them rattling at once. I woke you up and told you about it, and you said you’d go to see what it was. While you were gone I remember seeing the moon go by outside, go by the porthole, and then the ship must have turned or something. Then the moon came by again and lit up the whole room. Then you came back, still in your pajamas, and got back in bed and went back to sleep without saying a word. The moon was shining right outside the window and everything in the room seemed to gleam, but still you didn’t say anything. I remember feeling a little afraid of you for not saying anything, and my toes started curling again. Then I went back to sleep—and here I am. What do you think of that? Isn’t that some dream? God. What do you make of it? You didn’t
dream anything, did you?” She sipped from her coffee and watched me.

I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say, so all I said was that she had better put it in her notebook.

“God, I don’t know. They’re getting pretty weird. What do you think?”

“Put it in your book.”

Pretty soon it was Christmas. We bought a tree and put it up and on Christmas morning we exchanged gifts. Dotty bought me a new pair of mittens, a globe, and a subscription to
Smithsonian
magazine. I gave her a perfume—she blushed when she opened the little package—and a new nightgown. She hugged me. Then we drove across town to have dinner with some friends.

The weather became colder between Christmas and the first of the year. It snowed, and then it snowed again. Michael and Susan went outside long enough one day to build a snowman. They put a carrot in its mouth. At night I could see the glare of the TV in their bedroom window. Mary Rice kept going back and forth to work every evening, Rosemary came in to baby-sit, and every night and all night the lights burned over there.

On New Year’s Eve we drove across town to our friends’ for dinner again, played bridge, watched some TV and, promptly at midnight, opened a bottle of champagne. I shook hands with Harold and we smoked a cigar together. Then Dotty and I drove home.

But—and this is the beginning of the hard part—when we reached our neighborhood, the street was blocked off by two police cars. The lights on top of the cars revolved back and forth. Other cars, curious motorists, had stopped, and people had come out of their houses. Most of the people were dressed up and wearing topcoats, but there were a few people in nightclothes wearing heavy coats that they’d obviously put on in a hurry. Two fire engines were parked down the street. One of them sat
in our front yard, and the other was in Mary Rice’s driveway.

I gave the officer my name and said that we lived there, where the big truck was parked—“They’re in front of our house!” Dotty screamed—and the officer said we should park our car.

“What happened?” I said.

“I guess one of those space heaters caught on fire. That’s what somebody said, anyway. A couple of kids were in there. Three kids, counting the baby-sitter. She got out. The kids didn’t make it, I don’t guess. Smoke inhalation.”

We started walking down the street toward our house. Dotty walked close to me and held my arm. “Oh my God,” she said.

Up close to Mary Rice’s house, under the lights thrown up by the fire trucks, I could see a man standing on the roof holding a fire hose. But only a trickle of water came out of it now. The bedroom window was broken out, and in the bedroom I could see a man moving around in the room carrying something that could have been an ax. Then a man walked out the front door with something in his arms, and I saw it was those kids’ dog. And I felt terrible then.

A mobile TV unit from one of the local stations was there, and a man was operating a camera that he held over his shoulder. Neighbors huddled around. The engines in the trucks were running, and now and then voices came over speakers from inside the trucks. But none of the people watching were saying anything. I looked at them, and then I recognized Rosemary, who was standing with her mother and father with her mouth open. Then they brought the children down on stretchers, the firemen, big fellows wearing boots and coats and hats, men who looked indestructible and as if they could live another hundred years. They came outside, one on either end of the stretchers, carrying the children.

“Oh no,” said the people who stood watching. And then again, “Oh no. No,” someone cried.

They laid the stretchers on the ground. A man in a suit and wool cap stepped up and listened with a stethoscope for
a heartbeat on each of the children, and then nodded to the ambulance attendants, who stepped forward to pick up the stretchers.

At that moment a little car drove up and Mary Rice jumped out of the passenger side. She ran toward the men who were about to put the stretchers into the ambulance. “Put them down!” she yelled. “Put them down!”

And the attendants stopped what they were doing and put the stretchers down and then stood back. Mary Rice stood over her children and howled—yes, there’s no other word. People stepped back and then they moved forward again as she dropped to her knees in the snow beside the stretchers and put her hands on the face of one child and then the other.

The man in the suit with the stethoscope stepped forward and kneeled beside Mary Rice. Another man—it might have been the fire chief or else the assistant fire chief—signaled the attendants and then stepped up to Mary Rice and helped her up and put his arm around her shoulders. The man in the suit stood on the other side of her, but he didn’t touch her. The person who’d driven her home now walked up close to see what was going on, but he was only a scared-looking kid, a busboy or a dishwasher. He had no right to be there to witness Mary Rice’s grief and he knew it. He stood back away from people, keeping his eyes on the stretchers as the men put them into the back of the ambulance.

“No!” Mary Rice said and jumped toward the back of the ambulance as the stretchers were being put in.

I went up to her then—no one else was doing anything—and took her arm and said, “Mary, Mary Rice.”

She whirled on me and said, “I don’t know you, what do you
want
?” She brought her hand back and slapped me in the face. Then she got into the ambulance along with the attendants, and the ambulance moved down the street, sliding, its siren going off, as the people got out of the way.

I slept badly that night. And Dotty groaned in her sleep and turned again and again. I knew she was dreaming that she was somewhere far away from me all night. The next morning, I didn’t ask her what she’d dreamed, and she didn’t volunteer anything. But when I went in with her juice and coffee, she had her notebook on her lap along with a pen. She closed the pen up in the notebook and looked at me.

“What’s happening next door?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “The house is dark. There are tire marks all over the snow. The children’s bedroom window is broken out. That’s all. Nothing else. Except for that, the bedroom window, you wouldn’t know there’d been a fire. You wouldn’t know two children had died.”

“That poor woman,” Dotty said. “God, that poor, unfortunate woman. God help her. And us, too.”

From time to time that morning people in cars drove by slowly and looked at her house. Or else people came up to the front of the house, looked at the window, looked at how the snow had been churned up in front of the house, and then went on again. Toward noon I was looking out the window when a station wagon drove up and parked. Mary Rice and her former husband, the children’s father, got out and went toward the house. They moved slowly, and the man took her arm as they went up the steps. The porch door stood open from the night before. She went inside first. Then he went in.

That night on the local news we saw the whole thing going on again. “I can’t watch this,” Dotty said, but she watched anyway, just like I did. The film showed Mary Rice’s house and a man on the roof with a hose spraying water down through the broken window. Then the children were shown being carried out, and again we watched Mary Rice dropping to her knees. Then, as the stretchers are being put into the ambulance, Mary Rice whirls on somebody and screams, “What do you
want
?”

At noon the next day the station wagon drove up in front of
the house. As soon as it was parked, before the man could even turn off the engine, Mary Rice came down the steps. The man got out of the car, said “Hello, Mary,” and opened the passenger’s door for her. Then they went off to the funeral.