In a haze he burst out, dripping. His shirt around his shoulders felt cold instantly in the air and he wanted to be submerged again. She was a sacrificial lamb; she was both great and small. He adored her. Dear friend.
She could hold him under; he would not protest. Instead she studied him with a serious expression,
frowning.
“I can, you know,” she said. “You can?” he asked stupidly.
He carried her upstairs, and only later went back for her chair.
It was the emotion of it that was piercing, a thing he could not have known. He would have guessed it would be difficult, the rawness of what was missing. Instead he was suffused by a sharp, rending emotion, unidentifiable to him. With Beth there had been warmth, but not this extremeness, tearing and erotic. Was it the effect of the pills? Afterward sleep together was like being in the water, where there was hardly a line between them. But then daylight was bleak. He raised himself on an elbow and gazed down. She was lovely at the top, fresh: down and down further she was sleek and firm: then she wasted into pale angles and bone. He felt sad and furtive. He should not be seeing this.
She was awake and studying his expression.
“I need to get out of here,” she said. “Right away.”
He helped her to her chair and waited while she used the bathroom; they rode down in the elevator, saying little. Her car was parked a block away and he walked beside her, glancing down at the top of her head. She never raised her face to look at him; even as he loaded the chair into the car he could not catch her eye. He watched her drive away standing where her car had been, on a grease stain.
It was barely dawn. The grass was dewy and the sky over the sea lavender. The skin on his arms pricked and chilled; he hugged himself and rubbed his upper arms with his hands.
Regret was nagging at him, even shame.
He was walking along the sidewalk back to his building, choked and empty, when he saw his dog.
She sat beside the front steps, waiting—thin and mangy, but alive. Alive!
He was floored by relief. He felt a splinter of pained love for Casey, shot through with remorse, as though his dog’s
return was her doing somehow. He knelt down on the grass and laid his cheek against the dog’s flank.
When he stood again and she rose off her haunches to walk with him he saw she was reluctant to move; she held up one of her back legs. She was lame.
The leg, it turned out, was broken and fusing incorrectly, and also badly infected.
“How did it happen?” he asked. He was still so grateful it was hard to be upset. She was alive.
“Can’t really say. Some kind of blunt-force trauma; maybe a car hit.”
“Are you sure?”
“Wait a second,” said the veterinarian. “Oh . . . take a look. You see this wound at the ankle, with the pus and scabbing? The hair’s gone. Looks like it was rubbed raw by a cuff or a chain. Same thing on this leg here. Let’s see. She has wounds here too, under the hair. And there’s tenderness here. We should do X-rays. She might have other injuries.”
“What happened?”
“She was chained at the ankle, maybe jabbed and hit or beaten. She worried the chain with her teeth, trying to get it off. From the angle here I can tell the injury predated the chaining. Someone kept her chained up when she was already injured.”
He felt a wave of faintness, bitter taste in his mouth. He saw Fulton’s wine cellar.
A course of antibiotics could be tried, said the vet, but there was significant necrosis. He advised T. to let him amputate right away.
“You’d be surprised,” said the vet, “how well they do on three legs.”
The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?
Such a house could even be the whole world.
•
It was days afterward that he went to see Casey. She was not answering his phone calls and he felt increasingly nervous about this. He gave his dog a strip of rawhide before he left, pulled on his running gear and went down to the beach. He ran south. Beachgoers were out in force; some of them wore very small swimsuits, though the air was only mild. The surf was low but still kids on boogie boards paddled frantically.
When he got to her building the sun was setting. Standing in the foyer he pushed the call button once, then again; he peered into the camera lens. She had a monitor in her apartment, though she seldom looked at the screen—only listened, said nothing, and used the remote to buzz people in. But lately she had not been in bed as she used to; lately she was active.
After a few seconds of waiting he turned to leave, let down. One of her neighbors, a man with a prosthetic foot, was hobbling along the sidewalk. He lived two doors down on her floor and they sometimes nodded at each other in the elevator.
“You seen Casey around?” he asked on impulse, as the man came up the walkway.
“She was out here earlier. She was watching a couple of kids carry boxes for her.”
“Boxes?”
“Moving.”
“Moving?”
“Yeah. She gave me a plant. I don’t even like them.”
T. stared at him.
“But I just saw her a couple of days ago. She didn’t say anything about it.”
“What can I tell you.”
The man was past, fumbling at his mailbox. He would call Susan.
Running back north he wanted to know; he swerved inland off the beach and found a payphone.
Susan picked up coughing.
“She’s moving?” he asked, when the coughing trailed off. No preamble. He felt agitated, even anxious. “Where to?”
“Thanks for your concern about my health, T. And in case you’re wondering, it’s pneumonia.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought it was just the flu.” “Walking pneumonia.”
“Walking? What the hell does that mean?” “It means you need to get a temp.”
“Sure. Of course. Take good care of yourself.”
“Here’s the thing. I don’t know what happened between the two of you. This is my daughter here, and my job.”
“Yeah,” he said, waiting.
“But she can’t have any contact anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry, T. You know how much I hate to be in this position.”
“You’re kidding.”
Susan coughed, and the cough wore on. “No.”
“It doesn’t—she’s my best friend, Susan. I can’t believe it. Is she really serious about this?”
“I think she’s serious,” said Susan. “Yes. I’m afraid she is,
T. And I’m sorry, but I really do have to go,” and she hung up still coughing.
He let his eyelids drop closed: a faint imprint of the great seal on the dollar bill, the glowing pyramid with its all-seeing eye.
He stood in the booth like a statue, testing the steadiness of his feet on the ground. He kept his eyes shut, and the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled him in the night air. He started to shake. It came to him that beyond himself he had deprived his mother—she would be friendless once more.
He brought them to her and they were taken away again.
He needed Casey, he thought, because he liked her company, because her presence made him more than he was without it, but he could not deny that at the beginning he had also believed he was doing her a favor.
That
was where his arrogance had been. It was a mistake to think that because someone had fallen down, someone was injured or sick or less than complete, you were giving more to them by your association than they were giving to you.
It was a bad mistake.
He leaned for some time against the wall of the booth, still holding the receiver loosely till it occurred to him that he did not need to. The ears of unwashed men had greased the black plastic. Revolting. There was a sheen on the curving surface, the whorls and smudges of fingerprints.
He walked down to the waterline holding his hands out at his sides, feeling a need to wash them. But even as his legs moved him forward he knew a certain ambivalence or resistance, as though the leavings of strange men were also somehow the last touch of Casey, which would be washed off with the rest.
Still he plunged in his arms. The water was freezing.
7
His mother forgot him on a Thursday. On Thursdays they had dinner together; he brought over takeout and she turned from her puzzles. This time, when he knocked on her door in the early evening, pizza box in one hand, she tried to close the door in his face. He put a hand out to stop it closing.
“I didn’t order one. It’s not mine.”
Vera stood behind her, shaking her head patiently. “It’s me,” he said. “T. It’s your son. It’s our dinner.”
He held out the box as though it might jog her memory.
“Yes,” said Vera, and stepped through the door to stand next to him, an arm around his shoulders. “This is Thomas, Angela. Your son! He comes almost every day with his dog. Remember? You call him T.”
“I don’t . . .”
“Let’s go ahead and let him in now, honey.”
“Dog. The white dog? The one with white hairs on it?”
“Yes,” said T., and nodded.
His mother turned her back and left the door standing open. She sat down on a stool close to the television and stared at it. She did not meet his eyes when he bent to kiss her.
Onscreen a man prodded another man’s chest with a finger.
“Is this the only symptom?” he asked the nurse.
“She’s fixated on hair. Dog hair, people hair. She looks for hairs on the furniture and picks them off one by one. She can spend hours doing this. And she keeps throwing away her hairbrushes. Then we have to buy new ones. I bought two in the last week. And I dug one of them out of the trash with yogurt all over it.”
“Organic,” said his mother, and squinted at him. “Fat-free.”
She turned back to the television.
She had forgotten which room was her bedroom, said Vera; she had slept on the floor of the corridor and her hands and feet had been icy when Vera found her. She had omitted to put on a shirt in the morning and gone outside in nothing but underwear and a brassiere; she had made her way to the building’s laundry room, where Vera found her picking the gray fluff out of the lint screens.
He went over to his mother and knelt down between her and the television; she leaned to her left and then to her right to see past him.
“You remember me, right? Mom. It’s me.”
Part of him thought that speaking close to her face, holding her wrists, fixing his eyes on her own would snap her to attention.
“Mom?”
“Are you a criminal?”
“I’m your son.”
She was staring glassily and he turned to look where she looked; a man punched another man in the face.
“Is that a joke? Or a lie?” asked his mother, more speculative than accusing.
“Why would I lie about being your son?” “Maybe you want to steal something.”
“If I wanted to steal from you I would just grab your purse and run.”
“You’re a criminal. You have a criminal mind.” “I give up, then. I’m a criminal.”
“Are you still my son?” “Yes. I’m also your son.”
“I must not have brought you up right. I did something wrong. Was I the wrong mother?”
“You were a great mother.” “Can you change the channel?”
“Sure. What are you looking for?”
“I just want to watch a show that’s not about criminals.”
He flipped through the channels, waiting for her to stop him.
“See? They’re all about criminals. All the shows are about criminals. All of them.”
“Do you want to watch the news instead?” “All that is is more of them.”
“OK. I’ll let you have the remote back then. Here.” “Are you a criminal?”
He looked over at the nurse, who shrugged and bent down with a cup of tea for him.
“We’ve already been through that.”
“I need to have a shower. I need to shave my armpits.” “Good to know. Go for it.”
“It has sprouts in there.”
She picked up a magazine from the end table and shuffled off toward the bathroom; he waited dranking his tea, and heard nothing. There was no sound of water running.
After he finished the tea he went to the bathroom door and knocked; his mother opened the door fully dressed and stood back slightly, waiting. Behind her the bathroom looked ransacked.
“Who are you?” “I’m your son.”
“The rapist? Or the murderer?”
“I like to flatter myself that I’m neither.”
“I remember you. You like to do those crimes. The police come and solve them and have a trial with a pretty lady talking. You have to go to jail. Because sometimes you do killing, other times you do rape.”
“I do mostly real estate.”
She studied him suspiciously, at some remove. “OK. I admit it. A little land speculation.”
“I know you. I saw you there. You’re the one from the program. Why do you even deny it?”
“Mom. I was with you in the living room, and we were watching TV. So let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you instead. I didn’t hear the shower, is all. I wondered if you forgot. You said you wanted to have one.”
“Oh,” she said, and turned to look behind her. The floor was littered with toiletries and medicines; the cabinet doors were ajar.
“What are you doing there?” “I thought . . .”
“Tidying up?”
“I wanted to get rid of them,” she said faintly, and looked down at the spread.
He remembered the vial of pills. He looked down at similar vials on the floor.
“Let me help you,” he said.
He knelt down and picked up the pills, slipped them into his pockets as she turned away and began to handle a hairbrush, plucking at the hairs that were caught in the bristles. Pink plastic razors were everywhere. He would not confiscate her razors, but he wished that he could.
“This is all over the place,” she said, holding a tangle of hair she had removed from the brush. “It gets in things. It grows on you.”
“It grows on all of us.” “Disgusting.”
“You like to have it on your head, don’t you?”
He put his hand on her shoulder and guided her to the mirror over the sink. They looked at their images: she was pale and old, he was smooth and young. She had not colored her hair in some time—since Beth, he guessed—and gray was woven through the yellow. He tried to keep his gaze on her worn features but it was hard and he was drawn back to his own reflection.